If you do graffiti in California’s Bay Area, chances are you have seen the letters PEROS sprayed on the walls of your city. He is a prolific piecer that is known to hit risky, high profile spots all over the bay. PEROS is not just a graffiti writer, he’s also a businessman, family man, entrepreneur and a skateboarder. Even with all of that going on in his life, PEROS still finds the time to paint some of the dopest pieces currently displayed around the Bay. We caught up with him in Oakland, CA to talk and ask him a few questions.
What name do you write and how did you get it?
“Peros and I got it just because when I was a kid I got caught with another name and I had to change it and I just liked the letters and I eventually pieced together the letters and it has stuck with me ever since.”
Where are you from?
“I’m from Berkeley, California.”
At what age did you begin writing?
“I’ve been tagging on shit since probably the fifth or sixth grade and then I really started getting into the bombing and painting around high school, maybe tenth grade. And I’ve been writing Peros since I was a senior in high school and I’ve just been going in ever since then.”
Do you do legal walls too?
“I’ve never really been a big legal wall person. I’m more into the yards and the street side no permission and stuff. I’ve done a couple, but I don’t go out of my way for them.”
What’s your favorite surface to write on?
“Virgin brick.”
Where’s your favorite place to paint?
“I’d say probably graffiti and the writing and all that really started for me when I was a little kid. Just wandering the streets of the industrial side of town finding abandos and climbing into them and just like breaking shit and smoking weed in there as a little kid. And I feel like that pushed over into painting and so I’d say my favorite spots are cutty abandos that are empty and not blown up, that’s probably like my favorite spot to paint, any sick abando.”
Coming up, who in the game were your main influences?
“Definitely NESTA, he’s probably one of my most favorite writers just because he was up everywhere when I was a kid in a time where not a lot of people were bombing in the streets. It was mostly like yard pieces and your occasional cutty bombing and NESTA was just everywhere, he did it all. Tags, rollers, pieces, cutty straight letters, so he was definitely my biggest influence. And definitely as I got older, it was ANEML. You know, rest in peace to my brother. But he was a huge inspiration for me as well and he taught me pretty much all the underground shit that gets passed on, he taught me a lot.”
What’s your favorite ANEML story?
“Oh man, I have so many. My favorite one was the first time I ate acid and it was like liquid acid, so it was really good. It was at like two in the morning after we were already completely wasted partying in the city. Then there was a big fight and somebody had thrown a big bucket of thick black roller paint all over the ground. Like thick roller based paint. And out of nowhere the acid woke me up and me and my friend DOJA went outside and didn’t know where everyone had went and ANEML was on his knees on the sidewalk in the dark all by himself. There was a giant puddle of the black paint that got spilled and he dipped his hands in it and we were looking at him and he just rubbed it all over his face. And we were all tripping super hard. We pretty much had a crazy night and we finally got back to the homies house in the TL and everybody was still awake at like seven in the morning, just crazy nights. But there’s so many stories I could tell about ANEML man.”
What advice would you give to the young writers coming up today, being and older guy in graffiti/
“It’s weird you say that, because I don’t feel like it. But it’s true though, it’s really true. Because now I see younger kids writing and starting off. I feel like there is something out here that has gotten away, like morals and etiquette. But it has a lot to do with out of towners too, like there are so many of them now that kids from out here are biased {against them.} If you get burned over your throwie you shouldn’t really trip. Don’t let graffiti be the main focus of your life, it’s not worth it, you have to try and better yourself. If you can keep doing it and that’s your passion, then do it, but don’t make it your main objective. Your main objective should be getting money and taking care of your family, and graffiti is on the side.”
You’re an established business man now, how has graffiti help accomplish that in life?
“Graffiti helped me get away from all the bullshit in life like gang banging and it took me away from that crowd and got me close to my real homies. We all had the same ideas and it took em away from a worse path and it gave me something to look forward to doing and that wasn’t negative.”
You skateboard as well, is doing graffiti and skateboarding similar to you?
“Definitely, I definitely would say that. They are both similar in that you can do them on your own terms and that also helped me get away from all that street shit that doesn’t get you anywhere. There was a time where I stopped skating for a while and that was when I was starting to go the wrong route. But graffiti and skating went together for me, like my childhood friends did graffiti and skated.”
Do you have any favorite stories about painting?
“I have lots of bad ones.” (He couldn’t help but laugh answering this one).
Okay, well what’s a bad one then?
“Probably when I was like eighteen or nineteen and I had just gotten out of jail and I had done half a year. I was only out two weeks when I started bombing again, but I didn’t go to jail for graffiti. But I had started bombing again and I was on MLK in North Oakland by the children’s hospital and I was hitting one of the pillars that hold the BART line up. I was on a bike with two flat tires, by myself, catching a tag and I saw the car coming up, but it didn’t have cop lights. So I finished my tag and the car pulled up and it was an undercover police car and I got on my bike and start biking down the street, so they put their spotlight on me and said “don’t get off of your bike.” And I thought about staying on the bike and going back to jail and before I even really made a decision I was jumping off the bike and running. And they got out and started chasing me and I was running down the street and this was a residential block at this point and i saw a wide open cut between two houses. I ran through the cut and right before I hopped a fence I looked behind me and there was an asian and a black cop like ten feet behind me. It gave me that adrenaline to just hop the first fence and I don’t even know if they followed me, because in Oakland if you hop a fence, they won’t hop over. You could be waiting on the other side with a gun to just shoot them. At that point I didn’t even care and I hopped like four fences in a row. I had to do some Jet Li shit and jump off a wheelbarrow to bounce off a shed and flip over a fence. I landed on my back on a planter, which fuckin hurt. I got up and hopped one more fence and I was like a super overgrown backyard of a trap house, it looked like either a trap house or an older lady neglected her home. But I saw the cop lights circling the block just sitting in the weeds in the backyard and it felt like I was back there forever, but it was really like fifteen or twenty minutes. So at this point the lights had stopped circling around, so I got up out of the weeds and I looked at the house and the curtains were cracked open about six inches. I couldn’t remember if the curtains had been open when I got there, so I waved and as soon as I did that the curtains flew open. And I couldn’t see anything in the house, so I had no idea who was behind those curtains and it spooked me. I instantly started running again and hopping fences back toward the way I had came from and I found my bike and there were no cops around. So I just hopped on my bike and road home. I got a bunch of stories like that.”
Have you painted in other countries or other states?
“I painted a bunch of other states, not really any other countries yet, but we will see. I definitely want to hit Tokyo, Japan. I just got back from New Orleans and I had a blast, the Raiders won. But I painted a bunch of abandos out there. I’ve painted Hawaii a bunch and New York a bunch. I’ve painted a little in Denver and Seattle.”
Besides the bay area, where are some of your favorite cities to paint in?
“Probably right now my favorite cities to paint are New Orleans and New York, but I’m trying to go check out other cities too.”
Anything else you want to tell our readers?
“I kind of want to reiterate to young writers to get their money up. I see a lot of guys walking around doing graffiti and carrying pistols and I think it’s stupid. I think if you do graffiti if anything you can handle it with your fists, but just basic shit you know. Also, rest in peace ANEML, rest in peace CEKS, everyone else that we have lost, there’s a lot of people that have passed away recently. KUTZ, SAZE, YESM, that was the homie man it’s crazy. But to all the homies I’ve lost and other people have lost. Live life.”
Follow PEROS on Instagram at: @ghostperos
Interview by: Skaz One
