My adrenaline soars walking out of the Greyhound station in Los Angeles directly into the slums. We had a three-hour layover so we decided to take the graffiti writer version of a sight seeing tour. We found the shittiest street possible and walked down it. Being in the true slums amongst dilapidation really gave me the itch to grill. Against my better judgment I whipped out a Silver Kiwi mop and started mashing shit. You know my steez. The crack heads were deep; we were two little white boys walking through multiple blocks of pure despair. We passed numerous soup kitchens and anti drug murals. Fools were posted up on every corner pumping crill and bums were asleep soundly in their cardboard mansions. They had intricate structures erected totally out of garbage. Do your thing. Do your thing. I hit up on a mural in front of a crack head and she freaked on us. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing motherfucker?” “Miss, he’s nothing nice.” Luckily she didn’t alert the hundreds of other crack heads and incite a lynching. We kept it moving and eventually made it downtown and got rescued out of the slums and swooped back to the bus station. The crack heads probably have the most viable voice to proclaim their disdain for graffiti. After all, the streets that graffiti exists in are truly the bums’ homes. But you can’t let a crack head phase you or stop you from doing your thing.

I do kind of feel bad for the old timers struggling to fight off this plague of graffiti though. They’re out there every day struggling. You might see five people standing around for hours to buff one storefront that took 10 seconds to deface. You can’t stop the destruction. Since when did these little mothafuckas start using acid to etch windows? What is the world coming to? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Old techniques are tossed aside for new ones that are far more savage. Destruction itself is an act of beauty and creation. My heart wells up with empathy for the poor lost souls on the hot streets every time I see a dilapidated building or a killed block.

I’m just trying to piece together why I’ve been wasting so much of my life doing this. I’m trying to find some reason for it all. There’s no logical answer, but something has me in its grips. I try to shake loose but boy it’s strong and I’m sure it’s nothing nice. The streets are ghoulish and uncertain. I’m afraid to step outside only to be swept away by a whirlwind. I crave and deeply fear that feeling of being totally out of control. It’s being at both the pinnacle of empowerment and destruction, wild in the streets with no regard for anything at all. It is really a liberating feeling when you’re looming over the edge. The intelligent part of my brain begs at me to use restraint and keep some semblance of will power. Don’t let it totally suck you in because you might not ever get out. Don’t fall through the looking glass. Stay at home, you can’t trust yourself out there. Can’t you find any real hobbies? Why don’t you like any real sports? Why are you obsessed with this thing that little kids do in washes and in bathroom stalls?

The streets are always calling. I try to do it only for shits and giggles. I try to paint only when it’s fun but when you’re off on a bender shit is like a full time job. Your mind is obsessed and your bones hurt. Shit is hard, it’s like trying to smoke crack in moderation or be a social heroin user. Nothing has ever really interested me more or captivated me for longer. Letters are constantly falling out of space and time and sometimes I wish they would stop so that I can get some sleep. You feel the most alive when you are on the edge. You can really taste life in the back of your throat when you’re getting chased by an angry mob of people or are lying down in shrubbery with the police few feet away from you creeping by.

The buffers allow the cycle to continue. If they were to let the streets run with graffiti the novelty would wear off and graffiti would eventually die out and fade away from our consciousness. The act of trying to eliminate and censor graffiti is what makes graffiti thrive. Pure old time subversion mixed with a little new school style and egomania. If the angry shop owners and poor little old ladies with toothbrushes weren’t scrubbing it out during the day we wouldn’t have to come back again and smack it up during the night.

The dance continues, but the censors have an unfair advantage. Every large city has a buff squad that is funded by tax dollars and paints over graffiti. In this society information can only be disseminated if you pay for it, public space is a hot commodity. Someone can easily hand out pamphlets in the streets to disseminate their opinions but their thoughts would, for the most part, be destined for use as birdcage liner or shit tickets for bums. If you write something on the front of a house the residents can’t help but to take notice.

Graffiti is, in theory, an open ended system. If you hade multiple lifetimes and a vast squad of goons you could saturate every surface available with markings. But in reality it’s all about what spots you hit and if you have enough respect not to get your spots ragged out and enough luck and skill to get a few that can escape the eye of the buff squad. Every writer has had something of theirs buffed before they could even see it the next day. Other people have stuff that runs for decades until the sun gets it. The key to getting over in graffiti includes foresight in scouting and also the ability not to think at all and run on pure instinct alone. Instinct is never 100 percent though. You just gotta do what you do.

We ended up getting in to San Francisco early in the morning and wandering down to Lower Haight where the streets were pretty killed. We were all gassed from no sleep and the Greyhound blues and started doing some day tagging when we smelled the familiar smell of Krylon Ultra Flat Black. At first we thought some fools were getting gully and doing paint tags in the street during the height of the day. Really it was an older guy in his fifties who was walking the streets painting over any graffiti on black surfaces with his can of paint. He had no permission from the storeowners and was greeted by only smiles from the same passersby who had been giving us sour looks all day. He carried a digital camera to document the before and after and, I assume, to take pictures of any vandals caught in action. We yelled at him to stop and told him that what he was doing was a crime. He just laughed it off because he knew he was in the ideological majority and offered to take a picture of us. We obliged but covered our faces. This had him a little pissed but we still forced him into our own photo op. I also got a picture of the dude’s license plate and if I had any bit of snitch in me I would send it to the cops. But I guess I can’t be mad. We each have our own side of the coin to hold down. Who says there’s no honor in combat anymore?

KAI1