There’s never anyone inside but they supposedly serve really good Thai food, although no one I know is brave enough to sample it. My friend's beautiful sister also works there and she attracts the few customers that the bar has. I notice a familiar White 4Runner in the unpaved parking lot, the lone car. I whip in with my broken down ’89 Acura and journey into the catacombs of one of the city’s main water drainage washes. The walls are 12 feet high and it’s an ideal chill piecing spot most of the time. Sometimes bike cops patrol it, but usually it’s the ideal graffiti playground. The boxcar manifests being schlepped overhead by UP engines - in and out of the main yard - have led to it being christened “The Freight Bowl” by the generation of graffiti writers before ours. I walk past makeshift villages built by sunburned hobos who lurk in crevasses, trying to get out of the heat. The walls are grilled down with gnarly Cholo hand styles and as I journey deeper into the barren concrete I see faint silhouettes of two figures painting down the way. I creep up through a tiny side tunnel flooded with piss and syringes and pop up right behind them. If I would have been 5-0 it would have been a wrap for them.

“Freeze motherfuckers.” My subterfuge only lasts a moment but shock is instantly discernable in their wide eyed looks as they turn around. They quickly see that I’m not the police and come over to say what’s up. Skae is painting a burner, the piece is pretty hype, the letters look like they’re straight out of an old Atari 2600 game, instead of being rounded they kink with a stair step effect as if the piece is digitized. It’s just the type of weirdo graff that most people can’t stand. His color scheme is grays and pinks for the fill-in, black outline, and yellow highlights. We share a few bowls of weed and talk for a minute while the other homie struggles to finish up his piece.

Skae is down with BY crew (along with many others) down in El Paso. They truly are Border Youth, most of them frequently rolling to Juarez for good old Mexican strip clubs, graffiti, beer, and coke binges. Skae has just been released from a little 4 month bid for scribing a window drunkenly in front of a sheriff. He has on eight hundred dollar prescription Gucci sunglasses and is dressed in white slacks and a white sweater. He explains that he has a shorty that works at the Gucci store in Mexico who is down to liberate the overpriced textiles in exchange for coke. He recently picked up a suit worth five grand. Dressed in all white he looks like he should be somewhere pimping prostitutes rather than painting his name in a wash. But goddamn, he’s got the fever. He asks me what’s up with the freights and I tell him they’re slim-pickings, but it’s still possible to get over. Toys have discovered almost all of our lay-ups and blown them through their ignorance of freight etiquette. Either that or we’ve blown them ourselves by over painting them, getting our shit up before the toys could get the chance to ruin them. I tell him that I’m down to try and rock some shit though. I ask him about the freights in El Paso, remembering them to be very choice when I last visited a few years ago. He says that they’re flourishing, as usual, and he’s really tried to step it up this year. Some of their spots are so chill that he painted 34 pieces during one long night. He also talks about a really dope lay-up right next to a bar where you can party all night and then paint until the sun comes up. I curse him under my breath because we usually get chased out by old Fast Freddie the Bull after two or three pieces. I tell him that we won’t get 34 – but we’re bound to find something.







It’s around noon as we roll out of the Freight Bowl and back to the ride. I twist up a blunt and we cruise around for a minute smoking it. We hit up McDonalds and he demonstrates how he hollers at girls. He emits a high pitched whistle that sounds like a bird call at every fine female that walks by. The ones that respond to it with a glance he calls “Squirrels” – they are the ladies ripe for the fucking. The ones that can’t hear his call (or ignore it) are christened “Moose Knuckles” – unsuitable to waste time talking to. I laugh as he breaks down this theory but he’s really dead serious about it. He says that it’s a purely instinctual call and response that is a throwback to primate days. I try the call a few times but can’t get any girls to respond. They must all be Moose Knuckles or I must have received the ass end of the evolutionary stick.

I roll up another Swisher as we head downtown towards the local hip hop shop. Little fifteen and sixteen year old toys congregate outside the store – their pockets full of over priced streakers and caps. I’m perpetually fascinated with this growing community of writers in my town because the scene is mad weak. They all probably watch MTV commercials and decide to do graffiti, realizing that the record store across the street from the bus station will sell spray paint to them even if they’re underage. They believe the common urban legend that graffiti can earn you pussy. I try and tell them to quit while they’re ahead. I try and tell them that all their efforts will get them is gone over by me or a pair of silver bracelets. We walk in and hear the same god awful “underground hip hop” bullshit playing; the corny rhymes set the perfect ambiance in which to display a grip of over priced 12 inches and the latest wack Tribal shirts. I cop a few overpriced Rusto Fats (fifty cents each for Christ sakes) and notice they just got a new shipment of Montana flavors in. We finally got Montana in our city just recently, a few years behind the trend, but by now it’s the Holy Grail to the toys. They seem to think that it will make their sorry throw ups look tight or magically imbue their outlines with style. I personally opt for eighty seven cent Wal-Mart silver and walnut fade away pieces if I actually have to stoop to paying for paint. I’m a cheap bastard though.







Skae buys all 50 of the Montana cans, peeling off two hundreds from a massive knot of bills. I ask him where he works and he says he’s currently unemployed, but he just got back from slanging Ketamine on the East Coast for a couple of months. He was getting a friend in El Paso to bring back a Tequila bottle full of pure liquid from Mexico. His friend would ship it over to him and Skae would cook it up and have a few raver fags serve it for him. Net profit: five thousand a week. He also told me about a Squirrel that served up three of his canvases for five G’s a pop. The same chick also watched his back for him as he painted subway backjumps. She would talk shit to any passersby as he drunkenly painted his pieces. He says he got four of them in the few months he was there but never got flicks. This really shocks me because I’m such a toy that I probably wouldn’t even fuck around painting clean trains without a camera. I’d hate for the vandal squad to have pictures of my shit, but not me. I always tell everyone that if I was really gangster I wouldn’t be doing graffiti – I’d be robbing banks or some shit.

Stocked up with cans we mash to the crib to smoke a few more blunts and have a few Guinness Stouts as the sun drifts behind the mountains. A twelve pack and a box of Swishers later we’re pretty hammered as we bounce out into the darkness ready for the mission. We pick up a few other friend’s and drive to the only nice train lay up left, the “Royalty Line” but it’s laid up sparsely. It’s usually at least three lines deep but tonight there’s only one lonely line of a few boxcars and a few hoppers. We have mad paint though and the spot’s dying so we decide to go for broke. Some big name toys had been through and capped some of our old pieces on a couple of the boxcars that had been there forever. Drunkenly laughing I fill in over them with the cheap silver, executing nasty throw ups, knowing that the paint will eventually fade away and that they will see their 20 color wack simple styles under a silver haze. I kill all of my cans and sit bored smoking cigarettes on the adjacent rail line. Skae calls me over after a few pieces and offers to share his paint. This is when I know he’s good people – even my closest partners are stingy as hell with their cans. He has an overstuffed duffel bag and I relish the way the Montana bubbles so nicely as it clings to the old steel. We rock end to ends all the way down the whole line of 8 cars – totally blowing the lay up – just obliterating it. I figure we might as well paint both sides. Halfway through painting the second side our other two partners run out of paint and soon we’re all dipping into Skae’s bag. After rocking the second side I feel like I’m going to die. I’ve inhaled a fucking case of paint as well as my share of beer and weed. I know I’ll probably shit blood tomorrow. It’s around 2 AM as we stroll out of the ravaged lay-up. We’ve been painting for over 4 hours straight and I’m ready to sleep for at least 15 hours.







Skae is a mad man that night though. We stop at a Jack in the Box he says he wants to do some bombing next. We’re all out of paint but he still had enough cans left to spot us. We eat Jumbo Jacks, onion rings, and tacos while we mash out on the freeway again. We park at the usual spot next to the train tracks right near a billboard that’s fairly easy to get. There’s a huge iron ladder that’s always stashed in the weeds by the bottom of the billboard. We walk up to the billboard and it displays an ad for the Border Patrol who is in the midst of a recruiting frenzy. Their slogan is displayed on the top of the billboard: “Toughest Training. Greatest Rewards.” It’s the perfect background, complete with a desert sunset scene. It’s irresistible. It takes us twenty minutes of searching to find the ladder in our stupor, and the whole time the wind starts picking up. We prop the ladder up and the four of us climb onto the small ledge at the bottom of the billboard. The wind really gets going as we start our fill-ins holding on to the bottom of the billboard for balance. The billboard rocks back and forth and we struggle to hold on, our balance impaired by the booze and reefer. We start getting loose with full on multicolor pieces. As we’re finishing we see lights down the line. They’re coming up quick and it looks like it might be the Bull. One of the dudes painting with us panics and dangles himself off the edge of the billboard trying to blend in with an adjacent tree. We all look over at him and can’t help laughing at the ridiculous look of terror on his face. As the lights come closer we see that it’s only a train, some nice NS engines pulling a manifest. The three of us quickly hurry down the ladder so that the engineer won’t spot us. Once we get to the bottom we look back up and see him still dangling and lit like a beacon by the lights of the passing train. His James Bond style move has backfired and now he’s stuck. We goad him on for a minute, still laughing, and then help him up. He’s extremely shook and gets down without finishing his piece. We quickly finish the billboard but there’s still paint left.

I feel like a soldier on a death march as we walk down the freeway doing a few fill-ins and catching tags until we dead every last can. At this point my legs ache and the last of the adrenaline has been used up and I feel like a graffiti robot: unthinking and not watching my back. It’s one of those nights when graffiti’s fun. You don’t have a care in the world. You don’t get chased and puke all over yourself. You don’t get arrested. My mind is still and I feel at peace for a fleeting moment. Still laughing I drop Skae off at the Mexican bus station as the sun is coming up so he can make his way back to Hell Paso. I make it home and sleep for 20 hours dreaming about fill-ins and the vast urban landscape with all of its imperfect beauty and limitless possibilities for adventure.

KAI1