A Look into the Life of a Graffiti Artist

The young man looks just like any other young businessman found anywhere in the world. He is just over the age of thirty, polite, articulate, and sporting a clean-cut appearance. He owns a beautiful home in the suburbs of another nearby city, and has a great job, a beautiful wife and his first child on the way. Everything about him bespeaks respectability and success. This wasn't always the case.

You see, when this young man was a teenager he developed an interest in an area most people probably don't even think about as they go about their day to day lives. If they do think about it, they probably assume its just young punks with a misguided sense of creativity, or nothing better to do with their time.

This interest was "graffiti" and this young man spent years as what is commonly known in the world of graffiti as a "tagger." Basically, he drove around the city, night or day, placing his "street name", or his "tag", all over bus stops and buses, walls, buildings, over and under-passes, and in subway trains and tunnels. Some would call him and his kind "graffiti artists." Most people would undoubtedly call him a "vandal".

He insists that few people have any real idea what it actually means to live this lifestyle, that they have no clue who these kids are, why they do what they do, and how they live their lives. He would like that to change.

He grew up in a middle-class part of Chicago, in a normal, happy, healthy nearly-suburban home. He had two very normal and present parents with siblings and aunt and uncles, and lots of friends.

He claims he was always a bit more adventurous than others his age, and that this fearlessness and willingness to climb trees higher than anyone else, or to explore things others wouldn't, probably contributed to and aided him later in his career as a graffiti writer. It certainly wasn't a prerequisite, but it must have helped. There is little about him or his childhood that might suggest how he wound up as a teenager, dodging subway trains in tunnels in the middle of the night while others were studying for high school finals.

"I don't really know how I first got interested," he says. "I just knew about it. I remember asking my parents as we drove downtown, where all of the trains with the writing on them were. Maybe I saw it in the movies or on television, and it just stuck."

Skateboarding, he recalls, was the first "outlaw" activity that he really participated in. "Outlaw", because back in those days skateboarders were, for the most part, seen as a nuisance. "No Skateboarding" signs hung everywhere and it was banned in most of the suburbs and throughout the city as well. While this was meant to discourage skateboarders, it tended instead, to unify them into tight-knit groups. With so few skate parks or allowable places to skate, they were confined to out of the way, hard-to-find drainage ditches or other places that could serve as half-pipes. This, in turn, served as great training for dodging the authorities.

"How I actually got started was through this skater friend I knew," he says. "He was a skater I met in Des Plaines back when I used to skate with a bunch of Maine East kids. He was from Texas and he was a huge Keith Haring

He insists now, before going any further, that he wants to make something very clear to me and everyone who reads this. He goes on to explain that there are those who go out and do graffiti and become "artists", like Keith Haring, or Jean-Michel Basquiat. But in his eyes, and the eyes of his crew, graffiti has nothing to do with art in any way shape or form. It's all about writing, and about respect..

"It's not about art," he says, "especially for people like me, and those who I hung around with. It was never art to me. I considered myself a writer. Our main goal was to get our names or the names of our 'crew' up in as many places as possible."

"Crews" are groups of graffiti taggers that tend to form when the young men and women get into this kind of thing. Most times the names, or "tags" that people see on the walls and trains and buses are the names of various crews. Some may think of these crews as disjointed and disorganized but most of them, he claims are run like "junior syndicates" or "mob families", with a leader, and their soldiers under them. There are even "wars" between crews, fought most often with paint on walls, buses, and trains, but they have been known, on occasion, to escalate into real violence.

For this young man, though, there was only ever one intention, one goal, for him when he got into graffiti. "I wanted to be a 'bus king'," he says. "Bus kings were identified and declared by other writers. To ensure your kingship you had to get numerous scratches in the rear windows of the buses to ensure you didn't get erased. There was even a technique to it. First, you scratched into the glass and then you either got your marker or your shoe polish out and that always depended on how much the driver was paying attention. If you accomplished 'bombing' several windows with shoe polish that was considered 'destroying' a bus and it made it impossible for another writer to get up and that meant you owned that line until it was cleaned. If you did that enough then you moved up the ranks to king that much quicker."

The taggers had their own lingo for things. When you went out and "bombed" something, it essentially meant putting your name or the name of your crew up on every available space. If you "destroyed" something you just made it impossible for any other writer to write on the spaces you had your name up on. Going to "war" meant crossing out the names of opposing crews, or the crew members tags. Or if you chose you could write their tags upside down and backwards which was known as "flipping."

"I started out as a street writer," he says. "I did bus stops and benches and lamp posts and things like that. That's how most people start out. However, if you want to get any respect you have to move on to buses. Once you get to buses it's only natural to move on to trains. In each case there are different challenges and risks."

Once a tagger has hooked up with other taggers and formed a crew they often worked in groups or teams. Sometimes they would attack buses in a coordinated effort, and other times it was simply a game or a means of challenging one another. Essential to becoming a successful bus tagger, was learning all the various bus routes and the route's bus drivers as well. Some drivers were more likely to be oblivious to the vandalism going on behind them, while others were far more savvy and alert to what they were up to.

"One time I had a driver tell me that he had clean windows and he wanted them to still be that way by the time we got off," he says. "Usually we would challenge each other. You would start in the back of the bus and you would take out your shoe polish or your marker and you would hit the seats back there. Then it was a game to see who could move toward the front and who could get closest to the bus driver without being caught. Sometimes you'd get right behind the driver and be tagging right behind his head."

Once you mastered buses, you moved on to trains. Running around in subway tunnels, and dodging trains while avoiding the third rail, is a skill all its own. It's highly dangerous, some might even say it's suicidal, but to taggers that was part of the fun of it.

"For example, look at the platforms in some of the Cumberland and Harlem stations," he says, "I knew taggers who would jump down under the platforms. The big prize was to get your tag up on a clear, distinct spot on the outside of the train. There were those who did the insides of trains but the outside of the train was the prize. Anyway, they would hide under there as the trains pulled up. Then, as the train stopped they would go for the white box that was right under the doors and paint it. That way you got your tag on a big flat white space that was visible."

Mastering this meant learning all the train times and schedules and having an understanding of how the city managed those schedules, and determined the size of the trains throughout the day.

"During rush hours the CTA would have eight cars on one train," he says. "If you tried to do it earlier than that you might have one or two cars. As you can imagine the more train there is the better. During certain times of the year, like when Taste of Chicago was going on, there would be more cars consistently. I knew guys who would spend literally hours and hours under those platforms."

Of course, you could also get into the tunnels and tag underground. This kind of work was done to impress other writers and not to create "works of art" for everyone else to enjoy.

"I had connections," he says. "I knew a guy who was on a crew and managed to get a hold of some keys. These keys opened up doors near the tunnel entrances normally used by the maintenance workers. They also opened up other maintenance doors inside. We could get into the tunnels easier with the keys while other people were having to climb over fences to get in."

Some taggers would check out which stations were closed for construction or maintenance. Not only were they great places to hang out, but they served as a good place to run to if one needed to get out of the way of a train, and of course they provided more fodder for destruction. More than once the taggers not only bombed the station, but they would attack the ticket booths to see if they could break in and would basically leave the entire place a wreck.

Rumors were always flying amongst the taggers of how others were planning some new outrageous feat, like filling the ticket booth with balloons, or with tire foam that would harden inside the booth. It was all about outdoing one another, making a name for your crew, and getting it out there. So the more outrageous it was, the morerespect it earned.

Other times stations would only shut down for the night and reopen the next morning. In this case the game was to do fantastic pieces on the wall that would be there for the commuters to admire on their way to work the next day. Sometimes, however, it was just a matter of tagging walls, lights and places that only other taggers would notice.

"Usually you can spot taggers getting onto a train," he says. "They head to the very back or very front of the train. They look at the lights in the tunnels and the walls and they notice the other tags and the names of the crews. Taggers know what to look for."

Trains, in general, presented a greater challenge than buses. As tough as some of the bus drivers were it was still a lot easier to get off of a bus to get away, than it was on a train, simply because you didn't have the rails to contend with.

"Every bus had a cherry you could pull," he says. "That was the red ball that opened the back door in an emergency. If you were about to get caught you could always call an abort to the mission and pull the cherry and run out. You couldn't do that with a train. Not only would it cause the train to stop and back up other trains but there was nowhere to really run once the train stopped. So, by the fact that you were trapped on a train you had to be more careful and take fewer risks to get caught."

Of course, if you didn't want to climb under a platform, or couldn't gain easy access to the tunnels, there was always the train yards where the cars were removed from the line to be cleaned. Finding a train yard full of freshly-cleaned train cars was akin to finding gold to a tagger. Despite all attempts at security, there was never enough to keep a resourceful and experienced tagger out. If they had knowledge of that yard and the guard's habits, and a willingness to climb the fence, they could have an eventful night.

"We liked going to the Lake Street line train yards because the train yard was in Oak Park," he sys. "It was the easiest to get in to."

The main objective once you were in a yard was to get your tag up on a train and then have that train run on the line. A tagger always ran the risk that the train would be rewashed and the tag removed, but if you got your tag up and it wasn't rewashed, that gave a tagger real bragging rights because it would be seen far and wide.

"I once did a train and it was so cold they couldn't wash the train and run the machinery so it ran with my tag on it. Of course we had our favorite yard," he says, "because it was the easiest to get into. Once you got in there you were in for an easy night."

Just like with the trains there were bus yards, and there was nothing better than finding buses that were freshly cleaned. It helped, again, to know the yard and how it operated. You could easily spend all that time tagging a group of buses, only to find out later that those were the ones still waiting to get washed and that all your time and materials were wasted.

With city buses being rotated throughout the city, and swapped out from one route to another, it was conceivable that if you tagged enough buses your could be seen all over the city. Of course, other taggers would notice them and then the topic of conversation would be which tags they were finding in which places and on how many different buses.

Once you had a group of like-minded people together it was inevitable that a new crew would form, and many of these crews took their cues from movies. To the crews this young man allied himself with "Goodfellas" was nearly like the Bible. This meant there was a leader and soldiers, like in the movie. Within that group there were those better suited to being enforcers and then those who were better at negotiating a peace between rival crews. When it came to wars, since most of them are fought using paint rather than fists or weapons, the winners were settled by committees and by other crews. In fact, when this young man first got into the lifestyle there was a kind of unofficial governing body comprised of older more experienced and respected taggers that would settle disagreements and other matters.

"We would meet by this wall and all of the crews would show up," he says. "Arguments would be settled or, if people needed to fight they would fight. The wars would be settled and winners would be declared. The title of Bus King and such would be given to people. If two taggers were fighting over a name, that would be settled. People would pass around their sketchbooks and taggers would do pieces in the various books. Ideas were exchanged and styles were talked about. The spot as pretty well known and that was the problem because the police started raiding the place. Eventually they moved the spot to Chinatown."

Once the police discovered the place in Chinatown the entire governing body just disbanded. This left the entire tagger community wide open and it quickly descended into warfare. Something as simple as saying the wrong word to someone or using a style of writing that someone else had already claimed would start a full-scale war. With no governing body, these wars would sometimes last for years.

"Wars could start all sorts of ways," he says. "Way back when you could have someone go to war with you just because one of your letters looked like theirs. Other times wars started because friendly battles over a train line went sour. For example, we got into a war with a crew because two guys had a battle to see who could do the most pieces over four days. I was with one of them on at least one of those nights and I could assure you that he did his share of painting, but I wasn't there when a winner was declared. Apparently one couldn't be decided on and the war started. The next night I was in a car driving with my friends from and J4F and we were going over everything they had from Devon to Irving on the red line. That was a great night."

Each crew, of course, had its own unique name. This young man was first part of a crew known as CWP which stood for City Wide Posse. From then he moved on to eleven others. After a time with CWP he moved on to WET (Why Even Try), CMW (Chicago's Most Wanted), KCC (Keep Chicago Clean), CBC (Cold-Blooded Crooks), BKR (Bus King Ruler), AOK (All Out Kengs - which was a deliberate misspelling to separate them from the street gang), RAW (Riters Against War and then Ruling All Worlds), J4F (Just 4 Fun), UAC (Up and Coming), and DTE (Down to Earth). Of those only RAW was actually created and lead by him.

"We started RAW with the idea of not going to war with other crews anymore," he says. "Everyone was going to war with everyone and with no one to declare winners they just went on and on. So, at first we were RAW for 'Riters Against War'. There were a lot of other writers who liked the idea and our crew grew pretty big. Of course, like all pacifists we eventually caved and we declared war on all kinds of people [who had] crossed us out and changed the name to 'Ruling All Worlds.'"

These wars sometimes escalated into far worse than 'flipping' a rival crews tag. He recalls carrying baseball bats in his car for those times when he and his crew had to exact some revenge on a rival crew. Sometimes, he explains, just walking home in a city crawling with rival warring crews could be a dangerous thing to do.

"We had this one friend who took his girlfriend home and got jumped," he says. "Nobody had cell phones back then but we all had pagers, so he paged us after he had been beaten. He called us and we went over and picked him up. We thought we knew where the two guys who jumped him were hanging out so we drove past this one kid's house. Sure enough, there they were on the front porch. I stopped my car and we ran at the porch the baseball bats. One of the kids took a bat to the back of his head but he didn't go down. He just kept running. The kids ran into the house and we ran right after them. I distinctly remember the one kid's father sitting in the living room watching television and being totally stunned at us chasing his kid through the house. The kid's mother was standing there screaming. One of my friends took a bat and smashed this flower vase that was on this table and the kids ran into their bedroom. We took off after that."

Of course, just like in gang wars, retaliation was something that could be right around the next corner.

"We were in the car and driving away and had stopped at a red light," he says. "Suddenly the window on my car explodes. They had gotten into their car and chased after us and caught up to us at the light. I stepped on the gas and ran right through the red light and tore out of there."

In between wars and late nights spent dodging trains and third rails, the crews still had to find ways to make money. Sure, you could get a regular job and buy all of your paint but you could never have enough to get everything done that you really wanted to do, and time spent working interfered with your writing time. So just like a drug habit, getting your paint could lead to more desperate and illegal measures. Shoplifting was common and the crews would work together on it like well-oiled machines.

"Spray paint was banned in the city," he says. "So like a lot of things it became a game to see how far out into the suburbs and neighboring towns you could go. You could get out into some small places and find a hardware store that had colors that you couldn't even find in the city anymore. We would walk into a craft store like a Michaels and there would be three of us and you would just divide and conquer."

One tagger had usually already purchased or stolen some kind of multi-pocketed construction coat like you what you find at a hardware store. Or if he didn't have one of those, he had an over-sized jacket or coat with holes cut in the lining. He would head for the Krylon paint, chosen for its wide array of colors or because it was easier to steal.

The second tagger would head for the section where the various markers were displayed. Craft stores were a favorite because they had a multitude of devices with sharp tips for scratching windows. It was important to find something like this that resembled a pen, because it was easier to conceal them from view on the bus or train. Plus they had all the markers you could ever want. Once again slits were cut into the lining of their jacket, which turned the entire lining into a big open space. Those spaces and their pockets were immediately filled with markers of all kinds. Large tipped permanent markers were favorites for tagging, while the more expensive "design" markers were prized for work in their sketchbooks.

The third tagger would head for a section that carried a much higher-quality spray paint, not for the paint, but for the nozzles on the cans. Nozzles can easily be swapped out from one type of paint to another, and these particular nozzles allowed for finer control of the spray which was essential for some of the distinct writing techniques. He explains that some taggers even run a side business selling just the stolen nozzles to other taggers. So in the store, this particular tagger would set about removing as many of these nozzles as he could.

"That's when we worked together," he says. "It was getting out of there that was fun. Sometimes you would have a guy whose jacket was bulging all over the place from spray paint cans. So, he would have to hide behind one of the other guys to get out."

Of course they still had to have money for gas in the car, clothes, or skateboarding necessities and other needs, which led to other illegal activities of that sort. In fact this young man ran a side business selling stolen sports jerseys..

"I wore a jersey to school once," he says. "I had people coming up to me and asking me if I could get more jerseys and stuff for them. Eventually it was like I was taking orders. I would have people coming up to me all the time and telling me what jerseys they wanted and in what sizes and I would call my connection from a pay phone in the school cafeteria. In a few days I would have the jersey and get money for it."

Going to a public school and painting and tagging in some of the worst places in the city also meant you could run up against gang-bangers. But a nice jersey, or drawing a gang-banger's name on a ball cap or a t-shirt, or even in a notebook in a certain way that he particularly liked were all methods of buying their protection and respect when you were in their area.

"There were times when we would be surrounded by gang bangers," he says. "Yet they'd leave us alone. If you did right by them they watched your back and you didn't have to worry."

That didn't guarantee that you wouldn't be in any danger while in a certain area. Just because a street gang wasn't gunning for you, a tagger could still find himself in territory that was under dispute. Gunfire was often heard, but the main concern was that it would bring cops to the scene. Trying to avoid cops was always a concern anyway, and getting away from them could be dangerous and even deadly.

"We were on the west side of town," he says. "We were in a really bad part of the city. We were up on this roof doing pieces and one of our guys was on an adjacent roof. Turns out there was this guy living in one of the apartments and he came out. Me and this other guy were up higher and we heard the guy at the lower level talking to someone and when we looked over we realized he was talking to the guy living in the apartment. The guy said he was an artist and that he was sorry because if he knew what we were doing he would have been all right with it. However, he thought we were trying to break in so he had called the cops."

Nothing causes panic in a tagger faster than word that the cops are headed for the area, so with the warning from the resident, the taggers began to scatter. It was the middle of the night and these taggers were on rooftops and they soon realized that they couldn't go down because the cops were already there just below the fire escape.

"So the guy I was with launched out of there like a bullet out of a gun," he says. "He starts running across the rooftops like a damn superhero or something. I look around and I am all alone. I go one way to try to get down and I see cop cars on the street. I go another way and I see another cop car and cops already coming up the fire escape. So, I run the way my friend went. The buildings are all close together and I ran from one rooftop to another. Then I get to this one roof and I leap over and my feet just don't touch anything. The roof of the other building was slanted a bit and the end I jumped over was at the lower end where the roof was much farther away. I must have fallen two stories and then I landed half on an air conditioning unit."

There is nothing quite like adrenaline for helping you to survive a two-story fall and a collision with an air conditioning unit and still not be slowed down.. Of course luck helped a bit too, and it just so happened that his friends were hiding on that same rooftop. They knew those rooftops, and explained to him later that they ran there because they knew none of the cops would attempt that two-story jump. Plus, the roof was covered with skylights that stood up high enough that you could crouch down and hide behind them, and he followed their lead.

"Their flashlights were going right over our heads," he says. "We just sat there huddled down trying not to move. We must have sat there behind those pieces of glass for twenty minutes or more and then we just left. We crawled down the fire escape and later on we found that friend who ran over the rooftops back at his place just sitting there watching television."

As if crawling around in subway tunnels wasn't dangerous enough, adding drugs or alcohol to the equation made it even more interesting and fun to them.

"Mostly it was pot," he says. "We'd get into the tunnels and someone would pass around a joint and we'd get a little high. We were also totally 'gangster' and drank forties. We never did the tunnels drunk, but we did do them high. Of course, that just made the tunnels that much more interesting. You had to be watchful and that was the key. There were usually spaces between the trains as they went in opposite directions. So, if an eastbound train came through you could head into the westbound side and wait for it to pass."

Having the keys, knowing which stations were closed, which you were closest to, and where the next station or safe area was, were all essential to your survival.

"There are maintenance rooms and exit rooms all over the place," he says. "You could just head down to one of those and wait for a train to pass. Sometimes the rooms were too far away or some people were just too slow and you'd just have to press up against the wall under the walkway and wait for it go past. Those things could be inches from your face."

In the movie "Goodfellas" the gangsters in that move had their big score taking a huge amount of cash from "Lufthansa". Likewise these taggers were looking for their own "Lufthansa", and for this young man's crew theirs was the Elston Street bus yard.

"It's funny because it was supposed to be an easy night," he says. "We were going into Skokie to this yard where they have old and retired train cars that they just use for parts. It's usually not guarded very heavily and hitting that is pretty easy. We used it for practice. Of course that night we get there and end up getting chased out. So, there we are in the car and it's like, OK, what do we do now? Someone suggested hitting the Elston bus yard, which was near by."

Of course, knowledge of how a yard is set up and their routine is key to a successful yard raid, and this presented a problem for the crew because they were not particularly familiar with the Elston bus yard. This meant they weren't sure, at first, where the freshly-washed buses were and which ones hadn't gone through the wash yet.

"We figured it out pretty quick but that place was busier than the other places we had been," he says. "There were buses coming in and out and people all over the place. It became a game though. We just destroyed that place. We got in buses and on top of buses. We were like kids in a candy store and we just destroyed it. That was a great night."

The crew left the yard that night feeling as if they'd just had a tagging "orgy" of sorts. They hadn't kept score, but they knew they had done well. Little did they know as they left that they were destined for the tagger hall-of-fame. It was with a mix of surprise and delight when their escapade made the local news the next evening.

"We were all sitting around the next night and the news came on and there was our bus yard and all of our buses," he says. "We started calling each other and it was so cool. The news on TV and in the newspapers said we hit twenty-seven buses. We thought it was so cool. We thought it was fun."

Well, that fun was short-lived. By this time a graffiti taskforce had been formed in the city, and they had been collecting the various tags, crew names, and other information. By now they were beginning to connect tags to real names and faces, and some of the tags used in the bus incident were well known.

"I was on the phone with one of my friends," he says. "Suddenly, as I am on the phone, I hear his front door open and the police rush in. Just before he called and told me to get out of my house. I heard them arrest him. We immediately swung into action."

The first thing was to get rid of the evidence. The attic room he and his friends lived in was covered with graffiti. They had seemingly hundreds of cans of spray paint just sitting on the floor. They took the cans and stuffed them into as many bags as they could and started calling around to people who might be willing to hide it for them. They already had cans of wall paint that they used as primer for walls along the train lines so they used that to cover the walls of the attic room.

"The guy who was willing to hide the paint had an old car that he wasn't using," he says. "He said we could use that as a place to hide the paint. We stuffed that thing full. It was ridiculous. We filled the inside of that car with paint cans. The problem was that Gulf War I had just started something like the night before, so everyone was supposed to be extra vigilant. So, of course some neighbor saw us stuffing things into this car and called the police. We really thought we could go back and get that paint once the heat was off."

Unfortunately, the heat was really on now. One of their crew was already in custody and others were now being encouraged to turn themselves in. When the crew had previously been hit with shop-lifting and other charges, one of them pointed out that his father was a lawyer, and very soon he unofficially became the entire group's lawyer. He worked a deal to have some of the charges dropped on some of the boys, but it included getting those involved in the bus yard incident to turn themselves in.

"I didn't bother," he says. "I went and hid out at a friend's house in Rosement for like two weeks. I missed at least a week of school or just went back a day here or there. Back then there was this rumor that Chicago cops would not serve a warrant in Rosemont so I knew someone who lived there and I hid out there while the other guys turned themselves in. No one ever gave me up, either."

Lessons are hard learned sometimes, and this close call did little to slow him down. He continued tagging . Ultimately, it wasn't the law that changed him, however, it was life.

He went on to graduate from high school, got a steady job and a steady girlfriend. The same happened to the others in his crew although they would sometimes end up thrown back together and there were moments when he would be encouraged to go back out for one more bombing run.

"I was in it for about seven years," he says. "There are times I miss it even today but it's not the same as it was back then. Back then we could all be there openly bombing a bus stop at a red light in the middle of the afternoon and cars could be there watching us and no one would do anything. Not everyone had a cell phone back then and it was too much trouble to go find a phone to call the cops. Now everyone has a cell phone and a cell phone with a camera in it. You just don't see it as much anymore. You see it in the smaller towns and cities, maybe, but not in Chicago so much anymore."

There are now video games where you can become a tagger with the object being to get your name up in as many places as you can in a fictional city. Even Tony Hawk's skateboarding game has a graffiti aspect, and there are even websites that have digital walls where you can put up tags and graffiti. These days, real-life graffiti artists and writers can put up a piece, take a picture of it with their cell-phone, and it can be revealed to the entire world in just minutes. Your name can be out there with a couple clicks of the mouse.

So, what did he learn from his experiences? Does he regret the things he did or the things he went through? Does he spend nights worrying about his soon-to-be-born child getting into this kind of activity someday? The short and simple answer to my questions is no. Regret? Maybe a little, but like everything else we do, it was all a learning experience, it helped him learn things he still uses today, and it helped to shape who is now..

"I learned how to be bold," he says. "I mean, I was never particularly fearful but I learned to be outrageously bold at times. For example, there was the night we were climbing over a fence to get out of there in a hurry because someone said they saw cops or something. Anyway, as I was climbing the fence I dropped my car keys into this bush there. Well, it was the middle of the night and my two friends just ran off to hide completely unaware of what had happened to me. I decided I was going to get a cop to help me find my key. Not to be stereotypical but I went over to this Dunkin' Donuts and there actually was a cop in there. So, I told this cop I had seen these two kids climb over the fence and I decided to pull over and see if I could see what they were up to and I had lost my keys. Before you know it there I was with a cop and his flashlight searching for my keys. We found them too."

That wasn't the only time, and of the many things he learned as a tagger and shop-lifter he learned how to act around a cop and how to spin a tale. He became adept at saying just what a cop needed to hear to let him off the hook.

"In fact about a week before the Dunkin' Donuts incident," he says, "my friends and I were running away from some cops and there was another fence. This time my coat pocket got caught and ripped open and all of my stuff came tumbling out. Again, my friends ran off but I told the cops I had been in the alley and a bunch of kids ran by me and cut my jacket with a knife and ripped the pocket. Again I had the cops helping me find my stuff and then giving me a lecture about getting home and staying out of alleys.

"I got busted at Woodfield Mall coming out of Marshall Fields with stolen clothes. I broke into this tall tale when I was in the mall cop's office and got out of it. Another time I started telling a cop how I was in an abusive home and my parents didn't care about me. Before long he was offering to find counseling for me and didn't want to press charges."

These days his life is filled with normalcy. He left Chicago and, in fact, the state of Illinois. He has moved on and grown up. He has a nice home and worries about paying the bills just like everyone else. He sometimes wears a suit and tie to work in an office, where he has people who report to him.

Does he ever spot a wall and wonder if he could get back there at night with some cans of paint to put up a spectacular piece that would leave people talking?

"Yeah, I miss it sometimes," he says. "I think about it sometimes. Things are just different now. Now, there's too much at stake. I miss the excitement and it really was a lot of fun. Despite all of the bad stuff it really was a lot of fun. We weren't doing it for art and we weren't doing it for some noble purpose. We were just trying to get our name out there."

What about those people who just assume that graffiti artists are punks who just want to destroy property? Is there anything he would like those people to know about graffiti?

"The biggest misconception is that all writers look the same. Sure there are b-boys, but there are a lot of cats you would never expect to be doing it. That's the great thing about writing. When I was sixteen, I was painting with guys that were eighteen, nineteen or twenty. Some of them had kids and wives at home. I mean you would never have suspected some of them. I mean writers came in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life and from every corner of the city. That was truly the coolest thing about it."