Artikel om JA

Once he called me from Rikers Island prison, where he was serving a couple of months for disorderly conduct and a probation violation. He said some of the inmates saw him tagging in a notebook and asked him to do tattoos for them.
It sounds right. Wherever he is, JA dominates his surroundings. With his crew, he picks the spots to hit, the stores to rack from; he controls the mission. He gives directions in the car, plans the activities, sets the mood. And he takes everything a step further than the people he's with. He climbs higher, stays awake longer, sucks deepest on the blunt, writes the most graffiti. And though he's respected by other writers for testing the limits -- he has been described to me by other writers as a king and, by way of compliment, as "the sickest guy I ever met" -- that same recklessness sometimes alienates him from the majority who don't have such a huge appetite for chaos, adrenaline, self-destruction.
When I ask a city detective who specializes in combating graffiti if there are any particularly well-known writers, he immediately mentions JA and adds with a bit of pride in his voice, "We know each other." He calls JA the "biggest graffiti writer of all time" (though the detective would prefer that I didn't mention that, because it'll only encourage JA). "He's probably got the most throw-ups in the city, in the country, in the world," the detective says. "If the average big-time graffiti vandal has 10,000 tags, JA's got 100,000. He's probably done -- in New York City alone -- at least $5 million worth of damage."
AT ABOUT 3 A.M., JA AND TWO OTHER WRITERS go out to hit a billboard off the West Side Highway in Harlem. Tonight there are SET, a 21-year-old white writer from Queens, N.Y., and JD, a black Latino writer the same age, also from Queens. They load their backpacks with racked cans of Rustoleum, fat cap nozzles, heavy 2-foot industrial bolt cutters and surgical gloves. We pile into a car and start driving, Schooly D blasting on the radio. First a stop at a deli where JA and SET go in and steal beer. Then we drive around Harlem trying a number of different dope spots, keeping an eye out for "berries" -- police cars. JA tosses a finished 40-ounce out the window in a high arc, and it smashes on the street.
At different points, JA gets out of the car and casually walks the streets and into buildings, looking for dealers. A good part of the graffiti life involves walking anywhere in the city, at any time, and not being afraid -- or being afraid and doing it anyway.
We arrive at a spot where JA has tagged the dealer's name on a wall in his territory. The three writers buy a vial of crack and a vial of angel dust and combine them ("spacebase") in a hollowed-out Phillies blunt. JD tells me that "certain drugs will enhance your bombing,"

citing dust for courage and strength ("bionics"). They've also bombed on mescaline, Valium, marijuana, crack and malt liquor. SET tells a story of climbing highway poles with a spray can at 6 a.m., "all Xanaxed out."
While JD is preparing the blunt, JA walks across the street with a spray can and throws up all three of their tags in 4-foot-high bubbled, connected letters. In the corner, he writes my name.
We then drive to a waterfront area at the edge of the city -- a deserted site with warehouses, railroad tracks and patches of urban wilderness dotted with high-rise billboards. All three writers are now high, and we sit on a curb outside the car smoking cigarettes. From a distance we can see a group of men milling around a parked car near a loading dock that we have to pass. This provokes 30 minutes of obsessive speculation, a stoned stakeout with play by play:
"Dude, they're writers," says SET. "Let's go down and check them out," says JD. "Wait, let's see what they write," says JA. "Yo -- they're going into the trunk," says SET. "Cans, dude, they're going for their cans. Dude, they're writers. "There could be beef, possible beef," says JA. "Can we confirm cans, do we see cans?" SET wants to know. Yes, they do have cans," SET answers for himself. "There are cans. They are writers." It turns out that the men are thieves, part of a group robbing a nearby truck. In a few moments guards appear with flashlights and at least one drawn gun. The thieves scatter as guard dogs fan out around the area, barking crazily.
We wait this out a bit until JA announces, "It's on." Hood pulled up on his head, he leads us creeping through the woods (which for JA has become the cinematic jungles of Nam). It's stop and go, JA crawling on his stomach, unnecessarily close to one of the guards who's searching nearby. We pass through graffiti-covered tunnels (with the requisite cinematic drip drip), over crumbling stairs overgrown with weeds and brush, along dark, heavily littered trails used by crackheads.
We get near the billboard, and JA uses the bolt cutters to cut holes in two chain-link fences. We crawl through and walk along the railroad tracks until we get to the base of the sign. JA, with his backpack on, climbs about 40 feet on a thin piece of metal pipe attached to the main pillar. JD, after a few failed attempts, follows with the bolt cutters shoved down his pants and passes them to JA. Hanging in midair, his legs wrapped around a small piece of ladder, JA cuts the padlock and opens up the hatch to the catwalk. He then lowers his arm to JD, who is wrapped around the pole just below him, struggling. "J, give me your hand, "I'll pull you up," JA tells him. JD hesitates. He is reluctant to let go and continues treadmilling on the pole, trying to make it up. JD, give me your hand." JD doesn't want to refuse, but he's uncomfortable entrusting his life to JA. He won't let go of the pole. JA says it again, firmly, calmly, utterly confident: "J give me your hand." JD's arm reaches up, and JA pulls JD up onto the catwalk. Next, SET, the frailest of the three, follows unsteadily. They've called down and offered to put up his tag, but he insists on going up. "Dude, fuck that, I'm down," he says. I look away while he makes his way up, sure that he's going to fall (he almost does twice). The three have developed a set pattern for dividing the labor when they're "blowing up," one writer outlining, another working behind him, filling in. For 40 minutes I watch them working furiously, throwing shadows as they cover ads for Parliament and Amtrak with large multicolored throw-ups SET and JD bickering about space, JA scolding them, tossing down empty cans.

They risk their lives again climbing down. Parts of their faces are covered in paint, and their eyes beam as all three stare at the billboard, asking, "Isn't it beautiful?' And there is something intoxicating about seeing such an inaccessible, clean object gotten to and made gaudy. We get in the car and drive the West Side Highway northbound and then southbound so they can critique their work. "Damn, I should've used the white," JD says.
The next day both billboards are newly re-covered, all the graffiti gone. JA tells me the three went back earlier to get pictures and made small talk with the workers who were cleaning it off.
GRAFFITI HAS BEEN THROUGH A NUMBER OF incarnations since it surfaced in New York in the early 70s with a Greek teen-ager named Taki 183. It developed from the straightforward writing of a name to highly stylized, seemingly illegible tags (a kind of penmanship slang) to wild-style throw-ups and elaborate (master) "pieces" and character art. There has been racist graffiti political writing, drug advertising, gang graffiti. There is an art-graf scene from which Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiac, LEE, Futura 2000, Lady Pink and others emerged; aerosol advertising; techno graffiti written into computer programs; anti-billboard graffiti; stickers; and stencil writing. There are art students doing street work in San Francisco ("nonpermissional public art"); mural work in underground tunnels in New York; gallery shows from Colorado to New Jersey; all-day Graffiti-a-Thons; and there are graffiti artists lecturing art classes at universities. Graffiti has become part of urban culture, hip-hop culture and commercial culture, has spread to the suburbs and can be found in the backwoods of California's national forests. There are graffiti magazines, graffiti stores, commissioned walls, walls of fame and a video series available (Out to bomb) documenting writers going out on graffiti missions, complete with soundtrack. Graffiti was celebrated as a metaphor in the 70s (Norman Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti"); it went Hollywood in the '80s (Beat Street, Turk 182!, Wild Style); and in the '90s it has been increasingly used to memorialize the inner-city dead.
But as much as graffiti has found acceptance, it has been vilified a hundred times more. Writers are now being charged with felonies and given lengthy jail terms -- a 15-year-old in California was recently sentenced to eight years in a juvenile detention center. Writers have been given up to 1000 hours of community service and forced to undergo years of psychological counseling; their parents have been hit with civil suits. In California a graffiti writer's driver's license can be revoked for a year; high-school diplomas and transcripts can also be withheld until parents make restitution. In some cities property owners who fail to remove graffiti from their property are subject to fines and possible jail time. Last spring in St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Antonio and Sacramento, Calif., politicians proposed legislation to cane graffiti writers (four to 10 hits with a wooden paddle, administered by parents or by a bailiff in a public courtroom). Across the nation, legislation has been passed making it illegal to sell spray paint and wide-tipped markers to anyone under 18, and often the materials must be kept locked up in the stores. Several cities have tried to ban the sales altogether, license sellers of spray paint and require customers to give their name and address when purchasing paint. In New York some hardware-store owners will give a surveillance photo of anyone buying a large quantity of spray cans to the police. In Chicago people have been charged with possession of paint. In San Jose, Calif., undercover police officers ran a sting operation -- posing as filmmakers working on a graffiti documentary -- and arrested 31 writers.

Hidden cameras, motion detectors, laser removal, specially developed chemical coatings, night goggles, razor wire, guard dogs, a National Graffiti Information Network, graffiti hot lines, bounties paid to informers -- one estimate is that it costs $4 billion a year nationally to clean graffiti -- all in an effort to stop those who "visually laugh in the face of communities," as a Wall Street Journal editorial raged.
The popular perception is that since the late 1980s when New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority adopted a zero tolerance toward subway graffiti (the MTA either cleaned or destroyed more than 6,000 graffiti-covered subway cars, immediately pulling a train out of service if any graffiti appeared on it), graffiti culture had died in the place of its birth. According to many graffiti writers, however, the MTA, in its attempt to kill graffiti, only succeeded in bringing it out of the tunnels and train yards and making it angry. Or as Jeff Ferrell, a criminologist who has chronicled the Denver graffiti scene, theorizes, the authorities' crackdown moved graffiti writing from subculture to counterculture. The work on the trains no longer ran, so writers started hitting the streets. Out in the open they had to work faster and more often. The artistry started to matter less and less. Throw-ups, small cryptic tags done in marker and even the straightforward writing of a name became the dominant imagery. What mattered was quantity ("making noise"), whether the writer had heart, was true to the game, was "real." And the graffiti world started to attract more and more people who weren't looking for an alternative art canvas but simply wanted to be connected to an outlaw community, to a venerable street tradition that allowed the opportunity to advertise their defiance. "It's that I'm doing it that I get my rush, not by everyone seeing it," says JA. "Yeah, that's nice, but if that's all that's gonna motivate you to do it, you're gonna stop writing. That's what happened to a lot of writers." JD tells me: "We're just putting it in their faces; it's like 'Yo, you gotta put up with it.'"
Newspapers have now settled on the term "graffiti vandal" rather than "artist" or "writer." Graffiti writers casually refer to their work as doing destruction." In recent years graffiti has become more and more about beefs and wars, about "fucking up the MTA," "fucking up the city."

Writers started taking a jock attitude toward getting up frequently and tagging in hard-to-reach places, adopting a machismo toward going over other writers' work and defending their own ("If you can write, you can fight"). Whereas graffiti writing was once considered an alternative to the street, now it imports drugs, violence, weapons and theft from that world -- the romance of the criminal deviant rather than the artistic deviant. In New York today, one police source estimates there are approximately 100,000 people involved in a variety of types of graffiti writing. The police have caught writers as young as 8 and as old as 42. And there's a small group of hard-core writers who are getting older who either wrote when graffiti was in its prime or long for the days when it was, those who write out of compulsion, for each other and for the authorities who try to combat graffiti, writers who haven't found anything in their lives substantial or hype enough to replace graffiti writing.
The writers in their 20s come mostly from working-class families and have limited prospects and ambitions for the future. SET works in a drugstore and has taken lithium and Prozac for occasional depression; JD dropped out of high school and is unemployed, last working as a messenger, where he met JA. They spend their nights driving 80 miles an hour down city highways, balancing 40-ounce bottles of Old English 800 between their legs, smoking blunts and crack-laced cigarettes called coolies, always playing with the radio. They reminisce endlessly about the past, when graf was real, when graf ran on the trains, and they swap stories about who's doing what on the scene. The talk is a combo platter of Spicoli, homeboy, New Age jock and eighth grade: The dude is a fuckin' total turd. . . . I definitely would've gotten waxed. . . . It's like some bogus job. . . . I'm amped, I'm Audi, you buggin . . . You gotta be there fully, go all out, focus. . . . Dudes have bitten off SET, he's got toys jockin' him. . . .
They carry beepers, sometimes guns, go upstate or to Long Island to "prey on the hicks" and to rack cans of spray paint. They talk about upcoming court cases and probation, about quitting, getting their lives together, even as they plan new spots to hit, practice their style by writing on the walls of their apartments, on boxes of food, on any stray piece of paper (younger writers practice on school notebooks that teachers have been known to confiscate and turn over to the police). They call graffiti a "social tool" and "some kind of ill form of communication," refer to every writer no matter his age as "kid." Talk in the graffiti life vacillates between banality and mythology, much like the activity itself: hours of drudgery, hanging out, waiting, interrupted by brief episodes of exhilaration. JD, echoing a common refrain, says, "Graffiti writers are like bitches: a lot of lying, a lot of talking, a lot of gossip." They don't like tagging with girls ("cuties," or if they use drugs, "zooties") around because all they say is (in a whiny voice), You're crazy. . . . Write my name."

WHEN JA TALKS ABOUT GRAFFITI, HE'S reluctant to offer up any of the media-ready cliches about the culture (and he knows most of them). He's more inclined to say, "Fuck the graffiti world," and scoff at graf shops, videos, conventions and 'zines. But he can be sentimental about how he began -- riding the No. 1, 2 and 3 trains when he was young, bugging out on the graffiti-covered cars, asking himself, "How did they do that? Who are they?" And he'll respectfully invoke the names of long-gone writers he admired when he was just starting out: SKEME, ZEPHYR, REVOLT, MIN.
JA, typical of the new school, primarily bombs, covering wide areas with throw-ups. He treats graffiti less as an art form than as an athletic competition, concentrating on getting his tag in difficult-to-reach places, focusing on quantity and working in defiance of an aesthetic that demands that public property be kept clean. (Writers almost exclusively hit public or commercial property.)
And when JA is not being cynical, he can talk for hours about the technique, the plotting, the logistics of the game like "motion bombing" by clockwork a carefully scoped subway train that he knows has to stop for a set time, at a set place, when it gets a certain signal in the tunnels. He says, "To me, the challenge that graffiti poses, there's something very invigorating and freeing about it, something almost spiritual. There's a kind of euphoria, more than any kind of drug or sex can give you, give me . . . for real."
JA says he wants to quit, and he talks about doing it as if he were in a 12-step program. "How a person in recovery takes it one day a time, that's how I gotta take it," he says. You get burnt out. There's pretty much nothing more the city can throw at me; it's all been done." But then he'll hear about a yard full of clean sanitation trucks, the upcoming Puerto Rican Day Parade (a reason to bomb Fifth Avenue) or a billboard in an isolated area; or it'll be 3 a.m., he'll be stoned, driving around or sitting in the living room, playing NBA Jam, and someone will say it: "Yo, I got a couple of cans in the trunk. . . ." REAS, an old-school writer of 12 years who, after a struggle and a number of relapses, eventually quit the life, says, "Graffiti can become like a hole you're stuck in; it can just keep on going and going, there's always another spot to write on."
SAST is in his late 20s and calls himself semiretired after 13 years in the graf scene. He still carries around a marker with him wherever he goes and cops little STONE tags (when he's high, he writes, STONED). He's driving JA and me around the city one night, showing me different objects they've tagged, returning again and again to drug spots to buy dust and crack, smoking, with the radio blasting; he's telling war stories about JA jumping onto moving trains, JA hanging off the outside of a speeding four-wheel drive. SAST is driving at top speed, cutting in between cars, tailgating, swerving. A number of times as we're racing down the highway, I ask him if he could slow down. He smiles, asks if I'm scared, tells me not to worry, that he's a more cautious driver when he's dusted. At one point on the FDR, a car cuts in front of us. JA decides to have some fun.
"Yo, he burnt you, SAST," JA says. We start to pick up speed. Yo, SAST, he dissed you, he cold dissed you, SAST." SAST is buying it, the look on his face becoming more determined as we go 70, 80, 90 miles an hour, hugging the divider, flying between cars. I turn to JA, who's in the back seat, and I try to get him to stop. JA ignores me, sitting back perfectly relaxed, smiling, urging SAST to go faster and faster, getting off, my fear adding to his rush.
At around 4 a.m., SAST drops us off on the middle of the Manhattan Bridge and leaves. JA wants to show me a throw-up he did the week before. We climb over the divider from the roadway to the subway tracks. JA explains that we have to cross the north and the southbound tracks to get to the outer part of the bridge. In between there are a number of large gaps and two electrified third rails, and we're 135 feet above the East River. As we're standing on the tracks, we hear the sound of an oncoming train. JA tells me to hide, to crouch down in the V where two diagonal braces meet just beside the tracks.

I climb into position, holding on to the metal beams, head down, looking at the water as the train slams by the side of my body. This happens twice more. Eventually, I cross over to the outer edge of the bridge, which is under construction, and JA points out his tag about 40 feet above on what looks like a crow's-nest on a support pillar. After a few moments of admiring the view, stepping carefully around the many opportunities to fall, JA hands me his cigarettes and keys. He starts crawling up one of the braces on the side of the bridge, disappears within the structure for a moment, emerges and makes his way to an electrical box on a pillar. Then he snakes his way up the piping and grabs on to a curved support. Using only his hands he starts to shimmy up; at one point he's hanging almost completely upside down. If he falls now, he'll land backward onto one of the tiers and drop into the river below. He continues to pull himself up, the old paint breaking off in his hands, and finally he flips his body over a railing to get to the spot where he tagged. He doesn't have a can or a marker with him, and at this point graffiti seems incidental. He comes down and tells me that when he did the original tag he was with two writers; one he half carried up, the other stopped at a certain point and later told JA that watching him do that tag made him appreciate life, being alive.
We walk for 10 minutes along a narrow, grooved catwalk on the side of the tracks; a thin wire cable prevents a fall into the river. A few times, looking down through the grooves, I have to stop, force myself to take the next step straight ahead, shake off the vertigo. JA is practically jogging ahead of me. We exit the bridge into Chinatown as the sun comes up and go to eat breakfast. JA tells me he's a vegetarian.
IF YOU TALK TO SERIOUS GRAFFITI writers, most of them will echo the same themes; they decry the commercialization of graf, condemn the toys and poseurs and alternately hate and feel attached to the authorities who try to stop them. They say with equal parts bravado and self-deprecation that a graffiti writer is a bum, a criminal, a vandal, slick, sick, obsessed, sneaky, street-smart, living on edges figurative and literal. They show and catalog cuts and scars on their bodies from razor wire, pieces of metal, knives, box cutters. I once casually asked a writer named GHOST if he knew another writer whose work I had seen in a graf'zine. "Yeah, I know him, he stabbed me," GHOST replies matter-of-factly. "We've still got beef." SET tells me he was caught by two DTs (detectives) who assaulted him, took his cans of paint and sprayed his body and face. JA tells similar stories of police beatings for his making officers run after him, of cops making him empty his spray cans on his sneakers or on the back of a fellow writer's jacket. JD has had 48 stitches in his back and 18 in his head over "graffiti-related beef." JA's best friend and writing partner, SANE SMITH, a legendary all-city writer who was sued by the city and the MTA for graffiti, was found dead, floating in Jamaica Bay. There's endless speculation in the grafworld as to whether he was pushed, fell or jumped off a bridge. SANE is so respected, there are some writers today who spend time in public libraries reading and rereading the newspaper microfilm about his death, his arrests, his career. According to JA, after SANE's death, his brother, SMiTH, also a respected graffiti artist, found a piece of paper on which SANE had written his and JA's tag and off to the side, FLYING HIGH THE XTC WAY. It now hangs on JA's apartment wall.

One morning, JA and I jump off the end of a subway platform and head into the tunnels. He shows me hidden rooms, emergency hatches that open to the sidewalk, where to stand when the trains come by. He tells me about the time SANE lay face down in a shallow drainage ditch on the tracks as an express train ran inches above him. JA says anytime he was being chased by the police he would run into a nearby subway station, jump off the platform and run into the tunnels. The police would never follow. KET, a veteran graffiti writer, tells me how in the tunnels he would accidentally step on homeless people sleeping. They'd see him tagging and would occasionally ask that he "throw them up," write their names on the wall. He usually would. Walking in the darkness between the electrified rails as trains race by, JA tells me the story of two writers he had beef with who came into the tunnels to cross out his tags. Where the cross-outs stop is where they were killed by an approaching train.
The last time I go out with JA, SET and JD, they pick me up at around 2 am. We drive down to the Lower East Side to hit a yard where about 60 trucks and vans are parked next to one another. Every vehicle is already covered with throw-ups and tags, but the three start to write anyway, JA in a near frenzy. They're running in between the rows, crawling under trucks, jumping from roof to roof, wedged down in between the trailers, engulfed in nauseating clouds of paint fumes (the writers sometimes blow multicolored mucous out of their noses), going over some writers' tags, respecting others, JA throwing up SANE's name, searching for any little piece of clean space to write on. JA, who had once again been talking about retirement, is now hungry to write and wants to hit another spot. But JD doesn't have any paint, SET needs gas money for his car, and they have to drive upstate the next morning to appear in court for a paint-theft charge.
During the ride back uptown the car is mostly quiet, the mood depressed. And even when the three were in the truck yard, even when JA was at his most intense, it seemed closer to work, routine, habit. There are moments like this when they seem genuinely worn out by the constant stress, the danger, the legal problems, the drugging, the fighting, the obligation to always hit another spot. And it's usually when the day is starting.
About a week later I get a call from another writer whom JA had told I was writing an article on graffiti. He tells me he has never been king, never gone all city, but now he is making a comeback, coming out of retirement with a new tag. He says he could do it easily today because there is no real competition. He says he was thinking about trying to make some money off of graffiti -- galleries. canvases, whatever . . . to get paid.
"I gotta do something," the writer says. "I can't rap, I can't dance, I got this silly little job." We talk more, and he tells me he appreciates that I'm writing about writers, trying to get inside the head of a vandal, telling the real deal. He also tells me that graffiti is dying, that the city is buffing it, that new writers are all toys and are letting it die, but it's still worth it to write.
I ask why, and then comes the inevitable justification that every writer has to believe and take pleasure in, the idea that order will always have to play catch-up with them. "It takes me seconds to do a quick throw-up; it takes them like 10 minutes to clean it," he says. "Who's coming out on top?"

Orkar verkligen inte läsa igenom allt, kan någon vänlig själ sammanfatta?

_-bacteria-_

Vad är meningen med att göra intervjun om du inte läser den?
Sammanfattning.....pffft!


Bra intervju. Tog sin lilla stund att läsa den.

the_arne - pfft på dig själv, jävla h4xx0R n00B

Kan någon länka bilden på den stora Saber peicen efter att JA spittat den?

sammanfattning:

JA målar graffiti.
JD är hans kompis.
SET också.
Dom målar också graffiti.
Dom knarkar ibland.

Nja, bättre sammanfattning är väl att artikeln beskriver den extremaste delen av NYCs bombingscen.

grymt! tackar för morgonläsningen:)

fet artikel.... holla

Okej då, det var ganska undehållande läsning! Propps

feta tips också, t.ex. crack o pcp innan man ska pieca. Ska testas!

I once casually asked a writer named GHOST if he knew another writer whose work I had seen in a graf'zine. "Yeah, I know him, he stabbed me,"

JD has had 48 stitches in his back and 18 in his head over "graffiti-related beef."

"It takes me seconds to do a quick throw-up; it takes them like 10 minutes to clean it," he says. "Who's coming out on top?"

där har ni en liten samanfattning. :D

kungen av beef. hats down.

Någon som kan hjälpa mig med lite länkar? Skulle vilja se JAs sabotage av Sabers livsverk. Sen så såg jag en sida med många av hans grejjer, den hette insane graff, insane getting up eller liknande. Någon som vet vilken sida det är?

kolla crazy bild-tråd.

aha, insanefame.com, tackar

Hahahaha, och Saber pajjade ryggen när han gjorde den där? Hahaha, stackars.

nice!

www.insanefame.com

Karatekid-JA rox.

Haha, nödvändigt o spitta...

amfetaminpsykos: Det där med karatekid har jag läst på endel forum. Förklara 

furbyone

Han har en het roll i Karate Kid III och en
mindre het roll i Rocky 5 bl.a.

Vet inte hur mycket mer man kan skriva här dock
innan moderatorer m.m. blir griniga.

Vart kommer intervjun/artikeln från? Fet som fan!

Rolling Stone Magazine.

Kan slänga in JA/Soni-biten från Subway Lives, mer mustig läsning.

SONI, a.k.a. Danny Gomez, is very nearly the last of the graffiti tag kings. He lives in Bushwick, a rowdy, working-poor section of Brooklyn, the son of an immigrant Dominican, who arrives at work before dawn in the small bodega he runs seventeen hours a day. Tonight, SONI is going to war against JA-John Avildsen, another tag artist, the son of a Hollywood movie director, who lives not in a hardscrabble section of Brooklyn, but in the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan. JA has "dissed" SONI by tagging the home of one of SONI'S closest pals with his nom de graffiti. Their battle will be fought in the perpetual night of the tunnels, as trains roar past, the scrawl of the combatants caught in the strobe of speeding headlights. Graffiti is dying, but SONI and JA intend to go out blazing. The mortal enemy of both SONI and JA is David Gunn. A New England preppy who could have stepped from the pages of A Separate Peace, Gunn is president of the Transit Authority-and the man who declared that he would eliminate graffiti from the subway system. For his success, he has been declared "the man who saved the subways"

1:05 A.M., Bushwick, Brooklyn: Danny Gomez
"I feel," announces SONI, "like getting up." "Yo," says SLICK. "Yo, man, let's get up, but we got to take care of ]A, man." "Check it out," says SONI. "We dry." The Bushwick night is howling to Danny Gomez and Rubin Fernandez. SONI and SLICK. Very nearly the last of the great Brooklyn graffiti writers. Tonight, they face a critical problem: no respect and no way to regain it. They have no paint. They can't get up. You need paint to get up-to shoot your name across the blackstars, the subway. A few days ago, ]A had seriously dissed SLICK. He came by car to 320 Empire Boulevard and tagged up the walls of Slick's house.

JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA JAJAJAJAJA All over the walls. Come down and fight, ]A had screamed into the hallway. Fair fight, ]A had hollered. Come on, SLICK, you afraid of a fair fight? Bullshit, man. SLICK wasn't afraid of no fair fight. He told his friends later that he stayed upstairs. There were, like, ten guys with JA, SLICK had said. In a car they came. From Manhattan. Fuckin' JA, man, think he rules the city. Man. Ten white boys he brings. Maybe it wasn't ten, but that was the minimum Slick could be outnumbered by and still keep his respect. SLICK and SONI are members of the Bushwick graffiti posse, U5, which had been formed in the winter of 1986, a marshaling of the dwindling graffiti-writing resources of the largely Hispanic neighbor- hood. JA is John Avildsen, the hated ruling king of graffiti in the city, a white guy from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father is a big Hollywood movie guy-director of Joe and the original Rocky, he also produced The Karate Kid and Lean on M e, and even got JA a part in one of the Karate Kid sequels. Worse, JA has almost unlimited access to spray paint and is killing everyone's shit. Buffing over their work. In plain language, he was scrawling on top of their scrawls, their tags, the nearly unreadable scribbles that wallpapered every public space in New York. Now he had come to SLICK'S house and tagged it up. The other fellows in U5 agreed that JA would have to be dealt with. But nobody was down for that tonight. People had school, people had work. Yo, maybe the weekend. For SONI and SLICK, that is too long to wait. Tomorrow, after they went to the Door, their high school in Manhattan, they'd take care of JA. They'd go to one of his tunnels on the West Side. "Yo, my cousin, OS, he's got some paint," says SON!. "We'll catch os tomorrow. We'll hang out at the Door, then we'll go by my cousin's house." "Bet," says Slick. "We gotta kill JA's shit."

And the 63rd Street tunnel turned out to be a spectacular place for teenage boys to hold graffiti-writing parties. Young John Avildisen once played softball there with some pals, including a pal named REAS, who remembered a fine graffiti gallery the city had built him. "Excellent," said REAS. "We brought our beers, we had time to work on our pieces. It was warm, modern and safe. Excellent."

11:25 A.M.: The System
The birthplace of Joseph Ramiro Casiano was painted a deep dark red, just a shade lighter than brown. "Deep red. Tuscan red. Well, box car red. It's actually Fox red. Railroad red," says David Gunn. Call it Gunn red. In 1984, when he came to New York to run the subways, Gunn assumed that everything had gone to hell because it all looked as though it had been decorated there- In fact, a year before Gunn set foot on Jay Street, some 200 cars had been completely rebuilt-new engines, air conditioning, new tiles, better lights. And the graffiti had been sandblasted off. What a shame it would be, one of the members of the MTA board had said, if these overhauled trains were just sent out and immediately scrawled on. In a moment of inspiration, she suggested that they be painted white. The notion was so utterly wrong, so contrary to all dictates of common sense, so close to being the definition of preposterous, that the board was enchanted. Yes, they said, paint them white. It will be a challenge to the graffiti writers. By the time Gunn arrived, there was no sign of any of the over- hauled cars. They had been mixed in with the remainder of the fleet and had vanished in the graffiti haze. "Fifty million dollars and you couldn't tell anything had been done to the cars," Gunn said. He convened his top staff. They would pick a color for the rebuilt cars, distinguishing them from the rest of the trains. And they would protect them. "I want a simple color," Gunn announced. "And I don't want lines in the car-they have a fake paint scheme with a painted blue stripe, trying to make it look like a modern stainless steel car. Well, it doesn't work. Also, if you've got a stripe on the car , when you're trying to get rid of graffiti, you've got a masking problem." A few days later the group returned. "The board room was filled with people," Gunn recalled, "with all these buckets of paint.

There must have been twenty people there. They had these swatches. ~d people were going, look at this, look at that, how about this. "Everybody was an expert. This was better than that color. This looks dark here, but it'll look better when you get it on." Gunn walked out of the meeting and back to his office. He dialed a number in Philadelphia, where he had been working until just a few weeks before and reached a man named Joe Lough1in, the superintendent of one of the city's trolley lines. "Joe," said Gunn. "Would you get me a gallon of Broad Street red?" "Sure," said Lough1in. "Can you get it to me right away?" "I'll have somebody deliver it to you." Early the next day, a messenger from Philadelphia arrived at Gunn's home with the bucket of paint. "1 brought it in, and we reassembled the group with their swatches. I said, 'Clear the space.' I opened the can of paint. And I said, 'That's the color.' "They're all saying, 'But-but-' "1 said, 'That is the color.' There was a little mumbling, grumbling. 'That's the color,That's it. Paint a train.' That was probably the most obvious decision I made." And that was how Gunn red came to replace the wallpapered madness that had amused, annoyed, and provoked New Yorkers for most of two decades. The day before JA and REAS blew out of Los Angeles, they'd driven to the U-Haul place and rented a container for the car roof.

As he packed up, getting ready to leave town, JA figured he had racked 700 cans of spray paint. Actually, he had 700 left, having gone through 3,000 cans during his eight-month stay in Los Angeles. "I was getting a hundred and fifty cans a day, " JA told REAS. "The paint is beautiful out here. The racks are incredibly easy." Which meant it was no trouble for him to swipe cans, a dozen at a time, from the shelves and racks. In New York, they were locked away by ordinance. Not so in L.A., which in its innocence, had never been invaded by the likes of JA on "racking" binges. Some kids called it "inventing" their paint. The penal code calls it theft. By whatever means, JA and REAS would be returning home with an arsenal of unprecedented proportions by New York graffiti standards, all of it packed in the U-Haul roof container. JA had left his mark behind on the West Coast. Of course, there were no subways out there-it was, after all, L.A., the expressway capital of the world. So JA bombed highway walls. Buses. All through Venice. He warred with KSN-Kings Stop at Nothing-a major graffiti crew on the West Coast. "Within a week or two, I just wiped them out, everything they had, for no real reason," JA said. JA had been in Los Angeles to try an acting career. As the movie director who' d filmed J oe, R ocky , and The K arate K id, his father, John Avildsen, had found JA a part in Karate Kid III as a henchman of the evil guy terrorizing Ralph Macchio. When that wrapped up, the young Avildsen found little work acting, and spent his time picking tag fights with the local graffiti writers. "They were making millions of public threats that I was going to be shot, " said JA, "that they had the Bloods and the Crips looking for me. Which they swore to be true."

REAS-Todd JAmes-had arrived in town a week before, to keep him company on the trip back to New York. JA and REAS were part of a small crew of upper-middle-class white boys in Manhattan who had taken to graffiti writing. Most of the kids in graffiti were poor Hispanics and African-Americans. But there were folks like JA, the son of a major movie director; REAS, a gifted artist from Manhattan's SoHo; and the Smith brothers, known as SANE-David Smith-and SMITH-Roger, whose father was a professor at New York University. The Smiths' most famous tag was executed on the Brooklyn
Bridge, the haunting, romantic nineteenth-century engineering poem that straddles lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. One night, they struck near the top of the giant stone parapets of the bridge. The next morning, a few hundred thousand people riding trains on the Manhattan Bridge, just to the north, could see the SANE SMITH tag. " A million writers will tell you that they thought of doing it," said JA admiringly, "but only the Smiths went and did it." The audacity of these boys-and their status as privileged children-made them choice targets of the police and government authorities. Law cases involving white graffiti writers made the papers. And the white boys were prolific. The Smiths andJA were sued by the city-with their parents also named because the vandalism had occurred while they were minors. Then there was the handwriting analysis case brought against Todd James by the Manhattan district attorney, who tried to prove that the REAS tag discovered on a row of trains one night was his. Of course it was; the prosecutors just couldn't establish it as a matter of law. For all these kids, seeing their name on the news was just another way of getting up-writing their tags, their graffiti names. So was getting arrested. One week, Roger Smith was busted. In a rare twin success, the cops nabbed JA the following weekend. He was taken to the transit police vandal squad office in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where he was booked. "I went into the bathroom to wash the fingerprint paint off my hands," JA recalled, "and I looked in the mirror and saw something on the wall behind me. Nah. Couldn't be. I turned around, and sure enough, there was SMITH, in that squiggled hand- writing, above the urinal. He'd tagged the vandal squad's own bath- room. In their own fingerprint paint." As they drove cross the country on the interstates, JA and REAS got up in the California desert, in Oklahoma, in Texas. No hassle. The stakes were bigger, though, because a slow-moving court in the Southwest had the time and appetite to sink its judicial teeth into a juicy graffiti case-unlike the judges in New York, who could barely find time and space to try violent psychopaths, much less a kid with a spray can. Also, REAS'S mom was getting married and he had to get back for the ceremony. So on their road trip, they threw up a few tags here and there, but didn't stop for any major attacks. "That's for the next time," said JA. Back in New York, JA was generous with the L.A. paint, among his friends, anyway. But he kept racking, whenever someone left a shelf unlocked. His goal, he said, was "trying to have seven hundred or so at anyone time-so I could go out and use twenty in a night, if I felt the need."

11:45 A.M., Bushwick, Brooklyn:
SONI You could have a car, maybe, if you lived in Bushwick and you had enough money. SONI'S father had a car .He got up at five in the morning to drive to the bodega he ran, and he stayed there until midnight. This wasn't a nice suburban town where there were arguments about borrowing the car .The old man had the car eighteen, nineteen hours a day, that was it. But New York kids don't need a car to get around. Even when their arms are too short to straphang, long before they can apply for a driver's license, Bushwick kids have the L train-the Canarsie. The L train could take you anywhere. You could ride it all the way into Manhattan, but even on shorter journeys, a new world rose above every local stop: Myrtle, DeKalb, Jefferson, Morgan, Montrose, Grand, Graham, Lorimer, Bedford. Or you could, as SONI did, ride it to the G train, which would take you back and forth to Queens. Around the same time ]A went to work in Hollywood, SONI started a job at Pergament, a discount hardware chain in the Middle Village area of Queens. It was a long commute, but he had to get some money. He was thinking about college. Today, though, SONI was off from work, and with SLICK and AUDIE was heading into the city on the only car they'd ever known, the L. They were going to take care of ]A once and for all. This was it. A few cans of gray spray paint had been procured, and there was more with SONI'S cousin downtown. The truth was, they were all getting a little tired of graffiti, but ]A wouldn't let it lie. The pride of U5-their graffiti posse-was at stake. The beef with him had started a year before, when they had done some big pieces out in the train lay-up at 121st Street in Queens. A very sweet lay-up it was, too, because the trains would be parked on some elevated tracks between rush hours, from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. You could go there and take off your shirt, catch some sun, and work in the leisure of daylight, rather than in the shadows of the tunnels. The boys from US had hit the yard with green house paint. Using rollers, they had tinctured three cars, from top to bottom, windows included. That was the base; then they launched the colors. They'd started several pieces-masterpieces, or "burners"-when the police arrived. After the members of the Bushwick crowd had either escaped or gotten handcuffed and led away, JA arrived with SMITH, and they proceeded to write all over the cars that the U5 crew had begun. "You use white, yellow, baby blue, pastel aqua, a hot pink, plum, and you blend with the colors to make a vibrant piece against your background," explained JA. "They didn't get halfway through that stage when they were raided. I didn't know what it said, or even who wrote it. If it was done by someone I knew, I would have tried to finish it for them."

Instead, he launched a rocket attack of his own tags. This was the start of the hostilities, the Fort Surnter of the late graffiti period. U5, with SONI leading the retaliation, began to write over JA'S tags. He buffed back. And so on, for weeks on end, and no one was running any productive pieces on the train. One day, there was a call to JA from SONI. "We want to squash beef with you," said SONI. Call off the quarrel. "Fuck that. You dissed me, man. That's that. Time for war." "Let's meet up." "Nab." "Yo, why don't you want to squash beef?" "Yo, you set if off, you know. Face the music." "Yo man, c'rnon, let's meet at 121lay-up," said SONI, picking the same train yard where it had all started. JA considered for a moment. "Yeah, I'll meet you there at twelve tonight. Dress warmly. " "Bet." That night, the U5 crew waited for JA. They had brought a bucket of yellow house paint, and began to tag the cars with handprints. SONI and AUDI did burners. As the hours stretched on, no JA. Someone kicked in a few windows on the cars, frustrated by his arrogance. Around 2:30, the last of U5 had left the yard, through the hole in the fence, next to the Long Island Rail Road tracks. A few minutes later, JA and two pals strolled in through the same hole. They pulled out spray cans and slashed the U5 burners with paint, and laid their own tags on top. Then the coup de grace: VICTORY IS MINE-AGAIN! EAT SHIT! Gratified by his labors, JA drove back to Manhattan. The next morning, his phone rang early. "Yo," said SONI. "YOU didn't show up." JA laughed. He could roll out of bed, still half asleep, and spit a rival square in the eye. "I just waited till you guys left so I could stamp all your shit, " said JA. SONI realized then what JA had done, that the train would parade his humiliation across the city. He scrambled for a retaliatory tactic: "Yeah, well, one can is going to dog all that shit you did," said SONI. "Too late," cackled JA. "It already pulled out." . SON! knew the time, knew that JA was right: the train already was in service. "just something to make them feel stupid when they saw the train go by, " JA later explained. This was the last attempt at a truce between 05 and JA, although for a while, the war went into an extended cease-fire-when JA moved to L.A. for his work in Karate Kid /1I. After a couple of months, the guys in 05 were getting restless. Their lives were going on. Married. Kids. Jobs. Graffiti writing was getting old. The trains were beat. The trains were clean. A train with a big piece on it, something you'd worked on all night, wasn't going out of the yard. Hell, a train with a tag wasn't going out. It was getting to be a waste of paint. AUDI called a meeting and made an announcement: "This is the deal. We're going to close down 05 for 'ninety. Before then, we're going to king the city. The streets. Write everywhere we can. After we reach our goals, like a writer wants to, we're going to break up 05, because we don't want 05 to fade away, like a crew that was tough, and the new writers come up and they go over us. We don't want to go out like that. We want niggers to know that when U5 was strong, nobody would take us down. "Even if they buff us after we stop writing, they know that if we was together, they couldn't handle us. That's the point." Later, AUDI explained, "It went beyond trains. Streets, mainly. What we hit now is trucks, the streets, things that still move. Like the train used to be. Garbage trucks." AUDI could talk tough. He could talk about kinging the city. But his boys were growing out of it. Then one day, JA returned, and he seemed to have more paint than God.

5:15 P.M., JAy Street, Brooklyn: David Gunn
David Gunn gives every appearance of being an adult-he is well over six feet tall, has beaten cancer, and has run three major rapid transit systems-but he is possessed of a child's energy. After a big meeting, he'd bounce in and out of his office every five or ten minutes, replaying winning arguments and turns of phrase with Peter Barrett, an aide who was particularly low key. Gunn would sit down in his chair, return a phone call or two, and try to read a memo, but some fugitive thought would come to mind, and he'd spring to his feet and stride across an alcove to Barrett's cigarette-hazed office. Gunn is a bubbler, a kid, people say, explaining why they find it impossible not to like him. Today, when he gets back to the thirteenth floor at Jay Street, the MT A meeting just past is still on his mind. At his office, his secretary, Monica Santanelli, hands him a batch of messages and reminds him of an appointment that would delay any postmortem of the meeting just past. A gang of Parisians awaits him in the office. Gunn is well practiced at the hearty greeting, though his hospitality tends to run no further than coffee and bowls of unsalted and butter-free popcorn. Which means that people frequently get right down to business when they come to see him. "How did you do it?" asks the head of the delegation. The question was kind of funny. Everybody was always wondering why the New York subways couldn't be like the French-or the British, or the Swedish-and yet, all those
"New York," Ed Koch once said, "is where the future comes to audition." An arrogant remark, in some respects; accurate, too. At the end of the 1980s, graffiti was reaching the status of pestilence in many of the world's other major subway systems, just as it was being eradicated from New York's. Gunn wastes no time gloating. He cannot forgive New York's failure to stop graffiti at the very beginning. "You better deal with it now or it will become a massive problem for you," he warns the Paris delegation. "I mean, there was, in my opinion, no excuse for that /, ever getting out of control here the way it did." It began, in a burst of innocence and excitement, around 1970 and captured a certain kind of imagination outside the borders of tbe middle class: for the art crowd, it was the great spirited voice of the If .- ghetto rising.

For Europeans, it was as exciting as Jazz. That year a Greek-American kid from Washington Heights named Demetrius went to work as a messenger. He rode the subways from one end of the city to the other, delivering packages and envelopes. Soon, people noticed cryptic words scrawled on the walls of stations, in cars, everywhere, it seemed. TAKI 183. As his name rolled across the city on subway cars, he became an underground mystery. Maybe these were surveyors' marks for the new subway line that was always being built. Or a coded message for terrorists. Then the New York Times discovered that TAKI was a person. It was a diminutive for Demetrius. On the condition that they not reveal his last ' name, he explained why he wrote: "I didn't have a job then, and you pass the time, you know," he said. "I just did it everywhere I went. You don't do it for the girls, they don't seem to care. You do it for yourself. You don't go after it to be elected president. ...I don't feel like a celebrity normally. But the guys make me feel like one when they introduce me to someone. 'This is him,' they say. The guys know who the first one was." Demetrius of 183rd Street between Audubon and Amsterdam Avenues, known evermore as TAKI 183, caught fame. For New York kids, the subways always have been a nearly perfect form of mobility: no driver's test required. Not much cost. Available around the clock. No parental hassle. But also, no status-no " way to whitewall the tires, no flashy equalized stereo systems, no five-speed transmissions to gun up and down the avenues.

Graffiti changed all that. Tags, spray-painted on a car that moved past millions of people, evolved before their bleary eyes into a typography of flourishes and stars, clouds and crowns, the ornamentation so thick and rich that the names were recognizable only to other kids. Even the names were code: FLASH. SCENE. CRASH. DAZE. LEE. DONDI. They reigned in a dark empire well known to the authorities of the street world. The kids could find emergency hatches in the sidewalks that led directly into tunnels, or pad along catwalks to areas where trains were laid up. The third rail, carrying 640 volts of elec- tricity, was instant, fried death in the eyes of the adult police officer; young graffiti writers danced over it, knowing where to put their feet. The more juice, the bigger the thrill. Official notice of the graffiti phenomenon came on a summer day in 1973 when Mayor John V. Lindsay went to Brooklyn to cut the ribbon on a new municipal swimming pool. The new pool was a typical Lindsay-era project: an amenity in a poor neighborhood that, symbolically and practically, might cool people off during the deranging heat of New York summers. Lindsay was beyond his hour of hope then, his campaign for the presidency having died a quick and public death, and his energies for running New York City having waned after seven and a half years. The press no longer cared where he went or what he did. Still, the pool was a Lindsay win. It had survived in the city's capital budgeting, a brutal process often dictated by powerful construction interests more concerned with roads and giant edifices. As he walked in, Lindsay looked around. Before a single drop of water had been stirred by swimming kids, graffiti had been splashed over the walls of the pool, on the benches and the walkways. A group of neighborhood boys, outfitted for the ceremony in bathing suits, crowded around the mayor. "You gotta see the locker rooms," one of them said. There, it was the same story: marker scrawls across the new cabinets, on the floor, the walls. "It's stupid," said the boy. "Brand new and its messed up al- ready."

Steaming, Lindsay returned to City Hall and walked into the office of his chief of staff, Steve Isenberg. "Get the fucking place cleaned up," Lindsay ordered. "I want you to get on top of the graffiti." Isenberg launched a press war against the manufacturers of spray paint, and pushed shopkeepers to shelve cans and markers out of reach. Laws were passed making it a crime to carry an open spray can. Vandals were sentenced to clean up their own messes. Lindsay sniped at the MT A about its ineffective measures against graffiti. More than half the fleet had to be stored out- side secure areas and there was no stopping the tireless writers. By the end of his final term in 1973, the city was spending $10 million a year on graffiti removal. The announcement raised goose bumps among teenagers around the city. Ten million! And they, the kids, with spray paint they had "invented," grabbed for free in hard- ware stores, were winning: by then, 63 percent of the subway cars were covered with it. The number grew daily. To catch the graffiti writers, transit police spent long nights hunkered down in the weeds of Bronx cemeteries, positioned on tombstones with infrared binoculars that allowed them to peer into the adjacent train yards. The few kids who were caught laughed at the cops. They walked in and out of courts crowded with violent criminals. In the police vandal squad, Roger Smith had tagged the men's room with the paint that had just been used to fingerprint him. And if any mayor had stuck his head out the window of City Hall, he risked having his nose tagged with Day-Glo pink or gringo gold: not 100 yards from City Hall was a major production center for subway graffiti. In the very hole in the earth occupied, a century earlier, by the magical wind subway train tunnel of the inventor Alfred Ely Beach was the perfect studio for graffiti. Behind a locked, unmarked door in the City Hall BMT station is a flight of stairs down to an unused platform and level of tracks. Here in this lay-up area for the N and the R lines were prime spaces for the graffiti writers of the 1970s and 1980s. The city had built two stations on top of each other. The lower one was part of an expansion plan that was dropped. The facility was unused, except for storage of trains between rush hours. The Rolling Thunder Writers- the RTW crew-took over the lower level and executed "burners"- colossal murals-that are still spoken of with awe among graffiti alumni. The simple tags of TAKI 183, once mistaken for the dry musings of an engineer laying out a tunnel, had given way to great dancing murals. Love letters, and political messages, girls with improbable breasts, soared atop the old trains. Cartoons moved across the city eye.

The City Hall lay-up, old Beach's tunnel, was perfect for such detailed work "because it has a platform, and (we) could do top to bottom writing. There were lights there," said REAS. "In the yards, a lot of times, you have just a foot and a half to work in, and the trains are way taller than you can reach," said JA. "City Hall was perfect. " It aroused the imagination and the indignation. "The thing that depressed me most about the subway, and everyone else, was the graffiti," said Felix Cuervo, a federal worker who grew up in the city ~d did not learn to drive until he was over fifty. (And gave it up when he turned seventy, in favor of the subways. ) "When the city was on the verge of bankruptcy in the early seventies, each time I saw a graffiti-covered subway car , I felt like crying-the graffiti seemed to me a realistic symbol that my hometown, if New York City can be called a hometown, was really going down the drain." No doubt millions felt just like Cuervo. But graffiti chic also arose. "I've always wanted to put a steel band with dancing girls on a flat car down in the subways and send it all over the city. It would slide into a station without your expecting it. It's almost like that now," Claes Oldenberg, pop artist, told New York magazine in 1974. "You're standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America. At first, it seems anarchical-makes you wonder if the subways are working properly. Then you get used to it. The city is like a newspaper anyway, so it's natural to see writing all over the place." Norman Mailer wrote "The Faith of Graffiti," an extended, meditative essay on subway pictures. " At night, the walls of cars sit there like the mechanical beast of omnibus possessed of soul-you are not just writing your name but trafficking with the iron spirit of the vehicle now resting. What a presence." He was loudly denounced; essentially for thinking the graffiti had any value. The only correct value was to curse graffiti from the pulpit of public office and the editorial page. Not a word of these homilies could reach the ears of the boys and young men who labored in the graffiti world; in fact, Mailer had captured the wild noise of their hearts. Painting on walls was a game for "toys," the apprentices of the graffiti world. Subways were the peak. "The main thing was to hit the trains," said SMITH. "It's more of a rush-you're communicating with the trains," said JA. "Things that move," said AUDI. "Writing is like an addiction, " adds REAS. "You get a Ban deodorant roll-on and take the top off. You buy the ink, put it inside the roll-on bottle, then get a chalkboard eraser and tear a strip. If you had drippy tags, it showed you had a lot of ink and you were taking over the entire space. It was-" "Vandalism," says SMITH, laughing. I' "It was good," says REAS.

"You were like, yo, check out my drips. The tirades that greeted Mailer were unlikely to persuade REAS, or, if they did, would only encourage the black spirit that lifted his gifted hand to draw, on a station wall, a startling lifelike pile of steaming turds with a balloon message: EAT IT. Guard dogs were assigned to the yards, briefly, at the behest of Mayor Koch, despite worries that they would cause more trouble by being hit with trains than they would solve . "I would prefer wolves," Koch announced. He had sworn off the subways, but the graffiti issue was a nightly blight on television news-not only because people were talking about it, but because the decline of the subway system had become the number-one problem of average New Yorkers during the 1970s. Every night, break- downs and fires stranded thousands. This demon, graffiti, was the most visible icon of a failing, dying subway system, collapsing from government ineptitude, ignorance, helplessness, not from Magic Markers. If Koch or any other senior public official had been a regular user of the city subway system, they would have known that graffiti were no more than a signature on a plaster cast on a leg: what kept the patient from walking wasn't the cast or the scrawled names on it, but the fractured bone beneath it, unable to carry any weight. The graffiti were a symptom, yet on the lips of scores of politicians and news- casters, they reigned as both substance and style.

But graffiti were an empire tottering of it’s own weight. The quality and energy of the writing dwindled in its birthplace with the rise of its cachet. "The top names were pulled into the mainstream art world," notes SMITH. Gallery exhibitions were organized, and tourists, especially Europeans, would come to view subway-style murals. The writers began to earn good money-money unheard of in the scrape-by streets of the Bronx and Brooklyn where the greatest talents had bloomed. Money that lifted the best of the writers and artists out of the subways. "After 1982, that was when you started to see a lot of throw-ups," said SMITH. "A throw-up? That's when you just throw a tag up on a wall. You'd start getting whole trains, just tags, people tag over other tags."
The writers started wars that consisted of little more than illegible scrawls over someone else's throw-up, like dogs waiting to lift a leg at a cherished fire hydrant. The age of graffiti was coming to an end. Not only were the galleries pulling out the most inspired talents, but the arrival of Gunn and his boss, Robert Riley, at the Transit Authority, had signaled a whole new approach to the war with the tottering cast of writers. David Gunn started his first year by hiring hundreds of new car cleaners. To pay for them, he did not replace mechanics as they retired or quit.