My hands tremble with a surge of adrenaline. I shove them into the pockets of my jeans and draw a sharp breath. The brisk night air chills my lungs.
“Car!” I bark, a moment too late. The vehicle rounds the corner, driving toward us. I squint in the glare of the oncoming headlights, pivoting into the shadows of the overpass. Between a stroll and a sprint, I’m trying to look nonchalant, but also wanting to get the hell out of there.
Animal instincts take over: leave Fernando behind. Run if necessary. Damn the fact that he drove me here and I’ll be stuck in New Jersey without him. Better to figure out another way home than to spend the night in the back of a police car.
I steal a glance over my shoulder. He’s tucked the cans of spray paint into the waistband of his jeans and is pulling at the bottom of his striped sweater, covering the nozzles. He affects my same clipped stride, but in the opposite direction; he’s headed uphill and I’m going down.
My mistake is obvious. What an idiot I am! Why would I walk toward the oncoming car?
Fernando’s headed in the direction we came from, where his car is parked in the desolate open street. I, though, have trapped myself under an overpass with 15-foot retaining walls on either side. There’s nowhere to run. No one else around.
I freeze, bracing myself for the blare of the siren and the glare of a police searchlight.
The car keeps rolling. Maybe the driver slows slightly, but if so, it’s only to eye me with confusion: a kid in a dark green hoodie standing frozen on the sidewalk with his fists clenched at his sides and his eyes squeezed shut.
Then, car is gone. My heart still flutters in my chest, and I haven’t been breathing. I allow myself a sip of oxygen, crestfallen and a bit disappointed in my nerve. I meekly turn and wend my way back, only to find Fernando finishing his tag.
He adds the final flourish, three dots to the lower left, then turns and calls to me from across the street as I approach, “Shit, man! That’s what I’m talking about!” His smile beams in the twilight of the streetlamp on the suburban street.
My eyes dart to the Neighborhood Watch sign posted on the street lamp above his head. This whole graffiti thing may be new to me, but I’m pretty sure shouting on a quiet street at 1 a.m. on a Monday night isn’t the greatest way to avoid drawing attention.
Fernando seems unfazed.
The tag is a beauty. Letters at least three feet high on a prominent wall that drivers can’t miss. The evening is young though, and he still has plenty of energy.
On the way back to the car, he pulls out a fat permanent marker and tags the side of a utility box at a large intersection. That makes four for the night, the first two hits covering the side wall of a grocery store. He’s riding high on a wave of bliss and paint fumes.
Fernando is perhaps better known by his tag, TORGO. Fernando, in fact, isn’t even his real name. In exchange for disguising his identity, he’s agreed to grant me one lesson in the night school of graffiti, a pass into his realm of tags, bombs, throwies, beefing, buffing, and the like. In this one night, I hope to take in at least a partial education of the art form, its inspirations and intentions, its techniques and tactics.
Maybe it’s the joint transgressions, being together in the midst of broken laws, but Fernando and I have a sort of instant rapport even though this is only our second meeting. True, I’m here as an observer, not an accomplice, but to an arresting officer, the distinction would be moot.
I first met Fernando while polling friends as to their knowledge of the graffiti world. I had always found myself inexplicably drawn to the scrawlings I had seen on New York City buildings and, to a lesser extent, the back alleys of my South Dakota hometown. I wanted to gain some insight into this world that has struck me as both dangerously alluring and alluringly dangerous.
Now as we cruise, searching for an open stretch of wall, I look over and see him glowing in the light of a streetlamp, giddy with excitement. He strikes me as an unlikely graffiti artist. Perhaps it’s my relative naïveté when it comes to all things urban, but I generally expect bombers - as Fernando calls himself and other taggers - to be scrawny, shady characters, unable to leave their mark on the world in any way other than spray paint or permanent marker.
Fernando, though, has the body of someone who spends more time in a gym than in back alleys. His broad, expressive face tries to hide behind the thin goatee of a young man not quite able to sprout true facial hair. An honesty rests in his eyes. And though he seems proud of his street toughness, his quick smile and bright laughter betray his enthusiasm and almost childlike joy for life. At only 20 years old, he’s barely more than a child.
That’s not to say he’s without his element of intimidation, though.
When I first met him a week earlier in a fast food restaurant, he struck me as a cross between a hardened bike messenger and a gang member in the midst of rehabilitation. He wore an unzipped hooded sweatshirt and devoured his burrito with a voracity I hadn’t seen since eating with my high-school-football-playing brothers.
After an email inquiry, Fernando responded with a terse, “Yes, I do graffiti,” the statement that led to the meeting. Face to face, I was impressed and shocked by his candor, his insight, and his self-awareness.
“I do it for the thrill,” he told me. “It’s like every little sound, you don’t know what it is. You end up living in a heightened sensory state. It’s definitely a high and a thrill.”
He spoke of the evolution of graffiti, of its commercialization. He spoke of artists making the move to galleries and the way this flowed back to the streets. He spoke of women artists and how they fared in what he called “a male-dominated sport.”
He also spoke of graffiti as therapy. He called it a personal, meditative experience that gave him space and time to detach from the stresses of his everyday life.
This revelation, a lens through which I never considered the act of tagging, gave me pause with regard to my original goal for the meeting: to convince him to let me tag along with him on a night out. But, I sheepishly asked anyway, and was stunned when he agreed. In fact, he seemed downright delighted, as though no one had ever expressed an interest before.
We set the date, and I felt a sense of excitement well up within me.
That is, until I learned more details. We were going to Jersey.
Fernando told me that he was from Queens. So, I assumed that he tagged either there or in Manhattan. But he now lived in Union City, and wanted to hit up a few places in the surrounding area.
His reasoning actually caused me to feel the first inkling of connection to the stranger across from me, someone who I thought would be entirely alien. “New York takes too much work,” he said. “There are so many people who come here because it’s the Mecca of graffiti, and they’re tagging everywhere. So, in order to shine out above them, you have to do twice as much as they do.” He said that New Jersey was different. “Everything out there is so open and clean. New York is too cluttered.”
Flashes of the verdant mountains and pristine lakes of South Dakota floated before my eyes for a moment before I refocused on the grimy brick walls of the burrito joint. I knew what he meant.
So, I had hesitantly agreed and mentally started calculating my prospects of ever returning from a late-night ride on the PATH train. Much to my relief, though, Fernando called me the afternoon of the night we were to go out, and said he would have his car in the city. He would pick me up, and then we’d drive around. We’d cover more ground that way.
And so far tonight, we have. He’s now up to seven tags: four in spray paint and three in the fat marker. My education has begun.
bomb: [bom] (n) the physical mark left behind by a graffiti artist SYN: tag (v) the act of leaving such a marking; “to drop my bomb”
throwie: [throh] (n) slang “a throw-up;” a mark left by a graffiti artist distinguishable as his or her name in large bubble letters as opposed to plain script
beef: [beef] (v) an act wherein one graffiti artist inscribes his or her marking over that of another graffiti artist in an act of disrespect
buff: [buhf] (v) to repaint or clean property in order to rid it of graffiti, typically done by non-graffiti artists; “I dropped my bomb on that store, but they buffed it the next day.”
As we drive around, he occasionally sniffs his fingers. “Man, that smell! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t inhale aerosols recreationally, but when I’m out here, the smell really gets to me. It gets me going.”
The buzz and hum of adrenaline in his ears, or perhaps the dizzying spin of fumes, has instilled a rhythm in Fernando. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, swaying his head as his eyes scan the storefronts and facades, licking his lips in anticipation.
I’m struck by the emptiness of the streets, the bleak desolation. I’ve seen fewer than five other people then entire time we’ve been out. The tags left by Fernando and other artists are the few features that humanize these bleak vistas, marking them with the work of human hands.
Fernando’s voice swells with pride as he points out his own tags like a hometown hero giving a tour to a visiting dignitary. That gated store. This electrical box. The side of that white delivery truck.
He cuts himself off mid-sentence as he slams on the brakes. “That spot’s getting hit tonight,” he says, jerking his chin in the direction of a blank red brick wall at a large intersection. “I’ve wanted to do it for a while, but I forgot about it.”
He throws the car into reverse, nearly backing over the No Parking sign as he veers to the curb in front of it. He leaves the engine running as he bounds from the car almost before it’s stopped moving. I pour myself onto the sidewalk, a bit addled from the whiplash-inducing ride.
Fernando’s already finishing the second O of TORGO by the time I get to the wall. A car abruptly rounds the corner, casting its lights directly on us, but it’s too late for him to stop. He has to finish this one. Now. He does the three dots, and we’re out of there. The other car’s taillights still cast a crimson glow on our dashboard as we pull away.
Fernando is flying. He takes his eyes off the road for a disconcertingly long time, watching the tag grow smaller behind us. “Man, that is such a sexy fucking spot!,” he screams. “Everyone’s going to see that one. That was probably one of the most exhilarating spots I’ve ever hit. Everyone, everyone is going to see that on their way to work tomorrow!” He acts out a scenario, doing voices to indicate a man and a woman. “‘Torgo? Who’s Torgo?’ ‘Gee, I don’t know, honey.’” He pounds his fists on the steering wheel and explodes with laughter. “Damn!”
As we continue to drive, though, the high begins to lag. Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, a half hour go by, and yet, he hasn’t found another suitable spot. He says he wants to climb something, to put a tag somewhere that will make people wonder how he managed. But the neighborhood we’re in is lousy with police and other obstacles.
I take the downtime as an opportunity to ask him slightly more personal questions, biographical stuff. As he answers, the pride of the hometown hero vanishes from his voice. The fire is gone, the passion and the candor he exhibited when talking about his art. He spits out responses. Answers about moving to Texas for a while after his dad lost his job. About school and work, bars and clubs.
But he’s not quite the same person he was a moment before. The deflation is almost visible. A wall is thrown up and the naked honesty in his eyes is somewhere behind it.
I catch myself. He’s just a guy. And we’re out here tagging. And that’s it. I dismiss my momentary lapse into analysis as just a misinterpretation of his fatigue and let it go at that.
He, too, catches himself beginning to ebb, and steers the conversation back to the topic nearest to his heart.
“It’s like, you drop three or four tags, and you think it might be time to call it a night. But then you see another blank wall and think, ‘Nah. Nah, I got time for one more.’”
As he revs himself back up, the excitement he creates is contagious. I’m beginning to realize the temptation of tagging. The rush of it, the satisfaction, and the thrill. It’s like stealing when you know you won’t get caught, doing it just because you can. But, even for a veteran like Fernando, there are certain limits that usually remain unspoken. Unless you ask.
“I won’t do a church,” he says. “I won’t do a school. And I won’t do a private home. Like, I wouldn’t just walk up to that house there and hit it. That’d just be wrong.”
We continue to drive, and the names of burgs rattle through my head, sounding as alien as any prefecture in Fiji or Thailand: Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken. They all look the same. Somewhere west of where we started, he finds an area that looks decent in his estimation and parks the car.
A cat pauses on the sidewalk as we step out of the car, the only other being awake at this hour. The streets are eerily empty. We begin walking, and it’s not long before he’s hit a bank, an abandoned attendant’s booth in a parking lot, and the side of a white van - he points out that he’ll only do a vehicle if it’s already been tagged by someone else.
As we walk up a hill, seconds after the now TORGO-bearing van, a police car cruises through the intersection ahead of us. I notice Fernando stand a bit more erect as his stride tightens. He breathes again once the patrol car is out of sight, but we see another on the next block. “All right, man,” he says. “That’s it. I’m done. Two cops in a row, that’s a bad omen. Like a black cat.” He begins craning his neck as he walks, clearly on the lookout.
We pass an empty parking lot, and he exhales loudly through his clenched teeth. “All right, man. Now the paranoia’s starting to set in. Maybe I should stash these here.” He pulls the two cans from his waistband, but puts them back a moment later without another word.
It’s not until we’re back in his car that I see the muscles of his jaw soften. “I’m spent. I mean, I’m definitely tired, but it’s just that I want that rush. I want to keep putting my name up. I want people to see it.”
But I notice as we cruise around, presumably back to the city so he can rid himself of me, that we’re passing many of the same spots he’s already tagged, tracing a circuitous route through the suburban streets. His gaze falls on each wall with a sense of pride and dignity, and I begin to see that it probably wouldn’t make much difference to Fernando if anyone else ever saw TORGO; it matters only that he knows it’s there, that he knows what he’s accomplished.
For the accomplishment is a tenuous one, one easily erased and one for which he could be even more easily prosecuted. And he knows it.
“Really, it’s all luck,” he says as we watch yet another police cruiser pass the ‘fucking sexy spot’ that he’s been admiring, his engine idling at a stop sign. “See, if we’d been there 10 or 15 minutes later, or if the car that drove by before had been a cop, that’d be it. I’d be gone. You wouldn’t have a ride home. My car would be stuck there.”
I grin, pondering how long the car would actually sit there, what with the No Parking sign and all.
As he again begins to tire, through with his fix for the night, the protective wall creeps its way back into his eyes. I’m struck by the sense that he has two distinct sides to his personality, a public and a private — as most people do — but for him the distinction is glaring. He has whatever person he is when he’s Fernando, going about the business of his life. I’m sure that person is a nice enough guy, but I’ve hardly ever met him. He’s certainly been absent for the majority of our Jersey adventure.
I’ve been hanging out with TORGO, an adrenaline-addled, hyperactive creature of the night. TORGO has been more than cordial. He’s gone out of his way for me, answered my questions, and has been so accommodating that it’s honestly surprised me. But at the same time, he’s kept me at arm’s length, maintaining the mystery necessary to facilitate his facade. Even when he’s eating a burrito, as soon as Fernando starts talking about his passion for graffiti, a Jekyll and Hyde switch puts TORGO into Fernando’s place.
Silences begin worming their way into our conversation. We head toward the Holland Tunnel with the Manhattan skyline rising against the black sky and one of the two men is driving me home. We reach my building and I ease out of the car, thanking whomever it is that’s behind the wheel.
I stand on the sidewalk, watching as the taillights pull away and round the corner. The car either carries Fernando home to bed or TORGO back into the night.
Article URL: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/streetlevel/fall-2007/jackson-graffiti/
A project of the Department of Journalism at New York University.
© 2007 New York University.
