Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture

Going All City

Going All City

Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture

Stefano Bloch

The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49344-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49358-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49361-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226493619.001.0001

Figures on pages 13, 18, 27, 35, 37, 46, 56, 61, 66, 70, 79, 113, 131, 137, and 152 by Maria Celis; Figures on pages 85 and 91 by Stefano Bloch; Figure on page 141 by Chaz Bojórquez (from One Hundred Tags © Chaz Bojórquez, 1996); Figure on page 147 by Christian Guzmán.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bloch, Stefano, author.

Title: Going all city : struggle and survival in LA’s graffiti subculture / Stefano Bloch.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019023567 | ISBN 9780226493442 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226493589 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226493619 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Graffiti—Social aspects—California—Los Angeles. | Graffiti artists—California—Los Angeles. | Subculture—California—Los Angeles.

Classification: LCC GT3913.C22 L67 2019 | DDC 306.109794/94—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023567

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

1   A Night Out

2   The Under Ground Kings

3   Getting In

4   Factions

5   Where We Stayed

6   Left Behind

7   Players

8   Small World

9   Kids Rulin’ Society

10   Freedom

11   All City

12   Can’t Be Stopped

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

List of Gangs, Crews, and Groups

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Introduction

My mother would leave me in her car, parked in front yards, in apartment complex lots, in alleys. I would sit for hours waiting for her to come back. She would tell me to stay out of sight, so I would lie down on the backseats or sit in the footwells or pull down the seats and lie in the trunk. When my brothers and, later, my sister were in the car with me, my mom would scare us by saying that if the police saw us, they would take her to jail, and we would have to live in a foster home with an evil woman who would beat us. My mom never hit us, so she thought threats of violence would scare us. I didn’t know enough to fear corporal punishment, but I was afraid of losing her, which was a possibility time and again.

One of those times happened when I was in sixth grade and my brother was about five. We didn’t have gas in our apartment, so my mother had boiled water in an electric wok to make pasta. The handle had melted, and when she tried to lift the wok to drain the pasta, the contents spilled onto her pregnant stomach.

Don’t worry, I’ll watch your kids, a neighbor said, as the paramedics carted my mother off.

She yelled up from the gurney, Stay away from my fucking kids you piece of shit! Stefano, stay inside. Keep the door locked.

My little brother and I spent the next two days in the tiny apartment, alone and terrified, watching TV and eating uncooked Top Ramen noodles, too scared to use the wok with the melted handle. On the second day, I walked up to Victory Boulevard to find a supermarket where I could steal some food. I was scared to be defying my mom’s orders, but I was hungrier than I was obedient.

Other times my mom would just disappear. I would wake up to an empty apartment, quiet except for the noise from the TV that was always on. It would be past 8:00 a.m., so I knew I wasn’t going to school, but I would be starving, as kids tend to be when they wake up. She usually arrived home around noon with a single McDonald’s breakfast sandwich. The otherwise repulsive smell of that food mixed with old cigarette odor was comforting because it meant she was home and not in jail, dead, or lost. It also meant I didn’t have to go in search of something to eat, although by age eleven I knew how to get around.

When cops came looking for my stepfather at whatever house, hotel, or apartment we were living in at the time, they would tell me that my mom would go to jail if I didn’t tell them where he was. I remember one cop yelling in my ten-year-old face, Tell us if he is in the house or I am taking your fucking mother to jail and you will have to live with a bunch of fucking rapists in juvenile hall!¹ I couldn’t tell them because I didn’t know where he was, but regardless, juvenile hall sounded better than the foster homes my mom had told me about.

A few times, my mother was taken to jail after a traffic stop, where she would serve a day or two, or maybe a weekend, for a warrant. Once, when I was five, the police took me with her and put us into a holding cell for a few hours. I spent the time spelling out the names carved in the paint on the wall. Other times, I would come home from school to find one of her friends at the house, smoking and nodding off, there to tell me that my mom needed a break from us because we were driving her crazy. In each case, we later found out she had been ordered into a drug rehab facility. And each time, she would leave early, sometimes breaking a court order, and greet us with hugs, a pack of baseball cards, and promises that she would take us to Disneyland for being good kids. Promises of Disneyland were always hanging in the air.

Every couple of years, I would find her in the bathroom after she had ODed. I would have to open the door by sticking the ink tube from a pen into the hole in the doorknob to release the push-button lock, drag her into the hallway, and, if we didn’t have a phone—which was almost always—run to a neighbor’s to call 911.

My mother’s habit of leaving me in her car went on for several years. When I was older, I would leave the car, defying her order to lie low, and instead walk the block catching Cisco tags.² I had lived in enough neighborhoods to read my surroundings quickly. In fact I felt anonymous, almost invisible, in a way that worked to my advantage as a writer. I never felt I stood out. My main concern was how my tag would be seen by someone who might pass through the area. I would always find a bus stop and catch a tag at the base of the bench facing an oncoming bus. From there I would find the nearest freeway, walk up an on-ramp to write on a light pole, guardrail, or sign facing oncoming traffic. I caught these tags during the day, usually with no more than a yellow Mean Streak, and I would be back in the car, no incriminating spray paint on my fingers, before anyone called the police. Then I would keep out of sight, not because my mom had told me to but in case my description had been given to the police: shaved head, white T-shirt, blue Dickies, black Nike Cortez shoes.

The audience I cared most about were the people who knew me or knew of me, but I also wrote for myself. I loved to see my work up in places I had been before and think about how my tag lasted long after I was gone. So I looked for landmarks in addition to the fame spots on the freeway and bus benches. Tags there did not last long but would get immediate views. I would hit every dumpster in the alley, the bases of streetlights, or the side of a drainpipe on the back of a store. Few people would see these low-pro tags other than local writers who would wonder what I was doing there. Prolific taggers do not discriminate when deciding where to write, knowing that every tag counts—every tag gets seen by someone at some point. And behind every tag is a story about survival and about striving to be seen, or a momentary reprieve from deprivation and desperation.

Graffiti Everywhere

Every city has graffiti. In some cities, graffiti is bold and abundant, written atop bridges, across walls, on newspaper stands and mailboxes. In other cities it is more discreet, relegated to the undersides of bridges, alleyway trashcans, and behind apartment complexes and school gymnasiums. Whether you call it art or see it as indecipherable scribbling, you can’t miss it. But however prevalent it is, few people have seen it produced in real time. Most people think they know who is writing it—some kid, some outsider, or perhaps a member of a gang—but sometimes they don’t think much at all about how it is created. It seems to just appear overnight.

Political statements, religious psalms, memorials, declarations of love, inane wordplay, and various forms of profanity and imagery have been written on walls in stealth throughout history. But graffiti as individual names systematically and stylistically written on outdoor public and private spaces began in earnest across the US during the late 1960s, when newspapers started reporting that singular monikers were appearing across Philadelphia and, soon after, in New York City. By the late 1970s, cities began to declare war on graffiti, and task forces were created to stop the scourge. Meanwhile graffiti art was being brought into galleries and used in advertising. By the early 1980s, graffiti was the visual complement to a burgeoning hip-hop culture. More than ever, race was read into the cryptic wall-writing. Black and Puerto Rican kids were most often its imagined authors.

By the 1990s, even as graffiti became the handiwork of a distinct subculture of self-described writers who belonged to a global community, illegal wall-writing became synonymous with gang identity. The term tagbanger emerged, conflating taggers with gang members even though these two groups share more enmity than identity. This conflation helped fuel a moral panic. Influenced by the broken windows theory, which connects the appearance of quality-of-life crimes like smashing windows and graffiti writing to the commission of violent crime, cities were funding graffiti-removal efforts by the millions in a stated effort to stop the violence.

While the Los Angeles Police Department founded the militarized Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) task force to combat gangs, the Los Angeles Rapid Transit District (now called the Metropolitan Transit Authority) created the Graffiti Habitual Offender Suppression Team (GHOST). In the first years of the 1990s, CRASH raided the homes of both suspected gang members and graffiti writers in an effort to reduce the nation’s highest homicide rate. At the same time, GHOST and related groups, such as the LAPD’s Community Tagger Taskforce, raided those same homes to try to control what amounted to a $10 million-per-year graffiti problem in Los Angeles alone.

Since the early 2000s, crime rates, and in particular violent crime rates, have plummeted across the country. In the city of Los Angeles, the number of homicides has dropped from more than 1,200 in 1992, to 656 in 2002, to fewer than 300 in 2012. As a result, the connection outsiders now make between violent crime and graffiti may be more tenuous, especially as street crime and gang membership have become less apparent. But graffiti continues to spread along with efforts to remove it.

Today, the Los Angeles Board of Public Works receives thousands of graffiti reports per month through the Office of Community Beautification’s Anti-Graffiti Request System. The City responds by spending about $20,000 per day on graffiti removal. This figure does not include the amount spent by Los Angeles County, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the California Department of Transportation, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Department of Recreation and Parks, or the countless private citizens, property and business owners, vigilante buffers, and community groups armed with their own paint rollers, sandblasters, and spray bottles full of chemical solvents. Further untold millions of dollars are spent on graffiti abatement measures and infrastructure as well as on investigating, arresting, prosecuting, and jailing graffiti writers. These same calculations can be made for New York, Chicago, or just about any other city in the US.

We know about the efforts to stop them, but who are these taggers? Why, despite knowing that they could be jailed and even killed, do they obsessively cover city spaces with their cryptic writing?

Growing up in LA, I counted some of these taggers among my closest friends. We were growing up and coming of age amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability, and my friends and I were scared, traumatized, and independent to the point of self-obsession. We had to create a place for ourselves as a matter of social and existential survival, regardless of the potential costs to our freedom. We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being writers gave us something to live for, and going all city gave us something to strive for. And for some of my friends, it was something to die for.

Going All City

To go all city is to mark surfaces with graffiti throughout a given city. To be an all-city graffiti writer is to be widely recognized for these efforts. By age sixteen, I had earned all-city status. My name appeared on light poles, electrical boxes, and curbs, spelled out in boldly painted letters along freeway walls, atop buildings, and across billboards from one side of LA to the other. I stockpiled writing supplies, pored over maps, accessed seemingly inaccessible spaces, and hit high-profile spots. And I was not alone. I was one member of an active global graffiti community hell-bent on gaining personal fame through illicit painting.

But this book is not about how to analyze, romanticize, intellectualize, or criminalize graffiti writers or the practice of painting graffiti. Many scholars in the social sciences have already done that. Instead, this book is about my experiences and my identity as a prolific graffiti writer. Rather than telling you how to think about the complexity of other peoples’ social lives and their decision-making processes in the context of structural violence, I offer an ethnography—more specifically an autoethnography—of my own day-to-day experiences with poverty, violence, and power. You can read the social commentary about young vandals and their motivations for doing graffiti between the lines, extracting an analysis of struggle and survival in the context of navigating the city. But the story I offer illustrates first and foremost the complexity of culture and identity as I witnessed it and lived it for myself. This book is about me, to be sure, but it is also about the countless people who make their way through broken families, violent neighborhoods, and impoverished communities as they strive to make names for themselves in any number of ways. As graffiti writers, we tried to make names for ourselves by going to great lengths to write them across the cities we all share. Perhaps, by the end of this book, for good or for bad, you will begin to understand why.

Navigating the Text

The experience of traumas and vulnerabilities such as the ones discussed in this book are difficult to place within a neat chronology. Past decisions and taken-for-granted experiences accumulate and conspire to affect future outcomes and perspectives in ways that are often unseen and unacknowledged. This book, therefore, follows only a loose chronology, which allows me to rely on different forms of reflection at different times in my attempt to tell a story that is filled with social complexity, changing spatial contexts, and apparent political incongruities. The chapters follow me and my friends from when we were kids walking the block to the time we became all-city graffiti writers traversing the city, with the final chapter describing my path to becoming a college-bound kid navigating a larger but no less complicated world. The chapters do ultimately move forward in time, but it is the geographic progression of my life—from smaller to larger—that guides my story.

In writing this book, I relied on my own memory and reflected critically on my life and circumstances. I visited places where I had experienced trauma, triumph, boredom. Sitting on bus stop benches, standing on street corners and in front of 24-hour doughnut shops, and walking under freeway underpasses, down alleys, and through apartment complexes and motels where I used to live sometimes brought me to tears, provided me with a sense of exhilaration, or made me laugh. This was part of the process of combining and reconciling memories of personal experiences and impressions with objective facts. The process forced me to re-experience deeply held pain, fear, and inspiration.

A Note on Accuracy

In the chapters that follow, I’ll take you with me, through memories and streets, to discover and navigate the city as life unfolds in ways that are relentlessly real. Many of my stories may appear outlandish to some readers who have not experienced the complexity, incongruity, violence, and madness of being poor and disobedient. Knowing this, I worked hard to ensure the complete accuracy of what I have written here so that your trust in me might allow you to suspend your expectations and prevent you from arriving at quick or simple conclusions.³ In short, you can rest assured that every detail of this story is true.

1

A Night Out

The Crew

I woke up at 1:00 a.m. to the beeping of a cheap alarm clock and the green glow it cast over the Krylon spray-paint cans stacked in a pyramid against the wall. I pressed the off-button and started tapping on the others’ shoes to wake them.

All-night bombing missions usually started from my house. Even if my mom woke up as we were leaving, she wouldn’t say anything for fear she wouldn’t be seen as the cool mom. Cool described those parents, almost always single mothers, who didn’t care, didn’t let on that they cared, were checked out on drugs, or relished the attention they received from wayward teens who usually referred to them as Mom.

Arest, whose real name was Ignacio, had his feet wrapped in a towel. Before falling asleep, we had made him put his smelly Nike Cortez shoes on the balcony. Arest was our reluctant comic relief. He always seemed to appear from out of nowhere and got around by hitching a ride on the back bumper of the city bus, holding onto the grill with his left hand. He was free-range before that term was applied to kids, and even after years of friendship, none of us had ever met his family.

The Under Ground Kings (TUGK) had become a full crew since recruiting Tolse. After he got in, he brought Lyric and Beto into the crew, and they brought a few friends of their own. Most of us lived in gang neighborhoods and had older brothers in gangs, but we were each looking for something different. With a fully-fledged crew, we could finally function on our own, without the drama of gang affiliation.

This particular night of bombing would be casual. Each of us took four cans of paint from the pyramid—two in our waistband and one in each pocket of our oversized Starter jacket or hooded sweatshirt. The pyramid shape ensured that no one took more than his fair share, as one missing can would distort the entire formation. We planned to walk from where I lived in Panorama City at the time, up Van Nuys Boulevard, and into Pacoima. A distance of three miles that seemed so far. The route was dangerous because of gangsters and cops, but by the time we made it to the main boulevard a bit after 2:00 a.m., the strip clubs and bars would be closed, and the cops would be busy patrolling for DUIs. By the time we reached the Pacoima Housing Projects around 3:00 a.m., even the most diehard gangsters would be back in their apartments asleep.

There were too many of us to access any one high-profile spot, so we decided to just catch tags on both sides of the street as we walked. Working in pairs, one partner would act as the main lookout, and the other would be the principal writer, who would of course hit up his lookout’s name. Inevitably, this caused an unstated battle between Tolse and me. He would be on his side of the street with his sidekick, Arest, and I would be hitting spots on my side of the street with Smoke, a guy who had just gotten into the crew and was happy to be anyone’s sidekick.

As we walked, we rarely spoke. The idea of walking down the street wearing headphones and listening to music was strange to us. We couldn’t afford such blissful wandering where we lived. We were