SPEAKER_08: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather. From soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear, and t-shirts are the number one, two, and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless, and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I and use code 99 P-I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas. B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I code 99 P-I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I love podcasts. I really do. Not just mine and the ones I'm associated with. But I listen to dozens of podcasts a week and I'm always looking for some spark that excites me, comforts me, challenges me, entertains me. I love seeing the proliferation of podcasts. It would never occur to me to mock it. Like, I know the joke. Everyone has podcasts now. But I always want more. You know, not all of them are for me. But when one hits, I just get excited about its existence. I get excited about existence in general. And this happened to me when I was listening to a new show called California Love. It's a podcast about seeking to understand what it means to belong and not belong to the places that we are from. And the episode I thought would most resonate with you, my beautiful nerds, is about graffiti, which is a huge part of the visual expression of cities. There is a culture war being played out before our eyes in the back and forth between attackers and anti attackers. And this kind and humane story is about those signs and what it feels like to be in the middle of it, where the stakes to an outsider can seem so low, but actually couldn't be higher. This is California Love. Here's Walter Thompson Hernandez.
SPEAKER_03: It's spring 2017 and I'm on the 733 bus line heading west on Venice Boulevard. I'm sitting in the back of the bus. It's the early afternoon and there's nobody else sitting next to me. I'm listening to music on my headphones when I notice an old friend hop on. It's Ivan and we used to be in the same circles when I used to tag in the early 2000s. Ivan hasn't changed a little bit. He's still wearing oversized T-shirts and still speaks from the side of his mouth like he used to when we were teenagers. His hair is still cut really low too. It's been more than 15 years since we last saw one another. Oh, s***. What's up, man?
SPEAKER_03: We dap each other up and hug. He sits next to me.
SPEAKER_05: Hey, you still right?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I do still write. This is California Love and I'm Walter. I was 12 years old and I was wearing the grey crew neck sweater and matching sweatpants that the officers had issued to me.
SPEAKER_01: My last name was written on the back of my sweater to identify me.
SPEAKER_03: I was 12 years old and I was wearing the grey crew neck sweater and matching sweatpants that the officers had issued to me. My last name was written on the back of my sweater to identify me. In 97, the Scare Street Program met at the Downtown LA Central Police Station three times a week. Twice a week we had classes and on Saturdays, that's when we had boot camp.
SPEAKER_01: Can you not do push ups? No, sir. We've been learning.
SPEAKER_03: They made us do push ups, burpees, squats, sprints and more burpees and all on the station's hot roof. About two dozen of us, all under the age of 17, were in the program. Usually because the judge had ordered us to attend for some crime we had committed. One of the guys was a graffiti legend named Sight, a South Central writer whose name could be seen throughout the city. He was what writers called an all-city bomber. His stuff was everywhere. I was like, damn, that's Sight. What I do remember is all the cops getting mad at me, screaming at me in my face, the saliva all in my face.
SPEAKER_03: Some people were there for skipping school, fighting or violating probation. But Sight and I, we were both there for graffiti vandalism.
SPEAKER_04: I had about 10 or 11 warrants for graffiti, all kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_03: I started tagging with a group of friends I had met in middle school. And once I learned how to tag, I began to go out and paint the streets. Maybe it was all the things I was seeing and experiencing at home that drove me to be as far away from it as possible. My mom had a boyfriend at the time, this white dude, who was unemployed and smoked weed and drank heavily every single day. He was abusive and controlling towards me and my mom, and he and I would often physically fight, which led to numerous visits from the police. Home was definitely somewhere I didn't want to be. And Sight's home life, it was just as rocky as mine.
SPEAKER_04: Me and my mom were sleeping in parks in the car, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for night. We slept in a lot of back streets in South Central LA, like Western, Imperial, and then the sheriffs will kick us out. And we'll move one block over.
SPEAKER_03: Graffiti was a lot of things for me. It was an outlet. A way for me to take out the rage, the pain and the hurt I was experiencing at home. The streets and the walls, they were basically my therapy.
SPEAKER_04: I existed when I did the graffiti. I existed. That's why I started doing it. That sense of awakening, rebirth.
SPEAKER_01: Get off me! Get off me!
SPEAKER_03: The first Saturday that Sight and I were there, the inmates and guards took turns yelling at us. And he and I smiled at each other the whole time. We thought they were suckers. Our moms were both with us that day, and we knew the guards couldn't put their hands on us, so we felt safe. And we talked our s*** out.
SPEAKER_03: But scared straight? It actually didn't scare me straight. In fact, it got me deeper into graffiti. About two years after I finished the program, I started catching spots with a guy named Aloe. He was a pretty well-known writer in the graph world. And the crazy part? He looked just like one of my favorite rappers.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, everyone used to call me Tupac.
SPEAKER_03: In just a few months, we became like brothers, and we joined the same crew.
SPEAKER_02: You were young and willing to do graffiti, so I was like, hey, we could be besties and let's do this together.
SPEAKER_03: Aloe's talking like an old head right now, but he's really only three years older than me. He and I spent every day together painting the city. This means going out and tagging. I remember there were times I'm like, I don't really feel like doing this.
SPEAKER_02: You're like, come on, let's go. And I'm like, all right, let's go. And we would go, and then it's like, once we're there, it's like, I'm so glad I did this. There's a lot of people, like I knew a lot of people too, and not everyone. They'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, let's go, let's go. But who really wants to go? You know what I mean? Who's really going to go?
SPEAKER_03: Aloe and I spent a whole summer together, and our bond was stronger than any relationship I've had as an adult. Because he was also unhappy and tormented by his home life. We were just kids, but we understood each other's pain and how ignored we both felt. Aloe taught me how to tag on the Venice Boulevard bus lines. We caught spots in the panels and the overhead lights. I taught him how to do everything that he knows. Shut up!
SPEAKER_02: So, you're scribing into a transparent case so people wouldn't be able to see it. There has to be some way for you to make what you just wrote pop out into the world. So usually what we would do is we would take like dirt from somewhere. So we lick our fingers and rub the tops of the lights. You would smudge that on the spot. The dirt would end up filling the spaces of the graffiti spot that you just caught.
SPEAKER_03: Bam! Now your spot's going to be seen.
SPEAKER_02: I used to show him like different slap tags and how you write on a slap tag. For those of you that don't know, like post office used to have like stickers that people use for mailing. And graffiti artists would just go and grab them. They're free stickers. We could just write what we want on them.
SPEAKER_03: We'd sometimes go back to Aloe's house after painting and lock ourselves in this room.
SPEAKER_02: Just smoke and drink in there and play music. A lot of Wu-Tang, a lot of Tupac. All eyes on me. A lot of Nas, a lot of Biggie. Just write, just write, just write.
SPEAKER_03: We wrote our names all over the city because we felt invisible and it was fun.
SPEAKER_04: I existed when I did graffiti. I existed.
SPEAKER_03: We painted a few of our passes. National Boulevard, Robertson, Crenshaw. We painted billboards on Venice Boulevard. We painted at the Belmont Yards, the Aloe River and the Motor Yards. We were everywhere, but our names rarely stayed up for more than a few days.
SPEAKER_03: For four years I tagged. And for four years, a white dude named Joe Connolly painted over our spots. 98, 99, 2000 and 2001. This guy Joe made it his mission to buff out tags using paint and equipment he had purchased himself. Seeing him buff out my throw ups wasn't a good feeling because creating that art took a lot out of me. Like this one time when I spent an entire night doing a piece with large bubble style letters on a rooftop near Pico and Robertson and it was gone the very next morning. And I knew it was Joe. And it wasn't just us, it was all of us. There was a whole city of kids putting up spots trying to be seen and then this white guy named Joe would come out of any races again. Joe was definitely a villain. It felt like he was our villain.
SPEAKER_10: You could write all day long, but you're never going to get up in the morning and see your s*** because I'll be buffed.
SPEAKER_09: You couldn't even read the sign earlier. You could not read the sign.
SPEAKER_09: My name is Joe Connolly. They call me the graffiti gorilla among other things.
SPEAKER_10: Look at that. Isn't that beautiful? I mean it's not like it was the day they made it, but it's nice. Isn't that nice looking?
SPEAKER_03: Joe was a one man anti graffiti unit. You may have seen his infamous sign up at Pico in Fairfax. It says, Graffiti no longer accepted here. Please find a day job. Thank you. 1993. Joe Connolly, the graffiti gorilla.
SPEAKER_03: Joe used to chase us out of the motor yards and paint over our spots. We all thought he was a city employee, but really Joe acted alone.
SPEAKER_09: After the King rights, our neighbor organized out. The building was still burned out. Trees didn't want to get planted. All these people wanted to fix the neighborhood, helicopters were everywhere. So I went to this meeting and they had all these things that they wanted people to do. There was only like seven or eight of us there. So I'm sitting and I'm thinking, I'm not going to say anything. I'm not volunteering for, I mean, I'm working seven days a week. I got two little kids. I'm making money. I'm not. So they said graffiti was the last thing on the thing. They said, you're taking graffiti. I'm like, yeah, cool. That'd be excellent because there's no graffiti around.
SPEAKER_10: I go out the next day and I start driving around. I'm like, oh my God. We out, right? It was late summer 2000.
SPEAKER_03: Aloe and I spent a night catching spots all over the West Side before going back to his house to chill. And then at 4 a.m., I got a weird craving for Hawaiian punch. So we decided to walk the routes.
SPEAKER_02: And then you took a streak and then for some stupid reason, I was like, hey, let's record this. And I took this video camera that I had. We didn't make it to the store.
SPEAKER_03: We crossed the street and you decide to start tagging on a trash can.
SPEAKER_02: And my dumb ass, instead of looking out, looking back, I'm looking through the lens at you and police pulled up on us.
SPEAKER_03: The cops handcuffed us, made us sit on the curb and then separated us for questioning. I was already on probation for a previous graffiti offense. I thought I was for sure going to juvie. The cop says to me, what's your name? Back then, I hadn't started off using my mom's last name, Hernandez.
SPEAKER_03: So I said Walter Thompson. And the cops were like, that's not your name.
SPEAKER_03: I thought I was lying to them. They thought Walter Thompson sounded like an 80 year old white dude's name. And now that I'm thinking about it, they were kind of right. I remember them asking me about that.
SPEAKER_02: So what's your friend's name? And I was like, Bezel, because I'm not trying to give up your name. I didn't know what you said. So I was like Bezel. And the cop was like, what's up? I was like, I don't know. I don't know his name. Like, because I was like, maybe he's not going to give his name.
SPEAKER_03: So I and I started laughing at the cops for not believing me. But the cops, they didn't think it was funny. They got mad and they got frustrated and put us in separate cars and took us back to the station. I went home after three hours. But I love. He was there for almost three days.
SPEAKER_04: People can just know me as Sighght. My mom kicked me out when I graduated from high school. She kicked me out because she felt she couldn't afford to take care of me anymore. So here I am thinking I'm about to get ready to go to community college. Nope. I used to sleep in my homie's garage. I used to sleep in the garage with a dog right here in Normandy in 76. Because he couldn't let me stay in his house, but he's like, hey, I got a garage. I mean, sometimes me and a dog or fight over who will sleep on the couch. That's where graffiti really kicked into high gear because I was out, depressed, lonely, hungry. And this is only thing that kept my spirits up, letting that trauma out during graffiti. There's a human need to express yourself. Unfortunately, the lower classes and the impoverished don't have the spaces and the walls to just be creative. They don't own nothing. They can't write in their own apartment building. They get kicked out. They don't have a house to do in the backyard. So where are they going to do it at? The streets are they can't be.
SPEAKER_10: Look at they got stars and they got they got can't control popping at the top. This is something you've been in the game for a while. This is nice. Once I started noticing it and all that, I got interested in it. And then I started studying it and going out mainly with taggers.
SPEAKER_09: Isn't that. I said, look, I just want to travel with you guys. They're like, oh, you stupid white boy. I'm like, OK, I saw I'm gonna learn about this no matter what I just want to learn. See that you were skinny. It goes up and it pops like there with that little circle. That's called can control.
SPEAKER_09: There's nobody I don't think there's anybody in the world that gets graffiti like me. I don't I don't. It would take a lot. This stuff is this stuff on top of stuff on top of stuff.
SPEAKER_10: A lot of people get they don't get that graffiti has to start with all these tags and then it moves to a throw up and then it can be a mural.
SPEAKER_09: It can be a burner. It can be a production. You know, and so only a small amount of people are going to be able to get to to the art side of it, the real art side of it, whatever that might be, and then make a living at it. That's cool. But if they don't if they aren't allowed to tag, they won't get there. And the world would really suck if we didn't have graffiti.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, OK, yeah, some of this stuff takes a while to get to. But if you get out every day, it takes no time. I don't get excited by graffiti.
SPEAKER_09: It doesn't bother me that it keeps going up. It has to go up. Otherwise, the artist can't emerge and they should be entitled to emerge. I mean, it's it's and a lot of them, their stories are interesting to hear. Well, I kind of can read it.
SPEAKER_12: So why would I keep painting out graffiti if if I enjoy it?
SPEAKER_09: Because, A, they have to do it to they expected to get painted out and three kind of gives them a fresh canvas to keep going.
SPEAKER_03: It all sounds like to me, too. How could somebody love graffiti so much and spend every single day destroying it? It doesn't really add up, right? It sounds like something he says in front of Tiger so that he won't get beat up.
SPEAKER_01: Hey Thompson, your mom's here. You're out.
SPEAKER_03: After getting arrested that night with Alla, I changed my life. My mom was the reason. She picked me up from the station at 6 a.m. and it wasn't the first time. But there was something about that night that was different. She looked worn out. She looked like a mom who had no more fight left in her. I was really tired of disappointing her. I was afraid of her being afraid for me. And I knew I had to change things up.
SPEAKER_02: I remember trying to call you and like you were avoiding me and then I finally got a hold of you. And then you said something like, oh, I'm just kind of busy right now. I was like, you busy for me? What the fuck? What's going on right now?
SPEAKER_03: I stopped answering his calls. Yeah, like you just pretty much ghost me from right there.
SPEAKER_03: I started going to class again. It was just like, yeah, what the hell?
SPEAKER_03: I started playing basketball again. So I'm getting cheery as I'm saying this right now. And I stopped smoking weed and drinking too.
SPEAKER_02: After that, I just I think I couldn't find anyone else to really connect with. And then I actually started getting more into like fighting for some reason. I was never like a big fighter, but all of a sudden I'm like Mr. Macho Man and I want to fight everybody.
SPEAKER_03: My best friend and I wouldn't see or talk to each other for 17 years. It was one of the hardest choices I ever made because I left friends behind who I considered family. And it hit the hardest when I'd see their names on walls and not my own. It felt like they carried on with their lives and forgot about me. And it was harder because deep inside I knew that it was something I brought upon myself. I left the world where I was completely seen only to re-enter a world where being seen wasn't guaranteed. And for a 14 year old, it was all really confusing. I wanted to change. And soon, the entire allegrophy of the world would also change.
SPEAKER_08: We return with more California love after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand.
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SPEAKER_03: By 2006, Site had briefly stepped back from graffiti. He was no longer homeless, but his mom was. He was working to save money to buy his mom a home because he wanted to rescue her from the park she was sleeping in. He was going to school at a community college and working two jobs.
SPEAKER_04: And my grandmother was like, I thought after she saw how productive I was and how serious I was, she was like, look, why don't you just live here?
SPEAKER_03: About the time I walked away from graffiti, what used to be a misdemeanor offense was now a felony. Graffiti artists started doing hard time for their art. Some people in L.A. refer to this time as a terror campaign. It's when Tagger's homes were reportedly being raided like they were drug dealers or members of a violent gang.
SPEAKER_04: It was a perfect sunny day at South Central L.A., as Ice Cube would say it a couple of days before Thanksgiving. 2006. You hear loud bangs on the door. I'm in the bed naked asleep. My auntie go open the door. I told her, don't open the door. I don't know who that is. She opened the door anyway. The police come in looking like they're in war gear. Just like seven, eight of them.
SPEAKER_06: They got assault rifles with beams coming out of them. They pull me out into the main den and they're like, where are the drugs and where are the guns?
SPEAKER_04: I'm like, there's no drugs and guns here. You got the wrong person. You got raided the wrong house. There is no drugs or guns. They're like, where is the guns and the drugs? They're tearing up the whole house.
SPEAKER_04: They put some shoes on me, no socks, pants, no belt, shirt, handcuffed me. They walked me outside. They got a whole neighborhood outside watching, you know, knows what people be. They took me down to the sheriff's station in Watts and they were high-fiving, man. They were high-fiving. They were like, yeah, we got this dude. We've been looking for this dude forever. I'm like, wow. When I'm out through my head, I'm like, I didn't know graffiti is this serious. If I knew graffiti was this serious, then I would have not have been messing with it. They gave me an interrogation room. I don't know. No law sent me down. They sit down a folder of paperwork about six inches tall, all photos of stuff I did in L.A. And they open a folder, they show me pictures. I'm like, dude, this is all, this stuff is all old, dude. They were like, if you date these to a more recent date, we'll let you out today. I'm like, for real?
SPEAKER_03: But it wasn't for real. Sight was charged with multiple accounts of nonviolent felony vandalism. He says the evidence he signed ended up being used against him in court. According to him, they had him date pictures of his tags to a more recent time to land within the statute of limitations. Sight was facing around 30 years in prison, so he did what he had to do, and he took a deal for eight years and eight months. His sentencing was just part of the city's draconian anti graffiti movement, and multiple hometown heroes like him were arrested. City attorneys say it's about time taggers are treated like criminal gang members.
SPEAKER_03: In 09, then L.A. city attorney Carmen Trutanich had a mission to go after writers. He and his staff began to gather street-level intelligence and prepared injunctions targeting graffiti crews. While Sight was in prison, a lot of taggers reached out to him to provide support, including one he didn't know that well, but who I used to be really tight with.
SPEAKER_04: Aloe wrote me while I was in prison. I met him only once in person on the Venice bus. I never hung out with him like that. He went to prison for something that we were all doing. That could have been any one of us is what I'm saying. So it's like you got to pay respect to him.
SPEAKER_02: For him to only meet me once or twice, I didn't want to be like, hey, I'm going to reach out to this dude. All I can say is graffiti did that.
SPEAKER_04: We wrote together every, yeah, like every three weeks or so.
SPEAKER_02: What am I doing? How's everything going?
SPEAKER_04: Just trying to see where his mind was at.
SPEAKER_02: It felt good, man. I felt like I wasn't alone. I felt like graffiti is bigger than what, it's more than what people think it is.
SPEAKER_04: I was in there for about five years because I was like good behavior, fire camp, all that stuff. And then he was like, you know, like a year or two before I got out, he was like, I'll pick you up from prison. And he did that. He picked me up. Got my first meal. Took me down to Venice Beach. Bringing in the salty air. I hear the crash of the ocean. Put my feet in the water. It was good, man, but I felt broken. I felt vulnerable.
SPEAKER_11: This is just all of our stuff to get rid of that, the graffiti. We think, we think this is all we need. We're not 100% sure.
SPEAKER_09: Well, the city, you know, they, I hate to say they killed my kid. To this day, they never apologized about that. He went on a school field trip and died in a drowning incident. They had told none of us that there was never going to be any swimming out there. The way it happened and all the things that happened in the city, the city could have helped me and they never chose to help me. They chose to desert me. They've never said, we're sorry about your son. That's, I think, one reason why I stay in graffiti abatement is because I'm not able to fix my life because you can never control. It's like trying to herd cats. You can't control ****. So I can control graffiti, which makes people's lives better. So for me, it's just, I spent probably a small fortune on it, but it really saves me mentally. I'm still looking for that orange piece. That thing just melts right off.
SPEAKER_03: By 2015, I was working as a journalist and writing about race and identity. One day I received a call from a childhood friend, Nikki, telling me about the company she had just started in Compton. Nikki's company was primarily hiring undocumented workers and formerly incarcerated people, two groups of people who live with the most stigma. I walked inside of the lobby and saw a framed newspaper article featuring a black man standing in front of a graffiti wall. I took a step closer and he looked really familiar. I took another step forward and noticed that the wall read S I G H T in big and bold letters. It was SITE. Oh, damn, that's SITE from Scare Straight. Do you know SITE? I asked Nikki. SITE, she replied. Yeah, he works here. He's actually in the back driving the forklift. Let's go see if he's back there. What are the odds? The three of us went out to lunch that day and began reminiscing about Scare Straight and graffiti. Something told me to ask SITE about Allo because there weren't a lot of other black graffiti artists. So what do I have to lose? Allo? SITE replied. Yeah, that's my boy. My jaw dropped all the way to the floor. Give me his number, SITE. I called him and nobody answered. I went home after lunch and later that day received a phone call from an unknown number. I answered and this mysterious voice asked, Hey, is this Bezo? Allo and I met up a week later at Earth Cafe in downtown L.A. I was nervous and I was scared because even though a lot of time had passed, I didn't know how he felt. Maybe he felt abandoned by me. When I saw him, he didn't really look like Tupac anymore. He now had a fro and tattoo sleeves halfway down his arms. Honestly, he looked like he had been through a lot, but he still had that same charming smile and that same laugh. So much had happened since we last saw one another. He had gotten married. He had survived two drug overdoses. He's vegetarian. And of all things, like of all the things in the world, he was studying to become a lawyer. A lawyer. We talked about our families, about food and our friends. And towards the end of the night, he looked at me and said he had something to give me. I was just like, hey, do you remember this? And I remember your face was just like, wow.
SPEAKER_03: He handed me a slap tag. Remember those post office stickers he talked about earlier? Well, I have filled this one out the same night we got arrested. Before that weird Hawaiian punch craving. This slap tag had our names on it. It said Bezo, it said Aloe and it said our Cruz. And he had kept this one slap tag through the years, through everything. And now I have that slap tag. And it's one of the most important things in my life. Meeting up with Cite and Aloe prompted me to see what our old nemesis Joe was up to. Maybe it was closure I was seeking. I don't know. So I found Joe on the Internet. I contacted him and I spent a few days with him.
SPEAKER_03: It turns out Joe hasn't changed. He's still covering up graffiti and he's still doing it for free. I was wrong about Joe. This dude really surprised me. He lives in South Central with his wife and cares for and abuse people.
SPEAKER_09: So I think she probably was in a yard where she was like a dog where there was a male slap.
SPEAKER_03: I really expected Joe to agree with me at the door with a red MAGA hat on. But he didn't. He does have an award from Trump, though, for graffiti abatement, of all things. President Trump, best guy in the planet for community in the state of California.
SPEAKER_10: Forty million people. And I'm the only one who's got one of those in the state of California.
SPEAKER_09: Anyways, Joe actually hates the government.
SPEAKER_03: These people don't give a **** about our people.
SPEAKER_09: What he means are everyday people, working class folks, and especially people of color.
SPEAKER_03: And Joe's also really into fitness. He's an avid bike rider and a former football player from the South Side of Chicago. Rudy, that ******* guy stole my story.
SPEAKER_09: What do you mean?
SPEAKER_03: Do you remember the film Rudy? The classic?
SPEAKER_10: That ******* guy stole my story. That was my thing, man. I wanted to be a walk-on football player at ND. And then that *******, he got there three years ahead of me and took my ******* crazy.
SPEAKER_11: Oh well, here we are. Yeah, here we are.
SPEAKER_03: I decided to bring Joe and Cyte together because I wanted them to talk about how they perceive one another. Cyte thinks Joe was a part of the problem, you know? Just another white dude who's part of the system to lock the black and brown people. Joe, on the other hand, had never met Cyte, the human. He buffed out a lot of his pieces, but he didn't know the man. He thought Cyte was just another dude from the hood who got caught up in the system. So I invited both of them to my aunt's house to talk because it was a neutral space. I wanted both of them to feel as comfortable as possible. I mean, I really didn't know what was going to happen. Cyte's like, you know, somebody who is really chill and really mellow, but... Cyte! Get your **** in here!
SPEAKER_10: Joe's kind of out there.
SPEAKER_10: Cyte, stop! Come on! How are you, man? So you still putting **** on the walls? Yeah. Are you really? That's good. I like that.
SPEAKER_03: They sat at my aunt's dining table and talked about what they agreed on. Graffiti, when you're looking at the outside of it, it's ugly. It's horrible. It's this and that.
SPEAKER_04: But once you step foot into that world, it's a whole another perspective on the matter. You will never be able to relate unless you hang out with graffiti artists or are graffiti artists. You will never be able to relate. It'll just be judging from the outside in. And Cyte wasn't messing around. He came ready.
SPEAKER_03: He even reached out to the graffiti community on Facebook to see if they had any questions for Joe.
SPEAKER_04: Do you want to hear those questions?
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, let's go!
SPEAKER_04: Shy and blank want to know why you buffed out the rooftop in 92 and told them to get day jobs. I thought it was just funny. It was just funny. It came from an American Express commercial.
SPEAKER_09: Another person asks, why did you?
SPEAKER_04: Some of the questions were really angry.
SPEAKER_03: That's Caltrans. Caltrans is so insane about how they buff burners.
SPEAKER_09: Cyte told Joe he was really hated.
SPEAKER_04: A lot of people plotted on you. They plotted on your family. Wow. A lot of people went after your kids secretly. I can't say who. OK. And it's almost similar to like, I don't want to say it. I don't want to be disrespectful, but like, you know how a cop goes out and shoots a kid or arrests kids and people feel that pain forever? Yeah. It's kind of like the same.
SPEAKER_03: It seemed like the news that people went after Joe's kids really affected him, especially since Joe had lost his son. He was physically shaken and he really let down his guard. Joe revealed a different side to him that people weren't used to seeing. It didn't feel like a performance anymore. It felt like we were finally getting the real Joe. After I lost my son, I lost my grandmother, my parents, my brothers, my in-laws, my sister-in-laws, a lot of artists, a lot of people I knew, a lot of people in my community.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, there was a time in like 99 through 07, 08 where there's a lot of funerals. There's just so many funerals and it just, I mean, it's a lot. And so I just, and then with a lot of things that mainly with my son and there's still fall off from that, which is now almost, it's almost 21 years, you know? And so I just kind of then just really became a lot. I don't mean to cut you off. No, no, no. No, no, no.
SPEAKER_04: You know, I met a lot of different graffiti artists, at least about a thousand of them that I know more, have the same story as you. Are similar. Yeah. And I'm listening to you. I'm listening to you. And what people don't know and people forget is any kind of painting is therapeutic.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Painting, doing art activates one side of the brain that helps heal trauma. You've been through some trauma. I feel that the more, the longer that person paints reflects how much healing they need and how much therapy that that painting provides. I still do it because I still suffer through trauma that has not been rooted yet, uprooted. So, and I see it in you. You might not be doing graffiti, but you are painting over it. Oh, yeah. Yet it is still in a way therapeutic and provides a sense of relief.
SPEAKER_04: And the other side of that is that it's fun. It's competitive. And there's some people that are game, and so be it or not.
SPEAKER_03: In that moment, I think Joe finally felt seen in her too. He wasn't the in your face, Joe, the wild Joe, the ra ra ra Joe. You know, he was soft and he was gentle. In sight, I'm pretty sure he felt the same way, too. People see walls with graffiti on them and think that the people responsible for the tags are criminals. But it's hard to know that there's a whole life behind the spray paint that emerges on the wall. And to be real, it's impossible to see the things that people are dealing with at home. It's already hard enough being a teenager. But imagine not having a way to express yourself. That's really hard. Some see it as property damage. But what about the damage people are experiencing in their own lives? Each piece of graffiti is a window into someone's life. Sometimes, though, the window is hard to see through because there's writing on it. But each window and each wall tells a different story. The walls are the first thing I see when I travel to a new place. They tell me everything I need to know about where I'm at. They alert me of danger, tell me who lives in that community, and who I need to be aware of. Let's go back to that bus. Spring, 2017. I'm on the 733 bus line, and we're heading west on Venice Boulevard. I'm sitting in the back of the bus. It's the early afternoon, and there's nobody else sitting next to me. I'm listening to music on my headphones when I notice an old friend hop on. It's Ivan, and we used to be in the same circles when I used to tag. Ivan has to change one bit. He's still wearing oversized t-shirts and still speaks from the side of his mouth like he used to. And his hair is still cut really low. It's been more than 15 years since we last saw one another.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, ****, what's up, man?
SPEAKER_03: We dap each other up and hug, and he sits right next to me.
SPEAKER_05: Hey, you still write?
SPEAKER_03: When Ivan asked me if I still wrote, I paused, because the truth is, nothing's really changed. I am still writing. I'm just not writing on walls or buses or freeways anymore. But I'm still writing to be seen. Yeah, I told Ivan. I do still write.
SPEAKER_03: The lead producer for this episode is Elizabeth Nakano, supporting producer Tamika Adams. Our editor is Arwin Nix. Our senior producer is Megan Tan. Our sound engineer is Valentino Rivera. Original music by Andrew Ipe. This episode was written by me, Walter Thompson Hernandez, with help from Elizabeth Nakano. Angela Bromstad is our executive producer. For more information on this episode of Scared Straight, go to LAIST.com forward slash California Love. California Love is a production of Alias Studios. I'm the host, Walter Thompson Hernandez. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate you.
SPEAKER_08: This is just one of an eight-part series. I encourage you to subscribe to California Love so you can hear them all. We'll have a link in the show notes. 99% invisible is Delaney Hall, Kurt Kohlstedt, Sofia Klatzker, Katie Menkel, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sean Real, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Le, Chris Berube, Abby Madon, and me, Roman Morris. We are founding members of Radio-Topia from PRX and still based in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Do not fret. We'll have a new episode from us next week. In the meantime, check out and pre-order our new book. It's called The 99% Invisible City at 99pi.org slash book or pick out and discover and share a cool story about design and cities in the built world and share it with your friends at 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
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