Ryan ChartrandThick fog slides in from the west over San Luis Obispo cutting short the orange glow of sunset and stifling the stars. A shrouded moon rises and the city sleeps.
It is 2 a.m. now and all is quiet. Even the swirling ocean breeze can muster little noise. Along train tracks, at the western side of the city, two figures appear out of the dark. The gravel beneath their feet crunches with each step. One figure, the lookout, comes to a stop. The other approaches a boxcar and from his hooded sweatshirt pocket produces a can of silver spray paint. Shhhhht, shhhhht, shhhhhhhht, he sprays. A misty cloud glints in the moonlight as it floats upward.
He signals to his lookout; it’s time to move on to the next spot if they plan to finish before daybreak. The more paint they leave dripping in the city, the better their chances are to get your attention.
The two graffiti writers, who chose the aliases Cream Cheese and Colla’ Greens for this article, may very well be the graffiti kings of San Luis Obispo. They’ve sprayed their monikers on everything from lampposts to overpasses to trains, and their passion for the graffiti lifestyle as well as the unwritten code of conduct that defines it won’t allow them to stop.
“The ultimate goal of every graffiti writer is to king a major city. To be the most known, the most wanted, the most loved, and most hated writer in the entire city,” he said. His friend added, “There’s a whole underground world of graffiti that nobody’s even explored because it’s literally underground.”
Cuesta Park, just outside of San Luis Obispo city limits, is host to what some say is the best graffiti in the area. Casual visitors to the park no doubt stop at the slides or the picnic tables next to the sign that reads “raccoon reservation area.” Knowing visitors and the occasional lucky adventurer continue along a narrow dirt path that crosses a creek and runs into a large concrete wall and tunnel. The entire length of the tunnel, which measures approximately 50 yards, is coated on both sides with bright, colorful, flashy lettering, and the occasional popular character, namely Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants. It should come as no surprise that such a place would also bear Cream Cheese’s tag; he’s everywhere graffiti is, everywhere it’s not, and already planning where it will be next. To him, the allure of graffiti is much more than an adrenaline rush.
“It’s like, why does a drug addict do drugs? Same thing. Why does an alcoholic drink every day? Why does a workaholic neglect his kids? It’s all the same thing. I just want to paint every day if I can,” Cream Cheese said. “I don’t have a good reason for writing graffiti, I’ve never gotten laid off of it, it’s never brought me anything but trouble, but I just can’t stop doing it.” But if San Luis Obispo Police have their way, the last thing he will paint are his cellmate’s toenails.
“They’re crazy out here,” said Cream Cheese, “I think they want a trophy, I think that they would make a trophy out of me if they got me.” To be arrested now would almost certainly mean a felony count of vandalism for him. The damage he has caused in San Luis Obispo is well over the $400 cutoff for a misdemeanor charge and he’s already been booked in New York for vandalism.
San Luis Obispo police officer Sean Gillham, a Cal Poly graduate, said that each tag put up by a graffiti writer is subject to an investigation. Evidence is collected at each crime scene and photos are taken of the graffiti that are analyzed like a signature in a fraud investigation. He also said that one of the keys to thwarting a graffiti writer is to cover their tags as quickly as possible so as to disallow them the satisfaction, or the notoriety, of having their name up.
Cream Cheese makes no excuse that ego and narcissism play a role in the graffiti artist’s motivation; that’s the name of the game. Either strive to have the most technically astonishing and aesthetically pleasing tags, he said, or strive to be the person with the most tags; a bomber. Either way, fame is part of the writer’s motivation.
“I don’t even want to be the best. I don’t want to be a professional artist; I just want to write graffiti. I like the bombing aspect,” said Cream Cheese. “It’s like fifty-fifty. Fifty percent of it is running around hopping fences, climbing stuff, just knowing the underbelly of whatever city you’re in, whatever town you’re in … and then half of it is artwork.”
Colla’ Greens interprets his own graffiti in a different way. “My goal has been to go out and actually create something that makes somebody stop and say, ‘wow, you know, that’s actually nice. It’s in some place where it shouldn’t be, but it’s nice.’ If they do that then I’m cool with that even if it gets painted over at that point, because it kind of got through.”
The police interpretation of graffiti is simple: It’s vandalism, it’s not art, and it certainly isn’t pretty. Gillham said that graffiti makes the city look bad and “leads to other things”-such as organized gang behavior. While he admitted that San Luis Obispo does not have any “hardcore gangs,” he said that graffiti was a sort of advertisement for unlawful activity. Gillham’s notion of graffiti did not sit well with Cream Cheese and Colla’ Greens.
“The only crime I commit is graffiti; I don’t do anything else, I don’t do drugs, I’m old enough to drink, so I go to the bars and it’s not a crime. I don’t even steal my spray paint; I pay for it all,” Cream Cheese said.
Colla’ Greens responded to the comment, “Graffiti was invented as an alternative to all of that; same as anything that was in hip-hop. It was like an alternative to people that was doing bad stuff.” He may have been painting with his fingers while graffiti was getting its start, but Colla’ Greens still remembers a time when it was passed on like a tradition.
“I’ve been around since ’89 so, I literally went out with my cousins and watched them and they took me and they’re like, OK, fill in this whole square; that took the whole night. I got paint all over my face and hands filling in one square and after that I was hooked,” he said. “And my name was actually given to me, it wasn’t like something I just looked up in a book, like oh, this word sounds cool. Names were handed down, they weren’t something that you could control. You had a trait or a characteristic about yourself and they were like, ‘oh, he kind of acts squirrelly so he can be squirrel.'”
Even though names are not necessarily handed out anymore, they said graffiti writing still has rules, which serve to uphold a code of honor of sorts. Central to this is the idea that a writer’s name is everything to them, and when someone else begins writing it, there’s soon to be a conflict.
Cream Cheese is currently in such a conflict. Shortly after leaving his native New York, someone from his old graffiti crew began writing his name with an “s” at the end of it. Now, if Cream Cheese ever runs into this person, words won’t even be exchanged, the fight will be on. “If I go back and I cut his face open with a razor, I won that name, like now it’s my name. From now on everyone’s going to look at his face and they’re going to say my tag, and they’re going to be like, ‘he did that to you.'”
They said that without this lifestyle, graffiti isn’t the same.
“There’s a line between what’s considered street art and tagging and graffiti,” said Colla’ Greens, “and it’s very thin. Some artists get fame, and they still have the same name, but they’ve gotten into trouble hundreds of times and now they’re making thousands of dollars because of what they did prior. You got respect for what you did that was a crime; now you changed it and now you’re making money off of it.”
To Cream Cheese, “graffiti is for everyone and graffiti is free. You can’t buy it, so once you start selling graffiti, it’s art; it’s not graffiti anymore. If you gave me a canvas and a can of spray paint and sat me in a room, I could probably do something really nice; but if I did something nice in the middle of the night with no light on a dirty wall it’s just so much more. It’s worth so much more. You risk your freedom to go out and do this; it gives it an actual value and you can’t buy it, you can’t buy the wall, it’s priceless.”
And though graffiti may be priceless to Cream Cheese, he recognizes the graffiti writer’s legacy is no more permanent than the paint it’s created with. “I’ll move away and my name will disappear and that’s it, it’s not a big deal.”
As day breaks in San Luis Obispo, the city begins to wake and once again the streets are filled with a current of traffic. The two graffiti writers vanish. Not into thin air, but into the crowds of people who line the city’s streets, who gather in its buildings and marvel at the writings on its walls.