Graffiti Writing With a Conscience

By Max Lewontin

"Hey, Mr. Boston!" a raspy voice called out. Standing on a quiet warehouse-filled street in Long Island City, Queens, elevated trains rumbling overhead, I whirled, turning away from the brightly colored graffiti murals toward the sound. Walking towards me, dressed in a light jacket and black sweatshirt, hood pulled over his head, was Meres One. Not that tall, but with a piercing gaze that seemed to follow your every move even when he was looking down, he radiated intensity. "How's it going?" I said. We shook hands. His grip was powerful. It was early March—gray and gloomy—but the vibrant colors of 5 Pointz, Meres' labor of love, stood out.

Meres—whose real "government" name, I would later find out, was Jonathan Cohen—was a graffiti "writer," as the people who make painting on public and private property their passion term themselves."Born in Queens, pretty much raised in Queens," as he described himself, Meres ran 5 Pointz, one of the largest legal spaces for painting graffiti in the world. It was a sort of second job beyond doing graffiti and working as a commercial artist.

I had first become seriously interested in graffiti a few months earlier, after starting to work on a documentary for my media production class in high school. At first, I was stuck, an outsider, unsure of how to penetrate the often-secretive worlds of graffiti writers and of those who try to stop them. "I know the perfect guy," my teacher had told me. "He's a little intense, but I don't know how to get a hold of him. He doesn't have a phone." In my head, I pictured a crazy-haired guy flinging paint, Jackson Pollock-like, at a canvas in a crowded studio.

But, like everyone else in America in 2009, Meres did have a cell phone, along with a habit for almost never checking his voicemail and then leaving ominous-sounding messages in a gravelly voice: "I got a call from this number. Call me back. Meres." I remember standing in the kitchen at home, phone to my ear. I had called to ask if he would be willing to be interviewed for a documentary. "Sure," he said."When can you come down?" "Would Fri--" I started to say. He cut me off, sounding somewhat apologetic—"Wait, wait, there's a train."

I was surprised. Despite his quirky mannerisms over the phone, Meres seemed willing to talk to me, even though I was an outsider who didn't write graffiti and insisted on learning about the extensive, often-closed-off graffiti culture as I went along. In the few months since I had begun working on the documentary, I had been rebuffed several times. "Sure, I'll see if anyone I know would be willing to talk to you" the owner of a small clothing and graffiti supply store in my hometown of Cambridge had told me with a sneer. "Just write your email down here," he said. "Email?" I thought skeptically. I never heard back from him, despite having come in with a friend who claimed to know him well. I guess I wasn't trustworthy enough. I wondered if I would even be able to work on the documentary, feeling stonewalled from every direction. My attempts to talk to the head of graffiti removal for the city of Boston had also gone nowhere. I had called City Hall every day for the past few weeks—"Yes, my name is Max Lewontin," I would say, trying to sound business-like. "I'm working on a documentary about graffiti in the city of Boston…."

But suddenly, after a few short phone calls, I was in Long Island City. Getting off the subway at genteel-sounding Courthouse Square, I understood what Meres had meant. The roar of the elevated 7 train, making its way to Shea Stadium, was deafening. "It comes by every three minutes," Meres told me, looking up towards the subway cars which had been the mecca of every spray paint-toting New York kid until the late 80s. "After awhile you just kind of forget it's there."

He walked around, glancing up at a rickety metal staircase on the outside of one building. Like everything else in two-block warehouse that made up 5 Pointz, it was covered inside and out with colorful, almost entirely spray painted graffiti. Intricate, winding letters in bright, blended colors—the "wildstyle"—spelledout names I sometimes couldn't read. Every so often objects and "characters," as graffiti writers call them, popped out from the mass of letters: the baby from "Family Guy," a spinning break-dancer,a spray painted, realistic-looking portrait of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat with his face split, half man-half tiger. Meres' own distinctive spray painted character, an anthropomorphic light bulb, face contorted into a variety of expressions, beamed down from corners and walls around the building.

Meres stopped pacing. "Have you eaten yet?" he asked. "C'mon. I gotta get some breakfast." It was now 3 o'clock in the afternoon. "Sure, thanks," I ventured, unsure of what to say. We walked up the street towards a small diner next to the subway stop. Meres stopped a few steps from the gate outside 5 Pointz, looking towards a colorful wall. Impressed, he whistled appreciatively, pulling out a small digital camera to take a picture of the mural. He stopped again a few feet away at a brick building with a small wooden door on the side. It was a small bar, darkened inside. I was surprised; everything seemed to be centered around these few blocks. "My birthday's coming up in a few days," he said. "I'm just gonna stop for a few minutes and set up the party." I laughed, wondering at the time why this all seemed so ordinary. Weren't graffiti writers supposed to be sneaky and suspicious, operating only at night? Meres went in and came out a few minutes later. "I'd invite you, " he said, laughing, "but you probably have to be over 21."

As we reached the corner and crossed the busy street to the diner, Meres told me about what he had been doing recently. "I haven't been bombing much in a while," he said, referencing illegal graffiti writing, "but I got off a few on top of this bridge a couple weeks ago that came out well."He mostly "pieced" he told me, doing large, often legal, graffiti murals, called "masterpieces," at various locations. We walked into the diner and sat down. "Hey," Meres called out to the waiter. He'd been here a lot. A few minutes later, Meres' friend and fellow graffiti writer Zimad walked in. Sporting closely cropped hair, a goatee and thick-framed square glasses, he smiled and sat down. Meres introduced us and then perused the menu. "You getting anything?" he asked me. "Nah, I think I'm good," I said. "You should get something. The cheesecake's really good," he insisted. I looked over at the glass display cases lining the counter, filled with heaping slices of cheesecake and then back at the menu, half expecting to be sitting across from my Brooklyn-born grandmother—"You should eat something, Max, You're too skinny!"

Instead, I looked back across the table at the two graffiti writers I had just met. "Sure, I'll have the cheesecake." Zimad smiled again, "So you're from Boston," he asked, half questioning. "Yeah," I said. "I've always been interested in graffiti, seeing a lot of around, but I just started working on this documentary…"

Looking back, I have to laugh, both at myself, and at the absurdity of the situation. I was sitting in a crowded diner, in a place I had never been before, talking to graffiti writers about graffiti, which I knew only a little about. Yet somehow, like the "Mr. Boston" moniker that didn't really describe a kind of shy "People's Republic" of Cambridge-native like me, it seemed to fit anyway.

The waiter came and left. Meres and Zimad started talking. The words flew back and forth across the table, "I had this spot, but it just didn't work," Zimad said. "It wasn't coming off, paint wouldn't stick or something." "What'd you use?" Meres asked. "Rusto," he replied referencing Rustoleum, a popular spray paint brand. "I buffed it and everything." "Yeah," Meres agreed. "I just haven't found that many good spots lately, but 5 Pointz is doing well, almost in season, but I'm waiting till the weather warms up." 5 Pointz, I found out, was usually open for painting from April to October, mainly on the weekends. Suddenly, they were talking about online dating and social networking sites. "MySpace, I don't know, well, it's kinda…" "Facebook too, people keep tellin' me I need to create an account, but…" Meres trailed off. He looked towards me. "Are you on that shit?" he asked. "Yeah well, I have an account, but I don't really use it," I said.

I sat, cheesecake in front of me, not saying much, listening as the conversation ebbed and flowed from topic to topic. It was kind of like one of those New York-set sitcoms that seem to be always on TV, straight out of an old "Seinfeld" episode—"So what's the deal with…"

I snapped awake. "Yeah, I heard Cope's got this deal," Zimad was saying, talking about a well-known graffiti writer from the 70s and 80s. "Yeah, this reality show or something, he's living in this house, and the show just follows him around." "I can't believe he's doing that," Meres replied. "Doesn't he do well enough?" "Yeah, well he's got the gallery shows, I mean, I've done a few, but it's not the same as being out there and writing," Zimad interrupted. I listened closely. "Yeah, as a crew, together" Meres was saying, "it's just not the same as doing a gallery show, selling stuff, having to find a gallery, all that…."

I looked around the restaurant again. It was fairly crowded ,people coming in for late lunches. We sat for a while longer, then Meres glanced at his phone, signaling for the check. I returned once again to the camera bag at my feet. I was working on a documentary, I reminded myself, if only I could have gotten a camera in here, filmed a real conversation…

"The interview's probably not gonna work," I thought. "I don't even know what to ask." I had made it all the way out to Queens, but I was still nervous, unsure that my idea for a documentary on graffiti from multiple perspectives—both for and against it—would get past a bunch of half-finished interviews. "Do you wanna go? We can do the interview in front of the Biggie mural," Meres was asking me, talking about the spray-painted black and white tribute to slain rapper Biggie Smalls that adorned a locked door marked "Office." "Yeah, sure," I said, doubts beginning to subside. We left, slowly walking out. "Nice meeting you," Zimad said, "Good luck with the documentary and everything." "Thanks," I said, "It's been really good to talk to a bunch of writers." "Yeah," he said, smiling enigmatically and putting out his hand.

Suddenly, we were back at 5 Pointz. Meres paced back and forth, his hood back on his head. I braced myself and held the camera steady, focusing on the figure striding back and forth under the metal stairs. "You ready?" he asked. The train rumbled by, winding around the curve past the parking lot down the street. "Yeah," I said, pressing the record button.