Kiosk - Biters Among Kings (page 2)

Biters Among Kings

"Give me a word. Any word," Fusco says politely to me.

He sounds like a magician, except he's wearing a black bandana over half of his face and coolly shaking a can of Montana 94 Planet Blue, his favorite color in his favorite brand, ready to write.

“I’m not sure,” I say a bit hesitantly. We’re standing in a dusty parking lot behind an office park in Downey in front of a brick wall filled with cracks and soot and old bubble gum. It’s broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon, and there are families and truck loaders less than half a block away, but Fusco has been "practice-tagging" here ever since high school and assures me that the coast is clear. Grinning after my response, Fusco straightens out his Dead Kennedys t-shirt and proceeds to beautifully tag "I'm Not Sure" onto the wall.

"The most important thing to keep in mind is flow," Fusco explains. "You need to time your motions just right. You can't really hesitate 'cause it'll show in your lines." His voice is slightly muffled by his bandana, but his tone is patient and he clearly knows his stuff. Instead of tagging the letter "E" Chicano style, Fusco writes the character in its traditional lower-case form and extends the end of the letter into a stylized arrow. Popularly known as “wildstyle,” the stylized arrow is a technique that originated in the streets of New York City but can now be found in virtually every major metropolis.

It's best to not rely on a sole can of spray paint when doing a job; you never know when it might run out or choke. Some writers wear masks, but Fusco personally prefers bandannas for their simplicity and efficiency. If he's doing a larger job, such as lettering, he usually wears a backpack that's filled with at least three or four cans of spray paint. Fusco packs in even more if he plans on using a more complex color scheme or creating color patches. Krylon is normally his brand of choice, but Montana 94 and Ironlak work well for larger pieces. With those two, the lines are thicker, the colors bolder and the paint much more resistant to the effects of sun and rain.

Most writers strive to convey a unique aesthetic in their work and consider it an art form, according to Fusco. For many artists, graffiti serves as an outlet from marginalizing circumstances or as a defiant response to the institutionalization of art, say, in a museum. The most common purpose of graffiti, though, is to exhibit a writer’s identity and his affiliation with a crew, his gang or his neighborhood. It can also be a means for expressing serious political statements, or for allowing a writer to make tangible what was a passing idea in his mind. Like any other form of art, graffiti can be inspired by an infinite amount of things.

"My current influences are very eclectic," Fusco says. "It can be the patterns in a design I see, or the people in my life. It could be a good Zeppelin song, or just the feeling I get from rocking another piece!"

Born and raised in L.A. County, Fusco lived in the city of Bell Gardens until the age of ten, then moved to Downey with his younger sister Isabel and their parents, and has lived there ever since. As a teenager, he attended Bell High School where Brian Matias*, a classmate, noticed Fusco sketching in his notebook one day.

"He said, 'Hey man, have you ever done a locker rocker?'” Fusco recalls. “I've been hooked on tagging and writing ever since."

That was back in freshman year, when Fusco's graffiti career started. Very soon, idle doodling in class became more deliberate and elaborate etchings on public property. School grounds were the most accessible canvas and, within hours of meeting Matias, who would later become a fellow crewmember of STK, Fusco began tagging hallway lockers with images of cars, girls and cartoon characters. He would often finish each tag with his signature, "Page," which Matias had given him in honor of Fusco's habit of drawing in the pages of his notebook. Matias, now 28, remembers that Fusco was a quiet kid who would crack jokes every once in a while, but mostly keep to himself. But his shy nature didn’t matter. Fusco could draw, and Matias knew it.

"Adrian has good flow from drawing quickly and in pitch -black circumstances," he says. "You can't learn that on a computer … which is what a lot of kids are doing nowadays."

Once Fusco became a sophomore, his graffiti playground quickly transcended the boundaries of campus and opened up onto the streets. Along with three other Bell High boys, Matias and Fusco formed STK, or "Sworn To Kill," and began tagging and writing up the neighborhood as biters. As a form of initiation into the crew, each member had to "paint in the heavens," or write on a piece of public property that was difficult to reach. The more dangerous a potential canvas was in terms of physical safety, or getting caught by police, the greater the prestige a writer would earn by taking it on . This is a typical way for a biter to gain respect as well as to establish his crew in a neighborhood. To show that a writer was affiliated with a particular crew, painting in the heavens had two requirements: the writer’s signature and the name of his or her crew. The practice is gang-like, but not quite there.

When Fusco was 16, he climbed to the top of a billboard off of the 710 Freeway while
his crewmembers kept on the lookout below. As quickly and skillfully as he could, he tagged "Page" and "STK" onto the back of the board. Up until that moment, Fusco says that he had never felt such a rush or sense of pride in his life. He affirms that the name of the crew is harmless. As untested young taggers, he and the rest of STK didn't want to further fuel their lack of experience with a weak-sounding name. They never "killed" anyone and they never engaged in any illegal activity besides graffiti. STK wasn’t a gang; it was a band of brothers, a family with members that sought to express their inner creativity and were bound by this common goal.
By junior year Fusco was an expert in the Old English font and would write on trains, overpasses and bridges. He would often stay over at Matias’s apartment and work on his sketches on a plain drawing pad, staying up all night to map out ideas. STK would then scope out a potential space in the city, wait for the streets to empty out in the early morning hours and then write together while keeping watch for one another. They would typically incorporate a clown character into their pieces and this icon soon became somewhat of a mascot for the crew.

"Every kid has, or should have, a way to let his mind free," Fusco says. "For me, it was bombing the walls of L.A. with graffiti and repping my crew."

STK continued to be active after its members graduated high school, but its stamina was brought to an abrupt halt with the loss of one of its members, Mario Saavedra*, who died in a car accident. Saavedra was the “little kid brother” of STK, and his passing hit the other four members hard. It was clear that the crew would never be the same without him. After Saavedra's death, STK's graffiti activity began to dwindle. At the time, Fusco was 20 and in his second year at Cerritos College, studying to become a network technician. Largely due to his friend's fatal accident, however, Fusco withdrew from social activities, lost interest in school and eventually dropped out of college.

While he is still best friends with the other crew members, Fusco has been bombing L.A. much less, maybe once or twice every few months. He says that a lot of writers begin to fade once they start a family, fall into gang life or engage in another commitment. But he doesn't see himself ever completely leaving the graffiti scene. His priority now, though, is completing his Computer Engineering degree at CSULA and pursuing a career in the field.