Leaving Their Mark : Youths Risk Everything to Tag Walls, Buses and Traffic Signs With Graffiti

By JOHN M. GLIONNA

March 10, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Epic and Rival are kicking it with the TIKs.

One minute, they are scribbling street hieroglyphics on the kiddie slide at some park. The next, they are jumping a chain-link fence into the nearby flood-control channel, cans of ultra-flat black spray paint angrily hissing over ink-scarred concrete walls.

Then they are on a crowded city bus, chiseling script into the hard plastic seats--a handful of San Fernando Valley teen-agers on another Saturday night seek and destroy mission, doing whatever it takes to get their signatures seen by the outside world.

Epic and Rival, friends since third grade, are unassuming 17-year-olds dressed in the hip-hop uniform of the day--cockeyed baseball caps, flannel shirts, hoop earrings and low-slung trousers, baggy enough to fit their fathers.

But along with this little-brother naivete has come a more sinister street savvy that threatens to rob their school-age innocence like a masked thief in the night.

The TIKs--Think I Kare?--recently added a weapon to the spray-paint cans and Mean Streak marking pens of their graffiti arsenal: Now they have guns.

“We don’t go looking for trouble,” said Epic, who recently started shaving. “But when trouble comes looking for us , we’re ready for it.”

Mirroring the most notorious inner-city gangs, some roving graffiti bands have declared a bloody new street war--all for the high crime of having their tags crossed out, their burgeoning manhood challenged.

Across Los Angeles, taggers are being killed or injured.

Last month, a Reseda High School student was gunned down on campus in what police think might be a tagger-related killing. Seven members of a South-Central Los Angeles tagging crew KMT--Kings Making Trouble--were injured last weekend in a drive-by barrage of bullets.

But behind the headlines--within the daily workings of a tagger crew such as the TIKs, things are never black and white. Although each crew member has access to guns, precious few have ever fired one. Most still grapple with the fear and guilt of actually pulling the trigger.

Because the TIKs (pronounced Ticks) don’t consider themselves gang members--just a bunch of bored suburban kids looking for fun. And respect from their peers.

Take Epic. A member of his junior high school chess team, he quit to start tagging.

Instantly, he says, came the party invitations. He met girls.

“Without tagging,” he said, “what do I got?”

As the Saturday sun dipped low like an orange graffiti stain, Epic and Rival were already sassing the night, ready to tackle the tagger’s biggest challenge.

They wanted to “map the heavens”--spray-paint the hard-to-reach but very visible freeway destination signs. Such signatures could taunt highway crews for months, noticed by hundreds of thousands of motorists, bringing what they see as instant fame.

Scratching his stylized mark, his face squinched up like a kindergartner with crayons, it’s not adults Rival wants to impress: “It’s other taggers. Who cares about adults?”

But even taggers hold some things sacred. “I would never tag a house,” Epic said. “You can’t find fame that way. But I’ll paint the wall outside the house.”

Epic and Rival are an unlikely pair, a teen-age odd couple who began tagging as a way to make friends. Epic is black, with a quiet style that wins the attention of girls his age. Rival is white. He has asthma. His voice gets high-pitched when he gets excited.

At a park in Chatsworth, the pair meets with a dozen fellow members of the Valley version of the TIKs--which has hundreds of members across Los Angeles.

The Valley TIKs are equal-opportunity taggers. There is Pres, an Italian from New York; Wicer, an 18-year-old Turk; and DJ, a Filipino who wears goggles and a cap pulled down over his face.

There’s Gonja, a dark-eyed kid who carries a .22-caliber long-barreled revolver. With his constant scowl and tattoo showing a happy-face skull and crossbones, he’s the most respected Valley TIK tagger.

And there’s Cuer, pronounced “cure,” a Latino who works at a hospital and whose single mother speaks no English. He feels sorry for the aged people he helps all day.

The boys’ backgrounds vary like their tagging signatures. If Cuer is a Latino James Dean wanna-be, Rival is Alfalfa from the “Little Rascals,” seldom out of his parents’ sight.

While the TIKS say they have fired their guns at carloads of enemy crews, Rival questions their commitment to violence. “These guys carry guns to be cool,” he said, to jeers from his crew. “They won’t admit it but they don’t really need them. I don’t, anyway.”

Instead, the boys jab with insults sharp as knife blades. They mock rival taggers, referring to the USCs--Unstoppable Criminals--as “Unsalted Crackers” or “Unusable Condoms.”

They laugh over Rival’s partially deformed leg. And the asthma attack he supposedly suffered while running from the police--holding his inhaler with one hand and the belt loops of his baggy pants with the other.

Cuer blushes as someone asks him where he got the blood-purple hickey on his neck.

“His mother kissed him goodby,” one boy cracked.

Epic and Rival began tagging three years ago--two bright middle-class kids who work only hard enough for Cs and Ds in school. When teachers recommended Rival for an advanced placement class, he rebelled, preferring easier work.

Meanwhile, on the streets, he and Epic invented signatures they thought suited them. But at the movies or at home, Epic becomes Darryl and Rival is just Jason.

Last year, they joined the TIKs for the safety of numbers. They carry beepers and can summon help in minutes. In exchange, the crew requires them to defend its logo and not deny membership if questioned.

Flashing the 1960s-era peace sign, the older boys speed off in their cars to visit girlfriends, leaving Epic and Rival on foot. They plan to meet later with the crew’s “queens”--high school-age girls who also tag with the TIKs.

With a few hours to kill, Rival and Epic trudge toward Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Route 245 bus. They are itchy for mischief.

Rival leans close to the two timid-looking teen-agers in the back seat of the bus:

“You write?” he asks.

It is tantamount to drawing a line in the sand. The strangers know what follows: a question about their crew. They eye Epic, anticipating a slight they would be forced to defend. They nervously name their crew and ask Epic his age.

“Seventeen,” Epic responds proudly. “And a half.”

Rival senses their fear. For the first time that day, his chest swells. They boys get off the bus, saying goodby. Rival and Epic do not return the farewell.

For Rival, the high he feels from this show of respect does not last long. After he and Epic have spray-painted their curlicue signatures on bus seats and windows--all without being caught--they slink down a darkened boulevard, tagging telephone poles. That’s when Rival’s beeper goes off.

He calls the number. Instead of getting a message from a fellow TIK, he receives an insulting, profane taunt from an enemy crew. (Actually, it was a fellow TIK playing a prank.) Later, at another bus stop, Rival sees that his tag has been plainly crossed out.

“Man! I’ve been dissed! I’ve been dissed!” he says, his voice screechy, worried. Epic looks at the ground consolingly. He knows his friend has been disgraced.

Indeed, tagging has not always been good to Rival.

He has been arrested twice for vandalism and sentenced to 200 hours of community work. He fears that he will be caught shoplifting $4 cans of spray paint, that his parents will drop his allowance, putting an end to the trips to the big and tall shops for baggy street wear--the extra-extra-large coats and Puma sneakers with thick laces.

“Don’t worry,” Epic says. “We’re gonna map the heavens tonight. All points killed.”

Epic may think he was born to tag, but his mother fears he has become just a common vandal.

“I detest what he does,” she said. “It’s terrible. It’s wrong to deface people’s property.”

A hospital nurse, she has tried everything to make him quit. He was grounded. He father threatened to beat him. “He told me it was an illness,” Epic’s mother said. “Like smoking--hard to kick.”

One day, school officials turned Epic over to police for tagging his textbooks. Then his parents sent him to live with relatives in Virginia. There, a teacher complimented him on his artwork. He returned home with a new vigor to paint the streets.

Sometimes, Epic will go on tagging runs for nights at a time without coming home. Now his mother wants him to seek psychological treatment: “Young people are dying just for having one of those stupid spray-paint cans. If my son were ever hurt or killed, it would destroy me.

“I cry. I say, ‘If you can’t stop for yourself. Do it for me.’ ”

The heavens would have to wait.

In the end, Epic and Rival get cold feet. Instead of a late-night assault on the freeway road signs, the pair sneak into a Valley motel room to party with 40 other teen-agers--drinking malt liquor from 40-ounce bottles.

By 3 a.m.--the bewitching hour for most taggers--they are devouring fast-food hamburgers.

As they eat, sleepy-eyed, a 16-year-old tagger queen called Seksee says she is a soldier in what she calls the newest war of the streets.

“We girls have a battle of our own going,” she boasts. “We’re tagbangers, too. But I don’t carry any gun. I carry a screwdriver. It’s just as effective.”

But even Epic and Rival admit it: Despite their weapons, they are far from being gangsters. Rather, they are bored kids, some of whom fear the wrath of their parents far more than they do each other.

Seksee knows that lesson. Leaving the party, she wrecks her mother’s car--colliding with another motorist. Her friends, accomplices in tagging, flee.

Unhurt, with her friends gone, she stands sobbing in the street, waiting for the police.

“What am I going to do?” she says. “My mother is going to kill me. I won’t get out of the house for a month.’

Tagger Terms Following is a glossary of some commonly used tagger phrases: Tag: Your graffiti signature.

Crew: Your tagging group--also known as a posse, mob or tribe.

Homies: Fellow members of your crew.

Kicking it: To relax with your homies.

Toy: A novice, amateurish tagger.

Ranker: A person who chickens out, doesn’t defend his tag.

Slipping: Being caught by rival taggers without homies to back you up.

Mob: To hit a target with graffiti.

Kill: To completely cover with graffiti.