War of the Walls : THE TAGGER: ‘CREATOR’ : ‘It’s for the chase and the street fame.’

Everywhere you turn, it’s in your face: on street signs, garage doors, freeway overpasses.

Tagging--destructive scrawling on public and private property--is also on our lips. It’s a hot topic, from the inner city to the outer suburbs.

Just last week, Mayor Richard Riordan signed into law a $1,000 penalty for graffiti taggers. And the deaths of seven taggers in a freeway crash July 2 brought the human side of the issue to the forefront.

Why do teen-agers tag? To find out, staff writer Michael Quintanilla explores the secret life of a 13-year-old who “bombs,” or scribbles, his tag name Creator (CRE8) throughout Southeast Los Angeles.

And how does the community cope? With anger and plenty of paint, says Sergio Palos, 39, whose print shop in Creator’s neighborhood gets sprayed every week.

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“I got started in the third grade. I was 8 or 9 years old. I’m 13 now. I started off as a tagger or a writer. Taggers say writers. The media use tagger because that’s the word they know, but we also call ourselves writers, mobbers, bombers.

My tag is Creator, and my crews are DSK, HAL and 415. DSK stands for Drop Some Knowledge, Dropping Some Knowledge, Dee Style Kings, Dope Smoking Kings, Dope Style Kings. HAL stands for Hard Ass Latinos, Hispanics at Large, Hell After Life, Having All Ladies and Horny After Love. I also belong to the 415 crew, which is the police code for disturbance of the peace.

It’s like a family to belong to a crew. They watch your back, you watch theirs. You kick it every day with them. Some of us go to different schools. Some I know from the street. Some go to high school already. You get friendship, love, supplies, everything.

I bomb because I like the chase, the getting up (tagging on a wall) without getting caught. I bomb during the day and night as long as I don’t get caught. The cops are patrolling my area more often so I got to be careful. I do it whenever I have supplies or whenever I need a good time. My girlfriend is a tagger as well. She writes Vina. We put Vina and Creator and Creator loves Vina. All it takes is a couple of seconds to get up and then I’m gone. Catch me if you can.

I’ll tag anything. In the beginning I would get up on abandoned buildings. Now I don’t care. Well, sort of. I wouldn’t like no one to write on my stuff. I do it to get known, to get up, regardless if people feel that I’m causing damage to property. I’d say the damage I’ve done is quite a bit. Will fines prevent tagging and graffiti? Nobody gives a damn, they’re just gonna do whatever they want.

Most of the time I get up on stop signs and city-owned stuff. Buses are a prime target. I shove my foot in the gas exhaust, jump up and write.

The way to get known is to get up on big stuff, on heavens (freeways, billboards, the top of a wall of a tall building). But they buff (paint over) you. You get known with landmarks (tagging on stop signs, trees, utility posts), because landmarks don’t get buffed as much and people see it. Neither do rooftops.

I got caught once before. I was with a bunch of people, and I was training them to become writers. They were watching me getting up instead of watching the corner. The cops were at the corner and the guys ran away instead of playing it off.

I just cleaned my hands right away. All you really got to do is scratch your hands on a curb or something to get the paint off. I have long nails to scratch off the paint. If paint gets under them I have to bite them off real fast. The police caught up with us and I just acted stupid--like, ‘I don’t know nothing. I don’t know that guy’--because he had paint on his hand and he didn’t take it off. I got arrested. They fingerprinted me and all that, and my parents had to come and pick me up.

My parents sort of talked to me about it. Of course they told me, ‘Don’t do it again.’ But I’m not gonna listen, and they don’t have to know about it. My dad knows I’m a tagger. I think my mom does too. I know my dad knows because he’s seen my artwork, not just my scribble-scrabble. My dad’s cool. Like, I’ll drive by with my dad and I’ll say, ‘Look, Dad, I’m up.’ He’ll say, ‘When did you do that?’ Sometimes he’ll be supportive, or sometimes he’ll be like, whatever.

Now I hardly get caught ‘cause I know how to do everything. Cameras are no problem. All I do is make a smoke bomb, throw it, and the camera sees smoke and that’s it. I’m pretty lucky, actually. Like the other day I was doing a throw-up, a big piece, and a cop drove right by and I just laid on the roof. I was with my cousin and some other guy, and when the cop drove around the corner, I finished. Most of the time I wear dark clothes and hide in the trees. I’m about 4 foot, 10 inches and 80 pounds. If they shine the spotlight, they can’t see me.

I guess tagging can be a crazy life. Like with some crews, it’s crazy. We don’t like each other, you know. We shoot them or they shoot us. I’ve gotten jumped a few times. During the day I carry a screwdriver or knife for protection. But at night I carry a gun. I have three guns. I hide them. My mom took a .38 from me. I’m getting it back. I got it back already once, but I gave it back to her.

My objective is to get up because if I’m up I get known and then people will say, ‘Hey, CRE8, I saw you up,’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, where did you see it?’ Like I said, it’s for the chase and the street fame. I’m small right now, but by the time I’m the average age of a tagger, about 15, I’ll probably be up more than anyone else getting up. I want to be a king by the time I’m 14. I don’t know how long I’ll be a tagger. I don’t know about the future.”