‘Bushman’ stomps out graffiti in Huntington Beach
Graffiti often happens overnight, but taggers should be warned: Huntington Beach resident Adam “Bushman” Orozco is an early riser.
Orozco is an artist by trade, an airbrush muralist. But he realizes there’s a right and a wrong way to express yourself.
For more than two years, Orozco has set out to clean up the graffiti in Surf City.
“People have been coming here and tearing apart our city,” said Orozco, 59, adding that he’s noticed a proliferation of graffiti in Huntington Beach in recent years. “Huntington Beach, it’s not like Venice, you know? It’s a different lifestyle, an ohana style. We have a different flavor here. But these people have been coming and marking up, and no one’s doing anything about it.”
Orozco said he has had his own murals tagged over. Finally, he had enough.
He dedicates time nearly every day to going around Surf City and cleaning up graffiti. Sometimes he sees it first. Sometimes people tell him about it online, through Facebook Messenger.
Not even a recent major shoulder surgery can slow him down.
On Friday morning, he and his son Thunder, 22, painted over some graffiti behind the Arco gas station at Beach Boulevard and Adams Avenue. Sometimes he will also enlist his younger son Koa, 17, a senior at Huntington Beach High.
“You’ve got to work fast,” Orozco instructed Thunder. “People will see you [cleaning up] and they’ll try to come back the next day.”
Orozco is a character. A former professional boxer, he’s nicknamed “Bushman” because of the long curly hair he had as a child. He also likes to sell merchandise that carries the phrase “HB Till I Die.”
But in talking to him, it’s also clear that he cares deeply about the city that he’s called home for decades.
“I started my own vigilante thing against the taggers,” he said. “It only lasts about one night with me around. They put it up at night, and boom, 5 o’clock in the morning if I come across it then I’ll take it down, or if I see it during the day when I’m driving around.”
Orozco has two vehicles fully stocked with paints and supplies.
“I can match brick, stone, slate, marble,” he said. “Whatever it takes, I have the tools to do it.”
He pays for it largely out of his own pocket, though he said supporters will sometimes give him Home Depot gift cards.
Huntington Beach resident Jayme Markle hasn’t met Orozco in person, but she’s spent time talking with him on the phone. She recently started a GoFundMe to help him with paint and supplies. The goal is to raise $5,000.
“The community at large needs to be supporting him in cleaning up the graffiti,” Markle said. “Paint, tools and other stuff all costs money, so I think the community should be helping out. I mean, I donated to it, and I put it up.
“He’s a really down-to-earth, decent man. He truly has a heart for Huntington Beach and making it a pretty place to live. Nobody wants to see that ugly graffiti, and he’s really the only one who has stepped up to clean it up, because he can’t stand seeing it either. Huntington Beach is not the ghetto, or at least it’s not supposed to be.”
What Orozco believes in is generosity and the Aloha spirit. He was good friends with Rick “Rockin’ Fig” Fignetti, the local surf personality who died last July after a heart attack.
Orozco executes the Blowing of the Pu conch shell, a Hawaiian tradition, for paddle outs and other beach events in the city.
Local surfer and musician Don Ramsey is another good friend of Orozco’s. His advice to Orozco after his shoulder surgery was to sit down and relax a little bit, but of course “Bushman” didn’t listen.
“It’s amazing what he’s doing,” Ramsey said. “I mean, he’s removed so much. I run into [graffiti] downtown or in different parts of town, and I’ll send him pictures of it. Two or three days later, it’s gone. He’s on it.”
In August 2020, Orozco was honored with the Mayor’s Making a Difference Award by then-Huntington Beach Mayor Lyn Semeta. But, he said, he doesn’t clean up the graffiti for accolades like that.
To him, it’s about protecting the city he loves, where he lives blocks from the beach.
“My heart is here,” he said. “I grew up poor and every day I wake up and I see Catalina. I wake up to a beautiful sunrise, and I go to sleep with a beautiful sunset. You couldn’t ask for anything better, bro.
“If everybody did this, followed my lead, we wouldn’t have graffiti here.”
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