CHAPTER 4
Experiments in Hell

Brad was more than ready for summer. His sophomore year at Pratt was coming to a close and he was eager for a few hot New York City months. The summers in Brooklyn are good ones: the heat puts everyone on the streets, house parties happen on a daily basis, and until the annual late June heat wave hits there is a pretty amazing lust for life in the air. In addition to all that, before the end of this particular summer, young Brad would finally be turning 21.

In the past few months, Brad had not only gotten a good foothold in the graffiti world, putting up the massive Pink Verbs + Giant Head piece with Leon as well as an impressive stack of signs all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, but he had adapted fully to the city, both geographically and socially. Between the documentary he’d been focusing more and more on over the last year and the vast arena of street art, Brad had no shortage of creative outlets and an open summer to pursue them to the best of his ability. With the same idealized fervor of a twelve-year-old boy dreaming of summer vacation and its promise of unparalleled freedom, Brad saw the city nearly brimming over with possibilities.

As a last-minute formality, Brad decided to get an idea of what his next year would look like at Pratt. Attaining this information was absurdly complicated and bureaucratic, and he visited three different offices before finally being directed by a janitor to the secretary who dispensed schedules for the upcoming year.

He found himself in front of a forty-foot counter that ran the width of the room, blockading the smaller desks and work areas behind it like an old fashioned post office. This massive counter top created an impression of authority and efficiency and was very effective at keeping fit-prone students at a safe distance.

After five minutes of standing at the counter, Brad eventually attracted one of the receptionists and asked where he could get his upcoming schedule. He was re-oriented with a raised finger towards the back of a line hugging the entirety of the left wall. The long progression of students led to an elderly, bald, male administrator who manned, fully on autopilot, an apparently even older printer. One by one, the young artists would hand the man their student IDs, take the paper that was spat out, and head wordlessly back towards the door.

The long listless line led right back out into the hot afternoon sun. Taking his place at the end of it, Brad tanned his neck and checked his watch. As his friends were lounging on the courtyard lawn, drinking brown-bagged beers and eating deli sandwiches from Hyun’s corner bodega, Brad was standing in line for information he didn’t really care about. But with the summer stretching endlessly ahead, he resigned himself to the wait and stayed put, watching one student after another re-emerge into the daylight at inexplicably long intervals, each one bearing a simple six-line block of information printed out on a wide-striped green and off-white piece of paper: Teacher Name, Room Number, Weekday, Time In and Time Out.

But when Brad finally got to the head of the line forty-five minutes later and handed his ID over, all that came out of the printer was a bill. When he asked the liver-spotted gentleman why, he was met with a shrug and a hand pointing at the receptionist Brad had started with. Without even looking at the paper she wrote a room number down on a post-it note, handed it over, and walked away.

This time Brad made his way to the Bursar’s office and a face-to-face session with a woman whose job it was to provide advice and council for the young student in crisis.

“Drop out,” she said. “If you don’t have the money to pay for college… you must drop out.”

“That’s it?” Brad asked, stunned. “The only option at this point is to drop out of college?”

“People often use the word option when there are two answers to choose from,” she replied, deadpan and disinterested. “You don’t have four thousand dollars to hand the cash officer downstairs, do you? That’s the minimum payment to even put you back on the books and save your spot in the classes you registered for. Without that… well, do you have the money?”

“No.”

“Well then Bradley, there’s no option. You just dropped out. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a long line of students to help behind you.”

“That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it,” she replied.

Brad walked out of the office shell-shocked. He knew that his parents had fallen on hard times, but he didn’t know that for the last six months they had had stopped paying the portion of his loan bills that they had taken upon themselves to handle. The only option he had was to take a temporary leave of absence, go back home to Atlanta, and get a job. He could live there for free, save up the money, and eventually get his life back on track. As the woman had said, the word option implies choice, but he only had one road before him… Brad was heading home.

In an instant, not only had he lost a great deal of his freedom and autonomy, but he was brought face to face with the troubles that his family had been going through – troubles of which, up to now, he had only heard bits and pieces.

Brad’s father had been in the Marines throughout his childhood, and with that, Brad had a typical military childhood growing up near different bases for a few years at a time and then moving again. The Marines had given them a good life, trained Brad’s father to be a pilot and always kept them financially comfortable.

Good with people and possessing a strong mind for business, his father eventually got involved with real-estate and had done very well for himself. He was a man who prided himself on always, no matter what, obeying the letter of the law. The trouble is, when dealing in great sums of money, other people are all too willing to play dirty to take what’s been earned honestly. Brad’s father had had all the profits of his hard work stolen from him through back room deals and dirty pool. By the time Brad came home, his family was barely scraping by, and he had to cinch his belt as tight as it could get and pitch in.

Finding gainful employment in Atlanta while bearing foot-long dreadlocks wasn’t the easiest thing to accomplish, but eventually Brad found work as a waiter in a lousy Tex-Mex restaurant. Two weeks later, he started splitting his paychecks evenly between a savings account for college tuition and his family’s emergency reserve. It wasn’t much money, but it was appreciated.

Brad had for some years found friendship, guidance, and support in his father’s friend “The Judge.” The first real patron of Brad’s art, right back from when he was fifteen, the Judge had steadily bought work and financially supported his craft throughout its development. When Brad came down to Atlanta this time, he found that the Judge had great plans for him, providing contacts and paving a road into the super wealthy homes of Georgia’s conservative Republican Party set. But when Brad excitedly showed him photographs of the artwork that he had been putting up all over New York, the Judge did not hold back with what he thought. This was immature, a dangerous road, and if he were to continue in any way on this path, things between them would be different in the future.

It was a classic invitation to sell his soul for success, and it was one of the most difficult decisions Brad ever had to make. In the midst of his family going through bankruptcy, he had to choose between a future of financial stability offered by a longtime friend, a man who had supported him from the start, and a world of expression that he found himself infinitely more in tune with. It was where he felt free, and where he felt his art would actually interact with, and be available to, the audience he wanted to reach.

Brad chose the harder road of street art, and the Judge withdrew his offer. Both were saddened at this turn of events, and all at once, Brad felt another option crash down before him.

Brad’s time in Atlanta was feeling like more and more of a dead-end. The money wasn’t coming fast enough, and he was drowning in his day-to-day routine. He was treading water in the name of getting ahead, and the anxiety that generated was pulling him deeper into depression.

Thankfully, Brad soon found ways to pass the time and still believe he was doing something of value. He found a Kinko’s that was managed absently, and started printing out gigantic photocopies of his drawings, building a stockpile for his eventual return to NYC. Printing out large-scale copies normally costs between twenty and fifty dollars a time, depending if you go black and white or color. That’s an easy way to break the bank. But Brad noticed that it was all rung up on the honor system, which as a destitute artist was music to his penniless ears.

Soon he was going to Kinko's every night after work and would print twenty or thirty posters and pay for one, maybe two on days that he felt guilty for getting over on a billion-dollar international corporation. With time, word spread to friends back in NYC and he was doing favors across country. Inside of a month he was printing out countless posters a week and mailing them back up to New York. He supplied Adorn and Matt Hollister (known at the time as Ben Grim) as well as turning out a healthy amount for himself.

One Saturday night, while drunk and lying in the back of a friend’s pick-up as they drove to a house party, Brad glimpsed a gas station out of the corner of his eye. The giant red neon letters forming the word SHELL were momentarily cropped so that Brad only saw the huge word “HELL” suspended above him. He was jarred sober. Suddenly he felt a spark of interest he hadn’t experienced in months. Between waking up and helping around the house in the morning, going to work, ripping off the copy center, and drinking beer until he passed out, Brad was long numbed by his routine. Finally something had grabbed his attention and he could feel his brain begin to work again.

After a solid month of talking himself out of doing it, Brad stopped pretending it was a debate and got prepared. One night around midnight, he took a metal mallet out of his father’s toolbox and an extendable ladder out of the garage, and he commandeered his mother’s minivan for the rest of the night. Driving over to the gas station, he already felt the guilt sinking in. He could see the damaged ceiling of the minivan, which he had ruined one afternoon while moving some of his art. It was a testament to him being a burden, him taking advantage, not taking responsibility, making his parents’ life harder. Looking at it now, and knowing that he was borrowing the van in order to commit a deliberate act of vandalism, stung deep. But his mind was set.

He pulled up across the street from the Shell station and parked on the side of the road. It was still open at 2am. He shut off the engine, sat there and reflected upon what he was about to do. A half an hour passed. He thought about what it would do to his parents if he got arrested, using their vehicle to commit a crime. He thought about what he was doing here in Atlanta – working for barely more than minimum wage, stealing from Kinko's on a nightly basis, amassing a vast array of street signs, drinking too much, and now out at two in the morning waiting patiently to smash out a light at a gas station…

Suddenly the main lights switched off at the station. The white halogen bulbs that lit the pumps, the street corner, the shop inside, were all extinguished. The only thing that lit the street at all was the word “SHELL” in dark red neon, floating ominously twenty feet off the ground, tinting Brad’s eyes bloodshot. The gas attendant pulled out of the parking lot, not wasting a second’s thought on the minivan parked across the street.

As the attendant sped off into the distance, Brad moved his head back slightly, letting the edge of the driver’s side door crop the light as he remembered it. In the night sky above him, the letters H-E-L-L spelled out in the colour of blood spoke volumes. Brad got out of the car and pulled out the ladder.

Brad was far more shook out in the silence of suburbia than he ever was in the city. In a metropolis, there is so much background noise that you could jackhammer into the concrete in the middle of the day and no one would blink. In the quiet nights of a small town, all you had to do was raise your voice or slam a car door and someone would be checking what “all that racket” was. Any passerby who spotted the ladder would have pulled over out of nothing more than curiosity and busted him redhanded.

Brad climbed the ladder and inspected the neon lettering up close. He had gotten this far but still wasn’t sure if they were single lights, or if they were connected like strings of Christmas tree lights. If smashing one made them all go out, then he really would be engaged in mindless vandalism. Looking closer, it did seem that each letter had an independent power source, so he decided to take his chances.

He pulled on pink rubber dishwashing gloves borrowed from his mother’s kitchen to protect himself from electrocution, took a breath, and swung the metal hammer, whacking the letter “S” hard on its side. The lights inside flicked quickly on and off about ten times, finally remaining on. Past the point of hesitation, Brad smashed the side again, this time with everything he had. No more flickering, the light just went dead. In the partial red light of the remaining letters Brad was finally making good in his own personal Hell.

He quickly got down, packed the ladder into the back of the minivan and looked at his illuminated handiwork. Thinking that they might fix it first thing in the morning, Brad got back out of the van and climbed the grassy hill behind. He sat there for a while and stared back at what he had created. Suspended high above him in the dark of the unlit street, the word HELL floated lonesome and surreal in the sky, the only light source for miles.

At first all Brad had wanted to do was recreate a trick of the eye, but now he realized that he had uncovered something much more than that. Possibilities began to suggest themselves and ideas to fly. Here was subtraction as a tool, used to re-contextualize, to transform, to give new meaning to what is left behind in the altered environment. His thoughts were still murky at best, but here was a new way to interact with street furniture, not just to add and change and mutate, but to cut away, to sculpt through subtraction.

With this epiphany, things were looking up for Brad. The months had been racing by, even if it didn’t feel like it, and by the time he had finally adjusted to life back in Atlanta it was December. With Pratt’s tuition all paid up, and due back in class mid-January, he decided to spend the rest of his stay with his family enjoying the holidays.

Driving home one day, Brad’s father suddenly started furiously cursing at the road.

“Of all the stupid shit! What moron decided this road needed to change?”

The road from the shopping mall, which connected directly to the street Brad’s family lived on, had been blocked off from the turning lane. Now, thanks to the freshly painted double yellow line, he would have to drive halfway around the enormous mall and pull a U-turn to get to his house.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! God damn! This is going to add five minutes of driving each way, every time I leave the house!” he protested. “You want to do me a favor?” He turned to Brad. “You paint an arrow on the road, where that turn used to be, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

“Consider it done,” replied Brad.

His father smirked and they laughed at the idea of going out at night to fix every stupid mistake city-planners made.

That night, without telling his father, Brad went out to do just that. He taped off an arrow, painted it, and placed either side of it a couple of traffic cones he found nearby to protect the paint while it dried. By morning the cones had magically retreated back where they came from, and there were a couple of faint tire tracks through the paint, but the eight-foot white arrow looked as official as could be.

When his father saw the arrow, he couldn’t believe it. He pulled over on the side of the road and called Faye, his wife and Brad’s mother.

“I was just kidding. We were joking around last night, and before I woke up it was done.” He was telling Brad’s mother about it while feeling in a strange combination of pride and disbelief. “I guess I owe Brad a hundred dollars.” Brad took the money, and wished his father Merry Christmas.

Before Brad knew it, the calendar read January and he was packing for the trip back to Brooklyn. With hundreds of posters and a dozen large, freshly-altered street signs that were far easier to steal and work on in Atlanta, Brad realized how much work he had ready to put up once he touched down. He stuffed everything into his giant portfolio case, checked it with the rest of his luggage, and ordered a handful of tiny whiskey bottles from a stewardess for the quick flight back.

Brooklyn took Brad back to its wintry yet welcoming bosom. It was strange at first, being so out of the loop, the awkwardness of seeing old acquaintances and explaining over and over again why he’d been M.I.A. for the better part of a year. He was never sure if they really cared to hear it, or if he cared enough to tell the same story for the hundredth time. However, he was up and running soon enough. The winter house parties were somehow hotter than the parties he left behind in the summer. With so many people crammed into a tiny apartment, the radiator and hundred-person body heat combined their powers to toast you when you walk in, winter-geared up, fresh out of the cold. It felt good.

After getting acclimated, Brad was itching to put up some of the work he had done down south, so he reached out to Matt Hollister to go on a mission. Over the better part of a day, they went through Brooklyn and into Manhattan putting up wheatpaste poster after poster. Once in the Lower East Side, they really started carpet-bombing buildings with posters. Brad was eager to get his fresh work up and feeling somewhat bullet-proof following the success of his minor exploits in Atlanta, and before they knew it they had put up over a hundred posters, covering block after block from the LES to the East Village.

What neither Brad nor Matt knew was that they were being followed. As they were pasting up an absurd number of posters, a teenager with Down Syndrome was trailing them on his BMX bike and taking Polaroids of everything they did. Every fifteen minutes or so, the handicapped kid called the cops with an update on where Brad and Hollister were and what they were up to.

As the two artists were bombarding the Lower East Side of Manhattan, blissfully unaware of the handicapped gumshoe on their tail, the police were driving up and down every street in a twenty-block radius looking for two white males in their early twenties, their arms full of posters and paste.

As he was pasting a poster over the glass door that led to the offices of the Village Voice, Brad heard a blaring “woop-weep!” scream up behind him.

The cops cut the siren, stepped out of the car, and approached the two.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing kid? Don’t you know you’re breaking the law? You’re putting shit up in the middle of the day!”

Brad was stone cold busted and had to think fast. “This is illegal? I didn’t know that. I’m from Atlanta.” Brad handed his Atlanta Driver’s License over to the cop. “I see posters up all over, I thought it was ok. Wait, look,” Brad pulled the still wet poster and it peeled down easily. “See, it comes right off,” he said brightly.

The cop handed the license back to Brad and said, “Well I guess if you pull it down, it’s not such a big deal….”

Suddenly someone rode up to them. “Finally! Here is the evidence I collected!” proclaimed the out-of-breath and overexcited teenager as he jumped off his bike. He handed a four-inch brick of Polaroids to the other police officer. The photos documented every poster they had put up for the last three hours. Out came the handcuffs.

They put Matt in the squad car first. As they were pushing Brad’s head down so it wouldn’t hit the top of the door, he couldn’t help but reflect on what had happened. This was the first time he had ever been busted doing street art, and it was not only because he came back to the city cocky. This was karma. He had used his artistic/criminal talent for non-artistic work and personal gain. As he considered giving back the hundred dollars to his dad, a gnat flew directly into his eye. Already handcuffed, and no one willing to do him any favors, he just grinned and bore it. He was going to have to take his karmic licks; no negotiating was going to get him out of this.

It being after 5pm when they got picked up and brought to booking, they had to spend the night in the holding cell and see the judge in the morning. They were given baloney sandwiches, which they eventually used as pillows, and killed the clock as fast as they could.3 The next day, after being fined a hundred dollars each – which confirmed Brad’s karmic theory – the two headed back to Brooklyn. After a sobering dose of reality, Brad was home.

The legal drinking age in NYC and the rest of America, and the last hassle of youth to fall away. As a man who could legally buy his own for BYOB events, Brad’s summer was primed to be a hazily memorable one.

To cover his bases Brad had stretched a wool beanie over the license plate in case there were cameras at the gas station. He didn’t wear anything over his face, thinking that would be an instant indicator of guilt if someone drove by and saw him up on the ladder with the hammer. The logic wasn’t fantastic, but there it is.

Brad killed time freestyling with some guys who were jailed on minor marijuana busts, while Matt laid down and took a nap, getting woken up an hour later by a black guy who whispered in his ear “Yo, I’m Slim Shady, the real Slim Shady.” Matt, being blond, skinny and white, took a lot of teasing, while his partner in crime, just as white with ridiculous dreadlocks, was making all kinds of friends in the cipher.

See the work sHell