FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Writer's Block

Pez Went into the Ocean and Never Came Back

Trudging is tradition in Frisco, especially for the vandal lot. The city itself is barely 50 square miles, so naturally any graffiti writer worth his weight in Rust-Oleum flat has effortlessly loitered on every block.

Writer's Block is a regular column that takes a low-brow approach to profiling various street bombers and modern-day vandals with a mixture of stories, off-the-cuff interviews, and never-before-seen pictures.

Trudging up Columbus Avenue under the stainless-steel skies of a typically overcast San Francisco, Pez and I were seeking decent coffee in a city rapidly becoming unwelcoming to its native sons. We finally hunkered down in a Happy Donuts populated by Asian gangsters laying waste to stacks of lotto scratch-offs.

Advertisement

You see, trudging is tradition in Frisco, especially for the vandal lot. The city itself is barely 50 square miles, so naturally any graffiti writer worth his weight in Rust-Oleum flat has effortlessly loitered on every block. The only time vandals aren’t trudging is when they're running. And Pez (or Pezo) has his fair share of running stories, which he usually tells while trudging.

“SF is small enough that you can walk all city—you can't walk all over New York. I mean you technically can, but not in one day. You can walk through twenty different neighborhoods in SF over the course of an evening. And it’s all beautiful and grimy at the same time.”

“Like graffiti itself, and graffiti writers,” I offered.

“Yeah. There's all these great contradictions. Open space and no space. It’s like a dystopia.”

It’s a paradox, and in its place, a valid one. But that grime beneath the surface can also be found in Pez's graffiti. It's candy-coated gloom and the ugly truth about traveling carnivals.

As we talk, he ballpoint-desecrates a handful of napkins in a matter of minutes with different variations of his nom de plume, adding a multitude of doodads that are familiar to anyone who knows his work—asterisks, dots, swirls, stars, and arrows claim almost all the negative space. Much of this iconography goes back to his parents, who were always highly encouraging of his artistic leanings.

"I always got sketchbooks, markers, and pencil sets for Christmas. When my dad was an active artist back in the 70s, his style was very Native American and really loose. I've always tried to mimic that."

Advertisement

There's an obvious kinship between the obscure tokens that Pez litters his graffiti with and the rudimentary rock drawings of our nation’s earliest peoples. And though Pez pawns most of it off as artistic detritus, he admits to some touchstones of symbolism, such as his arrows signifying motion and direction, and even more arcane, crossed arrows symbolizing friendship.

When pressed for other early influences on his own work, Pez's answer is Ren & Stimpy, and the illustrator behind it, John Kricfalusi. His work today is still heavily informed by cartoons and comics. Things like Conan the Barbarian and pop album covers of the 70s and 80s are staple motifs in some of his more serious pieces.

Pez is one of those weirdo vandals. He's part of a sub-sect of the greater graffiti subculture that combines the dogged criminal dawn determination of a true street bomber with a style more akin to kindergarten acid trips and notebook doodles. Essentially, graffiti writers who forgot to color within the lines—writers like Orfn, Neck Face, Revs, Twist, and Espo have defintely influenced Pezo.

While colorful, lively, and often childishly jejune, Pez's work also toys with a certain mystique that, when paired with his pedigree as a seasoned street runner, keeps him from slipping into the quagmire of the mainstream "street art." His work is on par—both in aesthetic and skill—with any celebrated street artist, but unlike those poor souls now suffering the decline of the Banksy zeitgeist, Pez remains a steadfast vandal.

Advertisement

He claims he was set in this direction by Sect BTM (a.k.a. Vic20), an early mentor who stressed above all else that Pez be original. He made a conscious decision not to copy the styles of others as he developed his hand, especially when it came to letters. In order to be original, especially in a milieu as intra-puritanical as graffiti, he had to fully embrace the weird—and the life, for better or worse. Speaking on the recent deaths of Vote 1810 and Jade BTM, and the inordinate amount of writers who have died from causes outside the usual dangers of vandalism, our time at Happy Donuts ended on a somber note. "Graffiti writers tend to live very dangerous lives,” Pez mused. “They tend to do a lot of drugs and drink a lot and be out at all hours of the night. They say to themseves, 'Let me put myself in this really sketchy situation, come out of it, and be that much stronger for it.'"

Being friends, Pez and I were both a little uncomfortable kicking it under the guise of serious journalism, and with an idle and gray afternoon still ahead of us, we decided to forgo the formal interview process to go kill some scrap cans. Spotting a copy shop on the way to the car, Pez is drawn in as if by a tractor beam, and in no time his battered backpack becomes a sweatshop of stickers and zines and the materials needed to make both.

Trudging still, we made our way down a muddy path to a freeway soundwall as rush hour traffic began to clot.

Advertisement

“I’m a lifer," Pez proclaimed. “This isn’t a fad or hobby. It’s like eating or masturbating, or acting on any other primal impulse. It’s ingrained in my DNA. I think about graff everyday.”

“So you’re saying you’re a junkie.”

“I’m the guy from Point Break. I went into the ocean and never came back.”

Watching Pez work is watching somebody amuse himself. He doesn’t approach a spot like an assassin, all grit-teeth intensity and arched-brow concentration the way most vandals do, but rather like a child given permission to draw on his bedroom walls. He rarely bothers to register what he’s painted as he fills in all available spaces with tags and doodles, and at one point, a giant cock with a dollop of cum bearing his crew's name, "D.F.W."

"I think vandalism above all should just be about anarchy and destruction… I prefer quantity over quality in the sense that I would rather have a thousand minimal tags, like little simple white-out tags, than one crazy piece on a rooftop."

As we traded hugs and stickers before parting, I concluded our day together with the most typical of questions for a vandal, but one that is perhaps more telling than any other.

“What’s your favorite tool?”

With a grin that could be either sly or wise, he replied, “Mop. Filled with Marsh. T-Grade. Not K-Grade. T-Grade. That’s what I prefer.”

And being a weirdo is, by definition, doing what one prefers. And graffiti writers are no different.

For Pez, it clearly is the joy of the action that propels him and commits him to the vandal lifestyle, rather than the street fame or gallery fortunes, or even a regard for the grand and storied history of graffiti in San Francisco, in America, and the world at large. It’s just fun to draw on things. Too much fun ever to stop. You go into the ocean and never come back.