Story and photographs by Tony Piff
Shame lives in his mom’s basement. He holds no job and often borrows from his younger brother just to pay for gas. A cardboard patch covers one window of his car. Because his chosen work is a felony, his passion is a private one.
We meet in a parking lot just past midnight on a Monday, then drive to pick up one of his associates, Vamp. They haven’t yet chosen tonight’s spots. “Kingshighway’s open in five minutes,” Shame remarks. Vamp nods. I ask what they mean. “MetroLink stops running at 1,” Vamp explains.
I’m surprised by the exposed, well-lit parking spot we choose, but the cover of foliage is only steps away. They grab two backpacks from the trunk, and we casually cross the grass to disappear into the bushes. Descending a steep embankment, we arrive at the MetroLink tracks and follow them into darkness. Vamp’s slender frame is clad in black. Light on his feet, hands gloved, wearing glasses, Vamp resembles a cat burglar. Shame has a hunkier physique, and his fitted blue jeans exaggerate the build of his torso. He wears a bulky army jacket over a black hoodie, and a Rambo-style bandanna encircles a Rambo-style mass of brown hair. The dark locks frame well-defined features, and his eyes shine, alert.
“I ate McDonald’s today, so I’m gonna’ get cramps if I run,” Shame tells Vamp as we walk down the railroad tracks, our stride shortened by an awkward third.
We come to an overpass with walls that they apparently know well. “You wanna trade spots tonight?” Shame asks Vamp as they shake up their cans, marbles rattling. Shame agrees and stakes out his area, and Vamp moves 30 feet to the right. The walls have been “buffed” recently: They are white, utterly blank, waiting.
Conversation ceases and the night is quiet, except for faraway traffic sounds and the gentle puffing of aerosol. Shame outlines his letters in four minutes, inventing the shapes as he goes. “I’m filling in with a thin, so it’s gonna take a while,” he tells Vamp, who is taking his own sweet time, continually referring to a predrawn sketch and using his phone for light. Seven minutes later, Shame has finished his “fill.” He reoutlines each of the black letters in a pale blue. “Dude, I fuckin’ hate Krylon paint,” Shame mutters without turning from his work. “I’m so happy I got this Rusto ... It even smells better.” On consideration, I agree: The Krylon fumes are sharp and penetrating compared with the thick, heady Rustoleum vapors. Finishing with a blocky 3-D shadow, Shame signs his piece with a fountainlike, unintelligible tag, adds the letters OFB (“Out for Blood,” the name of their crew) and lists the crew members: SHAME, VAMP, ECKS, SOLO, RODEO. He flings the empty can over the wall. Thirty-four minutes have passed.
Vamp puts the final touches on his piece, and we proceed to the nearby tunnel. It’s lit up as bright as a Walgreen’s, and some time passes before I’m comfortable there. Each guy spends about 30 minutes putting up another piece, Shame pointing out how thinly the paint goes on. “If this was Rusto, that’d all be perfectly black,” he says with a frown. Then his brow clears. “They’re just gonna paint over this,” he says, “so as long as it’s legible, and you can see that I got style ...”
He sticks his tag in the upper left. We scramble up the embankment, toss the backpacks in the trunk and head for Wal-Mart, where Shame’s thrifty sensibilities trump his taste for quality paint. “Feel how thin that is,” he says, rattling a can of the 96-cent value-special and buying it anyway—a definite breach of graf etiquette. “You’re not considered an artist if you don’t rack [steal] your paint,” he says, a little embarrassed, but at this hour we have little choice. Butterfingers are only a quarter, so he gets three. Then we hit a trainyard near the river before calling it a night around 5 a.m. Vamp has to go to work.
Shame will sleep until noon, draw in his sketchbook (or on the computer or on his bedroom walls) and go practice with his band. Graffiti traditionally falls within the domain of hip-hop, but Shame is deeply committed to the St. Louis punk/hardcore scene. (He loans me American Hardcore: A Tribal History, an exhaustive, quasi-academic tome on the genre, which he recommends highly.) As the lyricist and vocalist, he shouts and screams full-volume into the mic. The music is energetic, furious, brutal. “I’m a lot better expressing myself to a crowd of people,” he says. He then assures me that he’s not really that angry, and I believe him, at least in part because of his sparkling aw-shucks smile. His graffiti resembles his onstage performances, and in neither case does he claim to have a message to deliver. “There’s no point of it,” he says of his art. Then he corrects himself. “Obviously, I’m doin’ something,” he says. “I just wanna prove myself.”
Shame’s first crew called themselves CHC, for the “CreekHopper Crew.” In drainage ditches, they taught themselves to paint. Five years later, his pieces would impress even a disapproving critic—they’re technically proficient, aesthetically tasteful, characterized by smart, clean lines and a strong sense of graphic design. He’s no longer interested in painting creeks or abandoned warehouses. The writers he most respects paint visibly and prolifically—they’re the true “bombers.” Guer and Obces, two writers from another crew called Lowdown, “are more up than anyone in St. Louis,” Shame says. He speaks of elder OFB crewmember Solo with admiration: “He’s not good, but he’s everywhere. I’m not hittin’ another spot that can’t be seen from a road or train.”
For all his devotion to the slacker arts, Shame is emerging, reluctantly, with a marketable skill. “I seriously get asked to draw something for somebody every day,” he says, half-annoyed. Now 20, he’s taking a general-education telecourse, paid for by an uncle. “He wants to see me do good,” says Shame, occasionally willing to entertain pragmatics.
Shame has been busted only once. On our way to pick up Vamp, he advises me, “Generally, if we run, the rule is, every man for himself. I won’t go back to my car. I’ll find somewhere to sleep, or I’ll walk the streets until morning.” When some nonwriting friends tagged along one night and failed to evade the police, Shame gave himself up and took the vandalism charge; his friends got tickets for trespassing. He did 40 hours of community service, and on his 18th birthday his record was clean again, blank as a freshly buffed boxcar. And because the charges were for a piece that wasn’t even his, he got to keep his moniker.
