STORYTELLIN’ PART: 1
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Summer 1985 — After watching Beat Street a thousand times over the summer vacation, I started looking for graffiti around my neighborhood. By this time, New York-style graffiti in Los Angeles was only about two years old, but it was starting to pop up around my area. This corner was a block away from my house, and I’d walk to the pizza spot there for a slice of oven-baked pizza almost every Saturday that summer.
On my way there, I’d always check this mailbox, which had several tags, including one in white paint marker that read “FRAMEONE K2S.” The letterforms were choppy and straight, packed together with the flow and precision of someone who had practiced the signature over and over. To me, it read as a single run-on word, and I pronounced it as “FRAY MEE OWN.” By then, I was intrigued by graffiti and had already started attempting my toy version of it, even contemplating a name of my own. Looking at “FRAY MEE OWN’s” name on that mailbox, the task of coming up with something as unique as his seemed overwhelming. What was a “FRAY MEE OWN”? I imagined it to be an Italian word.
Saturday came, and around 4 p.m., I headed to get my slice of pie, a soda pop, and a round of Dragon’s Lair. As was my custom, I made my pilgrimage to the mailbox to ogle the hand styles, checking for any new additions to the makeshift gallery.
“Hey! You write?” a nasally voice called out from behind me.
I turned around to see an older Spanish guy, probably in his late teens, with hair parted down the middle, walking toward me. He had an intense look, sharp eyes. Startled by his presence, I felt like I’d been caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.
“What?” I called out, stalling for time as he crossed the street toward the mailbox I was standing beside.
“Do you write?” he repeated.
Not knowing what he meant, I instinctively replied, “No.”
He introduced himself in a friendly manner, pointed out that it was he who had written the name in white paint marker, and then left. And that’s when I learned that the name on the mailbox actually read “FRAME ONE.”
I must have seen him again at least once more as i have a vague recollection of being in his apartment or walking by it with him as he pointed it out which was just a few buildings over to the left of the picture.
I never saw him again after that, but he did grace the side of the laundromat on the corner with a small two- or three-color piece, which I noticed one Saturday morning as we drove past on our way to McDonald’s for breakfast. To me, seeing that piece there was like Indiana Jones finding the golden idol. It looked out of place because, although this area had several tags in inconspicuous spots—like mailboxes, poles, and electric boxes—there was no large-scale graffiti: no throw-ups, and certainly no pieces. I can’t recall what it said now, and it lasted only a few days before it was painted over, but the memory of this event remains etched in my mind so many years later.
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