Scouting the turf

Sometimes on the weekends, Rob and some crew members would go on graffiti road trips. They went to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Greensboro, N.C., and throughout eastern Virginia — “Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News, Hampton, Richmond,” Rob rattles off without thinking.

In the morning they would drive around, looking for train tracks. They’d follow the tracks, searching for places where the trains “laid up.” If they stopped near a factory, the crew noted what hours the factory operated, when people were coming and going. At night they’d leave their car in a residential area, close but not too close.

“You really have to search for the best place,” Rob says. “We don’t ever see trains and then immediately go paint them.”

Rob remembers cruising the highway, scouting for buildings with roofs at eye level. He remembers standing on a rooftop in 20-degree weather. He had on gloves, soaked in paint and freezing to his fingers.

Once he saw a train he’d painted come back from wherever it had been. On its side was his piece. A simple but profound sensation washed over Rob. That train had gone somewhere. His piece and his tag had been out there, moving. And people saw them.

“It was an unexplainable feeling,” he says. But he adds, “It’s kind of a cool feeling to never see it again. Because that means it’s out moving.”
His crew went through a “pure” phase where they didn’t take photos. They stoically sent their anonymous art into the world, with no record of it but their memories. But that didn’t last long. Photos show your weaknesses, help you improve your technique, Rob says. And if he was going to spend so much time painting, he at least wanted something to remember it by.

Legal technicalities

Rob never got busted for graffiti, directly. But he says that once police in Chesapeake suspected he was a writer, they began to harass him and watch his every move.

Police in the greater Virginia Beach area had already been cracking down on graffiti before Rob moved there. And about a year and a half into his stay there, he got careless.

He was out with Over and Vers one night, painting the back of an abandoned store. They’d been sloppy, had parked the car right there. Rob heard the sound of another car. He put his can of paint down, stepped away from the wall and tried to warn the other two. But it was too late — the police car rounded the corner while Over and Vers were still painting.

The policeman arrested Rob for contributing to minors. He got the other two for vandalism.

He couldn’t pin any graffiti charges on Rob, but after that, Rob says, he began to get pulled over frequently without cause. It was as if cops were always on the lookout for his truck. About four months later, Rob was at the laundromat when the same cop who’d arrested him before pulled into the parking lot and began to shine his flashlight into Rob’s truck.

“Got any spray paint in here?” he demanded. “Got any drugs in here?”

There was an open 40-ounce of beer in the truck. Upon searching the truck further, the cop also found a marijuana pipe. He tried to cut a deal with Rob: no charges if Rob gave him information about graffiti.

“I’ll let you go tonight if you talk to me,” the policeman said.

“I ain’t telling you shit,” Rob told him.

“Fine, you get arrested here; you spend the night in jail.”

The policeman persisted with the bargaining. Finally Rob said he’d go back to the station with him. There, the cop showed him photos of graffiti from all over Virginia Beach.

“I don’t know names,” Rob said. “Nobody tells me names. I’m just a photographer” — he added this because that night at the wall, the same cop had discovered a camera among Rob’s things.

The cop let Rob go on the grounds he’d return for interrogation the next day. The next day he talked to a detective from Portsmouth, another city outside Virginia Beach, who specialized in graffiti.

The detective was cool for a while, Rob says. But he grew aggravated when Rob still refused to talk.

“You know, you can give us some information and you can leave here happy,” the detective said. “Or else you can stand your ground and take a lie detector test tomorrow.”

“Give me a lie detector test!” Rob yelled furiously. “Give me the test!”

There never was a test, but the detective did proceed to flip through three more photo albums full of graffiti.

“I don’t know who that is,” Rob said again and again. Some of the photos he saw were his own pieces, pieces he’d never even photographed.

He was at the station for five or six hours. Then they let him go. The charges were eventually thrown out of court, Rob says, on the grounds that the search had been conducted illegally.

Rob was through with being hassled in Chesapeake. He sold his truck and moved to Virginia Beach proper. Around that time he started to work for Service Master Restoration Services, a company that cleaned carpets and repaired water damage. It was different than construction; he had a lot of idle time where he just rode around in a van, traveling from one work site to another. When he wasn’t driving, he was doodling, constantly scribbling graffiti-scrawls in a notebook with colored markers. At night he was with his crew.