Arts Story

Rudy Garcia finally has a call. A condominium in Lincoln Park has been hit, and Garcia has been summoned to work his magic – scrubbing spray paint off the facades of any building marred by “taggers” and “bombers.”

Garcia rolls up to the condo in his white, unmarked ice cream-looking truck with a duct-taped passenger seat and a rusty, gutted interior. He had a much nicer truck, but that was before the City of Chicago swooped in on his turf. He had to sell the shiny, new truck two years ago, get rid of his four employees and close his West Side office to cut costs. Now he’s broke and his graffiti removal business is failing.

Garcia is the original “Graffiti Blaster,” not to be confused with Mayor Daley’s free-of-charge graffiti removal service, which goes by the same name. But Garcia maintains that he is the original graffiti blaster, and he has papers of incorporation dating back to 1985 that he says prove he was the first to come up with the idea.

But eight years after Garcia hung out his shingle, the mayor stepped in and stole his concept and his company name. Under the Daley’s “Graffiti Blasters” program, business owners and residents don’t have to pony up the cost to clean up a tagger’s mess. The city will do it for free.

As a result Garcia’s business has all but dried up. Now he begs for work, scouring the graffiti-plastered walls of condos and businesses throughout the area, looking for crumbs the mayor’s folks may have left behind or were too busy to get to. “I’m struggling,” he says, digging out some spare coins in his pocket.

But today is a new day and an opportunity to make a couple hundred bucks.

Garcia hops out of the truck, he has owlish eyebrows furrowing as he surveys the damage. He is wearing blue jean overalls and black elastic belt, riding below his round belly. He examines the scene like a CSI detective. His black hair is slicked back with gel, and he has a graying goatee. He looks about 60.

“I’m around 50 years old,” he says, smirking. It’s the only thing Garcia isn’t frank about.

“Lechuga,” is scrawled in purple spray-paint on the sidewalk. “That means lettuce in Spanish,” he says. On the beige brick wall facing the street, an “L” and “K” are sandwiched in between a purple crown. Garcia pulls out his camera and snaps photos of the crime scene. Years on the job and Garcia knows how to decipher the encrypted messages of the gang bangers like an urban archaeologist. “This is Latin Kings,” he says. He eyes another message, and says grimly, “This means someone will be killed, it’s retaliation.”

On the limestone corner of the wall Lechuga signs off on his canvas.

“This will be harder to take out, the paint is embedded in there,” he says examining the drip pattern. He contemplates solvents and chemicals to blast it away. He runs his fingers along the grainy brick material and the smooth limestone.

Garcia tries to call the tenant to give them an estimate. No answer. He calls the building owner on the FOR SALE sign, but no one picks up. He paces around for 30 minutes, it’s a waiting game. He could go home but he doesn’t want to waste his gas, plus the mayor’s Graffiti Blasters will take away his business if he doesn’t act now. The gray storm clouds aren’t helping either. “It needs to be at least 75 degrees, the hotter the better so the heat can penetrate the thick purple paint,” he says.

Two college-aged females approach. “You must be Graffiti Blasters,” one woman says. They seem pleased he has arrived. “I am the original Graffiti Blaster, not part of the city,” Garcia hands them each a business card. “This is my web site, you can see my work.”

But they are confused; they think Garcia works with the city. He now spends 15 minutes talking about how the mayor stole his name and business. “Yeah, yeah,” the woman says, pretending to care. “How much would something like this cost to clean up?”

“I need the work so bad, I will lower the price to $350,”he says, hustling. “That’s a gift… I got 20 different chemicals I use.”

“Let me get back to you, I have to talk this over with the condo association,” she says.

Garcia heads back to his truck defeated.

“Someone calls me and when I come out there, they think I’m the Graffiti Blasters,” he says. “I’ve just lost 500 bucks.”

His phone rings for another job on the North Side.

“What an eyesore,” he shakes his head griping about everything he sees wrong with graffiti: the declining property values, the ghettoizing of a community, the utter disrespect of youth, “And for some little punk to mess it up,” he says. “It’s just a shame.”

Somewhere in the city, Jose “Loony” is planning his next conquest. He’s a bomber, a graffiti writer addicted to getting his name anywhere and everywhere. We agreed not to use his last name to protect his identity.

“The bomber mentality is this,” Loony says: “Get your name out there and graffiti everything: the billboards, water towers, trains.

Loony is a veteran, 24, and he’s already been arrested three times. But he loves the thrill and danger associated with bombing. “Yeah I’m obsessed with it, imagine all this stuff in my lungs,” he says. “I probably have bad kidneys and shit.”

On a Monday afternoon Loony drove two hours to a Home Depot in the suburbs to get spray paint. Spray-paint sales have been banned within the city since 1995 in an effort to curb graffiti vandalism. But that didn’t deter this career graffiti artist. Along with some people in his crew he stuffed backpacks full of 40 to 50 aerosol cans, enough for two to three nights of writing.

With the advent of the internet, graffiti writers have found new ways to advertise their latest masterpieces: YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace. On Chicagograffiti.com aspiring and accomplished writers post photos of their graffiti scrawled on trucks, subway trains and billboards; the more difficult and challenging the piece the more street cred they acquire.

Loony brags about his amazing feats: emblazoning “BAD” on viaducts and overpasses along the Kennedy Expressway. One drunken night his friends shimmied him 20 feet up a poll as commuters took out their cell phones to call the cops. “Doing it was pretty intense,” Loony says. “Once I climbed up. I had to [spray] it fast, do it clean and get the fuck out of there.”

His 30-man crew called BAD (Bombing All District, but also known as “Blast at Daley”) hates the “buff” — the term they use to describe the destruction of their work by any and all graffiti blasters, whether it’s the mayor’s crews or Rudy Garcia. “Chicago is the city of buff,” he says. “I guess they are doing their jobs. Somebody needs to get paid $25. Bottom-line: they’re bitches.”

***

It was 1985 when Rudy Garcia first had an epiphany. Graffiti had exploded onto the Chicago skyline. Nothing was immune: subway trains, the walls of private businesses, water towers and even rooftops became urban advertisements. Garcia saw dollar signs. Straight out of the military, he was eager to capitalize on the sudden need to clean up the mess. A former construction worker, Garcia knew every type of brick there was. To launch his business, all he needed was a unique formula that wouldn’t permanently damage buildings. He spent months reading books in the Chicago Public library and later testing his formulas on abandoned buildings hit with graffiti.

From the start, business was good for the optimistic entrepreneur; he called his company Graffiti Blasters.

“When I started this, my community looked like a ghetto,” says Garcia, who grew up in Back of the Yards. “It broke my heart.”

Garcia reminisces about a time when the money and clients were rolling in. He says he use to make up to $5,000 a day. He was flooded with calls from distraught business and home owners. “I could flip a coin. North Side or South Side. East or West,” he says. “Now I have to beg, it never used to be like this.”

In 1993, Mayor Daley launched his own graffiti removal initiative. He also called it Graffiti Blasters. Garcia sued the city for trademark infringement 14 years after he first became aware of the city’s use of the name. But by the time Garcia filed suit, the city had already cleaned 1,000,000 sites and had invested heavily in the promotion of Graffiti Blasters. The effort knocked Garcia out of competition. In February of this year, his case was dismissed. U.S. District Court Judge Milton Shadur of the Northern District of Illinois ruled in favor of the city, stating Garcia had waited too long to file his claim. He had slept on his rights.

The City of Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation declined to comment on whether they were aware of Garcia’s business before the city launched its own version of Graffiti Blasters.

Garcia insists he didn’t sleep on his rights. He shows a log of phone calls and emails – dating back to 1998 – that he sent to 50 different attorneys, some as far away as Los Angeles. None would take his case.

“It was like one man against an army,” he says.

Cruising along Western Avenue, Garcia rides with both doors open for the breeze, he looks left and right, navigating the city like a graffiti tour guide.

“There’s some work for me right there,” he says about a white van in a scraggly vacant lot.

He sputters by in his truck and he sees yet another business hit by graffiti. He stops with a sense of urgency, handing his business card to the man crushing metal inside. A well-dressed secretary comes outside. He pitches his company again: “Check out my Web site, www. Graffitiblasters.net,” he says pulling a card from his overalls.

In a dusty old saloon he once owned, Garcia stores shoeboxes full of before and after photos of the graffiti he has removed, 25 years of memories. He hoped to later the saloon into a restaurant. But his graffiti-blasting business dried up and the bank loan never came.

“My 350,000 home is going to be foreclosed,” he says. “In 90 days I’m going to be evicted. I have to start my life all over again. I can’t retire.”

Garcia keeps on pushing; he has to. His cell phone rings, somewhere on the North Side, a house has been hit on Sheffield. It’s a race against time but the original Graffiti Blaster doesn’t quit, another day another job.