Few names better represent the writer than Smith. He looks and acts the part of an average Joe and would seem more at home behind a desk than painting on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge. But it is in performing such feats of expression that he has put a whole new meaning on the most common of surnames. Smith in graffiti terms means never being suprised to see him up, wherever you are. The name is as common on concrete as it is in the phone book, and that’s just half of the story. His younger brother Sane was a masterful painter whose influence was immediate and universal. He died young and beloved, creating a cult of fans that grows daily. Smith survives, not encouraging the myth, but not discouraging the facts, just setting his mind on the future with a positive outlook he’s gotten since his marriage to Lady Pink and keeping the past at arm’s length, bound in photo albums.
It’s hard to believe Smith led a sheltered existence in a neighborhood like Washington Heights. This Dominican enclave is packed with people, a veritable pressure cooker of population. But beyond the turbulence that’s intrinsic to New York, the Smiths led a quiet life in one of the noisiest corners in the city. Mom immigrated from Germany and was focused intently on fitting into society. Roger and his little brother David were struggling to fit in as well, being poor and clueless to a lot of things. “It wasn’t until high school that I stopped wearing bell bottoms and plaid shirts.” He really didn’t start writing until he went away to school. He was living on campus at a college in the Bronx, and on the weekends, after school and work was done, he started getting up.
His brother started writing at the same time, and though Smith is a little fuzzy on the exact timing, within a month, they were on the same page. Sane was much more on the typical writing curve, starting to write as a fourteen-year-old. Even then he was a little late to the party. The whole culture was full-blown in 1984, and the Smith brothers found themselves outside of the scene, just like they were in their neighborhood growing up. It took a while to make their first bona fide all-city connect—Jon 156—but with him they enjoyed the atmosphere of competitive cooperation in the AA layup. Every week they would race down to the same store on Canal Street, haggle with the store owner for the same cans of Retardo seventy-nine-cent clover green (“That other guy told me not to sell it to you”), then submerge themselves in the steel until late Sunday night. They hit the layup eight weekends in a row and, relieved that the pattern hadn’t been detected by the detects, enjoyed the first wave of fame.
Fame is a funny drug. Like a lot of get-highs, some get stoned while others barely feel the effects. The mature Mr. Smith never cared about getting gassed, his fun was in doing it. He ignored the bench, passed off interviews to friends, and didn’t trade photos. To Smith, photos are good for the half-second glance that ignites the memory of the sights, the smells, what happened. A lot of writers duped and shipped photos to enhance their stature. He had grown past proving anything to anyone. The photos were merely to keep a moment alive. With a low-key, high-impact approach, SaneSmith were also keeping a movement alive. At a time when shell-shocked writers wouldn’t write because of the buff and the fences going up, SmithSane were all about seizing their day with two sets of hands.
Smith, ever effacing, thought his strength was in defacing. His brother was a master at piecing, but they both did equal amounts of everything. At first, they kicked around the idea of the two of them writing Smith, but the competitive nature of writing created Sane. After a year of trying to outdo each other, they started writing each other’s name and became a whole new entity. SaneSmith became a code word for quality and quantity. You heard it as a shout out on the Red Alert show, spitting from the competition’s lips, and then one day, saw it in the newspaper.
In the New York Newsday, in forty-four glorious picas, a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge bears the spray painted name of the most famous of American colonists, Smith. The very cornerstone of this great land sits like a rude name belt buckle on the bridge that represents the strength and ingenuity of the country freedom calls home. The authorities weren’t amused, and the mayor had to hate the inscription next to the name: “It’s nothing new, Koch is thru, Sane 182.” Even the FBI wanted a piece of the pair for hitting a national landmark. It was a month after the deed that the cops were waiting outside their house, a little later that Smith was picked up with JA outside JA’s house, and maybe two months that the city announced a new weapon in the war on graffiti: the million-dollar lawsuit.
Smith was shocked, but not suprised. Sane always quoted Sun Yat-sen, “You must know your enemy well, but ignore him.” He always took a serious approach to the job. He could see that it was war, and there was an enemy that would make things personal. Jon One painted a piece where the 1 goes above ground, and a week later Smith saw workers on the tracks with wire brushes scrubbing the piece. After 1986, the war came to him, in the form of the vandal squad leader going to his house and pleading with Mrs. Smith to stop the madness. Then trains would be pulled off the line, the SmithSane car buffed, and put back into service. Ten years later he can still feel the combination of anger at the action and awe at the reaction that the written name provoked. Out of a million names they made it war with one, and on that name they placed a worth of a million dollars. SmithSane would make it personal in return and hit the city with a combination that was hard to beat, and impossible to defeat.
It must have looked like a slam dunk to the district attorney’s office. They had a minor in Sane, and so they could name Mom in the suit as a responsible adult, and Smith was a college graduate. No jury in their right minds could sympathize with any of the trio. The brothers Smith went the well-worn route of volunteer lawyers, telling them that they may be guilty but the prosecution couldn’t prove it, no way. The volunteer lawyers, intimidated by the size of the case and the sheer audacity of the defendants, passed. They met three bad mouthpieces before Sane made a move worthy of Bobby Fischer and called superlawyer William Kunstler. Kunstler liked the sound of things and he agreed to take the case. It would end up being stalemate for the state.
At the depostion, a lawyer for the prosecution came out and greeted the famous Kunstler warmly. The seventy-year old Kunstler pulled the mesozoic-era gag of, “Hey you got something on your tie,” and when the lawyer looked down, popped him in the nose. At that moment, laughing into their jackets, they knew they had a kindred spirit in their attorney. No matter how serious the State wanted to make it, this was a case of kids having fun, and Kunstler was prepared to make the lawyers aware of it. With Kunstler aboard, the case was postponed several times. Then Sane passed away, then Kunstler passed away, and finally the statute of limitations passed. Whatever point the government tried to make, it’s been rendered moot by time moving on.
Queens.
Uptown.
Half of a hot handball court with SHARP.
Laid up and Sprayed up.
