Revs called at 5:00 to make sure I was on point, and I answered the phone on the first ring; “Okay, you’re up. Very good. I’ll be there by five thirty a.m.” At 5:29, I hear his truck three blocks away, sounding like a four-speed volcano. It’s a souped-up 3/4 ton custom built to one ton specs with a lot of of aftermarket accessories that make it look like something out of Mad Max. Forget the film vehicle, Revs’s vehicle is strictly high performance. It may sound like a dragon on a four-pack-a-day habit, but it’s the most efficient vehicle for getting over yet devised. The cab and carriage is stock, but the rest has been rewelded, rebuilt, and reworked by Charger Hi-Performance in Brooklyn. There’s a gangbox in the bumper, racks for ladders, a fire extinguisher, and an emergency light on top, perfect for accessing utility roads without John Law breaking balls. It sets off an alarm on a Range Rover a block down, so I step quickly to meet him at the corner.
Revs is all business this morning, so the ride goes without the usual good-natured banter of the “how’s-the-missus” variety. He’s been off his pace, having missed a few Sundays due to work. He’s got hundreds of pages of an autobiography to write, one page to each tunnel in the subway system. Today his total stands at thirty-seven, and he’s anxious to get past the writer’s block forced upon him by the fates. We talk sites, already narrowed down to two that we know to be free of workers, and decide on one that may offer access to another line, which would further increase Revs’s running total. At the site, he double-checks his supplies, and in a commanding whisper to himself says, “I got paint, ladder, rollers, film, spray, vests, and uhhh, okay, that’s it.” And with that we load up and descend into the darkness.
His pen and paper are a can of Rustoleum Flat Black and a roller-painted rectangle of yellow oil-based paint. He paints the page and I walk a block in each direction, catching tags under the 130-watt lights few and far between underground. I’m marking, but also doing reconnaissance, trying to get a feel for where we are. As I walk back Revs meets me halfway and I report my findings. So far it’s calm and quiet. I hear a rumble in the system, like a stomach digesting lunch, and we play the game of “where’s the train?” Before we can guess, I spot the lights of the train on the tracks. We step behind the pillars and then I hear the disgusting sound of an express bearing down on us from the other direction. I brace myself for ten seconds of terror and think thoughts of meadows and rainbows. The two trains roll past like they’re dancing and we’re cutting in. Soon all is still, and the next sound I hear is Revs’s keys as he gets back to work.
He climbs up a wood ladder custom made at the VIC Labs and writes. He puts the date, which is wrong, and I almost correct him when I remember the intention. Today he is writing a story from his childhood in Brooklyn, which as I’ve seen in other pages is populated with other kids, neighborhood weirdos, and at the furthest periphery, his parents. Today’s story centers on two brothers and their mother. The kids are a permanent stain in Revs’s brain pan because at the age of ten they had complete control over their mother, yelling at her, pumping Kiss on the radio, and generally being brats. To the young Revs, they were definitely on the next level. As the words emerge from the can, I laugh and am awed by seeing someone in their element, doing what they do best. A train appoaches, and Revs gets himself situated in the shadows. I watch the page catch fire in the oncoming lights and then slowly go out after it passes. Revs gets back on the ladder and as my eyes adjust to the rapid change in light, the writing becomes marks and slashes, like a wall in a cell that a prisoner has marked with notches to record the days passed. I smile and shudder at the image, knowing too well that’s exactly what it is.
Don’t need no gallery to pump it up
Don’t need no 15-year-olds to soup it up
Don’t need no happy dicks to laugh it up
Don’t need no girl to sex it up
Just need a rope and I’ll sew it up.
Bay Ridge way back in the days.
The most passionate writers in graffiti command respect and form a union of sorts based on that level of commitment. Revs is the foreman, with a steel-toe work ethic and eighteen years of journeyman experience. In the early ′80s his name was Revlon and his voice was evolving in typical NYC stylistic fashion: simple-style whole cars and semi-wild panel pieces. Since 1990, however, he’s been devolving his style to the point of a pure primal grunt: posted handbills and roller letters. His style these days is so far under the Revlon styles of the previous decade that most spectators think it’s two different people. The Revlon styles had a lot more makeup, and Revs is just grease under the nails. Those who like their graff shiny are not too keen on the rusted finish of Revs’s work. But then his work is working, as opposed to the preening most pieces do.
When he was only Revlon, he was like a lot of other losers in the world. He was lonely, disconnected, a punk rock misfit with no place to be. He hated people and only liked dogs. Then one day he found a beautiful girl from the neighborhood and fell in love. It would seem that humans were going to win a place in his heart, until she betrayed him. Feeling like his one shot at love was gone, he fell into a grip of darkness that would not let him go. One day he saw a cat get run over by a car and he lost it. He drove his friend home to Brooklyn and wheeled back to the city. The sight of “too much shit” everywhere pushed him to the top of the Manhattan Bridge. At the summit of that steel mountain, right before he was ready to take a sailor dive into obscurity, a voice told him, “It’s not the right time.” He paid attention and climbed back down into the depths of himself.
Revlon was sacrificed on that bridge, and Revs came down from the span a whole other man. He was no longer down for the crew games and the styles that kids were into; he was going to work for that voice he’d heard on the bridge. His graffiti became a spiritual howl in the concrete wilderness. His method for spreading the word was definitely a new testament. Well, not completely. The idea of posting handbills with names on them was first explored by DJ No and Tess of the X-Men, a Brooklyn squad of some reknown. Sacha Jenkins, a Q Borough resident, was good for some, but when Revs got with the medium, it was like Oppenheimer getting with the atom. The Adam Revs got with was Adam Cost, another Queens writer who was also feeling flyers. Revs saw that Cost was getting his bills up high, so he asked Carl Weston of Video Graff to make the connect, and that was that.
At one point in their partnership, Cost and Revs were standing on the verge of real art-world success. Glenn O’Brien wrote about them in Artfourm, they had gallery owners snooping around, and they enjoyed a public notoriety for their antics that even Turk 182 couldn’t front on. Then one day, before they could even enjoy success, it was gone, as if opportunity played ring and run on them. Cost was caught putting up a sticker (the other stickers in his pocket amounted to sixty-two counts of “possession of graffiti materials”), tried, and sentenced to 1600 hours of community service, but not before the media depicted him as a disturbed, compulsive individual. Revs went to Alaska to wait out the hysteria, and only after being back for a while asked me, “How come we didn’t blow up?” And the only real reason we could agree on is the work they did, while important, was ugly and unpopular. It’ll take years after the damage has subsided that they’ll get theirs. By then, however, the era of Cost and Revs will just become another chapter in the autobiography of Revs.
The autobiography will be a huge book of photos and text bound in diamond plate steel. It’ll weigh over seventy pounds. Besides the recent tunnel work, the book will contain his theories, practices, and beliefs about life at the graffiti job site. I don’t expect too many will get raises or promotions once the foreman has said his piece. He cackles at the thought of the hackles he’s going to raise. Even without the commentary that will undoubtedly flow between the photos, the pictures alone will effectively tell the tale of a man who was only living to finish his story. That’s the motivation, now let me tell you about his character. On the exterior, he isn’t aging gracefully. His skin looks stonewashed, his hair like frayed rope. But his eyes and his smile let you know that his soul is well maintained if the facade isn’t. He puts the frame through serious wear, working all day and pushing forward on his work at night. He grabs no more than four hours of sleep a night, but he’s never grouchy. He only gets testy when circumstances keep him from accomplishing the work. The theme of his work is a self-portrait, ugly on the outside, but pure beauty at the core. Just like the ′69 Charger that represents his aesthetic (sorry that’s not meat and ′taters) ideal, he is dirty on the outside, but polished to a showroom finish on the inside. He is the Union Boss, manufacturing his myth in steel. After he closes the book for the last time, a lot of people are going to have to rethink what it means to work.
First shot, March, 1984.
BMT panel, 1985.
In action with the punk rock patch, September 1, 1985.
The checkerboard piece revisited, 4 stories high and 125 feet long, with Peek, 1997.
The sheista, in register ink on a doorway, 1994.
Sculpture, 1996. Broome and West “Fraudway” Steel, mixed media, photographs. Dimensions variable. I got a call at 8:00 am to meet Revs at this site, and to bring my camera. He had a crew consisting of Joey and Fuel, upstate’s Katzenjammer kids. Work vests, hardhats, clipboards were in evidence as if we were surveyors doing an impact study. The carefully constructed cover was blown as I kept a camera in everyone’s grill the whole time. Note the railroad spikes at the base, just in case the 3 gallons of epoxy didn’t cut it.
