Words: Host18
Photo: Stephen Schuster
At a time when New York street bombing was at its zenith, the MTA crew started to make waves as one of the strongest groups out there. For one member however, being the Most Talked About wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In the early ’90s, Desa started getting up…getting up a lot. Around this time, I watched a Video Graf with him painting clean trains. Shortly after I saw the video, I was waiting to catch a train to head into Manhattan, guess who had a run of throw-ups across that crisp silver surface? Go ahead, guess. Desa was catching the attention of New York City’s graffiti writers, but unfortunately there were others watching, waiting. In August of 1994, New Yorkers picked up their copy of the Daily News to see “MILLION DOLLAR VANDAL” splashed across the cover page. The bold statement crowned a photograph of Desa being held at the arm by a police officer, Desa’s face adorning a sly grimace. A graffiti writer as the cover story of the Daily News, a position normally held by celebrities, presidents and terrorists. It seemed the media was selling us a new threat, a greater problem than just spray paint on a wall and Desa was going to be the poster child. His prior problems with authorities weren’t going to help him either. Desa was going to prison.
Now, years later residing in his East New York, Brooklyn neighborhood, Desa awaits the release of a new 200-page book about him from the publisher Also Known As, titled Million Dollar Vandal that includes action photos and an in-depth biography. His attitude about the book is less than enthusiastic. Desa will say he no longer writes, yet new tags and throw-ups of his pop up here and there. At 31 years old, he seems uncaring about graffiti any further than the action itself. It’s just what he does, maybe out of compulsive necessity or maybe just for shits and giggles, either way he certainly doesn’t need the fame or the attention but he continues onward, in his own way and at his own pace.
Can you tell us a little about this book coming out that’s about you?
It’s just photos of me, of my name. That’s about it, I guess you have to see it. It speaks for itself.
It’s just a photo book?
Yeah. Other than that, there’s not much. There’s some text in it, but it’s mostly photos, because that’s the whole point.
After all the shit you been through with graf, because of graf, how do you feel about graf right now?
I don’t really care about it anymore as much. It’s dying, it sucks. Not that I hate it, not that I think other people suck. The best type of mentality is, Because you don’t really think about it—it don’t control your life. And you can just do it when you want and that’s it. It’s just how my mentality is. It’s just towards a lot of people and a lot of things in life. I stay in, I don’t really associate with people anymore. And that has to do with the accident, getting hit by the car, kinda screwed me up in the head. I learned there’s other things more important than going out at night, drinking at bars and things like that. I’d rather wake up in my own bed in the morning instead of in the hospital or in jail.
Can you talk a little about your accident?
I don’t really remember much. It was just an argument in a bar. One of my friends was arguing. Two guys were standing, one guy was getting ready to hit him, so I just threw a bottle at one guy’s head, and he moved and then I tried to attack him with something and there were so many people there that the odds were against us, so we just had to run. I don’t know what happened after that. I don’t know if I saw the car, or the car saw me. I don’t remember anything, really. What I just told you is basically from what someone else told me. I don’t remember any of that at all. I never did. There’s days you could say, You remember when we did this three years ago? Sometimes I say I don’t remember and people think I’m lying. I have a lot of lost memories from the accident. Things years ago and things recently, I forget. I got other injuries: I can’t see out of my right eye, my leg was screwed up, my face, my jaw, it was a bad accident. I survived, but I’m really fuckin’ screwed up from it bad. So that’s that.
Did you have any issues with health insurance?
No. The guy was drunk, so it was his fault, so I didn’t have to pay for any of it. Medicaid paid the rest.
So through everything you’ve been through because of writing, you still continue to write on some level. What keeps you writing at this point?
I guess the same thing that keeps someone like Seen, someone that wrote in the ’70s and the ’80s to come back out once in a while and do it. It’s just there, it doesn’t go away, it’s like the AIDS virus, you can’t get rid of it. I don’t necessarily do it for people, I just do it for myself, but I been through so much shit that the average person would never in their life pick up a pencil or a crayon again. Me? I don’t know. I been through so much that I might as well. If I dedicated all that hell, all this shit I had to deal with, might as well. I love it, I hate it. I really hate it because of the situation I got myself in. And that situation is always there waiting to grab me again, to fuck with me, that’s the part I hate. If I [stop] right now, that’s it, I’m not going to think about it and talk about it, I’ll walk away, I’ll go read a book.
There’s something inside of everybody that does it for years and years, they stop, they just do it. No matter what it is, if you have any type of job. Even if you was a cop, there’s people that wrote when they were cops that, you know, maybe they’re not going out in the street and writing, but they still do it—they fuck around on paper or something like that. It’s just in you. It’s in your brain, It’s in your hand, your compulsion. Someone’s gotta figure it out, not me.
How has graffiti affected the rest of your life socially, family wise?
When I got in trouble, it was bad for my family, but that’s the only thing. The average person, graffiti, they never really got in trouble. If they got arrested, it was misdemeanor, it was nothing. There’s so many people right now that are my age group that did graffiti, they did a lot, they did a little, they got arrested ten times, dozens of times. These people, they got good jobs and they still come out and do graffiti once in a while. If I didn’t get in so much trouble, prison time and all that, I probably would have had a more positive answer, that it would’ve been fun. But because of that, it takes all the fun away. If I fall—I got a bad hip—it’s gonna break. If I get arrested, I don’t just get arrested, I stay in jail and I gotta go to court and they want to put me in prison every time and it’s a big fuckin’ problem. So I got mixed feelings about what it did to my family. When I got in all that trouble, it probably affected my family more. It affected me a little, because these people weren’t acting like rational people, they were acting like I was really a bad person. Put me in a newspaper, put me here on TV, that’s ridiculous, I didn’t do anything wrong.
When a person’s photo is on the Daily News for something negative, not one person’s ever going to believe that he didn’t just do graffiti. This person did things that they’re not saying because there’s no way your photo could be on the front page of the Daily News for a bad thing, and there’s not more to the story. That’s basically what they did and why they did it, because they know deep down inside that it was just a pathetic joke, doing what they did to me. But I couldn’t win anyway, so even if I went to trial—which I didn’t do because I would lose—I had politicians going into my court case, police [too], I had people sending letters in with their support. I couldn’t win. When I got sentenced there was probably 40 people in the courtroom waiting to see me off. If I went to court to get sentenced and for some reason the judge said, Oh, you know what, this case is nonsense, let me just dismiss it, they’d take me outside and hang me from the tree and then light me on fire. That’s how bad it was for me and that’s how I felt. That many people there that day, they wanted blood. You had people there with walkers. They had walkers, literally. Old people. Just to fill seats an’ shit. It’s ridiculous. To make it seem like I wrote on a woman’s house. It’s just garbage, really, but it affected [my family] I guess more, because I was locked up, even though it affected me. They worried about it more. Prison is not a good place.
What made you decide at this point to do a book?
’Cause he did his other book, Also Known As…
The guy Raven, from 12oz Prophet?
Yeah. He asked me to do these photos for the book. So I went, he took some photos of me. When it was finished, he showed me, he said that he thinks the photos were going to be the best thing in the book. I didn’t think they were gonna be that good, the quality. So when he did it I was like, “Alright cool.” He came to me and asked me if I wanted to do a book. It’s just going to be photos, things like that. If it was someone else, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I apologize to him a lot because I’m not enthusiastic about it.
All the graffiti, all the Vandal Squad, everything, do you feel that it was worth it? Are you in the middle of it?
All the trouble I got in, all the problems I could have in the future, it definitely wasn’t worth it. But, it wasn’t the Vandal Squad’s fault. It was my own fault to do what I did, not just graffiti, but threatening people, things like that, that’s the reason I have my real problems. I threatened to burn down people’s houses and some other things. That part of my life, that incident, was what got me in the most trouble. I’ve had enemies ever since. And it wasn’t really the Vandal Squad, if you’re going to write graffiti on trains, they’re going to come after you. It’s their job. You can’t just blame them. So it really wasn’t worth it, what I did to get in trouble, it wasn’t worth it.
To purchase Desa’s book, Million Dollar Vandal, go to fourthehardway.com
