Queens was
quite a change, compared to the Bronx. The Bronx had the toughest gangs
and
people got shot in broad daylight ( in front of my building ). When
Queens comes to mind, most dudes would think of it, as living in the country. I
didn't think it would be a very good spot for me to live. The
day after I moved to Queens, I took the train back to the Bronx to see where I
“laid my soul down”. On the way back to Queens, I got off the train at
Queens Plaza, to learn as much as I could about my new territory. There
were many warehouses, prostitutes walking the streets, and dudes hanging out
drinking. As a joke, I walked up to one of the prostitutes and asked her,
“Where can I go to write Graffiti”? She told me, “There are trains all
over the place, you can go right down there”, as she pointed towards the Queens
Bridge projects, “they park the trains over there at night”. I cased out
some spots around 33rd and Rossens, by 46th Street and the big department store, Steven’s, where they sold big television sets and
had a big Rustoleum rack. Eventually, I walked the whole strip of Jackson
Heights getting familiar with the area, and the styles. I brought my own style
around Queens, not only in my writing, but also in my attitude and wardrobe.
People started noticing me.
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KINGS
OVER NIGHT
One day I went over to
the 69th
Street schoolyard, which was the first place I took a can and started painting.
I used the handball court in the schoolyard for my own little chalkboard,
bringing my own Bronx Graffiti, which brought a lot of attention. I was real
cool with the TMT CREW that had TEAN, FED, KELSON, and CHAIN 3; the best artist
from the whole group, however was this guy who wrote NIKE. He was my first writing partner on the 7-line.
NIKE was like a playboy, always hung out, drank Colt 45 beer,
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and was always down to do
anything. Together, NIKE and I, made several attempts to get into the
7-yard. We got chased, lost a lot of paint, and went through some real
nightmare kind of shit. He even went as far as to tie rope from the
highway down into the woods where the 7-yard was located, without even being
seen. Whatever time of day we got off at the Willets Point stop, it
was desolate. Not a person in sight. If you walked over the
bridge that lead into the US Open Stadium, you could look down, see the
7-yard, and right there was the Look-Out Tower. If someone were seen
scooping out the yard or just looking suspicious, they would call the cops.
The way NIKE thought about it, and bare in mind he was a black guy from the
projects in the Bronx, was to go through the highway over the bridge with a
rope. This became a regular routine for us, eventually taking over the
place. At the time, I was not writing FUZZ ONE on the trains, but
doing LORD 138 pieces since FUZZ was already hot in the Bronx. Every
time we got in that place we did LORD and NIKE pieces on every subway car
that was parked in |
there. While we were in there, we met a lot of Queens writers that
hit the yard hard. NIKE and myself would sometimes go there with a
hundred cans or more, hitting that spot non-stop. Sometimes we spent
hours in there until the sun came up. I started seeing less of NIKE
when he got hooked on drugs, and ultimately lost touch with him.
That’s when I realized I needed a new partner.
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I hooked up with
this guy from East New York, who I met some time ago at SOLID’s funeral. He
wrote DONDI. We both started doing a lot of cars on the BMT’s and IND’s,
together. I welcomed him into my hood, in Jackson Heights, where we did a lot of
PRE 2's and PRINCE’s ( on the number 7 line ). That’s when people really started
bugging out! Later, I brought people out from the Bronx, like NIC
707, BOOTS 119 and a few others, out to the seven line. It seemed like every writer that was hitting
other lines followed me to the seven’s (even if they don’t want to admit it). There
were guys in Queens that didn’t write Graffiti, but wanted to start, so I sold
them names (to write).
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They used to come with me to the yards to get their names up. I wanted
to take over the sevens at that time, and knew that I needed at least five
hardcore names to do it. The names I picked were PRINCE or MR
PRINCE, ROMEO, DJ 2, LOVE MACHINE, LUCKY LORD 138, IVORY 2 (which I was
already rolling with from the days living in the Bronx), as well as
putting up my old homeboy SOLID, and last but not least FUZZ ONE. I
started bombing with those eight hardcore names and went
there on the regular. After a while I only went on weekends, from
twelve up to twelve down. Maybe on a Monday I’d go hit the yard, lay
off for a while and then return on Wednesday or Thursday. There was
a time I hit the seven’s hard for five days straight with forty or fifty
cans! Sometimes I would take the scraps, hide them in the bushes and
then come back with another fifty cans and use them all to hit the
insides! I could remember showing up there to pick up my paint
( at my secret hiding
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spot ), only to find all my shit gone. Next thing I knew, there were
all these ugly BIONIC pieces running on the sevens. It was a total
waste of my paint. That’s when I found other spots to hide my paint
away from toys. After I killed the line for six months, every top
writer from the seven’s wanted to meet me. This dude CAINE 1 who was a hippy white
boy, did the famous Alice Cooper piece and rocked the lines a few years
before. Then there were guys like |
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CHINO 174, SON 1 & PRO, and a few others, but you have to remember most of
the stuff on the sevens was nothing like what you saw up in the Bronx.
I’m talking about wild style burners, where on the seven’s if a guy had a
bubble with a brick background, it was something amazing for that line.
So... when I started turning up and doing my shit people
started noticing the uniqueness of my pieces. It was something they never
saw before. There was one time I went into the yard with about 200 cans and
straight up killed it. I did
DJ 2's
in the corners, which I filled in with
pink paint and outlined with black. From there I killed the centers with FUZZ ONE’s. I then moved on to the next car and did CK’s
( which stood for CHEEBA KING ) down in a row. Then the whole ten rows of cars on the same train, I did
LORD’s and PRINCE’s. I remember moving on to the next train and painted those
ten cars with DJ 2’s, 2 HORNY, LOVE MACHINE 79, 2 SEXY, 2 SASSY one, |
after another. When I was done with that
train, not one part of the train was visible. I left no room for any writer to even do a single piece or
throw-up. Once I did that, a whole
bunch of guys I knew like NEON, TOPAZ, CE 1, JOEY TC, DEMO, SE, SKY 2 (a.k.a.
LO), started coming to my house just talking up about what I did. They all
asked questions about all the names they saw, not realizing all the names were
mine. I wrote so many names that writers, ‘til this day, do not even know
they were mine. There is a writer who wrote SERVE, which I was writing
SERVE’S way before him and sometimes I wrote SERVICE.
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I
had so many names when I was bombing the seven’s, that the cops thought it was
the work of thirty guys from the Bronx. There was this other dude who wrote DJ
FUZZ and had a girlfriend named peaches, which was the same name of my
girlfriend; it was a straight up omen. When I moved to Queens, I started a
trend. When I went out painting, I always
dressed up, as a result dudes started dressing like me, wearing the bucket hat
I had always worn. Guys even checked me out to see what kind of shoe laces I wore. Once they saw
the kind of style I was writing on the trains, completely different from the
past years. If it weren’t for FUZZ ONE moving to Queens, the history of “Queens
Graffiti” would have just faded
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out. Every
chick that I ever went out with always wanted something to do with
Graffiti. I enjoyed them being with me, but I always tried to
discourage them from getting involved with it. I have to say about
65% of the girls that I had wrote Graffiti and were intrigued with it.
It seemed like every dude in Queens hated me, cause they would say to
themselves “Goddamn, I know where my female is at, she’s at the 7-yard”!
There were times when I used to hit the streets I would always stalk a new
female, it seemed like every week there would be “FUZZ ONE LOVES BABY
DOLL”, which there were a lot of baby dolls (like 1, 2 and 3). I had
girls nicknamed BABY DOLL throughout Jackson Heights. Shortly
afterwards, the nightclubs started popping into the scene and I started
wondering how much longer I would bomb trains. There were times I
walked into the seven yard, and go over my own pieces. It was
just insane! My name was around so much in Queens, that people even claimed
to be me. When I stopped writing, I ran
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into
guys that were top dog writers ( like KEL 1st
) who complimented me and told me how much he enjoyed my work (years after I
quit). I was honored when KEL 1st told
me that he followed most of my career. He enjoyed how the four train
rolled into the station with some of my LORD pieces, and some of my
top-to-bottoms that he felt were incredible. KEL 1st said he saw pieces he never saw, prior or even after that. I
think that I was
a writer mainly in the dark, so I was never given the recognition that many
other writers received (later on). I never started writing for that
anyway, I did it
solely for myself. If they saw it or didn’t see it...so what! I knew I did it,
and that’s all that mattered to me!
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~~~~~~~
PARTNERS IN CRIME ~~~~~~~~~
How I met FLAME is still in my
memory. One day, I was hanging out at the Donut Shoppe on 74th Street with
my girl CE-CE ( an old school rapper at the time ), who sung a record in
Jamaica, Queens. A short Dominican dude ( FLAME, I later found out ) and
two other dudes saw my pilot and a can of spray paint on the table. While
me and CE-CE were talking, he said to me, “Do you write?" I
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said,
"Yeah, I’m FUZZ ONE". At the
time FLAME was writing FLAME 3, and mostly hitting the
streets and would be up here/there on the subways. We talked some more and
and then he said “We should get together, hang out and hit the trains”. That is
when FLAME became a part of FUZZ ONE; two dudes that conquered the whole Queens
area, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Nobody went to anyplace or did the shit, that
we did. Even when we went to clubs together, everybody knew we were “the
faces”. FLAME had the coke and I had the cheeba, we had a different
female everyday. We sometimes had women fighting over us. They knew us
as gigolos! We we were even thinking of putting signs in the subway that said “We
won’t get you pregnant”! Guys hated us 'cause we were like the Miami Vice
in Jackson Heights. There were guys who had their female for ten years
(the love of their lives), and once the girl would politick with us, it was all
over. Everything that FLAME and I did, is only what people dreamed
about. It
was graffiti, and politicking with the baddest Bitches around New York City.
FLAME’s brother worked in Clapper’s where he picked up the power suits and
gigalo ties we wore. We would go out to Studio 54, and then from there
would go to the seven yards all dressed up. I remember a time, that was
really funny. I was hanging with FLAME, DONDI, this big dude FORCE 5, CHINO
174, and this kid that wrote ARCEE. One day we were out in Manhattan and sent this dude
for a beer run. He would go in the store, run to the back, grab a few
quarts of Colt 45, run out of the |
store,
and jump in the car for a quick get away. This kid ARCEE was kind of a new
jack, so FLAME and CHINO174 sent him into this Bodega to grab some beers.
When the dude went in, he must have gotten
spotted walking out
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the door with the beer. That is when a whole bunch of
Spanish dudes started chasing him toward the exit. It was FLAME who said,
“Fuck this dude, let’s get out of here”. So, we took off! From the back
window, we saw this kid ARCEE running down the street after the car with quarts
of beer falling out of his shirt (and six Spanish dudes chasing him). I kept
telling FLAME, “Let’s go back! Let’s go back!” But FLAME said,
"Fuck that toy,
leave him there.” The rest of the guys just started laughing on him, but I felt
bad. After an hour of trying to convince these dudes to go back for ARCEE, they
finally agreed. When we went back, we didn’t have to go very far to find ARCEE
walking on the highway. He had a beer bottle clenched in his hand, his shirt all
drenched in beer and no sneakers on. I finally convinced these cold-hearted
fucks to pull over and pick him up. These dudes were like some of the craziest
dudes in the history of Graffiti. FORCE 5 was this big Spanish dude from
Jamaica Queens who
spent a lot of time in the military, and CHINO 174 was
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another crazy fuck that would flip
on someone at any moment. My whole idea behind us all hanging was to
hit the seven yard that night, but all these guys wanted to do
was…nonsense. The night ended up taking a turn for the worse, cause the
next thing these crazy fucks wanted to do was pick up a hooker. So
we took a trip to Courthouse
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Square in Queens to get a hooker. The car was filled with so much
smoke from all the cheeba and taking swags of that last beer ARCEE had, that it was
like a “Cheech and Chong” movie. DONDI was so zooted that the dude ended up
going into a coma, while CHINO 174 and FORCE 5 continued like two predators out for
their prey. We picked up this one girl and for some crazy chance of
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luck, she
jumped into the car with all five of us. These dudes got really
shady and basically kidnapped this chick. They drove her into Flushing Park
around the seven yards, and tried to make an attempt of taking her clothes
off. DONDI was in the backseat completely out of it. I'll
never forget when I heard FORCE
5 scream “This Bitch is a dude”! All the guys started to flip out, CHINO 174
began beating on the dude and FORCE 5, chased the hooker out of the car. It was
some crazy shit you only saw in movies. After all that, I convinced them to bomb the seven
yards, which was a short distance away. We went to my secret hiding spot, grabbed some
paint and when we got into
the seven yard, CHINO went off to do his own thing.
FORCE 5 did these giant F5 throw-ups, while me and Dondi started on a car
together. FLAME got busy on a car right next to us where he started
doing some really |
wild shit ( that looked interesting in it’s own way ). ARCEE, well he just held on to
the paint as we wrote. As DONDI and I were finishing the last few touches
of what we did, all the lights on the train turned on and some of the doors
opened from the last cars. We all ran towards the back of the yard,
climbed on a train, jumped off the back of the train on to a lamp post which swung us into
the swamp water just outside the yard. ARCEE grabbed CHINO, I guess
because he
didn’t know how to swim. CHINO in return began to punch him.
Eventually, we all got away! Damn, it was a real crazy night!
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FLAME and I continued
doing our thing in Jackson Heights, but like all things, they soon come to an
end. We both got into selling drugs, but it wasn't until FLAME started
using that I began to worry. I tried to help him out, but like they say...
when people fall they fall really hard. The dude got really bad and there
was nothing I could do to help him. It just didn't work out, so we
eventually parted company. That was the worst part of FUZZ ONE in Queens.
As a result, I felt Graffiti got real
tired and I just stopped. I feel I took Graffiti to the most ultimate extreme
and don’t think anybody on this planet did more names than I did, more pieces
than I did, or just wrote Graffiti with such a flare, as I did.
There was this one night
I made a comeback. I hooked up with CEY CITY, BD - CITY, T-BOP, and started bombing
75th
Street lay-up on the E’s and F’s. I just killed it! Another
night, I went down there with the same dudes with about 300 cans of my paint and killed
it again. Afterwards when we were deciding which way we should leave the
lay-up T-BOP AND BD wanted to go one way and CEY CITY
and I wanted to go in the other direction. When CEY CITY and I came up through the Union
Turnpike station, the police were right on us. The cops beat the shit out of
us with their clubs and locked me in a phone booth for four hours. The whole experience put my
life through a living hell because I had to go to court, scrub trains, and go to
jail. After I got out of jail, I went to live in DONDI’s house in Brooklyn. It was a short,
eight month stay of sleeping in his basement and racking up my own food
and clothes. As time passed, DONDI went on to the art gallery scene, which I didn’t agree with
'cause I felt it was not real Graffiti. However, he had to do what he needed to
do and we still remained boys. I moved back to queens and just left the
Graffiti scene alone.
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The
Ultimate Come Back
When
I got back to Queens, during the mid 80's, it was all bombed. Writers even
did top-to-bottoms on peoples homes
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Nevertheless, my legacy was
still there. I saw some of my styles in many of the pieces that was
out there. Once in a while I did a piece here and there on the
down-low with some of my females. A lot of my females started dying
off from writing, or just died period. I give them so much props cause
they were like the freaks at large. They took risks that not even
dudes took. By the time 1990 came, that was a real big era for
me. I figured I was either going to sink or swim. I moved to Elmhurs in
1990, where I started politicking with
these two little dudes, BRUZ and RONT and a few of these little Chinese
dudes that followed me around. These kids expanded, met other dudes out there
and bombed. That is when I met VEN, GHOST,
REMOTE, JA and KET. GHOST was a die-hard writer from the 1980’s.
He hung
from the bottom of the train tracks, just to bomb his name on a pole underneath
it. KET would even bomb a cop car. |
He was straight up wild, while JA
was just out of his mind. FUZZ ONE made another comeback on the
Queens
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trains, BMT’S,
IND’S, IRT’S, everything. We all just straight up, killed it.
REMOTE was
this really nice white kid, who I really got a long with, but soon disappeared
from all of it. GHOST on the other hand, was just this madman who I went out to
Long Island with to rack paint and ink. From there we took off to the A
lines, killed the insides and then went crazy on the outsides. I mean
everywhere we went, we bombed. Ever week, I had a new partner. It became FUZZ and JA, or FUZZ and GHOST,
or FUZZ and REMOTE. Those guys
took me to the last stage of die-hard Graffiti bombing. We did a
top-to-bottom on someone’s gate right in front of the store, while the guy inside
was selling his burgers. Other dudes came back into the scene and went out
with us;
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Dudes like IZ
THE WIZ, SACH, QUIK, SAR, VEN, BRUZ and a few others. SAR was a guy that I met through IZ
THE WIZ, who I knew since 1974, and we started politicking. SAR was not only a
good dude that had my back, but a good dude overall. We even brought back some
old school cats like my man BOOTS 119, and even little CAV started hanging with
us. Of course,
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we all started bombing real hard. To the seven yards,
is where we headed on the regular, and then killed the E’s and F’s.
Life became good for us...we all lived in
residential neighborhoods, had cars, jobs,
girlfriends, and other responsibilities, which made what we were doing really
crazy. I thought, “I’m never going to get out of this shit”!
However, by the year
2000, SAR went his separate way and I started to get tight with one of
my females and gave Graffiti a rest. From 1970 until the year 2000,
that’s thirty years, that I devoted to Graffiti. I don't think anybody, devoted that much time into this one thing, than FUZZ
ONE. After a year or so, I thought about writing a book on how it
all began. A BRONX CHILD HOOD , is the name of the book that I
finished. I starting on my next book TAKING IT TO QUEENS, and looking to get in
touch with the Females I rolled with back in the day. Contact me at DJFUZZONE@YAHOO.COM
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