OJAE FYC

 

To set off 2024, we bring you OJAE FYC. From painting in the early days of the Freedom Tunnel, to skating at opening-day of NYC's first skatepark (Mullaly), OJAE's history in both graffiti and skating runs deep. And, if you ever wondered if his tag was skate related (I sure did), read on to find out.   

What did you get into first, skateboarding or graffiti?

I got into graffiti first, but skateboarding kind of at the same time. About 1986 I was returning home to the Upper West Side from living in a bunch of different foster homes on Long Island, and the first thing that I saw was graffiti. And it really piqued my interest. Then I somehow wound up with a skateboard. First I was into BMX because everybody in the neighborhood had a bike. That's how we got around as kids. And we made little ramps and stuff. Originally I'm from the Amsterdam Projects, then I was living on 78th and West End. I went to P.S. 87 - if you're from the Upper West Side, you know what that school is. I had a skateboard and there was this young woman who took a liking to me and started to tell me about her boyfriend who was very much into skateboarding. Her boyfriend turned out to be Andy Kessler. They both understood that my life wasn't in a good place, so they kind of took an interest in me and took me with them to do things. It got to a point where I'd spend weekends in Andy's house. One day Andy and I went to Mullaly Skatepark. I was about 12 or 13, and it was like day one of the park opening. There was a contest going on that we went to check out. At the skatepark, I ran into this dude Greg from midtown Manhattan. Greg was with this quiet white kid, who ended up being Kaz. Instantaneously Kaz and I formed a bond. Since Andy was a lot older and mostly skating ramps, and Kaz was my age and lived relatively close to me, Kaz ended up being my "in" to the skate world. He'd come up and skate the Museum of Natural History with me, and this shallow flat bank on 96th & Columbus and Lincoln Center and all that. Then he would take me to all the Midtown spots: Fuji, Paine Webber, CBS, the Bubble Banks, and other spots. 

 

From writing to skating, OJAE stays up on walls. Marriott Hotel, 1991

 

And of course there was the Brooklyn Banks and the whole World Trade Center area and the Wall Street area. Back then, that area was dead as a door nail on the weekends; all you saw was skateboarders down there. It kind of paralleled the video game 720: you go to a skate spot in the game and it would just be kids skating around. That was the start of it all. As I got more immersed into this with Kaz, I kind of piqued his curiosity with the graffiti. We already formed a relationship with skating, so in a sense he became my graffiti partner. We skateboarded and wrote graffiti together. This was at such a golden moment in NYC skateboarding because at that moment from what I remember skateboarding didn't really exist anywhere. You were kind of an outcast if skating was your thing. It wasn't understood and there wasn't much of it. The irony of it is that it was already so big while it was underground. You know, there was OD's skateshop in Midtown, then SHUT emerged, then Benji's skateshop. At the same time Skate NYC and SOHO skates were both on their way out. You had pockets of kids from different neighborhoods with the same interest who knew about all the same spots. So like on a Friday or Saturday night when you'd go to the Fuji building, there was no more LES kids or UWS kids, it was just straight up one big motley crew of skaters. I don't think I've ever seen any other sport or activity where people are such individuals yet so welcoming and mentoring of one another. There was no "you suck, get out of here!" We might make fun of you, but it wasn't done maliciously. It eventually formed this ill skateboard community that was long in existence before Zoo York (the board company) came along and really blew things up and put skating on the map. I grew up a couple blocks away from Eli Gesner, who I skated with a lot. He was sponsored by Z, so he'd hook me up with boards. And you couldn't buy them in NYC, so for me that made it a little extra dope to have them. 

 

50th Street 1 train station. 1991

 

How did you get your tag?

There was a neighborhood guy who originally wrote Chooch 156. Crazy dude. I met him when I was like 9, and he was like 15 or 16. Later he changed his tag to Ment TDS. You know the documentary Dark Days? Well, there's two younger white dudes in it. One of them just comes home from jail, and there's a scene where he's washing in the water falling from above. That's Chooch 156/Ment TVS. So if you go back through that film, you'll see I've got tags in his room underground. And he's the one that opened the door for me, graffiti wise. Like Kaz pulled me further into skateboarding, Ment pulled me further into graffiti. A lot of the first dudes I met in graffiti were from 156 crew: Praise, Design, Chow, Omni. Jon had already gone to Paris. But there was also the CM crew from the neighborhood. I went to school with Kev CM, whose brother was NICEO. So that's who I really first linked with, you know NICEO, Devs, Kev, Bens, those are really the first people I started venturing out writing graffiti with. But Ment saw me with the skateboard and it had OJ wheels, so he gave me the name OJ. Originally it was just the O and the J. Briefly it was OJAY. Then a very old friend of mine, Dos AOK, would give me all these hand styles, and he started writing it with an E, and it stuck. 

 

OJAE tags in the documentary Dark Days

 

I was going to ask, but you just answered: did you ever ride OJ wheels?

My first board was given to me by Andy Kessler. It was a Sam Cunningham Blockhead with 179 Indys and OJ II team riders. And I loved those wheels. 

 

OJAE ollies the CBS ledge. 1991

 

What's unique about your throw up is that you do the second letter first. Like Smith does his M first, you do your J first. How did you come up with that?

Progression. If you look at a lot of my first throw ups, the J goes behind the O. Or it's squished in and the proportions aren't right. Over years of doing it, I finally realized that I should do the J first to make it stick out and look like a J as opposed to getting shoved behind the O and you're like, "what is that?" 

What's the story behind your crew FYC?

I got this dear friend that I met in high school, he writes Care HR, IBM, his crew is FY. He was much older than I was, and I thought FY was so dope. I wanted to be down, but I wasn't going to ask, "can I be down?" So I made FYC, kind of in my head like, "fuck your crew, I'm, making my own crew." At first, me and Kaz had BHC. Big Hooter Crew. Big Hoochie Coochie. But then I formed FYC and I stuck with it. Now I think the oldest FYC tag is from '91. FYC is not a traditional crew where you have a gang of people who are affiliated and they hang out. If someone pushes FYC, then I have formed a brotherly bond with them and consider them family. There are many people who push FYC who have never met each other, and they are all over the place: Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Florida, other countries. Ultimately, FYC is a representation of me: Forever Young and Crazy. 

 

OJAE and Kaz up in the Freedom Tunnel

 

Who did you look up to in skateboarding?

I'm pretty sure my first skate video was Public Domain. That first scene with Ray Barbee and them... I still have that song burnt in my head. When I was young, I recorded that song ten times in a row on a tape, and I would play and skate as fast as I could down Broadway, weaving around people, ollieing off and up curbs. So my first major impression was Ray Barbee. Also Mike Vallely and Ray Underhill. Then when H-Street's Hokus Pokus came out, that seemed to really blow the doors off of things. The Donger was insane; he was more my style of skating. I liked to skate big and fast, I wasn't the best at all the technical tricks. But I was good at gaps, steps, handrails, ollieing trash cans and shit like that. I used to like skating the steps at the Museum of Natural History and ollieing the chain to the drop, which was easier than the steps, but scarier. 

Who did you see up a lot when you first got into graffiti?

When I first started writing, I lived a couple blocks from the Freedom Tunnels, which no one knew about, yet everyone knew about. When you walk down from Riverside Drive and 72nd St., and keep walking down into the park to the boat basin, to the right of all that was an old on ramp or off ramp to the highway, and there was nothing keeping people from going back there. But only homeless people and graffiti writers went back there. You just turn a corner and you're in one of the most sacred places to write graffiti and not have to worry. So I spent all my free time there. As I hung out there, people would come and go to paint, so I had the opportunity to meet so many different people. The first people I saw up in my neighborhood was Omni 156, Tao, Hangman, Seal, obviously Niceo and Devs, all them CM dudes. So that's all my very first influence. Plus, the 156 guys, but they were sort of on their way out. Trains were finishing up and benching the trains and wanting to go and do pieces was kind of fading away. Graffiti was transferring to the streets. I got to meet Chama WKS and Part TDS down in the tracks. Which at the time when I met them, I had no idea who these guys were. I was like 11 or 12 years old and they let me hang out with them the whole day. I got real cool with Chama, who was inspirational in a way because he was like, "when I come back I want to see huge tags, top to bottom! Throw ups on all the gates!" It's crazy how it came full circle, because I thought I'd never seen either one of those guys again. But more than 20 years later I ran into Chama and Part on Instagram, after putting in all this work, and they remembered me. Same thing with Kel1st and Mare 139. Around the corner from me on 77th and Broadway is a place called the Belleclaire Hotel. It was a shady place full of prostitutes and drug dealers. It was a weekly or SRO. Before it was a weekly, some people lived in there. I met this kid that lived in there. We became real close, like brothers. It got to the point where I would stay in his house instead of mine. His mom knew a lot of "it" people. The neighbor down the hall from us was this guy named Adolfo, and I guess he was some famous artist. We used to go to his house to chill. It was crazy, in the midst of this shit hole hotel, he had this ill four-bedroom apartment. He had these three friends that would come over all the time, who ended up being Mare 139, Kel1st, and Kel's girlfriend at the time, Debi Mazar. Now I'm hanging with those three on a daily/weekly basis. Kel spoke to me a lot about graffiti. I wish I still had all the outlines he did for me. So those are all the begining influences. Then obviously JA and Reas and Ghost. Then in high school and the late '90s I started meeting more people. Up in Spanish Harlem like Dreads NIW, Cue, Kep, ARS dudes. They're all derivatives of SM, Dobe, those guys, Spawn GNR, Jover, Aver, Joves, all of them dudes. And then what does skateboarding do? It brings you to the village. I met Cash and CA in the Freedom Tunnels, they were a little younger than I was. But I already knew Rast and his brother, AOS. Before skateboarding, my thing was ice skating. I would go to Wollman Rink all the time. And I knew Rast and AOS from ice skating, from when we were mad young. Now I run back into them in this RFC circle. It's crazy how these things come full circle. Another example, as I got older, I started hanging out with all these private school kids because of the building that I lived in. There was a dude who wrote Phed, I met him between 96th street and 86th street on the 1 train, there's a famous station called Ghost Town. I met him there one night painting by myself, and we became friends. Now with this circle of private school kids, I run into him there. Like, "oh shit, what's up?" Same thing with RFC. I already know Harold and Casper from skating, now I know them through RFC. Another person that I met early, early on, who I used to skate with all the time, was this kid named Ryan Sikorski. He's the owner and founder of Fat Beats. He and his buddies used to come over from New Jersey all the time and sleep at my house. The first time they came to my house-because I lived on the 15th floor-the first thing they wanted to do was throw shit out the window. We threw a skateboard wheel out the window and it hit the windshield of a taxi cab, bounces off the windshield and hits some dude in the back of the thigh and he dropped from an ill charlie horse! 

 

OJAE and Kaz along the Hudson Valley line. Peep the reflection in the puddle.

 

What is it about these two subcultures that they attract a lot of the same people?

Although the worlds are so far apart, they're also parallel. Most people who write graffiti and/or skateboard come from a shitty household or bad circumstances. With those two outlets comes so much; it's a big bang for your buck. It's therapy, it's a supporting community, you're a rebel, you feel like a badass, and it's an uplifting feeling to be a part of because no one else is a part of it. It's the mischievousness about it. Rolling around with a gang of kids skateboarding we were definitely terrorizing shit - running into people and running into stores and snatching shit and running out. Same thing with graffiti: bringing everybody together and when everybody's together everyone wants to wil' out and be bad. It was acting out against whatever circumstances you have going on. As you get older, it can be a positive thing in your life. It doesn't have to be so wild and outlawish as it was when you were younger. Painting and making art is therapeutic, as is skateboarding. You kind of get the same feeling of accomplishment out of both. Progressing and getting better at both makes you feel good. Another thing with both skating and graffiti, as well as being participants, we're also fans. I'm a big fan of other people doing graffiti. 

 

 

In skating it's not cool to film at skateparks. In graffiti it's not cool to paint legal walls. So are legal walls the graff equivalent of skatepark footage?

I stopped skating in 2004 due to a car accident. I went to press the brake at the point of impact. But the impact shoved the motor and everything in, which ended up wrecking my ankle. With that car accident, there goes skateboarding for the rest of my life. But I can agree in the sense that if you're going to film some skating, film something that's going to stand out. Film something that you found in the street so there's more substance to the content. As for legal walls, there's nothing wrong with them. I say it all the time: if you like to put stickers up, if you like to draw artsy fartsy shit, you like to paint legal walls, you like to bomb streets and tear it up, or if you like to film at skateparks, whatever it is you do, be true to it and own it. Don't paint legal walls and then talk about how you're up everywhere and kill shit, acting like you're a graffiti vandal when you're not. If you can't be true to what you do, then why should I give you respect for what you do? And that point applies to everything in life. 

Last question: will you hit my book?

Of course!