Describe the scene for us back then. Who were you running with?

I had a good friend of mine who wrote LUST. He was a roommate and a buddy. We were always up to no good. Graffiti was part of our no good. We used to roll independent. We had crazy friends. I knew a lot of people and got to meet a lot of people, but I didn’t really roll that way. I’ve been in the yard with all these guys and had little spurts and experiences, but I wasn’t rolling with this or that certain crew. I was really more self-experimenting.

What other trouble did that lead to?

When you’re seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, that sort of trouble.

You don’t want to get more specific than that?

No—the usual antics of being a city kid, really. You can fill in the blanks. Too many people glorify it, and I’m not into that. I’m old now. (laughs) Been there, done that. By the time my kids get to the point of bullshitting, I’ll have heard everything by then. They won’t be able to pull the wool over my eyes.

Why did you go with the name STASH?

It’s the dumbest thing in the world. As a city kid, I shared a room with my brother in a two-bedroom apartment with a single mom. I always used to hide my shit and then get freaked the fuck out thinking that he took it when I couldn’t remember where I hid it. That’s where I learned the word stash—like “stop stashing your shit.” I kind of almost credit my brother in a way. Everybody thinks it’s a drug reference or that they know where it came from because of the connotation. I actually started writing graf before I even knew anything about illicit drugs.

What was the first thing you hit?

It was the inside of our apartment building. We lived in a city building and it had thesereally nice fireproof paint stairways, and that’s when we were inventing our markers. We would put all these things together to make markers. It was all art shit, but we made markers out of it. We used to just bomb the stairways and kill the insides of these buildings. Then it was mailboxes—anything with a smooth surface. I sort of gradually started feeling out how to do things.