Until that point, the only information you have to go on is the way a person dresses and talks, maybe the music they listen to. But being inside someone’s house, it’s intimate or something, like all of a sudden you have a whole new set of clues. I remember the first time I saw Rick’s apartment. He lived with his dad, who worked night shifts, so we would go there a lot. The first time he took me there, I remember noticing how dingy everything was. Not much furniture, dirty dishes in the sink, an overflowing ashtray in the middle of the coffee table. When he opened the fridge to grab us some beers, I noticed that there was almost no food. But it was his room that really caught me by surprise. The walls were covered with a giant graffiti mural in progress—he’d actually spray-painted the walls of their rental apartment. I’d never even heard of a thing like that. Obviously I knew that graffiti was his thing—that was how I had met him, standing around in the shadows, watching him and his buddies throw up a huge burner underneath an overpass.
