COMA & NORE

Coma & Nore in Clout #5 | Click here to purchase this issue!
By Roger Gastman | Photo by Christina Garcia

Even though Washington, DC is the nation’s capital, it’s actually a small city (roughly ten miles across) divided into four parts, NE, NW, SW and SE.  DC is a very confusing city to drive in, as all four sections have their own numbered streets.  For example, there is a 9th street located in both SE and NE. 70% of the population of less than one million is African American. Most people who spend time in DC - from tourists, to government workers, to stupid college kids only see about 25% of the city and a majority of them choose to live in either Maryland or Virginia. The other 75% of the District that goes unseen consists of neighborhoods, freeways, parks, and lots and lots of abandoned buildings, houses, and housing projects.

DC has not been known as the “Murder Capital of the United States” for years now.  This was a title its citizens proudly held for several years during late ‘80s and early ’90s. Vendors downtown sold T-shirts whose front read “Washington DC” and on the back bore bullet holes and the slogan “Sorry We Missed You.”  Crack cocaine reigned king of the streets during those years. In 1990, Mayor Marion Berry was caught in an undercover sting, smoking crack with a hooker in a cheap hotel room.  He was overhead on the surveillance tape proclaiming that the hooker was responsible for his demise, screaming, “The bitch set me up!”

Graffiti was never huge in DC, but it’s been prominent enough since 1984 when teenagers in local “Go-Go” crews began writing their names all over the busses and inner city walls. They were not writing graffiti for the reasons others around the country were. They were simply writing to boast their names and crews. Names such as “COOL CALM CHUCK, MONSTER, RE RANDY, and COOL ‘DISCO’ DAN” ruled the city. By the late ‘80s almost all of these “Go-Go” writers had given up writing on walls and busses and traded in their paint and markers for drug dealing, drug habits, jail, or the grave.

Traditional graffiti had caught on in DC by the late ‘80s. With JOKER, MESK, and WAKE forming MURDER CAPITOL ARTISTS and kinging the Red Line between Tacoma Park and Union Station for the daily commuters to see. Well-known writers such as CYCLE, SOPE, FELON, JASE and others started their careers on the violent streets of DC and by the early ‘90s DC had a small, but flourishing scene.

To be a well-respected writer one traditionally has to go “all city.” That is a task nearly impossible in DC. To become a well-respected writer in DC you put in your work in on the Metro train Red Line and its surrounding areas. The only hang over from the “Go-Go” era of graffiti was COOL “DISCO” DAN, whom was as close to a ghetto celebrity as one could be. His name was in so many places around DC that unless you were blind you could not go into the city without seeing it somewhere. The Washington Post wrote about him, he was talked about on the radio, he was the definition of old school DC graffiti, a time when real gangs ruled the streets and beef meant something different than a cross out war.

In the late ‘90s DC graffiti began to die out. Many writers had moved away from the city, and the younger ones were not pioneering new spots or doing anything innovative. Old Hall of Fames were buffed or became a bust. Regentrification made parts of the city that were once a home for graffiti untouchable. For the most part it seemed doubtful that DC would ever again see “real” bombers who would take the city back as their own and not be shook by the city’s up kept looks.

People popped up here and there, but for the most part, they were in it for a minute then disappeared. Either done with graffiti, happy with their few flicks or caught and scared. 9/11 brought what many thought would be an end to DC graffiti. DC already had an abundance of police and “special forces.” Now with even more heightened security, moving freely through the city to break laws was becoming an impossibility.

In their early twenties, both COMA and NORE caught the tail end of DC graffiti’s last decent years, and their tags and throw ups would pop up here and there. Mostly they concentrated on the highways between DC and Baltimore and the freights. Neither one of them really seemed interested on taking over the city.

In late 2002 something in their heads clicked and they declared all out war on DC. “DC is my toilet, I wanted to shit on DC,” COMA proudly states.  Never in the history of DC graffiti has the city been more damaged, never have there been more fills done by a crew, let alone a single person. With the exception of COOL “DISCO” DAN, whose legendary status could never be touched, COMA and NORE have taken the title of all out DC street kings. Throughout the year the two of them each did hundreds of fill-ins and thousands of tags.

COMA and NORE are true bombers, and their graffiti is everywhere. Neighborhoods that had never been touched by anything except local ghetto graffiti were getting crushed. “We didn’t really have to worry about the police that much in a lot of the places we were painting, it was more the neighborhood people we were afraid of,” NORE says. “The only people out in those places in the middle of the night are up to dirt of their own and don’t want us writing on ‘their’ turf.”

For over a year the city was theirs alone. From trendy club districts to burned out projects their fill-ins could be found. COMA and NORE were often chased, harassed by police, and hated on by locals. Other DC writers could not keep up and were amazed at the amount of damage that these two were putting on DC. They painted often four to five nights a week, not happy with the results of the evening unless that had done over a dozen fills together. 

Neither COMA nor NORE knew the city very well and that helped them stumble their way into places that had never been painted, bringing a new meaning to going all city in Washington DC.  “We were on Minnesota Avenue in SE doing fill-ins.  A local scoped us out and threw a bottle at us.  We were pretty sketched out so we went to the car.  After only a block or so, we got a flat tire.  We turned into a neighborhood to try and fix it, but there was no jack in the car.  We had no idea what to do, so we had to ask a cop for help.  We stashed our paint and went to find a cop.  We found one, but he slammed us face first onto the pavement.  Then he searched our pockets and cuffed us.  For over 20 minutes all they did was yell at us and ask us what kind of drugs we were trying to buy.  Finally they uncuffed us, called us stupid white boys and told us to walk home.”