Spray My Rage
By Caitlin Dewey
Shortly before dawn on June 15, 2009, 19-year-old Jordan Wood paced the roof of The Westcott Theater, too wasted to remember how he got there. He had just finished painting his tag, JDK—short for “Just Don't Kare” or “Jeffrey Dahmer’s Kid”—on several small restaurants and shops in the area. But spraying brick walls and alleyways that were hardly seen denied Wood the thrill, the heady self-satisfaction, that came from tagging riskier targets. With 12 beers and 13 prescription anxiety pills running through his system, Wood climbed the drainage pipe in the alleyway between The Westcott Theater and University Christian Fellowship, pulled himself onto the theater’s wrought-iron balcony, and scrambled atop the air conditioner at the far left corner of the building.
From that vantage point, he made his largest and most permanent mark on Westcott Street: a 10-foot-tall neon-orange JDK written in bloated bubble letters.
Wood downed enough cheap beer and anti-anxiety drugs to black out most of what happened that night, but he remembers finishing his work and standing at the very edge of the roof, staring into the dark street. Despite the summer heat, he wore a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, his buzzed hair and low forehead hidden. His slight frame almost disappeared in the dark.
The anonymity produced a sharp, euphoric feeling: he was, in his own words, “the king of the fucking world.”
The next morning, Wood woke up with a hangover in the Syracuse Justice Center. A year and a half after becoming Syracuse’s most hated tagger, Wood smiles at the memory of that night and wrinkles his eyebrows when I ask if he regrets it.
In the past four years, Jordan Wood has been charged 21 times for graffiti, vandalism, and related crimes. He has caused some $25,000 in damages and made headlines on six occasions. Before Wood, graffiti kept a pretty low profile in Central New York. Most taggers belong to in-groups called crews, said Sgt. D.J. Pauldine, a Syracuse Police Department graffiti specialist. Crews operate under a strict code: no tagging homes or small businesses. No covering someone else's tag. No ratting. No getting caught.
The rules generally keep crews off Pauldine’s radar. Instead, they head to spots like Interstate 690, the underside of the Franklin Square Bridge, and the West Side Wall bordering the West Fayette train tracks. Here, taggers can “write” without attracting the attention of the general public or causing the type of private property damage that spurs crackdowns and cleanups. It’s indicative that Syracuse’s graffiti taskforce, which Pauldine co-founded in 1990, fell dormant in 2001. Pauldine estimates that only six crews remain active in Syracuse. In reality, Wood and several other taggers agreed upwards of nine or ten crews currently operate. Among them, MVP and H2K attract the most attention. Until last year, so did Wood’s Spray My Rage, or SMR.
SMR did not begin as a graffiti crew. Before Wood and his high school friends took to tagging, they assembled in his friend Doug Hague’s basement to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, smoke pot, play videogames and chat. But the routine wore thin for Wood and his friends, a feeling that Jeff Ferrell, a criminology professor at Texas Christian University and a former graffiti artist, can sympathize with. “We live in a culture defined by risk management and bureaucratic rules,” he said. “It’s a system of boredom, fed by fake excitements like video games. Graffiti writers are desperately bored. Often, they’re just looking for an authentic experience.” Once they find such an experience, Ferrell continued, it’s difficult to give up.
Tagging quickly grew into a habit for Wood and his crew. On an average night, the boys descended on Walmart or Home Depot and stole as many paint cans as they could fit into a backpack. They returned to Hague’s house and downed beers stolen from Wegmans or someone’s mom’s refrigerator. Once they were drunk, they drove out to the water towers or to the thruway and took turns tagging—on empty walls, on buildings, on top of other writers’ tags, or murals.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” Wood said, eyes squinted slightly. “Someone might have a better style than you, a style that they took a year to learn. They may have painted something that took them hours—but in 15 minutes, I can destroy it. I can make it like it wasn’t there. And I did it all the time.”
Wood says SMR operated the same way as other crews. But competitors saw them, especially Wood, as rogues—a bunch of guys who didn’t play by the rules. “He’s a big sack of shit and I hate him,” wrote Tyler D’Huey, a 14-year-old crew member, in a YouTube message. “I hate that guy and I’m glad he’s locked up,” wrote another. “The dude was the biggest asshole ever with no respect for anything or anyone. Plus he sucked.”
In September 2009, Wood’s relationship with rival crews almost turned violent. Wood and Hague emerged from Trexx, a downtown nightclub, and found five members of H2K waiting outside. While Wood searched for a weapon—he traded his knife for two shots and a couple Ativans earlier that evening—Hague and his mother screamed H2K down.
By this time, Wood was drunk more often than he was sober. He drank his first beer at an age when most children still think the other sex has cooties. A chubby, friendless kid who grew up pining for his absent alcoholic father and second-shift mom, Wood began drinking at age 12. That same year, he repeated the seventh grade and underwent a psychiatric evaluation for what his private school teachers worried were “suicidal tendencies.”
Growing up, Wood switched schools and neighborhoods often. His mother worked at Catholic Charities during the day and as a cleaning lady by night. Wood started washing his own clothes and cooking for himself when he was seven years old. That year, he told his mother he wanted to kill himself. The psychologist she brought him to became the first of many to diagnose Wood with clinical depression. Family history and mental health issues rank among the top risk factors for developing alcoholism, said Susan Scholl, a professor in Syracuse University’s Addictions Program and a veteran addictions counselor. “Prognostically speaking,” Scholl said, “the cards were always stacked against him.”
By the time Wood entered high school, he regularly drank, smoked pot and cigarettes, and popped drugs like Xanax, Valium, and Atavan. During the summer, he started drinking when his mom left for work and continued until he went to bed. He was drunk and stoned for weeks at a time. What he could not by from dealers or friends, he stole from supermarkets and big box stores.
In some ways, drinking helped numb Wood’s social insecurity and supplemented the antidepressants that never quite made him feel better. But chemical dependency also tends to amplify underlying issues, Scholl said. Wood had been getting into fistfights since middle school, but in September 2008, the violence became more severe. In a drunken argument with his then-girlfriend, Wood pulled a steak knife from his pocket and demanded that she kill him. When she refused, he held the knife to her neck instead.
Like most of the girls Wood has threatened or hurt, his girlfriend did not break up with him—even after he drunkenly shoved her to the ground at Trexx and left threatening voicemails on her answering machine. The mother of his current girlfriend, 17-year-old Brooke Kluskie, filed a restraining order against him after he beat Kluskie up in September 2008. But when Wood and I met for the first time, Kluskie came with him, following a step behind and holding his hand.
As soon as Wood went to the bathroom, she recounted the drunken argument when, after a prolonged screaming match, he shoved her against his bed and hit her repeatedly. He returned just as she started to cry, her huge, mascara-ringed eyes pooling at the corners.
“I did think he might kill me,” she stammered, glancing from Wood to the table and back again. “But I really love him, you know? I love him so much. He just became a different person when he was drunk.”
He held eye contact with Kluskie, unblinking and unsmiling, until she finished the story and gave him a watery smile. He muttered something dark about regret and the evils of alcoholism. Wood can’t remember whether or not he covered Kluskie’s mouth during their struggle, a critical detail in the still-open case.
Before Kluskie, Wood dated an ingenuous girl named Sierra Dell, whom he wrote daily telling her how much he loved her and detailing his ambitions, sexual fantasies and frustrations in jail. Dell deposited hundreds of dollars into his Justice Center commissary account, answered each of his letters, stood outside his window in the rain and sent him nude pictures of herself when he begged for them. A week after he got out, Wood dumped her unceremoniously.
“How do you justify what you did to her?” I asked him, three days after Dell told me, near tears, that she still thinks he’s a good person.
“Well, I mean, once I wasn’t drinking every day, like once I spent time with her sober, I realized we had nothing in common,” he said. He dropped that line in a letter he sent Dell from rehab on October 20: “To much alcohol clouded my mind and sight from what I truely wanted [sic],” he wrote.
“But you weren’t drinking in jail,” I reminded him. “You know, when you asked her to put all that money in your commissary account, and when you were writing letters saying you loved her and were going to change for her and stuff.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, stretching uneasily. “But when you put it like that, I sound like an asshole.”
According to the literature I pick up at Wood’s Tuesday meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program only works for people who admit to things like being an asshole. Wood sits against the back wall, arms crossed, face neutral. The group meets in a dingy second-floor conference room at the Montgomery Street YMCA and draws a mixed crowd—grizzly seniors in cheap sweaters, a few motorcycle buffs with large tattoos, and a clique of young guys like Wood who yawn a lot and say they’re “just here to listen.”
Some of the people at the meeting have lost their families or their jobs. A Hispanic man wearing a gigantic silver crucifix recounts how he totaled his car, drunk, with his small child in the backseat. Wood stares at the floor. The two guys next to him text or sleep through half the meeting and pass on sharing when the group leader calls them out. But Wood, to my surprise, introduces himself and tells a story about his mother.
“I can relate to what everyone’s been saying,” he says, his eyes scanning the room. “I used to steal money from my mom’s purse to buy alcohol. And when she started putting her money in a lock box, I broke into it—safety pins, screwdriver, hammer, I found a way. And I don’t know if she’ll ever trust me again.”
“Thank you, Jordan,” the room says when he’s finished.
After the meeting, Wood and I walk to Freedom of Espresso where he orders the largest coffee on the menu. “This and eBay are my new addictions,” he tells me. He offers to pay for my drink, and when he opens his wallet, I notice a picture of his baby niece inside. He wrote to Dell once explaining that he wanted to take his niece places and teach her things, the same way his older brother did for him. But he also told Dell she was the love of his life.
That title belongs to Kluskie now, and as soon as the two of them can roll back the restraining order, they want to move in together. Wood imagines going to school one day to become an English teacher. At one point, he planned to get a tattoo of Jay Gatsby—an idealistic, misguided man just trying to fight his way through a world better than the one he came from. Wood assures me that he’s happy now, though. He’s happy with Brooke. He’s happy sober. He left his bad habits and addictions behind.
“So you’re not tagging anymore, right?” I ask.
He balances his chin on his coffee cup, looking down at the table, that old smirk sneaking across his face.
“Sorry, I can’t answer that question.”