The locals say a kid named Little Matt is behind it. Aside from the usual targets of dumpsters, walls and light poles, taggers like Milk have bombed the ever living hell out of most anything on State St. that will hold ink: air conditioning units, soda machines, store front windows and doors, business signs, awnings, you name it.

New Brookland Tavern taking the heat

It’s a breezy and idyllic April day on State Street in West Columbia. Couples ease back with late lunches in front of Cafe Strudel and watch the birds on the river, while the bearded and bespectacled get jacked on caffeine and poke around with college philosophy assignments at House Coffee. Meanwhile, down a side alley and unbeknownst to the general clientele, a cop with a clipboard and a reporter with a cheap haircut lean forward to squint closely at a fresh piece of graffiti.
“I don’t know what that is, but it’s sure not anything good,” Detective David Myers says, observing a large scribble that, to my eyes, looks like an amoeba wearing a Hell’s Angels patch. The word “fetus” is written nearby. Myers shrugs and begins to takes notes for his report and I leave him to his work.
State Street has always had as much graffiti as any other side of town; most any urban area in the U.S. does. But, lately, I had to admit, the bright storefronts overlooking the Congaree were beginning to look particularly beleaguered, more resembling a hack Lower East Side than a Vista West shopping row.
Misty Claire, owner of the Middle Way, is at her wit’s end but keeps her composure while pointing out the dozens of tags on the side of her building. “There’s this guy who likes to draw these brain-looking things,” she says nodding toward a scribbled monstrosity. “He wrote on my building one time, ‘I want to be what killed the dinosaurs,’ whatever that means.”
Misty points out a large building with a sidewall facing the parking lot behind New Brookland Tavern. “Wayne Skipper, who owns that building, has had to paint it like five times in the last two months. That,” she says, indicating six-foot tall balloon letters spray painted in white, “was just done last night.”
“Yeah,” Mike Lyons, an owner of New Brookland Tavern, says of the building later. “Mr. Skipper painted it over and two days later it got tagged again.”
I notice that I literally can’t look to the horizon in any direction without seeing the word “Milk” alongside a sort of modernized “Kilroy was Here” type of design slapped up everywhere. The locals say a kid named Little Matt is behind it. Aside from the usual targets of dumpsters, walls and light poles, taggers like Milk have bombed the ever living hell out of most anything on State St. that will hold ink: air conditioning units, soda machines, store front windows and doors, business signs, awnings, you name it. A miniscule percentage of it is half-passable graffiti art; the bulk of it is the same old, uninspired tagging with Sharpies that was outdated in Columbia 15 years ago. Lately, though, the tags have been coming with added bonuses in the form of smashed windows and trashed awnings.
After Detective Myers concludes his investigation for the day, some hipster kids and I head back to the alley for a closer look at the amoeba tag.
“Hmm, I’ve never seen that one before,” the guy says. The girl agrees: he’s a new one. They recognize a tag down the way that belongs to “Wolf Kid.” One of them regards the “Learn” tag with disdain. “That guy’s a douche bag,” she says. “Oh, and there’s ‘Ad Star.’” I wait for her appraisement. “Douche bag,” she declares after a moment. They don’t seem terribly concerned about the tags on the alley wall, but both agree that the tags on the doors and signage are taking it a bit too far.
Misty Claire was able to use acetone to get the half dozen “Milk” tags off of the door to her shop. Kitty Mirosavich at House Coffee used it on her sign too, though the images are still faintly visible. So far, Misty has spent hundreds of dollars cleaning up after the vandals and the tags keep coming back. She and her husband, at the end of their rope, are now offering a $500 reward for information leading to Little Matt’s arrest and conviction.
West Columbia police currently have Detective Myers working the case. According to Major Jackie Brothers, the recent spike in graffiti is more widespread and not relegated to State St. These spikes in activity, she says, are indicative of new blood in the graffiti world. “But, it’s not just tagging, now,” she says. “It’s damage to property.”
“I almost dread coming to work,” Claire told me, “because I wonder, ‘What’s next? I hope my signs are still there. I hope my planters in front are still there. I hope they haven’t broken out the windows in the back again.’” 
Most of the ire of the business owners is directed at New Brookland Tavern, even though they don’t seem to have any more to do with the graffiti that any one else and have to spend money to repaint their vandalized building, too, or risk being ticketed by the city.
“Well, it’s the crowd they cater to,” says Claire, “not the owners.”
“I know the last time I caught someone tagging our building out back it was a kid who’s come to shows at New Brookland Tavern, but he was not a customer of ours that night,” Mike Lyons says. “In fact, he had been sitting down at the coffee house for five hours.”
The businesses—New Brookland Tavern included—have to pay fines to the city if they don’t paint over the tags in a specified amount of time. And then, Lyons says, they’re just going to tag over it again until the police catch the guy. New Brookland Tavern is planning to put up a $200 award that leads to a conviction of the worst tagger, most likely Milk. He says are they’ve considered putting up security cameras in the back of their building, too. But, he says, anyone on the block could put up cameras, as easily as he, including the police. “Everyone points the finger at me, so I have to take care of it for them. I mean, at least, that’s the way I feel.”
Lyons says “Milk” originated down by the river. “Once you had more cops patrolling that area it slowly moved up here,” he says. “And you can find that tag halfway around West Columbia now.”
“I can go down to the coffee house and point at one or two guys who know,” Mike says. “Hands down, they know who the taggers are. And they won’t tell.”
“Since we first opened the bar, they [West Columbia] have been trying to shut us down,” Mike believes. “The mayor would send the cops over. When we first took the bar over, the cops would say, ‘Yeah, they told us we had to check by every hour and try to find something to bust you on.’”
“We’re a rock-n-roll venue in an area where they don’t want a rock-n-roll venue,” Mike says, “and so they’ve been trying to find a way to shut us down and this time it’s graffiti.”
Eventually, the taggers will start college or move away or suffer an arrest or, worse, suffer some street justice if they make it easier for the city to force a great music venue like New Brookland to be shut down.
Just like skateboarders learned not to tag public skate spots due to the unwanted attention it would draw, many who enjoy hanging out on State St. wish taggers wouldn’t mess it up for the rest of them. Or, as one put it, repeating sage advice that’s been passed down through the ages: “You don’t shit where you eat.”

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anon.   |2008-04-30 16:28:44 milk is crap. even writers think so. they need to catch that kid. Reply | Quote 0   0

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