I was cleaning out a coat closet at my apartment this week when I discovered this sticker book. It has a long history! When I was 16 and living in Park Slope, I met a girl named Rachel at a youth group mixer at Garfield Temple. She was 15, pretty and intense, and had very hip taste in music: Paul's Boutique, punk rock, that one good song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, etc. We dated for about a year and had a good time—she ran with a group of girls who mostly went to Midwood, and we'd throw house parties when people's parents were away, and my friends from Stuyvesant and Bronx Science would come and we'd all drink Budweiser we bought at the one bodega that would sell to us.
I was into graffiti then: It was enjoying a brief resurgence in the early '90s, and my friends and I would go out tagging in Chelsea and sometimes do more elaborate pieces in parking lots. At home, I covered my whole room in graffiti, which my parents somehow allowed. Rachel wasn't that into graffiti, but she did like stickers. This is right around the time Shepard Fairey first started doing stuff outside Providence, and she collected those stickers and other ones and decorated her room with them.
We broke up the summer after I graduated from Stuy. I was miserable because I realized a bit too late that I wanted to stay in New York for school, but hadn't applied to any schools here, and was generally too much of a depressive drag that summer to be around. It was pretty sad and we didn't talk to each other for a long time after that.
We reconnected a few years later, after I transferred back to Columbia, when I noticed some of the stickers I'd put up for our graffiti crew by the 7th Avenue F stop kept getting covered up by other stickers, which it turned out Rachel and her friends were making. That led to some emailing, and eventually, becoming friends again.
Years later, when Rachel moved to Boston to do a neuroscience PHD program, she was clearing out her apartment in Brooklyn, and remembered how much I liked graffiti, and gave me this book she'd created when her parents made her take down all her stickers when she left for college. I meant to scan it and put it on Flickr with all my graffiti photography, but somehow never got around to it— I guess I felt like it was too nostalgic and I didn't want to think so much about the past. But this week I decided to finally do it.
Looking through the book, I rediscovered a lot of stickers I'd forgotten. Not just the Obey stuff, but also lots of other graffiti, like Stem's masterful take on the Mets logo, and lots of fun stuff from bands and local clubs. It's a real record of the street vibe of the middle 90s. Rachel also sent me a couple of pictures of the stickers in her room, so you can see how it originally looked there. She turned out fine, by the way—she married a doctor and still lives in Boston, and we still see each other once or twice a year to catch up and talk about Park Slope stuff.
