This was his first big tag. So he lied and told his parents he was sleeping at a buddy's, when instead he drove to a field off Speer Boulevard.
There he and three friends unloaded a few dozen spray cans and some forty-ounce bottles of beer. Then they went to work on the side of the bridge.
It was midnight, pitch black, and every so often they had to flick on the car headlights to see what they were doing. At any minute they expected to get busted.
After five hours, they stood back in the weeds and admired their work: four street names, painted eight feet high in jagged graffiti script.
Beside his tag, Jher wrote the date--May 3, 1993. Beside that he left a declaration: "Consider this an introduction to last."
In 1997 Denver spent $1.25 million removing graffiti from public and private property. Work crews painted over 850,000 square feet of scribble. Police filed 10,000 reports of graffiti vandalism. Detectives compiled a list of 800 known taggers. This month Mayor Wellington Webb declared war on graffiti. Taggers belong in jail, he says.
It's a Sunday, around 11 a.m. Jher kneels between the potholes of an alley off Ogden Street and 13th Avenue, rattling a can of Krylon.
"This is my name here," he says, tracing the letters on the brick wall. "You kind of have to know what you're looking for. If you're not used to it, it's kind of hard to see."
He outlines the "J" in bright blue, and the letter pops out from the back wall of the Penn Garage.
"You just go with the flow," he says. "Freestyle."
Jher is one of Denver's most notorious graffiti writers. His murals and cartoon characters have appeared on dozens of walls, from Federal Boulevard to the 16th Street Mall. His work has been featured in graffiti magazines. His tags have traveled coast to coast on the side of freight trains.
His crew, RTD, has attained legendary status in both the underground world of hip-hop and the second-floor office of the Denver Police Department's property-crimes unit.
"I'm an artist," Jher says. "I just want to paint."
On this morning, Jher's lanky frame is drapped in the usual baggy jeans, baggy T-shirt, basketball sneakers and backward baseball cap. He has a temporary tattoo of a Mickey's beer logo on his forearm, a pack of Kamels in his pocket and a thin black beard outlining his thin face.
He's an easygoing if intense kid who considers himself something of a philosopher. He thinks a lot about graffiti. He even lectured about it at the Denver Youth Summit.
What's happening today is getting out of hand, he says. The more penalties that are passed, the more taggers rebel. Pretty soon some thirteen-year-old is going to get shot and killed over a spray can.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
"All it takes," he says, "is an open mind."
And an open wall.
Jher grew up in Vista, a suburb of San Diego. Unlike the New York City teens who popularized graffiti in the Seventies, he wasn't poor, disadvantaged or alienated. He attended good schools, had friends, got much of what he wanted. His home life wasn't perfect, but he didn't have it as hard as the kids in the Bronx.
When he visited Los Angeles with his friends, he became intrigued by the graffiti along the freeways and drainage ditches. It was like a mysterious language, an entrance to another world. He wanted to belong.
When he moved to Denver six years ago at age fifteen, Jher was already skateboarding and had the ragged hairstyle, oversized jeans and counterculture attitude that went along with it.
"I'd be out there just trying to have a good time, and people would look down on me and give me tickets and stuff," Jher says. "Adults would get so childish about something so stupid as skateboarding. That's when my ideas about things started to change."
Jher entered the local graffiti subculture like most kids do: as a tagger, a toy, scribbling without style or conviction, marking traffic signs, trains, dumpsters, billboards, whatever. Back then, that's all that mattered: writing as often as possible, getting noticed by friends.
When he was tagging, he felt as though he were on a secret mission. He walked in shadows, dressed in dark clothes. Being part of the crew was like being in a gang. It had that sense of belonging, that feeling of family.
His dad said, "No. Don't do that." But it only made him want to tag more. After a while, it became who he was.
Graffiti had its own vocabulary, like "toss-ups," "fill-ins" and "fat caps"; its own ethics, like not writing over work that's better than yours; its own Internet sites and national magazines. There were special places, like the abandoned sewage plant off 50th Avenue and Washington Street, where taggers gathered to practice, check out the competition and battle for respect.
Graffiti even had its own hierarchy. At the bottom were taggers. Next came bombers, then writers and, finally, kings, who'd mastered all styles of writing. Kings spent most of their time crafting masterpieces, which showcased everything a writer could have: intricate lettering, outlandish cartoon characters, realistic portraits.
