My Night with Ohurt

by Paul M. French

One of the city’s most prolific graffiti artists is a woman with a handle of pain.

The voice on the line shocks me. For weeks, I’d been tracking down the person responsible for a message I couldn’t escape. I saw it in Baker. I saw it in Cap Hill. Behind a high fence rolled with razor wire, in the upper part of RiNo where the mural-rich neighborhood relapses into grit, there it was: OHURT.

A message. But also a name, a persona. Self-promotion is rampant in graffiti culture. The more your name is “up,” the better. As I’m later told, “It’s like marketing without a college degree.” Graffiti artists compete for wall space the same way corporate brands muscle for airtime—one of these isn’t trying to sell you something, and that’s the one that’s illegal.

So when I started exchanging messages with Ohurt, it was a criminal I pictured—an image my mind and the world’s penal systems mostly code as male. But speaking to me late at night, from a blocked number, is the bright voice of a young woman. She laughs at my confusion and agrees to let me tag along.

A month later, Ohurt and her husband pick me up in an SUV en route to zones of vandalism. It’s about midnight, and I’m wearing dark clothes, as instructed. The weeds in the planters outside my complex bend with late winter gusts. I feel the chill enter my fingers and worry I didn’t layer properly, as instructed.

“Are you excited?” Ohurt’s husband asks me from the driver’s seat. The whole sequence makes me feel like a kid. In Ohurt’s world, that’s what I am though—despite her being about a decade my junior.

Ohurt is in her mid-twenties, and there’s absolutely nothing about her appearance that strikes me as tough. As she turns her head, I notice a bow in her hair, white ribbons falling down her back—ostentatiously girlish, the kind of thing you’d see a fourth grader wear on a field trip to the state fair.

“Yeah, I’ve never done anything like this before,” I admit.

We joke a bit about the risks of journalism. The SUV and the good humor of my subjects put me at ease, but I’d sent screenshots of my interactions with Ohurt to a close friend before heading out, just in case. “Writing is a contact sport,” Ohurt’s husband had said after joining us on that first phone call. In this context, “writing” meant graffiti, with artists referring to themselves as “writers.” By “contact sport,” he meant that violence is always a possibility.