The Return of Shades

continued

house Grizzly Peak.

"I'm what you call up-and-coming," says Agee, a thirty-nine-year-old Detroiter. "When I was younger, I could have been where I'm at right now, but I was into too much bullshit--drinking, partying."

He was in middle school when a friend showed him how to create curvy "bubble" letters in spray paint, and after drawing them on paper for a few years, he started tagging buildings near his father's store on the east side of Detroit. His father, since deceased, was a jazz saxophonist who sold incense and candles and was big in the city's hippie counterculture--"John Sinclair was my godparent," Agee says.

He got his first commission "doing the elevator walls in Trapper's Alley." With a $300 budget for supplies, he bought Krylon paint in "every color I could find," plus a respirator to protect himself from the fumes. That led to other commissions, but his partying ways eventually got the better of him. By age thirty-two, Agee had married, had two kids, and had divorced. He knew he had to get help when he woke up one morning drunk, hopeless, and covered in cat hair in some woman's apartment.