The thick Brooklyn accent resonates through the cell phone. Almost immediately, graffiti artist Mike “Mr. Kaves” McLeer begins illustrating a place only a few have known.

“It’s like being inducted into a secret society of juvenile delinquents,” his raspy voice dictates. “You pay your dues and learn before you ever set foot in a tunnel. It’s 10 and 11 year old kids training each other how to be vandals and outlaws.”

It was the early 1980’s, when rap was in its infancy and break dancing on cardboard boxes was the norm. Late at night, Kaves and Chicago’s Blackstone Renaissance Hotel general manager, Rob Cartwright would sneak out and tag train cars, walking between the tunnels connecting 95^th to 86^th and 86^th to 77^th.  The boys from Bay Ridge claimed the Verrazano Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island as their own.

The first time Cartwright went it was 2 a.m. He was 11 years old.

“I was a scared shit,” says 38-year-old Cartwright with a laugh. “I can still remember the smells and walking through the tunnels. I still remember everything about it, those smells that connect you emotionally. It’s not the smell of urine. It’s just a distinct smell of New York that makes me happy. I wish they had an air freshener with that smell it makes me so happy.”

“It was so exhilarating,” Cartwright continues.  “because more times than not you’d would get chased by the cops so you’d have to run really fast and have to know where to hide.”

During the day, they’d fight off sleep and practice penmanship, marking their tags, names bestowed to them from more experienced graffiti artists, in their black books. They’d map out the train yards, known as lay-ups where the trains would be “laid up” for the night, and plan their next rendezvous. They’d come up with excuses for why their grades were slipping and tell their respective mothers that they were sleeping over at their friends’ houses so the could be out all night.  An evening would start at a White Castle or under the Verrazano Bridge as they made their way to the RR train or B, climbing two stories high, silhouetted in the moonlight.  The beginners would do fast pieces known as “throw-ups,” the more experienced would create expansive murals known as burners.

“It was before the internet,” Kaves says. “This is was our chat room, our way of being recognized, to create something and have a voice.”

But he was always careful to beat his mother home before she returned from her waitress job at 3 or 4 a.m.

“We couldn’t help ourselves,” adds Cartwright who tagged under the name Survive 185. “Whether it was throwing a “Hello My Name Is” sticker up on a train or something more elaborate, it felt like something I had to do when I was young and I felt good about doing it.”

Despite his romantic depictions of graffiti art, Cartwright, now a suit-and-tie businessman, stopped tagging by the middle of high school. Years passed and Cartwright and Kaves, his graffiti name given to him after a portion of the Verrazano tunnel known as the ‘Kave,’ lost touch and drifted apart.

Cartwright moved to California, working in hospitality management for places like the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey. Kaves, 40, continued working as a graffiti artist, doing designs, logos and pieces for Nike, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, WWF, PONY, RECON and Van’s Warped Tour, MTV’s Real World: Brooklyn loft and the likes of the Beastie Boys, Everlast, House of Pain, and Busta Rhymes. He now also owns a tattoo shop, Made in Brooklyn and tours with his band, The Lordz of Brooklyn, that has peformed at Knicks, Mets and Giants games and appeared on programs like The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

THE CHICAGO CONNECTION

Last year, they reconnected in the old Brooklyn neighborhood, bonding over graffiti. When Cartwright saw some of Kaves’s work, in particular an Al Capone piece and another called “Chicago Type Writer,” he thought it was a perfect fit for the Blackstone Renaissance Hotel, known for it’s quirky décor on South Michigan Avenue near Grant Park. After all, Capone, who was born in Brooklyn and used to get his weekly haircuts and shaves at the Blackstone Renaissance, which will celebrate its 100^th Anniversary on April 10. Thus the birth of the Graffiti Outlaw exhibit at 332-room Blackstone Renaissance Hotel, which already maintains a collection more than 1,600 works, mostly by local artists.

Tonight kicks off the Graffiti Outlaw exhibit, which will remain open to the public 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. daily until Sept. 25. Approximately 16 pieces will be shown, mostly Kaves work, along with one or two pieces by Cartwright, who is making his first public appearance as an artist.

Both Cartwright and Kaves joke their days of climbing trains and dodging the cops are over. These days raising their own kids is about as crazy as it gets.