I had a lady come in yesterday with a lock that was probably a lot bigger than I thought.
She was 150 years old and she was so unaware of what she had there and how rare it was.
I thought it was cheap and nice, only because I wanted to do the job.
She thought it was too much money.
Her husband calls me up and says, we're going to buy a new one.
I say, how are you going to buy a new one?
Somebody will come over, screw it all up and make it look like shit.
A gift that I have, okay, from the creator or whatever the hell it is,
I don't know, at my hands.
I could see something and hold it in my hands, I couldn't do it.
I pick up these keys about once a week, usually get about 100 pounds, 150 pounds of keys.
But they got to be sorted out.
I got a lot of different guys who collect scrap, you know, and whenever I give the word out,
I say, listen, I'll pay you more for the keys than you can get at the scrap yard.
Three or four years ago, I made a collage on this door with all these keys, you know?
I figured, okay, I'll just do it and I like it, you know, if nobody else likes it, it's fine.
There were bananas over this door, man, they weren't fucking crazy.
So I said, I like to make a chair out of keys.
So I made the chair out of keys, people love that even more than the door.
Then I said, ah, I'm going to cover the fucking building in keys.
You learn techniques, you master them, but then as you progress,
you actually find something that's much more unique, much more personal.
In art, I think everyone ultimately is looking for truth
and everyone wants to get as close to the bone as possible.
A locksmith and an artist is very similar.
I mean, the more you do, the more you see, the more you draw, you know,
somebody can teach you how to draw, and then after that, it's just, you know,
you got to do a lot of practice.
Being a good, safe cracker is all about experience.
My second wife had a good analogy, man.
She said, when she was a kid growing up, she had this cat.
She loved this cat so much, and every now and then this cat would disappear.
One come back for a week and she'd be so worried about it.
And this cat would come back and be all tattered up and beaten up,
and she'd have to nurse it back to hell.
And then the cat would go back out again.
She says, that's you.
On the one hand, it speaks to his lifelong profession, being a locksmith.
And, you know, certainly when you look at all these myriad keys,
sort of swirling about in this composition,
you think of all the keys that perhaps he's made,
and all of the interactions that he's had with people.
You know, his art relates to his profession,
but also in some broader sense to a greater story about New York.
As time goes by, it will be a Greenwich Village, certainly,
but a New York City and an American landmark.
Everybody's in jobs that they don't like.
They're in relationships they don't like.
I didn't raise my kids because I had to, because I wanted to.
All these obligations I had, I didn't because I wanted to,
not because the government was going to tell me I had to do it,
or morality, or the police was going to tell me.
I didn't do it because I wanted to.
