The first three publications of APT: 1012 have been doing well to enthrall the attention of adolescents and young adults. Yes 22 years of age is still considered young adult to me.

I have this thing about gauging maturity based on the lever of a person’s sexual performance and I know I was simply teasing pussies until I turned twenty-five or twenty-six and felt I was sufficiently and adult when I could make a woman cream her pants by playing with her nipples.  

My childhood really ended at the age of twelve but I did not know what I was doing until I was about twenty four. Prior to losing my virginity, my mother would tell me as I would sit in my room and craft stories, she would tell me to never forget about my race and people and to be sure to incorporate them as much as I can when I illustrate. She believed we never had enough representation in literature, movies, television, in anything really.  

As I have been crafting APT: 1012, I have been tickled pink at the amount of ethinic culture I’ve been able to cram in such few pages and wondering how she would respond to this story.  

She might say something like, “ You could have shown black people in a better light, why are they so materialistic, basing life on money, sex, and abusing one another?”  

I am sure I’d laugh and defend my work by stressing my dependency on the truth of our culture and though I am a dream weaver and could have crafted an illusion to appease our private sensibilities. I dare not! To sacrifice the image of the African American culture, I’ve been surrounded by my whole life and made to cut corners in showcasing the truth of our present rape culture, just because it makes you feel bad, is an insult to the word truth. If you feel bad, that is a good thing. It means you’ve not lost your ability to empathize and through this lens of pain, you might decide to dream of something better.  

Knowing it is out there because anything is better than what we we’ve been given.  

In my mind, I happen to live in a rather zebra patterned spectrum. Where white robed people tend to glow with bronze and gold auras and, “evil,” are those robed in black hoods and hued in purple flakes. No grey areas and any little room for error. I have this desire to achieve greatness and have crowns set aside for the white robed golden arrayed people who desire to stand with me in my efforts to paint murals of love; on barren walls; of those that have trouble defining what purity is.  

I refuse to believe in making evil, no matter where it originated from, ‘necessary.’  

I don’t wish to learn from it. I don’t want to be around it and when I see it, I’ve only decided to talk about it to highlight what to stay away from. If it was up to me, I’d not even perfect the illustration of rape, but would instead, plaster it with lines of yellow and black caution tape and set in a garbage heap of memories to be burned away.    

It took me a while to really decide how I wanted to showcase the altercation between Dino and Victoria. A lot of artists have attempted to depict rape scenes or hardcore sex and I always feel they miss what rape is. In my imagination, because I’ve never been raped, nor have desired to rape anyone, I see the woman struggling while the man seeks to conquer her. Breaching her but because he is such an inept person and had to result to rape, he ejaculates before he can even get in and due to his inability to please a woman, he takes his anger out on her, beating her to sleep and this is why Victoria ends up in the hospital. Remember the old bastard is 65 year of age and wouldn’t be able to get up to meet the challenge anyway.  

Other artists I’ve seen depicting rape, have made the mistake of illustrating the woman eventually taking pleasure throughout the act and if she finds pleasure, it can’t be seen as rape.  

I wanted to give the audience a defining image for the Dream Weaver’s vindication and justification for his following actions. He would not have seen the act but when he visits the Apartment 1012 he would have seen evidence of something horrible happening and he will need that image to finally give him the will to pull the hammer.