Bob Peck "Graffiti kept me safe through some pretty interesting times."

In the crush of tattoos on Bob Peck's right leg you can find the number 113. It's the name of an alley between two rows of garages along West 112th and West 114th near Franklin, where he would see spray-painted names like ROX1, OOPS and DEK2 as his mom walked him to school. He remembers thinking that whoever did that must be completely free, to "just put their names on anything they wanted." By 1990, 113 was where he'd spend his days.

Today Peck, 29, lives in an uncluttered and sparsely furnished Tremont house. He still paints, but uses his real name. He and his crew are one of five that will compete for the $500 prize at Cleveland Public Art's City Xpressionz Aerosol Art Festival this week. He's reached the point where mural commissions and demonstrations add up to a day job. But he suggests that you picture him as a "ribs-showing skinny kid in a lime-green shirt with mustard-colored triangles on it, '80s style, and blue sweat pants that left his ankles showing. And a mullet."

Peck's mom had been diagnosed with cancer before he was born, and they lived on SSI. By the time he was 13 years old, he says, she had given up. She smoked and drank all the time, and when he'd show her drawings, she'd hold them upside down and mumble in a monotone, "Those are nice." They'd stare at a 13-inch TV, he says, and she'd tell him how horrible he was.

For Peck, graffiti looked like salvation. At first he'd copy what he'd seen spray-painted on the backs of the 113 garages, and other walls in the neighborhood, writing in notebooks. Then he'd begin to work on his own name. He wrote "B-Man," which he calls a "goofy kid name he came up with," and the number 113 next to it. He says another writer tracked him down once, riding a bicycle around the neighborhood, finding clusters of his tag closer and closer together until he found the right street and asked, "Hey, does anyone know where B-Man lives?" So B-Man met the Optic Boom Crew, and eventually Sano and members of the Cleveland Scribe Tribe. But it wasn't long before the answer to the question about where he lived would be open for debate. B-Man had just started high school at West Tech when he began to couch-surf at friends' houses, stopping home about once a week to check on his dying mom.

He'd spend days in the alley, nights along the red line, painting his stylish cartoon characters, and his name with song lyrics like footnotes, documenting his moods. Essentially homeless, feeling betrayed, he says he took it out on the walls, painting all night sometimes.

Eventually a friend's grandparents would take him in, giving him a room and food, but still no supervision: He came and left as he pleased. He got word that his mom had stopped paying bills and got evicted. He figures he might have been 14 or 15 years old by then.

He remembers the day when he learned his mom died. He was painting in 113 when the man he called Pap, his friend's grandfather, rolled up in a car, rolled down the window and said, "Get in. She's gone."

So he packed up his paint and went to see her for the last time. Later that day he'd come back to the alley with another can of paint and write, "Rest in peace, Mom."

A few months after that he left for Denver and stayed for six months. When he came back, Pap had packed up his room in boxes, and his girlfriend of two years had taken up with someone else. So he was on his own, and he began to write a different name: Lost.

Being Lost is how Peck made a name for himself. He dropped out of the Cleveland School of the Arts — which he says he couldn't handle after West Tech — and spent all his time between hours at a string of pizza jobs either painting or drawing. For a while he was All-City, his name blaring his existence on walls east, west and south. He started going to clubs, asking if anyone needed a CD cover design, a flyer, a poster. He'd get $5 for this, $10 for that. He says he worked hard to give people art on time, the next day if necessary. One night at the Agora, someone introduced him to Santina Protopapa, who then worked at the Rock Hall. She'd shortly hire him to give a demonstration for a hip-hop show. Being Lost wasn't only about recognition anymore. There was work to be had.

Peck says the first couple of times he demonstrated his art for crowds and educational programs, he was scared out of his mind, asking himself what he was doing showing people highly developed graffiti skills. But he got comfortable over time. The recognition led to more gigs. He talks easily now.

Former Cleveland Public Art program manager Melanie Fioritto says when she was in the process of launching Cleveland Public Art's first aerosol art festival five years ago, Peck just showed up one day and made himself available to help.

"I depended on him to be the conduit between me and the artists," says Fioritto. "In that way, he was integral in helping launch the whole thing. Then it got to the point where I was getting calls from people who wanted to commission murals, and he was my go-to guy."

Fioritto and Protopapa both would refer more business, and soon he was getting hired by developers like Bob Stark, who'd charged his marketing department to find a crew that could paint plywood panels while Crocker Park was still under construction. Peck has since painted characters around East Fourth Street and the interiors at five Revol cell-phone stores. Last winter he and a crew stood on ladders for two days painting the ceiling of the new Big Fun store on Coventry, including a cartoon mock-up of outreached fingertips as God creates Adam.

Protopapa, who left the Rock Hall to start the Progressive Arts Alliance, keeps him booked steadily as an outreach artist in Cleveland schools. He's quit working at a framing studio, except for maybe a day a month. Graffiti is his day job. He admits to getting the itch once in a while, but he says he hasn't painted anything illegal in years.

"Graffiti kept me safe through some pretty interesting times," Peck says. "It kept me from more serious crime. It gave me a focus."

arts@freetimes.com