Graffiti Palace Page 14

“There’s a sign that demands a guerrilla art attack,” Jax laughs. “I could get all Freudian on that shit!”

  “No wonder this place is crawlin’ with the fuzz,” Sofia says, “it’s holy Mecca for every cop in town!”

  A few blocks before 135th Street, police barricades, fire trucks funnel the street down to one lane, then rows of storefronts smashed, engulfed in flames. As the VW approaches, cops in riot gear fan down from the lines of barricaded police cars, advancing on a huge mob throwing bottles and bricks and waving sticks and bats and pipes. “Just like Selma!” Chants fill the night between rising and falling sirens.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Sofia wrenches the wheel and the VW squeals into a U-turn, back up Avalon.

  “Hang a left on 132nd,” Jax shouts into the wind. Sofia nods, downshifting. Monk hangs on to the door handle. This street is quieter, there are only closed storefronts, a few passing headlights. “What we have to do now is zig when the cops are zagging.”

  At San Pedro Street, the southbound lanes are blockaded; cop cars ring City Bank, shotguns ready. Northeast, smoke and fire cloud the night sky. Fire trucks rumble past. Sofia turns right, guns the VW up San Pedro. Police cars and barricades funnel traffic north, past El Segundo Boulevard, then 127th and 126th Streets. Every intersection’s barricaded, the cops squeezing traffic north.

  “Sorry, man.” Jax turns toward the backseat. “We’re not getting you very far south, but that’s a real shit storm down there. Plus I don’t think the fuzz would be too amused at my little bag of tricks.”

  “That’s okay.” Monk nods. “I don’t want to be anywhere near these cops, either. Maybe Main Street is more mellow. I’ll work it out.”

  “Shit!” Sofia slams the steering wheel. “They’ve closed Imperial here too!” The VW whines north, past Imperial Highway and blockades of flashing police cars.

  “This is fucked, sorry, man.” Jax shakes his head.

  “It’s cool,” Monk says.

  The VW revs past 112th Street: no cruisers, only darkness. “This is good, make sure the pigs are gone.” Sofia drives past another dark street, then pulls to the curb at 110th Street: the sidewalks are empty, a few lights on beyond the iron-barred windows of the silent houses and porches guarding dying lawns.

  “Good luck, man.” Jax and Monk shake hands.

  Monk climbs out of the idling car. “Thanks, man, you too.” Pausing at the window, he doesn’t want to go: for a mad second he wants to say something, blurt out that he’ll ride with them awhile, even north …

  Sofia smiles up at him, exhales smoke over his head like a ragged halo. “I have a feeling we’ll meet again, Monk.”

  “She’s funny like that.” Jax leans over, grins, steals Sofia’s cigarette. “It’s a Mexican thing.”

  “Watch yourself out there.” Sofia grinds the stick shift into first gear. “The city doesn’t care who it burns.” The VW lurches away, Monk watching the little dark bug as it whines into the night, toward the street lamps and headlights flickering beneath distant pyres of flame and ash. The city doesn’t care who it burns. He feels the metallic spirals of his notebook digging into his ribs. In the notebook, in his wanderings, with every sign and note he sketched, he’d always gotten this feeling that the city was alive, that every tagged wall or mural or paint-bombed alley or the altered code of sprayed lettering on signs and billboards was the city’s way of communicating: how else could all this brick, stucco, and steel draw the painter, the artist, the street scholar? There had to be an invisible force, an attraction that flowed both ways, inanimate to animate. Monk trudges down the darkened street. At the mystic interstice where the mind and the beating heart held the brush or the spray can and the paint touched the inanimate skin of the city, who could really say where one began and the other ended?

  13

  Classified: Inter-Department Only

  Volume 2: Field Operations

  225: Community Profile

  225.40: The Inner-City Negro

  Today’s American Negro is the descendant of slaves. Generations of slaves were tortured and beaten mercilessly. As a result, only the strongest males and females survived to reproduce. Today, most Negroes are natural athletes and possess strength and endurance superior to Caucasians. The field officer therefore must use extreme caution when engaged with Negro suspects, and be prepared to use weapons of force.

  Ten blocks from the Imperial command post. A mob, hundreds, overflow and surge up Main Street: mostly men, T-shirts sopped in sweat or shirtless, black bodies deeper shadows in the night, lobbing bricks, bottles, anything down the street toward squad cars blocking 108th Street, a line of officers in riot gear slowly marching toward the crowd, flashing red lights reflecting in their face shields. Along Main, shop windows smash, furniture, pawned appliances, shoes, clothes, and merchandise boxes fill looters’ arms, funnels of black smoke churn from splintered doorways and imploded windows. Just like Selma! No shame! and other chants rise between shrill sirens.

  Telecopters thrum overhead in the darkness, circling like great ghetto birds, pointing video cameras down at the mobs: above the telecopters, police choppers hover, raking the streets and flames below with swaths of searchlight beams. Tonight the telecopters don’t just report the news, they create it: the news choppers track the rioters with telephoto lenses, radioing to the police, locations, movements, everything from loiterers to traffic patterns down in the streets. On those streets, scrambling near the protective phalanx of advancing riot police, TV newscasters report from live-feed mikes, the long whip antennas of their news station wagons swaying in the smoke, or shoot the rioters and burning buildings and running looters with handheld Bolex 16 mm cameras: most of the white folks, huddled behind locked doors back in their redoubts in the Valley, watching their black-and-white TV sets, will only see telecopter aerial shots, godlike views of the faceless savages below, down in their dark tenements, where they will soon be stopped, contained. Street-level views are for the riot’s black devils only, haunting their gutters and alleyways, oblivious to the stars and firmament above: no white men on these streets, where cold statistics accuse two out of every three black men of having violent or criminal tendencies … Only the police force dare venture down here in these burning streets, a force that Biff and Jane and little Biff Jr. and pigtailed Doreen back in the Valley, in the glow of the Philco, pray is a deadly force, a magical wall that will crush this obscene onslaught. But tonight there are a few brave souls here at street level, camera crews, miked newscasters, reporters dodging bottles and bricks with their cameras, and, reporting breathlessly into her mike, TV newscaster Brey King.

  “The devastation out here is unbelievable,” she shouts into the mike before the rolling camera: peroxide blond, late twenties, gray lusterless eyes, red lipsticked mouth, gray V-neck sweater, tight but knee-length brown leather skirt. “The gap between police and rioters is closing … a clash seems inevitable … we’ll stay as long as we can to give you this live report of … of a city under siege!” The camera pans in for a close-up of Brey’s face, white skin tightened with thousands of dollars of plastic surgery and lifts and tucks, every year the scalpel slices another wrinkle, another crow’s-foot, another chin line in a merciless race against male anchors who have twenty years’ more professional longevity than any talking head cheesecake like King can hope for.

  Monk’s walking behind a few black young men scattering past the news crew, away from the advancing police line. “Young man! Young man!” King shouts, cutting Monk off from the sidewalk as she thrusts the mike to his surprised face. “Why are the Negroes rioting?”

  “Ah, social inequalities, I guess,” softly. “The inherent racism of a police force that’s trapped in a Jim Crow past.” Monk, realizing that being interviewed about the cops on TV is probably light-years from cool, slinks away. He scowls back at the white woman: What’s the use talking to white people? He knows he shouldn’t think like that, boxing her into some kind of simple racial equation, but she and
her kind, aren’t they doing the same thing to him? Most of the time the only communication between whites and blacks seems to be self-conscious, patronizing chatter about race … spoken words are signs too, and these feeble attempts at communication from the White Power Structure—the WhiPS graffiti copied in his notebook—are really miscommunication, static that walls in ignorance instead of tearing it down. Monk frowns: perhaps there is a limit to empathy, a gulf that can never truly be bridged between others.

  Brey turns the mike toward a black youth in a sweaty green tank top. “Why are the Negroes rioting?”

  “Rioting? Lady, we ain’t rioting. This is an insurrection. This is the Civil War part two!”

  “You are telling our viewers this is a protest against prejudice? A civil rights movement—what about the looting, the burning, the hooliganism?”

  “Hula what? We’re tired of gettin’ beat up by the pigs and not havin’ nothin’! Chicago, now L.A. White people better learn or it’s gonna burn!” He trots away into the darkness.

  She grimaces into the camera. “You heard that young Negro of the streets. To him, the police are … it sickens me to even repeat his vulgar street slang, the police are … inhuman pigs. This is Brey King live from Main Street in Watts!”

  “We’re out,” cameraman Peterson yells.

  “Okay!” King’s spooling the mike cord around her elbow and palm. “We’ll cut that first boy—the smart one—just use Mr. Hula what,” grinning, “perfect.” Riot police march past them—half a block up, the mob presses forward, chanting, pelting debris down the street: bricks and shattering bottles explode ahead of King and her news crew—a soundman and two shooters lugging a Bolex 16 mm and a video camera on a tripod. They scramble ahead, rushing along the brick-fronts and store facades. Jiggling camera shots of looters smashing windows, grabbing merchandise, angry men chanting or lobbing bottles and bricks. They’re close to the front line of the mob, past the ranks of cops that slowly march forward like a tide of metal shields and batons and black boots crunching over glass shards.

  Into the mob now, soundman holding the remote feed as King shouts into her microphone, “It is a war zone down here, folks … there in the middle of the street, a bottle bomb has just exploded against that store. These bottle bombs, I’m told, are called Molotov cocktails. The rioters fill a glass bottle with some kind of flammable liquid, ignite a rag or paper fuse, and throw this handmade bomb. Perhaps its Russian name points to a connection between these Negroes and the Communist influences often cited by police. Here a young Negro carries what appears to be a case of beer, and another young man has boxes of something, perhaps merchandise … there behind us, you see the LAPD slowly advancing in full riot gear … Chief Parker has warned us that tear gas may be deployed … but we will stay and give you these live reports as long as humanly possible … it looks like one block south of Main Street, a fireball has erupted over what appears to be a gas station … Why do they do this? They seem to be burning down their own communities, why? Young man, will you tell the cameras why, what are you doing here tonight?”

  A thin black teenager, shirtless, big gleaming Afro, a boxed radio in his arms. “What you done foh us?” pointing into the camera. “No jobs, no money, no hope. Watts is on fire tonight, tomorrow maybe Beverly Hills. Fuck you, honkies!”

  King turns to the video camera, ashen-faced. “There you … you have it … raw and uncensored, direct from the streets. Tomorrow Beverly Hills, or your town. That seems to be the fear, the response we’ve been hearing lately. Everyone is afraid, perhaps even the police and the city’s leaders. Parker’s warning, that the police are the thin blue line, all that separates us from violence and chaos, seems to be heavy in everyone’s minds. Police are on edge amid reports of lone Negro provocateurs drawing officers in chase down alleys, only to be ambushed by waiting mobs. And there are reports tonight that gun shops, pawnshops, army surplus stores—any store where one can purchase a gun or rifle—are under heavy guard by police and armed store owners. Citizens are arming themselves, buying every gun available for miles. There is widespread fear—perhaps only rumor, perhaps not—that Negroes and gangs and militants are targeting these gun shops under cover of the riot, leaving burned-out stores to cover their real haul of stolen weapons.” A black man hustles across the street in front of King. “Sir, sir! Why are you out here tonight?” She holds the mike up to a middle-aged black man who’s drinking a 40-ounce golden bottle of Brew 102.

  He looks her up and down with bloodshot, rheumy eyes. “Mmm, you a fine-lookin’ white girl,” mumbling as he pats her on the ass.

  “How dare you!” The camera jostles. “Van Zanger, cut!” She shouts to the other cameraman. “Cut!”

  The crew scrambles across the street, dodging flying bricks and bottles. At 110th Street they duck around the corner, a shadowy buffer zone between the closing police and the mob: a shoe store and coffee shop; across the street, boarded-up abandoned brick-fronts. Two black men run under the burned-out street lamps. “Hey! Young men! Come here, please!” King waves her mike. The two men walk over, smoking cigarettes. “Get ready to roll on my mark,” she hisses to the crew. “Here’s twenty bucks,” pushing a wadded bill into one man’s sweaty palm, whispering, pointing behind her. The two men shrug, nod their heads. “Roll!” The cameras flash on: the men heave bricks, smashing through the restaurant and shoe store windows. They grab some Florsheims and, puzzling over the broken plate glass of the restaurant, grab a coconut layer cake on its silver pedestal.

  “You next, white people!” A black face leers over the white cake and into the camera. “Fuck the man! Black power, baby!” Shaky Bolex footage follows them as they disappear down Main Street. On every black-and-white TV across the cities and valleys, the contrast of the melting white cake below the black face is as stark as lightning flashing in the void: camera lights, cathode-ray-tube dots, even the black ink printed on tomorrow’s newspaper headlines and photos can only reproduce every black face in the darkest, glowering tones, black masks that the day’s technology cannot refine to show any human nuances of anger, pain, sadness, fear.

  “The brutality … the raw, animal desperation,” King’s panting into the camera, “is almost palpable here on the streets … is this America or some dark, distant land of upheaval … Perhaps some of the liberal pundits are correct, is this another Vietnam? Have the Negroes and the white war protesters united in besieging Los Angeles in another guerrilla war of fire and attrition? Reporting live, this is Brey King … and we’re out.”

  The line of officers crushes against rioters. Billy clubs rain down on black faces and arms; pipes and sticks smash against helmets and shields; bottles and bricks push officers back. Clouds of tear gas explode into the mob, spilling knots of men out into the side streets and ducking into ravaged buildings and storefronts; Molotov cocktails burst in fiery blooms behind the ranks of cops, and the police huddle, groups pulling back or surging forward into the chanting and sirens and screams.

  “I’ll give the suits ratings,” King hisses, waving her crew north. She’s working behind the police lines now, approaching 107th Street. Behind them, riot police and mobs clash in the churning glower of tear gas and firebombs, oscillating in the ruby lights of distant patrol cars and chopper searchlights from above. “Screw Cronkite, right here.” They’ve stopped on a sidewalk under a flickering, still working street lamp: in the distance, a burned-out shoe stand and, down the block, a dark fireball of the engulfed gas station. “Peterson! You know what to do! Hurry up!” They set up the video camera and remote feed, King glancing around nervously, no one nearby. The crew tears up Peterson’s coat and shirt. He lies sprawled on the sidewalk. Brey extracts a bottle of ketchup from her strap bag and squirts it over Peterson’s hair and face and chest. “Roll!” She crouches down near Peterson. “We’ve found this poor man … an ambulance is on its way … a human face to the senseless violence that rules the night … Sir, can you speak? Can you tell our viewers what happened?”

&nbs
p; “They jumped me,” Peterson chokes out, grimacing in pain. “Four or five Negroes … God help me.”

  “Channel Eleven News. We’re not going to report just from the safety of the telecopters … we’re here live on the battlefront, in a city gone mad,” shaking her blond curls. “Will you be next? This is Brey King, live in Watts.”

  Small crowds have worked around the riot line, smashing windows and lobbing Molotov cocktails at the barricaded police cruisers: more sirens are closing in from the west. The intrepid anchor and crew make it just north of 107th. Bottles fly, rioters crisscross around them under patches of smoke and shot-out street lamps. “King! Let’s get the hell out of here!” A disheveled, ketchup-smeared Peterson screams, trotting toward the news station wagon, lugging the heavy camera. King, her high heels clattering, runs behind. The soundman throws his equipment in the backseat, jumps behind the wheel as Brey King and Peterson pile inside.

  Van Zanger’s trudging up 107th Street toward his station wagon, the heavy Bolex on his neck strap. The mob and police line seem to have melded into the next block east. A police car passes him, sirens wailing. Up on the corner, a knot of black men trot into an alley: behind the alley, a pillar of thick black smoke bubbles into the night sky. On Main Street, he walks toward the station wagon, its whip antenna a metallic line that points toward the smoky shroud muffling the skyline. Where are those guys? He sets the camera on the hood, unlocks the door with its Channel Eleven crescent blue logo. He straightens his narrow emerald tie, tucks in a white shirttail under his thin alligator belt.

  “What you comin’ in here wiff your cameras and shit?” Two black men approach: a tall thin man with a baseball cap, shirtless; the other paunchy in a sweat-soaked T-shirt and sweatpants.

  “The newscast is over. I’m leaving.” Van Zanger lifts the camera, opens the station wagon door.

  “Why don’t you stay in your own neighborhood? We don’t need you taking pictures for the cops, whitey.”