Graffiti Palace Page 15
“Whitey? Who do you think you are talking to, young man? I’m a journalist.”
The tall man with the cap steps in close and puts his hands on the camera. “We’ll be takin’ that, motherfucker.”
Van Zanger grabs the Bolex. “Now you listen to me, you hooligan. Do you have any idea who you’re—”
A fist rams into his stomach. Hands twist him spinning, strangling by the narrow tie. Pinned against the station wagon, a punch slams his jaw, then his ribs: he crumples to the ground, panting. Lying on his back on the hot asphalt, the world is upside down: the smoky night sky seems like a glowering floor, the whip antenna a sinister metronome that ticks away a new kind of time—the world and time are fractured, changed; Van Zanger lies wheezing on his back, the two black men with the camera alien shapes moving from his field of vision: he’s in shock, not about the bruised rib, fractured jaw, stabbing inhalations of breath, it’s that he’s somehow entered a dark universe, a strange, inverted world where a Negro would dare think, would dare insult, would dare strike a white man.
14
Arcs of white electricity bolt from the gaping maw of the giant dragon, its gold scales shimmering, crimson eyes locked in baleful, reptilian malevolence at the towering apartment building as its tile roof explodes in a shower of crumbling concrete, dust, flying tiles and beams. A great dinosaur foot smashes down on the street below, crumpling cars and light poles as a prehistoric growl thunders, its bass wail shattering windows far below. The dinosaur plows like the bow of a great ship slowly through high-tension wires and buckling towers. The saurian’s dwarfed, tweezer-like claws throttle the undulating, serpentine neck of the dragon as electric rays shoot from the dragon’s mouth, exploding down several blocks, demolishing two office buildings and fleeing cars … but two more dragon heads rise from the smoke on weaving golden necks, spitting electric bolts into the dinosaur’s smoking neck and chest as the beast roars in pain, falling backward like some prehistoric avalanche, the iron girders, electric lights, silver storage tanks of the Mitsubishi Refinery exploding and crushing under the titan’s rolling body. Above, gliding out of dark clouds and rising pillars of black smoke like a flying nightmare, a gargantuan moth beats its silvery powdered gossamer wings down toward the bleating Medusa heads of the dragon. The insect’s multifaceted eyes reflect the destruction below like hellish mirror balls as its bloated thorax swoops above rooftops and billboards and bent telephone poles: suddenly the giant moth falls and plummets into cars and splintering houses of wood, raining blue tiles and dust—
“Cut! Cut!” Honda bellows into a megaphone, leaping from his chair: a middle-aged, short Japanese man with a jet-black crew cut.
Above the smoking rubble of Tokyo, grips and technicians and puppeteers scramble along scaffolds and catwalks, reeling in spools of wire from hoists bolted to tackle beams that fan out over the set.
Honda’s screaming into the megaphone in machine-gun Japanese as the special-effects crew blasts the set with geysers of white smoke from fire extinguishers. “You incompetent idiots! We’re behind schedule! I’ll have your balls for this!” Strands of harness wires gleam in the clouds and smoke-like silvery webs.
Cables winch and the puppyish, green puffy head of Godzilla rises into the scaffolding like some kind of fantastic decapitated apotheosis. Now the lifeless, droopy golden necks of the three-headed dragon lift on wires into the rafters and clouds and klieg lights, dragon heads whose chimerical, slanted eyes and royal, blazing gold suggest an evil origination that Japanese moviegoers will not fail to identify as the diabolical, genocidal Chinese: Godzilla’s mortal enemy, King Ghidorah. Godzilla stoops, picks up a bottle of Suntory whiskey that’s hidden behind an apartment.
“Now we have to do another take,” Godzilla says. The monster looks as if an angry, tough-looking Japanese man’s head has been transplanted onto its green, scaly neck. Godzilla, mustache, mottled skin, a sweat-soaked rising-sun bandanna on his shaved head, gulps down a mouthful of whiskey. “Good. Maybe King Shithead can stay on his marks this time.”
“Fuck you, Nakajima!” a young, angular Japanese man shouts, dripping sweat inside the chubby dragon’s rubber suit. “You hog all the camera angles! I am the star!” King Ghidorah swings at Godzilla, but the great green lizard ducks.
“Are you insane!” Honda screams into the megaphone. “Get off the set! Prepare the next shot! I have to bring this piece of shit in in three months!” Technicians and grips pull the giants from the smoky set, Godzilla twisting Ghidorah in a headlock as they trip over camera lights and cables and fans. A knot of men finally separate the monsters. “We’ll shoot if it takes all fucking night!” Honda lights a cigarette, twists it into his silver cigarette holder. A script girl pushes a glass of whiskey and ice into the director’s hand. Modelers and technicians and pyrotechs work on the set feverishly. “Okay, we must wait!” Honda throws the megaphone on the director’s chair.
* * *
Honda broods in the warehouse’s makeshift office. A single halo of light from a desk lamp illuminates the smoky room. The director sits behind a desk, sipping another whiskey and ice, sucking on his silver cigarette holder between clipped shouts into the black telephone. On the desktop, piles of script pages, shooting schedules, contracts, drawings, storyboards, ashtrays heaped with cigarette butts. Outside the window, in the warm, summer night of this strange and magical city, sirens and hazy lights drift in from the darkness. “No! I want Gamera! I think he’s going to be a big star! Mothra is not box office! And Mothra’s tiny, singing pixies! Are you people insane! Even little kids won’t buy this shit … no! Mothra’s in every goddamn movie, huh! Mothra’s a whore! How can I work with this shit, huh!” Honda exhales a cloud of smoke, chugs down Suntory whiskey. “Talk to Daiei Studio! How much does Gamera want? A hundred thousand yen! Is he crazy? Top billing too, huh? Over King Ghidorah? You think he can break into the big three, huh! He’s no star! Are you all drunk on sake? Who? Baragon? I don’t want fucking Baragon! Who the fuck— Hello! Hello!” He slams down the receiver. Smoking, he sips whiskey, gazing out into the dark void beyond the window. Somewhere out there, the city of his boyhood dreams, Hollywood, the valleys and hills where the legendary American directors he idolized, Ford, Huston, Curtiz, and others shot their classic movies. And what am I doing? Shooting another goddamn Godzilla picture. Fucking actors whine about typecasting, I’m a typecast director. I’ll die in my boots, carted off some goddamn set between rubber monster suits. Meanwhile, they kiss Kurosawa’s ass. He gets to shoot whatever the fuck he wants, samurai Shakespeare movies that don’t make any money, while they shit on my kaiju movies that pay all the bills … they give me ninety days to shoot this crap, push me ahead of schedule and that prima donna Kurosawa gets two years. I should retire, just do Suntory commercials. Try to get some independent financing for my scripts, like Welles. If only he could shoot his own project, a World War II movie involving kamikaze pilots and flying saucers, but Toho’s not allowed to shoot any war movies or they’ll lose government financing. The closest he’s gotten to his dreams is half a reel of Godzilla fighting Gigan with giant samurai swords in Godzilla Yakuza Assassin before studio execs pulled the plug and ordered Honda to take a four-week vacation. They want him to read treatments with titles like Godzilla vs. the Space Hippies and Godzilla Goes to Prison … Godzilla is his blessing and curse, he hates and loves the fat rubber bastard, tears the suits apart in drunken rages, pummels the beast with a cane for blowing a shot; but he could be protective too, shooting past schedules and budgets to get the right scene or light on the beast, weeping and raging when spineless American distributors superimposed flames from Godzilla’s maw because they didn’t want to be reminded, thank you, of past atomic holocausts by his radioactive spray in the original prints. Now he just wants to get these shots in the can and go back home. It’s enough to make any man drink: sitting around for hours while the tokusatsu crew rebuild their models and sets and wires and explosives, all for a shot that lasts maybe a minute. Hond
a steps to the window, leans over the sill into the warm summer night. There, out past that sloping dark rooftop and nest of TV antennas, is that smoke? This place is another world to him, filthy streets and slums, Negroes everywhere: he’d heard Negroes liked giant monster movies … he should feel indebted; perhaps they identified with Godzilla, who’s feared because he is misunderstood, persecuted by white technology, whose very name itself means “gorilla whale,” a great, wild blackness on the screen. He longs for the safe feng shui—fusui of Japan, the comfortable geometries of rice fields, white paper houses, swept streets, cherry blossoms.
Downstairs, the crew finish the set for the next shot, winching wires through pulleys suspended from the scaffolds, dabbing paint on model buildings and houses and temples, covering explosive wires with paint and paper, framing miniature streets and cars in camera angles. Godzilla and King Ghidorah stand in full costume near the set as cameramen measure their green and gold rubber suits with light meters. Godzilla, through an immense plastic straw snaked down his rubbery throat, slurps from a pitcher of whiskey and ice. “Hey, Matsuda,” a voice deep inside rubber darkness, “is it true your father is a Chink?”
“Fuck you, Nakajima!” Ghidorah head-butts the King of the Monsters with a terrific assault from all three dragon snouts and Godzilla pitches backward, a light tower shattering beneath his armored scales, whiskey and ice arcing over the flopping monster in amber splashes. Godzilla scrambles up, throttling a golden, shimmering neck as Ghidorah kicks his nemesis’s foamy crotch.
The crew in sweaty tank tops and shorts shout and cluster around the rolling, twisting monsters. “Twenty bucks on Matsuda-san!” Everyone’s peeling wads of yen bills from their pockets.
“You’re on!” A cameraman pulling bills from his wallet. “Twenty on Nakajima-san!” The crew slap down bills in a pile atop Honda’s Suntory rolling wet bar.
The two behemoths square off, warily circling each other. Nakajima clenches his green claws into fists.
“Eeee-yaaahhh!” Ghidorah karate chops Nakajima across the neck as Godzilla sinks a right punch into the rubbery gut of the dragon. The Titans of Terror roll across the studio floor, past still-smoking buildings, crushed automobiles, tangled power lines …
The beasts topple down a concrete stairwell, piling up in front of double steel doors. Godzilla pulls Ghidorah to his stubby feet but the diabolical Matsuda-san seizes a fire extinguisher and hurls it at Godzilla: the red cylinder caroms like a giant missile off the dazed leviathan’s snout as the green lizard smashes backward through the double doors and out onto the dark sidewalk.
Godzilla pounds on the door. “Let me in! I am Haruo Nakajima! Japan’s greatest stuntman! I’ll have your jobs for this!” Green claws pounding on cold steel. “Fuck all of you for betting against me!” Godzilla shrugs: it’ll be a couple more hours till they’re ready to shoot, plenty of time to nick down a couple of drinks. The monster stomps down the alley.
Lumbering east on 120th Street. Stench of sweat and whiskey inside the rubber suit. Nakajima, through slits cut in the throat of the monster, can only see sidewalks, buildings, signs directly ahead, framed in rubbery rectangles. Godzilla stomps past a bullet-riddled sign, WELCOME TO WILLOWBROOK, but there are no rivers here, no gurgling brooks, only sirens, Negroes with sweat-stained shirts on sidewalks and drinking beer in shadowed doorways. Two teenagers pass, exchanging raised fists of black-power salutes with the monster.
Monk stops on the corner, almost drops his notebook: down the street, lurching toward the melted hulk of a torched car, is that … Godzilla? He laughs out loud as he realizes that he’s almost not surprised at the hallucination, just one more aberration in this endless night of fire, signs, and wonders. How should he read this sign? The beloved monster that haunted so many of his childhood matinees stalks southward, in Monk’s direction, toward some bums beyond the twisted car hulk: he shrugs, steps off the curb, and slowly trails the great lizard.
Godzilla moves south, toward the county park, Monk following a block behind. Nakajima’s stuntman instincts, perhaps fueled by alcohol and a fierce personal code of method acting—despite that it’s 112 degrees inside the suit and he’s close to passing out—propel the veteran kaiju into the brackish olive waters of the park’s lake. Godzilla’s great claw rises dripping out of the depths and smashes down on a hapless radio-controlled white boat someone’s abandoned in the dark waters. Godzilla slowly ambles from the lapping waves, lumbering onto the shore, towering as he looms past a wino huddled under a wad of newspapers on a park bench, the bum’s paper-bagged Colt 45 malt liquor can slips from his fist as he sprawls in terror on the dirt.
The monster reels east on 121st Street, perhaps attracted by distant twinkling light, a single, throbbing orb that looms up into summer darkness and smoke, atop the Watts Towers. “This is where we part, old friend,” Monk grins, watching as Godzilla disappears down 121st Street, the finned green tail sweeping a clattering beer can to the curb. Monk crosses the avenue and trudges south, still smiling: maybe he should let go, just drift, see where all these strange currents carry him; in the moment now he feels happy, a little reckless … he’ll keep going south, but Karmann will wait … this is the time, he realizes, with his city in flames, that the semiotician should record the signs and wonders in his notebook, before the fire burns away these shadow-words and the city is scourged, voiceless.
Godzilla gazes in behemoth wonder, shaking his foamy muzzle at the singed, dead lawns in front yards: how could the armies of Japanese gardeners, his own countrymen, allow such a disgrace?
From blocks around, from certain angles refracted through smoke and night and smog, from basement apartment windows, from downhill grades and streets, people watch in horror as the monster seems to tower above the cityscape rooftops and smoke and electric wires, transfixed by beams of white light as it glares toward the distant red blinking glow of the latticed eponymous towers. Yes, it’s every Negro’s nightmare, they’ve rehearsed it every Saturday night in darkened musty ghetto theaters, smells of sweat, buttered popcorn, Afro Sheen, booze in paper sacks, the house is packed as this week’s bad horror movie plays out in garish, scratchy color on the old, patched screen, everyone laughing after the obligatory shout-outs that are the real show: Don’t open that door! Run, nigger, run! You better hope that’s some kind of flashlight gun, motherfucker! Dracula’s got more pussy than Tom Jones! I got a dark house, ain’t no bitch takin’ off her clothes in my house! You scared of Transylvania fog, try walkin’ in Compton smog! Now searchlight beams lock on Godzilla’s growling face, blinding him. The city must make a stand here against the marauding invader, keep it away from the blinking ironwork tower that seems to be a kind of beacon to the monster. “Freeze! Police!” Megaphone voices beyond the blinding lights. Godzilla lurches backward, rolls in titanic slow motion down a concrete embankment, smashes through a chain-link fence, and plummets through the darkness. A cataclysmic splash as the monster plows into the muddy waters of Compton Creek. A lifeless green mass floats down the river—is the monster really dead this time, after so many battles with Rodan, King Ghidorah, Mothra, King Kong … or is this only another boozy blackout? Godzilla bobs down the concrete channel, past its graffiti spray-painted on 45-degree walls tilted up like a profane gallery to the heavens, southbound, toward the converging, paved tributaries that empty into the Los Angeles River.
15
Classified: Inter-Department Only
Volume 6: Emergency Department Directives
150: Baton Holds During Civil Unrest
150.10: Sanctioned Baton Holds
1. The American Strangle: baton under the chin, grip with both fists.
2. The Japanese Strangle: twist the right arm behind the back, push the baton against the side of the neck.
3. The Negro Strangle: place suspect into full headlock. Insert baton between forearm and carotid artery. Push baton handle forward to incapacitate or break suspect’s jaw.
Monk is on 122nd Street, trudging west toward
Main. It seems the farther south Monk gets, he somehow ends up going north, as if the city’s magnetized, drawing him back like black iron filings. Now he can see Main Street’s intersection is blocked with flashing patrol car lights. He heads down an alley. On 124th passing the graffiti-scrawled broken wall of a vacant lot: he hears a woman’s shrill scream to the east, or sirens, it’s impossible to tell. He feels hopeless, weary down to his bones; too many sidewalks, streets, everyone—the city itself—running on pain and fear, the harbor and Karmann a universe away. Here he sprints across Main Street, between barricaded blocks, passing a pawnshop and thrift store, smashed and gutted, straggling looters lugging cases of beer, booze bottles, cartons of milk, bundles of clothes, lamps, framed paintings, kitchen chairs. Some of these looters’ names will later be found in commission reports, newspaper articles, morgue inventories, police blotters, victims like so many others of mayhem and violence and misadventure in the nights of fire—but some of these transgressors’ fates are darker, victims of forces not understood, unfathomable chains of cause and effect: the stolen whiskey bottle that provokes a fight that takes the looter’s life; the carton of cigarettes that conceals the waiting Lucky Strike that will engulf that Beauty Queen mattress and incinerate its sleeper; the black thrift-store clothes that reflect no headlights as the car grinds over the jaywalker; the stolen car that sails over the guardrail of the Harbor Freeway; the doll little Shawna dangles from the window as she slips and plunges into the night; purloined guns and knives sold in the streets for cash or drugs that weeks, months, years later return in deadly force in the hands of accosting strangers; bras and panties cursing looters with infidelity and sexual diseases, hair pomades that precipitate death by mistaken identity, scarves and shirts blue or red in the wrong ’hood that bring showers of bullets from passing cars in the dead of night, fans that short-circuit and incinerate window-barred rooms, vinyl LPs playing loud music that masks evil’s turning doorknob and footfall, GE White Light bulbs that fail as descending Florsheims miss and slip down darkened staircases, wristwatches that propel victims to late or early fates as they tick out final moments too slow or fast in ghetto time.