Graffiti Palace Read online

  In the distance, the lights of Broadway glow. On either side of Monk abandoned or looted storefronts pass in shadows. A car roars past jammed with young black men, radio blaring, then it’s gone. Silence, glass crunching under Monk’s sneakers, a siren pealing somewhere. A block up on South Spring Street, tucked under the stucco canopy of a padlocked shop, Monk hears a metallic, plaintive ringing, like something urgent, alive inside a phone booth. He runs toward the booth, its lights smashed out, like a dark coffin set in the concrete sidewalk. The ringing is deafening, filling his mind as he slams through the broken doors and lifts the receiver.

  “Hello! Hello!”

  “Take Athens Way.” That old man’s grizzled voice again.

  “Who is this? Please—”

  “Some call me Tyrone. Friends call me Tyre, around and around, like the rubber on a ol’ tire … maybe I’m just tired, old and tired.”

  “Who is this? Where are you? Please, what’d you mean I was your eyes?” A dial tone bleats from the receiver. Monk stares down at the black plastic phone in his shaking hand. He toggles the silver switch in the telephone’s cradle. Silence, the dial tone is gone. “Fuck!” Monk slams the receiver again and again into the cradle, then stabs his index finger into the zero on the rotary disk and dials. “Operator! Operator!” Silence. He pats his pockets, no nickels or dimes. Calm now. “Okay.” Monk gently sets the receiver back in its cradle and steps out of the booth.

  In the smoky distance, fires and the flashing red lights of Broadway’s scattered working signals glow in the night like brimstone beacons. On the corner, knots of men and teenagers gulp beer and pass a bottle, smoking cigarettes, hunched on the warm curb and the steps of shuttered buildings. Someone throws a nickel in an upturned hat on the sidewalk, and a couple of winos, sharing a bottle in a greasy brown bag as Monk passes, dance and croak out a raspy duet:

  If if was a fifth,

  We’d be drunk,

  If hip was a whiff,

  We’d be crunked—

  If cool was a fool,

  We’d be jive shuckers,

  If bullshit was a big hit,

  We’d be singin’ mother—

  Monk walks north into a pitch-black alley that parallels Broadway. “Okay, Tyrone.” He cuts through a vacant lot and crosses Broadway, heading west on 122nd Street. Athens Way: a dark street fringed with back alleys, fences and walls, iron-barred tiny houses, towering electric power lines that parallel, to the west, the rising concrete stream of lights and engines of the Harbor Freeway overhead. Monk turns south and pauses, sketches a few new outlaw murals and graffiti—puffy spray-painted letters and words—as he passes: he’s seen most of these works before, but there’s some fresh throw-ups: he’s recorded this new word in his notebook, some of the taggers calling their work throw-ups because speed of execution is a point of pride, but they’re hip to other associations of the word, like throwing bombs at the Man and vomiting their disgust and pain into the public. Huge looping words, cloudy glyphs, veiled threats—UR Next … Look Behind U … RU4 Da End?… Krip Keprz—and spray-executed, harsh lines in bright reds, pinks, limes, oranges, turquoise, symbols of angels, demons, fire escapes, mushroom clouds, blood drops, floating heads and hands, magnifying glasses, and spiral purple vortexes: the sonic mania of Ameba88—88 for Eighty-eighth Street, where the mysterious artist was rumored to have been born. Athens is one of the main galleries in the city. Every house, wall, gate, power pole is a canvas, even horizontal planes of sidewalks, driveways, asphalt road. Ameba88’s works command the surfaces of the most inaccessible areas: only those who can seek him out are worthy of judging his work. His murals are not of the world but underground, where only graffitists and wandering scholars with notebooks view his anti-galleries of spray-painted icons and intricate scripts on iron hatch plates high atop power-line towers, along twenty-foot walls beyond coils of razor wire, rooftops, the concrete pylons and overpasses and exit signs of the Harbor Freeway—no height or barbed-wire spools or spiked fences or padlocked bars or rushing cars or gravity itself can stop Ameba88’s assault: some of his work seems sprayed from impossible angles or composed from vantages where no steps or scaffolds exist …

  On this wall Ameba88’s sprayed black and brown men who glide above the dark cityscape on wings of flames. The wall corners into an alleyway where Ameba88 has attempted to continue the mural, but there are only a few strokes of a red angel’s wings and then the spray stops, dripping toward the pavement. Monk looks down: he sees the crosshatched imprint of sneaker bottoms stained in red paint, a couple more half-prints down the alley, as if something made Ameba88 stop and run.

  Across the alley, at the base of a tall fence, he sees two black candles half burned in saucers, three broken twigs, and a Dixie cup full of something reddish. The corner house is an old Victorian three-story that towers above the row houses. The white picket fence and the house’s bright lavender panels and indigo moldings are the only surfaces not tagged or sprayed.

  “You can pass this way.” Monk turns, hearing a woman’s voice. An old black woman is stooped in the open doorway of the house’s octagonal tower. Her long frosted hair blends with a white knit shawl draped around bony shoulders hunched over her cane.

  “I’m just going to El Segundo Boulevard, ma’am.”

  “You want to go south … through the house is an alley that’ll take you there.” A soft, gentle accent, perhaps Southern. Monk nods, walks up the pathway. Her sable eyes are milky, almost blind. Her cheekbones are drawn, her face pale, shrunken like a gourd, only a bronze wisp of color seeps back into black skin under her eyes. “My name is Mab,” closing the door behind him. “My friends call me Queen.”

  “Mab? I’m not Mercutio, am I?” tucking his notebook in his pants. They stand in the entryway.

  “More of a dark Romeo, but with a kinder fate in store, let us hope.” Above them, a spiral staircase ascends into the shadows of the octagonal tower.

  “You’re some kind of voodoo queen. That’s why your house isn’t all tagged up.” Past the staircase, a large parlor, faded tapestries on the paneled walls.

  “Please. The word is voodooienne. Voodoo is a force, neither good nor evil, but it can be a kind of shield. Please come in.” A fireplace crackles in the center of the far wall, though it is stifling summer outside. A round maple table with a green cloth is in the parlor’s center. White candles flicker from sconces on the walls. A great window fills the east wall, but it is blocked with heavy burnished copper drapes that wrinkle over polished floorboards.

  “You knew I was goin’ south.”

  “Did I? Perhaps. Then again, this street runs north and south. A fifty-fifty chance.”

  “What else do you know, Miss Hoodoo?” Monk stares into her milky eyes. “There is a voice on the telephone. A blind man. I think I saw him once right before the riot began. His name is Tyrone or Tyre or something. He told me to take Athens, towards you … Who is he?”

  “I … I don’t know,” a slight edge in Mab’s voice. “But before I can let you go—”

  “Aw, come on, Queen, I’m just trying to get home. Let me go if you can’t answer my questions. I’m not burning or tagging nothing. Please don’t curse me or stick pins and shit in your dolls or whatever you hoodoos do.”

  “Don’t be so theatrical. How do you think you’ve got this far safely, with all that is going on out there? Voodoo ain’t witchcraft, it’s just a path that might work for you, just a state of mind if you like, or it’s just nonsense.” Her milky eyes bear down closer to his. “It does not require your knowledge or your belief to work…”

  “Look, lady, if you don’t mind, could I just be on my—”

  “Of course, I only wanted to say that before I can let you go, please eat a little and drink a little with me, because if your soul were to pass through my home without this hospitality, it could prove dangerous … to me! Don’t look so damned scared.” She digs a silver crucifix from her withered bosom. “I’m Catholic.”

  They s
it at the mint-cloth-covered table. The old woman pours tea, a silver plate with a knife and single peeled banana between them. The candlelight flickers over Mab’s shawl, like a strange veil that’s seeped into her kindly, wizened face. “Last time I had tea, bananas were forbidden.”

  “Then you must have had high tea with a Muslim.” Mab smiles. “Superstitious lot,” cackling in the firelight.

  “Aren’t you going to read the tea leaves?” Monk sips the hot tea: he’s starting to sweat, the fireplace crackles, it feels like it’s a hundred degrees in the dim parlor.

  “I am not a charlatan or a fortune-teller. No one can tell the future.” Tea steam rises into her cloudy irises. “I can only tell your pastent.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your present, which is part of your past, your pastent.”

  “Not much of a trick.”

  “I told you, I’m not a trickster. You’re going south, going home. The closer you get, the farther behind you in reality are … a woman waits for you, a woman you love, but there is danger … not for you, but for her.”

  “How’d you do that? What danger?” Monk’s mouth is a little open.

  “You see? The past and present is tricky enough!” Cackling. “Screw the future! I’m old!” Laughing, clinking teacups.

  “Why can’t voodoo tell the future?”

  “Because the future doesn’t exist. The future is a series of possibilities, but finite. There are … ways … to determine possible futures … some people have thousands of potential paths … some have only three or four … most people have six to eight, depending on age and sex and other … things.”

  “Well, how many futures do I have?” He dabs sweat from his brow with a napkin.

  “We could find out … but do you really want to know?”

  “What else can voodoo do?”

  “Voodoo can only make the mind stronger or weaker. It can influence human action. Make a woman fall in love, make a man forgive, bring hate or love, protect or expose oneself or others to good or evil, protect a house from burning down out there, stop a hoodlum from spray-painting … create channels … where one’s journey may be safe or perilous.”

  Monk picks up a silver knife. “No,” Mab gently taking the knife, “we mustn’t slice the banana, we must always break the banana. When you cut the fruit with a knife, you bisect the core of the banana, the inner stem, which, if you look, is the exact shape of the crucifix.”

  “Can you tell me about my paths?” Monk chews banana, sips tea.

  “Perhaps. But only if your mind is ready.” Mab’s eyes drown out the candlelight. “These powers, these shadow things, are extensions of the mind … a zombie is a state of being, not a reanimated corpse … a night loa, a spirit, is a state of mind … no, wait, a zombie is a reanimated corpse,” cackling, “just kidding!” She nudges his shoulder, sips tea. “Go to the window.”

  Monk steps to the copper-draped window.

  “What’s out there?” Queen Mab chews banana.

  “Athens Way,” Monk unbuttoning his sweat-sopped shirt. “The freeway.”

  “No. Out that window is a full moon. Fireflies glow above the swamps that trickle into Bayou Saint John … willows hang and tremble like old beards from mossy branches. Yellow gas lamps flicker around the crescent of Congo Square … people watch from the balconies atop the old stained and ivy trellises of mansion walls … as, down in the square, a naked black woman chants and dances, swaying with a black rooster over her wild, sightless eyes as the old hoodoos chant and circle ’round her, scattering white feathers and glass beads and rice at her bare feet, drinking from bottles and spitting rum on her glistening black skin. If you don’t believe me, pull back the drapes and look … but be prepared to see the world for the rest of your life as you have never imagined it before, if I am right.”

  Monk’s hand raises and touches the heavy curtain: but his fingers tingle; he’s afraid. He turns and walks back to the table, sits down. “Good,” Mab cackles, opening her ancient eyes. “You’re ready.” She opens a drawer in the table and extracts a blue velvet sack, stained with mud. “This is the earth, its seas and land,” a black gnarled finger tracing the velvet. “Inside are the runes.”

  “Ruins?” Monk mops his sweating face: a log crackles in the fire.

  “No. Runes. Stones with runic symbols, the ancient language of the first religion, long before Christianity. The Codex Runicus parchments may be the oldest written language. Move your seat so that you face the fireplace.”

  “Why?” Monk scoots over, the heat radiates from the grate.

  “You must face north, toward Odin and the gods of long-ago ice worlds.” Mab is rubbing the polished stones inside the sack with her fingers. “Choose four runes, a stone for each cardinal direction of life.”

  “And the four points of the cross.”

  “The cross existed long before Jesus saw one.” Queen Mab’s eyes gleam in the candlelight. “Four is also the axis points of the earth.”

  “I don’t believe in all this Stonehenge stuff.”

  “My child, voodoo is our religion. It is a path to our old ways and selves. It is all the magic and power of the old country brought here to this new country by us, by black slaves. Voodoo is the old and new, the pagan and Christian, the Norse and South, the evil and the sane. You must listen to me. I am Queen Mab. There are no voodoo kings, only queens. We are a matriarchy, like the old country, before men created the despotic kings of Africa. Listen and set aside your prejudices. I am the mother’s voice from the mother country, the womb from where all civilization began … Eve gave birth to Adam!” Mab cackles, slaps the table.

  “And Eve was black.”

  “Black is beautiful, baby. So listen when I say the runes are not confined to the old ways. There is power in these old signs, just as all signs hold power. A traffic sign can kill … a mathematical sign can bring riches or poverty … an atomic equation can bring the destruction of a world … a sign scrawled on a wall can bring power or death … you should know that!” Mab taps his notebook now.

  “How’d you know—” Monk stops. “You could have seen me through the window.”

  “That is one explanation. But I can assure you the runic language is still very important to your world. The runes have a long and living history in this country. A secret language waged in a battle for the nation itself, from the beginning and still fought to this day. The destiny of America must be either white or black, and these forces have been locked in enmity since the time of the Founding Fathers. You can see the war is still being fought out in tonight’s burning streets.” In the candlelight, Mab’s white orbs seem in a trance beyond him … the sweat, the dry buffeting heat from the fire, he feels dizzy but now he’s shaking, as if freezing. “The war over slavery was often fought with the secret codes of the runes. The so-called framers schemed bitterly over the slavery question, communicating in secret languages, including runic, using many clandestine organizations, such as the Illuminati, the Sons of the Confederacy, and the Skull and Bones society. Slaves fought back and adopted the same codes, but some say with the codes, with the ancient signs, came magic too … there are accounts of slaves casting runes in circles under lynched brothers and sisters to bring the dead back to life … to curse cruel masters … to escape by powers of flight or invisibility.”

  “Yeah, but the Civil War, all that shit was a long time ago—”

  “The war. Runes carved into cannonballs that never miss their mark … trenches cut into the earth in the horizontal configurations of runic signs … Confederate and Union troop movements under the protection of midnight stone-casting in gaslit command tents … runes scratched into the silver hilt of Booth’s pistol … Don’t be a fool. The struggle went underground mostly, with certain seismic manifestations—you just came from those streets, a city in flames. The war has never stopped. Black against white, night against day, darkness against light. You think it stopped a century ago? I don’t have time for your foolishness. I’m an ol
d woman. But consider this,” patting his hand, stroking his fingers and thumb. “My, such strong hands … if I were twenty years younger,” laughing. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Consider Old Yankee’s Bell. You know it as the Liberty Bell, but I’ve been around for a long time. The symbol, the foundation of our land. Rung July 8, 1776, to call Philadelphians to the town hall for the reading of the Declaration of Independence. The bell’s inscription echoes the great document and a new, free world is created: Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof—Leviticus twenty-five, verse ten. But the bell’s historic tolling cracks its forged metals, some say because of others using occult powers. The bell is sundered like the newly born nation itself. Old Yankee’s Bell is beloved—but only by abolitionists. In 1915, the bell is freighted by train to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It’s a world’s fair advertising the city’s rebirth from the great fire and earthquake … a disaster that may have not been natural at all … more of an … ethnic cleansing, the latest volley in the secret war.”

  Monk’s shivering even as the heat from the flames radiates from his face and warms his clothes.

  “In the middle of the night, somewhere across the lonely plains, the train never stops but the bell’s freight car is secretly breached. When the train arrives in Philadelphia’s depot, the bell has been split in two along the fissure of its crack. Only half the bell rests in its crate, the other half never found. Inside the bell’s demi-fluted remnant a new biblical inscription is discovered, etched in the ancient strokes of runic figures. Cursed be Canaan; a Slave of Slaves shall He be to His Brothers—Genesis nine, verse eighteen.”

  He sneezes, buttoning his shirt, bathed in sweat before the roaring fire: How the fuck can I be cold? “You are cold because you face north, and Odin and the spirits of ice are gathering … you are almost ready to cast the runes.” Queen Mab grins. “Nineteen forty-two … Negro soldiers are allowed to fight only in segregated units, deployed only in the worst, suicidal front lines. I could go on and on, but it’s all out there,” sweeping her shawled arm toward the draped window, “waiting for you—you are ready now for casting. Pick four stones and put them in my hand.”