Graffiti Palace Page 4

  Muhammad flicks through the notebook and loose papers, as if searching for something. Monk, getting that sour feeling in the pit of his stomach, reaches tentatively for the notebook. Muhammad frowns, closing it, slides it to Monk. “I know who you are and what you do. These too are signs long prophesied by the holy book. When cities begin to sprout this filth, it is the cancer manifesting in the body. It is the first sign of the beginning of the end. Rome too had these obscenities scrawled on every column and portico before the end.” Monk remembers a photograph in a history book, an ancient graffito carved into a Roman basilica: Illegitimi non carborundum—Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Elijah shakes his head. “These gangs, brother killing brother, black against brown, young man, all this too is part of their conspiracy. It is not an accident that whites have isolated us in urban zones, eliminated any economic or industrial bases from these zones, then flooded us and the Mexican hordes from the south with cheap guns and unlimited drugs. The Nation of Islam is the sword of the new Negro. The white man and Uncle Toms like Martin Luther King, Jr., have anesthetized the Negro. Their dreams of a Negro middle class and integration are just that, my son—dreams. Only the Nation’s way will bring us salvation, will smash white imperialism.” Monk drains his tea, nods, forces himself not to gaze toward the guards and the doorway from the temple. “Some will accuse the Nation of fomenting the coming rebellion. They will say the Nation cached arms and explosives, that we ordered gangs and secret undercover operatives to fan the flames of revolution. They will use their white propaganda machines to try to destroy us, mark my words. Perhaps,” the old man sighs, sets the teacup on its plate, “you will set the record straight in your book.”

  Elijah Muhammad stands. “I have prepared a room for you,” beckoning Monk to follow.

  “Ah, I really should get goin’, sir.” Get the fuck out of here, boy, get— But Monk can’t think, the old man keeps talking … it’s as if Monk’s mind has slowed, submerged in some kind of foggy static … everything is confused, jumbled … how can he be in this Islamic temple in the middle of the ghetto? What is really going on outside in his city? The spark of some kind of riot … or the gathering of night armies into a great race war?

  “You are not a prisoner. But please stay, if only for a hot meal. I’ve already made arrangements. Leave after you gain your strength, or in the morning, I hope, when it will be perilous but safer. You are under, as the white man’s TV commercial says, no obligation.” Muhammad opens another door.

  “Thanks, sir, but I—” Monk walks inside a large apartment, soft lemon light dimmed by a thick curtain over a window. In the room’s center is a dining table, a service of silver domed platters, porcelain plates, and cloth napkins neatly pyramided, set for two: sitting facing him is a black woman, her red lips and jade eyes made even more strikingly beautiful by the hijab covering her hair and neck. The abaya Muslim gown she wears covers her entire body, but even this medieval armor can’t disguise the voluptuous curves under heavy black cloth. The door clicks behind them.

  “Laylah Nefertiti,” extending her hand. The faintest smile plays under her eyes.

  “Americo Monk.” The food smells good as he tries to clear his mind: Think, boy, get the fuck out of here, back on the street before that shit out there gets worse.

  Her smile broadens. “A name at once ecclesiastical and adventurous. Please sit down, eat.” She uncovers silver platters: orange roast duck and roast beef garnished with onions and carrots.

  “Ah, I really need to get goin’, ma’am,” glancing at the door.

  “Don’t worry about Elijah.” She laughs, forking a pink slab of beef onto his plate. “There is no relationship, we are … free agents.”

  Monk reluctantly sits down, his notebook next to his plate. “What, no clams or oysters on the half shell?”

  She smiles. “So the old man gave you the usual speech,” scooping vegetables onto his plate, “about the Nation.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He’s starving. A hot meal, I have to eat something, then I’m out of here.

  “Elijah is a fanatic. Be careful, when fanatics have power, they are dangerous.” Nefertiti pours Monk a cup of hot tea.

  “You dislike him.” Monk sips tea: beyond the draped great window, muffled sirens wail in the night.

  “The Nation only cloaks itself in religion, it is a political organization. Elijah only cares about amassing wealth and power and, of course, concubines and beautiful consorts.” Her green eyes sparkle above the steam from her teacup.

  “Well, you are beautiful. You don’t have to lie about having no relationship.” Monk smiles, slipping a carrot in his mouth. “You his wife? Is that why you hate him?”

  Her eyes flash. “I apologize. You are not a fool. I am not his wife, only a mistress. One of many. He has twenty-one children out of wedlock. He’s planted what he likes to call his divine seed in half the women in this ghetto. He sermonizes against zina, Islam for adultery.” She forces a bitter laugh. “Women are chattel for breeding. He treats you like some princess out of the Arabian Nights, but if you get knocked up you’re back on some bus bench on Crenshaw Boulevard. I am lucky. I cannot become pregnant, so he gave me the Islam name Sh’laylah, Laylah, Lilith, Hebrew for ‘night.’” A rueful smile. “The succubus that lay with Adam and begat Cain, the first monster unleashed in the world. He is the satyr god, whose holy mission is to multiply the fruits of the Nation, to create some crazy future dream of a world ruled by black men.”

  Nefertiti stands, pulling him up, whispers in his ear. “You are in danger, come, where we can talk.” She leads him to a pile of giant gold-embroidered pillows where they sit near the draped window. “He won’t stop until you’ve joined the Nation, he sees you as a possible caliph, a kind of successor, perhaps.” She nods over to the notebook on the table. “You are a young scholar, as he was. Beware if you betray him. Six months ago, Brother Malcolm discovered his dirty little sex life and was assassinated.” Her lips move close to his, her lilac scent envelops them, jade eyes drooping sensuously. Beyond the window, a faint cry of sirens. “The only way you can be safe is to become a Fruit of Islam.”

  She claps her hands and another door opens from an adjoining suite: two other black women in translucent silver sarongs prance into the room, wiggling down into the golden pillows between Monk and Nefertiti. Hands with copper bracelets caress his thighs, lips brush against his as a tongue from somewhere nibbles on his left earlobe.

  “Ah, ladies, I should be going.” Monk presses back as gauzy breasts brush against him. “I have a woman waiting for me at home.” A siren, muffled beyond the draped window, screams forlornly as it dies away: Sirens, too many sirens, can’t think.

  “How jejune.” Nefertiti’s green eyes blaze as she stands and claps her hands twice. The two girls rush to their feet, then are gone. “Pity, I must be losing my gifts.” Laylah Nefertiti stalks to the doorway. The door closes behind her exquisite abaya-curved secrets.

  The adjoining door opens again: a black arm spills from a silver silk sleeve, bronze bracelets jingling, her hand motioning him. “Quick! Follow me! A fire escape.”

  He follows the woman through a dark, musty corridor, terminating in a blacked-out window. “Hurry!” she whispers as he bangs the rusted latch free and pries the ancient window open. “Be careful, the Nation wants your notebook. They are dangerous. They are stockpiling weapons, he’s planning some kind of race revolution.” Monk’s making a heroic effort to focus on her frantic eyes instead of the dark nipples heaving under diaphanous folds. “You’ve written a phone number, somewhere in your notebook. You must call the number, keep trying until someone answers. He will help you.”

  “Who?”

  “They’re coming!”

  Monk jams the notebook under his belt and he’s over the fire escape’s rusted railing, out into the night. The sirens are louder now, as if converging upon him. Hanging from the fire escape he sees, below the dark strip of 120th Street, a few street lamps flickering toward
Avalon: somewhere to the east is an orange radiance, fire beyond the tenement blocks ahead. A metallic thumping, and he gazes up. Elijah Muhammad stands on the grating, purple fez gleaming in the night like some wizard’s cap as he raises some terrible weapon to smash Monk’s hands gripping the warm rails. Monk lets go, drops to the next railing six feet below, grabs hold, legs locking around the rusted ladder as it creaks and echoes, pulling away from the brick walls with a terminal groan of distressed bolts.

  But it’s not a weapon raised above Elijah’s fez, it’s a guitar Monk sees as the old calypso troubadour slings it around and starts strumming. “You’ll be back, my son, into the Nation’s waiting glory.”

  A final, terrible iron groan as the rusted ladder fails and Monk plummets toward just another ghetto death here by misadventure: not free-falling, the ladder telescopes down, gliding Monk past bricks and windows until the rungs jar and lock to a stop, extending eight feet above the sidewalk where he sprawls. Up and he’s running, cuts into an alley off San Pedro, calypso guitar and the old imam’s sweet falsetto fading into the night. Blocks ahead is Main Street. He walks toward the distant lights and sirens, his fingers brushing the notebook still safe beneath his belt.

  5

  East on 121st Street to Main Street. Sirens wail from the north. On the corner, a crowd of young men drinking beers, huddled around a transistor radio crackling music from the curb. Monk heads south on Main, past a cubbyhole shoe-repair shop, front window smashed, display shoes gone, only a single ivory wingtip on the sidewalk. Cop cars speed past, sirens and lights flashing. Across the street, a crowd in front of Mama’s Boutique, a dingy thrift shop: someone hurls a trash can through the plate-glass window. Up ahead, the yellow-and-green neon sign of the Tote ’Em Mart, still open. Monk ducks inside, past the plastic totem pole jutting crookedly near the glass doors: plastic Indian faces leer down at him, grinning redskin masks that betray no memories of prairie genocide.

  “We are closing early,” the dark Indian clerk lilts in his Babu, north India accent from behind the counter: Ganges Slurpadavedjahpad gazes anxiously out into the night beyond the still pristine front plate-glass windows. Monk pours a small inky coffee from the machine. The store is empty except for two little boys at the soft drink machine. The children grab jumbo plastic cups and fill them, passing them under every plastic nipple along the machine, frothing jets of cola, root beer, lemon dew, cherry, Dr. Pepper, riffling up and down the spigots like virtuosos flaying a piano keyboard. “Hey!” Ganges waving his hands, shooing the kids away from the dripping machine.

  “Come on, Mr. Ganges,” one boy pleads, “make us one of your Indian drinks.” Ganges’s drinks are popular in the neighborhood, a little invention he stumbled on one day a few months ago when he was cleaning the soda dispenser: drinking a jumbo lemon-lime chock-full of crushed ice, he elbowed it down the hopper of the vanilla ice cream machine. Cleaning the tank, glops of green slime were collected in a bucket. In a moment of madness or inspiration he dipped a cup into the sludge and tasted. He started making the concoctions for the kids, who nicknamed it “Slurpee” in his honor.

  “No time,” waving the boys out the door, “drinks are free today from Mr. Ganges, see you tomorrow.” Ganges locks the door, peering out into darkness. To Monk: “Please hurry, sir, we are closed.”

  At the counter with hot coffee, flipping through his book for a small scribbled note he dimly recalls in a lower margin: there, a double-crucifix graffito from Rosecrans Avenue, the letters SK for the Sand Kings, a neo-Nazi gang, and the number 7339969. He remembers the Kings are desert rats, mostly around the Mojave area. The double crucifix is a telephone pole.

  The plate-glass front windows implode in a shower of crystals. “Discount night, motherfuckers!” A voice in the crowd pushing in from outside.

  “The back way!” Ganges shouts. Monk runs after the clerk. They head through a door stenciled THE SOUTHLAND CORPORATION, “THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN.”

  Ganges bolts the door. They’re inside a darkened stockroom, dim light filtering through a grimy skylight above. Ganges presses a finger to his lips, signaling silence, grabs Monk’s shirtsleeve, pulling him deeper past boxes, stacks of foam cups, syrup jugs, cartons of cigarettes and candy and Twinkies. They slide down a rear wall behind stacks of metal shelves.

  “The South shall rise again?” Monk whispers.

  “I know,” Ganges shakes his head, “very bad company.” He stares nervously at the bolted door in the shadows. “I am the first Indian to buy a franchise, the white stockholders are very unhappy,” whispering. Monk smiles and nods. “When I bought my store they required me to go to this board meeting in Texas. Have you ever been to Texas?”

  “No.” Beyond the door, muted sounds of shelves clattering to the floor, running steps.

  “It reminded me of what we Hindus call Naraka, or hell.” Monk laughs, then covers his mouth, too much noise. “A circle of old white men, they forced me to pray with them … I was very frightened. They informed me that they are changing all the store names to Seven Eleven … with the seven a number but eleven a word, an alphanumeric code because they believe the world will end on the seventh day of the eleventh month.” They listen and watch the bolted door, but there is only silence. “So I said, ‘Okay, November seventh, but before I purchase my store, can you tell me what year?’ But they would not say.” Monk grins and nods. “Very strange and alarming men,” Ganges whispers. “I think they are gone now.” They walk to the door and Ganges slowly slides back the bolt and cracks open the door, a sliver of light spilling over his black eyes as he peers outside. “Oh my Ganesha, my store,” he moans as they step out. The looters are gone, having left piles of groceries scattered on the floor and display racks crumpled and stomped; sludges of green Slurpee slime and green boot prints everywhere.

  “I’m sorry about your store, man.” Monk shakes his head.

  “Better go now.” Ganges ushers Monk through the smashed glass front door, padlocking it behind him. “Terrible,” he hears Ganges mumbling behind him, “the Southland Corporation will be very unhappy…”

  Monk follows a dark alley and he’s back on South Main. Mobs of young men spill over sidewalks. Above the rooftops of the shops, businesses, tenements, tapers of smoke curl up from distant blocks. Every rooftop in the ghetto—by secret covenant among white developers, media telecopter units, and the LAPD—is stenciled with huge black address numbers to track the denizens below …

  Traffic is light, cars slowly rolling down Main. Monk trudges past Sweet Tooth’s Donuts, glass doors shattered, the dim interior jumbled and ransacked. As he heads south, roaming groups of young men tote looted bags, boxes, chairs, six-packs, handfuls of merchandise indistinct in the gloom between sparse working street lamps: glancing up, he sees almost every other light’s been shot out. What are they doing to his city? He gazes around in disbelief: these streets he loves, these spray-painted codas and rainbow-spangled graffiti walls, the underground voices to hear and heed if one only listened—are they going to burn it all down?

  He passes Mercury Check Cashing. The store is in flames, smoke ripples into the night, one or two men still lobbing bricks and sticks through burning windows. No banks here in the ghetto, only these corporate chains that bleed every black paycheck 10 percent before a brother can even buy a beer on payday. Across the street, Mad Mel’s Radio & TV disgorges men and women, running, stumbling with loot through the smashed windows as alarms blare, lost in tonight’s sirens. On each block Monk hopes the destruction and the mobs will disappear, that this madness is localized, a few burning scars raked through his city, but each new corner brings another burning vista. A little boy cradling a huge radio, walking across the parking lot when this black man in black gloves and an army jacket snatches the radio from the boy and pushes him sprawling to the glass-sparkled pavement.

  Monk stops at a stucco wall, takes out his notebook, and sketches on a blank page: the base of the wall’s been spray-painted Farmers in blue and black; the let
ter M is inverted, for Watts … the graffiti is low on the wall, a warning that the gang is new and rising … but Monk has his doubts: sometimes gangs paint phony tags as decoys or to draw out traitors … he’s heard rumors that even the cops are doing it to infiltrate the city. He knows that sometimes signs are like the new physics, that the rules break down; the semiotician struggles in the twilight of uncertainty: message, sender, receiver, meaning can shift, change in time and space.

  A lowered purple ’61 Impala SS idles slowly to a stop, tinted window rolling down: a huge Mexican behind the chrome-chain steering wheel, bald, black glasses, evil grin above bouncing double chins. “Que onda puto?” he laughs.

  Monk’s terrified, his mind frozen with animal fear … he has to throw fast, and he better not make a fatal error. He’s pretty sure these vatos are with Las Sombras, the Shadows gang. He presses thumb to index finger of the opposite hand, throwing up the S sign for Sombras.

  “Buen trabajo, hombre,” grinning, a gold tooth glinting in the night. “Where you goin’, ese?” Another banger, a black scarf tied to his head, smiles around a toothpick, bloodshot eyes squinting out at Monk.

  “Trying to get a bus to the harbor, man.” Monk hopes his edgy voice doesn’t betray his fear.

  “Ain’t no buses runnin’ through this shit storm. You never make it tonight, bro. Hop in, we’re rollin’ some that way.” The Impala’s rear door opens, a third Sombra, wearing a tank top and cradling a bottle of tequila, beckons him in. Monk steels himself and climbs inside: safe passage once he’s thrown the sign, unless they cross any other gangs tonight. The driver’s huge body blobs across most of the front seat, wedged against door and steering wheel, black glasses and double chins nodding in the rearview mirror.

  The Impala turns, glides east on 127th. Monk stares out the window: on the corner, a wall of mostly young men lobbing rocks and beer bottles at two police cruisers wedged in a V formation in the intersection. The Sombra swigs tequila, rolls down his window, shoots a street lamp out with his .22. “Pendejo,” the huge driver laughs, turning down Avalon. Police cars scream past. A beer bottle bounces off the trunk. “Chingaso,” Sombra laughs, passing the tequila to Monk. Monk fakes a gulp and passes the bottle. The Impala thumps over a house lamp abandoned in the street. Turning down a dark, quiet street, looks like Towne Avenue. The lowriders, lights out, creep into a driveway: an old whitewashed Craftsman house, barred doors and windows, four Sombras standing guard in the porch shadows with rifles and pistols, glowering beneath bandanna headbands.