Graffiti Palace Read online

  “You get paid to kill mosquitoes, cool.”

  “That’s right, but we like to say ‘control.’” M.T. squats down and opens a silver case. He snaps on a rubber glove and extracts a purple pellet from a glass vial. “Die, you spawn from hell,” grinning as he lobs the pellet into the center of the huge inky puddle. “That’ll get all biblical on their bug asses.”

  “Lot of puddles in the ghetto.”

  “Yeah, job security. More puddles, drains, sewers, clogged tanks, abandoned swimming pools, flooded alleys, and leaking pipes than you can shake a pump sprayer at.” He stuffs the glove and clipboard into the case, closes it, and hefts up the handle. “Where you goin’?”

  “South, toward the harbor.”

  “Got another call goin’ that way, give you a ride. You can be Mosquito Jesus.” He measures the alarm on Monk’s face, then laughs. “Just fuckin’ wiff ya,” and slaps him on the back.

  They trudge in silence for a few minutes as Monk tries to think. What the hell is happening to him? What was that madness with Elijah Muhammad? Then a risky encounter with the Sombras gang … but it paid off with a ride a little farther south, and now another ride coming his way, this bear of a man braving pestilence from the night skies while the city burns. Karmann always said he’s lucky, maybe so, but sometimes he thinks there’s more than luck, he can’t explain it, more like a feeling, something on the periphery, just beyond his grasp: a kind of grace or light that’s kept him mostly on track; he smiles at the strange wonderment of following this ghetto spirit’s hard-hat lamp through the darkness. “This lot is huge,” Monk says as they travel east.

  “Yeah, we got maps over at the LAMA offices, but some of these lots aren’t on any city maps. When they are, you go there and they’re different, smaller or bigger, always changing shapes, a wall breaks here and there, someone builds in this corner or that, damn lots is always changing like some kind of creature.” M.T. chuckles as they move past a gigantic mound of demolished-building debris. “You see some shit in the ’hood,” shaking his head, the miner’s lamp scanning across the wasteland of weeds, puddles, broken battlements. “Back in ’61 I was out doin’ my rounds with a partner, found a vacant lot over off of Willowbrook. There was this big puddle, bigger’n the one back there. He lost his balance, fell in, mutherfucker disappeared. I grabbed a pole from the van, jabbed it into that black shit, hoping he’d somehow grab on, I guess. I couldn’t even reach bottom with that ten-foot pole, must’ve been some kind of weird sinkhole or some shit like that. Later that summer the puddle dried up and there was nothin’ there, just cracks in the dry mud, never did find his body.”

  The lot jags southeast now, past a weed-choked pyramid of old tires, rims soaked with fetid water, and circling mosquito squadrons. A rancid mattress and a heap of rotting clothes and rags. Monk notes the graffiti on a crumbling whitewashed wall: a black, drippy number 8 with a red 3 painted over the 8’s right half, sign of the Eight Tray gang. Finally, the street lamps and fugitive headlights of Central Avenue. They scrabble through a trampled chain-link fence and they’re back on the sidewalk.

  Traffic is lighter, as if cars are abandoning the city. Down the block, police cruiser lights flash as sirens fade. Men lope across the streets like scattered foot soldiers and into shadows; alarms bleat somewhere in the night. Monk and M.T. round a corner: out in the middle of the street, in darkness between burned-out street lamps, the dim outline of a manhole cover pried up, two glowing, feral red eyes blazing at them from the depths, then the demon vanishes, the sewer cover slamming down with a clang of rusted iron. “Did you see that?” Monk frozen.

  “Like I said,” M.T. heading for a long white utility van parked in the gutter, “see a lot of strange shit in the ghetto.” The van’s side windows are painted over with LAMA and the city’s seal.

  They drive south down Central. “Sewer rat.” M.T., lighting a cigarette, taps one loose in the pack for Monk.

  “That fucker was huge.” Monk waves away the cigarette pack.

  “They get fat down there,” M.T. exhaling smoke. “Seen ’em big as dogs. Willy—he works the South Side—tol’ me one time he saw one like a goddamn bear.” Outside the windows, looters stream in and out of a ransacked furniture store, toting armchairs, coffee tables, lamps, rugs. “Man, they’re tearin’ the city apart.”

  “You’ve seen them? The rats, I mean.”

  “Huh? Oh shit, yeah. See, LAMA ain’t just after squeets and bugs. We maintain most of the city’s infrastructure. Our charter is to eradicate all vermin. Bugs, rats, weeds, bats, pigeons, you name it. Workin’ the sewers is the worst, man. Sometimes you see these huge shadows and mutherfuckin’ red eyes glarin’ at you, some of these shadows on the curved walls lookin’ too big, them darting eyes way too high off the ground, man … you’d fire a few warning rounds and those things would disappear. While back, my flashlight caught one of them tails as it flicked away, must’ve been six feet long … You seen how that bastard lifted that manhole cover with its head? You ever try to lift a goddamn manhole cover?”

  Smoke billows from store doorways as Monk stares out the window. “Someone told me there’s this white dope growing in the sewers.”

  “Hey, that’s right. Cannabis albina sinistras, only grows in ghetto sewers. Down in the West Side, it don’t grow in any white folks’ sewers, not enough soul food down there I guess. Falls under LAMA’s mandate, we’re supposed to wipe that shit out too, under the supervision of the DEA,” M.T. laughs, “when we’re not sneakin’ it home and smokin’ it. Up on the streets they call it Narco Blanco, Albino Dyno, Rat Smack, White Weed, Sewer Shit, Underganjaground, and Moby Dope. Gangs sellin’ and killin’ each other over it, mutherfuckers tryin’ to grow it but it only grows in the sewers, man. It’s a sight, baby. You see these big milky plants growin’, clingin’ to the sides of those tunnels, roots dippin’ in the stream of shit between your boots. Must be some kind of mutant strain of dope. The stems, leaves, buds, it’s all this shiny white. Shit gets you seriously fucked-up—or so I’m told,” chuckling.

  M.T. slams on the brakes as a knot of skinny men in sweaty tank tops bolts across the boulevard. A bottle smashes over the van’s hood. “Fuck this.” He spins the steering wheel, the van lurches around a corner, down a darker side street. “I know those fucking rats are eating that white weed, ’cause you can see something extra crazed in their beady eyes. That albino hooch makes ’em nuts, you can see mountains of food and garbage they chew through, cans of beer and bottles of booze, some serious-ass munchies … you can hear ’em squealin’ and humpin’ each other against the walls, all they do is party, baby.”

  This street is dark, subdued under August’s balmy night. No lights, only the faint glow from barred windows of little houses. M.T. pulls the van to the curb, parks, shuts off the engine. “I gotta stop for a quick dinner break. Come on back.” He opens a cargo door behind the seats and they climb into the rear of the utility van.

  The interior of the van seems strangely elongated, receding into booths of rainbow-colored plastic beaded curtains that still sway from the ride. “I dig your beads, man.”

  “I’ll give you the tour.” M.T. parts a beaded curtain and Monk follows: a small love cushion and stereo; through another shimmering veil of beads, a still-sloshing water bed bathed in the jade glow of a lava lamp. “For the chicks, baby,” slapping Monk on the back. They pass through narrow, zigzagging corridors of tinkling beads: How big is this fuckin’ van? Monk shakes his head. A beaded cubicle with toilet and mirror; a crescent of beads enveloping a tiny couch in front of what Monk guesses to be the rear window, which M.T. reveals by pulling up white shades. “My love palace on wheels, baby. Every night I just back into any million-dollar view I’m in the mood to eyeball: the beach, perhaps the green cliffs of Palos Verdes, or the city lights over the gods themselves, Mount Olympus.”

  The maze of plastic beads tinkles apart and they’ve somehow made it back—to the front. They sit on chairs M.T. pulls from wall panels before
a tiny stove, mini refrigerator, and storage lockers bolted to the van’s side panels. He pops a ceiling vent, opens the cupboard, removes boxes and packets of tinfoil and frying pans, lights up the stove.

  “Hungry?” He pulls spices and bottles from a rack.

  “Actually, I just had duck à l’orange, unwisely topped off with some questionable Mexican food,” Monk says, grinning.

  M.T. cocks an eyebrow. “Too bad. I’m preparing peanut soy steaks with nut glaze, mashed peanut butter squash, and peanut faux rice with spicy barbecued nuts. Yeah, ever since they discovered that Moby Dope growin’ in the sewers, strange events start gettin’ reported with these damn rodents.” M.T. ladles steaming food dark as coffee onto his plate; the van fills with the cloying stench of roasted peanuts. “Reports of giant rats appearing furtively at street level, raids into kitchens and food storage, everything chewed and torn apart … old ladies and children disappearing in the night, you know, shit like that and the cops hush it up, but every once in a while down at LAMA we hear reports of home invasions, doors gnawed through, windows smashed, only homes and apartments of women alone, you dig, the women sayin’ they was intimately assaulted, descriptions of red eyes, clumps of coarse hairs in the victims’ fists.”

  M.T. opens the fridge, offers a dark wedge of pie to Monk. “Try this, peanut meringue with honeyed nut husks.”

  “Quite a peanut diet you’re on there.” Monk tentatively nibbles the oily pie.

  “That’s all I eat is peanuts.” M.T. polishes off the pie. “Listen, brother, the peanut is a secret soul food—”

  “I know, George Washington Carver.”

  “Yeah, well, did ya know every American Negro owes his life to Carver? Old George was born right at the end of the Civil War, and lucky for you and me, he was obsessed with the nut. Sharecroppers was starvin’ when he showed ’em how to grow peanuts and make peanut butter. Then the whites tried to steal it from us back in 1895, when that mutherfucker Dr. Kellogg stole Carver’s secret recipe. See, Dr. Kellogg was a head-shrink, and he discovered that when he fed peanut paste to the lunatics inside his Battle Creek Sanitarium, they became strangely docile … then he started that damn giant cereal company and turned the mighty peanut into a goddamn breakfast spread for white kids.”

  Outside, the muffled sounds of sirens and gunshots sound closer. Monk: “Ah, maybe we should get goin’.”

  “Okay, let’s roll.” M.T. clatters pans into the sink, bottles and tinfoil into the fridge, boxes into the cupboard. “Listen, son, don’t sell the mystic peanut short. People live to be a hundred and twenty on peanut diets, but the health companies and doctors have it all hushed up.” Monk nods: Don’t sell the mystic short … He won’t, he’ll try to go with it, with this luck or whatever force it is that carries him south. “Somethin’ else, peanuts is an aphrodisiac, or what I like to call an Afro … disiac,” chuckling. “You can churn the butter all night, brother.” M.T. latches the cargo door behind them. Back in their seats, M.T. guns the van down the darkened street.

  They drive south down Parmelee Avenue, paralleling Central. Sirens pulsate up and down Central, to the east. Monk opens his notebook, studying the page he last perused while fleeing through the secret panic rooms of the Southland Corporation.

  M.T. glances at the strange graffiti symbols and scrawled notes on the frayed pages. “You ain’t a tagger, are you? If so, then I’m aidin’ and abettin’ the enemy.” Chuckles. “’Course, half my damn crews moonlight as taggers, sprayin’ everything so in the morning they can clock in and paint over last night’s shockin’ vandalism. Job security.”

  “No, it’s a habit of mine. The college word is urbanologist.”

  “Kind of an infrastructuralist yourself, heh?” M.T. says to Monk. “What you lookin’ at there?” Passing 134th Street now: a car crumpled into a wall, a mob pulling the driver out through the smashed window; a parking lot lit by smoke and flames from distant exit doors, shadowy looters pushing shopping carts heaped with boxes and merchandise.

  “It’s a number I found sprayed on a wall.” Monk is dazed, transfixed by the smoke and flames that blur past. “Someone said I should call it.” But he’s got to call Karmann first; she must be on her second or third pack of Kents, worried about him. His dubious friends there, feasting and boozing. Maybe the party’s breaking up, everyone eager to get home. Are they watching the riot on the news? His old TVs barely work. Are they scared? Are their houses cinders? Are their families safe? Maybe all they have is a few radios, three or four brothers always with transistors pressed into their Afros. What if they can’t leave? No one knows how far the riot’s spread; the whole city could be burning, all the way south to the harbor, maybe Long Beach, the entire coast in flames …

  On Piru Street, two cop cars block the intersection: M.T. slows but the cops wave the county van through.

  “Maybe those cops’ll hold ’em back. Looks quieter. Crazy night to be workin’ a shift, but here we go, last stop.” M.T. pulls the van in front of another vacant lot off Central. “You can cut through here to Hillford Avenue. I gotta go back north up to LAMA.”

  The lot is black dunes and scrub brush and weeds in the night. Monk sees the dunes are heaps of slag and asphalt and bulldozed dirt left from some past demolition. They trudge through weeds, pyramids of old tires, rotting lumber piles, mounds of trash. M.T.’s silver case gleams under tonight’s hidden moon. Blocks of graffiti concrete jut from the earth like spray-painted ruins.

  “More mosquitoes to bomb?” Monk carefully skirts a large puddle whose black depths reflect a fathomless night sky. The air reeks of fire and smoke.

  “Smoke’s a bad sign. Smoke raises the ambient temperature, makes things nice and tropical for squeets. After fires, sometimes we see squeets that are, ah, unusually large and aggressive … but this report here ain’t squeets, it’s worse,” M.T.’s hard-hat lamp shines past abandoned rusted rolls of corrugated steel. “Bees.”

  “Don’t like bees.” Monk kicks a bottle, staring across this ruined, hopeless scape of all that’s abandoned and forlorn in this city: dark weeds strangle over white summer blooms … below, black beetles and black widows and black earwigs lurk beneath this rubble, scrabbling in their own miniature inner cities … above, black crows and blackbirds wheel through ghetto night skies … it’s what he’s always suspected, the ghetto projects on many levels, beyond the safe three dimensions of any city planner’s maps …

  “Me neither. This way.” M.T.’s light illuminates twisted strands of iron and cable stabbing up from the ground like alien stalks. “Look at this shit.” M.T. flicks on a flashlight, scattering the beam on the ground up ahead: green, purple, pearly, crimson bushes and plants dapple up half hidden by weeds and trash. “St. John’s wort, Rubicon, nightshade. Them’s voodoo plants and herbs, seein’ them more and more these days, crazy-ass voodoo doctors and witches and shamans and shit always startin’ or stoppin’ ghetto curses.”

  “Ghetto has its own flora and fauna.”

  “Spoken like a true urbanologist,” M.T. says. “White man looks around and sez shit, shor is a lot of black folks around here, so he moves his business to the West Side or retreats toward the Valley. Pretty soon the city is checkered with boarded-up buildings. Next, white folks get the wrecking ball and haul away them useless buildings. Now we got vacant lots, more and more every year.”

  “Spoken like a true infrastructuralist.” Monk grins. “But the urbanologist might say that these are more than just vacant lots. Only about forty years ago, back in the twenties or so, this city was like most other cities, still filled with trees and wild places and gardens and open lands. Swaths of wild oak, firs, cedar, pine. Then the white folks come and there’s this big land grab. In just a few years, most of the trees and fields are gone as the clapboard houses spread. But there’s something else going on here. Black folks secretly gathered in these wild refuges. The gardens, the wall of woods, the tangled arbors were natural dens where they could talk, sing, love, dream, read forbidden boo
ks and newspapers, slipping away from a master’s bonds only for an hour or two. So white folks bulldozed all these sanctuaries away, only goddamn weedy lots left. Now these lots take on a life of their own. Each year they morph into more and more of a new kind of jungle, an urban jungle, a ghetto jungle, man. The ghetto jungle’s got its own beasts too, mosquitoes, bees, flies, dung beetles, snakes, rats, black widows, crows, pigeons, sparrows, finally bums and gangs. And it’s not that the white man is making more of these city velds, it’s that these wild places are slowly growing, evolving, until they swallow the city and all that’s left one day is ruins.”

  “Jesus,” M.T. chuckling, “you’re the infrastructuralist. But you’re right, I seen strange insects, weeds, night things that exist nowhere in the world but here in the ghetto. You gotta meet the boys down in LAMA. There it is.” His flashlight transfixes a heavy, bulbous gray sack hanging down from a rusted pipe bent from a crumbling corner facade, the sack tapering off to tendrils of glop plastered around the pipe. They step closer: a few bees float around the hive’s obscene spout. M.T. shines the twin beams of his hard-hat lamp and flashlight on the hive, etching it in a brilliant sphere of light.

  “Fuck, they’re huge,” Monk’s whispering now: perhaps it is the darkness, the angle, but these insects look as big as locusts.

  “Don’t make any moves or noise now, shit, I didn’t think they’d get this far so fast.” M.T. slowly kneels and opens his silver case.

  “What are they?” Taking a step back.

  “They’re African bees, we call ’em killer bees, some of the boys call ’em brother bees.” M.T. laughs, slowly extracting a bronze cartridge pistol from the case.