Graffiti Palace Read online

  They crush the beer cans in their gloved fists and toss the cans into the gutter.

  Patrolling south on Compton now. Only a few civilian cars pass in the almost deserted, smoke-palled streets. Later, back at the 77th, passing the Crown Royal bottle in the locker room, much merriment and laughter trading tonight’s adventures with the other guys, another night out in the Duck Pond. The ghetto is the Duck Pond, just chock-full of those rioting, crazy Negroes like thousands of black Daffy Ducks back home on the TV: where you can hunt all night long, every wound or kill an internal department investigation that always leads to a few restful vacation suspension days, or coveted desk duty where Trench and others can talk to girlfriends and mistresses on the phone, read the paper, play the horses, sleep, drink fortified coffee from thermoses, before closing out cases with the inevitable imminent threat or justifiable defense rulings.

  Parked on the corner of 103rd and Compton, chomping doughnuts and drinking coffee. Across the street, a fire truck trains torrents of water up into a brick facade engulfed in flames. Music fades in and out of the crackling two-way radio.

  “Betcha the hookers are still working that spot on Santa Barbara Avenue.” Trench sips coffee.

  Vicodanz chewing, glaze on his lips. “We could check it out. That new one, Angel, she’s pretty hot.”

  “Gotta stay in our zone. You know Parker and his Sergeant Roddenberry Principle … space your patrols, patrol your space.”

  “Roddenberry, space patrol,” Vicodanz shakes his head. “Sounds more like outer space.”

  “Did ya hear the niggers wanna rename Santa Barbara Avenue?”

  “To what?”

  “Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard.”

  “Mr. I Have a Dream? Shit, I got a dream, stay in your own neighborhood, burn it down if you want.”

  They head south down Compton. An APB blares from the two-way and Trench guns the cruiser west on Imperial Highway: rioters run and scrabble up and down the sidewalks and across the street, under the shadows of shot-out street lamps. They speed past patrol cars lined and pinned against curbs, officers in riot gear advancing through the darkness. Bricks and bottles thump and smash glass invisibly from secret trajectories somewhere along the brick facades and storefronts that belch smoke and coil flames into the cloudless summer night. On the corner, flames licking from windows, the Scylla, a stucco flophouse hotel, lobby windows shattered, knots of men running, lobbing bricks. A TV, rocked out a third-story window, explodes behind the cruiser. Trench whips the wheel, the car caroms down an alley behind the hotel. A bottle bounces off the hood. Ahead, in the cone of headlights, a skinny black teen running.

  Monk watches as the upper-story windows of the Scylla Hotel overspill with flames and smoke. A rock plummets past his head, skimming his hair. Up on the rooftop, kids lob down sticks, rocks, bottles, chunks of plaster. A jet of water blasts over the parapet and Monk sees six teens running across the rooftop, drenched in water, their aerial assault vanquished. Across the street, a fire truck’s water guns spray the roof and the smoke-filled windows. A mob outside the lobby hurls bottles and bricks at the scattering firemen. A Molotov cocktail sputters into the darkness and explodes against the windshield of the fire truck. Monk runs as the water guns blast the mob and two squad cars screech in front of the fire truck.

  A cruiser brakes into the curb, cutting him off: Monk sees Sergeant Trench and shakes his head as the rear door pops open. “Get in.” Trench grins. Monk slips reluctantly into the backseat and the car glides forward. “Keeping your nose clean, Monk?”

  “Sure.” Monk shrugs. Vicodanz grins back at Monk.

  “Wearing your Felony Flyers, huh, kid?”

  “What, these sneakers?”

  “Sneaking away from some fire-bombing or looting maybe?”

  Do I look like I have a fucking TV under my shirt? Play it cool: “Didn’t know the riot was formal attire.”

  “Formal attire,” Vicodanz snorts, “that’s rich.”

  “How’s your little journal coming along?” Trench cruising down Imperial: some kind of explosion and fireball erupting behind them. Monk’s guts ache with the pressure of the notebook wedged beneath his belt: he’s afraid, that word journal triggering the visceral fear that these cops knew and probably hoped would shake him, and now he’s mad, angry that these motherfuckers can reduce him, splinter his intellect and his pride with just a word, like a master’s sadistic pleasure in the slow taunting of his black boy.

  “Nothing new. The Gladiators maybe moving down toward 115th, that’s about it.” Monk, patient, measured, careful not to betray fear or anger; he knows they’ll be done only when Trench is finished with him.

  “What about Las Sombras?” Trench slowing down as Vicodanz aims the sawed-off shotgun out the window and blasts a round above a knot of men milling on the corner: Monk flinches as the explosive concussion echoes in the car. The men scream and scatter into the night. Trench guns the cruiser ahead.

  “They’re about the same, still hanging around 120th and Main.”

  “Maybe Chief Parker’d be interested in seeing your little notes. Doing a little reconnaissance for the Gladiators or Sombras? Maybe carrying a few notes in there for your Islam friends with the fezzes?” Monk’s stomach under the notebook twists into a gurgling knot.

  The squad car brakes at Wadsworth Avenue, at the fringe of the Red Zone. Trench twists around, unlocks, slides the steel panel open. “Hand it over, Mr. Monk.”

  “Look, Officer Trench, you know me,” Monk trying to control the fear in his voice, “it’s just graffiti, art stuff, a hobby.”

  “Are you resisting an officer, boy—I mean, son?” Trench grins, rubbing his chin. “This is the Red Zone. Chief says Negroes violating curfew will be shown no mercy.”

  “Or we can do a fifty-seven on your ass,” Vicodanz beams. “That’s like Heinz fifty-seven ketchup, see? We take gangsters like you, drop ’em off in the wrong gang territory, march you out of the car right in front of ’em, tie one of them wrong-colored bandannas we got in the trunk around your head. Then you’re like the ketchup, real slow to get out of the neighborhood, red too with blood—”

  Heart pounding, Monk lifts his shirt and pulls the blue notebook from his pants, hands it through the grille panel. He clenches his fists, digging into the hot vinyl seat. Trench thumbs through the notebook, shakes his head, frowns. “Signs, spray-painted cartoons, numbers, notes, what is this shit?”

  “Like I said, it’s just graffiti. You know me, Officer Trench, I’m no gangster or spy. I’m just trying to get to San Pedro.”

  “What’s this mean?” Trench suspicious, jabbing his finger at a page sketched with a graffito of MFR scrolled in pink sausage-shaped letters.

  “It means ‘motherfucker,’ pink letters for pigs, for cops.”

  “Negro jargon, Parker said, remember?” Vicodanz to Trench.

  “So, you Negro kids, when you’re out there yelling,” Trench tensing, struggling to utter the new, blasphemous word, “mother … fucker to police officers, are the Negroes suggesting we have … sexual intercourse … with our mothers?”

  “No, it’s just an expression, like … ‘asshole,’” Monk trying not to grin.

  Vicodanz: “Parker says it’s because in the slavery days the master took the slave’s mother into the bedroom.”

  Trench glares, shaking his head toward Vicodanz.

  “Look, how about giving me a few days,” Monk says, “then you could let Parker see the notebook. See, I’m writing down the gang signs I see in the ’hoods and, maybe in a day or two, Parker could find some … pattern, something useful about the riot. I bet he’d sure appreciate your good police work.”

  Trench and Vicodanz exchange a dubious glance. Trench tosses the notebook through the grille. “Stay loose.” Trench lights a cigarette. “We’ll be in touch. We all have our little notebooks,” tapping his Field Reports book on the dashboard. Sergeant Trench scratches his chest, his nipples lately throbbing with a terrible itching and
burning … Monk nods and opens the door. The car throttles away into the night, a beer can arcing out the window, the radio fading with Petula Clark singing “Downtown.”

  9

  Monk’s determined to stay off the main avenues as he wends his way south, avoid Officer Trench and the fuzz, try to work the periphery around the worst of the flames and mayhem. He clutches the notebook tightly in his fist: he almost lost it to the cops. The little journal, Trench had sneered. Fuck them. Only gang signs and cryptic turf lines to the police. The book’s his secret history: there’s a gravity in it, he knows. The cops, the Nation of Islam, the gangs, the graffitists: for them the notebook is a kind of mirror to unlock the pieces that illumine their worlds, vices, and shifting balances of power; but the book is also the voice of the voiceless, an arsenal of this city’s outlaw, spray-painted walls and manifestos that shine like flags of warning; the words and art of the dispossessed are weapons of change, and to ignore or crush these voices can only bring fire and destruction.

  Police cars and desperate civilian vehicles glow down Wadsworth Avenue as roving marauders raid storefronts, then disappear into the dark side streets. He’s reached 118th Street; he should find a way off Wadsworth, zigzag down these little avenues with their shot-out street lamps. He turns down 119th Street. His Keds feel like iron weights, it’s everything he can muster just to take each step. The avenue is dark, only a distant street lamp a few blocks ahead.

  Monk disappears into the shadows of a dark alleyway. Next to a dumpster, there’s a feeble lightbulb glowing above a padlocked back door. He sinks down against the wall, stretches out his long legs, crosses his aching feet; tired, besieged, so many miles to go. He opens the blue notebook, turns the pages under the flickering amber light. The pages he almost lost, the secret ledgers and stories of the people and the city itself. Monk wipes his dirty hands. On a blank page he slowly, carefully writes in cursive: Karmann. He fills the entire page with her name but it is not just a name, now it’s a talisman, a spell of love. If he were an artist instead of a street scholar, he’d spray, tag, throw down her name all over the city, on every wall and gritty surface and sign: Karmann stores, Yield Karmann, Karmann Zone, Karmann Avenue, No Trespassing Karmann … that’s what they’re doing, back home, some of their alleged friends, trespassing against his girl and his trust. Turning the page, he writes in his crabbed, dense print:

  Dear Karmann:

  You are sick with worry over me, but I am doing everything in my power to return to you. You’re a dancer, you know how to play off them, feed their greedy emotions, never holding them too close or keeping them too far. Each time I walk these streets, the city becomes more alive to me … a living thing, in flux, too big for any single mind to grasp. Spray-painted manifestos and secret images and signs appear, disappear, transform, reappear like fantastic visions in an iron and concrete jungle. Do their meanings change, or do I change as I try to see them and understand? I am somehow linked to all of this, to the city, the signs, the voiceless rage and despair and hope, my obsessive recording, though I don’t know why. Whatever riddles and truths I might unlock, it’s all mist, nothing compared to the unfolding mysteries of your love for me and the miracle you carry deep within yourself. If I could, I would build a magnificent cathedral or palace of devotion to you. I would command every artist and graffitist to create all the colors and radiance of our love … then I would strike it down and tell them to begin again, because it must be a pale shadow of your light. Know that I am not afraid. There is nothing that can stop me from returning to you, and since we are one, there is no force that can stop you from being with me.

  He’s wasting time writing. He rises, jabs the pen inside the wire spirals, closes the notebook. Monk walks down the dark alley that curves toward 120th Street. Maybe he should head west to Avalon Boulevard. Monk stops. Wait: Mr. Collins’s old movie theater, it’s just a few blocks from here. Monk heads south down Belhaven Street. At 124th and Central Avenue, marquee lights glow above the faded salmon and teal colors of the art deco walls and scalloped box office of the Argus Theater. Monk grins. He used to work in the old movie house for a couple of summers back in high school. Is it open? Now the movie titles glimmer down in their backlit bold black plastic:

  The Sound of Music

  Alphaville

  That old marquee, some of his best work, those two summers when childhood’s fascination with words, codes, anagrams, puzzles grew into a dawning awareness of the secret scripts of the city’s signs and graffiti. Working at the Argus, he’d swept floors, ripped tickets, scooped popcorn, but he also changed the marquee each week, spearing plastic letters from their box, gliding each letter in its marquee runners, each letter magnetized at the end of his long pole, he was a semantic fisherman, a harpooner of language. It was a summer of semiotic discovery, old Mr. Collins always good-natured about Monk’s weekly marquee adventures in signology, which began one week with a dubious motion picture titled Last Days of Vesuvius. Monk lettered his own tagline on the marquee: DON’T TELL YOUR FRIENDS IF IT BLOWS! A summer of matinee madness followed, cat and mouse between Monk’s cinema codes and old Collins remembering to check the marquee, making Monk correct his youthful folly with his giant magnetic stylus. A baseball movie called The Stitched Ball became HE ITCHED BALL … unfortunate spacing advertised a Hemingway bio MY PENIS READY … and a Vatican spy potboiler teased THE POPE’ SHAT … a purloined S from the word SLAYS and a new sword-and-sandal epic was born: HERCULES LAYS SAMSON; and Monk’s favorite, a soaper called So Does My Love—until Monk left an E and S in the box: SODOMY LOVE …

  Monk stands under the buzzing marquee, shaking his head: Mr. Collins has converted it into one of these new twin cinemas. More memories flooding back: the old drunks used to slouch outside the doors here, begging for nickels, exchanging Night Train–fueled film theory: “Them tornadoes in The Wizard of Oz, see, they’s time tunnels them Munchkin motherfuckers use to trespass into the human world … that Citizen Kane, he ain’t dead, see? He’s disguised as Jedediah Leland, wants to see what his friends really think ’bout him … you know that Mutiny on the Bounty? Captain Bligh, see, he’s the good guy, it’s that mother Fletcher Christian, he falls in love with some island girl, it’s Bligh’s monogamy against the crew’s Bounty of sexual adventures…”

  “That you, Mr. Collins?” Peering into the graffiti-scarred ticket-booth glass. An old black man with snowy hair squints up from a comic book. “Remember me?”

  “Sure,” chuckling. “My penis ready. How ya doin’, Monk?”

  “Okay. You know they’re burning down the city?”

  “Yeah.” Collins closes the comic book, revealing a .38 pistol on the counter. “Safer in here than out there, boy.”

  “When did you change it to a twin cinema?”

  “Last year, landlord keeps raisin’ the rent. Why don’t ya come in? That Sound of Music is real good. No charge. Got plenty of seats to rest a spell, better if you was walkin’ out there in the daylight.”

  Monk shrugs. “Thanks, Mr. Collins.” He walks into the darkened foyer. Monk’s dead tired, a few hours dozing off in a plush seat in the darkness sounds good, and there’s something else, a weird feeling that perhaps he should stop fighting the city, that if he opens up a little, bends instead of opposing forces beyond any morning light’s logic, the night will finally release him, that his return is still possible.

  Red and lime neon lines flow around the dim snack bar with its yellow glass cases of popcorn and candies; sconces splash lavender light cones on the walls. Last time he was here, years ago when there was only one screen, the movie was The Crawling Foot … disembodied foot inching along, toes flexing, dragging impossibly slow along floorboards as the heroine screams trapped in the corner, Monk and the audience guffawing … Don’t open that—too late, the cop opens the door as a cowboy boot kicks him in the face … the foot grinds, crushing down on the hero’s throat as he chokes and struggles to wrench away the monstrous horror … Monk pushes through a door bel
ow a glowing sign: THEATER 1.

  He eases into a chair in the darkness. Two or three heads silhouetted, hunkered in the front rows; smells of popcorn and sweat. On the screen, a preview for the new James Bond movie coming this Christmas, assassins in ebony scuba suits hunting Bond with spearguns through Caribbean waters. Monk grins as the super white man dispatches the bottom-dwelling, black-suited frogmen.

  Then Monk is gliding over snowcapped mountains, alpine valleys, verdant, sun-dappled meadows as the camera swoops down on that Julie Andrews twirling, raising her frocked sleeves to blue skies:

  The hills are alive with the sound of music.

  With songs they have sung for a thousand years—

  “Thought I’d find you here.” Mr. Collins eases into the chair next to Monk, wedging his cane into the armrest. “’Course, I had a fifty-fifty chance.” Chuckling.

  “No more customers, Mr. Collins?”

  “Nope. Locked the doors. Sandi, that’s the snack-bar girl, she’ll watch the fort. You want a popcorn or Coke, she’ll give it to you, my treat. This is a good movie. They don’t make ’em like this no more.” Nodding his iron-gray head. “Seen it seven times,” he says, laughing. “That Julie Andrews ain’t too shabby. What you doin’ out in this craziness?”

  “I was just going to hang out this morning, do some work in my notebook, go to the library, maybe get a burger, take the bus home, then all this shit seemed to almost explode in my face, Mr. Collins.”

  The old man nods. “Still doin’ your art, keepin’ a notebook, that’s good. I remember when you worked here, every break you had your face stuck in some notebook or paperback. You keep readin’ and writin’, you meant for somethin’ better, little monkey.” Mr. Collins chuckles. “Remember when I’d call you little monkey?”

  “Sure, Mr. Collins.” All at once Monk feels peaceful, grateful for the sanctuary of the movie house, the old man’s company: Mr. Collins even smells good, scents of popcorn butter and some kind of crisp laundered smell from his neat tan and powder-blue cotton suit, like lilac.