At the kitchen table at last, she lights another cigarette, tops off her plastic cup of wine. Where the fuck is Monk, anyway? Out in the city somewhere, in his own world, escaping from all this, from a girlfriend and the baby. Shit, there’s Maurice—Fallouja Awahli now that he’s a Muslim—approaching, shaking his shaved head disapprovingly: crisply pressed black suit and white starched shirt with black bow tie, gold lapel pin sparkling, engraved FOI, Fruit of Islam. “Dear Karmann—or should I call you Rosaline?”
“Who?” Karmann’s looking for a way to escape, hoping one of the girls will saunter over and take her arm.
“Rosaline, who waits in vain for her Romeo even as he falls in love with Juliet. Why do you poison yourself with alcohol and tobacco?”
“My spirit is weak, Maur—Fallouja.” Karmann sips wine, trying to exhale cigarette smoke away from his brown forehead.
“Your body is a temple, you should set an example for your black sisters. We must all set an example for our people.” A temple with an occupant, she smiles wearily. His voice is soft, learned, soothing, always a grin on his lips to counterbalance the preacher born in him.
“I know, I know,” Karmann sighs, “I’m living in sin too.”
“Ah, yes. Monk should marry you. I hope one day God touches you and you are blessed with many babies, bringing glory and power to our people.” Karmann bites her lower lip and smiles. “This is the only way our people will rise from the ashes.”
“I didn’t know we were in the ashes,” desultorily flicking an ash, watching it float down toward the iron floor.
“Forgive me for speaking to you this way, but Karmann, you need a good, firm, godly man … a Muslim husband … you know I’ve known Monk since we were children and, well, you know, he’s always going off in a thousand directions … Monk has no direction in life.”
“He’s lost, all right, lookin’ for a sign.” She drains her wine: whenever she starts clipping off those final consonants in her speech she knows she’s getting drunk. He’s right, Monk does have some crazy notions: buying a barge and floating the containers out into international waters where he could declare the sovereign rights of a separate country, issue passports, turn Boxville into an offshore tax-free bank and floating casino. Her head swims, the migraine a relentless throb of electric pain. “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”
Behind her, Felonius angled, framed in a hatchway, talking on Karmann’s wall phone. “Come on, baby, come meet me … shit.” He drops the receiver and staggers away, the telephone swaying, bobbing against the metal wall like a pendulum. A tinny female voice drones from the receiver: If you want to make a call, please hang up and dial again … if you want to make a call, please …
She weaves down another tumble of crates and into a blue-painted Cronos container. A naked yellow bulb casts a faint gold light in the chamber. A cracked mirror on the wall reflects the navy-gray-painted toilet purloined from an old merchant ship. Nadine, a light-skinned girl in black hip-huggers, dabbles powder on her cheek before the mirror. “See you topside, honey.” She smiles, blows a kiss, high heels echo and click away. A stick of incense by the old iron sink tapers smoke. The water reservoir behind the toilet is lidless, no flushing here, gravity plummeting all waste down into the Pacific below: instead the tank is filled with fresh-cut wildflowers and strips of newspaper Monk has carefully cut for toilet paper. Karmann picks up a scrap of newsprint: Margaret Dumont dead, romantic foil in Marx Brothers movies. Featured in several of the comedy team’s movies, Dumont played aristocratic dowagers fending off the romantic orchestrations of the brothers, usually Groucho, as they played a series of bungling suitors competing for her attentions. An open portal reveals the brick facade of the Crescent Warehouse between daisy-print curtains. An oval hatchway is latched closed near the gray navy ordnance of the toilet, two deck chairs stenciled USND on either side. Karmann unscrews the lug bolts and flips the rusted rings, heaving open the iron door. Below, lapping, glinting in darkness, the Pacific. She collapses in a chair, lighting another Kent cigarette, staring down into the lens of the ocean, at the empty chair: where is he? Below, the waters lap and surge. A deep metallic groan shudders through the steel room, the currents pulling, pushing, grinding the pylons somewhere deep below the container’s welded mazes. She glowers at the empty chair, a queen waiting for the king’s return. Some king. Why is he always leaving her? Going off on his strange tours with his weird notebook and graffiti drawings: sometimes she feels so mad, so empty. Maybe this time he won’t come back … the baby, it’s all finally too much. Stop it now, stop doubting him. He’d better move his black ass. The whole world’s spinning like her head: all his so-called friends stealing his liquor, feasting and partying, even trying to steal his woman, offering her impromptu rings of promise. He’d better find his way home fast. Karmann drops the cigarette down into the glistening maw, a glowing red ember, then a soft hiss as it disappears into the sea. She’ll wait and Monk’ll be back, a good man: if any man can read the signs and find his way home again it’ll be Monk. Yes, she’ll wait, not patiently knitting, she doesn’t have knitting needles, but she has a phonograph needle, and she will spin all their records, weaving song by song until his return.
2
Americo Monk stands on the corner and studies the traffic signal: recessed in their steel scalloped sockets, the bulbs follow their programmed progression, green, yellow, red, but something is wrong; the red light flickers with darkness, as if Edison, no longer able to regiment the ghetto’s grids, has installed these sputtering fourth signs through the city’s ’hoods. The signal turns to green. Now Monk can see a blackbird fluttering inside its nest webbed in the light’s cowl.
He crosses San Pedro Street, walking east down 112th Street. His worn red Keds seem blood-orange in the dying sunlight. Run-down salmon-painted apartments and power poles flank one side of the street. Every door and window is open, surrendered to the sultry, stagnant heat. He passes a liquor store and a barbershop. Three men hunch on the curb, drinking beers from brown paper sacks. A little girl with no shoes pedals a tricycle past Monk, her reflection passing through his dark sunglasses like a sprite. A languid, suspended summer: Mother’s Day—the fifth of each month, when welfare checks arrive—has come and gone, and now the money’s drying up; soon it’ll be Fathers’ Day—parole days are on the first or last day of the month, and black men and long-gone fathers and husbands will return with empty pockets. He pauses, looking up at a billboard that shimmers through the smog behind the liquor store; a student of semiotics, he remembers the sign: a black man posed with a beautiful black woman as they toast a forty-ounce bottle of beer. OLD 88 MALT LIQUOR, in giant letters under their beaming faces, IT’LL KICK YOUR ASS … UMPTIONS … but some guerrilla urban artist’s attacked the billboard, pasting two giant white triangles—masks with black eyeholes—over the faces of the black models, transforming them into cartoonish Ku Klux Klan.
Rampant vandalism. Monk shakes his head, grins. He stops before graffiti sprayed in yellow on the brick facade of a padlocked storefront. Three numbers hyphenated like a birth date inside the drippy double loops of a capital B: 6-20-13. Monk opens his tattered blue notebook, a thick sheaf of papers, notes, diagrams, drawings of the city’s graffiti and street art: ink and pencil sketches of gang symbols, tagger signatures, homeboy art, margins filled with his crabbed, neat printing about locations, explanations, questions, affiliations, styles, leitmotifs, connections. He thumbs to an empty page and copies the graffito: numbers equal letter placement in the alphabet, 6 F, 20 T, 13 M, FTM, Fuck the Man, B for the Businessmen Gang, Watts area, 13 also marijuana, marking territory for drug selling. Monk copies the tagger’s autograph: a lowercase t with an arrow pointing up, Lil’ Tea from uptown.
Turning south, Monk walks on. Sun’s setting, he better catch another RTD Freeway Flyer bus back to the harbor. Karmann’s gonna be pissed off; the big rent party. He smiles: she’s a good woman, she’ll wait for him, like that Volkswagen convertible that shares
her name, always free and open, not just her legs but her mind, heart, soul. Back home where the containers offer him some faint chance of containment, warrens and levels of iron shields that might stop the inundation of signs and input that he suspects will one day drown his sanity in infinite white noise and static; but Karmann, with maddeningly practical female radar, always laughed at him and said no, it wasn’t containment that he sought in the iron wrens of the harbor but compartments: his life was an endless series of compartmentalizations, a vast accretion of disparate selves and moments, switching off with every closed iron hatchway and on again with every opened bulkhead. And now the baby coming … Ready or not, boy, it’s not gonna wait for you to get your shit together. His T-shirt sticks to his sweaty copper skin. Summer in the city always seems endless, an unbroken chain of tinder-dry days and humid airless nights, the seasons, nature herself suspended in urban purgatory: his friends had a term for it, ghetto time, when minutes, hours, days, and nights fracture and blur and compress into a searing Now—as if the atmosphere itself teeters on the verge of sparking into flames—everyone senses this, a jittery, heat-exhausted edge in dripping faces and dark burning eyes, every soul waiting to be consumed.
On the corner of 113th Street, he stares down at the sidewalk: seven pennies in a row. Above the pennies a tiny Dixie cup filled with water. Below the copper line of coins, a chicken wishbone, a greasy black thread tied taut between the prongs of the bone. Gris-gris, a hoodoo sign, pointing east, watch yourself, Monk.
A car horn blares and he squints up through the dark filters of his glasses: a burgundy ’63 Pontiac Bonneville rolls by slowly, windows down, four gangbangers in front and back seats. Two black men flanking passenger-side windows press their fists to the outside door panels. Monk’s thumb crooks inward toward his curved index finger as the Buick chugs along the curb. The fists pressed against the passing car doors curl, answering Monk’s sign with identical salutes: thumb and finger for G, the Gladiators, all brothers here, cool. The Riviera skulks behind a corner.
He explores this no-man’s-land with, if not immunity, then a kind of fragile grace. These tenement streets, abandoned alleys, shuttered brick-fronts, desiccated apartments, frame houses bunkered with grates and iron bars in every window. The gangs—Slausons, East Side Loco Boyz, Eight Tray, and the rest—suffer him free passage, a fleeting transit through their interstices, battle lines and war zones all but invisible except for the signposts sprayed on walls, which you ignore and fail to decipher at your own peril. A motorcycle cop sputters on his Harley-Davidson, faceless behind reflecting eggshell helmet—now the cop imperceptibly nods in Monk’s direction as he grinds gears east down 113th Street. Officer Reynolds. He knows almost all the cops, they too have sanctioned him safe routes, another gossamer passport through the city’s shadows. His clutched, bulging notebook is a badge, papers that usher him past subtle checkpoints and border crossings: the urban graphologist and graffiti semiotician has lately proven of interest to all the city’s fractious councils. The gangs and the police need Monk’s arcana to track enemies, gather intelligence about new gangs, outlaw splinters, incursions, ever-shifting balances and loyalties and territories. So he moves, a double agent, inviolate—for now—through the city, recorder, code master, pawn: but who is using whom?
At Avalon and 113th Street, two men argue in front of a pawnshop. “Motherfucker!” They walk down the sidewalk, shouting, hands gesticulating in the air like dark birds. Children laugh and splash around a broken hydrant, water cascading in the gutters, iridescent curtains raining down on soaked cotton shirts and torn pants. Where the pavement meets a low, crumbling wall skirting a weedy vacant lot, a graffito as if folded, half painted on the sidewalk, then extending up the wall: two black spray-painted hands, palms outstretched, thumbs joined in the center like some kind of craning head, splayed with a fringe of fingers like ragged wings, a night demon taking flight. Monk sketches the figure out in his notebook, scribbling the location and the artist’s tag in the margins: smOG … Las Sombras. A legendary East L.A. gang from before the war, back in ’41 or ’42 … Are they coming back? Hard to tell; the Mexican gangs have an added veil of secrecy, their street Spanish. Monk’s seen a pattern in his notebook, the black gangs seem to be creating their own Negro, underground slang and symbols, learning from their Mexican rivals. He’d seen smOG’s (OG for “original gangster”) work only once before. Maybe some kind of splinter group or homage here, tagged on the sidewalk.
Pneumatic brakes hiss, Monk turns: a fire truck idles before the broken hydrant’s sparkling geyser. Firemen in soaked yellow ponchos cap off the valve, shooing kids sloshing across the huge street puddle away from falling panes of water. An angry little boy skims a trash-can lid across the puddle, bouncing it off a slick poncho.
Sunset smog glowers over rows of bleached tenement apartments like the spine of some prehistoric behemoth. Avalon and Imperial now, cars and trucks shimmering in the heat. A car horn bleats across the street. Piñatas and purple candy skulls festoon a tiny grocery store; a beauty parlor, Afros ensconced in hairdryers, undergoing secret transmutations; another liquor store; dingy bail-bonds office. Monk passes a shattered telephone booth reeking of urine. Fuck Bitches drips cursively on a plaster wall. Sometimes he wants to erase, blot out all these atavistic scrawls of division and hatred, but it’s impossible: all he can do is catalog it, try to glimpse the glittering, infinite cosmos of these urban signposts, or be lost, swallowed into the blinding noise of unparsed glyphs. This city is always changing, shedding its skin of underground signs and languages in paroxysms of destruction and rebirth, seething in a secret war between the dispossessed, who write its street histories, and the cops and power structures, who destroy unsanctioned communication through anti-graffiti paint crews and incarceration and intimidation: he will be their historian.
South toward 115th Street. In an alleyway behind a burned-out car hulk, two winos sharing a forty-ounce bottle of that Old 88. One bum leers at Monk: “Brother, can you paradigm?” What’d he say? Now the wino’s in the middle of what looks like a world-record swig when his companion yanks the bottle from his mouth, foaming beer down his greasy shirt: they tussle, the bottle smashes over someone’s head, beer dripping down a chin as they fall backward into clattering trash cans. A black ghetto rat, big as a cat, skitters from the rolling trash cans, glass eyes glittering at Monk as it wedges its rippling fat fur through a hole in the brick wall and disappears like some kind of plague night’s apparition: Jesus, is it his imagination or are those monsters getting bigger, gorging on who knows what kind of garbage here in soul town, trash cans full of ribs, grits, fried chicken, Old 88. Monk passes the alley, knowing that the city’s signs are sometimes more insubstantial than his spray-painted taxonomy: a fist blossoming into a probing gang sign, a stranger’s threats, a child’s angry missile, a car horn, a smashed bottle—the city’s usual progression of violence as day flees from the sway of night’s darker forces. Now, in the final, smoggy prisms of the sun, women return to these blanched apartments and besieged homes, retreating behind locked doors and barred windows and security grates: thousands of the city’s women returning from work, not men—the Negro men are gone, taken by the police, drugs, booze, the open road, games of chance, pimping, girlfriends, whores, pool halls, death—women returning to their families, to children who no longer ask about Daddy, to silences and empty spaces that deafen and blast their souls.
White concrete traffic barricades have been erected on 115th Street, channeling traffic, a detour toward Central Avenue. Already a Businessmen tag spills across a barricade, no virgin canvas of white immune from spray can and bandanna-masked face: even this graffiti has been answered, crossed out with a clashing, rebel-red swath of paint from the Slausons. Barriers the Department of Public Works carefully entrenches in key sectors and corridors of the city, coordinating with LAPD not to facilitate flows of traffic but to siphon, control the grids of color: blacks and browns must stay within their quadrants of containment … (
not yellows, Asian gangs are underground) … in secret command centers bunkered throughout the city, municipal controllers hunch over blinking traffic panels and monitors and cold foam cups of black coffee, watching for any breaches, any vehicles that may slip beyond their vectors. Monk makes his way toward the Red Line bus stop. Better get back home: Karmann’s waiting. When it comes to women, there’s always some man waiting to take your place—better hold on to Karmann, his grounded, swollen-bellied goddess. Across the street, a derelict glares at him, silently rambling, lips sputtering, rants to himself—or is he speaking in some noiseless tongue to Monk? Candles and waxy glass jars encircle the sidewalk corner beyond the demolished stumps of the bus stop—votives left for the dead. Virgin of Guadalupe candles, glass bowls of wax painted with the crucified Christ, dried flowers, faded cards, a Popsicle-stick crucifix. But here there are darker powers mixed with the signs of light and redemption: a dirty string with three knots, seven pennies piled in a stack, an arc of white brick dust gleaming in tonight’s dusky shadows, portending a mixed warning to Monk, perhaps a path home more enigmatic and twofold than he’d like.
Monk turns right, trudging down Stanford Avenue. A brother, leaning against the sunbaked brick front of Ace Liquors, nods as Monk passes. Across the street, sunset glows and engulfs jagged rooftops and crooked antennas and looping telephone lines. The parked cars flanking him still radiate today’s pulsing heat.
Will cops and gangs let him pass? His notebook is a kind of spy’s black book for them, an intelligence coup for cops tracking the gangs’ ever-shifting territories and feared alliances, and a grail to the gangs, locked in constant war and turf incursions; so they wait, because the historian must write the history before it can be seized. He’s always been able to pass, neither black nor white, through these battle-scarred streets. In certain lights and times of day and angles of refraction he looks Caucasian, sometimes light Negro or copper. His hair is black, curled but not kinky, suspended in loops and ringlets: African, or, in other lights and to other people, disheveled or straightened; others see Mediterranean, white, Arabian—a walking Rorschach mirror that perhaps reflects more of the beholder than the subject; and the eyes forever hidden under those ebony teardrop sunglasses. His grimy red Keds step off the curb now, toward 116th Street. Monk clutches his sky-blue notebook to his sweaty chest like St. Paul with his Bible, his face, like the saint’s, wavering, darkening as he trudges into the dusk faintly smoldering with today’s last, fading light, deeper into profane pilgrimage.
Graffiti Palace Page 2