Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  “Please accept the hospitality of Las Sombras before you leave,” the giant’s gold tooth gleaming as they pass through the iron-grated front door, bars that seem to augur some future incarceration. Monk frowns: another delay, but he has no choice, he tells himself, talking away his fear. His frown crinkles to a faint grin: he’s safer with these cholos right now than out there in the streets.

  Inside, a dozen Sombras sprawl on ruined couches or stand around in a haze of smoke. The windows are covered with sheets and blankets, tequila and beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays everywhere: there is no air, only a fetid gloaming of booze, sweat, cigarettes. They sit around some kind of long steel ammo box that doubles as a coffee table, littered with bottles and cigarette butts. Young Mexican girls in clinging, sweaty tank tops bring food and beer from the kitchen. “El Gordo Pedo.” The giant swigs Jose Cuervo, munching a taco from a plate the girls set on the steel box.

  “Monk.” Wedged against his back, the cardboard cover of his notebook digs under his shirt, like a blade under his belt. Guitar chords softly strum in a corner: a trio hidden under the great black-and-gold mushrooms of their sombreros, one of the balladeers sitting on his accordion.

  “This is Slinky,” jabbing a fat finger at the Sombra from the Impala’s backseat. “Show him, wey. You, Quatro!” Quatro, a skinny Sombra in a knit cap, stands, frowns, puts a cigarette in his mouth with a shaky hand that Monk sees is missing a pinkie finger.

  Slinky pulls a Slinky from his baggy pants and whips the toy’s steel coils through the cigarette smoke. The Slinky flashes an inch before Quatro’s flinching face, snapping the cigarette in half as the coils spring back into Slinky’s hand like some kind of metallic, darting snake. “He spent months sharpenin’ those coils to fuckin’ razors, man. Quatro’s name used to be Pancho,” El Gordo shrugs, “but Slinky’s gettin’ better.”

  “Pretty soon you can call him Tres.” Slinky laughs, drinking tequila.

  “Call me Uno,” Quatro giving Slinky the finger.

  El Gordo grins. “Now, El Jefe will pass the sacred yerba.” He lights a yellow joint the size of a stogie, sucks in, passes it to Monk. El Gordo exhales, filling the room with several cubic yards of dense, sweet smoke. Monk takes a polite token toke, passing it down the circle of Sombras.

  Monk’s impressed: the drug is incredibly sweet and, well, powerful—the cracks on the whitewashed Craftsman’s walls seem to be crawling … and El Gordo, is he somehow expanding, a giant Buddha with gold tooth and black glasses swelling toward the ceiling?

  “This is Coyote.” El Gordo points to an empty chair. “He’s a ghost. You don’t believe me? We see him sometimes, simon?” to Slinky, who nods solemnly. “Coyote was a Sombra, man. Couple years ago some maricón shot him right between the eyes. Esos tipos buen tiros.” Laughter all around. “Those fuckers were good shots. We were goin’ about eighty too. Sometimes he sits there, sometimes we just see the fuckin’ bullet hole floatin’ above the chair, like some kind of red eye or something.”

  “More like a red culo,” a Sombra says: everyone laughs.

  Monk must look skeptical. “You see a lot of strange shit, you live in the barrio long enough. Ain’t exactly your West Side fuckin’ Story.” El Gordo sucks in the reefer. “Sometimes Coyote rides with us. Sometimes we leave a cerveza on the chair and it’s empty in the morning.” El Gordo’s eyes are hidden quotients behind his sunglasses. “When we roll, he always sits in the front seat, man. Riding shotgun, that’s where he got shot. When we talk, I see everything differently, it’s like,” whispering now, “I have three eyes, this other eye in my forehead where I can see the night and trees and all around me, like I’m seeing through Coyote’s bullet hole…”

  El Jefe claps his hands. “Mi corridistas!” The trio appears out of the smoky air, sombreros, Mexican serapes glittering, guitars strumming, the accordion breathing a snappy bass line. “My personal balladeers, to sing of the glory of Las Sombras gang.” The guitars twang and the accordion wheezes into tune as the three sing a cappella:

  They shot Coyote between the eyes,

  But a Sombra never really dies,

  Now El Jefe has third-eye vision,

  The spirit guides his every decision—

  They toast El Coyote as the corridistas bow and strum away, fading toward the corner with a final accordion sigh. “This is some powerful shit here, man.” Monk’s grinning. A girl offers him a plate of flan.

  “Yeah, it’s this weird albino weed.” El Gordo spoons a dribbling wedge of flan. “Only grows in certain places under the sewers. And only we know where,” chuckling. “Maybe it’s all that barrio shit and piss and booze and drugs and shit, but it’s the weirdest, white, shiny plants growin’ in the darkness, almost glowin’ … and man, does it fuck you up.”

  “The original Las Sombras,” Monk takes a small bite of flan, “they go back to the forties, don’t they? The Pachucos riots—”

  “We are los originales, ese. My old man, Slinky’s padre, Coyote’s tío,” El Gordo sweeps his flabby arm around the room, “all of us are la familia de Las Sombras. I got my old man’s zoot suit and fedora hangin’ in the closet. Man, those vatos had some sharp threads.” Everyone laughs. “Sombras were here before the black and white gangs. We go back to the thirties, man. Sureños straight outta Mexico … It was natural, see? We spoke Spanish, had to protect ourselves. We invented the throws,” twisting his fingers into Sombra and Gladiator signs. “We painted the first placasos, spray cans weren’t even invented, man, back in the day we used fuckin’ shoe polish. My old man rumbled in the forties, used to tell me things weren’t too bad till the gringos stole Chavez Ravine from us.”

  “Fuckin’ Dodgers.” Quatro shakes a pinkie-shorn fist in the air.

  El Gordo’s black glasses dip in agreement. “Squeezed all the niggers and beaners into the barrios, probably on purpose, hoped we’d wipe each other out. Since then nothin’ much has changed, just sellin’ a little green dope to put pollo on the table, protectin’ our turf like everyone else. Sombras don’t fuck with you unless you fuck with us. We’re family, not a gang.”

  Slinky uncoils his razor Slinky, bouncing it in a silvery arc from palm to palm: “We’re a social club.” More laughter, Monk grins.

  “Back in the thirties.” Monk’s eyes sparkle with light whenever he navigates the mysteries of signs and wonders, words within worlds, worlds within words—back in those storied days, when the first Mexican gangs’ graffiti used heavy, black Old English lettering and stencils to copy the font of the daily headlines: it was their own underground news, to counter the official, white narrative of the city’s newspapers, each morning edition that ranted against the blacks and the Mexicans, all the hoodlums that had turned their ghettos and barrios into squalid districts of shanty-town shame … and vandalized every wall with their gangster and drug-dealing underworlds … “That’s when El Tirili supposedly founded Las Sombras.”

  Silence. El Gordo’s fat arm frozen in mid-swig of a Cuervo shot glass, Slinky’s razor coils retracting on his palm with a final rattle, Quatro’s mouth open with a suspended tortilla chip. El Gordo: “What you know ’bout El Tirili, homey?”

  “You know, just the legends, what people say.” Monk striving for a casual tone here. “I like to study graffiti, the placasos and tags around town. Just kind of a hobby. They say El Tirili was the greatest pintor. That he started the Shadows back in the thirties. That he disappeared after the sailor riots in the forties, rumor is he went underground, but some folks say he’s just a folk legend, never existed.”

  “He’s real, man.” El Gordo lifts his black shades, his bloodshot eyes transfixing Monk for a moment, his teal teardrop tattoo like an icy stigma freezing Monk, then the shades drop down. “My old man met him once.” Slinky and Quatro nod.

  “They say some of his placasos still exist somewhere in the city.” Monk cautious here. “I’d like to see one. Some people say what he did was amazing, crazy, even—”

  “Impossible?” El Gordo
nods. “Simon, ese. We’ve seen one or two. Some are hidden. Some we’ve painted over with watercolor to protect his obra maestros. The lettering, his estilo, it’s what the fuck, Slinky, sobrenatural?”

  “Sí, El Jefe.” Slinky nods. “Supernatural.”

  “Vatos say all kinds of shit about El Tirili.” El Gordo rubs his chins in thought. “How his lettering, his pictures have hidden signs of, fuck, antiguo?”

  “Ancient,” Slinky cascading his razor coils around his neck like a metallic python.

  “Ancient Azteca powers … even the colors, colors like you’ve never seen in your fuckin’ life.”

  Monk wants to show El Gordo the notebook, two or three tags and bombs he’s sketched, where the colors, the puffy lettering seem to shimmer with a depth and geometric gravity of lost jungle pyramids and temples, and dusky artisan hands long turned to dust.

  “Yeah, they say some strange shit about El Tirili.” Slinky swigs Cuervo. “About placasos that are portals, about taggers disappearing into fuckin’ thin air—”

  “Hey, talkin’ about disappearin’ in thin air,” El Gordo seems a little eager to change the topic, “remember Chicken? Back around ’60, when I was just startin’ out, one of our, what do you call it, chinga de madre, our instigations—”

  “Initiation,” Slinky scratching his groin, a faint rattle of muffled metal coils.

  “Yeah, our initiation was you had to play matador, see. We’d go out in the Chevy, lights off, hammer the pedal, almost sideswipe cars. If you was fresh pussy you had to stick your head out the window and pull back just in time, only Chicken, his timing was a little off.” They laugh. Slinky passes the joint to Quatro. “The fuckin’ car cut Chicken clean in half. That’s how we got our badass reputation, man. The cops said it was, what the fuck?”

  “Retaliation,” this time from Monk.

  “No te rajas!” They all stand, chink beer cans and tequila bottles. “You don’t chicken out!”

  “We seen some shit, vatos,” El Gordo wiping a tear of laughter from below the black glasses: no, not a tear, it’s the faded blue tattooed teardrop.

  “El Carro Fantasma,” Quatro whispers, crossing himself.

  “Simon ese,” El Gordo nodding, sips tequila. A girl leaves another tray and he grabs a giant fist of pork rinds. “One night we was rollin’ dark down Crenshaw and this Cadillac passes us, lights out too, then this pendejo blinks his lights at us, and it’s on, cabrón. You know you never light up on a vato unless you ready to throw down. So we both skid around and make a pass, I got my twenty-two out the window and Slinky’s aimin’ his sawed-off, and Coyote, he says somethin’ ain’t right with this fucker and the Cad goes past us and we blaze on it, and nothin’ happens, it’s like the fuckin’ bullets bounce off and shit … and the driver, man, he’s wearin’ a black hood and it’s dark but I couldn’t see his face, it’s like he had no face … So this fucker roars past us, goin’ maybe one twenty, hauling ass. Then this cop car flies by us but it’s chasin’ him. So we take off and follow ’cause I never saw a ride like this fuckin’ car, man. It must’ve been a ’56 or ’57, black, those big tail-fin lights. We got closer and you could see every time this fucker hit the brakes this chrome skull face would light up in the rear window, glowing red eyes and teeth, it was fuckin’ tight, man.” El Gordo spews out a mountainous cloud of blue smoke, passing the joint to Monk. “And hangin’ from the rearview mirror, a huge pair of fuzzy pink dice. So the cops are closin’ in behind him and … You tell it, Slinky, he won’t believe me.”

  “The pigs are on his ass,” taking the joint, now the size of a cigar butt, from Monk, “the Cad belches this black cloud of smoke and the engine screams. The car, it just kind of glided up and it shot through the sky … we saw it bank left above Crenshaw and Normandie, weird green flames spittin’ from silver tailpipes, then it was gone, that chrome skull head glowin’ and grinnin’, then nothing.”

  El Gordo props a huge boot up on the ammo box. “So where you tryin’ to go?”

  “Get back to my woman.” A girl in a sleeveless blue sweatshirt sets a plate of rolled corn tortillas on the ammo box.

  “Homemade.” El Gordo nods toward the plate. “Papadzules, Sombra specialty.”

  Monk tentatively gnaws an end of the tortilla. Instantly his mouth burns with choking heat. He gulps a beer.

  “Hey, Maria!” El Gordo shouts toward the hallway that leads to the kitchen. “He don’t like your zule.”

  Monk hears silverware crash from the kitchen, then a woman’s shouts: “Fucking gilipollas criticó mi manjar … la verga—” Maria stands in the hallway with a butcher knife, guacamole and salsa stains on her apron. She steps closer to Monk as Slinky moves beside her, the razors of his metal coils glinting in his palms: Monk, eyes still watering, pushes back against the cushions, his notebook digging into his spine. Maria raises the knife … and slips it into her apron’s sash. El Gordo roars with laughter as Maria grabs a rolled tortilla, smiles, munches, saunters off toward the kitchen.

  “Back to your woman? Donde?” The gold tooth glints as it bites down on a lethal papadzule.

  “San Pedro.”

  “No mames, that’s gonna be hard. We’re burnin’ down this fuckin’ city, then there’s the Rollin’ 60s, the Eight Trays, Gladiators, the Slausons, all the rest of those motherfuckers.” El Gordo pours Cuervo. “You gonna need la mano de Dios, or la mano de Diablo.”

  Monk staggers to the door, slips through the iron grating. A sphere of ruby light glows all around him … inside floats a bandanna-shrouded face … El Coyote, the third eye … Monk shields his eyes from the terrible, burning orb and runs down the steps.

  “Vaya con Dios!” Echoes behind as Monk steps toward the corner, coughs, weaves down the sidewalk. As he turns back down 129th, a distant corrido fades into the night. Monk shakes his head: Get your shit together, boy, getting high … find a phone booth that’s not firebombed or ripped up. Karmann’s depending on him, that rent party’s probably some kind of siege by now, his girl surrounded by all his so-called friends. Maybe he’s just as bad: how could he leave her like that, pregnant, surrounded by wolves? If he could just hear her voice, maybe talk to Maurice, he was the most responsible one, maybe he could keep those alley cats in line, though Maurice too always has that look when he’s with Karmann—Monk walks faster, toward the diffuse ivory light that must be Avalon Boulevard.

  6

  South on Avalon. The night is now pierced with a constant Doppler effect of rising and falling sirens. Monk passes mobs spilling back and forth along the avenue, lobbing bricks and bottles and cans at the trickle of dazed traffic that weaves past patrol cars. In the distance, police cars have barricaded the next intersection, a line of officers in black standing ready with shotguns. The night sky above Monk seems to splinter as the air thuds and roils. He looks up: the first ghetto bird of the night hovers past, helicopter blades scudding through the darkness, its searchlight fanning across the boulevard like an incandescent tunnel. “The city is under emergency curfew,” a loudspeaker blares like God from the sky, “stay in your homes or you will be subject to arrest.”

  Bottles explode, somewhere ahead a shotgun booms. Monk passes smashed-out windows gaping from dark brick-fronts. Across the street, smoke tapers behind a junkyard. He cuts into a huge vacant lot between darkened store facades, past the trampled chain-link fence, moving east toward distant smoke rising somewhere along Central Avenue.

  Monk trudges through weeds and trash-strewn dirt. Past heaps of shattered wood, abandoned mattresses and rusting refrigerators and ovens, old tires welled with stagnant water. Beyond an avalanche of bricks from a broken wall, the earth deepens into weedy darkness: this lot seems to be immense, a swath of weeds, dead bushes, piles of garbage that wind through the city for blocks. Monk freezes: ahead, glowing in the flickering aureole of a sputtering electric lamp, standing in the clumps of weeds and trash, Christ crucified.

  A black man in denim overalls, shirtless, arms extended like a cross. Monk c
an see a strange light coming from a miner’s hard-hat lamp glowing on his head. Monk moves closer, skirting around a huge puddle of muddy water that gleams up from the weeds and piles of trash. A mosquito whines past his ear. The apparition moves and the cross is broken: checking his wristwatch, picking up a clipboard next to a silver metal suitcase near his muddy boots. The lamp beam transfixes Monk. “Evening,” in a deep voice as the man scrawls something on the clipboard.

  “Just passing through,” Monk says warily, smiling, just another encounter here with one of the countless madmen who haunt the ghetto night.

  “Don’t be afraid, I work for the city, dig?” Tapping the metal box with his boot toe. The case is stenciled LAMA: LOS ANGELES MOSQUITO ABATEMENT.

  “Twenty-two strikes in ten minutes.” The man extends his forearms like a needle addict for Monk to inspect: dozens of tiny red bites up and down his big black arms like some terrible rash. “That’s a Class Two infestation, pretty bad.” He’s buttoning up his work shirt. “They breed in these puddles, old tires, anywhere they can find standing water.” He extends his big hand. “Mosley Terrance.” A handshake, Monk waves another mosquito from his ear. “Friends call me M.T.”

  “Don’t those bites, ah, bug you?”

  “All the time,” chuckling. “I’ve banked a lot of bug juice through the years, I’m immune to the little bastards. Fact, I’ve got so much insect bacteria in me that they usually get sick and die. LAMA entomologists have discovered squeets are specially attracted to dark skin pigment, it’s always us brothers, ain’t it?” Laughing. “Dark skin and body odor … so a squeet’s idea of the ultimate bug buffet would be your Negro bum.”