Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  Midway down the block, Monk stops. Someone’s tagged a bomb, a gigantic graffito across the stucco side of Payday Liquor. Monk walks along the wall, printing the letters into the margins of his notebook. Giant Gothic black and silver numbers sprayed towering up the wall: 12197820, and an arrow pointing south. A simple code, each number but one corresponding to a letter: LS, G, 8T, Las Sombras, Gladiators, Eight Trays. An ominous sign, the city’s three biggest gangs united? Impossible … and united against what or whom? The cops? This is intelligence Trench and all the pigs over at the 77th would be very interested in. Why don’t the fuckers leave him and his notebook alone? He wants to just pass through the city, unmolested by all factions and agencies, studying the signs, quietly compiling his urbanologist lore. And the arrow? South, either toward safe harbor and the woman he still hopes waits for him with a grace wearing as thin as the vinyl records she spins down, the needle and the groove her own clock counting the time until he returns, or to some other fate. At the end of the spray-painted wall, near the chained and padlocked glass doors of Payday Liquor, Monk squats down, inspecting the graffito’s tagline. As he suspected, scribbling in the notebook, closing its tattered cover: he’d know that style anywhere, those black numbers ghost-lighted in silver, no drips, that Number Seven Regal Silver spray paint, the bold, assured strokes … smOG’s struck again. Monk steps back from the wall: it’s like the store and the wall have disappeared, all you can see at first is the graffiti, like smOG’s blown up the store. “It’s a bomb, a graffiti bomb.” Monk labels the page he’s copied in his notebook, BOMB, underlining it twice. “Most powerful weapons don’t kill us, they change us.”

  Monk rattles the chains on the door, peers through the glass: three white clerks huddled behind the counter, two of them pointing shotguns at the front door. Monk shrugs, walks on as sirens, cop cars hurtle past.

  Once he gets to Belhaven, he’ll be southbound, in the general direction of smOG’s acrylic arrow and perhaps some kind of state of grace, back to the harbor, to home. An old man passes him, in a hurry, trying to get off these streets. Near the corner, four black men hanging around, talking, pointing up the street. Monk ambles past a billboard shrouded in barbed wire—a beautiful black model, straightened hair, rubbing a cotton swab against her high cheekbones: BE THE WOMAN OF HIS DREAMS … WITH OUR CREAMS … SNOW WHITE LIGHTENERS. The sign’s mast is graffitied with the usual tags, nothing notebook-worthy here, a Grape Street Gladiator crossing out an Eight Tray territorial incursion.

  A woman, her face hidden under a red cap and white veil, rushes around the corner at Belhaven Street and slams into Monk. The shopping bag clutched against her chest falls to the sidewalk, record albums cascading from the ripped bag. “Sorry!” a husky voice blurts out. She squats down, slipping the albums into the bag, carefully sliding some of the vinyl records back into their jackets.

  “Here you go, lady.” Monk bends down, gathers up a few albums for her: Roach, Mingus, Getz, Coleman. “You got some great jazz here.” His father played with half of these musicians. He’s looking at the last album, a black-and-white photo of John Coltrane in profile, stampedb A Love Supreme/John Coltrane.

  “Thank you.” That deep yet feminine voice again, jarring from such a wisp of woman as she reflexively bows: she’s wearing a ruby old-fashioned tam-o’-shanter beret, a gossamer white-net veil blurring her face. She takes the record from him; a small tattoo on her right hand, between thumb and forefinger: a single rose, black stem with red petals yet to blossom open.

  “Miss Toguri.”

  Behind the veil, her eyes widen in alarm as she stares up at Monk, then red lips, mottled in shadows behind the veil, slowly smile in recognition. Her hand sweeps back the veil: a Japanese woman, middle-aged, pale, one of those Asian faces that betray no wrinkles, the only signs of aging a kind of weight and gravity in the cheeks and worried mouth. “Mr. Monk. Are you okay?”

  “More or less. Just trying to get home.”

  “Be careful, please, Monk.”

  “Yeah, you too. It’s turning into a hell of a riot.”

  “From riots come revolutions.” She smiles cryptically. “You are still writing in your notebook?”

  “Yes.”

  “My story too?”

  “Some notes, yes. Is that okay?”

  “Yes. Please write it all down. All the stories. Not just your signs, but the people who scrawled your signs. Soon, after these fires, the city and its signs will change … many of us will be gone.”

  “You too? I hope not, Miss Toguri.”

  Again that smile that seemed to conceal torrents of unspoken words. “Soon I might perhaps complete one more … final chapter of my story for your notebook … Goodbye, Mr. Monk.”

  Clutching the torn bag to her chest, she propels herself east toward Central Avenue, beret and veil angled down to the sidewalk and her hurried steps, as if pushing into a gale or some force instead of the distant sirens and black-smoke night sky.

  Monk lingers, staring at her retreating figure. Back in February, wandering around Los Angeles Street and Eighth, he’d found this strange graffito, numbers arranged inside the outline of a red rose with a black stem:

  931

    5

  He couldn’t figure it out. A few days later he showed up at the Watts Towers. Behind the iron pinnacles, under canopy tents with folding chairs and wood tables, people would gather for a class or a panel or an exhibit or speech or anything else these poets, professors, activists, gangs, Nation of Islam, citizens, and hundreds more, wanted to organize. There Monk found Big Morton Lighthouse—a black scholar and amateur historian, a kind of fixture and gadfly around Watts, whose shaved round head and stout seven-foot frame suggested an avatar of his surname. Lighthouse laughed, tapping his finger on the graffito in the notebook. “You said around Eighth Street, huh? That’s near Little Tokyo. Let’s see, that thirty-five number runs up and down, that’s north to south, that’s latitude thirty-five north. Longitude’s east to west, so you reverse that top number, gives you 139 east. That’s the coordinates for Tokyo. That’s Iva. She lives not too far from there.”

  “Iva?”

  Lighthouse grinned. “You might know her better by her stage name, Tokyo Rose.”

  “The Tokyo Rose?” he’d asked in astonishment. “From the war?”

  “Oh yeah. In fact, she comes around here sometimes … active in the community … you might even say a rebel-rouser.”

  A week later, after a few discreet inquiries in Little Tokyo, he’d found her little apartment and knocked on the door. She was gracious, made him tea, said she could talk to him, help him with his notebook project, his history of the city, he explained.

  Monk showed her the sketch of the rose graffito. “The Tokyo Rose,” she sighed. “I’ve seen a few around town.”

  “If you look closely,” he traced the outline of the drawing with his pen, “the stem and the two sides of the rose are shadowed, forming the letter Y. Is that a Japanese gang?”

  “Y for ‘yakuza’? Could be … there is a connection to the rose.”

  “A connection?”

  “I will tell you … in a few minutes.” She poured tea.

  “Maybe it’s a Chinese gang … Y for the Yow Yees, their turf is nearby. Or maybe it’s the 880s … Y for yellow, their color, of course.”

  “That’s a lot of Ys.”

  “Whoever it is, why do they invoke your name and your past?” Monk asked.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you about the yakuza and the rose. I want to tell you everything. You’re a scholar, you can put it all in your notebook and later figure out what is important.”

  “You were born here in the city, Miss Toguri?”

  “Yes. Just a few miles from here. I went to Compton High School. ’Course, it was more white back then, but I never fit in anyway. I was raised a Japanese American, second-generation, a Nisei. I am a Methodist!” She laughed and sipped tea. “My uncle Ito, the old atheist, used to scold me whe
n I was a little girl coming home from church on Sunday. ‘You are Japanese, you are kami no michi, Shinto … you take the gaijins’ god and forget about Japanese gods … it is foolish to turn your back on the kami … your path will not be easy.’ No shit, Uncle Ito. The old buzzard was right. Sometimes I think it was all Uncle Ito’s fault. Maybe he was an agent of fate or the tool that kami no michi possesses to punish treacherous spirits.”

  “You know Mr. Lighthouse?” Toguri nodded to Monk. “He said you had the incredible bad luck to be visiting Japan when Pearl Harbor was attacked.”

  “Yes. Uncle Ito, back in Tokyo for his last years, was dying. I was twenty-five and sent to Tokyo to represent my family for Uncle’s last days and funeral. December seventh was the day my life ended. I became a … spirit in limbo. A life that was a death in life, a series of … confinements both mental and physical that would never end. Stranded in Tokyo when war was declared, I was branded an enemy alien by both countries. And so my ordeals began. POW camps in Yokohama and Mito. I can still feel the rough cotton prisoner’s uniform that seemed to grow magically each week as my emaciated body wasted away. Dirty water to drink, just enough insect-infested rice and bean soup to keep the human skeletons alive. I began to hate my own people. Can you understand this? I was an American, I wanted to return to America, to join the war effort and prove my loyalty. I finally got a letter from home. My mother had a market on Flower Street, just a few blocks from here. She lost it all, they herded everyone onto buses at Santa Anita Racetrack and took her away to Manzanar, out in the wasteland. Overnight, Little Tokyo was empty … during the war the Negroes moved in … did you know it was called Bronzeville for a while?”

  “Shit.” Monk laughed.

  “Relocation camps, they called them. My hatred spread to all Americans and then … I began to hate myself … I was this … hyphenated half-spirit of all I despised. The kami were truly punishing me. At the Mito camp, I met my only friends, but the kami spirits would make sure these friends would be agents too, like Uncle Ito, in my … unraveling.” Her eyes never blinked, as if she were slipping into a trance; Monk had the feeling she was looking through him, somewhere beyond. “Major Cousens-san and Captain Ince-san were Allied prisoners of war, Cousens an Aussie and Ince a bookish Filipino. Ince-san was starving, the camp guards saving their most creative cruelties and beatings for Asian POWs. I would save a crust of bread or a handful of dirty rice for Ince-san when I managed to eat. One day Cousens-san approached me. The Japanese Ministry of Propaganda had offered him and the captain jobs on the state-controlled radio. I spoke English too, he could take me also. A chance to survive, ride out the war. Of course I said yes, and the kami smiled with sardonic laughter. They worked for NHK Radio in Tokyo. Major Cousens-san became producer of the show. He and Ince-san wrote my scripts. Fifteen-minute spots between American swing songs to keep the GIs tuned in. I didn’t want to lie to the servicemen, didn’t want to get them hurt or killed. Major Cousens-san agreed, and he and the captain played cat and mouse with their radio censors, whose limited English provided the means for my friends to write scripts that kept my anti-American banter limited to girly flirtations, scoldings, and … threats that were so over-the-top, I could only smile and imagine every GI stuck in a foxhole laughing and reading between the lines. All I needed was a handle, a name, so the major baptized me Orphan Ann, your favorite enemy. Later they would give me another name, the curse that would obliterate my identity. Shakespeare was wrong, a rose by any other name would smell—period.”

  “Your name wasn’t Tokyo Rose?” Monk asked.

  “No, only the Americans called me that. Countless GIs huddled around their radios in huts, jungles, camps, fields, villages, cities, and towns scattered halfway across the world, looking forward to a cigarette and Orphan Ann’s sultry voice during The Zero Hour. I tried to help the soldiers when I and my writers could, even slipping in warnings when Major Cousens-san learned some rumors about an impending attack … a pun, a lowering of my voice to a whisper, an American slang phrase—once I remember I blew a whistle impersonating an American drill sergeant, the whistle blasts in Morse code. After a year or two, our secret efforts backfired … because we’d warned the Americans of some attacks, I began to … spook the GIs. Some said I could tell the future, that Orphan Ann knew the next victory or defeat, which ship would sink, which fighter plane would crash … what was worse, some soldiers thought I was whispering, flirting with them personally, speaking only to them … that I knew, like God, who would live and who would die … When Japan finally surrendered, I thought my long exile might end. A military tribunal, with the testimony of Major Cousens and Captain Ince, and the evidence of some of the scripts and broadcast recordings, found me innocent of any war crimes. It was noted in the record that I tried to aid American servicemen whenever possible, that I was coerced into the propaganda effort along with many other POWs. But the kami spirits are patient … I am only a paper candle-lantern … the kami blow the lantern across the dark waters of my life until the candle extinguishes itself. My visa and papers were delayed. The U.S. government was at odds with the tribunal’s ruling in Japan. By this time I was in love with an American serviceman in Tokyo. A baby girl was born, Fumiko. The baby was very sick. I tried to—” Toguri broke off, her lips trembling as she sipped the last of her tea. “This is difficult but I want to say all this now, quickly, get it over.” Suddenly she squeezed Monk’s hand across the table. “Promise me you will write it in your notebook.”

  “I promise,” Monk said, and finally she released his hand.

  “I tried to feed Fumiko but there was no milk in my breasts. When I held her, she was light as a balloon. All the hospitals were bombed-out, food and milk were hard to find, and the baby was sick. She needed doctors and hospital care in the U.S. My visa and papers were held up. A month later, in November, Fumiko died. My lover disappeared. I fell on hard times in the rubble of the city. My radio friends went back to their old lives and countries. The Japanese and the Americans didn’t want me. The tribunal and the U.S. government didn’t want me. I lived hand to mouth, odd jobs in Tokyo as the months passed. My daily visits to the consulate brought no relief from my limbo. Because of my English, I worked in bars sometimes with the GIs, but I was no longer young or pretty. I never prostituted myself. I held myself in grace even among the most drunken and dishonorable American soldiers. The bars were run by yakuza, but they were not unkind. They gave me some money, clothes, food, sake. Obatsu, my gangster boss, a big Buddha with two fingers missing, chopped off due to the usual yakuza misunderstandings, was a kind of father to me. One rainy night, because I asked, Obatsu took me to a dingy pachinko arcade, where, in a back room, an old man ran a tattoo parlor for Obatsu and his underworld friends. The old artist—forced by Obatsu, because it was a shocking societal lapse to tattoo a woman—inked a beautiful rose on my hand.” Toguri raised her pale hand from the teacup and stared in silence for a moment at the small, black-stemmed solitary red rose between her thumb and forefinger. “A rose by any other name … a rose for Fumiko, the sansei, the third generation that will never be, the red petals that will never blossom.”

  “The Tokyo Rose graffito I saw.” Monk placed his teacup in its saucer. “It has a personal meaning—the loss of your daughter—but it’s also a Japanese gang, maybe offshoots of yakuza during the war.”

  “I suspect so, but as I told you, I don’t know. It could also be a Chinese gang, as the yakuza made many inroads into China, when the Japanese overthrew Manchuria during the war.”

  “Miss Toguri, if I were to guess what you mean to these gangs…” Monk slowly twisted his teacup in its saucer, gathering his thoughts. “Graffiti is communication … but it’s also war for hearts and minds, for more power … it’s communication that’s weaponized … you were used as a propaganda weapon … but you turned it back and used it against your real enemies, who were finally defeated. You were the weakest victim they could find … a woman, a prisoner, an orphan in a strange land, de
stitute … an abandoned mother who lost her only child. And yet you found a way to help destroy one of the greatest evils in history.”

  “I don’t know.” Her gaze seemed to search into Monk’s eyes.

  “How did you get home?”

  “Finally the visa materialized and I returned to Los Angeles. My parents were dead, no family, the Flower Street market and Little Tokyo shops long gone in the … shuttering and land-grabbing orgy of theft and violence after Manzanar. I worked down in the Garment District, anonymous behind banks of sewing machines under fluorescent lights and giant fans, forgotten, but not by the cruel spirits of Shinto. In ’49 the government finally came and arrested me for high treason.”

  “Mr. Lighthouse showed me a history book with your arrest mug shot in it,” Monk said. “You’re actually smiling, like … that Mona Lisa.”

  “Why not? We live in an upside-down world where the innocent are guilty and the guilty innocent.” She paused and looked into his eyes. “A world where those that see may be blind, and those that are blind may see.” That Mona Lisa smile again. “My court-appointed public defender was as well-meaning as he was powerless. It was 1950, they were burning not witches but comic books and immoral novels. The American Legion and the Legion of Decency were making America safe from flesh peddlers, Commies, and freethinkers. The Rosenbergs were arrested for atomic spying. My public defender said the radio star Walter Winchell was broadcasting raving tirades demanding my arrest and imprisonment. Winchell had the ear of Senator McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee … my defender called it the House of Un-American Activities.” Toguri smiled and gazed for a moment into the mysterious patterns of the tea leaves in the bottom of her empty cup. “I was caught in this madness, a cold war world all the more evil for trafficking its violence and injustice underground. I served six years. Now I have finally found my way back to my city. It draws me … like the war, maybe it suits my dark destiny.”