“Cook?” Monk feels dizzy.
“We cook it, honey.” LaDot smiles. “You cook cocaine and it leaves this paste in the bottom of the pot. They call it basuco, from basura, trash. They used to throw it away … until they found out you could smoke it. They’ve been doin’ it in Colombia since the twenties, kind of a secret. Who’d you steal that recipe from, honey?”
“Sombras.” He frowns and glares at her. “You talk too much, bitch.” He licks his greasy lips. “Blast, Mr. Clean, corn flake, whitey, trash … Bazooka blows your mind.”
Highbeam drains the glass, throws it against a concrete pylon half buried in broken bottle shards. “Bottle, bitch.”
“The rooms … hallucinations,” Monk’s mouth full of ash and acid.
“You’ll feel better, honey.” LaDot hands the bottle to Highbeam, traces a black fingernail down Monk’s damp chest.
“My harbor houses, up and down the Harbor Freeway,” Highbeam says proudly, his eye closing as he drags smoke in from the blunt and hands the joint to LaDot. “See, what we doin’ is givin’ every brother and sister—like you—a complimentary ball-pipe of bazooka. I gots these dumps rented everywhere in dah ghetto, where ya all can hang and have another taste, for a reasonable fee,” exhaling smoke. “I’m just a … wha’s that fancy word, bitch?”
“A facilitator.”
“Yeah, I’m just a facil-tader, takin’ you to the house where you meet dah real host.” Wafts of smoke ring the great Afro like a dark, smoky planet. “You wuz in number seven, topside, just above channel twelve.”
Monk’s brain throbs. Jangled memories—or hallucinations—of those rooms: hopelessness, sloth, lust, fear, paranoia. How long had he been there? Had he committed the seven deadly sins? Sloth and lust he remembers from his lapsed Catholic childhood, watch out for those demons, mortal sins that prey on a life that has—so far—maintained a kind of fragile grace, always on the brink of that black abyss of damnation: had he let lust come between him and Karmann? She must wait for him, just a little longer— “The last room.” Monk feels dizzy, jagged.
“What room, honey?” LaDot lobs a jade bottle into Highbeam’s paws. She smiles, takes a hit from the blunt.
Monk closes his eyes, sinks his burning head into his hands, but he can’t stop the vision returning in his pinwheeling brain: flashbacks of an immense shadow staining the wall, perhaps a fantastic Afro, or a throbbing, monstrous black brain.
“Cow!” Highbeam bellows. Cronk, swearing under his breath, rises from the stacks of tiny plastic pendants of white crystals next to the gleaming scale. His footsteps echo away into dripping darkness. Metallic clangs reverberate down the spillway, from the iron-hinged hatchway below the spewing drain. “Fuck.” Highbeam jumps from the throne, walks toward the hatchway’s dim outline past a cone of vibrating light.
“Would it be okay if you showed me the way out?” In the distant gloom, rusty metal groans as Highbeam pries open the hatch plate with supernatural strength.
“Don’t worry, baby.” LaDot presses close to him. “Highbeam always passes out, then I’ll get you out of here. He’s harmless—unless you fuck with him. You’re safe, you’re a future client. You’ll be okay, unless he does too many blasts before he passes out. Then sometimes he gets a little, ah, weird.”
“He’s not weird yet?” Monk’s afraid, but his fear is fragmented, blurry, like something dark, fluttering on the periphery of his awareness: it’s that new drug they’ve doped him with. The towering Afro gleams back into the splayed, dripping light beams. A man walks at his side, under the shadow of the great kinky penumbra.
“Hey, Standard,” LaDot nodding coldly, sipping Chivas.
“LaDot.” Standard’s white, sweat-stained T-shirt stretches taut over bulging muscles. Out on the street, everyone knows blacks with bodies like Standard’s come only from the prison yards, where they spend six hours a day, year after year, pumping iron and morphing into rippled strongmen as they grow angrier and bitter at the white folks who put them behind bars until one fine day it’s parole time and another pissed-off, jobless Herculean black man hits the mean streets.
“VSOP,” Highbeam orders, taking his throne, swigging from the green bottle. LaDot frowns and prances off to the hot plates. “Wha’s the word, Standard, my man?”
“The word is good,” Standard smiles. “One thousand, two hundred eighty-four.” He lobs a massive rubber-banded roll of hundred-dollar bills into Highbeam’s palms.
The Afro nods majestically. “Blue-Cap! One grand, two eight four!”
“Aye! Aye! Captain!” Blue-Cap shouts back. Monk watches as Blue-Cap, over at the scales, counts tiny bags into a paper sack.
LaDot returns with two glasses of brandy. “The word, then the world!” Highbeam shouts, clinking glasses with Standard. The men drain their tumblers. LaDot freshens their glasses with more amber brandy: for the first time, Highbeam appears a little drunk.
Standard’s just come by the old Zephyr from San Quentin, where, by a clandestine and lucrative deal with certain guards, he’s secreted away every two weeks from his life sentence without parole to purchase the yard’s growing pharmaceutical needs. Raised fatherless, he spent most of his teen years in youth camps and correctional institutes: everyone called him Standard after he ripped a Standard-brand urinal from a detention center bathroom wall and beat another inmate to death with the porcelain bludgeon. Transferred to San Quentin in ’59, he became an adept of the prison commode. The toilet became his safe, where by an ingenious rig of strings and weights and floats, a drug stash dangled in darkened pipes. The ivory throne revealed still more wonders: one night, while puking a tad too much cough syrup, cocaine, Malt-O-Meal, and whiskey, Standard heard, like the prophets of old, a voice whispering up from the gurgling drain. Voices, incipient madness, until he heard the whisper again: “Standard? Is that you? It’s Cook…” Randall “Crazy” Cook, in the next cell over. In the months that followed, Standard experimented and refined the commode’s amazing acoustical powers: by controlling flush patterns, bowl water volumes, through trial and error etched on his walls that the guards mistook for scratched calendar days, he discovered that he could converse with every cell on every deck … Soon the prisoners were communicating through a vast, secret web of interconnected pipes and drains: it was like some fantastic future machine, thousands connected through a kind of inter-net of invisible lines and devices, powered by what Standard understood to be the mysterious, little-known properties of water and wave propagation and sound amplification through liquid and metal media. Even the most remote toilets, over in the segregated blocks of Death Row, could be reached by Standard’s remarkable tapping codes on the toilet’s flush handles: the historic breakthrough code was back in ’60, when Standard tapped out, in response to the watery coda clicking back from Death Row: Mr. Chessman, I presume? Gradually the warden discovered the illicit network and took steps to ban “potty talk.” But the authorities were helpless. Restrictions like solitary bucket rooms, secret laxatives to jam transmissions and garble communication, flushing sabotage were ineffective. Stoolies and decoders were enlisted to break changing codes and intercept messages, or bomb communiques with explosive diarrhea. The warden studied toilet flowcharts, water bills, pressure spikes, plumbing blueprints, brought in wave technicians and sonic engineers, but Standard was always one step ahead. Nothing would stop the toilet drug traffic and gang pipelines of communication: Standard, like all the disenfranchised above in the city—blacks, Mexicans, gangs, musicians, graffitists, cons, even these new hippies—would always find their own underground languages and signs of communication and identification. And now Highbeam’s creating another argot, his bazooka drug addicts. If Parker and the cops, the white establishment could only half-glimpse the secret babel spreading up from these hidden strata: subterranean, underground, street level, and beyond. Monk shakes his head. For the cops to understand, break, and arrest someone like Standard and these new gangs—the 1965 men—they’d have to filter through so ma
ny walls of code: the Negro, the Convict, the Gang Member, the Addict … then maybe they’d have the real Standard, unless he’s cocooned under yet another semiotic cloak: the Jailhouse Preacher, the Assassin, the Militant, masks within masks.
Cronk returns with a frail Mexican girl in a filthy, ragged white cotton dress and shirt. The dress balloons over her bloated, pregnant belly. Monk stares into the dead vacuum of her eyes in her deathly pale, sunken face. Cronk pushes her to the throne. Highbeam, his single eye leering down, leans forward and rips open the girl’s blouse. He squeezes a sagging, milk-bloated breast and she whimpers. His big black thumb and fingers pinch her nipple over the tumbler glass and white milk squirts into the Jägermeister. Highbeam swirls the liquor with a finger until it’s pearly brown. He twists the breast toward Standard and the girl moans in pain.
“No thanks, man.”
“Don’t know what you missin’,” pushing her away into Cronk’s arms. “Give her a blast, Cronk.” Cronk nods, leads her away beyond the generator lamps. To Standard: “Here’s to bidness!” They drain the tumblers. LaDot fills their glasses with brandy. “Le’s do a blast too, baby! Blue-Cap, get dah horn!”
Blue-Cap appears with a duct-taped baggie. Standard rips it open and extracts a pinch of this white goop, like gummy tobacco. Blue-Cap holds a glass pipe drilled with a metal bowl tamped with a wad of steel wool. Standard mashes the drug into the bowl as Blue-Cap sparks a match. “Motherfucker,” Standard rasps as he exhales. Next Highbeam takes a hit as he closes his eye. Clouds of acrid smoke hover under the great Afro like banks of fog.
“You got dah treaty?” Highbeam’s bloodshot eye opens, squinting.
“Yeah,” Standard exhales smoke.
“Don’t I get a taste, baby?” LaDot, pouting, rubs Highbeam’s thigh.
Highbeam turns, high and drunk, to Blue-Cap: “Bazooka, bitch.” Blue-Cap lights the pipe as LaDot greedily sucks down the swirling chamber of smoke.
“This is the only way I could smuggle it out.” Standard grins, stoned, pulls off the tight shirt from his rippled muscles. He turns, flexing his shoulder blades. Monk steps closer: on the convict’s chiseled back, a tattoo against the black canvas of his skin, a map of—Monk stepping closer—Watts. Highbeam snaps his fingers and Blue-Cap hovers around Standard, clicking pictures of the tattoo with a Kodak Instamatic. Monk, craning around the flashbulbs and Highbeam, tries to get a glimpse of the map’s inked streets and arteries as they shift and glint against dark muscles under the generator lamps. Is that a red-inked route that meanders through the city, snaking south? Naomi Avenue south to East Fifty-eighth … the flashbulb explodes and the map disappears in white light … Monk sees a blur of inky map lines … Hooper south … East Seventieth to Miramonte Boulevard, then south. Monk sees a zigzagging trail down Makee Avenue to Compton Avenue, toward the blue-inked border of Florence—
“Tha’s only haf duh treaty, bitch!” Highbeam growls. Standard turns, Monk’s lost the map.
“Now, be mellow, monster,” Standard smiles. “All the brothers got our backs this far through Watts, we got Gladiators, Grapes, Businessmen, more … the northern territories, dig? But farther south, gettin’ down toward Compton and shit, yuh gonna need the beaners: Shadows, Boyle Street Boys, 190th Locos, and all them cholos. They got the other half of the treaty. El Tirili—the Reefer Man, a big dick with the Shadows and the Locos in the joint, he’s got the southern half tattooed on his back. Then y’all can … patch it together.” Standard seems to be grinning, but Highbeam takes no offense. Monk’s hazy mind reels: then El Tirili is real? The Reefer Man still out there somewhere, almost as old as the ancient, mystical graffiti he left in the city, like an elusive grail. Monk spies a wedge of tattooed routes between the great Afro and Blue-Cap: he can’t see the street name, are those Southern Pacific tracks?
“Where’s dis reefer, mufafucker?” Highbeam’s eyeball squints down suspiciously at Standard. Monk moves around Blue-Cap, sees an inky scrawl of tattoo line bending to Elsie Street, then the red route drops south again to Parmelee Avenue, blocks closer to home and Karmann. Monk’s repeating the street names in his bazooka-blasted mind, trying to remember them, like a spell, a passage home … but he can’t take out the notebook, risk losing it to these gangsters.
“Don’t worry, boss.” Standard pulls his shirt on, the tattooed palimpsest disappears under sweaty tight cotton, Monk frowning as the map, his safe passage home, vanishes. Standard hefts his duct-taped bag, nodding his gleaming bald head toward the iron hatch door. “El Tirili’ll find you.” The great Afro nods and the two men slip into the shadows toward the rusted portal and the dark waterfall churning from the elevated drain; Blue-Cap disappears toward the tables and scales.
“Mama, I’m hungry!” A little black boy wanders out from the shadowed corridor. He rubs his eyes, a finger digging into, scratching, his big round Afro. Tiny red and blue Supermans swoop and fly, printed on his cotton pajamas. The boy Monk had seen in LaDot’s bed.
“Okay, Freeway honey.” LaDot scoops him up into her arms.
“Pancakes, frone!” the little boy hollers. Monk can see, in the boy’s face and voice, a disturbing mirror of Highbeam’s darkness.
“Blue-Cap!” LaDot shouts. “Blue-Cap’ll make you pancakes, Freeway baby.” Blue-Cap appears, takes the child’s hand. “Go make Ricky some pancakes.”
“His name’s Freeway?” Monk asks.
“Nickname,” LaDot answers. “When he was a baby we took him all the time, up and down the Harbor Freeway a million times, Highbeam building up his harbor houses and clients. ‘Freeway’ was the first damn word he spoke.”
Monk has to get out of here, no telling when this stoned one-eyed giant in his cave might snap: it’s all he can do to control his fear, he knows it’s that newfangled, industrial-strength dope, but he has to escape before the terror, palpable as these dripping walls and shadows, engulfs him. “How ’bout that way out, LaDot?” Monk whispers.
“Ssshh,” LaDot cinching her robe. “Wait till he passes out.”
Rusted iron groans and echoes down the slipway as Highbeam, growling with inhuman strength, opens the hatch and Standard disappears. Monk’s stomach drops as the door closes with a terminal metallic grind. “Bitch, we doin’ big bidness.” Highbeam staggers to the throne. “The dream is comin’, baby,” slapping LaDot hard on the ass, “and it ain’t no fucked-up peace dream.” He pulls a crystal pipe from the wiry depths of the Afro, collapses on the car-seat throne, lights the pipe. “We gettin’ da money, gettin’ the guns, gettin’ the brothers and sisters ready. See, we ain’t just fucked-up gangsters. Got secret plans with that Castro mufafucker … he’s gonna help us take over Haiti … gonna be all Negro Americans, can’t touch us, Rollin’ 60s’ own economy of guns, money, bazooka, ain’t that right, frone.”
“Yeah, ogre,” LaDot nods.
“What?” the wild eye throbs in rage.
“I said yeah, oh great,” LaDot smiles.
Highbeam swigs brandy, his eye drooping closed. “There was a riot before dis one, long ago, folks forgot. I see da visions when I blast on the horn … a hot country, covered in sand … a great riot, all the fuckin’ slaves rose up and killed their white masters. It was a … a wha’ you call it?”
“Utopia,” LaDot whispers, like a mother soothing her son to sleep.
“Yeah … we gon’ have that in Haiti, Fidel’s missiles back us up. Whites be our slaves … gon’ have our own black Mount Rushmore on da biggest fuckin’ mountain … big rock faces of Thelonious Monk … Malcolm X … fuckin’ Gabe Jones wif his trumpet … and ol’ Highbeam—” The bottle slides from his fist and shatters on the ground: Highbeam snores, slumped forward like a fallen oak.
“Gabe Jones?” Monk whispers.
“His favorite Negro comic book hero,” LaDot whispers. “Jones, this commando in Sergeant Fury’s squad, a jazz badass that blows his horn when they charge into every battle.” LaDot’s hands stroke his chest. “Maybe I’ll blow your horn.”
“
Look, you’re fine and everything,” Monk gently pulling away from her. “Help me get out of here, please,” he whispers: that black, strung-out fear tingles through him.
“Wait a few minutes, make sure he’s out.” Her dilated, drugged eyes fix on his face. “Call me LaDot, baby.”
“LaDot?” he asks, eager to change the subject: “Los Angeles Department of Transportation, huh?”
“How’d you know?” LaDot grins, impressed.
“Seen it stenciled here and there in my city travels.”
“Yeah,” laughing. “My mama used to say I was conceived under the Florence Avenue overpass of the Harbor Freeway. She remembered lyin’ on her back, starin’ up at the rumblin’ concrete bridge stenciled LADOT. Now I got little Ricky Freeway, guess it runs in the family. Well, Highbeam’s asleep, I’ll show you out, but it’s a pity,” gently brushing his lips with her fingertips. “There’s a tunnel that’ll take you up to Compton Creek, then you just hop the fence. Come on.”
They walk across the spillway, toward the iron hatch in the shadows. Cronk is gone, Blue-Cap’s slouched stoned at the card table, boots up on the table and scales, listening to music from a transistor radio, gazing off in the other direction. Monk pulls the notebook from his pants, fans through damp pages, scribbles names that are already fading from his pounding head.
“What you got there? You a reporter, a snitch?” LaDot leaning into the notebook.
“No, the map.” Naomi … Sixty-seventh … Miramonte—“Fuck,” he hisses: it’s gone, it’s all gone. Behind them, Cap groans, shifts his boots on the table as Monk stuffs the notebook into his pants.
“Sure you won’t change your mind, baby?” LaDot holds his hand. “I got a cozy little pad off tunnel number seven.”
Monk shakes his dizzy head. “You should get out yourself. He’s crazy.” The cones of light from the generator lamps splay across dripping pylons and angles of concrete channels and storm drains behind them.
“Highbeam’s okay. You know they say that when you lose an organ, your other organs kind of overcompensate,” smiling bravely. “No, you’re right. I know that Negro island shit is crazy, but I’ve seen a lot of true heavy shit go down. Bazooka, it’s bigger than anything, a revolution.”
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