Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  “When’s the last time you played together?” Monk sips beer.

  “Last chime we grooved was the last bright of the last decade, before the sixties and hippies.” (December 31, ’59, an auspicious year: on 113th Street, under cover of darkness, Elgin Q. Boyd slips his suitcase onto the seat of his station wagon and drives out of Watts, the Last White Man to leave the city.) “It was the twilight of bop, it was the hep of chimes, it was the bummer of chimes.”

  “I’d like to hear about that, Mr. Reed.” Monk grins, for once not dwelling on his notebook.

  “Tha’s Uncle Chu, please. It was right here, in the Congo Club. We tore up the joint. No one played bass like Monk, maybe Big Jay McNeely or Mingus. That was the last time I saw him, said he had a gig in Detroit, I think. A little reefer madness?” Chu offering the stub of joint to Monk.

  “No thanks, I’m good.” Monk smiles, sips beer.

  “I feel bad, I’ve probably spent more time with yo’ old man than you.”

  “That’s okay. I’m grown. My mom’s around, she’s cool.”

  A young white girl approaches Chu, black hair in a ponytail, wearing plum culottes and a crop-top pink blouse. “Mr. Reed, could I have your autograph?” She nervously offers a pen and this blue album cover that reads City Blues.

  “Sure, baby.” Chu takes the pen and album. “What’s yo’ name?”

  “Carla,” in a small, nervous voice. Chu scribbles words on the cover. “Mr. Reed, my friends and I have a bet. Should bop be called colored or Negro music?”

  “You call it whatever you want, sweetie,” handing her the pen and album. “To me it’s just jazz.”

  “Thanks!” Clutching the album to her chest, she disappears into the plastic hanging vines and the dark tables across the club.

  “See what I mean? Cute but a real cube.” Chu sips his beer. “I wish you coulda seen the good side of Monk. This one time, I think it was over at the Finale Club, this young cat, a real gone sax player, Local 767 pulled him off the stage, that’s the musicians’ union, ’cause he didn’t have no damn union card. So Monk paid his membership fee right then and there so this young man could play and get paid. Another time, I forget what club … I got to quit smokin’ this shit,” Chu laughs, stubs out the reefer in an ashtray. “We all got thrown out of this club ’cause he refused to use the segregated Chamber of Commerce.”

  “Chamber of Commerce?”

  “Tha’s what we call the toilet … as many an illicit transaction takes place inside and around the porcelain chamber.” Chu laughs. “Now where was I?” Chu slips his dark glasses on. “Yeah, ol’ Monk was one of a kind. Soul solfeggio.”

  “Soul what?”

  “Solfeggio … he played only by ear. Couldn’t read music. Tell you a little secret. In his bass case, he had a notebook of sheet music. But the sheets, they were all drawn on with cartoons and designs, and all these notes and stories about life and people.”

  Monk stares in awestruck silence at Chu’s jowly grin under the Christmas-light sparkles reflecting in his dark glasses.

  “I’ll tell ya somethin’ else too, Americo. Yo’ daddy was an outsider … that’s what we call a cool cat who plays against the melody, outside the notes. He had a vision … a kind of way of seein’ how everything in his pages, in his notes, connected in the future. ’Course, in his case he didn’t see the patterns, he heard ’em.” Chu grins, his sunglasses locked for a moment on Monk. “Well, I got to go on, nice seein’ you, kid.”

  Chu Hurricane slumps from the barstool like a dark mountain. Monk watches as Chu picks up his sax from its stand on the stage; three band members wait behind their instruments. Chu slips a silver reed into his saxophone, the notorious number five reed, which only the mightiest wind wailers can master. Behind the drums there is a small stack of nutmeg cans, the drummer’s addicted to the stuff, Chu grinning as he remembers some girl last night remarked, Look at all that nutmeg! You boys sure must bake a lot of pies.

  Up on the stage, a spotlight shines a dusty cone of light down at a black man with a red bow tie, white vest, silver suit. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is your master of ceremonies, Pigmeat Markham. I have good news. I’ve agreed to stop performing stand-up comedy, and so the riots have officially ended.” Laughter, a drumroll and cymbal crash from the drummer on stage. “I just came back from performing in Vegas … to a riot! Sinatra and the Rat Pack were at the club. Sinatra saved my life. After the show, two big guys were beating the shit out of me. Sinatra saw what was happening and came up, and he said … that’s good enough for now, boys.” Scattered laughter. “I bumped into Sammy Davis, Jr. too. Man, his hair reminded me of my wife … both used to be kinky.” More laughs, snare drum and cymbal crash. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for mister embouchure, the king of winds, hittin’ another homer outta the park, Chu ‘Hurricane’ Reed and his band!”

  Chu takes center stage, red and blue Christmas lights shimmering above him like stars suspended in a firmament of cigarette and reefer nebula. “What’s the word?” Hurricane calls out to the crowd.

  “Thunderbird!” the audience shouts and claps. The band thunders into the bop assault of “Good Sauce from the Gravy Bowl.”

  Chu stares down into the copper gleaming funnel of the horn, as if falling down into its golden vortex. He’s got to get outside, away from the melody, perhaps time itself, as if to find a key to somehow stop the madness and violence and hate outside, beyond the sound.

  Hurricane’s fat black Buddha’s face is pale as his fingers blur and poly-chords ring the night, the S of the horn’s piping a brass-plated serpent screaming, ascending toward some millennial key. The black ballooned mouth breathes life into the reed, into the recondite brass chambers and flanges: eerie chords that glissando higher, ninths to shattering elevenths. Chu’s face is a black sweating mask about to explode as he inverts the notes and breaks through, moving outside, a long arpeggio anviling each screaming note higher. He’s skirting the edge, a Bop Gabriel wailing toward a crescendo that not even he can transcend: a splintering twelfth note sustained for an infinite moment at perihelion before the sound and the solo finally diminish with Reed’s last mighty breath: he leans against the piano, bellows cheeks gasping in air as the audience applauds and cheers. Outside, in the streets filled with blood and fire, has the sound, the soul, the energy they’ve released made some kind of difference?

  “Bathroom?” Monk inquires toward the faint wisp of the bartender.

  “Upstairs to your right.”

  Monk climbs a rickety staircase garlanded with vines and ascending African masks; below, the crowd yells and applauds as bass and drums play solo riffs. Monk brushes away vines. Can’t a brother just get home? The dim hallway is shadow-suspended with smoke drifting from downstairs. Where’s that bathroom, left, right, fuck. He lurches through a door. Rusted iron cargo walls, welded rungs fading into cigarette smoke, Motown music blaring from a scratchy phonograph. Karmann backs under blinking painted electric bulbs casting pastel shadows. Marcus and Dalynne sit kissing, coiled in piles of blue and purple pillows. Slim-Bone, Felonius back Karmann toward the pillows: she cups her hand protectively around the swell of her belly, dark wine splashing from her plastic cup … Monk grabs Felonius, they topple over strands of lights, the phonograph screeches, bottles of wine clatter from a table, rainbow lights flicker to darkness—

  Monk opens his eyes: citrine waves and foamy surf ebb and flow above him, a marine-themed ceiling. He’s lying on a bed. Monk bolts, sitting up. A white cat springs from the lap of a girl sitting beside him on the bed: raven hair laced with deep green strands like seagrass, so long it cascades and disappears under aqua silk blankets and frilly cream sheets like sea foam. Hyacinth eyes, black lipstick, a delicate child’s face, pale, made translucent by the dark counterbalance of black hair. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m C.C.” Smiling, a black lacquered fingernail tracing down his sweaty arm.

  “Oh shit, is this, ah,” watching the ivory c
at stretch its nails into a teal carpet, “a cathouse?”

  “I prefer the word brothel.” She sits up, tiny rose nipples under diaphanous green and gold.

  “Oh shit … did we, did we—”

  “Not yet.”

  “How old are you?” Monk scoots to the edge of the bed.

  “Age is such an arbitrary concept,” then laughter, deep like a woman but trailing disturbingly into little-girl giggles. “Don’t be so … insular.”

  Monk’s gazing around, blue-green submerged light splaying from a lamp: a dresser and a table with tiny fountains, a water wheel and a water clock all softly dripping and tinkling; a wall is centered with a great saltwater aquarium, bubbles glistening up in waters suffused under indigo electric bulbs, golden seahorses suspended in glowing space.

  “Relax. You came in and had some kind of fainting spell. Kept mumbling ‘Karmann’ and something about a notebook. Is she your girlfriend?” That ebony fingernail gliding over his collarbone.

  “Man, that dope downstairs is something else. You’ve got an interesting collection of, ah, water apparatus.” The room seems almost misted with the cool negative ions of the water clockworks, wheels, tinkling fountains, gurgling ladders.

  “Well, in a brothel time is money. I’ve always been interested in horology—no wisecracks, that’s the study of time.”

  “C.C. What kind of name is that?” shrugging away her hand.

  “Canadian Club. Would you like some?” She stands, sways toward the dresser, beautiful buttocks shimmering under the gown, but there’s a hint of adolescent, jiggling baby fat.

  “No thanks. Just had a couple of beers with Mr. Reed.” Seahorses stare dolefully out at Monk in their heliotrope sea, tiny fins flapping, like limpid, yellow changelings.

  She laughs, pours a shot of whiskey into a dusty tumbler. “Yeah, he’s a live wire, Sir C—that’s what we call him, C for ‘Chu.’” She sits next to him on the bed, too close, scents of brine and lilac and honey wafting into his nose.

  “Is he your—”

  “Pimp?” More laughter, she drains the tumbler. “No. All us girls up here are independent contractors.”

  “Well, I have to go. Sorry I barged in on you.” Monk stands but her little hand squeezes his.

  “What’s your rush? Stay a few minutes. You look a little wobbly to me. I won’t bite you … unless you want me to.” C.C. takes a pearl seashell brush from the nightstand and slowly combs her long thick strands.

  Monk rubs sweaty palms on his pants legs. The seahorses curl and float in their purple world, snout mouths pulsing, perhaps silently warning him? “Maybe just a few minutes,” he croaks, light-headed, gazing around the watery den, tongue thick. “I’ll take that CC now, please.”

  She saunters to the bureau, chinks a good shot in the tumbler. Monk drinks it down, opens his eyes: she’s standing before him, budding nipples inches from his sweaty face, dark thatch shadowed between her legs under shimmering chartreuse, brine, lilac, honey. “You came here for a reason.”

  “I was looking for the bathroom. Besides, I have a girlfriend.”

  “You don’t understand, Monk,” sitting down next to him.

  “How’d you know my name?”

  “You were saying all sorts of things in your little nightmare. Monk, Felonius, a notebook lost in a … trench? And Slim-Bone—I’d like to meet him,” giggling. “The Congo brothel is … different. There’s a lot of rooms up here, and each room is different, with a different girl and john.”

  Trench. Monk frowns. “Are they all—the rooms, I mean—as unique as yours?” The whiskey warms him.

  “Some even more startling,” C.C. laughs. “This place exists on many levels … for the hedonists, for those on the physical plane, there are the usual rooms, girls, and kinks … there’s interracial for the hip, there’s segregated fun for the squares … even segregated love-ins. But when the johns’ proclivities explore more, how should I say, more cerebral, philosophical levels, that’s when us girls really start the meter ticking. The man in the room for the love-in can’t face just a single girl, but needs multiple girls because he himself is fragmented … there’s a gent in Talia’s room, she’s tied him up, wants to know if the universe has a purpose? When his time’s up he’ll come out spent, exhausted, on the verge of belief in an extrinsic or intrinsic finality or purpose in all matter … in Mona’s room—you should see Mona’s room—an old man’s crying in her naked arms, having experienced with—through—her a panpsychism breakthrough, now he sees all matter as sentient.”

  “What kind of whorehouse is this?” Monk wants to go but her legs, her breasts, the brine and lilac, the child’s face with the dark eyes of an old sea nymph …

  “This is a metaphysical brothel, honey.” She pours another shot in the glass, Monk hypnotized by every curl, wisp of childish nakedness under diaphanous turquoise spangles. “You put your money down and we strip—strip you of any illusions or hang-ups or shaky worldviews. We’ll give you the best fuck of all time—a mind fuck.” C.C. sips whiskey, presses the tumbler into his hands, squeezes his trembling fingers. “Daphne’s in her room, dressing, undressing herself. Is she the same girl or is she different each time? Her john’s an endurantist, thinks objects never change, but she’ll take off the leather pants, a painful bruise where she’s laced them too tight, and john’ll leave tonight, a perdurantist, every curb he crosses, every mailbox, every wall now in a constant state of riot and change.”

  “Until he gets Mona the next time.” Monk sips whiskey: the wheels drip and turn, water time splashing by in echoing streams and gurgling mysteries. “Mental whores.”

  “You’re beginning to dig,” C.C. raking black nails over his thigh. “We know what our johns need, not what they think they want. You should see Theda’s room. All white, no bed, furniture, zero. They come in and leave later with the greatest sex experience of their lives, because it all took place only in the mind. Her johns lie there, fully dressed, and Theda puts them in a mental construct of ecstasy. She’s an idealist, the world only exists in the mind.”

  “Who’s the object, the whore or the john?” Monk grins. “Who is the whore, what is the john?”

  C.C. smiles, nods, then her black lips frown and in the aquatic lamplight she looks ancient and wise. “I’m afraid we’re the whores, incorporeal yet objects at the same time. We have no metaphysical identities of our own. Empty vessels, reflecting only the strengths or cracks in each john’s philosophy. It’s not all fun and games. Some of the johns, they come up here all liquored up, you know, start acting like swines … then we become a kind of mirror. Be careful, there is danger. There is a … a cosmic mechanism that sometimes must be invoked … Last night, in Lara’s room, her john had his cosmological thrill. Is the universe finite or infinite? She says, ‘Imagine the edge of a finite universe,’ but he can’t, no one can. He jumped out the window. One time, a group of drunk white sailors came upstairs, wanted black girls to dress up like slaves. Sir C and the boys downstairs slipped a Mickey in their booze, shanghaied them. They woke up in the pitching shadows of an oak-and-pine hull, ankles chained to tarred floorboards, above them, through the iron mesh of rusted deck grates, Negro mariners marshaled the sails of their barque toward the port of Sofala, and the African markets that awaited their cargo of white slaves.” She guides his hands over her tiny breasts. He can feel her heartbeat, her black lips part in a sigh, lilac warmth bathing his face.

  “I gotta go.” Monk pulls his hands free, trying to ignore the bulging heat beneath his pants.

  “No, you can’t go, I won’t let you,” she hisses. “Just a little longer, please?” Her voice is low and sweet, pale angel’s face glowing up into his tired eyes. Only her spidery hand rests gently on his knee, but Monk feels as if an impossible weight holds him down, as if the gurgling and wheeling water machines themselves exert the gravity of submerged fathoms pressing against him.

  “This is just a misunderstanding, please let me go.” On the dresser, the ivory cat
sits, jade eyes mesmerized before the purplish aquarium, studying the seahorses congealed in their violet, watery prism. What’s she doing? Some kind of hypnosis—

  “Don’t be gauche. You’re in a metaphysical brothel. There are no accidents. What’ll it be, big boy,” C.C. slipping a pale leg over his lap, “determinism or free will? You think your journey has been one of free will but every step has already been determined.”

  “Please, I have to get home.” Tell her she’s too late, the notebook is gone—

  “No! You can’t leave!” Hissing, her cinder eyes reflecting dangerous depths. “Once you taste me, you’ll forget about her.” She squeezes the hardness beneath his jeans. Monk closes his eyes, a powerless dread swooning over him. C.C. pulls his hand to her black lips, kissing his fingers. “Bitch!” Slapping away his hand, she jumps from the azure satin bed. “Moly.” Tears flood her mascaraed eyes.

  “Who?” Monk opens his eyes, an invisible weight seeming to lift from paralyzed limbs.

  “Not who, what!” C.C. screams, stamping a naked foot. “An herb, your fingers stink of it!”

  The gris-gris. Monk wobbles to his feet: the tinkling water wheels have stopped, one or two final drops plinking in their dark pools.

  “You’re under her protection, you can split now.” She sits on the bed, a little girl, wiping mascara from her eyes. Seahorse eyes follow him. He walks, each step a little lighter as if he’s emerging from invisible depths, and he’s out the door, down the staircase, and into the smoke and vine-tangled light and the reassuring throb of the Congo Club’s saxophone and thumping drums.

  The club’s almost empty, the jazz piping from radio speakers. Reed and his band are gone, the bartender’s wiping down the empty bar top, waitresses filling trays with empty glasses. Monk sprints out the padded doors, bathed in lemon neon blinking lights as he jogs down the street to the Finale Club. He sees a couple of parked cars but no burgundy Corvair convertible, no ride home.