Monk’s fingers let go of the rebar. He blinks and looks around: the old woman’s gray eyes stare up into his, a wrinkled, scarred smile. Sweet smoke puffs out from the long white pipe clenched in her grin. The glass shards and gems twinkle green, blue, amber in the sculpture’s iron webs.
“You put a spell on me.”
“Must every daydream and memory be magic?”
“I’d forgotten,” Monk whispers. “I must’ve been eleven or twelve.”
“Eleven years ago he finished the towers. Come sit down, have one more cup of tea.”
Mojo brings the teapot and they settle on the green couch; Monk fills their cups. “My nickel, that was the last object he put in the towers?”
The old woman nods, sips tea. “That’s quite a coincidence. If you believe in coincidences.”
“I’m gonna find that nickel one of these days. Coincidences do happen.”
The old queen shrugs. “You can see I’m a sculptress, I too work with metal, scraps, things you find. Thirty or so years ago … Sabato … Mr. Rodia and I were lovers.” Her gray eyes glow with light as she smiles. “Don’t look so surprised. I was quite beautiful in my day, the scars and wrinkles did not really manifest themselves until I grew older. In ’54 Sabato completed Nuestro Pueblo and moved away, up north. Of course, by this time, we were no longer … intimate. But our bond … second sight, hoodoo, the electricity lovers share, call it whatever you like, your boring coincidence, but our bond never wavered. A coin cemented into the tower, perhaps coincidence. After all, some object must be last to complete a structure. You’ll want more. Young people these days want more. Just a few years ago, they tried to condemn the towers. The white city councils said it was unsafe, but the truth is, they could not abide such primitive monuments to … us poor folks, the outsiders, the powerless. To test the towers to see if they were safe, they attached steel cables to each tower and pulled them with cranes. Ten thousand pounds of pressure. Nuestro Pueblo didn’t budge.”
“He was a great engineer, a great artist.” Monk sips tea.
“Yes, he was … however, I’ve heard that … that kind of pressure against Sabato’s towers … towers welded by hand with rusted scraps and set just a few inches in hand-mixed concrete … well, many folks, most of ’em white, can’t understand it … but you see,” patting Monk’s knee, “I … and many of us hoodoo kings and voodooiennes … blessed and cast spells of protection for Sabato, for the towers, before them cranes could roll up. And your graffiti. Some places are holy, they project an aura. Since ’21 … the towers have never been trespassed with one mark of graffiti…”
Monk’s thinking of that other hoodoo, Queen Mab, her Victorian house and picket fence miraculously untagged. Did they know each other? “Okay, Miss Mojo,” Monk smiling. “I’ll try to keep an open mind. What do I do? Go to the towers? Find the coin? Talk to Mr. Rodia?”
“No, no, young man. Go to the towers? Better wait till this … insurrection’s over. Parker’s ordered the Guard to surround the towers,” she laughs, “damn fools. He’s afraid Negro snipers will use them, or fix antennas up there for criminal broadcasts … and talk to Mr. Rodia? If only you could. Sab—Mr. Rodia passed away last month.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Mojo.” Monk drains his teacup.
“Yes. Well, he and I … it was a long time ago. You just remember those that wear shades may be shades … and watch yourself ’round those evil white men you’re gonna meet.” Mojo closes her eyes and sets the smoldering pipe against her cup, sinking back into the jade cushions. “Now, young man, if you don’t mind showin’ yourself out, I’m very tired.”
Monk sets the cup quietly on its saucer on the table. In the sputtering candlelight he ducks through cage-welded corridors and descends rungs into the pitch-dark alleyway.
23
Monk is walking east on Sixty-sixth Street, staying clear of the boulevards like the hoodoo queen said. Is the horizon lightening toward sunrise, or is it only this unending night’s fires and the charnel ruins of the city?
Maybe that old witch is right: wires slant from utility poles, lines and plugs coil and web from telephone transformers; wires droop and loop from house to house, chimneys to yards, or splayed over fences and brick walls. Monk’s not sure if the power companies have rigged firetraps for the ghetto or if folks are just stealing watts from the man.
Miramonte: Standard’s street. Monk heads south down the quiet avenue. Tiny bungalow houses, doors and windows grilled with iron bars. Some people hunker on stoops or curbs, talking softly, sipping beers in the summer night heat, gazing at the smoke-smudged, flame-ribboned horizon. Monk’s mind is working, the sign scrawled in his notebook luminous, tantalizing in his mind: M: vines on a meter.
These blocks have a crimson hue. Red-painted window trims, red flower pots, wine-shaded windows, brick walls and walkways like rusted blood, even the flowers: roses, cardinals, lantana, scarlet sage: this is Gladiator territory, and these houses, these people languid in summer’s moment, exist only by fealty to their gang overlords. Monk stops and stares up at the black street sign. Miramonte. The letters flash in his mind: Miramonte … M: on a … it’s part of the message … M: vines on a meter … Tyrone, whoever wrote it … they somehow knew he’d take this street … Standard’s street … who else knew, Standard, the gangs, the cops?
He’s reached Sixty-eighth Street, his mind working through the code, burnished letters spinning like some kind of combination that might tumble and reveal a guarded secret. Subtracting Miramonte, the remaining letters are v … s … n … e … e—
“Seven.” Monk’s reached the corner, staring at the street sign: Seventieth. A black boy rides past on a bicycle with a fluttering red bandanna tied to its handlebars. “Fuck. Miramonte seven … vines on a meter.”
Monk walks diagonally across the street and steps up onto the sidewalk: before him is an abandoned house, its white stucco walls covered with graffiti tags, bombs, drippy numbers and diagrams between its broken windows. On the corner of the wall, half hidden, sprayed in neon colors of graffiti, are smashed, rusted old electric meters strangled beneath knots of dead vines spidering up the wall.
He treads across the summer-bleached lawn, past the meters and vines to the southeast side of the house, invisible from the street. He stares up at the large spangled graffito painted over the entire side of the windowless wall: cubes of neon gold, red, and orange pyramids and temples—strange ziggurats that fuse Egyptian and Mayan pyramids into futuristic lines that have depth, dimension, a vibrating life … Monk gently touches the graffito to see if it is real. Beneath the impossible temples is a golden scroll, like a papyrus, blank and shimmering, a strange black pen poised above it, ready to write. “El Tirili,” Monk whispers. Impossible but here it is, an El Tirili masterpiece that no graffitist would dare paint over. He steps farther back, gazing up at the mural. Rodia’s voice echoes in his mind: I have time … but no space … “I see it now … graffiti’s like the towers … it exists in time.” Monk’s talking to himself. “Graffiti travels through time, shaping the people, the city in its wonders and warnings … but it can’t transcend space, it’s fixed in cement foundations or sprayed walls … the papyrus … books, the notebook … the word travels through space … mind to mind, across the planet … but the pages are blank unless someone sees them, words are not signs until they’re read … until they change us here, this city, then the next and the next…”
* * *
At the corner of Florence, Monk crosses the street, his heels crunching broken glass. He passes a news van parked at the flooded curb, a reporter, cameramen, two men adjusting klieg lights on stands. Channel Five’s Wink Rover stands before the camera, bathed in the chalky glow of the lights, microphone ready, nodding as a man shuffles through the cue cards.
“Ready?” The card man’s inhaling a cigarette nervously.
“Give me a minute.” Rover glares at the cue cards, then at the Channel Five news van parked on the corner, its long whip antennas an
d their portable lights like beacons to him, Hey, Negroes, we’re over here, come and beat the shit out of us whiteys. Next to the van, his co-producer is talking to the new token Negro hired by management to “team-cover” the riots. Wink suspects the Negro newscaster is secretly slipping messages into the broadcasts, codes to clandestine black operatives: where the cops aren’t … which stores are not yet looted … city blocks ripe for larceny where the power is out.
“Okay.” Rover nods as a tiny red light blinks on above the lens and the cameraman signals him. “This is Wink Rover with Channel Five News with live coverage of the riots in Watts. We are on Florence Avenue where the police have responded to a series of confrontations with Negro rioters. Channel Five News just hours ago brought you Chief Parker’s press conference announcing the deployment of the National Guard. As I speak to you now, the National Guard is en route from Camp Roberts, but they are,” Wink pauses, grimacing professionally into the lens, “some two hundred miles away. Meanwhile, armed gangs of Negroes seem to loot and then set fires faster than the police and fire brigades can respond. The police and fire departments are undermanned and spread too thin across this burning metropolis. A few National Guard units, including the Mechanized Infantry Division from Long Beach, and the First and Third Battalions from the San Fernando Valley, may arrive sooner with,” Rover nods gravely, “God’s speed. Indeed, because tonight there are reports of truckloads of Negroes with rifles and guns terrorizing the city. Some of these hoodlums wear scarlet armbands to identify their criminal brothers-in-arms, and to spread terror in the night as they rove the ruins of their violent handiwork—”
Another cue card slides into position as Wink glares into the camera: “We have unconfirmed reports from our police sources that hundreds, perhaps thousands of guns and weapons have been seized from Negro rioters and gangsters at police checkpoints throughout the city, guns, we are told,” pausing, shaking his head, “even guns taken from scores of little Negro … children.”
Wink’s been working double shifts since the riots began; sometimes he stays late at the station, going over the kinescope monitors with producers, watching the magnetic tape recordings of the nightly broadcasts, when strange thoughts race through his exhausted mind. Watching the news feeds, the buildings, flames, faces seem to repeat in endless loops … are they showing the same footage over and over again? Images edited and broadcast across the country to fuel the fear, hate, and terror?
He nods toward the lens and cue cards. “Chaos and paranoia seem to fan these flames. Civil rights activists charge police with firing into mobs, while Chief Parker—at least publicly—has stated officers’ orders are to fire above rioters. The chief yesterday stated that he fears the Negro unrest may be coordinating with large groups of the city’s Negro and Mexican gangs. There is mounting concern that rioters and gangsters are gathering and concealing vast caches of guns, weapons, and bombs for an all-out assault on police, or a gang war of unprecedented violence—”
The camera’s red light dies as the operator yells, “Cut! Cue!”
The darkened avenue seems to funnel into the red and lemon flashing lights of cop cars and fire trucks beyond the newscasters. A Molotov cocktail bursts in a flower of flames at the center of the avenue, illuminating crowds of rioters fanning across the street. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Cue cards flutter to the curb as the cameraman, light techs, crew, and Wink Rover run toward the news van. They pile into the van and it skids away from the curb, stamping a black tire track over a cue card printed NEGRO MEX GANGS GUN CACHE.
* * *
Monk’s safely across Florence as a news van, followed by a police car, roars past. Now, from the open windows of the tenements above, from loudspeakers and radios and megaphones somewhere in the night, a soulful, amplified baritone echoes between waves of police sirens: Brothers and sisters, let’s chill with Coltrane’s “Summertime” before we burn … baby, burn …
Police cruisers whip past. Monk stops; it takes his brain a few seconds to process what he sees: following the cop cars are two olive National Guard trucks, their flatbeds filled shoulder to shoulder with soldiers in full khaki uniforms and helmets, carbine rifles and M16 machine guns glinting from their shoulder straps. A few Guard snipers hold rifles with experimental army scopes that can detect light from dark targets. A third National Guard truck rumbles past, bigger, with a camouflaged steel cargo box jutting up behind its cab, twin, huge steel RDF loop antennas revolving on their motorized bases atop the roof, triangulating closer toward the renegade broadcasts.
The convoy squeals around the corner. Now Coltrane’s sax fades as a husky woman’s voice reverberates through the night streets, a sonorous purr down the avenues and across the ruined city … Tokyo Rose: We are one … Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad is of Negro-Japanese ancestry … hand in hand with the Japanese Black Dragon Society since the war, fighting with yours truly Compton Eve against the white devils … make them burn, baby, burn …
Squad cars brake in front of the iron staircase and boarded windows of a darkened pawnshop. Guardsmen leap up stairs, smashing through doors with M16 rifle butts and combat boots, cops scrambling behind, pistols drawn. In the night, Coltrane’s tenor sax peals like a squadron of mournful angels in D minor.
Inside the dark building, flashlights dart past racks of musical instruments, glass cases of watches, jewelry, guns. The soldiers smash and topple shelves, barrel past collapsing, teetering aisles stacked with boxes and suitcases and appliances. In the corner, flashlight beams transfix a makeshift studio carved out of boxes and stacked lockers. A desk heaped with radio equipment and microphones, wires and cables snaking down into the darkness. An empty chair. Under a microphone, a turntable slowly spins, the needle scratching around and around, orbiting the jade paper-label center of a vinyl record. The flashlight beam illuminates the revolving, fading print: My Favorite Things … John Coltrane. Beside the humming phonograph player: a paper cup, half filled with water, a solitary dead black fly slowly wheeling in its center; three pennies point in shiny, copper reflected light toward the stem of a single rose, its dried, red bud forever closed.
24
Monk’s a few blocks north of the bright streetlights of Firestone, Coltrane’s final, sad sax notes echoing in his mind, keeping to the shadow-splashed sidewalks of Miramonte Boulevard. Heading south, but is he following Standard’s secret gauntlet? Should he zig east and down Maie Avenue, or zag west and down Compton again? When he passes Firestone, the little barred houses transform into prisms of blue: light and dark shades of blue paint, cobalt blooms of baptisia, delphinium, periwinkle in flower beds, teal and sky drapes and furniture and doors, even dark blue cars, no longer Gladiator territory, instead the royal hues of the Farmers borderlands. On the dark horizon he can see the feeble twinkling lights of the Watts Towers rising over 107th Street, a skeletal beacon in the haze. I have time but no space. So many nights have passed, yet the fires still rage, and he’s only twenty or so blocks closer to the sea and the lover who waits for his return.
A black man in rumpled street clothes, rags on his feet, looms on the sidewalk before him, transfixing him with strange, ghettoized sunglasses cobbled from duct tape, wire hangers, mismatched black lenses, feathers, silver chains. “Beware, brother, I see with the eyes of the blind. I can see the glow of the bigots, of the damned … armies clashing in the night … it is the time of no time…” Monk pushes past him. “Why you gots to push me? And their dead bodies shall lie in the streets of the great city,” the old street preacher’s raspy voice behind him. “I’m tired.”
A turquoise-and-white two-tone ’61 Chevy Brookwood squeals before Monk, its windows blacked out. The car’s passenger window rolls down: a white gangster, shaved head glistening with tonic, brown eyes rainbowed with some kind of purple pharaoh’s mascara and jade grease pencil, grins at Monk. “I’m tired,” the preacher’s gravelly whisper fades around the corner, “I’m tired, so tire—” A shock jolts through Monk’s spine: Tyrone. B
efore he can turn toward the old preacher, the gleaming silver barrel of a .22 pistol levels out from the car window.
“Where you goin’?” The gangster whispers, instead of the obligatory Where you from?
“South, the port.” A back door swings open, the gangster waves the gun barrel toward the rear door. “No, please, that’s okay.”
Eyes gaze sadly up into Monk’s face, then the gangster whispers: “Little fly, / Thy summer’s play / My thoughtless hand / Has brushed away.” Monk stares at the gleaming gun, swallows hard, slides into the backseat. The Chevrolet glides forward as Monk stares out the tinted window, looking back, but the preacher is gone.
Another white banger sits next to him, shaved head, tattoos on his thick neck. He leers as his hands interlock, flashing Monk an S sign.
“Slausons?” Monk wipes sweaty palms on his thighs. “I thought you cats were Businessmen.”
“Nah,” the tattoo-neck laughs, “we use’ta be but those pricks sued us, copyright shit, so we changed it to Slausons.”
“Lamb, how many times have I told you,” glittering eyes turning from the front seat. “Don’t talk business.”
“Sorry, Asmodeous.”
“Here, Nobodaddy,” Asmodeous hisses, pointing out the front window: Nobodaddy, behind the wheel, slows. Monk leans forward. Telephone lines overhead, dipping over the street: old pair of sneakers dangle from shoelaces looped over the wires, toes pointing east. “Left here.” Nobodaddy turns down another street, east.
The car brakes to a red light. “Let’s go.” Asmodeous opens the door. Lamb pushes Monk out and the three men scramble inside the cab of an idling big diesel truck. Nobodaddy squeals the Chevy into a right turn, disappears as the truck driver—another white thug in an army jacket, black sunglasses, shaved head—grinds gears and rumbles through the intersection. “Let’s do some business … Monk.” Asmodeous smiles. He opens a hatchway in the rear of the cab, descends three steps into the cargo container, Monk following as Lamb steps behind, his big hand clamped on Monk’s shoulder.
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