Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  The ring of debauched angels nod in deference to the old master. Albion extends the smoldering nub of reefer to El Tirili. The Reefer Man shakes his sombrero, extracts the biggest joint Monk’s every seen, fat as a Cuban cigar. Monk studies the ancient brown hands, dyed a miasma of strange colors from decades of paint and spray: hands that never had to touch a cuete or gun.

  El Tirili removes his sombrero, revealing perfectly greased-back black hair. His rainbow-hued hands untie the serape and neatly fold it over the sombrero like a metallic flag woven with geometric symbols. The Reefer Man glares at Standard with mad-dog, bloodshot eyes.

  Standard rises, peels off the white shirt clinging to his great muscles, pulling it free like a shred of gossamer veil. El Tirili unbuttons his Sir Guy plaid, tosses it on ebony onyx: now both men turn, stand side by side.

  “Behold,” Asmodeous spreads his arms, “the prophecy fulfilled, the unholy united, the End-Time. The Demon red, who burnt towards America … the treaty…”

  Monk stares at the map tattooed on both men: Standard’s broad, ebony map of Watts he’d glimpsed in Highbeam’s storm drains, the northern cribs inked in deep blue, a crimson tattooed route snaking south, Naomi Avenue paralleling Central Avenue, Sixty-seventh Street, Compton Avenue, then Seventieth east to Miramonte, meandering down toward Florence; but now, the scarlet trail continues south, on the sienna canvas of El Tirili’s back … the blood line zigzagging from Compton Avenue to Defiance Avenue, snaking past Ninety-fifth, toward Ninety-ninth … south on Compton again … then 102nd, crooking west … and points south, turf of the Sombras, Vice Kings, Boyle Street Boys, 190th Locos, and more.

  “The covenant is born.” Asmodeous takes a tumbler of whiskey from Tyger. “A toast to all the dark envoys here. We are now an army, a rainbow of destruction. Rollin’ 60s and the niggers … Las Sombras and the spics … Yin and the 880s, Yow Yees, all the ABCs—American-born Chinese gangs, all of Tong’s angry children … and your humble servant,” bows, drinks, his eyes twinkling, “the Slausons and every wigger OG in the city. A sea of black, brown, yellow, white, a reign of fury no force can stop!”

  Everyone’s out of their chairs, chinking glasses as Monk tries to shrink into his upholstered cushions: “Burn, baby, burn!”

  Near El Tirili’s olive waist Monk glimpses a spidery red line dropping south and the words Success Ave: he tries to follow the crimson tattooed trail but the Reefer Man’s buttoning his Sir Guy plaid and lacing his shimmering serape, a dignified ancient graffiti gaucho, gold tooth gleaming as he grins across to Monk, the tattoo cartograph gone.

  “This is where you disembark.” Asmodeous smiles at Monk. Tyger, the transistor radio pressed against his ear, grabs Monk’s arm in an iron vise and shoves him through the smoke as the brakes hiss to a stop. Monk’s blood pounds in his face as he fights a rising panic; Tyger almost pulls him, Asmodeous and El Tirili flank tightly around him.

  “Your notebook is your pass to freedom.” Asmodeous and El Tirili block the closed silver panels of the bus door. “Two holy books, double is the power to he who unlocks both volumes.” Tyger’s radio has disappeared: Monk hears a click and Tyger’s pressing a switchblade against his throat. “You and I are alike, but you are afraid to release your darker angel. Every day on these streets, you pass, neither black nor white, but which are you? You’re both, white as an angel is the English child, but I am black, as if bereaved of light.”

  Monk stares into the madness of Asmodeous’s cobalt-and-ebony-webbed eyes. Monk slowly slips his hand into the back of his shirt, extracts the frayed, sweat-sopped blue notebook bound with its rubber band, hands it to Asmodeous. Tyger’s lips twist cruelly as he gently presses the switchblade into Monk’s throat: a drop of blood glistens from the silver blade tip as Monk’s eyes lock into El Tirili’s old eyes, which seem to twinkle with a bemused patience that urges Monk to wait.

  “Put away your claws, Tyger,” Asmodeous says.

  Tyger frowns and clips the switchblade closed. Monk’s forehead is beaded with sweat.

  “Mr. Monk, it would be foolish, or at least premature, to eliminate such an authority on signs and wonders. We may call on your expertise again. And this way, I can look forward to reading your next book of miracles.” The bus doors hiss, panels unfold open, warm summer blackness beyond the silver step and curb.

  “You’ve probably read it all before.” Monk swabs his sweaty forehead with a palm, then rubs a trickle of blood from his throat. He steps down into the night, El Tirili behind him.

  Pneumatic brakes hiss and the bus shutters, pivots away from the two men. Monk sees a flash of motion as the Reefer Man slips two spray cans under his serape: silver and gold iridescent letters, blocked like Aztec ruins—El T—shimmer on the metal side of the bus as it lurches down the street. El Tirili salutes Monk with a tug of his ancient, paint-spangled fist around the shining sombrero’s straw rim, then the old pintor walks down the street, sparkling, jeweled Florsheims winking into the night.

  Legs still wobbly with fear, Monk sprints into a dark alley, away from the fading, distant chug of the diesel bus. He turns down a street, no time to get his bearings. Another alley swallows him. After a few minutes he slows, his hand squeezing the coverless notebook tucked in his pants, his notebook. “Like I said, motherfucker,” Monk panting, “you’ve probably read it all before.” The deception took less than thirty seconds: Asmodeous left the table to bring in El Tirili. Standard and Yin were distracted with the two women. Tyger had his eyes closed, nodding along with the transistor radio pressed against his ear, the other white thug standing, watching as Asmodeous appeared with the legendary graffitist. Monk grabbed the gangster’s notebook, and, under the table, slipped the tattered, detached blue covers of his own notebook over the green cardboard covers of Asmodeous’s book, and stretched Jax’s rubber band over the covers. “Fuck.” Now he’s thinking about the terror, the perspiration on his forehead when Tyger pricked that knife to his throat. The sweat, the panic as Asmodeous held the notebook … Monk stared into those insane eyes, dreading any second that the frayed rubber band around the covers would suddenly snap …

  25

  I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.

  —Job

  Monk emerges from the alley, pulls out the ragged, coverless notebook from under his shirt and scribbles on a back page: Defiance Avenue, 99th … Compton. Already the inked maze of El Tirili’s map is fading from his memory. “Shit!” He stuffs the notebook under his belt, walks south, scattered headlights stabbing through the darkness. Monk trudges across an intersection, head tipped slightly forward like a ship against the current, a journey south again, perhaps forever in some kind of fiery limbo: he’ll skirt down Watts, try to follow El Tirili’s secret route, treaty, or trap until he wears himself down into the oil and blood of these warm streets themselves, or somehow finds harbor and home. Across the street now, he shivers in the hot summer night, a palpable dread infused with each intersection, as if these great asphalt crosses gouged into the city are crossroads that vibrate with a mystic nexus of violence and despair.

  South, near Ninety-sixth Street. White Mexican candles sputter on sidewalks, each azure flame burning for the souls of the disappeared. Knots of men roam down the avenue and crisscross between light traffic. Every few minutes police cruisers punctuate the summer’s heat with sirens as they swerve past cars. Monk passes a gutted taco stand, shop windows smashed or boarded up, an alley blocked and glowing with a flaming car. Up ahead, three men scurry from a building, throw boxes in an idling car, speed away into darkness.

  Monk walks south on Compton Avenue to Ninety-seventh. The intersection is darker, quieter than Ninety-second—gritty shops on corners followed by rows of iron-barred bungalows and vacant lots. Walking under a burned-out traffic signal: a dead white rooster hangs from the signal’s iron arch, a string noose furrowed in its neck, a gris-gris omen any white trespassers fail to heed at their own peril. A
liquor store, two black men with shotguns standing guard outside its pulverized windows; a pawnshop, fire gutted, muddy shelves and debris and clothes scorched and soaked in black water, its iron grilles warped and scissored open across the sidewalk. Monk shakes his head: this is the paradigm of the ghetto—liquor to numb the soul and mind, pawnshops to feed the thief, the desperate, the addict; gas stations’ neon winking illusory promises of mobility, flight, escape. Don’t think about escape, you’re not on the lazy nigger time measured out by bigots but ghetto time, fractured, torn away from white man’s time and history: here, in this squalid inferno, a minute, an hour, a night has no reckoning, only an endless movement through darkness between points of flaming terror—perhaps only hours, only a few nights have passed in actual white time; there is still hope, he has to believe that maybe it is only the sixth night—this has all been a kind of reverse, dark echo of the creation, and the seventh day will dawn with some kind of light and peace.

  On the corner, a couple of brothers are doing business out of the opened trunks of their two parked cars, hawking Afro wigs—for safe passage—get ’em while they last, a buck ninety-nine.

  A telephone rings in the distance. Past a couple of parked cars and a boarded-up store: a graffiti-tagged phone booth, glass panels shattered. A working phone booth in the ghetto, its line not yet cut by tonight’s clashing forces, a miracle here for Asmodeous’s book of wonders. Monk lifts the receiver. “Hello!” The booth reeks of urine. “Hello! Tyrone! Tiresias—”

  “I see yer ass, all right,” a gravelly, ancient man’s whisper crackles over static. “Head on down to East Ninety-ninth.”

  “Why? Who the fuck are you?”

  “Boy, you got to dance with the dead ’fore you can return to the land of the livin’.”

  He drops the phone, dial tone bleating as the receiver swings on its metal wire. He staggers from the booth.

  Monk heads south down Compton. Each street seems darker, narrowing toward the black clouds and charnel glow of the horizon. Cars trickle by, mostly black young men, interior lights on so brother won’t open fire on brother; some backseats and trunks are heaped with tonight’s plunder: whiskey and birdcages, shovels and sunglass racks, clocks and cigarette boxes, purses and mattresses, melting frozen dinners and bicycles. Angry voices howl from the street and passing cars, chanting, “No shame! No shame!”

  Monk’s carrying his coverless notebook, gripping its wad of loose and jammed pages. “I got my loot too,” fist squeezing the notebook: he’d looted and pillaged the city too, sacked it like some kind of fabled, mythic city of old … plundered a treasure beneath all their noses, a treasure beyond price, the signs and secrets and voices in the notebook … It has to be a key, an insane, dizzying key … what lock is it all meant to open? A car passes, Monk watching a young white woman’s face panicked, gazing out the window of its dark interior. The rear window’s been smashed. The car turns, engine gunning, lost, looking for any freeway ramp, police line, some kind of escape, and disappears.

  Ninety-ninth Street. Tiresias. Monk stops, looks around, nods: This is the way … El Tirili’s map. A turquoise-and-cream two-tone ’61 Brookwood slowly idles, approaching from the opposite direction, no headlights. “Asmodeous,” Monk whispers, turns, runs. He hurls himself against a darkened doorway, pushes open the metal grate, and slips inside the brick building.

  A long concrete stairway leads down into darkness, a dim, flickering light somewhere below. Monk walks down the steps, scuffing his Keds in slow motion.

  It’s cold down here, not enough to make his breath mist, but jacket-cold, like industrial air-conditioning. He’s in a hallway that turns right, where the sputtering light comes from. Folding his arms over his chest for warmth, Monk heads toward the shifting glow.

  A large, windowless cinder-block room. Stainless-steel gurneys draped with sheets like layers of snow. Monk opens the notebook, fans through waterlogged, torn, smeared yet still intact pages, finds the drawing of Standard’s map he’s sketched. He slowly draws a crooked black ink line, continuing Standard’s route. Now he draws El Tirili’s streets, quickly before he forgets: Compton Avenue, Defiance Avenue, Ninety-ninth. Fuck! What’s next—he can’t remember. Someone with a flashlight—the flickering light Monk saw from the stairwell—turns, the light beam stabbing Monk’s face as he shields his eyes with his hand.

  “Nothing to loot here.”

  “I’m no looter. I got kind of chased in here by a gangster. I’ll head back now, don’t want any trouble.”

  “Gangster, huh?” The flashlight plays over Monk’s ragged notebook in his fist. “Well, there’s a back door if you wanna go out to the alley.” The figure walks closer, the flashlight illuminating the floor and a gurney draped with three mounds of white sheets, a shape that Monk with a shock realizes is the head, stomach, and feet of a cadaver. “Long as you’re not looting. I’m just closing up. Come on, I’ll show you the way.”

  Now Monk can see a middle-aged woman with dark, striking eyes, her short, jet-black hair swept back beneath a plastic blue visor. “There’s nothing to loot here anyway, unless you’re after the embalming fluid. They tell me the kids dip cigarettes in it, charge two bucks a smoke. Call ’em wets or greens for the color they turn. Oh, it’ll get you high, but that formaldehyde and chemicals,” shakes her head. “It’ll kill you after a spell.” She’s smiling at Monk, her face pale, almost chalky; she’s wearing a white long smock, its hem fluttering ghostly above black shoes.

  “This is the morgue?”

  “Overflow. Los Angeles Coroner’s Department. Fire’s knocked out the power here about an hour ago, they’ll go to backup generators if they don’t get it back on line soon. My name’s Karen,” holding out a pale hand.

  “Americo Monk,” shaking hands: hers is like leathery ice.

  “You some kind of reporter, maybe for one of those Negro papers?” The flashlight shines down on Monk’s notebook.

  “Huh? This? No, just a writer.”

  “Too bad. I could show you some things. I know, I talk a lot. Well, I’ve been doing this job for twenty-one years, and there’s no one to talk to.” She laughs as they stop at one of the draped cadavers on its gurney. “’Course, I must admit, I do talk to ’em, had some nice conversations.” Monk stares at the woman, who grins. “Don’t be alarmed, just nice conversations in my imagination, they don’t talk back—yet.” She laughs. “You sure you’re not a Negro reporter? All that madness up there, fire and death, I could tell you a few things. Take this.”

  Karen shines her flashlight at the corpse and slowly pulls down the sheet. Monk gasps: a black male, looks like twenty years old, large Afro, eyes closed as if asleep. “This is Willie Ludlow.” She pulls a cardboard file from a shelf under the gurney, opens the folder, the flashlight illuminating a black-and-white police photo of Ludlow’s chest: it’s as if some beast ripped out his lungs in a gaping cavity of blood and bluish intestines. Monk turns away. “Sorry, but look, this is what I wanted to show you.” Karen holds another photograph in the flashlight beam, a six-pack of Hamm’s beer bottles on the curb. “This is what Mr. Ludlow was killed for.” She covers the young man’s sleeping face.

  The woman leads Monk to another draped gurney. “This is Darrell Posey.” She gently unveils the sheet from the face: a heavyset black man, short-cropped Afro, cheeks still puffy with baby fat. “I don’t have to look in their dossiers, I know ’em all, talk to ’em every night. Darrell was shot seven times for stealing a radio.”

  Karen’s at the third gurney and pulls back the sheet: a young black male, eyes closed, but his jaw is fractured and purple, caked blood still under the large, flat nose. “This is Michael Adams. Twelve years old. Shot three times. Didn’t steal anything, just throwing rocks at the police.”

  Monk stares at her dark eyes shimmering beneath their blue visor: what did that old hoodoo say about shades? “There’s plenty more. Ellis, stole a box of diapers. Shortridge ran from the police. There’s Owens, drunk and belligerent. Flores,
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Elliot, Jones, Whitmore. All he did was stomp on a police car hood. Must be about half a hundred now, they’ll be a hundred more unless this madness stops pretty damn soon.”

  The flashlight illumines a clipboard with a sheaf of papers hanging by a chain near the metal doors. “You have to keep a record,” her blue-tinted eyes seem to penetrate him, “otherwise all their pain and passing is for nothing.”

  They pass through two heavy swinging doors, this room as dark as the first, but Monk feels a slight warming temperature. “This is the autopsy lab. Don’t worry, nothing to see, everyone’s put away for the night. Watch your step as we cross our little river here, follow me.” The flashlight angles down at the floor, a stainless-steel gutter runs across the threshold, water gently sluicing through the channel. Monk steps over the water, following her. The sting of formaldehyde and bleach burns his nose and Monk frowns. “Smells, huh? I’m used to it.” Now Monk can see the long metallic autopsy tables, and the sinks and spigots and pipes that drain into the metal channels that bisect the tile floor. “Getting warmer, isn’t it? Good.”

  Karen unlatches a heavy steel door and they step into the next room; Monk can feel the warmth inside. The woman shines the flashlight around: a large cinder-block gray room, windowless like the others. Two heavy, blackened iron carts on wheels in the corner; long iron hooks and poles standing in another corner; a row of heavy silver steel buckets lining a wall, and in the center of the room, a cement-block housing about the size of a car, with a clamped iron hatchway. “This is the cremation station.”

  “They all get cremated?”

  “No, but quite a few. All the John and Jane Does end up here. Folks have six months to identify ’em, or into the flames they go. Most of my friends out there,” she points to the rooms they’ve passed, “their folks won’t be able to afford a funeral, so the city will cremate their loved ones and return the remains. We do offer a few reasonable coffins, nothing fancy. They’re in the next room.” She shakes her head. “Fire up there, and fire below, huh? Ashes to ashes.”