Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  Trudging up the wooden plank, finally almost running across the Matson observation deck, past the white plastic chairs and table, to the far railing, the edge of the world.

  She descends the welded steps that angle down the side of the container. Each time her hand grips the crooked, thin pipe handrail, she remembers him bending it, welding it piece by piece, perhaps his rusted, galvanized fingerprints are still here, meeting each touch of her hand like a ghost, like one of his damn signs.

  Safe, alone in the candlelight now. Their bed waits in the corner, a mattress under piles of blankets, beyond Monk’s shelves and crates jammed with their paperbacks and junk: a bed too empty, too forlorn to look at now. Karmann pours merlot into a plastic cup, finds aspirin in the nightstand drawer, swallows two pills, empties the cup and refills it.

  Her fingers riffle through the records that fill an orange crate on the rug, pulling out one of Monk’s jazz albums. She sets the vinyl on the turntable, a finger gently guiding the needle to the groove: side two of Undercurrent. Karmann needs another Kent, but her fingers brush her belly, and she settles for the wine. “Thirty-three and one-third revolutions per minute.” How many orbits, songs spun in the air like spells, until he returns? By the time she gets through side one and Bill Evans’s piano goes into her favorite song, “Dream Gypsy,” the Kent pack and the bottle are almost empty. She stares down at the cover, the blue-tinted, underwater photograph she loves titled “Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida”: the profile of a woman in a long white gown, barefoot, floating on her back languidly just beneath the water’s surface, her head half submerged, her face invisible, still clinging above in the air and the light, blending into a soft, mysterious radiance beyond … her black hair and palms suspended under her in repose, peace … but it’s not death to Karmann, it’s as if the woman is almost free, rising from dark, murky depths.

  12

  Monk stands before a billboard on the corner facing a boarded-up storefront. The street lamp here is broken, only starlight dampened through smog and smoke. Up on the catwalk of the towering sign, shadows move: a man dressed in black works over the billboard. Monk stops, watching the tagger, dwarfed under the huge advertisement of giant packs of gum hurled in the air as a crowd of white hands wait to catch them. The man in black scurries along the catwalk, unfurling, pasting big cutouts against the billboard. Now, flying through the air with those packets of diet gum, there are several images of red bricks and flaming Molotov cocktails.

  The tagger spray-paints his name in the bottom corner of the sign with a lightning stroke of silver, jumps down from the iron ladder hanging from the billboard’s side, stops, nods at Monk, only his eyes visible, visored between a black bandanna and black beret. “Nice work,” Monk smiling. “I think I saw your work down on Central, around Seventy-ninth.” Monk slips his notebook from his jeans, fans through several pages. “Yeah.”

  The shadow pads over to Monk and gazes into the notebook. Monk’s sketched a full-page picture of two black parents beaming, doting over their baby boy, who’s standing inside his playpen, clutching the bars with his tiny dark fists as if in a rehearsal for some future, preordained incarceration. Monk’s indicated where the playpen manufacturer’s name has been blocked over with PICKANINNY PLAYPENS and, below the smiling toddler, another paste-over: NOW WITH NEW ULTRA-LEAD PAINTED BARS!

  “Thanks.” A green VW convertible whines over to the curb, headlights out. A cute girl smoking a cigarette is behind the wheel, brushing long brunette strands from her face. He throws a canvas equipment bag into the backseat. Monk can’t tell, by the strip of eyes and brow and forehead above the bandanna, if the shadow is a black man or just smudged with grease and dirt.

  “Are you going south? Anywhere south, I got a long way to go, man.”

  “How can I say no to a fan?” To the girl: “He’s cool.” Monk jumps in the back and the VW lurches out of the darkness and down 132nd Street. “This is Sofia.”

  “Monk.” Sofia salutes him with a wave of cigarette smoke. “Got a few of your works here, Jaxsy GK,” Monk tapping the notebook. “You should open up a gallery.”

  “Friends call me Jax. A gallery, yeah, the pigs would dig that.” He pulls the bandanna down around his neck: a black man in his thirties, handsome, with a neatly trimmed mustache.

  “Man, it’s weird.” Monk shakes his head. “I don’t know why … I pictured you as a white man.”

  “Why?” Jax’s rubbing paint from his hands with a rag.

  “I don’t know. A white Madison Avenue type … fired from his job, seeking revenge on all those billboards.”

  Jax laughs. They pass a pawnshop, knots of shadowed men smashing windows. Sirens drift somewhere down the blocks of smoke as looters scurry in the dark interstices of shattered street lamps. “Hope you don’t mind a few stops.”

  “Sure. What’s the GK stand for?”

  “Giant Killer, for the billboards.” Jax takes a hit from Sofia’s cigarette. Jax is well-known in underground art circles, but Monk’s never heard before the explanation for the artist’s initials. Jax bumped up his notoriety a few years ago in New York, when he famously—despite cameras and security—tagged the foundation of the Statue of Liberty with a red, white, and blue stencil: TORCHES NOT TORTURE.

  “The city is our canvas.” Sofia smiles, kills the headlights, pulls to the curb.

  “Wanna come?” Jax’s impish grin lights up his face. “I could use a lookout.”

  “I have to get home.”

  “It won’t take long,” Sofia says, turning toward the backseat. “Then we’ll go south.” Now Monk can see her face: olive, translucent skin, full lips, brown eyes so dark they look like obsidian mirrors.

  Monk nods. “How can I say no to Jaxsy?”

  The two men jump out, Jax grabs the canvas bag. The VW disappears around the block in a puff of exhaust and cigarette smoke. They trudge across the street and hop a crippled chain-link fence. Before them looms a huge Foster and Kleiser billboard, the massive advertisement glowing under its canopy of flickering fluorescent lights: an attractive white couple sitting in a bar, toasting with frosty glasses of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer as they watch the TV over the bar. The man’s hand rests lightly on the girl’s waist as they watch a horse race on the television screen. Great glowing lime letters read INVITATION FROM YOUR TAVERN KEEPER … COME AND WATCH THE RACES … PABST BLUE RIBBON. Jax unzips the canvas bag, telescopes out a collapsible aluminum half-ladder with hooks. He pulls the bandanna over his face, hooks the ladder up around the bottom rungs of the signpost’s iron ladder, straps the bag around his neck, and hoists himself up onto the catwalk. Monk sketches in his notebook as Jax goes to work with incredible speed. A few quick slashes of spray paint and now a black man sits in the bar with his white companion, his dark hand unspeakably caressing her waist. A sticker’s pasted expertly on the board, background browns and grays already perfectly matched, then a silver-painted scrawl in the bottom corner, tagged Jaxsy GK, and he’s done, already clambering down and unhooking the ladder. Monk doesn’t have time to finish his sketch as he laughs and they run back through the fence. They jump into the waiting VW and Sofia peels away into the darkened street, headlights out. Monk watches the billboard pass behind them: INVITATION FROM YOUR TAVERN KEEPER … COME AND WATCH THE RIOTS.

  “Sorry, man,” Jax sharing Sofia’s cigarette, “we have to backtrack a little, Sofi’s turn now, but we’ll get a little more south.” The VW rattles along light traffic west down 135th Street.

  “Maybe we can get some news.” Sofia twists the AM radio knob.

  “You’re listening to KABC and this is Joe Pyne. We’re back with Negro militant Ernie Smith.”

  “Have you heard this crazy white man?” Monk grins and Jax nods.

  “Mr. Smith,” Pyne’s voice is shrill, “are you going to tell me that your fellow Negroes burning down stores and looting merchandise is my fault?”

  “You damn right, it’s your fault, and every other white man in power that’s keeping the N
egro down!”

  “You are just like the Muslims and the other Negro militant nationalists. What about the good Negro leaders like Martin Luther King? Why don’t you tell your people to integrate peacefully?”

  “King and Dick Gregory and all the rest of them are nothin’ but Uncle Toms. Integration is a white word to keep the Negro down. It took the Civil War to end slavery, the white man don’t understand peace—”

  “You, sir, are just a Negro hoodlum,” Joe Pyne’s voice blares in the radio static. “Your organization and the Muslims and the white hipsters out there, you’re all Commie liberals who advocate the violent overthrow of the United States!”

  “You should go on his show, Jax!” Sofia shouts.

  “You whites are afraid of the black man unless he’s weak,” Smith’s voice rattles from the radio. “The black man does everything better, even the wrong things! He’s stronger, makes more babies, gets drunker, fights harder, lives faster, and screws better!”

  Everyone laughs, Sofia’s eyes wide with feigned shock and amusement in the rearview mirror.

  “How dare you!” Pyne shouts, then an announcer’s voice crackles over the radio: “KABC will return after station identification.”

  Jax snaps off the radio. “Everyone’s going crazy,” smiling, “maybe this is the last summer before everything gets all biblical and burns.”

  “All these stations with new talk shows, angry white men,” Monk says. “What the fuck do they have to be angry at? People driving in their cars, isolated, through all these streets and freeways, listening to these fools … no wonder everyone’s pissed off and insane, afraid of everyone else.”

  “They clog all our senses with their propaganda.” Sofia waves her hand while she talks. “Eyes, ears … they’d inject their lies or wire our brains if they could figure out how, but we’ll take it back, one street at a time.”

  The warm summer night buffets Monk in the backseat. A helicopter scuds over them, choppering east toward Compton. They pass a gas station, police with shotguns guarding pumps. “We’re almost there,” Jax says. “Won’t take long. Sofi’s more of a hit-and-run artist, guerrilla art.”

  “Jax is into iconography, using corporate ads’ own weapons against them.” Monk watches Sofia’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Ike said beware of the military-industrial complex.” Jax smiles. “But it’s the advertising-media complex that holds all the power. They project their own reality, then they can shape public thought to their own ends.”

  “Jax wants ’em to think, but I’m more into artistic rape and pillage. I think the greatest canvas would be if they burn this entire city to the ground.” Sofia exhales smoke.

  “You’re an anarchist, Sofia?” Monk yells as cop cars, sirens pealing, careen past.

  “Call me Sofi.” She brakes the VW to the curb. Half a block ahead, a big General Outdoor billboard shines above the street: a smiling white couple sitting on the grass with a picnic blanket and basket. Near them, a little girl squeals as she arcs into the air on the park’s swings, her little brother waving at Mom and Dad from the top of a metal slide. COME HOME TO GARDENA GOLD MEDALLION HOMES. In the lower corner of the sign, smaller print: Models do not reflect ethnic preferences.

  “We’re a team, like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera.” Jax slides behind the wheel.

  “Like Abbott and Costello.” Sofia grabs the canvas bag.

  Jax thumps the VW into gear, and they lurch down 135th.Monk turns around: Sofia’s walking in the shadows toward the receding billboard. “She never answered my question.”

  “Sure she did. She wants to burn down the city, but only for aesthetic reasons. Therefore she is an artist, not an anarchist.” They’re heading back, around the block. On the corner, three young men smash windows.

  “Done already?”

  “Sofi’s fast, hit-and-run,” pulling over as Sofia jumps in the passenger seat and they throttle down the street. Monk stares at the billboard and laughs: all she’s done is slap a paper over two words in the bottom corner of the sign: Models always reflect ethnic preferences.

  North now, up Vermont Avenue. Not the way Monk wants to go, but Jax said they’d eventually swing back south. Monk realizes he hasn’t thought about Karmann since he stumbled on Jax and Sofia, but his surprise and pangs of guilt have already faded; this rush of outlaw exhilaration seizes him, he can’t believe he’s found this Bonnie and Clyde graffiti duo, kindred masters of the city’s secret scripts and shadow signs … in this cramped, hot backseat, even with all the mad rush of the burning blocks rushing past, there’s no place he’d rather be but with them, here and now. Cop cars flash, cordoning off a retail store, smoke and flames churning from its windows and rooftop. The sidewalks overflow with crowds watching the police and the fires. Fire trucks honk past them. “Beautiful,” Sofia says, lighting a cigarette.

  Past 126th Street, Jax pulls over near a darkened alley. “Ten minutes, I’m going to do them both.” Jax climbs out, stubs his cigarette under his shoe. “Our last hit for tonight,” to Monk, “then we’ll get you south.” He grabs the canvas bag and pulls the bandanna over his grin.

  “Watch your ass.” Sofia revs the VW down the street.

  Jax lopes down the alley, then jumps a wall. He’s in a dark triangle of a city lot, behind a glowing, towering MOB billboard: Mobius Outdoor Billboards. The huge sign is a great V, two billboards connected by a single steel catwalk above the iron posts. Jax hooks the half-ladder to the bottom step of the sign’s suspended rungs and scrambles up. Looming before him, a colossal panorama in color beneath the cowling of fluorescent lights: it’s Pat Boone, posing in slacks like a casual giant, a tennis racket in the crook of his elbow. Behind him, a Falcon station wagon, roof rack loaded with fishing gear, skis, luggage. GOING PLACES THIS SUMMER? TAKE IT EASY, TAKE DICKIES CASUAL SLACKS.

  Back on Vermont, Jax scrambles into the VW, bandanna stylishly curled back into his shirt. Monk nods like a critic at an exhibition as they gaze up into the illumined vista of the billboard that now assaults the senses of tonight’s stragglers: the tennis racket’s vanished, Mr. Boone now cradles a shotgun … crouching on her knees, her cheek resting seductively on the thigh of those pressed slacks as she gazes up at him, blouse very unbuttoned, is an expertly painted black woman. “Check it out.” Jax holds the steering wheel as they grind gears down Vermont. Sofia and Monk turn in the summer warmth rushing above the convertible. The second MOB billboard glows down behind them into the street lamps of Vermont: DEL MONTE ROUND-UP! It’s Bonanza’s Lorne Greene and Michael Landon in a grocery store, commandeering a shopping cart heaped with cans of spaghetti sauce, ketchup, corn, tomatoes, applesauce, pears, pineapple, the two cowpokes pointing six-guns as they roll down the aisle: but now, in Jax’s still wet spray-can strokes, two black men stand before the shopping cart, hands in the air … behind the Bonanza boys another black man runs, a TV in his arms.

  “Still using that number-seven nozzle?” Sofia turns east on 120th Street. Down the avenue, knots of men chase two teenagers across the avenue. Jax nods his head. “Nice work, baby.” Ahead, police cars barricade Hoover Street: cops toting shotguns slowly wave a single lane of cars through the intersection, shining flashlights into windows.

  “Stay cool, baby,” Jax says to Sofia. “They’re lettin’ everyone through. Cops want us Negroes and cholas to go home.”

  “I got this.” Sofia idles behind a Corvair, slowly passing the roadblock. Down Hoover, smoke and fire trucks, an apartment spewing flames and ash into the night. “They’re gonna burn down this whole city.” Sofia’s eyes nod approvingly in the rearview mirror. “The city’s the ultimate canvas, the flame God’s brush.”

  “Yeah, the city’s the canvas,” Monk watching the flames, “and people are painting it, changing it, trying to take it back, maybe,” tapping his notebook. The VW turns right on Avalon Boulevard, finally southbound.

  “All this graffiti everywhere?” Jax lights a cigarette. “Yeah, it’s beautiful, man … fuckin�
� subversive and all that shit, like my little adventures in advertising … urban art, takin’ the city back one street at a time, one mind at a time, that’s where it’s at.”

  “You guys are dreamers,” Sofia laughs. “The only way is to burn it all down, then keep moving, keep burning, till nothing’s left.” Flashlight beams splay into the convertible, across their faces and dark clothes, the canvas bag hidden under the backseat.

  Jax turns back to Monk. “Don’t mind her. She wears the combat boots in the family.” The flashlights wave them past and Sofia accelerates down the street. “You know what I’m sayin’. We’re cultural jammers. Throwin’ monkey wrenches into their propaganda machines. Gotta keep jammin’ their frequencies until everyone sees through their lies. The boards we hit—you know what most of ’em are selling?”

  “Booze and cigarettes.”

  “Yup, then hair and makeup products.” Jax exhales smoke. “Booze to keep us natives sedated, cigarettes to kill us faster, then all that makeup shit—black girls want to look like white girls, white girls want big lips and wanna be black girls.”

  “Advertising is white money, white culture domination.” Passing headlights strobe Monk’s face. “But the taggers, the muralists, that’s color money, black and brown, color culture fighting back. There’s hope, man, ’cause on the reverse of all your billboards there’s anti-billboards—signs tagged up or covered with graffiti. Maybe the underground advertisers will one day catch up to the big boys.”

  “Hope it’s not too late.” Sofia accelerates, the VW whining past patrol cars and sirens on El Segundo Boulevard.

  “Hey, check out Cooper’s Donuts!” Monk gazing west out the window, toward Main Street: the giant glazed concrete donut seems to hover above the haze and smoke, like some stoner’s hallucination.