Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  22

  Monk turns and heads south down Central again. He passes Club Alabam, its front doors padlocked now. Those girls and their damn Corvair—without hitching some kind of ride, it’ll take hours to make up his lost time, but even Sin Street, this late at night, is emptying out, only one or two cars rumbling past, ignoring his waving thumb. Ivie’s Chicken Shack is dark, closed. Another block and he’s trudging past the lemon neon and bamboo walls of the Congo Club again, feeling hopeless, like a pawn in a secret maze.

  “Hey! Monk’s kid!” Monk turns around: the bartender stands in the doorway of the Congo Club. “Phone call.” The bartender disappears past the two towering FOI bouncers. Frowning, Monk follows, nodding up to the guards as he pushes through the padded doors.

  Only a few stragglers finish their drinks in the shadows under the strings of Christmas lights. Waiters are setting chairs atop tables as Monk heads toward the bar. The bartender slides a black phone across the bar and hands Monk the heavy receiver. Monk licks his lips. “Hello,” his voice hoarse, exhausted.

  “Gage station.” An electric current tingles through Monk as that old gravel voice rasps in his ear.

  “Tyrone, who are you?” Monk pleads. “Who is this?”

  “Downstairs … the book…”

  Monk stares at the receiver as a dial tone blares, then a metallic busy signal bleats like an insect drone. He sets the receiver into the black cradle and looks up: the bartender has her back to him, polishing glasses. Monk quickly picks up the telephone and stabs numbers on the rotary dial. Come on, baby, pick up. Another busy signal rings in his ear. Usin’ up my booze and my phone bill. He smashes the receiver into the cradle. The bartender turns and glares at him. “Thanks.” Monk pushes the phone across the bar and stalks toward the padded doors.

  He heads east on Fifty-seventh, away from Sin Street. The street is dark, no traffic, only distant sirens. Monk’s walking fast, his feet numb but painless in his unraveling Keds sneakers. Keep going south. Phantom telephone calls … Tyrone the blind madman with his satellites and ringing phone booths … maybe some kind of trap … the cops and the FBI spying from every phone in town. Headlights twinkle as a car speeds past and Monk presses reflexively against a brick wall until the taillights disappear around the corner. Trench would love me showing up, turning myself in … fuck him … get back to Karmann, then when it’s safe, after the riot … come back with witnesses … get my notebook … private property they stole.

  Monk turns south on Naomi, then freezes: Naomi, the street on Standard’s tattoo. Slowly, a street sign looms closer. His Keds count off grids in space and time, each sign bringing him closer to Karmann, to home. Fucking cops think they can roust you anytime they want, steal your shit. He starts at the sound of a bottle smashing against a wall as two teenagers run down an alley.

  Naomi dead-ends at Fifty-eighth. “Fuck!” He can’t remember Standard’s secret route. Monk walks a block east to Hooper and heads south again. Hooper is quiet, but a block ahead is Gage, a major street: traffic and cops, maybe National Guard soldiers. Monk moves quickly through the darkness; any pedestrians caught past the curfew will be questioned, arrested: Monk doesn’t need to dwell on the interrogation procedures the police would subject him to once they linked him to Trench’s assault and felony evasion. Those bastards have my notebook, all my work … like they’ve pried open my head and their dirty fucking pig fingers are thumbing through my dreams.

  Monk sprints across the red signals of Gage: there is a glimpse of flashing police cars, a blockade down the street, then he’s shrouded again into Hooper’s shadows.

  He turns east on Sixty-fourth Street: Gage is behind him and he slows down. This street is quiet, dark. The silence is broken by a siren in the distance, fading down Gage. Monk passes a house and a dog howls. He moves faster. Three black men stand around a parked car, drinking beer and nodding to him as he passes. Where the fuck am I going? Parmelee’s up ahead … that’s it, the street from Standard’s tattoo … goes south to what, Sixty-ninth or Seventieth? Downstairs, the old man said … my notebook’s downstairs in some room.

  The dark tunnel of an alley swallows Monk. Behind a brick wall, a stereo blares. The alley angles into Parmelee Street. A police car rushes past as Monk freezes in the shadows, then it’s gone. His heart pounds against his rib cage.

  Monk stops, licks his lips. Don’t do this to Karmann. She needs you now. “Fuck it.” Forgive me, baby. He turns and heads north up Parmelee. How can I find it? Are you fucking insane? How can I get it back from a fucking police station in the middle of a fucking riot?

  In the distance he can see the blinking red traffic lights of Gage Avenue. Tyrone called it “the book.” How does he know all this shit? Who is he? Monk thinks of the old black man with the strange, duct-taped sunglasses he saw at the Oasis Shoe Stand, waving his cane, ranting to no one, to the darkening night. It really is the book, maybe the key to all this fire and madness … much more than gang turfs and vandalized walls.

  Ahead, a car crawls past the blinking red lights of the intersection. Monk slips into another alley just before the strobing ruby glow of Gage Avenue. The alley parallels Gage, east behind a block of storefronts and shops. He’s going to walk into the police station, take his notebook, and walk out. Monk shakes his head; he has no plan, no chance. Think. A few more blocks to go. He silently, quickly passes trash dumpsters, padlocked iron doors, fenced storage areas piled with auto parts or stacked oil drums. One Stop Auto Repair, yellow metal sign glowing past under a lightbulb. An electric transformer box hums as he hurries on. In the distance headlights splash over the mouth of the alley: Monk freezes behind a telephone pole and the car is gone. He walks on and stops again. A dumpster, heaped with overflowing trash and cardboard boxes, under a cone of light from a utility pole. Beyond, another sign in the shadows of the stucco walls above another metal door: Tipsy Tom’s Liquors. Monk stands, transfixed in front of the dumpster, staring at the flattened cardboard boxes heaped on the trash and stacked and piled on the asphalt. He picks up a square of cardboard and examines it under the dim light: Old Crow Sour Mash Whiskey. Monk folds in all the flaps, sticks it under his arm, and walks faster toward the end of the alley.

  Monk turns left from the alley and onto Compton Avenue: he can see the parking lot of the Gage Division police station ahead. He swallows, his mouth dry as dust, walking faster now, his heart thumping. Trench … don’t think about it.

  He crosses over into the parking lot. The station’s sign glows under lamps embedded in its gray stone walls. Two guardsmen flank the glass doors, rifles angled, ready in their hands. Stay cool, Monk keeps repeating to himself, stay cool … every brother in town trying to get away from the police and I’m trying to break into the police. Monk threads between rows of parked cruisers: as he passes the last patrol car, he quickly sets the folded cardboard against its rear wheel, beyond the sight of the guardsmen.

  “I’m here to file a report—it’s an emergency.” Monk’s voice is cracked, strained.

  “Put your arms up for a weapons check.” A soldier slings his rifle as Monk raises his arms. The guardsman pats him down quickly. “Go ahead.”

  Monk walks down the hallway. Two cops gaze into his face as they walk toward the rear doors. Monk is careful to look them in the eyes as they pass; fighting the urge to turn around, he measures each step along the white hallway floor.

  The hallway opens into a large main room illumined by ivory frosted lamps suspended from the ceiling like glowing pearls. Cops, motorcycle officers, men in rumpled white shirts and black ties move around the room or sit at desks. The polished floors are painted with red and blue lines, marking various pathways to the departments within the large station, Roddenberry’s idea of mapping, controlling space within the precinct …

  Monk makes a conscious effort to breathe slowly. Rows of wood file cabinets line a wall; two women clack feverishly above typewriters on their desks; opposite is a wall of offices with opaque glass and wood doors; m
etal portable fans whirl and hum atop file cabinets, swirling the strata of cigarette smoke that hangs in the stifling air.

  “Can I help you?” A big sergeant with red hair squints down suspiciously from a huge standing desk near one of the pillars that section off the floor. Behind him, suspended from the center of the wall, is a great framed black-and-white photograph of Chief Parker, his black-wire glasses gazing down at his force below, his men who toe the thin blue line.

  Monk steps up to the desk as another cop with black coffee walks across the room, glaring at Monk’s red sneakers.

  “I’m here to file a report.”

  “A report? There’s a riot goin’ on, in case you haven’t noticed. Come back next week.” His pale, jowly face scowls down. “What’re you doin’ out past curfew, anyways?”

  “Trench,” Monk stammers, “Trench … Officer Trench told me to file a report.”

  “Trench? He ain’t here, out on sick leave.”

  Relief floods through Monk. Sick leave. Monk represses a grin, thinking about Jax’s double-taped spray cans. “Trench wants it right away … about the Slauson Avenue gangs.”

  The desk sergeant frowns. “Okay.” He slips a paper from behind the desk and snaps it into a clipboard with a chained pen. Monk takes the clipboard and sits in a row of heavy wooden chairs along the wall beyond the big desk. He begins to fill in the form. The sounds of typewriters and police scanners and voices meld into a soft babble all around him.

  After a few minutes Monk returns to the desk sergeant. “Can I use the bathroom?”

  The sergeant sighs and jabs his thumb behind him. “Downstairs.”

  As Monk sets the clipboard upside down on the chair, he pulls the pen from its chain and slips it into his pocket. He walks down another hallway, toward wide stone stairs that descend to the next floor. A white woman, clutching a sheaf of papers, walks past him, averting her eyes from Monk.

  He passes a sign: 2ND FLOOR BOOKING ANNEX. His sneakers pad down the steps. Downstairs, Tyrone said.

  Another large room sectioned off with pillars, desks, offices and interrogation rooms, and a hallway in the distance. A cop walks past, sizing up Monk skeptically. Monk heads toward the hallway. Two officers, caps in their hands, approach him. A tall white cop stands blocking him. “You lost, son?”

  “I’m looking for the bathroom, sir.”

  “What ya doin’ here?” The other cop, chewing gum, grins. “Run outta gasoline?”

  “I’m filling out a report … Officer Trench asked me to.”

  “Trench?” The tall cops nods. “He’s out. His partner, Vicodanz’s here, want to see him?”

  “I really have to go … go to the bathroom.”

  “Down the hall to the right.” The two cops continue toward the stairs.

  At the hallway, Monk turns right. He passes a door with a metal sign plate: LOCKERS. Opening the door, he slips inside.

  Rows of tall steel lockers on each wall, the floor divided by wooden benches. Behind the lockers, two men are talking, inaudible, muted in the sounds of water spraying from showers somewhere beyond. Monk quickly works down the rows, jabbing, testing each locked handle. One opens and he grabs the hanging clothes inside; another door opens but the receptacle is empty; more locked doors, then a locker opens and he grabs two shirts and a pair of boots; finally another locker opens and he seizes a motorcycle helmet and jacket.

  Out the door, clothes and helmet bunched in his arms, he runs down to the end of the hallway and pushes through bathroom doors. Monk rushes into a cubicle, kicks the toilet lid down, and piles the helmet and clothes atop the toilet. Latching the door closed, he hangs the shirts on the hook.

  Monk’s going through the clothes, trying on a shirt, when he hears the bathroom door open as three loud male voices boom and laugh and speak outside the cubicle. Footsteps. “They ain’t burnin’ down Van Nuys.” Laughter. Monk looks down at the polished black boots he’s stolen, spaced on the tiles and pointing out like, he hopes, what one might see under the occupied door of a bathroom cubicle. “White people don’t burn down their neighborhoods.” Tinkling sounds of urination, then tap water gurgling and more voices. “Burn down the store, then you don’t have to work there. Niggers.” Laughter as paper towels rip from dispensers, and finally the door closing and silence.

  He steps from the cubicle and gazes into the mirrors over the dripping sinks: a black motorcycle officer stares back at him. The leather jacket is zipped up, snug against his old shirt, his Keds stuffed into its pockets. The gray uniform pants are too big, but passable, tucked into his big rider’s boots and worn over his jeans. Now Monk snugs on the white and black-trim motorcycle helmet: too small, a vice of pain, but it’s on and hides his wild hair.

  Down the hallway and past the interrogation rooms and offices. Monk’s boots click up the stairway. His leather jacket creaks as his storm trooper boots echo past the desk sergeant, who’s yelling into a telephone. As he paces down the hall toward the exit doors, he feels like some kind of astronaut about to exit his hatchway and go out into the waiting darkness and void.

  Monk nods to the guardsmen, then crosses the parking lot. He turns and walks along a row of cruisers, picking up the flattened cardboard leaned against a rear tire. Monk walks on, resisting the temptation to look back at the guardsmen. Pausing at the second to last patrol car, he opens the rear door and sets the cardboard inside, folding the flaps until the box is assembled. Now, if the Guard or anyone else is watching, they see a Negro motorcycle officer removing a box from the backseat of a cruiser.

  The guardsmen watch as the Negro motorcycle officer approaches, lugging a case of Old Crow Sour Mash Whiskey. “You boys want a bottle?” Monk shifts the empty box onto one arm, pretending to struggle and balance its weight as he tentatively opens a flap, then stops. “Sorry. I know, you’re on duty. Maybe later.” A soldier opens the glass door and Monk walks into the station.

  Monk marches past cops, his head tilted down, eyes shadowed under the helmet’s visor, past offices and clacking typewriters. The desk sergeant ignores the motorcycle officer creaking by. Monk descends the steps.

  He walks across the Booking Annex, toward the hallway beyond the last section, passing the rows of offices and interrogation rooms. Under his helmet, sounds are muted, muffled, as if he’s a sleeper lost in some whitewashed, authoritarian nightmare.

  At the hallway, Monk turns left. A white cop walks past, ignoring him. Ahead, double doors are stenciled BOOKING and HOLDING CELLS. He’s in another cavernous room of filing cabinets, desks, cops, plainclothesmen. Monk keeps walking, surreptitiously looking for signs: a semiotician, who can’t ask for signs but must seek them, has to appear found when he’s lost.

  Passing another pillar, he marches along a row of holding cells and interrogation rooms, some doors open or windows with blinds pulled up. From the corner of his eye, he can see some of these rooms are empty; one room has two detectives talking at a desk; in another room, a black man is handcuffed to his chair as two white cops sit next to him. There’s an empty room, then Monk passes a door ajar where, in the wedge of light inside, he can see a black man sitting alone on a wood bench near the wall, his back to Monk, one wrist handcuffed to the rail of the bench as the prisoner’s other hand holds a smoldering cigarette.

  Finally a sign, real and concrete as its metal screwed into the door, yet transcending reality with its secret meaning that only Monk can read: PROPERTY ROOM. Yeah, my fucking property.

  Monk’s face is sweating as he lugs the empty box up to a lieutenant behind a desk adjacent to the door. “More hooch for Parker and the boys.” Monk grins, setting the box slowly, heavily on top of the desk’s corner. Under the cop’s badge, his name tag says SULINSKI.

  The lieutenant glances at the box. “Old Crow? I wouldn’t touch that swill.” He shakes his head. Monk feels clammy sweat dripping down his face. “Parker’s Micks, they’d drink fuckin’ piss if it’d get ’em drunk.” He opens the center drawer and slaps a ring with a single key on
the desktop.

  “Yeah,” Monk scoops up the key, “even the brothers won’t touch this shit.” He lifts the box carefully back into his arms, unlocks the door, and steps inside the room.

  His elbow nudges on the light switch. Inside are metal shelves stacked with evidence, some tagged, most not: a baseball bat, labeled boxes, a bundle of bloody clothes tied with string, boxes of files, an old suitcase, a TV, boxes of booze and products, tagged wristwatches and rings, pistols and rifles and knives. Monk sets the empty box on a shelf. He rummages around the shelves. Where the fuck is it? There. On a lower shelf, near the dusty window, next to a box of files. He picks up the blue notebook, squeezes it, gazes at its thick sheaf of papers; loose, torn, waterlogged, stinking of smoke, but all of it, all of his dreams, all of the secret voices of the people and the narrative of the city itself: everything that those in power would burn away from memory …

  Unzipping the jacket, Monk clips the stolen pen into the spirals and wedges the notebook into the loose waistband of the uniform pants and zips the jacket up. He turns off the lights and locks the door behind him.

  Monk sets the keys on the lieutenant’s desk. Sulinski doesn’t look up from his newspaper.

  He wipes his sweating brow as he heads toward the rows of holding cells and rooms. If only he could remove the suffocating helmet and leather jacket. He hears a male voice mumbling, talking to himself. “Hey! I knows you!”

  Monk’s frozen in front of the open door of the interrogation room: inside, a black man, black sunglasses and greasy hair, one wrist handcuffed to the bench, smokes a cigarette, but now he faces the doorway and grins, nodding at Monk. Fuck. It’s Lamar. Felonius’s friend, a thief and addict. “I knows you, motherfucker,” his voice slurring, “Monk.” He shakes his head, mutters incomprehensibly. “Youz a cop now?”