Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  Monk hesitates, trying to process his shock: he’s been passing through the streets and the nights unseen, like a ghost, and now this man recognizes him, as if some veil has been pulled away. “You a pig now?” Lamar asks, then laughs and waves his cigarette: he still looks drunk or stoned.

  “I have to go.”

  “Fuck that. You tell me wha’ you doin’ here, motherfucker. Get me outta here.” He rattles his handcuffed wrist against the bench. “Why you dressed like that?” Now he’s muttering incoherently, shaking his head. “You get me outta here,” raising his voice, “or I’ll tell ’em I seen you, tha’s worth somethin’, motherfucker!”

  “Okay, okay.” Monk steps inside and shuts the door. “They get you for looting?”

  “Fuck them honky stores! I want out! I’m gonna tell ’em you here!” Raising his voice. “You here to bust me out!”

  “Okay, yeah, don’t yell,” Monk’s voice pleads, but not just for Lamar, for himself.

  “Shoulda stayed at yo’ ol’ rent party, things was goin’ real good,” shaking his head back and forth. He mumbles, then grins. “Why you leave tha’ girl all alone, nigga? What kind of man is you? That Karmann’s fine … maybe I’ll go back and show her somethin’ real fine…”

  The room seems to glow with a pink aura as his temples throb and his mind somehow seizes, stops in suspended time. His fist clenches the dangling chin strap and he whips off the helmet, a blur of arcing white as he smashes it across Lamar’s face. Lamar’s body rocks violently into the corner, then the prisoner’s unshackled arm swings wildly up, hitting Monk in the mouth. Monk slams the helmet into Lamar’s face, blood spurting from the prisoner’s broken nose, then Monk hammers the helmet again and again over Lamar as the man’s free hand tries to impotently swat away the attack. Monk steps back as Lamar slumps off the bench, unconscious, his wrist broken, suspended from the handcuffs’ taut chain. Fuck fuck Christ what have I done. Monk gazes down at the white helmet: drops of blood are spattered on it. He wipes the blood off with his palms and snugs the helmet back over his long hair as he steps from the room and shuts the door.

  * * *

  He has no memory of leaving the station, or the parking lot, or running through the darkness. He’s back in the same alley off Compton Avenue, hunched against a wall, gasping for breath. Spitting blood from his mouth, his tongue experimentally probes a loose front tooth. Monk rips off the helmet and it clatters to the ground. He unzips the jacket, tosses it down, and pulls the notebook from the gray uniform pants. Setting the notebook atop the jacket, Monk strips off the pants and the motorcycle boots. Christ, what have I fucking done? Monk stares at the helmet, glistening on the pavement like some kind of evil ivory egg. He’d beaten the hell out of Lamar—a worthless bastard, but another brother. He’s no better than the cops … is the notebook that important? He put everyone in danger, himself, Karmann, anyone who stood in his way. He chose his goddamn book over her.

  His clothes are drenched in sweat. After a few minutes he can breathe. He sits against the wall, pulls his Keds from the jacket pockets and laces them on. Monk picks up the notebook. All of this madness for this. He riffles through the pages. One of the last few blank pages—the upper corner’s been neatly folded. Monk creases back the paper. In a shaky hand, someone’s scrawled a note in black ink:

  M: VINES ON A METER

  Monk trudges east in the shadows of the alley. He’s lost hours after backtracking northeast to the Gage Station, and now he’s back just a few blocks farther south from the clubs on Central; but he can feel the notebook pressed against his ribs. He can still taste the blood in his mouth and his broken tooth aches. Since the station he’d made peace with himself: Lamar is no brother and deserved whatever happened to him, and the notebook … it’s part of him, Karmann realizes that … probably knows him better than he knows himself.

  Past Compton, he’s reached a small, dark street: Makee Avenue. Monk heads south. The smashed street lamps above seem to cast their own darkness. If only he can remember Standard’s map: is it Sixty-seventh to Compton … or East Seventieth to Miramonte? He coughs, gagging in smoky air. Monk studies graffiti-sprayed walls and paint-bombed boarded-up windows, absently touching the notebook wedged in his waistband. Now someone’s added another graffito to his notebook: M: vines on a meter. What does it mean? Too many people knew about the notebook: Nation of Islam, the gangs, the cops, whoever Tyrone is … Who knows how many others? M: maybe for Monk, a message to me. Too many dots to connect … it’s vertigo, any patterns that seem to coalesce only fade like shadows: sometimes he’s sure the city is one giant graffito, a sprawling, urban uber-text that one day, with enough notebooks, he might unlock to reveal all its hidden codes. Sometimes the graffiti in his thoughts and notebook blur into the city’s spray-painted icons, until his mind and the streets seem like one vast network of rainbow messages, the convolutions of his brain and the corridors of the city fused into one myriad, fantastic structure, like a palace of graffiti.

  On the corner of Sixty-sixth, he sees chrome gleam in the shadows: a phone booth. Monk slides open the folding glass doors, grabs the black, warm plastic receiver. “Fuck.” Its dangling, severed, tiny red and white wires gape from the sliced black cloth cord. Monk sets the receiver back into its scalloped cradle. A random act of sabotage, or was it gangs, looters, even the cops? Did Tyrone know one of his myriad voices had been silenced?

  Armored ambulances from the police tactical unit scream by, shotgun-toting cops and green-gowned EMTs in the lights of their cabins—Medical Armed Response Vehicles—MARVs, Chief Parker’s latest brainstorm, lights flashing, speeding toward the looming, fiery outskirts of Watts and points south. A black car, headlights out, whines past, then staccato pistol shots ring out as it screams across the street. Monk runs into an alley, presses against cool bricks, waiting in stifling silence, only his breath wheezing in the shadows.

  He turns, Keds squishing something: a plate of cooked rice, brown sugar, black-eyed peas, two twigs crossed on the rim. “Shit,” wiping his sneaker on the wall.

  “Quit steppin’ in my congris!” A rain of sparks showers down on him. Monk spins, bumps into metal: the alley terminates in a wall of tangled steel rising like a shrapnel dam. Are those shopping carts? “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Up there, behind the gnarled bars of a wedged cart, he sees a robot’s iron square face, its dark, glowering visor reflecting coldly down on him. Monk’s mumbling Klaatu barada nikto when the visor flips up: an old black woman’s face in the grid shadows. Monk steps closer. Only her snowy frizzled hair and iron eyes are visible in her sunken, grayish skin.

  “Now I’m tired of this shit.” Monk glares up at the visage behind meshed steel rods and rusting cart handles. “Another hoodoo. If you’ve been expecting me, then what’s my name?”

  “Names aren’t important, boy.” She opens a jagged section of steel network, like a thatched doorway. Something falls near his sneakers, a white flower on a black stem. He picks it up, sniffs: the gris-gris he’d found on that curb. “That’s right, Sherlock Homie. Come on up.” Rungs are welded into the jumble of carts and Monk ascends into the wire opening.

  She stands before him, short, wizened, with pink culottes, tennis shoes, lavender bowling shirt replete with flying pins and zooming bowling balls and a name embroidered over a vest pocket: Earl. Now he can see one side of her face is scarred, as if her dark skin was somehow burned, shriveled with wrinkles. She sets the welding mask and torch atop a rusted tank cylinder. “Just doin’ a little home touch-up.” A warren of stacked cages, welded from carts; every wall, floor, ceiling, like some kind of mad X-rayed structure, reveals jumbles of furniture, bag-lady flotsam, hanging plants and pictures, webs and knots of welded rebar, plastic roofing, rusted water pipes welded through cart walls, dozens of candles glowing.

  “Please, sit down.” Monk’s followed her into another cubicle, ducking his head. They sit on an old green sofa in the candlelight. A round table, welded from cart handles and
scrap, is draped with a lace doily. “I’m not a hoodoo, young man. I am a voodooienne, a female practitioner of the craft. Lungwort tea?”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” The lattice walls are strung with pouches, jars, tin cups suspended on strings; welded sculptures of iron, wire, scrap metal fill recesses lit with white candles.

  “Mojo. Call me Jo.” She twists a nozzle flange on a dripping pipe, water sprays into a pot. Ancient hands prime and ignite the butane stove.

  “You set that charm, the flower, the cigarettes.” Dried talons of chickens or birds are looped from strings on the dripping pipes.

  “The Moly? Doesn’t prove nothin’. I put little things all over this town. Can’t be too safe.” She spoons bluish grounds into steaming cups.

  “But C.C., this whore—ah, girl over at the Congo Club, she said I was under protection.” Monk takes the cup from her.

  Jo frowns. “I know that place. A water sprite. You must be tryin’ to get back to the water. Sounds like more than coincidence now, heh, young man?”

  “Then how come you don’t know my name?” Sipping tea: licorice, minty.

  “I do know your name!” Her voice angry. “I keep repeating it. You are a young man. That’s all I see, all that I need to know.”

  “Why am I here?” The tea warms his stomach.

  “You tell me. You’re the one bangin’ on my door.”

  “Well, I’m tryin’ to get home, and some folks are tryin’ to stop me. But you’re gonna help me.”

  “Sounds good.” The old woman nods, opens the pipe spigot, soaks a sponge, gently dabs the pale gray wrinkles that line her brow and seem to melt and run down the scarred, bleached side of her face. “Have to keep it moist,” returning to the sofa. Light warms her iron eyes. “I sure enjoyed your little Chinatown adventure.”

  Monk stares at her, his eyes wide in disbelief, almost panic. “Voodoo?”

  “Not voodoo, just a sensitivity.” Mojo dabs her cheek with the sponge. “Think of me as a liberated Negro woman, a pioneer. Voodoo gives the power to women, not men. It’s what your white folks call a matriarchal culture. I was kidnapped, didn’t have time to be a Christian. Guess it’s just as well. The Bible says the serpent gave Eve the apple of carnal knowledge.” She sips tea. “But in the book of voodoo, the serpent gave Eve a better gift, gave her first sight, vision … every gal has some trace of it, call it woman’s intuition.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “When I was six years old we moved out here. By train, there were no cars back then, that’s how old I am. A voodoo king took me one night while my folks slept, and I was raised in secret in their church, in their society.”

  “Church?”

  “The voodoos have secret churches. See, from the outside, it’s a Christian church, with your pastors and Bibles and such, but inside, they’re reading secret verses, praying to older gods.”

  “Like a coven of witches.” Monk sets the empty cup on the doily.

  “Well, you got kings and queens instead of warlocks and witches. Babies and children with gifts or born with signs—what white folks sometimes call defects. I was born with a caul, a kind of extra veil of skin on my face … remnant of the womb … some black folks think it’s a sign … such strange children may grow up with the sight, may see things nobody else can. So I was kidnapped, they left a changeling in my place for Mama, so they told me.”

  “A changeling? But you were six years old.”

  “A double for me, a girl under the voodoo spell.” Jo nods. “Happens all the time. Mama was happy to be free of such a bewitched child. Lot of black folks disappear from Negro cities. Sometimes it’s the voodoo. Babies become voodoo and voodooiennes, each with their own specialty. Men disappear if they wrong the church, and women are taken to be brides or concubines, like that white bitch Aimee Semple McPherson,” chuckling. “’Course, virgins are prized and lots of mamas in the ghettos make sure their little girls lose their virginity damn fast to keep ’em safe. I was twelve when I ran away from that voodoo king and his church. There was an orphanage that took me in, and later charity doctors operated on me, removed my caul. Left me with scars, scars that got worse as I got older. But they couldn’t remove my … insight. I became a seer.”

  “If you’re a seer, when will I make it home … or will I?”

  The old woman sighs, rises, takes his teacup, rinses it under the dripping pipe. She removes a clay jug from a wire hook, pours something in the pot, starts the stove again. “I’m not a fortune-teller, honey. More like an old travel agent.” Pours white liquid in his cup. “Warm milk. Child, you look beat. You need some good motherin’.”

  Monk sips warm, sweet milk, smiles. “Thanks. It’s good.”

  “Sure is. Nothin’ like fresh breast milk.”

  Monk sprays milk across the green sofa. Jo shakes her head. “That’s good gris-gris you’re wastin’. Helps you see through the eyes of the innocent. You’re gonna need it for the journey.” Monk wipes his lips with a napkin, disturbing images in his head of dank storm drains, monstrous Afro shadows, and a cyclopean, bloodshot eyeball.

  Pings and taps echo from the tangled network of rusty pipes. The old woman leans against lattice walls, cocking her frizzy head near a dripping flange.

  “What—”

  “Shhhh!” A final clang and the tapping stops. “A message.” She sets the sponge on the shelf. “Go south, but avoid all them main streets. The fires, the madness out there, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.”

  “Who was that? How can you do that?”

  “That? That ain’t nothin’. Black folks been doin’ that forever. Never needed white tricknology, had jungle drums long before electricity.” Jo laughs, removes a bone-hued, long-stemmed clay pipe from under the table. “They took away our drums and logs, but we found talking trees in this new land, or left notes written in pebbles and broken twigs and stamped cotton stems. Now we in the ghetto, not payin’ any bills and they turn off the juice, but we got candles, we got long-distance and local calls bangin’ on pipes, signalin’ with teapot whistles, window blinds, alphabets of laundry strung out on clotheslines, finger trails in dusty windows, gris-gris, you name it.”

  “Graffiti.” Monk grimaces but downs the last mouthful of tepid milk from his cup.

  The old woman opens a leather pouch and pinches tobacco into the white pipe bowl. “Now you gettin’ it. Word is you’re gonna meet a white man, a very bad white man. Stay with him until he reveals the way home. Remember that your enemies may be any color, human or inanimate … Beware of sunglasses … You don’t have sunglasses, do you?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Good. Those that wear shades may be shades, spirits caught between this world and the next. Beware you don’t become a shade yourself. One more thing, might help.”

  Mojo takes his hand and Monk rises from the couch. She leads him past the rusty pipes to a candlelit alcove of welded scrap-metal walls, thick black carpets under their feet. They stand before a sculpture, a kind of rebar-welded dome of iron ribs, gleaming dark jagged pieces of glass and seashells and gems cemented among its iron lattices. “Go ahead,” she nods, “touch it, run your hands over it for a moment.”

  Monk traces his fingers over the rough, cool iron, the smooth glass baubles, the faceted gems. Under the candlelight, the glass and gems twinkle with dark, soft radiances: blue, green, amber, blue, green, amber—

  He’s walking along the railroad tracks just north of 107th Street. The sun sets into a layer of smog behind him. Up ahead, a man in a hat slowly ambles near the tracks. Closer, Monk can see dusty blue overalls as the man gazes down, scouring the gravel berms of the tracks as he walks: he’s lugging two bent iron rods on his strong shoulders.

  “Mr. Rodia!” Monk’s reached him as the old man looks up and squints in the sunset light.

  “Who’s that? Monk’s boy! How you doing?” Rodia smiles: his leathery, unshaven face is shadowed under his perennial dusty gray porkpie hat; sideburns, wisps of hair chalk white
.

  “What ya doing here, Mr. Rodia?”

  “Well, you see this rebar?” Rodia taps the iron bars balanced on his shoulder. “Sometimes I come out here, stick one end in the tracks and bend it just so it’s how I like it.”

  “For your towers?”

  “It’s our towers, your towers. Para nuestro pueblo.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Our town, our towers.”

  “How do you know how much to bend it?”

  Rodia grins down at Monk. “After a while, you can kind of feel when it’s right. What are you doing out here?”

  “This!” Monk digs in his front pocket and extracts a shiny round piece of metal, holding it up to the old man’s face.

  Rodia takes the metal and examines it, flipping it over in his gnarled hands. “A buffalo nickel all squished by the train, huh? Listen, you be careful, don’t get squished too.” Rodia squints and examines the coin. “Good work. You can still see that Indian’s face, but he looks like he’s melting. You know what? Tonight I’m going to finish the towers. Just these two rebars to go.”

  “Aren’t you going to build more towers?”

  The old man smiles down at Monk, his eyes shining under the shadow of his sweat-stained hat brim. “I have time … but no space. Tell you what. How would you like me to put your coin in the tall tower? Your nickel will be the very last piece to finish Nuestro Pueblo.”

  “Yeah! That’d be great! Wait till I tell Mom.”

  “Heads or tails? Which side do you want to see when you visit the towers?” Rodia balances the coin under his crooked thumb.

  “Heads!”

  Rodia grins. “You catch it.” He flips the coin into the air. Monk’s fist snatches it and slaps it down on the back of his hand. “Bad luck, kid.”

  “Whadaya mean? I called it, Mr. Rodia! I think the buffalo side should be heads. I like it better than the Indian side.”

  The old man laughs. “Good! You think for yourself too.” Monk’s inspecting a swaying rod of rebar, running his dirty hands along the ribbed, rough iron.