Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  The long trailer glows from fluorescent tubes above: a black sofa and lavender leather chair, table and chairs, a cubicle or hallway with built-in steel walls and doors blocks the truck’s rear axle. Oil paintings—dark Flemish masterpieces—hang from riveted walls. Another white gangster sits in an upholstered chair, cowboy hat over his eyes, shirtless, a silver pistol on the table surrounded by heaps of green dope baggies and piles of joints—fifty cents each on every corner of Slauson turf. Two young white women lounge on the sofa, smoking cigarettes; smoke tapers up to the milky glow and funnels through open hatch windows in the roof, patches of hazy night rolling past above. One woman, long dirty blond hair, champagne halter top and cherry hot pants, the other short black hair, leather miniskirt, cutoff T-shirt. “Drink?”

  Monk shakes his head. “How do you know my name?”

  “You’ve been sent. This is business of the secret kind. Terror the human form divine, and secrecy the human dress.”

  “Sent?” Monk asks.

  “Gris-gris, niggers tapping on pipes, whistling teapot signals.” Asmodeous sips whiskey. “Get hip.”

  “Mojo?”

  “No spooks, just business. All them bags of hoodoo hanging on her chicken-wire walls.” Asmodeous glances over to the gangster slouching behind the table heaped with dope bags. “Just one of my dealers. Maybe there’s a reason for all your night wandering. Mr. Monk, you seem to be doing quite a bit of dwelling in the underworld. Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.”

  “Why am I here? So you can show off your Blake?”

  Asmodeous’s eyes sparkle darkly from the depths of blue and purple shadows. “You’re no fool. My father gave me my name, and the worn book that lit the nights of his prison sojourns—the collected works of the dark master.” Gravity slightly pulls their bodies to the left as the truck gears into a right turn. “Sit down.” Monk sinks into leather. The girls snuggle into him, scents of perfume and cigarette smoke, their hands patting his thighs.

  Asmodeous nods, sits on his throne, a stuffed amethyst leather chair. “Tirzah.” The blond in cherry hot pants smiles at Monk as she rises. Tirzah mixes Asmodeous another drink, plucks a joint from the pile next to the cowboy’s pistol. She lights the reefer, extends it to Monk, but he shakes his head. Tirzah inhales, leans over Asmodeous, kisses him as he sucks in her exhalation cooled by her darting tongue. He exhales, sips whiskey. Tirzah passes the joint to the other woman, Lyca. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

  Brakes hiss, metal walls groan, everything tipping starboard. Monk: “Where we going?”

  “Nowhere,” Asmodeous exhaling smoke, rasping. “We’re here. The Slausons are what you might call a mobile operation. I roll through the city, day and night. A convoy of offices. This is one of my recreational rooms. Cars, buses, trucks, each a room of my palace on wheels. Got a foyer, bedrooms, safe houses, gun rooms, dope processing, you name it. Always rolling, no fixed addresses, no cops, no stakeouts and raids. God gave me the ghetto, perfect cover to build an unholy kingdom. And did the Countenance Divine … Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here … Among these dark Satanic Mills?”

  “Trouble, boss,” a speaker in the riveted wall reverberates, Jake brakes rumble, everyone balances forward as the great container slows.

  “Excuse me for a moment.” Asmodeous drains his whiskey. Lyca and Tirzah curl around Monk and pass the smoldering roach to each other. Opening the fore hatchway, Asmodeous disappears into the glowing light of the diesel’s cab.

  The engine pings and idles, Asmodeous gazes through the big windshield and into the night bathed in the beams of the Mack’s headlights. Telephone lines splay over the intersection before them, a pair of gray calfskin Florsheim Imperial shoes knotted, dangling from shoelaces. “Shadows,” Asmodeous hisses. “Call ahead, you know what to do.” The driver nods his head, grinds gears, and the truck lurches forward.

  Monk is wedged so tightly between the girls on the couch that he’s wondering if they are some kind of bodyguards too, when Asmodeous descends through the hatchway. “Las Sombras,” to Lamb.

  “A slight detour,” Asmodeous says to Monk and sips his whiskey.

  Air brakes hiss, bodies sway. “Fuckin’ Shadows.” Fly turns his cowboy hat toward Monk. “That’s why we’re fightin’.” Fly’s thumbs and forefingers twist into an S. “Stole our Slausons sign.”

  “That’s not why.” Asmodeous’s voice is soft. “Back in ’55, we were kids. We called him El Gordo Pedo even back then—a fat Mexican kid on a chopped chrome Schwinn, baseball cards clipped to spokes for rumble sound effects. Had this fucking attack Chihuahua in his basket. Wanted to start our own gangs as far back as I can remember. Gordo stole my gang sign, the black handkerchief hanging from the left back pocket—that was my flag.”

  “Boss,” Lamb scratching his shaved head, “is that legend true, that the bad blood between the Gladiators and Rollin’ 60s started when Highbeam stepped on Lil’ Conk’s black shoes?”

  “That’s just a rumor,” Monk says without thinking, “the real reason is the Gladiators changed a couple of street signs, and they were dealing dope for blocks inside Rollin’ 60s territory for a year until Highbeam caught on.”

  Asmodeous bows his head. “The word on the street must be true, your gangster knowledge is encyclopedic. The word is also that you keep a kind of … graffiti encyclopedia?”

  Monk is silent: Stupid, can’t you keep your big mouth—

  “I too keep a book, Monk. But first a little pleasure before business. Fly.” The cowboy hat nods, pale hands tattooed with teal crosses tap white powder from a glass vial onto a small mirror ringed by olive bags of dope. Lyca leans over Monk and kisses Tirzah, a long, sensuous kiss; Monk presses back into cushions away from their dizzy heat. “Tirzah.” She pulls away from Lyca, smiles, rises, mixes another whiskey tumbler for her master. “Do you believe in miracles, Monk?”

  “Well,” careful now, “I’m skeptical, but lately I’ve seen some crazy shit.”

  Asmodeous nods. “In an insane world, miracles seem … commonplace. I too keep a notebook, a book of miracles.” Monk’s skin tingles, the notebook chafes his lower back as he presses deeper into cushions. Asmodeous stands, whiskey in his fist as Fly hands him the mirror chevroned with white powder. “I keep a journal of sanctioned miracles. Phenomena beyond any natural laws. Not the superstitious miracles of medieval times, but a record of city miracles, corroborated, witnessed, true as the dark angel’s light. Tell him, my souldier, what you have witnessed with your own eyes.”

  “Cops opened fire on me,” Fly grasps his silver S Slauson belt buckle, “every bullet bounced off this, like Superman.”

  “They’re all recorded here.” Asmodeous holds up a green notebook. “A new bible for a profane world. Categorized, annotated, documented, quoad substantiam—miracles of the dead brought back to life, quoad subiectum—the curing of the sick, miracles of every degree and class. Pending miracles, Eucharistic miracles of holy apparitions and forms. Wonders of pareidolia—natural stains and patterns taking the forms of the divine—or the unholy. Miracles vulgus and rarus … of the flesh and spirit, of the animate, inanimate. The mural over on Ninety-fifth in Watts where real salt tears drip from the Negro faces of unknown city martyrs.” Asmodeous’s nose vacuums another powdery line from the hand mirror.

  Thumbing through the pages, he reads: “A sparrow flies into the clubhouse of the Willowbrook Eight Trays, breaks its neck against the window. An hour later, their O.G., Tiny Playboy, goes through his car windshield, dies … Imperials’ gang house. Eleven homies drink for nine hours from a single beer that never empties … Spoony Athens, from the South Side Scissors, straddles atop Southern Pacific freight train Engine Nine and surfs the rails, over a hundred miles through curves and tunnels and bridges and track switches, speeds up to seventy miles an hour, from Soldiers Home to San Pedro.”

  Monk hopes he looks disinterested but he’s thinking of the page i
n his notebook, the mysterious graffito he’d copied from Engine Nine last year: the image of a huge hat, a sideways looping figure eight for its brim, a face with a cigarette dangling from frowning lips, and the train rider’s mythic name scrawled below—Bozo Texino … the ghost rider who’s haunted the tracks and rail-riding bindle stiffs for more than eighty years.

  Asmodeous licks his fingers, then leafs through journal pages. “Miracles from vulgus to rarus. Cops chase Eight-Ball, from the Crenshaw Stones. He stops at a corner where a candle jar burns, a votive to Guadalupe. The two cops run past him as if he’s enveloped in some kind of invisible benediction.”

  Above the green journal, Asmodeous’s face is spectral under the vibrating fluorescence. “Mero Vato, head of the L.A. Santaneros. His house is engulfed in flames, he’s trapped by the iron bars on every window and door. The fire department finds him unconscious but alive on his front lawn. Mero Vato’s chest is striped with burns where he’d pressed himself against the red-hot bars. He said he felt himself passing through the bars before he blacked out … dead gangbangers whose bodies don’t corrupt until their killers are killed … little kids shot in drive-bys, laid out in tiny open caskets, miracles of rigor mortis, their baby fingers fixed and curled into gang signs that reveal their executioners.”

  Asmodeous sips whiskey. “You must be thirsty, Monk.”

  “Just a Coke, or water if you don’t mind.”

  “Fly, fetch our friend a liquid Coke.”

  Monk swallows hard. “Could have called yourselves Hell’s Angels, too bad those new bikers took it.”

  “Yeah,” Asmodeous chuckling. “They’re afraid of us.” Tapping his notebook. “Imagine the power if one could predict or perhaps replicate just one of these profane miracles. I have recorded one or two rarus miracles of graffiti too.” As he reads, he studies Monk’s face. “Rollin’ 60s crossed out Bastard Gs’—from the Jordan Downs Huns—graffiti. At the exact same moment, Bastard G drops dead from a heart attack … the Reyes Locos paint RIP 3 G ST 61865—Rest in Peace three Grape Street bangers on June 18, 1965. When that day comes, three Grape gangsters are dead from bullets by the Vagabondos. You are afraid, I must apologize. If you were thinking clearly, we could discuss the law of large numbers—coincidence to the uninformed—to dismiss most of these miracles. But some of these events defy any probability, one has to postulate fantastic explanations that become more extraordinary than the miracle itself.”

  Fly hands Monk a frosty bottle of Coca-Cola, then pads away.

  Asmodeous reclines in his chair. “Word on the street is that you also keep a journal, a kind of graffiti Baedeker. You know how rumors fly through this fucking city. Wild stories about graffiti charms and curses that protect or take life, spray-painted interdictions that no power on earth can trespass beyond, graffiti portals where taggers disappear through their magic thresholds.” He closes his painted eyes. “A scholar like yourself no doubt recalls the infamous graffito blasfemo. The ancient Roman graffito of Alexamenos worshipping the crucified Jesus, the Christ portrayed with the head of a donkey … this underground image is the earliest portrait of Jesus we have … blasphemous, but it was the city’s story to counter the official gospels … so too we need our graffiti, don’t you agree? To give voice to the damned. Naturally, I am very interested in looking over your notes. Perhaps both texts will reveal some … holy key.”

  Jake brakes hiss, gravity pulls against Monk. “Good to go, boss,” the intercom crackles.

  “After you, Mr. Monk, please don’t be alarmed.” Asmodeous sweeps his hand toward the cab hatchway. “To my office for a little business.” Monk walks on jellied legs to the hatch, trying to control his fear and marshal his thoughts: I went through hell to keep my book, get it back … and now these fuckers are gonna take it. The iron door opens; the driver nods, his black glasses and shaved head gleaming. Monk climbs down the steps of the idling big rig, wedged between the driver and another Slauson, no escape, only one step down onto the asphalt road, then up the metal steps of an opened bus door idling parallel with the truck. Monk sees a flash of the gray exterior of the long bus, Asmodeous’s hand gently guiding against his shoulder. Pneumatic glass doors fold closed as they ascend into white light.

  The bus rumbles, jars ahead. The driver’s compartment is shuttered behind steel doors. They walk on thick burgundy carpets deeper into the silvery interior: recessed lights curve above, casting shining pools they pass through. The walls are padded, only a faint murmur of gears and the diesel engine, the windows blocked by reflecting metallic shades. All the seats have been removed as they reach the glowing nimbus of the vehicle’s smoke-shrouded rear section: a great black onyx table, a ring of black leather chairs, wet bar against a padded wall. Slouching in the chairs is a white gangster, boyish face and blond crew cut, pale in a black button shirt and pants; another white boy, shaved head, tinny music from a transistor radio held clamped over his right ear; a beautiful woman, long black hair, silver knit top and gold hot pants; that old crazy Chinese gangster Yin in his round eyeglasses and rumpled lemon suit, oblivious to Monk as the aged Fiendish Oriental chain-smokes and leers at another girl in the next seat, younger, red hair, carnation halter top, cinnamon pants, Monk can see the broken tips of her angel’s wings tattoo above the pink hem of her top. “You are a rucky rady,” Yin’s palm sliding toward her breast as she swats away his hand. A giant black man smokes a fat cigar, his bodybuilder thighs squeezed into the dwarfed chair: a white tank-top shirt stretches impossibly over bulging muscles, even the baggy gray sweatpants are sculpted by hidden muscles. Roof lights reflect from his shaved head, gold rings gleam from black earlobes. Monk recognizes him, that iron-pumping jailbird from the aqueducts, from Highbeam’s Rollin’ 60s concrete lair, and, under that taut cotton shirt, inked into the hills and ridges of his muscled back, a tattoo of the city, a promise of escape.

  “Standard,” Asmodeous nods to the giant, motions Monk to take an empty seat.

  “Here I am,” Standard grins, “in the back of the bus as usual.” Asmodeous sets his notebook on the polished ebony as he sits at the head of the gleaming table. Standard glances around at Monk, the gangsters, the two women, no indication that he remembers Monk, then he shakes his bald head and laughs. “Y’all one set of crazy-lookin’ wiggers.”

  “San Quentin good?” Asmodeous asks.

  “Oh yeah.” Standard grins. “You just keep that cash and kush comin’, double green, my man.”

  Asmodeous opens a recessed panel in the padded wall, pulls out an attaché case, hands it to Standard. Asmodeous extracts a reefer from the drawer, sparks its twisted tip with an onyx lighter.

  The white punk with the transistor radio pushes Monk into a chair. Monk feels the bus sway left, gears grinding far away. He looks around the table, at these faces that seem evil, hard with a drugged depravity, like masks waiting for the spark of violence to animate them. Monk feels the bus accelerate: he’s running out of time. Find a way out now before it’s too late! He controls his panicked thoughts, trying to measure Asmodeous’s face: Why would he let me go?

  Brakes squeak, the smoky, silvery-lit cabin lurches, bodies lean forward as if hunched in Asmodeous’s spell. “At last, excuse me for a moment.” Asmodeous rises, his scarab eyes glitter. “Albion,” to the gangster in black, “dope and drink all around, a toast, our moment is at hand.”

  Asmodeous stands at the pneumatic doors, bus idling to a stop. Air tubes hiss and the mirrored panels shunt open.

  “Angels, honored guests,” Asmodeous announces toward his infernal conference, Standard, Monk, everyone peering up through wafts of smoke. “El Tirili.”

  Monk staggers to his feet, astonished: El Tirili … the impossible masterpiece on the hidden canvas of an abandoned ghetto house … a riddle of space and time … and a sign, a key to his notebook.

  The old Mexican radiates before them: ancient gold and silver sombrero, peaked like a straw wizard’s cap; black eyes squint under the tattered brim, the old man’s copper f
ace wrinkled and pocked, desiccated with years of desert and mountain ranges, smiling down at the revelers, two tobacco-stained teeth and a gleaming gold cap; a blue, crimson, and silver serape drapes from his stooped shoulders, cotton weaved in interlocking geometric rings and pyramids and checkered plains that seem to shimmer in three dimensions; a long-sleeve Sir Guy lime-and-cobalt plaid shirt, black baggy cholo pants tied with a belt of silver-dyed hemp rope … and Florsheim Imperial shoes.

  Monk studies him as if he’s an apparition: El Tirili, the Reefer Man. Every tagger, bomber, graffitist, banger in the city has heard the wild stories, the rumors, the ancient Mexican in shimmering, rainbow clothes, never glimpsed, only his legendary bombs, murals, placasos illumine the city’s disenfranchised fringes to amaze every angry or inspired fist that clutches a spray can. No one knows how old the great pintor is. Young paint guns swear he was the first to use a city for his infinite canvas, never having to lambiche or kiss ass to any gang or territorial boundaries. Crews haunt the city in night pilgrimages to see the sacred icons of his pieces and pintadas, whispering of the impossible age of each masterpiece, dumbstruck by each unique eye-gasm: bombs on the Pasadena Freeway from the ’40s, iridescent tags on City Hall from back in ’28, cloudy chiaroscuros on the Arcade Building documented since ’24; puffy abstracts on certain Venice canals dating back to ’05 … an outlaw impasto on the Pico House noted with horror in the local paper back in 1892 … Victorian houses in Angelino Heights deflowered by his rebel brush in the 1880s. A ghost, acolytes say he’s an immortal imp, a living link back to the days when the first graffitists created ghostly works on ceilings using only the smoke from guttering candles. They say he made his own brushes and rollers from animal and even human hair; hammered and hand-rolled sheets of tin and steel to forge the first spray cans, using a secret mixture of ethyl-chloride propellant, carving valves and nozzles from wood, ivory, bone … mixed paints and washes in secret caves and cellars, bewitched colors no palette had ever seen before; conjured pigments and glazes in crucibles that cloaked his works with a patina that neither time nor man could destroy.