Karen unlatches another heavy, heat-resistant door, and leads Monk into the next room. The flashlight beam sweeps over stacked rows of caskets. Urns of different sizes and colors and shapes line wooden shelves against the walls. “We call this one the ‘Little Angel,’” patting a stack of white coffins, each casket about three feet long. “Can’t keep ’em in stock with all these newfangled drive-by shootings.” She shakes her visored head. “Back in the forties and fifties, we’d get gangster stiffs in here, but they only shot their own. These days, damn kids spraying bullets from cars, not aiming, too lazy to even get out of the damn car, get some exercise, aim for God’s sake, take some pride. Just unprofessional.
“Well, here’s the office and the back door.” She opens a gray-painted door with white frosted glass. The flashlight beam illuminates metal shelving with stacks of neatly folded and taped small brown paper bags, hundreds of them, each affixed with a typed white label. “Those are the ashes, I should say the remains. We keep ’em here one year, then if they’re not claimed, they all get buried in one big grave over on some county land out near Alameda.” The flashlight glows over a desk with a newspaper, thermos, coffee cup, small bottle of whiskey, and a shot glass. Karen smiles as she watches Monk stare at the paper sack on the desk. “Don’t be alarmed, that’s just my lunch bag,” chuckling. “Would you like a shot of whiskey for the road, honey?”
“No thanks.”
“Sure? You may need some strong spirits with you out there tonight. Well, be careful. They’re burning down the town. No offense, but sometimes I wonder if it isn’t a Negro cultural thing, all this burning, I mean. I read in Life magazine, I do a lot of reading down here when I’m not talking to Willie and Michael and my other friends that pass through the office. Well anyway, I read that every hundred years, you know, they torch everything in Africa, burn all the fields, raze the homelands, villages, everything, trying to strip away history, maybe that’s what’s going on out in the streets, Negroes burning away a history that hasn’t been too kind to them, can’t say I entirely blame them, white men do the same, don’t they? With their bulldozers and money? Well, I warned you I talk too much, just a lonely old bat with my quiet friends. You read the paper?” Karen picks the newspaper from the desk, her flashlight shining on the front page. Monk shakes his head. “Today’s Herald Examiner. Says five international scientific teams just discovered the age of the universe. Fourteen billion years. Now they know when the big bang banged. I’m afraid if they know when the universe began, you see, then soon they’re going to figure out when the universe is going to end. All that fire and death outside in the streets, maybe that’s the beginning of the end. Here’s the back door. You sure you want to go out there?”
“It’s the way home. I have a kind of … human map … but some of the pieces are missing.”
“Human map, huh? Well, you must’ve come here for a reason. Only the dead pass through my door and you’re not dead.” She unlatches the iron lock, slides a steel bar, and opens the heavy steel door: outside is a rectangle of starlight, a parked black van stenciled LOS ANGELES COUNTY CORONER, a barbed-wire fenced alley that angles back toward Compton Avenue. “Be careful out there. Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Monk.”
“You too, Karen.” Monk shakes her still icy hand, Karen’s ebony eyes twinkling beneath the visor’s blue plastic, then she disappears behind the closing door, a last wisp of white smock fluttering like a trailing ghost, gone, a heavy bolt snapping closed.
26
Nobody dared fight the flames. Attempts to do so were prevented by menacing gangs.
—Tacitus, the Annals, the Burning of Rome
National Guard battalions and police detour cars north, south, east, and west, away from the riots; the city’s been garrisoned, sealed off … Parker and the Guard have designated the Los Angeles River and other concrete bifurcations as firebreaks once the holocaust begins … Contingency plans, on the governor’s orders, are set in place: a vast swath of fires that might rage for miles west to Crenshaw Boulevard, north to Manchester Avenue, and south to Imperial, until the inner city is ruins and ashes …
Police cruisers block Compton Avenue. Cops siphon away a trickle of cars with flashlights below a hand-painted sign propped against a patrol car: TURN LEFT OR GET SHOT. A phalanx of cops in riot gear marches down the avenue. Monk slinks along the shadow line of brick walls: the cityscape to the west glows with infernal heat, a great shroud of black smoke and ash glowers above rooftops, blotting out the night.
Monk’s rushed, swallowed by sweating bodies, a sea of angry shouting faces, raised pipes and bottles and bricks, wielding signposts torn from concrete like metal flags emblazoned STOP, YIELD, ONE WAY. He’s pushing against the mob. He can’t remember the name of the street, the last route he’d glimpsed on El Tirili’s secret arteries south toward the harbor and Karmann: now the wall of bodies sweeps him back into 103rd.
This is the edge of the world. This is Charcoal Alley.
Darkness, visibility is only a few yards ahead in swirling ashes and banks of smoke. Every rooftop and store facade burned black; flames whip from doors, windows, parapets. Ahead, the only light is probing flashlight beams, or searchlight cones sweeping from helicopters above. Screams and shouts as men bump past Monk: he’s pressed against baking brick walls: the asphalt beneath his soles is hot, melting. Down the street, black-and-white police helmets shimmer. Arcs of foaming tear-gas canisters sail through smoke, ping and roll between rioters. The crowd surges and he’s pushed across the street.
Monk pulls up his wet shirt, presses it against his choking mouth, a billy club whooshing past his face as he springs away and into the shadows between two windows churning black smoke. An iron fire escape has peeled away, unmoored from its burning wall, angled across the avenue like a glowing skeleton. The great mob seems to slow, mired in darkness. Beyond the rioters, guardsmen and riot police hold their positions in massed rows, shoulder to shoulder across the burning avenue.
Copters scud above, searchlight-knifing ruby-glowing tunnels into crowds below as the officers and guardsmen hold the line. No one’s moving beneath the circling helicopters’ light beams and the rooftop flames above. Charcoal Alley glows before Monk, a hellish corridor of flames and smoke: more than the heat and terror, he can feel it, like some kind of force that’s drawn him to this American ground zero.
Beyond the rooftops, burning palm trees glow like giant torches. Monk staggers along sidewalks that are invisible, carpeted by smoke. A news van lies on its side, flames roaring from its engine and wheel wells. He shakes his head: The cops aren’t after rioters, they’re using the Guard to burn down the city with tear-gas bombs … my city, my graffiti, the signs and secret language … silencing voices in flames.
A phalanx of riot police is pressed back as rioters boil forward. Get out of here! Back to Defiance Street, Monk’s thinking, when gunshots and screams erupt near him: a cop, visor torn, face bloody with bits of twinkling broken glass, lurches past. Monk bolts past the charred hulk of a car and looks down in horror: a naked woman, cheek pressed into hot asphalt, pink taffeta dress burned away, only a singed hem fused to her belly, palm twisted around in terrible contortion, pale, ash-flecked thighs spread as if in some vain supplication … no, Christ, it’s just a mannequin. Monk gazes across the street: a department store, gutted; burning mannequins watch the flames from shattered display windows. A white mannequin spills from the broken window, arms sprawled on the sidewalk as if to escape; its upturned male face stares at Monk, auburn wig burning, lips melting down into a toxic frown, his scorched eyes riveted on his companion smoldering at Monk’s feet, perhaps a flash of anger or only flame’s light in his dripping cobalt eyes: I told you not to go out there.
Monk pushes past three men kicking an officer, baton clattering over the curb. In the distance, rioters hold sputtering flares like crimson torches. Waves of heat refract the night, wavering everything into ghost lines. Monk’s neck stings in agony and he looks up: a burning telephone pole
, its creosote dripping in fiery black gobs from its crossbeams, melted wires spooled over the pavement, arcing in electric-blue bursts around the mob.
National Guard 1st Reconnaissance Squadron and riot police march south through the smoke of Graham Avenue, which ends at Charcoal Alley. Above in darkness, helicopters buoy, invisible, mining their searchlights through smoke and tear gas below. A gas bomb bursts. Monk is knocked to the pavement, men scattering over him. Shoes grind down on his thigh and smash his hand.
Police and guardsmen stand in phalanxes five men deep, an armored blockade across Graham Avenue, cutting off any escape south. Rifle barrels, face masks, black-and-white helmets glimmer with reflected flames. Around Monk, crowds lob bricks down the street, toward the gathering forces behind them. Across the avenue, the rear of a two-story brick-front collapses in a rushing flume of cloud and ash.
From the south, Beach Street ends at Charcoal Alley. Convoys from the 18th Armored Cavalry and the 40th Armored Division line both sides of the avenue. Guard jeep headlights illuminate rioters pushing through Beach Street, skirmishing in a relentless fury that unbalances cops and Guard.
Somewhere in the darkness, echoing down from flaming storefronts, invisible loudspeakers blare up and down the cindered street: Burn, baby, burn …
A volley of gunfire, then screams. The mob crests forward, fists and weapons raised, into officers and guardsmen huddled in flanks. Police grapple and pound nightsticks into crowds as Monk tries to skirt past. He sees a flash of white helmet and a blurring nightstick as he’s clubbed across the face and crumples on the sidewalk. Monk’s world is the baton as it rises over his face, poised to whip down and crush his brain—no more fantasies now: no more enchantresses, poet-gangsters, muses, fortune-cookie spies, hoodoo seers, monstrous chimeras … Hands grab the baton as rioters pull the cop to the ground, guard mask and uniform disappearing under kicking boots and smoke. A wall of men shout and surge forward, bricks, bottles hailing into police shields, pushing cops back. Monk’s up, agonizing pain in his mouth as he spits blood, Fuck, I’m gonna die here—
Where the fuck is Beach Street? Monk limps down the sidewalk overflowing with darting men. A street sign droops, melted and warped into the pavement like an iron serpent. The Guard and police push rioters east into the burning vice of 103rd. Men fan past him. “Three for one! Three for one!” they chant, fists raised.
Monk’s reached Beach Street North as it ends in the maelstrom of Charcoal Alley. The 106th Infantry and police troop down Beach Street, pushing into 103rd Street. Cops and the 18th Armored Cavalry march east through Charcoal Alley, pushing Monk and the rioters back. Choppers rake searchlights behind the gathering forces. In the distance, the clanking iron treads of tanks gnaw through heated asphalt as their terrible turrets roll closer.
Sir Soul’s deep DJ voice, dark as tonight’s moonless holocaust, still echoes between the sirens and shouts: Burn, baby, burn.
“Fuckin’ nigger!” A cop smashes his shield into Monk’s face, jabs his nightstick into his ribs as Monk collapses. The cop turns, flailing his baton into the crowd. Panicked legs and boots kick and trample past Monk.
“Get the fuck off me!” Monk’s screaming as he blindly kicks and punches the rushing bodies above him. “I don’t want to die!” He claws a black face, elbows someone’s chest in panic, finally pulling himself up the baked concrete steps of a burned storefront. He staggers to his feet: Levi’s ripped in shreds, knees covered in ash-caked blood. There is no light east for him, only the screaming, dark faces of the rioters who flee into their terrible, gathering fates. Down North Beach Street, then east and west like an armored, seething crucifix, battalions of police and National Guard march beneath the pyres of Charcoal Alley.
Monk squints up into the burning vault of night: only orange cinders and white ash escape, floating into starless copper skies: then the towering wall and roof frame of the gutted Beach Street Liquor Store, flames whipping from buckling trusses and joists, groans as bricks topple in flamy arcs; a blazing wave shudders and collapses down toward Monk. Should’ve known the city would get me herself—Monk covers his face with his bleeding arms as the rubble inferno buries him beneath its flaming tomb, only a great black cloud of smoke sparkling with incandescent embers roils into the glowering pall over Charcoal Alley.
27
The morning sunshine warms his gaunt face: it feels like God’s hand caressing his cheeks, as if some kind of benediction finally flows over him and the destroyed city, after so many nights of fire, blood, hopelessness, incarceration. The rioters have vanished.
He walks along 119th Street, the sun’s rays slanting in pillars between the shabby tenements and apartment houses. All the fire trucks, police cruisers, National Guard jeeps and trucks are only a few blocks away. To the east, a pillar of smoke rises into the morning sky, a churning obelisk to mark the past six days of fire. He shakes his head: And on the seventh day He rested.
The facade of the stucco apartment building is riddled with bullet holes, chips of plaster crunching under his pointy brown Florsheims. The two windows above the double doors are shattered, the shards of glass in the panes glinting in the sunlight. Four huge black men guard the doors above the steps, rifles ready in their hands: their black suits and bow ties starkly contrast with their purple fezzes with crescents and stars.
The Fruit of Islam glare down at him as he drags his weary feet up the stairs still littered with blasted chunks of stucco and concrete. Now two of the giants grin. “Welcome, brother.” Shifting the rifles in their huge arms, they open the bullet-pocked doors and he steps inside.
He stands in a great lobby. Black men in black suits and bow ties work at long tables cluttered with telephones, piles of paper, pamphlets. There are blue-lit wall sconces, purple doors, bronze tapestries, but the lobby has been strafed with gunfire: walls, tapestries, doors are splintered and gouged with bullet holes; dust, bits of plaster and wood, copies of Muhammad Speaks stamped with boot prints are scattered across the scarred wooden floorboards.
“Welcome to the temple of Islam, my son.” Two men approach him. A hunched old man in a black suit, but, unlike everyone else, a bright blue bow tie, gazes up at him; his milky chocolate eyes look like they’re a thousand years old. A tall, rail-thin man stands at his side, his hand propping the old man’s elbow for balance.
“Man, they shot the hell out of this place.”
“The police, the white man is always at war with the temple of Islam,” the old man speaks softly, “but they cannot destroy the temple, any more than they can stop the Negro’s destiny toward Islam and unshackled freedom.”
“Yeah, well, I know all about the goddamn cops and the white man, excuse my language, sir.”
“Allah has brought you to us today. Why do you think you are here now, my son?”
“I wanna,” he licks his lips nervously, looking around the shattered temple, the powerful, proud black men with rifles, “I wanna join, be like you, a Muslim or what you call it—”
“A fruit of Islam.” The old man beams, extends his shriveled hand. “I am Elijah Muhammad.” They shake hands. “Allah be praised, He has guided another brother from the darkness to the light of the Prophet. What is your name, my son?”
He licks his lips as if unsure of his name; there’s a nervous anxiety in his thin body, as if he’s always controlling an instinct toward flight. “Marquette Bonds.”
The tall man leans over, whispers something in Muhammad’s ear. The old man’s wizened eyes flare open as he nods. The two men stare at him for a moment; now they can see something more than nerves and restlessness in the young man’s thin, worn face: it is a sad intensity that radiates from him, the haunted gravity of those who have been swept into forces beyond their control. “You are the one … the young man whose fate sparked this holy uprising against our white oppressors. Allah has sent you, my son! Allah has marked you like the prophets of old, to bear the torch of truth!” Muhammad nods, squeezes Bonds’s bony shoulders. “We welcome you
to the fold, to the holy love of Islam, to the sanctuary of our temple. Mr. Shabazz here will direct you to Miss Nefertiti, and your new life shall begin. Praise Allah!”
“Thank you, Mr. Muhammad.” Shabazz leads Marquette Bonds past a guard and up a shadowy staircase. A few steps down a narrow hallway washed with sunlight through a blown-out window, then Shabazz opens a white, bullet-riddled door.
Inside the room is a printing press in the corner, bookshelves, piles and stacks of newspapers and Muhammad Speaks pamphlets. A statuesque, beautiful black woman glides in her black Muslim abaya gown toward Bonds as the door closes behind him.
“I am Laylah Nefertiti.” Her green eyes, framed by the long, tight braids of her black hair, seem to shine like gems.
“Marquette Bonds.” He licks his lips, gazing around the room. Beyond the broken windows, he can see a wedge of the gray tenement across the street, and he realizes these are the windows above the main entrance of the temple that he’d gazed up at, minutes ago out in the street.
“Welcome to the temple of Islam, Mr. Bonds.” She holds a book in her hands. “This is the Quran.”
“The what?”
“The Quran, the Holy Bible. This is yours, to keep.” Nefertiti presses the book into his hands. “You must read the first verse, called a sura. It will reveal how Allah has guided you to His holy path. Please sit down,” as she indicates a chair against the other bullet-gouged wall. “You will read the first sura to me out loud, then we shall talk, and I will show you how to pray.”
Graffiti Palace Page 30
