Marquette nods, squinting down at the strange book in his hands, and walks toward the chair near the printing press.
Laylah Nefertiti turns, glides to the shattered window, and gazes out. Below, 119th Street lies in shadows and slanted sunlight. To the east, two columns of black smoke taper into the August skies. Down on the corner, the signals are still not working. A cop car, lights flashing red, barrels through the intersection and disappears. She listens as Marquette Bonds reads the Quran, slowly mumbling, sounding out some of the strange words. Beyond the window, a diesel engine, perhaps a bus, rumbles faintly as it accelerates somewhere down 119th. Watching the tower of smoke rising into the eastern morning, she suddenly remembers that other young black man, Monk. Was he still out there in the rubble and police barricades, or—Laylah closes her eyes, silently prays not to Allah but to God—had he finally made it back home?
28
The black void of night burns into a red wall of flames: now a crimson membrane of light flutters, blinking to daylight as he opens his eyes. An olive-green canvas tarp stretches over the day, masking sunlight beyond. He props himself up on an elbow, wincing in pain, rubs his stinging eyes, looks around: a long tent, a row of cots filled with mostly young black men. Two or three plastic bags of plasma hang from wires hooked in the tent’s cover, IV tubes like red vines coiling down into black forearms dangling from cots. He slowly twists, one shoe on the ground as he pushes himself into a seated position, his body racked in pain. His hand brushes sticky, clotting blood from his wild hair. Now he can see, down the rows of cots, one old man with both arms in slings mumbling to himself, and, near the tent’s drawn-open triangular flap door, a young black man, his torso taped with bloody bandages. Even the ceiling’s bleeding, two great scars of red slashed above—no, his eyes focusing, it’s a cross, a red cross.
“My notebook,” Monk whispers, his hand clutching at his stomach: it’s there, his fingers rubbing the metal spirals, now he can feel it under his filthy, ragged shirt. He looks up. A National Guardsman stands there, a pistol in his hip holster.
“Sit tight. You’ll be transferred to a hospital soon.”
“No,” Monk rasps, “I have to go home.”
“You don’t look too good. Maybe a concussion. Should have a doctor look at you.”
Monk concentrates, his head throbbing in agony, trying to remember. “Where am I? One hundred and third Street?”
“Wilmington and Willowbrook.”
“Bus … are the buses running?”
“Just some of the main lines.”
“Imperial?”
“Yeah.”
Monk staggers to his feet. “I know the way.”
“Well, you ain’t under arrest, but you look pretty clobbered to me.”
Concentrating on his red Keds, Monk limps toward the flap of daylight past the rows of cots. Near the exit, a young black man, his face and jaw swaddled in bloody bandages, only his swollen eyes visible, glares up at him, fixing him, accusing him in silence, rage, and despair.
Emerging from the tent, Monk squints into the daylight. Ahead is Wilmington: only a few blocks south, then he’ll reach Imperial. He staggers past guard jeeps and police cars. Two cops, shotguns balanced on their thighs, watch him as he hobbles toward the intersection.
* * *
The bus, its canary-yellow RTD Freeway Flyer paint and grimy silver skin gleaming in the sun, rumbles west on Imperial. The seats are empty, only five or six people in the last few rows. Monk slouches alone in the last seat, the notebook gripped in his fists, gazing out the dusty window: a patina of ash seems baked on the glass, tinting Imperial and the passing side streets into a gray netherworld. A silent, eerie panorama of visions through the window, like bombed-out ruins: charred, fire-gutted stores; scorched framing and wall shards like steps that ascend in vain from the streets; piles of rubble and debris.
In the late-afternoon light, each passing signal blinks red, Imperial a gauntlet of intersections barricaded by cop cars and National Guard jeeps. The cops couldn’t stop the riot, Monk’s thinking. They needed the fucking Guard. Parker and the police … they’re gonna lie about all this, a big fucking whitewash to cover the professor’s failure.
Past Compton Avenue, the bus lurches to the curb and stops, its hydraulic doors sighing open. An old black woman, hunched in a green, filthy shawl, steps inside and sits behind the driver. A waft of hot air and decaying stench fills the bus as the doors fold closed and the driver pulls away. Through the gray window, Monk can see a dead dog in the gutter as National Guard bulldozers scrape and claw piles of debris through the street.
He’s thinking of the Reefer Man’s mural on the abandoned house on Seventieth, the masterpiece that someone, or some force, wanted him to see, perhaps compelled him by the sign or spell scrawled in his notebook. The great pintura of cities past and future, of graffiti bound by time: its stories, its history and dreams are shaped—and shape—each generation of the city’s people … and the papyrus, the word, that is bound by space: once written it cannot be unwritten; the word migrates from city to city, civilization to civilization, creating new worlds.
A street sign passes: Success Avenue. “Fuck,” Monk whispers to himself: the street he remembers now, the secret passage on El Tirili’s back. He opens the notebook, finds Standard’s and El Tirili’s conjoined maps, and draws out the routes: Compton Avenue south, 102nd west, Success Avenue—suddenly he remembers it all, the pen scratching deftly: Mary, Zamora, 107th east, the alley down to Hooper and beyond. Monk’s fist squeezes the metal spirals of his notebook: somehow it’s all inside now, a book of graffiti and signs, secret grids of the city … the stories of the voiceless, the dreams hidden in shadows … somehow he has to make the world see it, read it, so the truth behind the darkness and destruction won’t be lost forever.
The hot bus is filled with the cloying, rancid stench of decay and death; Monk grimaces and breathes out of his mouth. The bus grinds past Central Avenue, barricaded by Guard jeeps: blocks north are the jazz clubs. Strange meeting Mr. Hurricane at the Congo Club. All those memories of his father … Mr. Cool … fuck that, the father ain’t the son … to be cool while your city burns is to play the fool … there has to be a way to get them to see what he sees in the notebook.
Stanford Avenue rumbles past; just a few more blocks west to the Harbor Freeway, then south to home, to Karmann and the baby—their baby. The bus veers to the shoulder as an ambulance screams past, then the driver accelerates back into his lane. Monk can see the face of the white driver in his long mirror, his eyes glancing warily back at his handful of riders in the rear shadows. The reek of rot and death, the sticky vinyl seats and hot, stifling air make him dizzy; he tries to open the gray window but it’s locked. He closes his eyes and remembers the morgue, the coroner lady, the cool, silent rooms and the smell of antiseptic chemicals and formaldehyde … the sheets slowly pulled from the cadavers … all those black and brown faces … men, women … boys … like sleepers that would never wake … the notebook … make the living listen, or all this death is meaningless.
The bus stops at San Pedro as a black man, a few rows up from Monk, tinkles nickels into the glass machine next to the driver and steps down to the curb. The doors fold closed and Monk braces as the warm, stinking air seeps inside. Beyond the window, Monk watches as young black men, shirtless in the late-afternoon heat, carry bricks from the burned-out rubble of storefronts. They lug the bricks, stacked heavily in their sinewy, sweating arms, to piles on the street corners as National Guardsmen, rifles in hand, watch over them. The bus lurches away, Monk’s thoughts dark: black men working like slaves as the Guard, like masters, look on; they’d get a penny a brick, make these Negroes clean up their own mess … nothing will change.
Monk watches Main Street glide past the dying light filtering through his ash-streaked window. One more block and the bus will weave onto the Harbor Freeway and rumble south toward the water and Karmann. Monk turns away from the window, exhausted, tired of it
all, and shuts his burning eyes. Yeah, nothing will change. If you rebuild the city, raze the ghettos for decent houses and parks, Parker and the white power structure will cry, “Crime pays! Don’t reward these violent Negroes for riot and pillage!” Monk grins cynically: rebellion is in the eye of the beholder. The only real change will be more fear. The cops, the TV news, the gangs: they’d all seize on this fire and death, brand it with their own propaganda; somehow he must make them see the real rebellion, the secret history of brutality and injustice bannered on the walls and testified in his notebook … the flames might shine a light on the people in the shadows, on the stories written on the skin of the city’s own walls … or his city will be only the first spark in a conflagration across the land … open their eyes, make them see the writing on the walls.
* * *
Monk hears brakes squeaking and opens his eyes. Must’ve dozed off. The bus lurches to the curb at a bus stop at the corner of Signal Street. Monk squints out the window: Harbor Boulevard.
Monk limps painfully down the aisle of the bus. His cheek and neck are smeared with ashes. His T-shirt and Levi’s are torn and filthy: dark, dried blood is caked on his elbow and knee beneath the ripped jeans; dust and ashes fleck his kinky, long hair, his red Keds sneakers crusted with mud and plaster, dragging singed laces. He digs through his pockets, fishes out folded notes and papers: Jax and Sofia’s registration and her driver’s license. And a strange dollar bill that he hands to the white driver: reddish paper, One Skrill printed in blurred script, an oval portrait of a silhouetted man with a huge Afro. The driver looks at the bill, squints up at Monk. “Heard of these, never saw one before. My supervisor thinks they’re rumors.” The driver folds the bill into his shirt pocket and swivels the hydraulic steel shaft next to the steering wheel: the doors fold open with a sigh.
“Thanks, man.” Monk steps down and onto the sidewalk, tucking the license and registration into his pocket, like spells that will one day conjure them up again. Sofia and Jax will find him; he’s almost sure he gave them the pier’s number back in their loft. They saved his ass at least a couple of times, and maybe he had stopped the cops from identifying the VW bug. Monk grins, picturing Sofia’s eyes full of mischief behind the steering wheel, waving her cigarette as she railed against the system, like an unhinged Latin revolutionary turned getaway driver …
The notebook feels heavy in his hand, spiral wires snapped and sprung, pages wet, ripped, falling out, but most of his notes and crabbed ink words are still legible. Monk staggers south on Signal Street. His knee and elbow throb in agony. To his left and right, the concrete estuary of East Channel and the railroad tracks are soothing, deserted barriers: no cops, rioters, buildings in flames. A few blocks ahead, looming past Signal Street, the tin rooftops of the Crescent Warehouse Company shine in the setting sunlight: he can already see some of the rusted iron cranes and masts of the shipyards. Soon he’ll smell the salted sea breezes. Exhausted, he walks closer to the harbor, to Slip Thirteen, to home and Karmann.
* * *
Near the end of the dock, Monk looks down, steps past one of Karmann’s green rent-party invitation cards, stamped with a muddy boot print. He pulls his aching body up the gangplank, leaning on the railing; below, the blue Pacific scintillates and sloshes against the pylons of the pier, echoing from the iron containers of Boxville—home—that loom above him in rusted stacks and blocks. Midway up the plank he stops; his ribs ache but then he feels his face flush with blood: his mind races with clashing, jangled emotions—exhilaration, pride, devotion, scraped and battered to his soul but electric with the joy of being alive. He stands inside the open hatchway of a Matson container, a room off the lower decks, away from port side, west toward the infinite Pacific below.
The room is lit in halos from blue and yellow bulbs strung along the welded roof. On the upholstered car seat bench under the blowtorched window, a black girl he doesn’t know sleeps, curled into a crumpled ball. He shakes her shoulder and her eyes pop open in startled alarm. “Go home. Time to go.” She bolts up, staggers through empty beer bottles gleaming on the floor. Monk sees someone curled up in the corner on a mattress, half covered in an army blanket and a jacket, snoring. Monk kicks a shoe dangling off the mattress. The blanket stirs, the jacket slips down as Cooky rubs his palms against his face and blinks his bleary, bloodshot eyes, shaking his thin face at the figure looming above him under a blue bulb of light.
“What the fuck?” Cooky sits up, trying to focus his eyes.
“Time to go home, Cooky.”
“Monk, is that you?” He stands, wobbly, still dressed in wrinkled pants and shirt. “Shit, what happened to you?”
“Go home. Get your fix before you get sick.” Monk turns, ducks through a hatchway, and trudges up a steel stairwell; his knee explodes in pain as he limps to the top step.
He steps into the double-wide Sea-Land container. A string of yellow bulbs wash the room in a lemon glow. On the old couch, Marcus stares into the Zenith TV. The volume’s turned off, silent black-and-white images in flickering static: shots of burned-out stores, fire-gutted buildings, National Guard jeeps and trucks on the streets. Marcus scratches his woolly beard and gazes up as Monk steps closer.
“Party’s over, Marcus.”
“Monk? Man, I didn’t recognize you.” Marcus sighs, pushes up from the couch. “Fuck, what happened to you?”
“Where’s Dalynne?”
“Shit, she gone, been back and forth couple of times, but the bitch been gone for a while now. You been caught up in this shit?” Marcus points to the TV.
“Go home to Dalynne.”
“We was only waitin’ around to see you get home safe, nigger.” Marcus scowls, scratches his wild beard as Monk turns away. “All right, I’m leavin’, fuck it,” Marcus mumbles as he grabs a half-full bottle of Monk’s Courvoisier cognac.
Monk limps through the iron chambers like a stranger, a reanimated corpse in torn clothes, ash-and-blood-smeared skin under the garish strings of rainbow bulbs. On a red hammock strung from the riveted walls between two portholes, someone’s lumped in its folds, snoring under a baseball cap. As Monk lifts the cap, a thin young black man he’s never seen before stares up at him. “Get out.” Monk can hear the Pacific lapping beyond the windows. Empty beer bottles and cans and plastic cups litter the floors and throw pillows and small tables. Monk stares at the black telephone mounted on the iron wall, its receiver suspended on its uncoiled line like a strange, dead pendulum clock: he resets the receiver in its plastic cradle.
In the WestCon container room, Monk kicks two bodies snoring, covered in blankets on the floor. Near the corner, in the light of a torched window, Slim-Bone and Felonius are hunched over a card table, still drinking cans of Brew 102, concentrating on their game of Ghetto Monopoly, a board game Monk made for a project before dropping out of his first year at Los Angeles Junior College. They slide their game markers—a tiny boom-box radio and a six-pack of beer—along the squares of blighted, condemned real estate: Grape Street, Jordan Downs, Willowbrook, trying to avoid the frequent Go to Jail squares when you must draw from the stack of orange cards that reveal no Get out of Jail Free cards, only further calamities and setbacks.
They look up from the game board. “Shit, here comes trouble,” Slim-Bone rasps as Monk hovers like a specter over the table.
“Man, you fucked-up.” Felonius shakes his head. “What happened to you?” His gold tooth gleams in the dusty slant of sunlight through the iron window.
“You okay, Monk?” Slim-Bone grins. “Man, we was worried about you, brother.”
“You have to go, Felonius,” Monk says. Then, in a softer tone: “You too, Slim-Bone.”
“We ain’t finished with our game.” Felonius sips his beer.
Monk grabs the can and throws it against an iron wall.
“Shit,” Felonius stands, “who the fuck do you—”
“Come on, le’s go,” Slim-Bone interrupts, grabbing his beer and wobbling to his feet.
�
��Yeah, fuck you, nigger.” They swagger past Monk and disappear through a hatchway.
Monk steps from the ribbed walls of the WestCon box onto the open deck of a lower container’s roof. He makes his way painfully up the welded boat ramp toward the rusted roof of an Atlas Maritime container. The sound of a high-pitched motor revs and whines above him in the sunlight.
Lil’ Davey’s on his red Vespa scooter, burning rubber, whipping the scooter in circles of black rubber tracks around the axis of his extended booted leg. The Vespa screeches, brakes, stops as Monk limps up. “Jesus, what happened to your ass?” Lil’ Davey says over the whine of the scooter engine.
“Get out of here.”
“I’ll split in a while. I’m meetin’ this chick down at the pier later.”
“Get the fuck out.”
Lil’ Davey stands, all six foot six of him, glaring. There is something different, a hard edge in Monk’s dark eyes. Lil’ Davey shrugs, revs the throttle. “You slay me, man,” grinning as the Vespa peels away, whines and clatters down the steel ramp toward the docks below.
Monk walks slowly toward the southern edge of the Atlas container’s rooflines and crosses a plank that angles up to the corrugated summit of another container. He stands atop the apex of Boxville, the southern Matson container with its rooftop observation deck.
The sunset burnishes the observation deck in copper light. A plaintive saxophone, soft, scratchy jazz music, floats up from somewhere below. Monk stares down at the white plastic table with its overflowing ashtrays of Karmann’s Kents, smiling at her red lipstick still traced and glistening on the filters. At the welded iron rail, he looks down into the Pacific lapping below. A few ships, freighters, and cargo tankers loom beyond the harbor, under a luminous sky, heavy and torpid in the water, stacked with containers like floating castles.
He gazes into the setting sun, into the infinite glow that bathes the Pacific in a crimson incandescence, fusing the sky and sea into a molten plain. Beyond San Pedro, tapers of black smoke still worm into the skies above the fire-raked city.
Graffiti Palace Page 31
