Monk’s determined to stay off the main avenues as he wends his way south, avoid Officer Trench and the fuzz, try to work the periphery around the worst of the flames and mayhem. He clutches the notebook tightly in his fist: he almost lost it to the cops. The little journal, Trench had sneered. Fuck them. Only gang signs and cryptic turf lines to the police. The book’s his secret history: there’s a gravity in it, he knows. The cops, the Nation of Islam, the gangs, the graffitists: for them the notebook is a kind of mirror to unlock the pieces that illumine their worlds, vices, and shifting balances of power; but the book is also the voice of the voiceless, an arsenal of this city’s outlaw, spray-painted walls and manifestos that shine like flags of warning; the words and art of the dispossessed are weapons of change, and to ignore or crush these voices can only bring fire and destruction.
Police cars and desperate civilian vehicles glow down Wadsworth Avenue as roving marauders raid storefronts, then disappear into the dark side streets. He’s reached 118th Street; he should find a way off Wadsworth, zigzag down these little avenues with their shot-out street lamps. He turns down 119th Street. His Keds feel like iron weights, it’s everything he can muster just to take each step. The avenue is dark, only a distant street lamp a few blocks ahead.
Monk disappears into the shadows of a dark alleyway. Next to a dumpster, there’s a feeble lightbulb glowing above a padlocked back door. He sinks down against the wall, stretches out his long legs, crosses his aching feet; tired, besieged, so many miles to go. He opens the blue notebook, turns the pages under the flickering amber light. The pages he almost lost, the secret ledgers and stories of the people and the city itself. Monk wipes his dirty hands. On a blank page he slowly, carefully writes in cursive: Karmann. He fills the entire page with her name but it is not just a name, now it’s a talisman, a spell of love. If he were an artist instead of a street scholar, he’d spray, tag, throw down her name all over the city, on every wall and gritty surface and sign: Karmann stores, Yield Karmann, Karmann Zone, Karmann Avenue, No Trespassing Karmann … that’s what they’re doing, back home, some of their alleged friends, trespassing against his girl and his trust. Turning the page, he writes in his crabbed, dense print:
Dear Karmann:
You are sick with worry over me, but I am doing everything in my power to return to you. You’re a dancer, you know how to play off them, feed their greedy emotions, never holding them too close or keeping them too far. Each time I walk these streets, the city becomes more alive to me … a living thing, in flux, too big for any single mind to grasp. Spray-painted manifestos and secret images and signs appear, disappear, transform, reappear like fantastic visions in an iron and concrete jungle. Do their meanings change, or do I change as I try to see them and understand? I am somehow linked to all of this, to the city, the signs, the voiceless rage and despair and hope, my obsessive recording, though I don’t know why. Whatever riddles and truths I might unlock, it’s all mist, nothing compared to the unfolding mysteries of your love for me and the miracle you carry deep within yourself. If I could, I would build a magnificent cathedral or palace of devotion to you. I would command every artist and graffitist to create all the colors and radiance of our love … then I would strike it down and tell them to begin again, because it must be a pale shadow of your light. Know that I am not afraid. There is nothing that can stop me from returning to you, and since we are one, there is no force that can stop you from being with me.
He’s wasting time writing. He rises, jabs the pen inside the wire spirals, closes the notebook. Monk walks down the dark alley that curves toward 120th Street. Maybe he should head west to Avalon Boulevard. Monk stops. Wait: Mr. Collins’s old movie theater, it’s just a few blocks from here. Monk heads south down Belhaven Street. At 124th and Central Avenue, marquee lights glow above the faded salmon and teal colors of the art deco walls and scalloped box office of the Argus Theater. Monk grins. He used to work in the old movie house for a couple of summers back in high school. Is it open? Now the movie titles glimmer down in their backlit bold black plastic:
The Sound of Music
Alphaville
That old marquee, some of his best work, those two summers when childhood’s fascination with words, codes, anagrams, puzzles grew into a dawning awareness of the secret scripts of the city’s signs and graffiti. Working at the Argus, he’d swept floors, ripped tickets, scooped popcorn, but he also changed the marquee each week, spearing plastic letters from their box, gliding each letter in its marquee runners, each letter magnetized at the end of his long pole, he was a semantic fisherman, a harpooner of language. It was a summer of semiotic discovery, old Mr. Collins always good-natured about Monk’s weekly marquee adventures in signology, which began one week with a dubious motion picture titled Last Days of Vesuvius. Monk lettered his own tagline on the marquee: DON’T TELL YOUR FRIENDS IF IT BLOWS! A summer of matinee madness followed, cat and mouse between Monk’s cinema codes and old Collins remembering to check the marquee, making Monk correct his youthful folly with his giant magnetic stylus. A baseball movie called The Stitched Ball became HE ITCHED BALL … unfortunate spacing advertised a Hemingway bio MY PENIS READY … and a Vatican spy potboiler teased THE POPE’ SHAT … a purloined S from the word SLAYS and a new sword-and-sandal epic was born: HERCULES LAYS SAMSON; and Monk’s favorite, a soaper called So Does My Love—until Monk left an E and S in the box: SODOMY LOVE …
Monk stands under the buzzing marquee, shaking his head: Mr. Collins has converted it into one of these new twin cinemas. More memories flooding back: the old drunks used to slouch outside the doors here, begging for nickels, exchanging Night Train–fueled film theory: “Them tornadoes in The Wizard of Oz, see, they’s time tunnels them Munchkin motherfuckers use to trespass into the human world … that Citizen Kane, he ain’t dead, see? He’s disguised as Jedediah Leland, wants to see what his friends really think ’bout him … you know that Mutiny on the Bounty? Captain Bligh, see, he’s the good guy, it’s that mother Fletcher Christian, he falls in love with some island girl, it’s Bligh’s monogamy against the crew’s Bounty of sexual adventures…”
“That you, Mr. Collins?” Peering into the graffiti-scarred ticket-booth glass. An old black man with snowy hair squints up from a comic book. “Remember me?”
“Sure,” chuckling. “My penis ready. How ya doin’, Monk?”
“Okay. You know they’re burning down the city?”
“Yeah.” Collins closes the comic book, revealing a .38 pistol on the counter. “Safer in here than out there, boy.”
“When did you change it to a twin cinema?”
“Last year, landlord keeps raisin’ the rent. Why don’t ya come in? That Sound of Music is real good. No charge. Got plenty of seats to rest a spell, better if you was walkin’ out there in the daylight.”
Monk shrugs. “Thanks, Mr. Collins.” He walks into the darkened foyer. Monk’s dead tired, a few hours dozing off in a plush seat in the darkness sounds good, and there’s something else, a weird feeling that perhaps he should stop fighting the city, that if he opens up a little, bends instead of opposing forces beyond any morning light’s logic, the night will finally release him, that his return is still possible.
Red and lime neon lines flow around the dim snack bar with its yellow glass cases of popcorn and candies; sconces splash lavender light cones on the walls. Last time he was here, years ago when there was only one screen, the movie was The Crawling Foot … disembodied foot inching along, toes flexing, dragging impossibly slow along floorboards as the heroine screams trapped in the corner, Monk and the audience guffawing … Don’t open that—too late, the cop opens the door as a cowboy boot kicks him in the face … the foot grinds, crushing down on the hero’s throat as he chokes and struggles to wrench away the monstrous horror … Monk pushes through a door below a glowing sign: THEATER 1.
He eases into a chair in the darkness. Two or three heads silhouetted, hunkered in the front rows; smells of popcorn and sweat. On the screen, a preview for the new James Bond movie coming this Christmas, assassins in ebony scuba suits hunting Bond with spearguns through Caribbean waters. Monk grins as the super white man dispatches the bottom-dwelling, black-suited frogmen.
Then Monk is gliding over snowcapped mountains, alpine valleys, verdant, sun-dappled meadows as the camera swoops down on that Julie Andrews twirling, raising her frocked sleeves to blue skies:
The hills are alive with the sound of music.
With songs they have sung for a thousand years—
“Thought I’d find you here.” Mr. Collins eases into the chair next to Monk, wedging his cane into the armrest. “’Course, I had a fifty-fifty chance.” Chuckling.
“No more customers, Mr. Collins?”
“Nope. Locked the doors. Sandi, that’s the snack-bar girl, she’ll watch the fort. You want a popcorn or Coke, she’ll give it to you, my treat. This is a good movie. They don’t make ’em like this no more.” Nodding his iron-gray head. “Seen it seven times,” he says, laughing. “That Julie Andrews ain’t too shabby. What you doin’ out in this craziness?”
“I was just going to hang out this morning, do some work in my notebook, go to the library, maybe get a burger, take the bus home, then all this shit seemed to almost explode in my face, Mr. Collins.”
The old man nods. “Still doin’ your art, keepin’ a notebook, that’s good. I remember when you worked here, every break you had your face stuck in some notebook or paperback. You keep readin’ and writin’, you meant for somethin’ better, little monkey.” Mr. Collins chuckles. “Remember when I’d call you little monkey?”
“Sure, Mr. Collins.” All at once Monk feels peaceful, grateful for the sanctuary of the movie house, the old man’s company: Mr. Collins even smells good, scents of popcorn butter and some kind of crisp laundered smell from his neat tan and powder-blue cotton suit, like lilac.
“Out there, burnin’ down their own neighborhood, what kind of sense does that make, boy?” Mr. Collins shakes his head. “Everything’s goin’ to hell if you ask me, but no one’s asking me. This was a good town, even when you was a kid, remember?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Last few years, I don’t know, it gets worse and worse. This new generation…” The old man shakes his head. On the screen, Captain von Trapp gazes up an ivory spiral staircase where Maria—Julie Andrews—smiles down at him.
“How’s your mama?”
“She’s fine, doing great.”
“She still livin’ on Hickory Street?”
“No, she moved to Arcadia, her sister lives there.”
“Way out there, huh? You see her regularly? I know you do, ’cause you’re a good kid.”
“I see her all the time. Talk to her on the telephone too. I’ll tell her I ran into you, she’ll get a kick out of that.”
“Please do. You tell her Mr. Collins sends his respects to Missus Lettie Monk, I sure do.” The old man nods. “Yes sir, Missus Lettie was a good woman, you damn lucky she’s your mama. All these damn fools out there burnin’ down the town. You ain’t burnin’ nothin’. You know why? ’Cause your mama brought you up right. Now, I know your father was never around, just like half the fools out there causing trouble, no papa to teach ’em right from wrong. Your father, he was a good man, but you know those musicians, always on the road, they shouldn’t get married if you ask me, ’course no one’s asking me.” Mr. Collins grins. “Missus Lettie, she was strong, raised you almost alone. Back then, when you was a baby, this town was still a good place. Big as hell, but Watts was a small town in a big city. Back in the fifties, I guess, when you was growin’ up, people watched out for each other, including your mama. Kids could run around, play ball in the streets, get a ice-cream cone at the little store, not hafta worry about no gangsters or drug addict fools … You remember it like that, son?”
“I sure do. You’re right, Mr. Collins, times now are different, very strange.” On the screen, Rolf and Liesl are talking in a garden vestibule ringed with rosebushes.
“Strange is right. Yeah, you kids could play in the streets. All the streets were dirt, no sidewalks or nothin’. We used to call it Mud Town when it rained, remember?” Monk nods his head. “Yes sir, back then everyone—Missus Lettie included—had chicken coops and Sunday barbecues after church, folks gave each other a hand. Your mama, she’d get a few eggs from the coop, give ’em to someone down the street who was hungry, that’s just the way it was. And those barbecues, man they was good.” The old man licks his lips, nods. “You remember the William’s Smokehouse over on 109th, near Central? You was too young. Well, Mr. William, he’d always give some ribs or somethin’ to the families, bring a big box to the barbecues.” Collins pauses. “Like I said, you was too young, but Mrs. William, she’d visit all the Negro babies in the neighborhood, including you. She used to tell all the mothers to pinch their baby’s nose every day so they wouldn’t grow up to be a big-nosed Negro.” He laughs, shakes his head. “One day, Missus Lettie caught her pinchin’ your nose and threw her out. Yes, those were good days. Folks looked after each other. I don’t know what the hell is goin’ on with people today. We used to get together, build a porch or a garage for folks, everyone pitched in. Didn’t need no buildin’ permits and a thousand dollars like today. Everybody pitched in, maybe ’cause it was after the war and people didn’t just look after themselfs. You remember your neighbors at your mama’s house offa Hickory Street? The Claytons, and that Italian family, the Rossinis?”
Monk nods. “I do. I used to play all the time with their son, Adam, we were about the same age.” Lost memories flood his mind: the little rubber pool in the Claytons’ backyard, playing softball in the field across the street in the rain—creatures covered in mud and blue jeans, Mrs. Rossini bringing over bowls of spaghetti.
Looming in the darkness, a puppet—a blond shepherd boy in lederhosen—dances as Julie Andrews jiggles its strings and sings.
“We built a porch for the Claytons. That’s the way folks were.” Mr. Collins pauses, looks at Monk, who seems lost in the movie. “Every Saturday you could stroll down the neighborhood. Folks, your mama too had old bathtubs in the yards filled with boiling water, washin’ their clothes and kids’ clothes and sometimes someone else’s clothes if they was workin’ or needed help. The women, they’d put the clothes on the line to dry.”
“Mom would put the clothes on the line, then us kids would hop in the tubs for our baths.”
“Tha’s right.” The old man rubs his chin, stares up at the movie screen. “I like this part here.”
“Got to get some water.” Monk feels dizzy. “Be right back, Mr. Collins.”
Monk reels out into the lobby. He slurps from the water fountain, asks for a box of Raisinets. The snack-bar girl’s face is bathed in lemon light, like a projection.
He pushes open a black door, heads down the aisle. The flickering projector beams seem like dust-swirling tractor rays that pull him deeper into the darkness. Mr. Collins is gone. Monk sinks in a velvet chair.
On the screen, like a black-and-white dream: trench-coat gumshoe and French tough guy Lemmy Caution bursts through a door into a seedy hotel room, neon signs blinking beyond the window. “Alpha-Sixty, drink up, you can’t stop it.” Drunk, a man in shadows offers Lemmy the bottle. Lemmy pushes him away.
Where the fuck is that Julie Andrews? Monk rubs his eyes.
“It’s just a computer, Dickson. You were sent here to do a job.”
Dickson laughs, swigs from the bottle. “That’s what Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon said. They failed, so will you. You’ll never make it back to the Outland.”
When he closes his eyes the dizziness subsides a little. As if stirred by Mr. Collins’s words, he sees those rusted, chipped porcelain bathtubs and his old neighborhood: Mrs. Whitaker, down the street, who hated kids and filled her bathtub with geraniums; Mom’s victory garden in the backyard, tomatoes and green beans and spinach and lettuce when food was scarce during the war; he remembered Mom working her garden, still a victory garden that filled her baskets and grocery bags with fresh fruits, vegetables, home-cooked honey bread he can still smell that she’d lug over to the Carmichaels, who’d lost his job, or to the Lewis family when their dad was drunk, or whoever had a hungry stomach to fill.
An engine revs, startling Monk from his reverie: on the screen, Lemmy Caution zooms down a Parisian freeway in his black Galaxie, beautiful Natacha von Braun next to him, her long hair cascading in the convertible’s rush of street lamps like strands of twinkling stars.
Mr. Collins slips into the chair next to Monk. “Had enough of white people singin’, huh?” He chuckles, sets his cane against the armrest.
“Guess I got lost.” Monk grins.
On the screen, Lemmy slaps Natacha. “Tell the truth, von Trapp!” he shouts.
Monk rubs his throbbing temples. Did he say von Braun or von Trapp?
“… you was just knee-high.” Dazed, Monk looks away from the screen: Collins’s been talking to him, but he hasn’t heard a word. “Brings back memories of your mother too. Missus Lettie was a fine-looking woman. Now, your daddy, he was lucky to get her, yes sir. When he left you and your mama, well, excuse me for sayin’, but that was a dirty shame. We all knew your papa was not a homebound kind of man. He was a good man in his own fashion, he had to find where he belonged, which was on the road or in the clubs, playing his bass. You put a man like that in a house with a young wife and a baby, well, he’s like a fish out of water and can’t breathe.”
The city is flickering black-and-white on the screen; only angles of light and darkness, soot skies. Lemmy and Natacha pass under shadows of gray concrete. Lemmy Caution, report for interrogation, speakers echo. The walls glow with incandescent white tubes, neon graffiti, but it’s graffiti of the future—numbers, equations, mathematical theorems …
“You lucky your mama was a strong woman, yes sir. Then Missus Lettie had to go to work, ain’t that right, Monk?”
“Golden State Mutual Insurance, over on Forty-second Street, Mr. Collins.” Mom went to night school, learned to be a stenographer. She’d come home tired, but looking fresh and beautiful and cook him a real dinner.
Monk watches as Lemmy and Natacha walk down the black-and-white lines of a hotel corridor, past prostitutes in spandex tops and miniskirts, their skin tattooed in numbers and equations like living graffiti. Lemmy bursts through a door, gun in one hand, Kodak Instamatic in the other, the room blinking in the incandescence of the flashcube. On the nightstand, the Gideon Bible’s been replaced with a white book, a single black title: Dictionary. “The notebook’s missing a word.” Lemmy thumbs through blank pages. “Tenderness.”
Did he say notebook? Monk rubs his eyes.
“I don’t know that word,” Natacha says softly. “Alpha-Parker erases, prints new editions.”
“Alpha-Parker?” Monk whispers. “When did it—”
“What’s that, son?” Collins glances over at Monk.
“Huh? I’m sorry, what were you saying, Mr. Collins?”
“We were talkin’ about how your mother had that job over at Golden State. But I’m sorry, I keep interruptin’ your movie.” The old man turns toward the screen: Lemmy and Natacha in the Galaxie, caroming through Parisian night streets, a city of installations and inhuman factories and concrete sloughs.
The rain-slick city in the background behind the Galaxie seems to flicker with Technicolor cobalt and green vistas of Alpine splendor …
Monk blinks. What the fuck? He closes his burning eyes. Maybe some kind of side effect from El Gordo’s drugs.
“Your mother’s a saint, she sure is,” Mr. Collins says to himself as he watches the movie. “Workin’ full-time and raising you.”
Monk remembers Mother would talk to him, she had to be mother and father to him. She would talk sometimes about her job over at Golden State, how the Negro girls in the stenography pool made less money than the whites, but you had to take it, not get angry, remember your pride, things would change, things were changing, she’d tell him, if only he could imagine how bad things were when she was growing up in Texas.
On the screen, Lemmy and Natacha rush through the door. Lemmy snaps pictures with his Instamatic: “Reporter Ivan Johnson for Figaro-Pravda…” Bursts of flashcube incandescence as … Maria and Captain von Trapp materialize like ghosts in the flashes, as a boatswain’s whistle shrills:
“Oh please, Captain, love them all!” Maria pleads.
“Yes,” Lemmy says, “only lovemaking can override the cold circuits of Alpha-Sixty’s logic.”
Monk slouches, dizzy. It’s the drugs … no sleep … I’m dozing, dreaming maybe … Think of something else. His mother opened the world to him because he was her world after his father left. She’d laugh and say she’d known just as many lousy Negro men as white men; most of them wanted to control you or change you; the world expected Negro women to be dominant because some Negro fathers were no damn good. She’d tolerated little foolery or stupidity; she was her own woman because, she’d ask him at the dinner table and ask anyone else who cared to listen, what’s the sense of equal rights if women don’t have them? You brothers hollering about keeping the nigger down—you better take a look at the woman on your arm.
The Galaxie barrels through plate glass and into the great computer banks of Alpha-Sixty. The machine’s smashed to rubble, blinking lights fading. “It is,” Alpha-Sixty drones, dying in a shower of sparks, “too late…”
“That voice,” Monk mutters, “it’s the chief…”
“Who?” Collins asks.
“Parker,” Monk whispers.
“You okay?” Collins says. “You don’t look too good.”
Monk nods and stares into the flickering screen.
The old man rests his hand on the cane’s handle and rubs his knuckles. “You remember when your mama came after you with that big ol’ wooden spoon?” Mr. Collins laughs, slaps his thin kneecap.
“Yeah.” Monk grins. He’d just started working for Mr. Collins, must have been thirteen or fourteen. He’d told Mr. Collins there was no school that day, so he cleaned up the theater, then hung around for four hours, watching the double bill: The Ten Commandments and Around the World in 80 Days. Mother tracked him down, marched into the theater, down the aisle, squeezing past patrons’ knees in the packed center row, pulled him up by the ear in front of all those people as Moses, on the screen, was parting the Red Sea, and, propelling him up the aisle, took out her wooden spoon from her belted chiffon dress—lavender and rose colors he still remembers—and the spoon seemed to the little boy the size of a croquet mallet as she proceeded to thrash his behind until the spoon snapped in half and spun into the rows, lost on the dark, sticky floor amid popcorn boxes and soda cups.
Natacha’s eyes, filling the screen like a giant black-and-white enchantress, seem to engulf Monk as she whispers to him: “Je vous aime.”
“I love you too.” Monk’s eyes are closed. “I’m coming home, baby.”
“You all mixed-up, like that Manchurian candidate,” Collins chuckles. “Showed that movie a couple years ago. He was all brainwashed. Didn’t know fantasy from reality, dreams from wakefulness, books from memories. I remember this scene, it was Frank Sinatra … his desk all stacked with books, a scholar like yourself … one of them books was called Ulysses … like you, too much livin’ in the mind. Come on, boy.” The old man tilts up on his cane. “You dead on your feet. You need sleep and I need to get home.”
Out in the shadows of the lobby. “That damn Sinatra,” Collins says. Monk blinks, grateful the celluloid kaleidoscope is fading from his brain. “When Kennedy, God rest his soul, was shot, that damn Sinatra and the Mob banned all the prints and the movie disappeared.” The snack bar’s closed, doors locked, marquee outside unlit like a slab in the darkness. “Mob didn’t want no links to no presidential assassinations, public might put two and two together … Come on, you can sleep in the projection room.” Monk follows Mr. Collins as the old man threads carefully up a narrow flight of stairs, rocking himself up step by step with the cane.
Mr. Collins unlocks a door signed EMPLOYEES ONLY. A small room, a great projector taking up most of the floor. It’s a 1960 Century, big as a dynamo—notorious for its Berlin mirrors, which have a propensity to burn film—its great 35 mm reels clicking as the celluloid strip threads through sprockets, spools, looping into white light and gleaming lenses. A flickering cone of light churning with dust motes beams through the rectangular aperture in the wall. A stack of silver reel canisters gleams near the projector. There’s a mattress and a blanket and pillow in the corner.
The old man snaps a switch on the projector and the light beam disappears, the big 35 mm reels slowly clacking to a stop. “It’ll cool down in a bit. You can leave the door open. Get some rest, son.” Mr. Collins points his cane toward the mattress. “This is where I catch a nap now and then, mostly during Westerns, I hate Westerns. You know where the bathroom is. Help yourself to a Coke or popcorn if you get hungry.”
“Thanks, Mr. Collins, I’m wiped out.”
“Sleep till noon if you want, no matinees tomorrow. Just let yourself out, door’ll lock behind you. You be sure to say hello to Missus Lettie, now.”
“Yes, sir.” They shake hands. “Thank you, Mr. Collins.”
“That’s all right, did me a world of good seeing you again. You be careful out there, it ain’t like the old days, Lord knows.”
Monk hears the old man’s cane tapping down the stairs as he collapses on the mattress. Somewhere beyond there is the click of the front door downstairs as Mr. Collins hobbles outside. Before sleep his mind seems to unravel in jarring fragments of dreams: iron hatchways and green and rusted rooms; a phonograph, the table invisible under wine and beer bottles and the plastic bowl half filled with rent money like a wilted salad; Lemmy, Felonius, Maurice, Maria, von Trapp, Marcus dancing with Dalynne; a Kodak Instamatic flashbulb flares as Felonius snaps a picture of Karmann; Maurice’s fingers glide over Karmann’s thigh in flashcube bursts; Karmann, submerged in citrine waters … her open hands slowly waving to him, beckoning, around and around, treading water, weaving endless circles within circles.