"Graffiti Palace: A Novel," by A.G. Lombardo, by James Scarborough

INTRODUCTION. 

You can situate the book as a cross between Homer’s Odyssey and Thomas Pynchon. You can also think of it is as Charles Bukowski retelling the story of Theseus' escape from the Labyrinth. (“…her final record spinning closer to the center, like an invisible thread that gently draws him down to her, down to Karmann” (Italics, this writer).

An extraordinary backstory, Theseus and the Minotaur. Read it here in Bullfinch’s Mythology. For our purposes, Theseus, once he kills the Minotaur, needs a way out of the Labyrinth. Out of her love for Theseus, King Minos’ daughter Ariadne gave him a thread. He would unravel this thread as he got deeper into the maze. Mission accomplished, he could follow it out. Karmann Ghia’s love for Americo Monk was the thread, if not the umbilical cord, that brought him back from the labyrinth that is Los Angeles.

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?  Americo Monk should be on top of the world. He’s got a girlfriend, Karmann Ghia, with whom he will soon have a child. He lives rent-free in the Los Angeles Harbor. Their home of welded together cargo containers would make Le Corbusier, the Cubists, and Frank Gehry jealous. He’s got a sui generis passion. As a self-styled amateur urbanologist (academics would call him a semiotician), he documents LA’s graffiti in a journal as precious to him as any holy grail.

What could go wrong? Bad timing. It’s the evening of August 11, 1965. A traffic stop (white cop, black motorist) sets off a conflagration (Burn, baby, burn), immortalized as the Watts Riots.

Having been out sketching and deciphering when the city’s lid blew, Monk aches to get home. His and Karmann’s monthly rent party has begun. Without Monk’s supervision and with Karmann’s despair, it spirals out of control. The men gorge themselves on his music and his alcohol. No such luck with his woman.

Monk pilgrimages from one wondrous peril to another. He’s torn by the desire to reconnect with his beloved Karmann and to document the things he sees around him. As a street scholar, he’s got enough cred to not get caught up in parts of the mayhem. Alas, there are plenty more parts he can’t elude. His odyssey takes him through LA’s demimonde (Chinese gangsters, graffiti bombers, witches, the Nation of Islam, Tokyo Rose, among others) and it’s not so demimonde (Cops with black and white agendas, backed up by the National Guard.)

Spoiler alert: He gets home, just as Odysseus got home to Penelope, both their honors intact. Imagine their responses to each one asking the other, “So, honey, how was your day?”

WHY DOES IT MATTER? In the event of something sudden and cataclysmic like, say, a cyberattack on a city’s power grid or on a nation’s currency, we need a Dante such as Lombardo to chronicle the event and its aftermath and to serve as a cross between a Greek Chorus and Google Street View.

WHO SHOULD READ IT?  

Anyone who loves

• stories that are gritty and phantasmagorical.
• historical stories that bear immediate relevance to today (just now, Stephon Clark, R.I.P.)
• language that is so combustible and oracular that it makes South LA patois sound like the King James version of the Bible.
• discussions on semiotics, signology, and art seamlessly woven into the abovementioned South LA patois.

WHAT SHOULD I FOCUS ON? Lombardo’s linguistic tapestry skills. The way Lombardo looms together the story’s plot, characters, and language make it a Bayeaux icon of woven perfection.

Americo Monk’s reaction to each calamity he faces. He frames each reaction as a matter of duty. Should I wend my way home to my pregnant wife? Should I stay and document for posterity and my own understanding what I witness tonight? Sometimes he has a choice. Sometimes he doesn’t.

Each of the characters he encounters on his wayward, quixotic voyage. They’re downright Dickensian. 

WHAT ARE SOME QUOTES THAT I COULD TAPE TO MY BATHROOM MIRROR?

Sometimes he wants to erase, blot out all these atavistic scrawls of division and hatred, but it’s impossible: all he can do is catalog it, try to glimpse the glittering, infinite cosmos of these urban signposts, or be lost, swallowed into the blinding noise of unparsed glyphs.

One bum leers at Monk: “Brother, can you paradigm?”

Will cops and gangs let him pass? His notebook is a kind of spy’s black book for them, an intelligence coup for cops tracking the gangs’ ever-shifting territories and feared alliances, and a grail to the gangs, locked in constant war and turf incursions; so they wait, because the historian must write the history before it can be seized.

“I study graffiti and gangs, I’m kind of an amateur urbanologist.”

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, spraypainted walls and manifestos that shine like flags of warning;

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.

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,

Each time her hand grips the crooked, thin pipe handrail, she remembers him bending it, welding it piece by piece, perhaps his rusted, galvanized fingerprints are still here, meeting each touch of her hand like a ghost, like one of his damn signs.

“The city is our canvas.” Sofia smiles, kills the headlights, pulls to the curb.

“Ike said beware of the military-industrial complex.” Jax smiles. “But it’s the advertising-media complex that holds all the power. They project their own reality, then they can shape public thought to their own ends.”

Was the ancient poet blind when he sang of the odyssey every man’s life must trace?

Sipping wine, Jax turns pages, silently reads some of Monk’s notes, nods with each new page and graffito. “I like how you record exact locations, colors, surface descriptions, overlays, cross-outs … shit, you’re an art critic.” “Maybe, but it’s an art that’s not recognized as an art. It’s communication. It’s language and code, hearts and minds. I think it’s the city talking. My theory is that America is a collection of cities, right? These cities are all planned and built by rich white men.”

Karmann sweeps through the containers in a seething rage, shouting at everyone to go home, like a mad noblewoman railing against the drunken peasants at a castle feast.

His Keds mark off another section of sidewalk, each crack bringing him closer to the promise of harbor and home; but he’s still subject to laws and forces unfathomable as this endless night of inferno and destruction:

“I got my loot too,” fist squeezing the notebook: he’d looted and pillaged the city too, sacked it like some kind of fabled, mythic city of old … plundered a treasure beneath all their noses, a treasure beyond price, the signs and secrets and voices in the notebook … It has to be a key, an insane, dizzying key … what lock is it all meant to open?

Below, through an open hatchway, the music fades away, now only the muted scratching of the needle as the vinyl circles below, her final record spinning closer to the center, like an invisible thread that gently draws him down to her, down to Karmann.

THE VERDICT? Embrace it now. Americo’s odyssey is our odyssey. The labyrinth he navigates could very well turn out to be our own. The revolution may be televised but there must also be a map. We need such a map. This is it.

HOW DO I BUY IT? Amazon (Hardcover $18.02; Kindle $13.99) or Barnes and Noble (Hardcover $18.74; Nook $13.99)