March/ April 2018 Building a Palace of Graffiti by A. G. Lombardo

Teaching full time in a Los Angeles public high school, my novel, Graffiti Palace, was written  over several years, like many novels are: in fits and starts, in heedless inspiration and dead ends, in notebooks, like trying to write one’s way out of a labyrinth. For all its flights of fancy, terror and beauty, GP is a book whose main character is the city itself. Starting out, I had no hero or plot, only the city’s graffiti that enthralled my mind and imagination.

I was born in Alhambra, not far from downtown. I remember the streets, palm trees, the Helms Bakery trucks, glass milk bottles from Adohr Farms on our doorstep. My parents lugged me around: I saw downtown, Angel’s Flight, the sketchy barrios toward City Terrace and East LA that my parents mostly avoided. There was graffiti too. We eventually moved to the Valley, but the graffiti followed me.

As a high school English teacher, graffiti seemed to more and more muscle its way into my consciousness. It was on stop signs, on the sides of trucks, on the sidewalks, on the walls of my school. Some of my students doodled graffiti constantly in their notebooks. They had chapbooks filled with colorful graffiti designs and bombs—gaudy murals. Finally I found some essays about taggers, graffiti, street art. The students and I developed some really good lessons: we explored art, vandalism, gangs, architecture, free speech, protest, metaphor—you name it.

We studied graffiti. It was underground communication, unfiltered, unsanctioned; it was ugly, it was sublime, it was creative, violent—just like the city itself.  I was a sort of scholar of graffiti. Why not write a novel about such a scholar? So I began to reexamine the spray-painted forms that had always been a part of LA, of myself.

I drove down the 5 to check out Boyle Heights, and the 110 to Inglewood, Watts, and points between. Freeways that are endless, smoggy art galleries. Gang scrawls, beautiful murals, rainbow caricatures, signs of protest, violence, and peace, line the fences, concrete barriers, overpasses, almost any surface.

Driving towards East LA, graffiti-covered boxcars line the train-yards off the 5 freeway, like mobile signposts, exports and imports of the city’s underground voices and dreams.

I walked and explored the city, but this time with a pocket notebook. The signs, literal as well as just below the surface, were everywhere. On Soto Street in Boyle Heights, I saw English and Spanish graffiti that used the Gothic fonts of the city’s newspapers, as a kind of defiant, coded rejection of the status quo.

On Florence Avenue in Inglewood, billboards were altered, hijacked by rebel voices…even the backs of billboards were painted in secret anti-signs for those curious to read them.

Near Watts, on Avalon Boulevard, I noted that graffiti had different colors, styles, numbers incorporated with cryptic letters.

Vacant lots off Imperial Highway transformed, in my imagination, into lairs where secret councils and the disenfranchised met.

So, an amateur semiotician, I studied these signs. I was Americo Monk, the hero of my novel, though I didn’t know it.

I returned to the Watts Towers. I had been there years ago, when I took a senior class on a field trip. They’d said “it’s ugly Mr. L! It’s cool, it’s weird, it’s art, trash”…just like graffiti. I ended up a few blocks away, on 103rd Street, at Watts Station: this was Charcoal Alley, ground zero of the Watts Riots.

Soon after, I began my notes for the novel. Now I had Americo Monk, graffiti scholar, trapped as the Watts Riots explode, trying to desperately make his way home: a gauntlet of terror, a wanderer far from home; I had my Ulysses, an American Odyssey.

When the city became my character, I discovered a kind of architecture for my novel. Every graffito is a mystery to unravel, streets lurk to hurl Monk’s metaphoric ship into the rocks, votive candles on curbs are omens, dying palm trees torches, broken street lamps shelter ghetto blackbirds, alleys are secret passages, and the sidewalks are haunted paths where a young girl named Iva—later Tokyo Rose–once lived.

Graffiti, like the best art, is multilayered, controversial, defying easy categories. Artists, writers too, are sometimes vandals, setting fire to the complacent, the unjust. It is not only about gangs; there are lone artists out there, graffiti-writers, protesters, urban historians. Like some modern literary theories, it may not be about the novel, but more about how the reader interprets the text. Graffiti as vandalism, art, or protest, may reveal as much about us as it does about its creators.

Los Angeles, perhaps more than any other American city, paves away the past with the new. Many people see the city as something out of the film Blade Runner, and in many ways, that’s true. It is the cutting edge: technology, entertainment, new religions, paradise, hell, creation and destruction. But as gentrification spreads, this kind of communication and art-form may be dying out. Graffiti meccas like the Belmont Tunnel in Westlake are sealed and imprisoned by toney apartments. So while you can, when you see the writing on the wall, maybe looking deeper instead of away might be interesting. That freeway overpass: someone braved the late night, the cops, coils of barbwire worthy of a world war I no man’s land, and death by BMW below, to tell you a little story of life and the city.