The self-ordained Zongo Khumalo descended the short staircase that led out of the back of Sammy’s Burger Shack where he had just been asked to turn in his whites and, in the words of the owner—a self-avowed asshole not named Sammy—“get the fuck out.”
Khumalo reached into the breast pocket of the scratchy fuchsia polo shirt he had been required to purchase for the distinct privilege of flipping not Sammy’s shitty burgers and removed a battered red and white Marlboro soft pack containing a half-smoked joint of sinsemilla, the first half of which may have had a deleterious effect on the morning’s events.
“Fuck it,” he announced to the Pacific Ocean that slapped just beyond the asphalt escarpment marking the edge of the Burger Shack’s domain and held a good bit of related detritus to help bolster the claim. A profusion of small star-shaped flowers of white, pink, and purple competed with similarly-hued burger wrappers for the privilege of being the landscaping’s most prominent feature.
Khumalo had just taken a large hit when a convertible Oldsmobile came smashing into the Shack’s gravel parking lot like an iron meteorite. Just when he thought the heavy chunk of Detroit steel was going to end up becoming an artificial reef, the driver locked up the disc brakes and jerked his wheel to the left sending the machine into a four-wheel slide and kicking up a fuck-ton of dirt, rocks, and duck shit in the process.
When the dust finally cleared, Khumalo expected to lock eyes with a typical wired-to-the-gills gearhead or one of the usual gonzo surfers that frequented the Shack after the morning break; instead, he was surprised to see—back-lit by the Sun still-rising toward apogee—a spitting image of Jesus the Christ himself.
Charlie Perigo threw open the perfectly balanced driver-side door—back when Detroit rolling stock still had bodies “designed by Fisher”—and immediately zeroed in on Khumalo who stood agape in the slowly settling cloud of debris dressed in his grease-spattered polo with his joint hanging from his bottom lip held by a thin scrim of moisture.
“Hey, brother,” Perigo addressed the incredulous ex-line cook. “What’s burnin’?” Khumalo turned back toward Sammy’s to see a plume of black smoke climbing out of the slowly turning rusted rooftop turbine vent.
“That would probably be the lunch rush,” he answered, retrieving the now-extinguished joint and pointing toward the shack with it.
“Not that,” the apparent maniac pointed at his hand. “That.”
“Oh, right,” Khumalo recalibrated his first impression of Big J’s stunt double as he fumbled for his Zippo lighter.
The two born iconoclasts connected with the natural force of a chemical reaction, Khumalo soon finding himself in the 442’s passenger seat, hanging on for dear life as the appropriately-named Perigo took the sharp shoreline turns at a full four-barrel roar.
Perigo shouted something over the car’s 400-cubic-inch engine in maximum thrum as whole dinosaur dynasties were vaporized and shot out the dual exhaust, never to be thought of again.
“What?” Khumalo shouted back in a register he didn’t recognize. As the Oldsmobile’s tight suspension groaned to counteract the brutal physics involved in the questionable choices Perigo was making on the turns, the force of inertia bent him toward the driver whom he began to suspect was completely insane.
“I asked you,” Perigo shouted as he slammed the Hurst shifter into a higher gear, “have you ever been shot?” Before Khumalo could answer one way or another—and to tell the truth, he would have said “no,” had he time to gather his wits about him—Perigo lifted his white T-shirt to reveal an even whiter scar on his abdomen. The former cook took the bait.
“Who shot you?” Williams finally played his part perfectly, coming in on cue as if rehearsed.
“Charlie,” Perigo answered and started laughing like the lunatic Williams had now decided he most definitely was. Even years later, throughout the arc of their friendship, whenever the two men got together they performed their ritualistic greeting, each time Perigo dissolving into laughter so that Williams never did find out if it was the Vietcong or actually the man himself who pulled the trigger.
“So, you were in ’Nam, man?” Williams asked, blindly groping around the floorboard for his dropped Zippo so he might steady his nerves for the next hairpin turn.
“I did one tour and then got the fuck out,” Perigo shouted, deftly swerving to miss a dead fawn in the middle of the road.
“Whaddya do there, if you don’t mind me asking?” Khumalo asked as he struggled to light what was left of his joint in the jet stream pouring in around the car’s windshield.
“Chopper pilot,” Perigo answered, shifting into a gear that Khumalo was sure had no place on the Shoreline Highway.
“You were a ’stick?’’’ Khumalo asked, passing the joint and hoping that its effects might just tame the maniac behind the wheel.
“No, man,” Perigo corrected, taking a massive hit before losing the roach to the wind. “The stick.”
Follow the story:
Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
Román Leão 
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