Román Leão

Author: Román Leão

  • Shit from an Old Notebook: Odds and Sods

    Sometimes when writing a long-form piece like a novel, you find yourself wandering down paths that don’t end up going anywhere, at least anywhere that helps the story.

    This one of those digressions that I rediscovered while cleaning out an old laptop that is not long for this world. I can remember where I was when I wrote it, high on a ridge over Fairfax, California, looking out the window of the little home office that I quickly threw together after the COVID pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt.

    I was lucky enough to be trapped in a honeypot where my view was across a wooded canyon. A few houses up the hill the road dead-ended at open space where my dog Biscuit and I could look down on the failure of modern civilization.

    Originally, I had the idea of making Burn Your Starry Crown a trilogy, checking in each time the tale-tail comet came back around, ultimately ending as an outer space yarn. I became disavowed of that idea as I quickly realized it was completely out of my ability to pull off. Maybe some day.

    As distinctly as I remember where I was, I have little-to-no idea what the heck I was thinking and/or smoking here. Enjoy.

    When the teacher became aware, he was cast out of a warm world of water and salt. He liked to think that he had been born of the biggest womb in the world: the Pacific Ocean. He was delivered, not squalling, but gasping for air on a pile of lava rocks; laid out like a sacrifice. But to whom should he be offered up? The teacher could think of no one.

    Nor could he imagine what chain of events led to his ignoble presentation; brined and bleeding from his corporal brushes with sharp coral. Nothing left to do but get on with it, he supposed, with very few clues as to what it might possibly entail.

    The teacher… did he always think of himself as a teacher? Did he actually have a name? He struggled to his feet and spoke the two words he remembered from somewhere; “I am.” His voice was parched and unfamiliar to him, but the intent was very recognizable. He knew he had been cast here for an important purpose, but exactly what that was might have to wait. He was famished.

    A lone figure appeared out of the dense growth surrounding the beach carrying a large polished plank with a fin attached. Perhaps some kind of shark totem, he thought. That’s a good sign, he recognized; and apparently he knew what a shark was.

    The man was tanned and had the bleached white hair of someone who spent his days in and around the ocean. When the figure saw the teacher standing naked on the heiau, he dropped his totem and spoke the two words that came to define their relationship going forward.

    “Holy shit.”

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1 [ficção]

    You could say that I was in on the ground floor of the intentional community at Girassol. I actually ran into Zongo in the Men’s Room of SFO right after he had made his connection.

    There I was, in one of the stalls delivering a package myself, when this bindle of coke, all folded up in a honey cut out of the pages of Playboy, bounced under the divider. Miss August, I believe. I recognized… never mind.

    There she was, lying on the tiles smiling up at me, and not a word from the next stall over. I guess he must have been judging the situation, you know, whether I was cool, or whether he was going to have to split in a hurry. I let him sweat it out for a couple of beats, and then let him off the hook.

    “Well, hello, woman of my dreams,” I rapped. “Who is crazy enough to leave you here unchaperoned?”

    I heard Zongo clear his throat and call out, “A little help.”

    Needless to say, once Miss August found the guy who brought her to the party, all three of us had a real good time; if imagining an image of yourself naked, objectified, and used to transport drugs could be considered a good time. Which, I imagine, some actually might.

    Look, I don’t want to give the wrong impression here, a woman’s body is a beautiful and sacred thing… I don’t want to… can we start over?

    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
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970) [ficção]

    Hindsight is always a cold-hearted bitch. Lucious Cole was a head case. Anyone who had to personally deal with him—whether his ex-band mates who threw him to the curb, or this writer, who once was caught in his maelstrom for a lost weekend in San Francisco—could attest to his mercurial nature.

    Lucious Cole was also a genius. Perhaps it took a seriously damaged personality to fully capture the zeitgeist of our troubled times. Cole’s new—and sadly ironically titled—album, A-OK, does just that.

    Starting the album with the slow, meditative lope of Hold Me Down, Cole’s trademark rock solid rhythm guitar anchors his plaintive vocal to the Earth. It’s easy to read too much into Cole’s entreating Come with me / Hold me down / I feel like I’m losing my grip / On the ground; but the entirety of Cole’s later output, from the National Loaf’s Cut the Loaf on, could be read as a cry for help, albeit, a consistently tuneful one.

    A weary resignation has crept into Cole’s consciousness by the title track where a swirling guitar figure underscores an exhausted soul coming to terms with leaving all his worldly possessions in the care of others. I’m glad that you still care / About all the thousand things / That I can no longer bear.

    A radio-friendly jangle of acoustic guitars announces the freedom that Cole has found in letting go in Clear Skies. Ex-National Loaf drummer Chas “Chalky” Woodrow provides his trademark skittering background as if trying to escape the session before being caught up once again in Cole’s drama.

    Should we infer anything by whatever olive branch brought his contentious former band mate back into Cole’s creative circle? Was Cole making amends, intuiting that time was short, or did he just need a damn good drummer to propel the obvious breakout single?

    Whatever peace Cole found in rekindling an old friendship has clearly eroded by the arrival of the tense and jittery Sliding Away [From It All]. Chalky reprises his rhythm work on this track, laying down a solid foundation for Cole’s precarious emotional house of cards, while a trio of background gospel singers try to provide a modicum of tranquility behind the singer’s fragile vocal. Woodrow has since talked about the A-OK sessions as a drug-fueled Boschian nightmare, which would explain Cole’s clipped and manic avian-sounding chirps leading into the fadeout.

    By the time A-OK hits mid-point, the album has eased into its horse latitudes, a calming tropic of mid-tempo song craft that would stand out as a handful of highlights on a lesser artist’s record. Cole, however, is merely lulling the unsuspecting listener into a false sense of security.

    Our man suddenly kicks the speakers wide open with Power Games, a ferocious slab of pure, uncut funk, that could have established him as a viable photo-negative answer to James Brown himself. This writer, for one, would have loved to see Lucious Cole live long enough to have blown some minds and moved some asses on the new Soul Train television show.

    Perhaps A-OK’s most beguiling, and hauntingly beautiful, song is the closing track. Named after a mythical kingdom in ancient Buddhist and Hindu lore, Shambhala has come to generally refer to a spiritually pure place where wizened “sun worshippers” live out their long lives in bliss.

    One can hear the primal yearning for such a place in Cole’s impassioned delivery behind a soaring orchestration incorporating exotic instrumentation from the Far East. It’s a shame he never found what he was looking for.

    Grade: Five bones

    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
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony [ficção]

    Doing his best to relax in a hard plastic molded chair, one of countless copies in a bleak line, the man formerly known as Fred Williams waited at the airport for a Pacific Air Lines 727 to arrive from McKinleyville. Khumalo sighed and took a deep hit of the local atmosphere. Filling his lungs with cool fog tinged with the volatile high note of spent jet fuel, he knew he had made the right decision. As soon as his current business was done, he was leaving.

    Khumalo watched from the gateway windows as the baggage handlers drove their cart out onto the tarmac and began testing the viability of any American Tourister luggage like the gorilla in the recent TV commercial. He was a Samsonite man, himself, and relatively sure that what he was waiting for would arrive unscathed by any simian exuberance.

    He was actually relieved that this would be the last time he would be on the receiving end of a delivery from his people in Humboldt County. If he didn’t know everyone in the ground crews at both ends, he would never have put himself on the line. Leaving town, however, was always going to cost money. Spotting the innocuous Glacier Blue case driving away from the plane on top of the handlers’ clown car, Khumalo made his way down to the baggage carousel.

    He always got a perverse kick out of the way that one of the most frustrating and soul-sucking activities one could endure at the airport was tarted up with a circus allusion. Who doesn’t like a ride on the carousel? What goes up, must come down… if it was good enough for Blood, Sweat, and fucking Tears, then you can stand ass-to-elbows with a crowd of exhausted travelers waiting for your dirty underwear. Ride a painted pony, motherfucker.

    Khumalo had long mastered the art of invisibility at the scrum. One just had to look tired and pissed off to be there. Any energy or excitement was immediately noticed as a tell that you were either on drugs, or up to no good. Perhaps both. It was the opposite of jury duty. He had been dismissed more times than he could remember by acting stoked to be a part of it all. Number 26… fuck right off.

    Having retrieved his suitcase, Khumalo made it as far as the men’s room off of the carousel before the bindle in his boot started calling his name. It had been some time since he had a hit of medicine, and if he was going to hit the ground running, he needed a little pick-me-up.

    After the supernormal vision he experienced on the corner of Broadway and Columbus, the newly-christened Zongo had somehow made it back to his North Beach flat and slept for three days. When he finally awoke, twisted in sheets damp with the poison of sweated toxins, he untangled himself, took a shower, and hightailed it over to the Fillmore District.

    “Hello, Fred,” a spry ninety-year-old Liana Chaves answered the doorbell after Khumalo used it to play an extended solo. “Did I call you over?”

    “No, Ms. Chaves,” he fought to keep from shifting from foot-to-foot and becoming the young boy Chaves always made him feel like. Khumalo supposed that compared to the nonagenarian, he was still a boy. Hell, compared to her, he thought, he was still a fucking embryo. Still, the old gal always treated him well, and Khumalo always mustered a little extra care when asked to maintain her jewel box of a home.

    “I wanted let you know that I was thinking about going back up north for a bit. I could check in on your property while I was there if you’d still like. Maybe do some fixing up if need be.”

    “Is that right?” Chaves eyed the handyman skeptically. “And you didn’t feel that you could call me on the telephone and give me that news?” The woman didn’t reach her nineties by being anybody’s fool.

    Against his best efforts, Khumalo began to rock a little on the balls of his feet. Jesus Christ, he thought, all I need is a baseball cap to nervously twist in my hands as I ask for the damn money for the Chronicle.

    “Ah, Ms. Chaves… you see… the thing is…”

    “Get on in here,” Chaves kindly released him from the hook she had so masterfully landed in his cheek. “I’m just breaking your balls. That’s great news, Fred. The sun just might do you some good, you’re looking a little pálido.”

    You don’t know the half of it, Khumalo thought, toying with the idea of telling the woman the whole story, starting with his mystic vision of the Giant Neon Doda and how she rechristened him on the side of Broadway while sailors and drunks passed between them on their ways to their own life-changing interludes. He thought better of it.
    I’m sure the ol’ gal has seen some weird stuff in her time, he mused. Hell, she lived through two World Wars, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression… but a Giant Neon Doda? Forget it. That story was not going to get the keys to her pad in Mendocino.

    As Khumalo followed Chaves down the entry hall, he had to resist running a hand over the polished mahogany wainscoting. “Do you have any idea what kind of shape the place is in, Ms. Chaves?”

    “Now, Fred, if we are going to talk business,” the elderly woman spoke without turning around, continuing her bustle toward the kitchen, “we should sit down and have a cup of tea like civilized folks, don’t you think?”

    “I suppose a cup of tea wouldn’t kill me,” Khumalo spoke to the majestic gray bun meticulously piled on the back of the woman’s head. “It’s just that I know what that climate can do to a place.” Chaves ignored his comment, already having laid out how this transaction was going to go.

    Once he was sitting at the comfortable farmhouse table that dominated the kitchen, its only competition a Wedgewood gas stove where an ancient copper tea kettle was happily coming to steam, Chaves told Khumalo about the property she hadn’t seen since the turn of the century.

    “My father was a dairyman, originally from São Miguel,” she narrated over her shoulder while bustling around, opening drawers and cabinets. “Like everyone from around the world, he came to California to strike it rich but soon realized that the best way to do that was to stick to what he knew best. It didn’t take long for him to put down the gold pan and carve out a small ranch out on the Garcia.”

    “The Garcia?” Khumalo raised an eyebrow, flashing on Jerry and helplessly imagining a farm growing out of his beard.

    “The river that winds through the property,” Chaves explained. “It flows pretty heavy in the winter if there’s been a lot of rain. You’ll like it, Fred. My father used to take me with him to catch steelhead when they were running.”

    “I’m not much of an angler, ma’am,” Khumalo lamented. Chaves ignored the comment and continued her monologue unabated.

    “I turned 13 in 1900, and that’s the last time I went fishing with my father, or saw the ranch. Sugar?”

    “No, thank you, ma’am,” Khumalo reached out for the delicate cup of fragrant tea. He blew on the brew, gazing over the rim of the bone China, now fully invested in the woman’s story. “What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”

    “Ah, tragedy, I’m afraid,” Chaves sighed. My father had business here in San Francisco and came down in the middle of a pandemic.”

    “Ma’am?” Khumalo had attended high school at Lowell out in the Parkside District and didn’t remember anything about a local pandemic from any history class.

    “The bubonic plague,” Chaves noticed the blank look on her guest’s face. “It started in Chinatown, and tore through the City, but the government denied it was happening. About the only thing good about the whole place burning down in ’06 was that it finally put paid to that whole business.”

    “Wow,” Khumalo offered, not knowing what else to say. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

    “It’s ancient history,” Chaves sighed. “Literally. When my father died, most of us children were farmed out to relatives. A few years later, I met my husband and we moved out to the Hawaiian Islands. He was in the sugar business, you see.”


    “And you never went back?” Khumalo asked. “Not even to visit?”

    “It was a different time, Fred. Back then, living in Hawaii… you might as well have been living on the Moon. I wrote to my mother every month after I left, but when the War broke out—this would have been the first ‘war to end all wars’—they started coming back unopened. I’ve tried over the years to find out what happened to her—what happened to Girassol—but life… you’re too young to have learned this yet, but life just has a way of barreling along like a train with no brakes. You see the stops as they go whizzing by, but too soon, you just sort of stop looking out the window.”

    “Who is Girassol, Ms. Chaves?”

    “Girassol is not a ‘who,’ Fred; it’s a ‘where.’ Girassol is, or was, our ranch. It means, ‘sunflower.’ The way I remember it, the Big House makes this place look like an earthquake shack. Oh, Fred, if it still stands, you’ll be amazed at all the amazing redwood. It was built a long time before that was hard to get.”

    “So you don’t know for sure if anybody is living there… or has lived there since World War Two?” Khumalo asked, beginning to imagine the house as a total tear down, that is, if the place hadn’t already fallen into Jerry’s beard.

    “World War One, dear. And, no, I have no idea; the deed came to me anonymously. How’s your tea, Fred?”

    Khumalo took a sip from the delicate cup and sat back in the woman’s overstuffed chair lost in thought.

    “Delicious.”

    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
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Squid Game

    While sitting at my favorite taqueria, enjoying my tacos dorados and reading the ruminations of Billy Collins on the death of the masculine hat, I overheard this dadaist conversation:

    “Squid.”
    “Have you ever had a really excellent squid steak?”
    “Negative, ghost runner.”

    Either the conversationalists in question were spies and were sizing each other up before getting down to nefarious business, or they were really, really high.

    I’m guessing the latter.

  • Eulogy [poema]

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one, my brother

    When we laid you to rest
    
it was like watching a library burn down

    Pouring out of our homes to bear witness
    
It was beautiful at first

    Until we realized that all our stories

    Were going
    up
    in
    smoke

    I tried to breathe it in

    Holding it deep in my chest

    Like a massive bong rip
    But only ended up coughing
    up
    my
    heart

    I don’t think anyone noticed

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick [ficção]

    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

  • Six Words on My Checkered Career [poema]

    Avoided
    Working
    In
    The
    Sugar
    Factory

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • Post #100—Looking Forward


    Well, the ol’ materfamilias has said a lot of goofy shit since… well, since I’ve known her, but I’m going to take this little piece to heart from now on. I think I must have been breaking her balls over Mother’s Day or something, and I prodded, “When is my day? Just because we decided not to have kids, there’s no day for me?” Of course, I knew full well that everyday was up for grabs without carpet critters running underfoot, but I could not pass up an opportunity to give her the business. She looked at me with a moment of strange clarity and said, “You have a whole month.”

    I guess I do have a month, or, at least, I’m claiming it. July is my time to shine, and shine I fucking well planned to do. If it killed me. Ever since I was a kid, the celebratory nature of July was bracketed by the Fourth and—at the tail end—my birthday, which just happens to coincide, more often than not, with the local Portuguese Festa. One of my folks favorite jokes was to tell me that they were taking me out to lunch for my birthday and, invariably we would find ourselves down at the Hall, sweating in the almost-August heat with a several hundred other souls waiting for sopas.

    This July hit different, as the kids say. Besides the fact that it was the coolest July in, if not my lifetime, at least half that long, it was oddly… subdued. Maybe it was the loss of Ozzy or the increasingly unstable political situation, but the last month felt like a demarkation of sorts and now we are all waiting for what comes next.

    I would say, “watch this space” for insightful commentary on the ongoing decline of Western civilization, but, in the immortal words of Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” In actuality, this space may be end up being part of my escape from all that noise. I am embarking on the long journey of writing another novel, and plan on posting bits and pieces as I go.

    Which brings me to a question that I have been thinking about a lot this last month: What is the point of art when the whole world feels like it is about to burst into flames?

    Talk amongst yourselves.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1 [ficção]

    I was right out of college and living with a couple of roommates in a flat over the Communist Bookstore in the Mission. A friend of mind had wrangled me a job working for Zev Avidan—we all called him “Z”—over at Celestial Records. This was back when their offices were still on Irving, out in the Avenues.

    Celestial had somehow gotten the North American distribution rights for Lucious Cole’s new solo album, A-OK; sort of a Syd Barrett meets Van Morrison at a Captain Beefheart clusterfuck in Golden Gate Park sort of thing. To tell the truth, I thought it was a hot mess, but you have to understand the times. The labels were a lot more willing to take a chance on some crazy act because you just didn’t know what was going to catch on.

    Cole still had some star power left over from his years with the National Loaf, and whatever self-destructive thing he did to land himself in the papers on any given day only helped our situation. It’s a sad fact that dying is one of the best career moves you can make when you consider the back catalog.

    I got involved because was Cole was coming to town for a string of shows at Winterland. I think Albert King was opening for him and all three nights were completely sold out. This was the summer of ’71, right after Morrison woke up dead over in Paris, and the company was understandably a little concerned about their investment.
    Z asked me to keep an eye on their boy; you know, keep him out of major trouble, and make sure he found his way to the venue at a decent hour and in reasonable shape. I have to admit, I was a little star struck. I was young and still susceptible to British charm back then. Cole would soon cure me of that. Permanently.

    Despite all the drugs and booze, or probably because of them, our man had the sexy lure of the disaffected poet about him. I have to admit when I saw him strolling up the jet way at SFO’s International Terminal, a pretty blonde stewardess on each arm, that I was a little smitten and maybe just a little jealous.

    Safely delivered by Pan Am’s fit yet curvaceous handlers, Cole made a rather elliptical beeline toward me. As he got closer, I could tell he was sloshed, but he still tried to double down on his remaining charisma.

    “Hello, darling,” he purred, or slurred, I couldn’t yet tell which. Perhaps both.

    I said something to the effect of “Mr. Cole, I presume, how did you know I was waiting for you?”

    “Because, darling,” he buzzed (yea, it was both), “who else would such a beautiful woman wait for?” And with that, we were set to launch.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1