Román Leão

Category: Kingdoms of the Radio: A Novel

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout [ficção]

    RECORD REVIEW, ROCK HOUND MAGAZINE, VOL. 4, ISSUE 7 | 1970

    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 in the National Loaf who threw him to the ducks, 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 takes 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 Loaf’s Cut the Loaf onward, 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. Founding National Loaf drummer Chas “Chalk” Woodrow provides a skittering background as if trying to escape the session before being caught up once again in Cole’s drama but finding no traction.

    Should we infer anything by whatever olive branch brought his contentious former bandmate, and longtime foil, 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]. Chalk 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 their damnedest 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 house 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

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

    SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA  |  1971

    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 damp 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 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-colored 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… you can 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 dug into the remedy, 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 sweated toxins, he untangled himself, took a shower, and hightailed it over to the Fillmore District.

    “Hello, Fred,” a spry eighty-four-year-old Liana Chaves answered the doorbell after Khumalo used it to play a brief but inspired solo. “Did I call you over?”

    “No, Ms. Chaves,” he fought to keep from shifting from foot-to-foot and becoming the young boy the woman always made him feel like. Khumalo supposed that compared to the octogenarian, 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 eighties 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 hidden in 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, tragédia, 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.”

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick (Pt. 1) [ficção]

    POINT ARENA, CALIFORNIA  |  1971

    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 actually not named Sammy—“get the fuck out.”

    Khumalo reached into the breast pocket of the non-breathing 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 declared to the Pacific Ocean slapping just beyond the asphalt escarpment that marked the edge of the continent, and by default, the Burger Shack’s domain. 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 a giant 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 metric fuck-ton of dirt, rocks, and duck shit in the process.

    When the filth finally cleared, Khumalo expected to lock eyes with a typical wired-to-the-gills gearhead, or maybe 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—the spitting image of Jesus Hieronymus 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, 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 billowing out of the slowly turning rusted rooftop turbine vent.

    “That would probably be the lunch rush,” he answered, rescuing the now-extinguished joint and pointing back toward the shack with it.

    “Not that,” the apparent maniac pointed at his hand. “That.”

    “Oh, right,” Khumalo shook off his first impression of the driver as Big J’s stunt double and fumbled for his Zippo.

    The two born iconoclasts connected with the heedless 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 yet 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 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 paroxysms of 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 medicine 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, a development that came with a 50 percent chance of starting a forest fire. “The stick.”

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

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    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 certainly had the sexy lure of the disaffected poet about him. When I saw him strolling down the jet way at the International Terminal, a pretty blonde stewardess on each arm, I was a little smitten and maybe just a little jealous.

    Safely delivered by Pan Am’s fit and 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.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1 [ficção]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    What fiery creation / Streaking across the skies… I love that fucking song! Oh yea, sorry, man. Are we rolling then? I was just about to say how much we all dug that “lost” Lucious Cole album when it came out. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard that Cole had died. The first time. I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.

    I was driving back up from surfing the Point break all morning with Chae. You’ve already talked to Chae, right? Man, I had just bought the Olds back then, a beautiful 1970 442 in Nocturne Mist. The top was down, of course, and the wind was blowing her long black hair around like she was in a shampoo commercial.

    I had the radio tuned to a pirate station from out in Boonville and they were playing a block of tunes from Cole’s old band, the National Loaf—not really my favorite as I’ve always been more of an R&B guy. Otis, Sam and Dave, that’s my bag. James Brown! Say it Loud!

    At the end of Cut the Loaf, their last big hit before Cole was shitcanned due to his uncool behavior, and alarming—even for that time—drug use, the DJ broke in and laid the trip on us that he was gone. It was still all rumors as to what had actually happened to him. I remember one story said that he had choked on his own vomit while crashing his motorcycle into an airplane. Hey, man, you have to consider the times, we had just lost Jimi, Janis, and fucking Morrison in quick succession, so we were getting used to shitty news and were becoming… uh, a little cynical.

    Chae was a big Lucious Cole fan, especially of the more personal solo stuff he had put out after the Loaf breakup. Personally, I can’t stand that singer-songwriter shit. For my money, if you can’t say it with a five-piece horn section, then maybe you should just keep it to yourself, that’s just me. Chae was pretty upset and moped around the rest of the day playing Cole’s records until I secretly started being glad that he was dead.

    Cole had checked out at the going sell-by date of 27 and everyone made a big deal of him being another member of the “club;” yet another case of wasted youth and potential. I’m here to tell you that 27 didn’t seem all that young back then. A lot of us had grown up hard and fast when the ’60s went up like a house fire next door to a fireworks factory. All the “flower power” bullshit that you hear about those days had been pretty well defoliated in Vietnam before getting stabbed to death by the Angels out at Altamont.

    I did one tour flying Hueys overseas—lift and assault—and got out just before the shit really hit the fan. It was no picnic, but nothing like those poor fuckers had to deal with after Tet. At least I ended up with a marketable skill after all that grind.

    Back home, I found enough action on both sides of the law to keep me flying with enough under-the-table cash and free weed that I was able to by my own chopper before too long and stay high enough to often forget where I had seen it last.

    My main gig before the farm was flying rescue for the County and fire spotting for the Department of Forestry. I was still keeping the hair high and tight at that time, and as a decorated vet, I didn’t attract too much heat. Of course, I ran night missions in the Triangle come harvest time. Back then, I was the only motherfucker crazy enough to make those runs, although our drunk uncle Sam was churning out flyers younger and crazier than me by the DC-8 load.

    You could say that I was mixed up with the family out at Girassol from day one. My man Zongo Khumalo was the one that first got permission to be there from the old lady that owned it, back before things got really weird. I used to party with Zongo when I first got back from Vietnam, back when he was still going by what he started referring to as his “slave name.”

    Zongo is tan as a motherfucker, but he’s not Africa tan, if you know what I mean, and the only two things he’s ever been a slave to are weed and pussy. As you can imagine, we hit it off pretty well.

    I do feel partly responsible for what happened, but when I really think about it, the whole downfall of Girassol was Lucious Cole’s fault from the jump.

    You know, if Chae hadn’t been feeling so bummed out that day, I wouldn’t have taken her out there with me and maybe she wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in all that foolishness. I guess some things are just written in the fucking stars.

    I read somewhere lately that the word disaster actually means “bad star.” That’s really when the trouble started, when that bad star showed up.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1 [ficção]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    I came down to San Francisco in ’68… no, ’69; it was right after the whole Manson Family thing. I tried to make something happen out there for a couple of years, but the scene had been getting pretty heavy. It seemed like all of a sudden, there was a lot of speed on the street, really nasty shit. Of course, I was no Boy Scout in those days. After staying up for seven days straight—pretty badly bent, actually—I had what you could call a mystic vision. Sure, you could call it a psychic break, but I prefer mystic vision.

    I was walking down Broadway headed downhill from Columbus past the Condor and the Hungry I looking to pop up Romolo to the bar under the Basque Hotel for a shot and a beer to help focus my spinning eyeballs. I had no sooner passed under the giant Carol Doda sign—the one with the blinking red nipples—that I heard a voice calling me.

    Now, I had been inside the Condor a time or 20 and had run into, or had nearly been run down by, Carol enough times to recognize her voice. This sounded like her, but… not. It’s hard to explain.

    “Fred,” she said. I was still answering to my slave name at that time. “You are now known as Zongo Khumalo.” Heavy, right? Well, Carol Doda calling me out to change my name would have been weird enough, but here’s the drop; she was nowhere to be seen.

    “Fred Williams no longer exists,” the voice explained. “Zongo Khumalo, it is time to fulfill your destiny.” The voice was really starting to fuck with my head. I kind of stumbled off the curb and that’s when I saw it. It was the sign.

    I don’t mean it was a sign, I mean it was the sign. I know it sounds crazy, but the giant Condor sign was talking to me. I must have stood there a half-an-hour in the piss-smelling gutter rapping with the Giant Neon Doda before one of the club’s goons gave me the bum’s rush.

    I had a plan by then anyway.

    I knew this old lady that lived over on Fillmore that had inherited some property up in Mendo. I had been doing some work for her at her place—really nice old pad, lots of old hard wood detailing that you just never see anymore.

    I must have mentioned to her at some point that I used to live up that way so when she got a letter from an attorney telling her that she now owned this place, she started talking about having me check it out for her.

    I didn’t have any plans to go back up the coast at the time. You know, I thought the City was where it was happening and, more importantly, I had done the Emerald Triangle trip. People think it’s easy—living the life of luxury—but it’s not all bare tits and bong hits. You really have to have your act together out there. I shined her on for a few months, not having any intention of taking her up on it. I had seen a lot of those old places that hadn’t been kept up properly. The woods are no joke. You have to keep an eye on the environment or it reclaims what you’ve so carefully carved out as soon as you turn your head.

    All of this was in the back of my mind when the Giant Neon Doda started telling me to go out and prepare a place to ride out whatever was coming down the pike. It really did feel like it was all… what’s the word? Predestined, or something.