Román Leão

Tag: commune

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 4

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    Once we decided to renovate Girassol, I figured I ought to let Mrs. Chaves know what was going on; that way if we ran into a hassle, we would be coming from a place of righteousness.

    I had to go into town and call her from the payphone at Sammy’s. Once I told her that the big house was still standing and in amazingly good condition, she actually wept on the phone. I told her the other buildings were a loss, but she was cool with us building some new ones. There was no electricity out to the property, but the gas lines were somehow still intact and the same company that provided it back when Mrs. Chaves lived there was still around.

    I got her to call the company and let them know that she now owned the property and wanted the gas back on. They said it might take a while since they would have to check the hookups, but it would be all right to put it in my name so that we could pay the bill. In the meantime, we had plenty of firewood from the tear downs.

    In fact, when we finally finished loading in all of the salvaged building materials, a girlfriend of Enrique’s brought out a jug of morning glory wine she had made and we had a huge bonfire.

    The acid-like effects of morning glory seeds was one of those things I had always heard about but never tried as they had a bad reputation for making you really sick as well as really high. For me, there’s nothing worse than losing your lunch while tripping balls, but this chick had figured out a way to extract the good shit and filter out the part that makes you nauseous.

    We were all tired from schlepping salvage all week but also had the mellow feeling of a job well done. We built a big pile of lumber we knew we couldn’t use again and all took a big drink of the wine. She called it wine, but had actually used Everclear in her process so it packed a punch like a smack from a bat.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 4

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    Once we put the word out on the street about what we wanted to build, it was amazing how quickly it caught on. There were a lot of heads that had been at loose ends, which was causing them heat in some of the small towns around the Bay Area. Small towns? What am I saying? They were all small towns! Still are, when it comes down to it. At least in the head.

    A boonie rat buddy of mine named Ikaia Keala—we called him Sticky Icky in-country—used to do under-the-table construction jobs around the county and had somehow pulled the gig to dismantle the buildings on a crumbling old resort. I think local kids kept breaking in and the county was afraid of getting sued if some drunk teenager got himself parboiled in the hot springs.

    Sticky said that we could have the salvage if; one, we helped him take it all apart, and, two, if we got it all the hell out of there. You should have seen the ragtag caravan of pickups, flatbeds, vans—whatever we could get our hands on—heading further up into the woods once we finished tearing those places down. We were like an army of ants all carrying pieces of some giant dead bug back to the nest.

    We hadn’t had time to improve the way in, and there had been some genuine—and well considered, in my opinion—arguments against it. It would be harder for the county to sweep in and hassle us if we left the road impassible, so it ended being up to me to lift the salvage up and over the tangled growth with the chopper. It was really weird, I felt like I was back in ’Nam again, helping to establish an LZ.

    Once a stick, always a stick.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Police Chief Warren Burton 1 [fiçcão]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    Of course I remember when that so-called rock star disappeared in San Francisco. I still had some friends on the force out that way. You can’t believe the stories they used to tell me; drug addicts from all over the country pouring in to the City and the city government refusing to deal with it.

    How would you like it if you got up to go to work one morning and some filthy young runaway was breast-feeding her malnourished baby on your front stoop?

    Girassol? That was something else entirely. At least we had them all in one place; out of the way. It was almost like they sent themselves to their own refugee camp.

    It worked for a while, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This SFPD friend of mine that I knew in Korea got the call that night of a possible drowning out at Ocean Beach. That strip has a notorious riptide, especially around ebb.

    The way my buddy explained it is there are billions of gallons of water that come pouring out of the Bay between high and low tides and it meets an unbelievably massive wall of sand just outside the Golden Gate which shoots the water both north to Marin and south to Monterey. Get caught in that and you’d be wishing you fell into a Mixmaster instead.

    He got a call that some morning joggers found a paint-spattered pair of coveralls that matched an APB for a possible suicide. It was Lucious Cole. The two yahoos that were supposed to be taking care of him called it in, saying that he had been talking about ending it and had somehow gotten away from them. Of course there were drugs involved. That’s no real surprise, is it?

    They never did find the body. After a while, everyone just figured that Cole ended up shark food and called it a day.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell [ficção]

    BOONVILLE, CALIFORNIA  |  1995

    Joaninha pulled her 1982 Honda Accord up to the high curb in front of the Boonville Mercantile and killed the engine. The weary mid-size sedan, however, had its own ideas and continued to diesel as if it was having an epileptic fit as the young woman gathered up the items that rattled out of her purse on the bumpy drive over from Ukiah.

    She was glad that she was almost finished with making the daily trip over to the college, but wasn’t looking forward to sinking money that she didn’t have into the aging car to ensure that she could achieve escape velocity from her hometown. Graduation was coming up fast and Joaninha was hoping that the Accord and her journalism degree would get her at least as far away as the East Bay, maybe Humboldt County.

    “Just a moment!” A cheerful voice from the Mercantile’s backroom called out as she triggered the tiny bronze Tibetan bells hanging on the shop’s front door.

    “It’s just me,” Joaninha called back. “I can take over if you want, Mom.” The familiar earthy smell of Nag Champa incense filled her senses as the stress of upcoming finals melted away, at least for the moment.

    “Sera, thank goodness,” a lively gray-haired woman in her early 50s bustled out from the stockroom, wrestling herself into a wool sweater as she walked. “Where is Kiḍa today?” Joaninha’s mother asked, using her native Marathi translation of a name she found, frankly, ridiculous.

    “He drove over the mountain today, mom. He is finally starting the interviews for his project.”

    “I don’t know why your boyfriend wants to talk to those idiots,” an old-timer shopping with a female eclectus parrot on his shoulder chimed unbidden into the conversation.

    “I don’t remember asking your opinion, Floyd,” Joaninha’s mother snapped, long having had enough of the local’s morning commentary on everything from the weather to Bill Clinton’s recent remarks on the Oklahoma City bombing.

    “Hey, I’m just saying…” the man replied. The bright red and purple parrot, uncharacteristically, was silent on the matter.

    “That’s your problem, Floyd,” the woman pointed out, “you are always ‘just saying!’ Why don’t you keep your trap shut for a change.”

    “Keep your trap shut! Keep your trap shut!” The tie-dyed-colored bird joyfully joined in the dialogue.

    “You should follow the advice of your feathered friend, Floyd,” Mrs. Joaninha advised as she grabbed her keys to leave. “Between the two of you, she’s the only one with any sense.”

    This last parry finally brought a moment of quiet to the Mercantile as the parrot bobbed up and down on Floyd’s shoulder in silent agreement.

    “Where are you running off to, Mom?” Joaninha asked as she punched the No Sale key on the ancient cash register. “It looks like we have enough change in the till to take care of the afternoon rush.” She raised one eyebrow toward the store’s one customer now that her Mom was finally done berating him.

    “I need to go drive your father to the clinic,” the woman explained, speaking back over her overtly parrotless shoulder as the bronze bells tinkled again. “He was in the wood shop and chopped off a finger or something, I don’t know. You know your father.”

    “Mom! How long ago did he call you?”

    “Don’t worry, mulagī,” the woman dismissed her daughter’s fears out of hand. “Your father is such a drama king. I’ll probably be right back.”

    “Shut your trap!” The parrot called out in farewell.

    “What can I do you for, Mr. Anderson?” Joaninha made the decision to not worry that her father might be bleeding out on the floor of his shop.

    “Just the usual,” the man sighed as he hefted a ten-pound bag of Roudybush bird pellets onto the counter. “I’m serious, you know. I don’t think your man should be out there kicking over rocks that are better left undisturbed.”

    “Well, for starters, he’s not ‘my man’, Mr. Anderson, but I’m sure that he would appreciate your concern. That’ll be four dollars.” Joaninha took the fiver proffered from her customer and hit the till, handing him back his change. “TK’s a big boy, he can take care of himself. I think it’s important that he works through his abandonment issues while he’s still relatively young.”

    “Is that what he’s up to?” Anderson asked, the parrot leaning in to hear the response. “Those cultists didn’t abandon your man, the State had to go in and take him away before those cult dummies killed him!”

    “TK says Girassol was a commune, not a cult,” Joaninha said, now thinking back to her own misgivings about the project. “I’m sure that everything will be fine.”

    “Commune, my ass!” Anderson snorted. “You just tell that boy to watch his six.”

    “I’ll do that, Mr. Anderson. You have a good day, now.”

    “Commune, my ass! Commune, my ass!” The parrot repeated as the pair retreated. “Commune, my ass!”

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift [ficção]

    UKIAH, CALIFORNIA  |  1995

    The Kid zipped up the ripstop nylon track bag he had just stuffed with everything he would need to conduct the interviews to complete his Senior film project. He had just spent the morning checking out one of the college’s brand new Sony DCR-VX1000 video cameras upon penalty of slow and painful death. He had also mortgaged his soul to the drama department for the use of one of their portable lighting rigs. If he failed to bring it back, he would be damned to be cast as Idiot One for whatever production called for protracted humiliation for the foreseeable future.

    On a whim, he had started out creating a documentary on his name. First name: The; last name: Kid. His unusual appellation had caused equal parts confusion, intrigue, and downright hassle in his twenty- four years, but it wasn’t until he started digging into the origins of his name, that the strangeness of it really began to reveal itself.

    The Kid, or, as he preferred to be called these days, TK (which at least teased the possibility of a name to be named later), had been born on one of the most notorious Mendocino communes of the early ’70s. From an early age, he had been told that his parents didn’t want to propagate any moribund Judeo-Christian mythologies by giving him a handle that echoed the very values they were trying to eschew.

    When Child Protection Services finally showed up, wondering why the child was not only missing from the closest school roster, but from any such registers, they had scribbled his no-name into the blanks where it remained even after they finally hauled him away from the wreckage of his parent’s utopian project.

    A knock on the door of his rented bedroom broke The Kid’s reverie. Serafina Joaninha, a young woman who often felt that she had more name than she knew what to do with, entered without waiting to be invited and asked the very question he had been putting off asking himself, “Are you ready for this?”

    Joaninha was a startling young beauty of Portuguese and Goan extraction, and The Kid was routinely unnerved by the way she always just seemed to appear when he was thinking of her. Of course, he did think of her a lot. The two met cute in a Mendocino College film class, the pair being the last two cinephiles sitting through a screening of the 1932 Danish film, Vampyr.

    The Kid, having been mesmerized by the slow-moving, dreamlike movie, hadn’t noticed Joaninha sitting next to him until the final frame. When he finally turned, for a moment he thought the Polish actress Rena Mandel had somehow escaped the screen and had joined him in the dark. Joaninha had the same uncanny dark eyes and doll-like mouth as the character of Giséle. The fact that she was wearing an antique lace-collared black dress only added to the illusion.

    “I got you something, Ken Burns,” Joaninha plopped down on The Kid’s unmade bed, giving the bag of equipment a little bounce while perfectly sure The Kid wasn’t going to complain, having long acquiesced any agency in her presence. She had originally been flattered by his look of disbelief that he was lucky enough to be noticed by her but was growing tired of The Kid’s tendency to put her on a pedestal.

    Perhaps when he finished his damn documentary, she thought, he would finally gain the confidence to realize his own worth. Joaninha was willing to wait a little longer, but she wasn’t interested in being worshiped. She had enough self-awareness to know that if they were going to make it, they would need to be equal partners in the relationship.

    “It’s a clapperboard!” The Kid exclaimed as Joaninha handed over the wooden device she had hidden behind her back. “That’s the one thing I forgot!”

    “I even got you some chalk. What are you calling this opus?”

    “I thought I’d name it after Cole’s final album,” The Kid said.

    “Kingdoms of the Radio, it is,” Joaninha pronounced and proceeded to chalk the title onto the clapperboard. “Let’s kick this thing off right now. Grab the camera.”

    The Kid, excited to start his long-planned project, dug out the video camera and tripod and set them up before the young woman.

    “Scene one apple, take one!” Joaninha announced. “Mark!” With that proclamation, she struck the clapperboard’s striped sticks together and they were both off to the movies.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Chae Burton 1 [ficção]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    Every community has its own creation myths; stories that bring members together in shared tradition while allowing new people to understand in a deeper way where the group was coming from. Girassol was no different.

    My favorite one was when Charlie almost shot Zongo and Enrique as they first popped out of the forest. I had taken a little hike into the woods to pee, so I missed it, but I would have loved to see Zongo’s face; not just at seeing the property for the first time, but staring down the barrel of an automatic for the first time as well. I’m guessing.

    Charlie used to love to tell how the huge Moon we had that night had risen above the tree line behind the mansion. It was a full moon at vernal equinox and came over the house due east, throwing some spooky shadows back over the courtyard.

    He’ll probably kill me for telling you this, but Charlie was always afraid of the Menehune. Ever since he was a little kid. Imagine the scene; it was dark, with this big full Moon rising over an abandoned ranch from the 1800s, and there are noises coming toward him.

    What would you do?

  • 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.