Román Leão

Tag: documentary

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

    POINT ARENA, CALIFORNIA  |  1995

    After the hour-long winding drive on Mountain View Road from Boonville, the sight of the blue Pacific Ocean was a revelation after the untamed stretch of green trees. The Kid was itching to stretch his legs and get centered before he started recording the locals talk about what they remembered about the early ’70s at Girassol.

    Having grown up in Mendocino County, he was ready for that job to be more difficult than it looked on paper. It wasn’t that the old hippies were wary about expounding about their glory days, it was often the case that there were large holes in their memories of the era, which they would then fill with unmitigated bullshit.

    The Kid parked his ’91 Light Blue Metallic Saturn SC2 coupe in front of the Lighthouse Café. He had spent a considerable amount of time making phone calls over the past few weeks talking the owners into letting him borrow their unused backroom for his project interviews. He finally played his ace card and told them that he had been born out at the infamous commune, something he hated to do but was going to have to get used to once the project was finished. The disclosure changed the owner’s attitude immediately and suddenly the documentary was real; as real as something that was going to take a semester of interviews and editing to finish, that is.

    “Hey, man,” a voice called from down the street. “Is that one of those new GM deals? How far the mighty have fallen.”

    “Excuse me?” The Kid turned around to see what appeared to be an aging stuntman coming toward him pointing at the back of the Saturn.

    “I remember when General Motors was proud to put their name on their cars. What is this shit?’

    “Can I help you?” The Kid said, eager to get inside the café and set up his equipment.

    “The question is, can I help you,” the man took off his Vietnam veteran baseball cap and stuck out his hand. “Charlie Perigo, at your service. You must be The Kid.”

    “That’s me,” The Kid declared, everything suddenly swinging into focus. Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Perigo.”

    “The honor’s mine, kid… or Mr. Kid, or… how are you dealing with it?”

    “TK, is fine.”

    “Far out. You can drop the Mr. Perigo business; it makes me feel like I’ve been pulled over. Charlie’s fine, or ‘The Stick,’”

    “OK, Mr. Stick,” The Kid motioned to the backseat of the Saturn. Would you mind giving me a hand with this stuff? Then I won’t have to make two trips.”

    “Not ‘Mr.’ Stick,” Perigo emphasized, “‘The’ Stick.”

    “Right.”

    “So, TK, have you ever been shot?”

    “Scene one banana, take one,” The Kid announced once the pair had set up in the backroom of the café. “Mark.”

    “I haven’t been in here since it was the Burger Shack,” Perigo noticed.

    “I see,” The Kid asked, hoping to move the conversation along as the video was rolling. “Did you move away after the commune split up?”

    “Nope,” Perigo answered, still trying to reconcile the room he was sitting in with the place he remembered. “86’d, I’m afraid. Honestly, I don’t remember why.”

    “I see. Did a lot of your… communards come out here, then?”

    “Ha! Communards. That would not have gone over too well with the feminist caucus, I’ll tell you that. You know, this place is where I first met Zongo.”

    “Zongo Khumalo? The guy arrested for trying to bomb the Pentagon with the Weathermen?”

    “I don’t know anything about that,” Perigo waved off the question. “I don’t know who your parents are, either.”

    “Excuse me?”


    “Your parents,” Perigo repeated, “I don’t know who they are.”

    “I didn’t ask you,” The Kid stopped the video. “That isn’t what is this is about.”

    “Isn’t it, though?” Perigo asked. “Do you get high, TK? We should take a break.”

  • 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.