documentary – Román Leão

The Kid zipped up the 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 painful death.

He had also mortgaged his soul to the drama department for the use of one of their portable lights. 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 down right 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 in 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 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 sitting through a screening of the 1932 Danish film, Vampyr.

The Kid, having been mesmerized by the slow-moving, dreamlike movie, hadn’t noticed the fellow cinephile 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. 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 bed, giving the bag of equipment a little bounce while perfectly sure The Kid wasn’t go to complain, having long recognized the effect her presence had on him. She had originally been flattered by his look of disbelief that he was lucky enough to be noticed by her but she was growing tired of The Kid’s tendency to put her on a pedestal.

Perhaps when he finished his damn documentary, 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 last 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.

Tag: documentary

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