Román Leão

Tag: family

  • 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: Charlie Perigo 3 [ficção]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    I had been surfing the late afternoon break at Manchester, north of the lighthouse, and the Sun was starting to drop behind the mountain. The great whites come in to feed when it gets dark, so I rode one last wave all the way to the beach, collected my stuff, and lashed my board to the chopper’s skid. Chae came and met me at the edge of the dunes. I had talked her into exploring the old ranch with me and she had showed up ready to go, dressed in cutoffs and hip boots. She looked so good, I almost asked if she wanted to forget the ranch altogether.

    I mentioned that being alone on the Girassol property always made me feel paranoid, like I was being watched from the tree line. This particular evening was really bad. I had a serious case of chicken skin by the time as soon as we landed. I could swear I heard voices, but I wasn’t about to say anything to Chae.

    It’s embarrassing, but as a kid, I was deathly afraid of the Menehune, the race of little people who live… well, in remote forgotten places like Girassol. I had an auntie from the Big Island who told me about them, and I never got over it. I know they’re supposed to be friendly; they were the ones who came out at night and built all the ancient temples and fishponds, but for some reason, they freaked me out. Maybe it was because they only came out at night. I never did like that story the cobbler and the elves, either.

    I know it’s wasn’t really in keeping with the whole peaceful warrior trip, but I used to keep my service piece, a Colt Commander, in the bird just in case I got bum rushed by a wild boar or some critter out in the deep country. I grabbed the gun and began my recon of the perimeter. By this time, the Sun was down and one of the fattest moons I had ever seen was rising up, casting the courtyard in an unearthly light.

    Across the clearing from the main house were the ruins of some smaller buildings, maybe worker’s quarters or something at one time. Behind that mess, was a dark tangle of green that made ’Nam look down right barren. That’s where the sound was coming from; because, of course it was.

    I have to say, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time down in the shit, not as much as the grunts, but the whole scene that night was bringing me right back to my time in-country. I took a defensive position behind one of the collapsed walls and waited for the little fuckers to come out of the woods. To my surprise, it wasn’t Menehune at all.

  • 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.”

  • 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: 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.

  • What’s in a Name? [Pt. 2]

    I was born Raymond Andrew Larsen in late-July of 1966, closing in on six decades ago as of this writing. Raymond is a family name, after a great-uncle on my father’s side, one of five born to an immigrant couple from the Azores. I think he helped keep my father on the straight and narrow after his father was out of the picture, a task with which even God themselves had limited obvious success.

    I have long suspected that my middle name came from Andy Nickolatos who happened to own the Black & White liquor store on the corner of Main St., a block and half from the house. I can neither confirm or deny—given that all parties, apart from myself, have passed on*—that the bestowal of Andrew either settled a bet or a sizable tab. I wonder what a middle name was worth in mid-60s commodities, and what that might translate into 21st-century dollars. It was probably a dodgy investment at best.

    By all accounts, my grandfather, a Dane named Larsen was a real piece of work. He and my grandmother, Elvira, were divorced—a rarity for Catholics in the 1950s—and he died when my dad was still pretty young. To this day, I have never seen an acknowledged photograph of the guy, although after dad passed I found a souvenir Los Angeles restaurant pic of him as a young kid sitting with two uptight-looking people. Not his usual crowd, to be sure.

    I know that Larsen in Danish means “son of Lars.” Having lived in California my whole life, the only Lars I know of is the drummer for Metallica, but we are roughly the same age. It would have been nice to fall into some of that Master of Puppets money, though.

    As dad got older, he dropped more stories of his strained relationship with his pater familias, none of them all too flattering. Of course, it was Louie’s name to claim or disavow, so we’re stuck with it, a tie to a lineage I really know little about. I’ve read that, like the Portuguese, the Danes have historically been really into boats, fish, and faded empire, so they should be my kind of people. Maybe we just got a bad one.

    After living under the Scandinavian surname for a half-century, I figured my pen name should pay homage to the side of Dad’s family I actually related to. Leão is Portuguese for lion, and given that, if pressed, I identify as a double Sun sign Leo, I can get behind that.

    Part of writing under another name, is the freedom a different headspace can afford you. At this point, Ray Larsen has done all kinds of different things, but they have followed a certain, if avowedly circuitous, path. This Leão motherfucker, though, who knows what shenanigans he might get up to?

    Quite coincidentally, the statement, “I read,” is translated in Portuguese as, “eu leio.” As far as Roman goes—or incongruously, “Román,” which denotes a Hungarian provenance (I don’t remember what I was smoke… erm, thinking)—it has historically simply meant, “a citizen of Rome.” If you’ve read your Phillip K. Dick, you’d know that we are all citizens of the Roman Empire, which never really ended but manipulates our materialistic and spiritually bankrupt world to this day.

    Wow, that got dark.

    As far as I know, Román Leão has no middle name, although he may be taking bids.

    *OK, Mom is still around, but either a) those characters cooked up a story that she believed. It was pretty early in the relationship, or b) she knew the gross percentage of GDP that the tab entailed and signed off on it. Either way, she ain’t sayin’.