Román Leão

Tag: kingdoms-of-the-radio

  • 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: Zongo Khumalo 3 [ficção]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    It had been a couple of years since I’d been back north, but I thought I knew every place there was to know. That’s one of the things that made me want to leave in the first place. I had directions and a map to Garissol from Mrs. Chaves, but they didn’t really make sense. Where she had drawn the road to the old ranch, there was only a solid wall of brambles. I knew that the fuckers grew fast in the county, but this looked like virgin territory.

    Enrique had a couple of big old machetes in the back of his bus from a harvest, so we decided to try and see what, if anything, was on the other side of the blackberries. We had spent so much time trying to find a road that seemed to no longer exist that the sun was starting to go down behind the tall trees. I guess if we hadn’t still been a little wired, we probably would have waited until the next day.

    It was pretty rough going, but we did start picking up signs of an old wagon road deep in the thicket. I found it incredible to think that maybe no one had been out this way since the very first cars drove up the coast. The very thought sent a chill up my spine, especially since the next thought was, “Why the hell not?”

  • 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.