Román Leão

Tag: radio

  • 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 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: Enrique Bravocado 2 [ficção]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    I don’t like to fly, let me just put that out there. The day I met Zongo, I was a wreck, having just got off the flight from McKinleyville. We hit some pretty gnarly turbulence over the coastal range and I was doing my deep meditation for most of the trip to keep from freaking out. It would have been a real drag if I had lost it, as I was carrying enough primo seeds from Humboldt County to revolutionize the entire situation out at Spy Rock.

    Can you believe that when I started helping some of the local farmers grow, they didn’t even separate out their female plants? When I started pulling out all the males by their roots, they thought I’d gone loco. After that first harvest, though, they all got on board.

    Anyway, after Zongo and I did all the speed he was carrying, we were rapping and he started telling me about the Girassol property. I’d never heard of it, and I had been around the county for a few years at that point. He said that some old lady he worked for from time-to-time in the City had inherited what remained of a ranch she had lived on as a kid and asked him to go check on the condition of the house that was there. Seeing how we were wired to the gills, we set out to find it as soon as we left the airport parking lot.

    I was still bouncing around in my dilapidated VW bus in those days. The salt air finally killed that beast, it ended up rotting it right down to the frame. Anyway, it took us until late afternoon to finally find what we thought was the turn off to the property.

    I immediately could see why I had never noticed it; the whole place sat behind an impenetrable thicket of blackberries with no way of knowing just how deep it was. There was no way the bus was going to make it through, so we took off on foot hacking our way through with machetes.

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2 [ficção]

    UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

    I met Bravo as soon as I hit ground. We did up the last of what I was holding and I caught a ride with him up to Mrs. Chaves’ property. The Mendo coast was different in those days. A lot slower, if you can imagine. I think there may have been one stoplight on the whole trip.

    The bottom had long fallen out of the timber and cattle businesses, and tourists, although around, weren’t everywhere. A couple of freaks in a busted-up VW van could still draw looks when we cruised through town.

    Bravo had been working on some of the remaining ranches as kind of a jack-of-all-trades, which suited him quite well. He told me that he had been a high school English teacher in the Bay Area, and couldn’t deal with seeing his former kids coming back from Vietnam in boxes, so he dropped out. He liked the repetition and the anonymity of working the fields. He also was stoked to be in the best shape of his life.

    Some of the established farms had started supplementing their income by growing the crazy weed, and my man was quite the expert, having lived up in Humboldt County. I was glad to hear that I would at least be able to find some smoke on the Garcia, as that was one of the factors that originally drove me to move down to the City.

    Part of me was glad that the rest of it was going to be hard if not impossible to get my hands on. As I had time to process the incident on Broadway, I could see that I had been getting pretty far out there.
    One good thing about being back in the Triangle was the utter lack of giant talking neon signs.