Román Leão

Tag: writing

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 2 [ficção]

    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 most of the time 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 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 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 coke 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 in 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 actually 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, just ended up rotting it down to the frame. It took us all 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.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1

    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 2 [ficção]

    
I first discovered the old Girassol Ranch by accident. When I finally bought my chopper, I talked my way into doing some fire spotting for the Department of Forestry. It had the added benefit of giving me an excuse to be be flying back and forth over the back forty when it was harvest time, and I could help some of my friends move some plants. No one was going to question the flights if I was supposed to by looking for flareups. Keep in mind, this was before CAMP and the sight of a helicopter made everyone itchy.

    Another benefit of being able to get above the trees was that I could see the surf break before I paddled out to it. If the wind was makai, or toward the ocean, it would help smooth out the faces of the waves offshore and keep their lips up. There were plenty of crunchers out there—I think the bottom drops away pretty quickly at Manchester Beach—but when the wind was just right and I had the break line to myself, it was paradise, man.

    The first thing you learn as a stick is to constantly be looking for a place to land. Choppers are like bumblebees, built totally wrong for extended flight. I mean, just look at the damn things; it’s only through sheer tenacity that either of us gets off the ground and I think that kind of pisses it off. The ground is always looking for a chance to take us back.

    I was coming back from where Bravo was working out toward Spy Rock when my engine took a shit. I lost all hydraulic pressure and had to fall back on auto-rotation, where I have to use the potential energy of my big chunk of glass and metal that really wants to fall out of the sky. I quickly reduced my pitch which took advantage of the wind flowing upward through the rotors and was able to keep them spinning, slowing my tearful reunion with the dirt.

    Luckily, I had noticed the courtyard of an abandoned farm on the way out and was able to aim my dead bumblebee toward it. The most butt-clenching part of what my old flight instructors unironically called a “controlled decent” is the flare. At the last minute, the stick has to yank the pitch back up to get the bird moving parallel to the ground before the big kiss-and-make-up with that dusty bitch.

    After I pried my chonies out of my clenched ass cheeks, I hopped out and took a look around. Out of necessity, I had developed a bit of a sixth sense back in ’Nam, and I had learned the hard way to pay attention to it. Ever since that first time, as soon I dropped onto the property, I would have the weird feeling of being watched.

    Of course, in time, there would be plenty of troublemakers there, but even when it was just me—and sometimes, Chae—I would always do a quick recon just to make sure that no one was going to mess with the chopper. I never saw anybody, or anything, for that matter; but I never could shake that feeling.

    All of the outbuildings that probably once housed the ranch workers were completely falling apart but the big house always looked to be in pretty good shape, almost like it was protected from the elements somehow. I don’t know when it was last lived in, but when Zongo made his way up there he said it was almost like the house had been waiting for him.

    Keep in mind that Zongo smokes a lot of weed.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1

    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 1)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 2)

  • The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings—Lew Welch

    Scanning the used books over at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madera, I came across several faded paperbacks by Beat writer Lew Welch. One of the lesser-known Beats, Welch is probably best known as the other hopeless drunk in Jack Kerouac’s majestically depressing Big Sur.

    Flipping through his work, however, I found Welch to be a gifted poet with a value system more in line with the nascent hippie movement that was emerging in the mid-to-late-’60s. That Welch disappeared into the woods around Nevada City with his 30-30 after writing a goodbye note only adds to the mystery of this important writer I had somehow missed during my fascination with all things Beat.

    Welch’s brief, lyrical chapbook The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings, originally published in 1969, and reprinted with three additional poems by Berkeley’s Sand Dollar in 1970, features a stunning wrap-around scratch board illustration of the Marin Headlands with a slightly more provincial San Francisco peeking (peaking?) over the hills.

    The title poem, the first in a pair of bookends that feature the mountain, intones the mantra: This is the last Place. There is nowhere else to go, as Welch boils down the western movement of humankind. Centuries and hordes of us, from every quarter of the earth, now piling up, and each wave going back to get some more. Buddy, you have no idea.

    The last poem, Song of the Turkey Buzzard, looks deeper into a riddle posed in a triptych of Zen-like koans (complete with commentary by Welsh’s literary alter−ego, the Red Monk): If you spend as much time on the Mountain as you should, She will always give you a Sentient Being to ride… What do you ride? (There is one right answer for every person, and only that person can really know what it is)

    Of course Welch, like anyone would, wishes for a cool totem animal like a mountain lion, but the mountain has other ideas: Praises, Tamalpais, Perfect in Wisdom and Beauty, She of the Wheeling Birds. Throughout the course of the poem, the mountain throws some pretty clear hints at him until in the second canto, he finally acquiesces, and given his final act two scant years later, it begs one to wonder if he hadn’t been planning it all along.

    With proper ceremony disembowel what I no longer need, that it might more quickly rot and tempt my new form NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN WING SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THEE O PERFECT O SWEETEST WATER O GLORIOUS WHEELING BIRD

    Sand Dollar

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 2) [ficção]

     “So there we were, at the Canadian border, five of us in a van crammed with instruments and two pounds of the best Humboldt County weed you could imagine,” Cole entertained a captive audience of very stoned fans with tales of adventure and debauchery on the road. “Chalky was the one driving as he hadn’t come on to the acid yet, and we were hoping to make it to Vancouver before he did.”

    Watching Cole from the corner of the dimly lit room through all the hash smoke, cigarette haze, and bullshit, sat a raven-haired 17-year-old with the unlikely appellation, Raenbeaux Starr. Blessed with an unerring sixth sense for trouble, Rosenda watched the girl watch from the opposite side of the room.

    “As soon as we drove up to the booth and the Mountie was giving Chalky the treatment, you know, ‘Where are you going in Canada? How long do you plan to stay? All of that—our fucking bass player lost his hold on reality. He lunged up between the front seats and starting raving and growling, “I’m a monster!”

    Caught up in pantomiming his story, Cole was oblivious to the girl staring a hole into the side of his face.

    “Now, Canadians have a very dry sense of humor,” Cole continued. “The Mountie simply looked at our bassist and asked, ‘Are you carrying any fruits or veg?’ It was all we could do not to just dissolve into maniacal laughter. Somehow, we got waved through and made it far enough down the road so that we could pull over and lose it. I actually pissed myself I was laughing so hard.”

    Rosenda noticed that while most of the assorted hangers-on were laughing at Cole’s story, the young girl in the corner had never shifted her gaze. She was, however, moving closer to the star, carrying with her a massive lit joint.

    The nymphean creature sidled up to Cole and took a huge hit before shotgunning the pungent smoke into his mouth, sensuously brushing his lips with her own. The crowd reacted with a mix of encouragement and bemusement, sparking Rosenda to question the act.

    “What?” she sputtered, the heady atmosphere in the room taking a toll on her faculties. “What’s wrong with that?”

    One of the heads that was sitting cross-legged under a massive purple batik mandala spoke up. “Oh, it’s groovy. It’s just that Raenbeaux’s trip is Angel Dust. You know, PCP? Your man there is gonna be engaged for the next few hours.

    “God damn it!” Rosenda raged. “You fucking idiots, I’m going to lose my job!”

    Back out on the curb, Shane’s thoughts had turned briefly toward wondering what he was going to do about dinner when the front door of the old house slammed open, straining the natural arc of its hinges. A totally nude and raving Lucious Cole took the wooden stairs three-at-a-time and took off down the middle of Webster, an enraged Rosenda in hot pursuit.

    “Bear, just don’t sit, there,” she panted, her legs furiously working her leather pumps in a futile attempt to overtake the flying Cole. “Catch him!”

    Shane took a second to take stock of the situation and then leapt into action. Stepping out of the Lincoln, it took several seconds for the uncharacteristically tall Irish-American to completely unfold his body, but when he did, he loomed in the throw of the streetlight like a pale, fire-topped menhir, or Celtic standing stone.

    “Cole!” he bellowed, his resonant baritone rattling the Navy glass in the loose window frames of the houses. “Not that way, mate! There be dragons!”

    The pinwheel-eyed rock star spun on his bleeding heels and headed straight for the driver who promptly clotheslined him, dropping him to the street.

    “I didn’t say kill him!” Rosenda gasped while catching up to both Cole and her breath.

    Shane quietly took stock of the situation and tossed the gasping woman the keys to the Lincoln’s vast trunk. “Get the rope.”

    “What? You can’t…”

    “Look, Karoline, do you want this guy around or not? In about 60 seconds, he is going to be up and back to playing Johnny-on-the-go. I don’t feel like driving around all night looking for him. Get me the rope.”

    Rosenda didn’t argue any further but retrieved a skein of yellow nylon cord. She began to ask why Shane carried rope, but immediately thought better of it. Besides, she was about to find out.

    With a weary grunt, Bear knelt down next to the unconscious Cole and placed one knee in his back while looping the rope around his wrists. With a deftness that suggested Bear might have either had some experience with animal husbandry or BDSM, he had the rock star hogtied so that no matter what superhuman strength he may temporarily possess; the man was going nowhere.

    “Hey,” a voice called out from the Victorian’s porch where a ragtag crowd had spilled out. “You can’t do that, man! That man has rights!”

    Bear chose to ignore the complaints and focused on wrestling the inert star into the backseat of the Lincoln.

    “Fascist!”

    That turned out to be the wrong tact to take with the former boxer. Although he had been too young to get drawn into the War, Shane had brothers that risked their lives to beat back the tide of extremism in Europe.

    Without saying a word, Shane gently shut the rear suicide door and walked around the front of the car. Once on the sidewalk, the streetlight threw his shadow across the entire front of the house, casting a pall on whatever meager protests were forthcoming.

    “Who said that?” He bellowed.

    “Hey man, you can’t just…” one of the heads started an objection and quickly ran out of steam as Shane stepped up.

    “So it was you?” He loomed.

    The wispy-bearded young man couldn’t have been a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet, but answered the big man’s question without too much tremor in his voice.

    “Yea, it was me… Man.”

    Shane took the young man’s measure as even the traffic on nearby Haight St. seemed to quiet down for once.

    “Good for you,” he finally spoke. “You should always stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. That’s what my brothers went to Europe and got their asses shot full of Nazi lead for. I applaud that sentiment, but in this instance, I promise you, your concerns are misplaced.”

    His reassurances delivered, Shane turned and walked back to the car, leaving the group on the porch speechless.

    “What are we going to do with him?” Rosenda asked, getting into the Lincoln’s passenger side.

    “We are going to sit on him until he gets his shit together. I know just the place.”

    “You really clocked him,” she said, peering at Cole over the headrest.

    “That’s why I get the big bucks,” Shane half-joked, while tied up on the backseat, an Englishman far from home dreamt of Elysian Fields.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1

    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 1)

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 1) [ficção]

    The black ’65 Lincoln Continental idled at the curb of the decrepit Victorian on Webster St. in the Lower Haight. Dry weeds reached out from a parched patch of dirt as if straining to see their sorry reflection in the perfectly polished chrome hubcaps. The driver, an Irishman named Bearach Shane, just Bear to friends and enemies alike, had been in this position many times driving for Zev Avidan’s record company. Shane was a man who knew where in the City to get just about anything one could want, and what Lucious Cole wanted was trouble.

    The house was a well-established stop on the downhill slide, and many customers who Shane escorted there over the years soon dropped clear out of sight. Once in a while he would see some former young and hungry musician down in the Tenderloin walking the streets in the zombie shuffle that all junkies eventually seemed to affect; the ones that didn’t just flat out stop breathing, that is.

    Still, Shane understood the drive to match their everyday lives with the thrill and adrenaline rush of the stage. Most professional musicians lived for that hour or two or three of total connection both with their art and their admirers. Everything else, whether it was sitting on a bus, sitting on a plane, sitting backstage, or sitting at home, was unbearable drudgery. And once they were pulled into that higher state, well, you just couldn’t yank out the plug in the same way that the roadies disassembled the back line.

    Shane also understood addiction; he came from a long line of alcohol enthusiasts. That wasn’t to say that he had some horrible back story, no worse than anyone else’s back in the day, no priest or drunk uncle ever laid a hand on him. Regardless, it fell to the old neighborhood palookas to raise him up as much as anybody could, or would, take credit for.

    Shane had grown up in the fog-shrouded streets of the Sunset District, just down the street from Celestial Records, although the building wasn’t a record company back in his youth. The square, two-story cinderblock office had once been a neighborhood gym, and he had spent a lot of time in his youth, working the heavy bag and sparring in the regulation-sized ring.

    A lot of people in the neighborhood said that he could have been a Golden Gloves champion if he had stuck with it, but Bear had other, less lofty, aspirations. By the time he was in his twenties, Bear knew the intricacies of navigating the City’s streets and alleyways as well as its myriad political and racial factions. He probably could have run for a seat as a City Supervisor, and won, but as he liked to tell people who asked, he wasn’t that corrupt.

    Shane rolled down the driver side window, lit a Camel unfiltered, and checked his thinning red hair in the rear view. The one conceit he was unwilling to make to Father Time was losing the fiery tint that marked him as a mac na hÉireann, or son of Ireland. Every six weeks he slipped into the back door of a beauty salon run by a Vietnamese refugee named Rosy and chased the gray away for another month and a half.

    His one vulnerability surveyed and assuaged, Shane clicked the radio on, leaving it low so he could still hear if there was trouble afoot. The late night DJ was talking up Cole’s upcoming run of shows and his eyes automatically shifted to the house. Anybody’s money whether tha’ English fucker was going to make his gig, he mused, at the same time wondering about the feasibility of getting some action going regarding that bet.

    He knew some old school hard-asses from back home that would love to see Cole go down if only because he was the Queen’s subject. Bear was more pragmatic than that, coupled with the fact that “back home” for him was about three miles away from where he was parked; he couldn’t fault the man for where he was born.

    Plus, the poor sod was under the ol’ broad’s thumb as much as anyone, maybe more. Shane knew enough professionals to understand that once a Brit started making a decent piece of change, her taxmen sniffed it out like the rotten bulldogs they were, and they’d be lucky to have a pot left to piss in.


    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1

    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 2

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

    I met Bravo as soon as I hit ground. We did up the last of my Colombian marching powder 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 an indentured servant, 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 to San Francisco.

    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.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1


  • Shit from an Old Notebook: Odds and Sods

    Sometimes when writing a long-form piece like a novel, you find yourself wandering down paths that don’t end up going anywhere, at least anywhere that helps the story.

    This one of those digressions that I rediscovered while cleaning out an old laptop that is not long for this world. I can remember where I was when I wrote it, high on a ridge over Fairfax, California, looking out the window of the little home office that I quickly threw together after the COVID pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt.

    I was lucky enough to be trapped in a honeypot where my view was across a wooded canyon. A few houses up the hill the road dead-ended at open space where my dog Biscuit and I could look down on the failure of modern civilization.

    Originally, I had the idea of making Burn Your Starry Crown a trilogy, checking in each time the tale-tail comet came back around, ultimately ending as an outer space yarn. I became disavowed of that idea as I quickly realized it was completely out of my ability to pull off. Maybe some day.

    As distinctly as I remember where I was, I have little-to-no idea what the heck I was thinking and/or smoking here. Enjoy.

    When the teacher became aware, he was cast out of a warm world of water and salt. He liked to think that he had been born of the biggest womb in the world: the Pacific Ocean. He was delivered, not squalling, but gasping for air on a pile of lava rocks; laid out like a sacrifice. But to whom should he be offered up? The teacher could think of no one.

    Nor could he imagine what chain of events led to his ignoble presentation; brined and bleeding from his corporal brushes with sharp coral. Nothing left to do but get on with it, he supposed, with very few clues as to what it might possibly entail.

    The teacher… did he always think of himself as a teacher? Did he actually have a name? He struggled to his feet and spoke the two words he remembered from somewhere; “I am.” His voice was parched and unfamiliar to him, but the intent was very recognizable. He knew he had been cast here for an important purpose, but exactly what that was might have to wait. He was famished.

    A lone figure appeared out of the dense growth surrounding the beach carrying a large polished plank with a fin attached. Perhaps some kind of shark totem, he thought. That’s a good sign, he recognized; and apparently he knew what a shark was.

    The man was tanned and had the bleached white hair of someone who spent his days in and around the ocean. When the figure saw the teacher standing naked on the heiau, he dropped his totem and spoke the two words that came to define their relationship going forward.

    “Holy shit.”

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony [ficção]

    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 cool 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 the 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 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… 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 a hit of medicine, 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 the poison of sweated toxins, he untangled himself, took a shower, and hightailed it over to the Fillmore District.

    “Hello, Fred,” a spry ninety-year-old Liana Chaves answered the doorbell after Khumalo used it to play an extended solo. “Did I call you over?”

    “No, Ms. Chaves,” he fought to keep from shifting from foot-to-foot and becoming the young boy Chaves always made him feel like. Khumalo supposed that compared to the nonagenarian, 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 nineties 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 growing out of 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, tragedy, 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.”

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick

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

    The self-ordained Zongo Khumalo descended the short staircase that led out of the back of Sammy’s Burger Shack where he had just been asked to turn in his whites and, in the words of the owner—a self-avowed asshole not named Sammy—“get the fuck out.”

    Khumalo reached into the breast pocket of the scratchy fuchsia polo shirt he had been required to purchase for the distinct privilege of flipping not Sammy’s shitty burgers and removed a battered red and white Marlboro soft pack containing a half-smoked joint of sinsemilla, the first half of which may have had a deleterious effect on the morning’s events.

    “Fuck it,” he announced to the Pacific Ocean that slapped just beyond the asphalt escarpment marking the edge of the Burger Shack’s domain and held a good bit of related detritus to help bolster the claim. A profusion of small star-shaped flowers of white, pink, and purple competed with similarly-hued burger wrappers for the privilege of being the landscaping’s most prominent feature.

    Khumalo had just taken a large hit when a convertible Oldsmobile came smashing into the Shack’s gravel parking lot like an iron meteorite. Just when he thought the heavy chunk of Detroit steel was going to end up becoming an artificial reef, the driver locked up the disc brakes and jerked his wheel to the left sending the machine into a four-wheel slide and kicking up a fuck-ton of dirt, rocks, and duck shit in the process.

    When the dust finally cleared, Khumalo expected to lock eyes with a typical wired-to-the-gills gearhead or one of the usual gonzo surfers that frequented the Shack after the morning break; instead, he was surprised to see—back-lit by the Sun still-rising toward apogee—a spitting image of Jesus the Christ himself.

    Charlie Perigo threw open the perfectly balanced driver-side door—back when Detroit rolling stock still had bodies “designed by Fisher”—and immediately zeroed in on Khumalo who stood agape in the slowly settling cloud of debris dressed in his grease-spattered polo with his joint hanging from his bottom lip held by a thin scrim of moisture.

    “Hey, brother,” Perigo addressed the incredulous ex-line cook. “What’s burnin’?” Khumalo turned back toward Sammy’s to see a plume of black smoke climbing out of the slowly turning rusted rooftop turbine vent.

    “That would probably be the lunch rush,” he answered, retrieving the now-extinguished joint and pointing toward the shack with it.

    “Not that,” the apparent maniac pointed at his hand. “That.”

    “Oh, right,” Khumalo recalibrated his first impression of Big J’s stunt double as he fumbled for his Zippo lighter.

    The two born iconoclasts connected with the natural force of a chemical reaction, Khumalo soon finding himself in the 442’s passenger seat, hanging on for dear life as the appropriately-named Perigo took the sharp shoreline turns at a full four-barrel roar.

    Perigo shouted something over the car’s 400-cubic-inch engine in maximum thrum as whole dinosaur dynasties were vaporized and shot out the dual exhaust, never to be thought of again.

    “What?” Khumalo shouted back in a register he didn’t recognize. As the Oldsmobile’s tight suspension groaned to counteract the brutal physics involved in the questionable choices Perigo was making on the turns, the force of inertia bent him toward the driver whom he began to suspect was completely insane.

    “I asked you,” Perigo shouted as he slammed the Hurst shifter into a higher gear, “have you ever been shot?” Before Khumalo could answer one way or another—and to tell the truth, he would have said “no,” had he time to gather his wits about him—Perigo lifted his white T-shirt to reveal an even whiter scar on his abdomen. The former cook took the bait.

    “Who shot you?” Williams finally played his part perfectly, coming in on cue as if rehearsed.

    “Charlie,” Perigo answered and started laughing like the lunatic Williams had now decided he most definitely was. Even years later, throughout the arc of their friendship, whenever the two men got together they performed their ritualistic greeting, each time Perigo dissolving into laughter so that Williams never did find out if it was the Vietcong or actually the man himself who pulled the trigger.

    “So, you were in ’Nam, man?” Williams asked, blindly groping around the floorboard for his dropped Zippo so he might steady his nerves for the next hairpin turn.

    “I did one tour and then got the fuck out,” Perigo shouted, deftly swerving to miss a dead fawn in the middle of the road.

    “Whaddya do there, if you don’t mind me asking?” Khumalo asked as he struggled to light what was left of his joint in the jet stream pouring in around the car’s windshield.

    “Chopper pilot,” Perigo answered, shifting into a gear that Khumalo was sure had no place on the Shoreline Highway.

    “You were a ’stick?’’’ Khumalo asked, passing the joint and hoping that its effects might just tame the maniac behind the wheel.

    “No, man,” Perigo corrected, taking a massive hit before losing the roach to the wind. “The stick.”

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1

  • 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.