by Don Winslow
Surfers? An assassination attempt?
Surfers?
California surfers?!
(“Okay, let’s coordinate our watches.”
Uhhhhhh… watches?)
Anyway, Chon drives to the hospital.
8
“Who did this to you?” Chon asks.
Sam Casey, one of their best “sales partners,” lies in bed with a broken jaw, a concussion, his right arm fractured in three places, and internal bleeding.
Someone beat the holy hell out of Sam.
“Brian Hennessy and three of his surfer buddies,” Sam says through his wired jaw. “I was selling them a lousy QP and they ripped me off.”
“You’ve sold to them before, right?” Chon asks.
One of Ben and Chon’s cardinal rules: never sell to anyone you don’t know.
Maybe only Chon would know that “cardinal rule” doesn’t come from the Catholic religious official, but from the Latin “ cardo, ” which means “hinge.” So a cardinal rule is something that everything else hinges upon.
Everything hinges upon not selling dope to people you don’t know.
And know well.
“I’ve sold to them a dozen times,” Sam says. “Never any trouble.”
“Okay, so look, the bills are covered,” Chon says. Ben has set up a shell corporation through which he offers health insurance to sales partners who are fully vested. “I’ll take care of Brian. Do me a favor, though? Don’t mention this to Ben?”
Because Ben doesn’t believe in violence.
9
Chon does.
10
It’s an age-old debate, not to be rehashed here, but basically Ben believes that to answer violence with violence only begets more violence, while Chon believes that to answer violence with nonviolence only begets more violence, his evidence being the entire history of humanity.
Oddly enough, they both believe in karma-what goes around comes around-except with Chon it comes around in a freaking hurry and usually with ill intent.
What Chon calls “microwave karma.”
Together, Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist.
Ben is the paci
Chon is the fist.
11
Rule of life Okay, more of a strong suggestion If you absolutely have to be an asshole?
Make yourself a little hard to find.
Go do your assholian bullshit and then lock yourself in your mother’s basement and put a towel over the Xbox to block the light, but don’t — beat someone up and then go surfing in your usual spot.
Just don’t do it, asshole.
First of all, try not being a dick for a change and see how that works out, but in any case don’t park your van where you usually stick the piece of shit while you’re out for one of your “sessions,” bra, because someone like Chon or, in this case, Chon might take a baseball bat to it.
Chon smashes out the headlights, the taillights, the windshield, and all the windows (baseball in the Steroid Era), then leans on the horn until Brian and his three buddies madly paddle in like “natives” in one of those old Tarzan movies.
Brian, who is a big freaking dude, comes out of the water first, screaming, “Dude, what the fuck?!”
Chon slides out of the car, drops the bat, and asks, “Are you Brian?”
“Yeah.”
Bad answer.
Seriously.
Bad answer.
12
Billy Jack.
You’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about, don’t even try to pretend that…
Okay, fine Chon’s sweeping inside roundhouse kick breaks Brian’s jaw and gives him a concussion before he even hits the dirt unconscious, little pound signs in his eyes like it’s a cartoon.
Chon steps over Brian’s prone body and drives his fist into the solar plexus of Buddy One, bending him over. Chon grabs the back of Buddy One’s head and pulls it down as he drives his knee up into Buddy One’s face, then throws him away and moves on to Buddy Two, who lifts his fists up beside his face, which does no good at all as Chon sweep-kicks him in the lower right leg, knocking him off his feet. The back of Buddy Two’s head hits the ground hard, but not as hard as the two side-blade kicks that Chon delivers to his face, shattering his nose and rendering him, as they say, unconscious, as Buddy Three…
Buddy Three…
Ahhh, Buddy Three.
13
Sad Fact of Life Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.
Never.
Ever.
“You can come down the evolutionary ladder,” Chon has observed to Ben and O; “you can’t climb up.”
(Okay, there’s always that ya-yo in the mall trying to run up the down escalator, but that just proves the point.)
So Buddy Three, having witnessed the utter destruction of his three pals in a matter of single-digit seconds, flees to the inside of the van (where, if he were smart, he would remain) and emerges (see?) with a pistol.
And says to Chon,
“ Now what are you going to do, asshole?”
The prosecution rests.
God is God.
Darwin is Darwin.
14
EXT. BEACH PARKING LOT — DAY
An UNCONSCIOUS SURFER with a PISTOL (with the safety on) jammed in his mouth lies slumped out of the sliding door of a van. TWO OTHER SURFERS lie in fetal positions on the ground.
In their wet suits, they look like baby seals in a PETA clip.
CHON roots around in the console of the van and comes up with a plastic-wrapped QUARTER POUND of dope, which he jams into his jacket pocket.
Then he steps over to a fourth surfer, BRIAN, who is on all fours, trying unsuccessfully to get to his feet.
Chon kicks him in the ribs.
Several times.
Then grabs him by the collar and drags him over to the van.
CHON
Brian, let the word go forth from this time and place: It is not okay to steal our product. It is especially not okay to lay hands on our people. And one other thing Chon stretches Brian’s right arm over the edge of the van’s bumper, then picks up the baseball bat and
CRACK!
Brian screams.
CHON
— next time I’ll kill you.
15
Time to go.
O’s trying to get out of the fucking house.
Very expensive house in the exclusive gated community of Monarch Bay.
Except Paqu is, like, on it.
“What are you going to do with your life?” she asks.
“I dunno.”
“Are you going back to school?”
“I dunno.”
“Are you going to get a job?”
“I dunno.”
Check Paqu out Blonde hair, perfectly coiffed.
Chiseled (not metaphorically) features.
Makeup perrrfect.
A couple of gr worth of clothing on her perrrfectly toned, sculpted body that features TTDF.
Tits To Die For.
(Many male ships have been wrecked on those cliffs, my friend. Crashed and broken apart. Y chromosomes flailing the crazy-bad whitewater waiting for a jet ski that ain’t coming.)
Now she turns her formidable tits and formidabler eyes on O. “Well, you have to do something.”
“I dunno,” O answers, wilting under the four-point gaze.
“You have thirty days,” Paqu says.
“To…”
“Get a job or go back to school,” Paqu answers, cutting up strawberries and putting the pieces into a blender with two scoops of protein powder.
She’s been into “power smoothies” lately.
“Oh God,” O answers, “have you been to one of those tough love seminars again?”
“DVD,” Paqu answers.
“Did Four put you up to this?” O asks.
She knows that Four put her up to it because he doesn’t want an “adult child” cluttering up the house he
thinks is his just because he nails Paqu in it.
I was in this house before you were, O thinks.
Come to think of it, I was in Paqu before you were.
“Nobody put me up to it,” Paqu yells over the whirl of the blender. “I have a mind of my own, you know. And if you go back to school, you have to take it seriously.”
O had a 1.7 GPA at Saddleback before she gave up the charade entirely and just stopped going.
“What if I don’t?” she asks.
“Don’t what?”
“Will you shut that fucking thing off?”
Paqu turns off the blender and pours her power smoothie into a glass. O knows that in a half hour she’ll go to the gym to work with her personal trainer for two hours, then drink a “meal replacement shake,” then go to yoga before coming home for a power nap. Then she’ll spend two hours getting herself ready for when Four comes home.
And she thinks I’m a useless cunt, O thinks.
“You have a power-smoothie mustache,” O tells her.
“If you don’t get a job or go back to school,” Paqu says, wiping her upper lip with the back of her index finger, “you can’t live here anymore. You’ll have to find your own place.”
“I don’t have money for my own place.”
“That is not my problem,” Paqu says-obviously practiced from the DVD.
But they both know that it is.
Paqu’s problem, that is.
She’ll forget about it, O thinks, cognizant of Paqu’s Bipolar Approach To Parenting.
Paqu has wide swings between
Absent Neglectful Mother and
Smothering Controlling Mother
So, like, Paqu will take off on — a European vacation
Rehab
Spiritual Retreat or just
Another Affair
And totally forget about O.
Then she’ll come back, feel guilty, and go in the
Complete Other Direction
Micromanaging O’s life down to the tiniest details of clothing, friends, education (or lack thereof), career (see “education”), and protein-carbohydrate balance, and was literally up her ass during a truly unfortunate “colonic” phase.
It’s Either/Or
There is no middle ground, and it has been
Ever thus.
The worst is when Paqu comes back from rehab or a spiritual retreat. Having fixed herself, she sets out to fix O.
“I’m not broken,” O argued one time.
“Oh, darling,” Paqu answered, “we’re all broken.”
Indeed, O thought, Paqu does spend a lot of time in the body shop. Anyhoo, after a long discussion about O’s denial regarding her “brokenness” it was decided that self-realization was a river that simply couldn’t be pushed and that O would have to remain in the eddy of her own delusion. Which was just fine with O, although she was pretty sure that Delusional Eddy was a guy Paqu briefly dated.
But now this thirty-day thing.
O heads for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To join the Peace Corps,” O answers.
Or go see Chon.
Which is the
Exact opposite.
16
Actually it was the fact that O had no freaking idea what she was going to do with her life that led Ben and Chon into the marijuana business two years ago because it engendered a discussion of “vocation,” and wordsmith Chon observed that “vocation” is merely one vowel removed from “vacation” yet could be considered an antonym.
That is vocation (n., from the Latin verb “to call”): an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which he or she is suited, trained, or qualified vacation (n.): freedom from occupation
“But,” Ben asked, “do you want freedom from something to which you’re especially drawn? Probably not.”
So, on his next deployment, Chon came home with A Purple Heart
A new set of nightmares and
17
A seed.
The White Widow.
A particularly fine, THC-laden breed of cannabis.
When the seed of an idea meets the actual, physical seed it is
Seminal. seminal (adj.)
1. Pertaining to, containing, or consisting of semen (uhhhh, no)
2. Botany: of or pertaining to seed (obviously)
3. Having possibilities of future development (oh, hell yes)
4. Highly original and influencing the development of future events (well, let’s hope so)
Ben took this seminal seed and, actualizing the potential for future development, developed the hell out of it in highly original ways that would influence future events.
Ben started to breed a new plant.
18
First he separated the male plants from the female plants.
“Awww,” O said, “that’s kind of sad.”
“We don’t want accidental fertilization.”
“Couldn’t we just put tiny little condoms on the male plants?” O asked.
Ben told her that they couldn’t.
O asked, “How can you tell the male from the female plants?”
“The stamens look like balls,” Ben said.
“Well, there you go.”
“We choose a male plant,” Ben explained, “take its pollen, and pollinate the female plant.”
“I might need a few minutes to myself here,” O said.
O found it highly amusing that Ben created an Isle of Lesbos-a virtual Women’s Prison Movie-marijuana farm. She also took a certain neo-feminist pride that the most powerful, juicy, THC-laden buds came from the females.
Anyway, Ben used the seed produced by the pollinated female to create what is known in genetics as the F1 hybrid. Then he grew that plant, took its seed, and bred it back with the parent plant.
“With the parent?” O asked.
“Yup.”
“ Iiiiiccck,” O answered. “That’s, like, incest.”
“Not like. Is.”
“Cue the banjo.”
She came to refer to Ben’s marijuana crop as “L.A.”
Not “Los Angeles.”
“Lesbian Appalachia.”
19
Ben kept inbreeding like a European royal family, generation after generation, until he produced not a Tea Party member or a drooling pink-eyed idiot, but a female plant whose fecund buds veritably dripped (okay, not really) with THC.
Tetrahydrocannabinol.
Aka delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol.
Aka dronabinol.
The main psychoactive substance in marijuana.
(For the blazers out there-it’s why you’re too high right now to understand “psychoactive substance.”)
Ben the Mad Botanist didn’t produce a Porsche, he produced a Lamborghini.
Not a Rolex but a Patek.
If Ben’s blend were a horse, it would be Secretariat.
A mountain, Everest.
Michael Jordan.
Tiger Woods
(before).
The max.
The ult.
Cherry Garcia.
Hydroponic cannabis.
20
“Hydro,” of course, means water, and there are many advantages to growing cannabis in water instead of in soil.
(For those of you paying close attention-it’s tetra- hydro cannabinol, remember?)
You get higher, faster yields because hydroponic cultivation bypasses the root web. A crop is usually ready in twelve weeks-four harvests a year-and you control your own “sunshine” and “weather.” Therefore, you can rotate your cultivation from grow house to grow house so as to have a continuous yield.
You don’t have soil-borne pests and parasites. You don’t have to worry that you’re going to wake up one morning and find that three months of work is being eaten or dying of a communicable disease. Ergo, you’re not going to spray your plants with toxic pesticides and other shit.
Because it’s more automated, hydroponic cu
ltivation requires less labor. The greater automation requires a higher start-up cost, but it can be amortized over several years, and the higher yield more than makes up for the initial outlay.
Ben also had a philosophical reason for going hydro.
“Human beings are mostly water,” he told Chon and O. “So it’s like the hydro is going home.”
“That’s sweet,” O said.
“Or stupid,” Chon added.
In any case, it took a lot more than just water to get the business started.
It took money, and a lot of it.
21
Start-up costs.
They already had the big-ticket item-the primo plant-so then it was a matter of hardware.
The biggest item was a house.
The selection of which was tricky, because it’s not so much the house, it’s what they had to put in the house. Marijuana, yes, thank you-but to grow the marijuana required, among other things Grow lamps.
Metal halide for the vegetative stage.
(O assured them she could achieve a vegetative state without a grow lamp, although one of those sun reflectors was always nice.)
High-pressure sodium for the flowering phase.
Each lamp took a thousand-watt bulb.
Each bulb could light fifteen to twenty plants.
During the vegetative stage those lamps were going to be on sixteen to eighteen hours a day, so they were going to produce, in addition to light, a hell of a lot of heat, which, unless you’re intending to do Bikram yoga in there, is a problem.
(“I tried Bikram yoga,” O told the boys.
“And?”
