Petra yawned. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m sure they could find somebody. Probably a lot nicer than the sort you usually end up with.”
“I’m not desperate, Mom. I just . . . happened to find him attractive.”
“I’m not saying you’re desperate. But maybe you do need a little company.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure don’t have any social life here.”
“Not yet.”
“You’ve been here a year! And I don’t think paying that little delinquent next door to help you with the garden and shovel snow constitutes a social life.”
“It doesn’t and I’m fine.”
“The cat has more of a social life than you do.”
“Good for him.” Petra turned around and headed to the kitchen.
“You know what Mabel Mansing told me today?” her mother yelled after her.
“How could I possibly know?” Petra yelled back.
“She said she heard the Rosefield people bought up the old trucking warehouse. They’re going to grow pot in it or turn it into a microbrewery. Maybe both.”
“Bully for them.”
“You could get a job!”
Petra walked back down the hall to her mother’s bedroom, all the while scrubbing a pot with a wad of steel wool. She smiled broadly as she leaned against the doorframe and continued scrubbing. “Luckily, Mom, I know nothing whatsoever about growing weed or any kind of crop for that matter and I probably wouldn’t recognize hops if I fell over some. Not my kind of plant science!”
PART THREE
Germination
As we are born to the boom and drive we are no different from you. Begin, begin. No matter the prospect, the love lost to pain, the start to catastrophe. We remain. Promising. Oh to surface with time and feel the earth’s spin. A sole directive: Begin. Begin! The promise of time is a treasure. We watch you, tender marvels waking to the bright orb. Waking to revolutions that stir the cosmos. Fledgling efforts gather to surpass the sum. At each node the transformations come, while the sprouting whispers of giants. The nascent drive loves the soul, the sun and the sigh of the wind. Begin. Begin.
from Cannto III, Cannabidadas
Chapter 10
Alice Morgan flopped down on her sofa. She’d just come back from a meeting with the neighbors, sorted out the plots for the community garden. Spearheading the project had truly been an eye-opening experience. Alice hadn’t any idea she had such a varied group of neighbors all keen on planting something they could watch grow and ultimately eat. Luckily, now the garden was almost finished, she didn’t have to head up any committees! The season, albeit a short one, was planned and they’d decided on a name too: Paint Patches. She didn’t much like the name but it would do.
The phone rang. “We got it, Mom.” Her son sounded hesitant. “CannRose-Medi made the cut. The DOH is having a press conference this afternoon. It’ll be on the evening news.”
It took a moment for Alice to register what he was talking about. The dispensary application had been sent to the Department of Health months and months ago. The state was so tardy reviewing and making its decisions she’d almost forgotten about it.
Luther, that aggressive lawyer, came on the phone. She’d had many conference calls with him in the weeks leading up to the application deadline. This time, he sounded absolutely ecstatic. He thanked her yet again for all her expert input. Alice noticed her son was silent. He was in fact concerned his mother might have changed her mind again, or would in the next week or so. But Alice never did anything in half measures or backed out of commitments once she’d made them. It was her signature.
“We’re in for a lot of work,” she said. “Hope everybody’s gotten a good rest in the meantime.”
“Absolutely,” said Luther. “We’re ready to hit the pavement running.”
“You’d better get started looking for a chemist or a manufacturing specialist. You know the person you’ll need to oversee the derivatives,” Alice said.
“Yes, ma’am. The headhunter has already been at work. We’ve got . . . I think four resumés here. But actually, it’s not a priority now,” Luther said. “The state has decided it only requires dried product by the first eight months. Oil and whatnot after sixteen.”
“Gives you some time but I wouldn’t leave it too long,” Alice said. “You need that expertise even to finish the renovations I’d say.”
“Good point!” said Luther. “Alice, is there any chance of you going to Hullbrooke to look at the grow facility? I think you should see the plans again before they start the next stage of construction.”
“I don’t know I’d be of much help any more than I have been,” Alice said. “The actual dispensary plans, of course, I’ll check those again and oversee modifications. I have to. But I really can’t help you with the grow facility. Or even the manufacturing part for that matter. Things have changed since I studied that stuff. That’s why you need that chemist or extraction specialist, whoever.”
Luther was disappointed. He didn’t trust Caldwell or his shady cousin to adhere to the planned renovations. Cyrus had persuaded Luther not to care about the offices, but he had a hunch he’d better care about the actual grow facility since the DOH would be watching. The plans had the engineer’s stamp on them. But Luther couldn’t imagine there wouldn’t be changes. Necessary ones. Likely complicated ones. Possibly disastrous ones with Caldwell around. Luther had recently learned Lazlo didn’t have a lot of fans when it came to contracting for commercial buildings and no experience whatsoever with industrial or manufacturing operations. Lazlo had assured everyone early on he would get all the best local people for the project. Luther imagined even if that were true, in fact because that could be true, the place might turn into a catastrophe.
Before he hung up, Luther suggested everyone should get together and have a little celebration soon. They said their goodbyes.
Alice stretched out on the sofa. A nap was in order. That would be her celebration. She didn’t relish the thought of an evening in the company of that pushy little lawyer or that bigmouth Caldwell. She pitied her son. Then she thought about her own work and setting up the dispensary outlets. Lord! There were two of them. CannRose needed to employ a couple of good dispensary managers, possibly another pharmacist if it was to keep to the plan. And with a dispensary in Lyston, Alice might have to make trips. A traveling businesswoman!
As for the near future, she needed to add some details to the dispensaries’ security. Even on the tony side of the city she wouldn’t be taking any chances, and the Lyston dispensary site was in a mall. She’d rather they have too many security features than too few. And there were a lot of organizational matters to consider. This would mean late nights as things moved along. Her staff at the drugstore would tease that she was looking bleary-eyed and maybe taking the dispensary thing too literally. Did they need to buy her a better bong?
Chapter 11
What Luther and the others on that congratulatory conference call with Alice didn’t appreciate was that Caldwell was already four steps ahead of everyone. Since the time they’d submitted the application, he’d seen just about every operation going. He was determined to take the best from all of them and build a masterpiece. What were they paying him for after all? He’d already decided on what equipment was needed and where it should be in the facility and how everything from the grow rooms to the shipping room needed to be rearranged. And the minute he heard of the application’s success he hightailed it over to his cousin’s place, humming to the radio.
Lazlo was in his yard cleaning up droppings from his wife’s four yappy miniature schnauzers. He straightened up, sensing a shift in the universe just by the way Caldwell zoomed up the driveway and pulled to a stop. He carefully laid the scoop and plastic bag on one of the lawn chairs.
Caldwell bolted out of the car, raced over and slapped Lazlo on the back. “We’re in business! We got it! Nothing to stop us now!”
Lazlo had been following Caldwell
’s often erratic orders regarding the administrative section for the last six months and listening to Caldwell’s revisions to the production-area plans for the last four. He’d been preparing accordingly and he was very skilled at dealing with Caldwell. Sometimes Lazlo succeeded in changing Caldwell’s mind, shifting some notion a little to the right or left, or mitigating some obsession Caldwell had. And Lazlo was so unremarkable he had perhaps come close to mastering the art of invisibility. Even with Caldwell’s most outrageous ideas he knew how to just say yes and then quietly do what actually needed to be done. Or he did what would ensure financial health, particularly his own financial health. Lazlo realized that Caldwell didn’t pay all that much attention to details or follow-up. In fact Caldwell jumped to new ideas so frequently he was apt to forget what he’d originally requested. This was a working style Lazlo could live with. In fact it was one in which he could flourish! He beamed at Caldwell.
Caldwell, by his own estimation, had grown enormously in the last year. It gave him an unshakable confidence. While everybody else was dozing, Caldwell had become a walking marijuana encyclopedia. With contacts! Certainly he knew way more about marijuana production than anybody else at CannRose-Medi. He could outtalk any of them. He countered all objections, doubts and queries, often with explosive dismissals.
“You simply can’t have that nursery guy running the cultivation. With only greenhouse experience? Not an iota of practice growing indoors? Medicinal marijuana is not some vegetable or ground cover! It needs to be crafted!” Or “What in God’s name was that engineer thinking? With that ventilation system the place will be infested with mold in no time.”
Eventually the doubters crawled off to their respective cubicles of ignorance, including Cyrus and Luther, who really didn’t have any time to waste on more research. So Caldwell ruled the roost in Hullbrooke, and since Lazlo was clearly crucial to the whole operation, Caldwell proposed his cousin be made vice president of CannRose-Medi. Luther, initially dumbstruck by this suggestion, quickly became vocal and vigorous with his opposition. Cyrus and Malcolm merely wrinkled their noses as if faced with something slightly septic but unavoidable. In the end it was Lydia who openly supported the decision. She could easily tolerate the man as her vice president, and Caldwell was delighted when she suggested Lazlo’s name and position be inscribed on his office door.
Chapter 12
The green light for CannRose-Medi prompted great municipal rejoicing. According to the Gazette, Hullbrooke’s Planning and Business Development Department was aflutter. Just like Ernie, Hullbrooke had not recovered to any degree after the financial collapse. Many businesses had closed or shifted out of the country altogether and so the local council had been unanimous in its approval of the plan. And judging from the quotes about attracting “even more new businesses” and “possible residential expansion,” the two local building inspectors, one slightly deaf, the other with a bum knee, were feeling bride-like with anticipation.
This didn’t mean that all the locals had been in favor of the operation. When folks heard the town had approved a plan and crawled into bed with CannRose, some of them balked. The not-in-my-backyard contingent and those opposed on religious and moral grounds had been highly demonstrative in their opposition. The Guardians of Jude and Ezekiel, some of Caldwell’s distant relatives in fact, had taken a dilapidated school bus, painted it blood red and filled it to overflowing with moldy hay and weeds. After dousing it with gasoline they set it alight in front of the town hall at midnight. They added fireworks too. Ernie, startled awake by the racket, ran out in his shorts to take a look. “Arise! Repent! Reject the smoke of torment! Arise! Repent! Reject the smoke of torment!” Being a little groggy and quite distracted by the smoldering bus with fireworks bursting out of it, he wasn’t sure what the protest was about so he jogged down the hill to find out. As he approached, a few protesters lowered their placards, brandishing them like spears. They hadn’t planned on people showing up in their underwear. The Guardians were duly charged of course but achieved their ultimate objective. The photo made the cover of the Gazette, and in the bottom-left corner of it you could just make out Ernie’s shin and foot.
#
Finally the true work began. The renovation of the offices had been just the appetizer. The rear end of the old building was soon crawling with contractors and tradespeople meeting the high standard set by Lazlo that they must have bulletproof insurance policies. And since they were willing to work with Lazlo, it meant they also had a fine appreciation of old-time adversarial construction culture. Those modular and prefab approaches were for the unimaginative. And this was no mundane project.
According to Caldwell — Ernie was now fairly well acquainted with him — this was a bold reno for revolutionizing plant cultivation. Steel and polymer reinforcement was required to support the rooftop HVAC systems, which looked so powerful Ernie figured they could probably service the Shanghai Tower. Apparently they could generate internal climates to remind a person of mountaintops, savannahs or the deepest jungle. Negative and positive pressure rooms could be established and temperatures could be controlled to decimal places. There’d be lighting brilliant enough to guide ships and roast retinas with electrical panels arranged like library stacks. There’d be polyester and fiberglass wall cladding, dazzling in its white purity. And epoxy flooring, or rather painted epoxy over old cement flooring — they would economize where they could. Three air showers were planned. Ernie knew about these from an evening cleaning gig as a student. They would whip up the hair and brace any spirit. Perhaps most impressive were the plumbing plans. The fertigation systems for the grow rooms were so elaborate Ernie thought the designs rivaled neural mapping of the human brain.
Forty rooms would be carved into the warehouse. Big ones for flowering, little ones for the baby plants and mothers. Potting, trimming, drying, curing and packaging rooms. And process rooms for extractions had their own bottling rooms attached. Even a kitchen was planned in the glorious hope the state would ultimately see the value of edibles. There were utility and storage rooms, production offices, change rooms, showers and washrooms. And also a vault to store the precious healing product before it made its way to the dispensaries. Spare areas were set aside too. Caldwell was thinking the company should do its own R and D, and its scientists would need a laboratory.
Lazlo asked Ernie if he could work more hours. “You’d be doing pretty much the same thing – cleaning up. It’s just there’s more of it now.” Ernie hesitated. He didn’t want work interfering with his winter reading program. He was catching up on the latest food trends, organic gardening and his new interest in permaculture and the free-stuff movement.
“How about just three days? Gives you four off,” Lazlo said.
Ernie couldn’t fault the math. And with the extra day’s pay he could save for a decent soup pot, proper set of knives too, maybe. And he needed more supplies for his rooftop garden.
#
Now the irony in acting on dreams of leisure is that so much freedom potentially holds the seeds of its own destruction. How very Derrida! A person free to get curious about work can be drawn right back into it. And so it was in Ernie’s case. Activities at the old warehouse became more compelling by the day, fascinating in the way a pig’s ear might be turned into a silky purse with sequins, rhinestones and seed pearls. Improbable. Definitely over the top. And possibly fucking futile.
The back of the building was a puzzle of surprises. As they ripped things apart they found bats, carpenter ants, old wiring just waiting to ignite and of course asbestos. There were also the usual wasps nests in the rafters and mice everywhere, and the existing joists and supports were all in inconvenient places for the new design. Lazlo, who was looking more haggard by the week, was often heard muttering, “Shit, now what?” or “What the fuck now?”
One morning before coffee break, Ernie watched the roofers descend the ladder accompanied by a faint sprinkle of rain. “You want this shit on your roof, conditions gotta
be perfect,” the team lead said to Lazlo. “We got another job other side of Lyston. Gotta get started. Weather’s supposed to clear next week. See ya then.” The guy slapped Lazlo on the shoulder. Lazlo squinted as the raindrops fell in his eyes. Ernie bet the roofers wouldn’t be back until the end of the next month and he was off by only a week.
The plumbing contractor was another “old friend” of Lazlo’s. Ernie saw him looking at some revised plans for the grow rooms with Lazlo. “I can’t just order those valves,” the plumber said. “They have to be custom made. Expensive as hell.” Lazlo grimaced. Then he pulled up the webpage that Caldwell had shown him. The valves were only ten bucks a piece at Home Depot. The plumber shrugged. “Well screw me. Not my usual supplier I guess.” And he sauntered off with a smirk that suggested to Ernie he had more scams up his sleeve.
And there were plenty of other problems. Ernie watched an HVAC specialist nearly decapitate an electrician with a swinging sheet of aluminum. Ernie had helped the electrician to his feet again. The guy was cursing and vowing all manner of vengeance. And a few of the carpenters Lazlo routinely employed had developed longstanding grudges against each other. Ernie intervened in a bout of fisticuffs over an ex-wife. He could empathize and was very effective in calming them down. And in a less hostile vein there was the apprentice who nailed his hand to a joist in a Christ-like manner because he’d “never used that Jesus effin’ kinda gun before.” Throughout all of this Caldwell was jumping in with opinions on everything and often giving instructions that were contrary to Lazlo’s.
The Hullbrooke building inspectors, who showed up way more than they needed to, added to Lazlo’s trials. One nearly fell off a ladder. The other was so hard of hearing Lazlo had to bellow everything at least twice, and when that didn’t work, he resorted to miming his responses. Ernie noted Lazlo’s hand gestures were becoming more aggressive by the day, occasionally verging on obscene.
The Buds Are Calling Page 7