by Roman McClay
“He left me here,” she said as she let the pen hover over the page. She wanted to justify this further, and so she said aloud what she thought would make the most sense. Saying that he didn’t love her enough to have her as his only girlfriend was not something she thought this cop would get. But, him not bailing her out for methamphetamine possession sounded like a good reason to be the CI for a search warrant at his house .
“That’s right and it’s us, me and Michael here, that are bailing you out,” he said as Michael Swinyard sat and texted on his phone; he didn’t like looking at her. She was strung out on drugs and had sores on her face that were topped clear with fluid and ruddy around the pustules.
She nodded and signed the affidavit and Messangelo smiled and took the paperwork in hand, rose and thanked her as he and Michael left the interview room and headed toward his LT’s office to get a call over to the judge.
She sat and thought of how many moving parts there were in her revenge. She had all these other men, Michael and Jeff-the-cop and Carey, and Jeff-the-grower and Chris-the-grower and Jeremy and two of Lyndon’s other girls all in on it. When you added them all up, she mused, they could stand toe-to-toe with that asshole . She laughed and that guffaw hurt her tiny chest. She quieted and retreated a bit; she went quiet and soft in interview room #3.
The duty cop came in and uncuffed her and took her to the intake office and began to process her release.
III. 2015 e.v.
He used his fore and thumb to pinch the leaves at the nodes; thinning the meter-high plants trestled by white grid-string. Each yellow or brown leave was allowed to fall to the concrete floor.
The fans blew in waves, oscillating, and the HVAC ran loudly like white-noise at all times. He breathed deeply of the warehouse air with 1,300ppms of CO2. His body adjusted to it just fine.
The buds were large, four days from harvest in this one row, and 11 days from harvest in the next. They called it, sea-of-green , as each 20 plants were staggered in space & time so they harvested one week apart; forever. He watched as they were dark green, nearly black, in veg, then would lighten, amber, yellow in time, a senescence of perfection. The buds would grow thick and heavy and sticky and the leaves would fall away. He saw it like a large cat giving birth to litters. This was the nature of life, the organism grows large on the outside, then, deepens inside.
The cycle was 60 days in bloom; after 30 days in vegetative state, and 10 days as clones. Every week he harvested 5-pounds under four lights at 1120 Yuma. Next door at 1160, he harvested every two weeks and yielded 8-pounds from six lights. He grew under 12 lights total at his home and there harvested 6-pounds under six lights each 30 days; and was selling 40-45 pounds of class A marijuana every month now at $2,000 a pound. After utilities -electricity was over $5,000 a month, rent, another $5,000 a month, and other recurring costs, and after his partners were paid, and infrastructure was improved, and the cops were paid, he cleared $20,000 a month.
He felt rich. And he acted like it. He bought anything he wanted; he bought mostly wine and books, and machines. He made sure his girls ate well and were well shod. They really liked shoes, it seemed.
He worked in bloom for three hours from 0900 until the lights when off for their dark period, then worked in veg for three or four hours. He left for lunch and then came back at midnight and worked for another three hours. He worked on average nine to 10 hours a day. And then on harvest day -once a week- he worked straight through, usually 12-16 hours .
This went on seven days a week for years.
He had come from the oil field and drilling and blasting and the rural farm, so this horticulture work was not as hard, but the hours were rough, and his body had begun to really break down by now. He was -in 2015 e.v.- 41, and his life was so complicated with all the business partners and vendors and customers -and now this tattoo shop- and his girls -the endless girls- that his house was like an old cat lady’s but instead of Siamese and hairless cats, it was twin girls of 19 and denuded vixens with Russian accents running around, and businessmen coming and going; taking or leaving cash. He was stuffing five lives in one. Each dollar had 50 cents of entropy attached. He was exhausted and he just jammed more fuel -narcotics, food, wine, sex, fast cars & bikes, and anger, his precious anger- all down his greedy gullet to power his body into the void. He didn’t care where he just wanted to keep moving forward like the cosmos itself expanding into nothingness.
But tonight he listened to The Whale on his iPhone and thinned the vines; he was like any good horticulturist, he understood the life-cycle of his crop. With harvest so close, the plant did not need its leaves at all, and any cellular matter he could cleave thus allowed all its metabolic process to go -be diverted- into flower -or bud- production. It was like the difference between bulking up and cutting in weight lifting, he thought. It was like the difference of desire between a boy and a man.
The resin of marijuana is so sticky, like the os of the female aperture, designed to catch the pollinating neurons, that it stuck to everything. His clothes were gummed up by it, and he wore Black Dragon latex gloves to keep it off his skin. Only rubbing alcohol would remove the resin, clear-to-amber trichomes , it was not water soluble at all.
His boots, hair and skin all smelled of pot, even though he never smoked it at all. And when he unfurled $5,000 in cash to peel off bills to pay for things -that was his walking-around money, what he kept back from the bank- everyone added one and one and knew he grew weed.
He hated that. He just liked growing things and was good at it; he had no cathexis for pot-culture at all. He just loved the way they grew, their phototropism, their beauty, piquancy, their response to his loving hand. He sank his hands in dirt, in perlite, in hummus, in coco-coir, in bat guano, and loved it more than almost anything. He liked that he had built businesses from scratch; from nothing. No help, no nothing. Just him and his brains and his balls. That , he thought, used to be what America was about.
And he worked twice as hard as anyone else, he thought, and he felt that everyone diminished his creativity, work ethic and business acumen. He felt they attributed his apparent wealth to the easy money of that industry; not his talent or industriousness. He could tell them of hundreds of growers who couldn’t make it even with 70% margins on their product; even with economy-of-scale. He could tell them endless tales of his own grows being unfairly closed, stolen, sabotaged, and how he had to move his breeding stock in the middle of the night to a new location like an angry goatherder fleeing rustlers and bandits from other clans.
But, nobody gave a shit about his hardships, they just hated that he had so much cash and seemed to take 4-hour lunch-breaks and answer to no-one.
He never told anyone that he’d had eight grows stolen from him, he never said one word; and that was after having been ripped off by Zendik. Zendik Farm had stolen all he owned, wiped him out and never once said, sorry, or, my bad. Jeanne Pinsolf and Chen Adkins and CJ Liliekis and Phillip ‘Verd’ Nolan all had stolen all he had, and they sat around with millions of dollars and clear consciences and made fun of him for being naïve . They slept soundly at night. And he was blame even for that, for it was his fault they never felt nervous of what he might do. Names unfurled on his neo-cortex from letters -not unlike the Ys and Vs of brachial splits- shunted up by his limbic system themselves from the slashes and dashes -not unlike scored seeds- down in the soil of his cerebellum. His mind was populated with names like tall flowers and the wind of his turbulent vex blew on them until each stalk was strong from such exercise.
He heard their names, that he thought them or said them was almost beyond what mattered to the gods.
Then -after Zendik- in 2007, Curtis McIntyre and Michelle Rodriguez ripped him off after she locked him out of the bank account for Bighorn Oilfield Supply; his business that he’d built himself. He had picked up the pieces from this putsch and just moved on without much complaint. He had always just rebuilt, picked up his load, as that one guy advised, and carried his burden
without bitching or getting any assistance; government or otherwise.
But, nobody would have given a shit anyway, that much he knew. He was Job , and they were Bildad , blaming him for his travails. It was not the world to blame, it was him, somehow, they all had decided; they had taken a vote. He had read the Book of Job, though, and God blamed Job’s friends for abandoning him, while still telling Job to shut the fuck up ; he ruminated on this more than once. But, he highlighted that God blamed Job’s friends, for abandoning him, that part of the tale did not escape him; that part he re-read two-to-one.
He never said a word until the last one; his 12th total burn. He had -then- finally had enough. Every man has his limits. Not that anyone gave a fuck, well, not until he came and knocked on their door.
He later told his brother that even if he was inclined to turn the other cheek, if he took Jesus at his word, then once both cheeks -or all four if one counted the ass- were turned and each in turn slapped and offended again by his enemies, then he had a right, a natural right -a Biblically sanctioned right- to kick some fucking ass.
But, nobody, he had thought, takes the Bible seriously, especially not Christians, they think you should just eat endless shit forever. They miss the point of that book like they do for everything else. He, however, would take it very seriously, as he read it in the years that followed his ruin. It offered more than comfort, it offered him direct, and Godly, advice. It said all the things that liberals like his idiotic family would ignore. It gave him sanction to take vengeance upon Satan’s minions here on earth. It was the word. It was the law.
They were naïve and he knew what it was like to be naïve , he too had thought the world was fair and right and that if you worked hard and were honest that you’d be protected by God and man -by America- alike. He’d learn to laughed at that thought, the idea that America gave one shit about the working man, or anyone; the idea that the police and first responders -as his brother and his bourgeois family gave praise to each night at dinner- cared at all about him or anyone anymore was a joke.
He laughed when he saw what a joke the whole country was. He knew better, he knew what they’d never know, with all their status and wealth and insulation from the real world: he knew that America was run by demons and they were intent on murdering each halfway decent man within its sinister borders. There was nothing left to save of the West, it was ruined long ago when betas were allowed to fucking breed , he’d think as he loaded magazines with ammunition he’d wiped down with rags soaked in isopropyl alcohol.
He wondered why they all thought he should give a shit about America’s laws and why he ought to give a fuck about all these good-Christians and their morals, when they didn’t give a shit about him at all. They expected him to be a masochist. They expected to be able to treat him like he -and what he cared for- didn’t matter but that he was to care about them and their values somehow.
He wondered that aloud one day and nobody had an answer. He knew why niggers hated America, he thought, for he was treated like a nigger more than once. But, try getting some daddy’s girl, some feminist, born-rich-bitch, who never had to work a day in her life, to understand what it’s like for a true alpha male, a working-class man, an entrepreneur who lives and dies on handshake deals, on honor, and is ripped off and maligned by every goddamn beta and sneaky Jew and cuckolding female in the world. Try to explain it to her , he thought. She wouldn’t have a clue.
They tell you to be smart, he thought. Chen too had told him to be smarter. Of course , Lyndon thought, do they have a PI follow their wives around 24/7? Do they secretly record the conversations of their parents, partners and kids? I mean, that would be smart right? How can you just trust your people? he mockingly asked the air.
But, he thought, what they didn’t seem to get was that he didn’t want to live in a world where you had to have a contract, and lawyers and cops and courts, he wanted a world where a man’s word was good. Just like they didn’t want to have to get a pre-nup, or tail their wife’s every move. They saw how gross that would be for them, yet, they couldn’t see why he’d feel the same in his life; and that to him, a deal was a deal. They didn’t understand the concept of honor at all.
Nobody got that. Not even supposedly good people. They thought he was naïve and dumb. Of course, they didn’t know that he had tried to sue for recompense and the State -oh, their vaunted State- had told him to pound sand. He had no standing, in legal argot. He had no legal right to sue. After tens of thousands in taxes paid, the State said to him, fuck you, Lyndon. And again, he had not said a word. He just took notes, and said, replied, mutatis mutandis, as they all said that they didn’t speak French and he smiled again as he stocked his load-bearing vest with magazines filled with 15 rounds, for the pistol, and 30 rounds for the carbine, and put one in the chamber of each weapon.
They thought he should just eat it. That’s what they’d do. They’d be ruined 12 times and never say a word, he thought. Well, thank God, I ain’t like them, he’d think, as he began a list of names and packed the zeolite gauze into his medical kit late at night when the girls slept and he had returned home from work.
But for tonight he was safely ensconced in his two grows and all that perfidy and double-dealing against him by those two Jews and three car salesmen, business men of various stripes, and shitty one-legged growers and callow youth , he thought as he assumed all that was behind him as he thinned the vines. He had finally found a solid grow to build and curate and cultivate and care for with heart; and since he made so much money for his partners -and did all the work- he was truly surprised when by the autumnal equinox of 2015 e.v., all his partners and half his girls had turned on him and he was left with nothing at all.
It wasn’t until three days after he had been locked out from his businesses -businesses he had paid for, invested in, worked in, built from scratch, ab initio - that he heard that his own father had advised the usurpers, the betrayers, the plotters, on how best to undermine his son. Lee MacLeod had conspired with a bunch of beta-males and scandalous females and then had the temerity to act surprised when Lyndon called him to verify. The old man had taken offense and became upset when the son had raised his voice at the fact that he had in fact betrayed his son .
His mother, brother and sister-in-law said not one word on his behalf. Not. One. Word.
They must not have heard his name when the gods spoke to them. He must not have ever been built up from the assembling of letters down -way down- in the soil of the people who had taken what they needed from him. Does the lung write poems with the name of each element it takes into itself? Does the heart carve what the blood is made of into its each chamber door? And yet the brain does name each man or woman that makes it pulse with such vex. This is not what we want . This is what we are , he insisted. We assemble shelter, hovels, castles, tall towers that reach up with such names of ancestors and enemies and progeny that will one day make such use of our names as well.
The brain names names. The heart merely supplies the turbulence and the flow to the lung sack’s blow of each flower, each stalk, each thing the bees of our incoming thoughts must land upon if propagation is to go on and on and on. He didn’t think. He was the thing that was long and curved and spinning like the earth under the swarm of such thoughts.
All this was written down. All of it was recorded by him and God , he thought, as he thought more and more of Job, and more and more of God .
6. The Bust
Why darkness and obscurity in all thy words and laws, that none dare eat the fruit but from the wily serpent’s jaws? Is it because secrecy gains female’s loud applause?
Urizen [Blake, William]
The privilege of actually smoking cigarettes was reserved for the Capo… the only exceptions to this were those who had lost the will to live and wanted to ‘enjoy’ their last days. Thus, we knew when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned
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Man’s Search for Meaning [Frankl, Victor]
To be alive is to be in trouble
Lecture, Colorado Springs 10.18 [Peterson, Jordan B]
I. 2037 e.v.
The Bust felt her left arm with her right hand, it felt thin, but taut, and she decided she had enough strength to move forward with her plan. She -with medicine tongue and a heavy hand - made lists; and she almost -with anticipatory reward- liked making the list more than doing the things on the list; but, now she was double lining each name, as if the boldness of the act took a metaphor like this to spark it, get it moving in that direction; map it out. Articulate it. Say it aloud.
She -Valance Jamesis Henderson- was only 18 -well almost 18- temporally, but 21 or 22 years old morphologically, and she had likely 200 solar years more; easily, if she could get through the next few days , she thought.
The first one had been awkward, and that book of hers had been clumsily held and opened but it had not given her away or anything like that, as nobody expects a woman 63 inches tall and 101 pounds with a soft and feminine face and quiet demeanor to pull a small, mottled .22, from a black book and shoot them four or five times in the throat and face.
It’s not the kind of thing a lady does , she thought and smiled at the goofy absurdity of such a statement. In the old times, one expected such things -expects death- but modern people are fucking clueless, she thought. They expect to live forever, no matter who they fuck with.
The book was Blonde , by Joyce Carol Oats, a terrible book, like all her books. What had Hitchens said of her ? she tried to recall. Chloroform in print ? Well, she had taken her black 50/50 blade and each day -for one year- had cut out a rectangle within the page inside the book to make a little cubby for her revolver. It was a cowboy gun, a double action replica, and it was blued a rustic black and tortoise shelled and beautiful and it fit inside the book after 354 days even, but she cut more out -23 more pages- to make it fit with a cleaning rag over top too .