by Don Winslow
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-hydrocannabinol, 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 cultivation 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?”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Because?”
“They yelled at me,” she said. “If I wanted to get yelled at in high humidity, I’d just leave the shower on and wait for Paqu to show up.”)
You can’t have that kind of heat in a grow room because
(a) People have to work in there and
(b) It’s bad for the plants.
Primo marijuana grows best in a controlled temperature of 75°F, so what they needed in addition to—in fact, because of—all those lamps was
Air-conditioning.
Every one of those lamps required 2,800 BTUs (British Thermal Units) of cooling, and a fan to circulate the cooled air.
So a fifty-light grow room—that’s one thousand plants—needed 148,000 BTUs. Add to that the power needed to run the lamps and the fans, and you’re talking 80 kilowatts of power.
Your average residential living room is wired to handle a single thousand-watt bulb.
So—they had to not only rewire the house, they had to find more power and do it
off the grid
Because the utility companies in addition to being rapacious, conscienceless sociopaths, are also . . .
Snitches.
If they notice an electric bill that is, say, twenty times what a normal house would use, they inform the police.
Oh, they’ll take the money (natch), but they’ll also drop a dime.
(The only dime to slip through their grasping
grubby greedy fingers.)
Anyway, the grow house would need more power and would need that power secretly, so there were two ways to get it.
Steal it—which is a matter of drilling little holes in the meter (Google it), but the Gambino family is safer to steal from than the electric company, and Ben had a moral objection to theft.
(“You can’t steal from thieves,” Chon argued.
“They are responsible for their karma,” Ben countered, “I for mine.”
“Can we get ice cream?” O asked.)
So the alternative was a generator.
This was not cheap—the generator needed to power a thousand-plant grow room cost between $10K and $20K and it
MADE NOISE
A lot of freaking noise
It practically screamed “Hey, there’s a grow house in here! Hey! HEY!!!!”
So if they put that generator in the backyard, the neighbors were going to come over—and not to invite them to a cookout. They might have been able to assuage one or two of them with some homegrown product, but it was a drop-dead guarantee that one of the neighbors was going to make the call, not to mention some black-and-white happening to cruise by and hearing that thing rumbling “probable cause.”
No, they had to put that generator down in the basement, and how many basements were there in Southern California?
Some.
Not many.
Ben and Chon went house hunting.
22
For a rental, not a purchase.
(Apologies to Tom Waits.)
For one thing, houses in SoCal—with or without basements—are expensive.
But the other thing
the other thing, the other thing is
under the tangled bowl of day-old schizophrenic spaghetti that is the drug laws, if the cops bust your grow house and you own it, they can confiscate that $600,000 investment. So not only do you lose your dope and your freedom, you lose your down payment and every mortgage payment you’ve already made, and you still owe the bank the balance of the loan.
But if you rent the house and the landlord can reasonably claim he didn’t know you were using it to cultivate a felony, he gets to keep his property and you go to jail free of that karma, anyway.
So Ben and Chon went looking to rent a house that
Had a basement
Wasn’t too close to neighbors
Wasn’t anywhere near a school or a playground (maximum sentencing under the guidelines)
Or a police station
Could be rewired
And where the landlord wouldn’t be coming around every twenty-eight minutes
Or ever.
This narrowed down the possibilities.
You can’t just put an ad in the paper stating your requirements, because the police will be happy to rent to you—they have some of these houses in stock—
You ain’t gonna find it on Craigslist
(Well, not that Craigslist—see below.)
You need
A Realtor.
23
Fortunately, this was Orange County.
(Before the real estate market flopped like a European soccer player.)
Back in those halcyon “finance and flip” days, you could walk into any upscale OC hotel (the Ritz, St. Regis, or Montage) and drop something—anything—in the lobby—
Chances are, whoever picked it up would have been a real estate agent.
Or you could drive up (or down, didn’t matter) the PCH and rear-end your ride into any BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Audi, Porsche, Land Rover, Land Cruiser—actually any vehicle not a Mexican gardening truck. Just prison-shower that ride and the odds were that the person who got out of the other vehicle would have handed you a business card before the insurance information.
Everybody in the OC had a real estate license.
Everybody.
Every OC trophy wife who required a “career” for her self-esteem got a license. Every surf bum who needed a source of income (i.e., all of them) got a license. Dogs, cats, gerbils had real estate licenses.
If they weren’t actually selling property, they were financing the mortgage, doing the title or the assessment, consulting on getting the property ready to show.
Others were involved in “creative financing,” aka “fraud.”
The entire economy then was based on swapping real estate around, boosting the price with every pass. Everyone was living off the ginormous Ponzi scheme that was the real estate market in those days, hoping they wouldn’t get caught with the hot potato in their hands when the whistle blew.
People were using trash financing to buy three, four, five houses that they hoped to flip, so people had houses they needed to rent and there were real estate agents who specialized in rentals.
So finding a Realtor was no problem.
Finding the right Realtor was.
Because, generally speaking, Realtors hate dope growers.
24
You see, most dope growers don’t have Ben’s social conscience.
They trash a property out.
They rip it open and put in cheap, dangerous wiring that often sets the place on fire. Their power needs cause neighborhood brownouts. They tape plastic sheets over the windows to hide their nefarious activities. They have people coming and going all hours of the day and night. Their generators make noise; their dope smells. They not only take the value of a particular property down, they lower the value of the whole neighborhood.
They’re dirtbags.
Rental Realtors and property managers properly shun them.
So Ben and Chon had to find one who was blissfully unaware.
The OC wife category was problematic because Chon had slept with probably half of them.
This is what Chon did between deployments—he read books, played volleyball, and fucked trophy wives, many of them (of course) real estate agents.
So he, Ben, and O went through the listings of Realtors.
“Mary Ingram,” Ben read.
“Chonned,” O said.
“Susan Janakowski.”
“Chonned.”
“Terri Madison.”
Ben and O looked at Chon.
“You don’t know?” Ben asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“My man,” O said.
They gave up on the OC wives and moved on to the surfer category.
“Here’s our boy,” Ben said.
He pointed to an ad for Craig Vetter.
“Is he a surfer?” Chon asked.
“Look at him.”
Sun-bleached blond hair, deep tan, wide shoulders, vaguely vacant look in the eyes.
“He’s been hit in the head a few times,” O concluded.
They called him.
25
Craig assumed that they were a respectable gay couple.
A little younger than the usual Laguna Beach life partners, but Craig was your basic “whatever floats your boat, dude” dude.
Dude.
Duuuuuude.
“We need a basement,” Ben told him.
“A basement.”
“A basement,” Chon affirmed.
Craig took a look at Chon and figured this was a dungeon sort of thing.
“Soundproof?” he asked.
“That would be good,” Ben said.
Whatever floats your boat, dude.
Craig showed them five houses with basements. The gay guys rejected all of them—the neighbors were too close, the living room too small, there was a school nearby.
At this last thing, Craig got suspicious. “You guys aren’t on one of those lists, are you?”
“What lists?” Ben asked.
“You know,” Craig said. “Sex offender lists.”
He’d hauled these two guys all over Laguna, Dana Point, Mission Viejo, and Laguna Niguel and they couldn’t find a place they liked. He almost didn’t care if he lost them now. Besides, the last thing he needed was neighbors picketing one of his properties.
�
�No,” Ben said.
“We just hate kids,” Chon added helpfully.
“You don’t have something more rural, do you?” Ben asked.
“Rural?” Craig asked. Like farms and shit?
“Like maybe out in the East County,” Ben suggested. “Modjeska Canyon?”
“Modjeska Canyon?” Craig repeated.
The lightbulb came on.
“You guys are looking for a grow house.”
26
They smoked up on the ride to Modjeska Canyon.
Ben and Chon of course would not confirm that they were looking for a grow house, but now they and Craig had an understanding.
He showed them a fixer-upper on a cul-de-sac. Neighbors separated on each side by small strips of trees and brush. No sight lines. Single level with a basement. Below-market rent because the place was kind of a mess.
“Will the landlord be coming around?” Ben asked.
“Not for five to ten,” Craig answered.
“Drugs?” Ben asked.
He didn’t want to start his operation in a second-generation drug house that the cops already knew about.
Come on, Craig.
“He robbed a bank,” Craig answered.
“Okay.”
“In Arkansas.”
Perfecto.
27
There was a lot to do to get the house ready.
Especially if you were Ben.
“Solar panels?” Chon asked.
“Do you know how much energy we’re going to be using?” Ben asked. Solar energy would supplement the generator and therefore use less natural gas.
“Do you know how much solar panels cost?” Chon countered.
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Because they cost a lot.
Worth it to Ben—convictions are easy if they’re cheap. Also, Ben wasn’t going to trash out the house or the neighborhood.
On this topic, Ben and Chon had your Vulcan Mind Meld.