by Don Winslow
Six years old, she already has a sense that there’s something better out there.
Kim imagines a room (of her own, Ms. Woolf) with walls, pink wallpaper and bedspread, dolls lined up neatly along the big pillows, and one of those Easy-Bake Ovens where she can make tiny little cupcakes. She wants a real mirror to sit in front of and brush her long blonde hair. She wants a bathroom that is immaculate and a house that is . . .
. . . perfect.
None of this is going to happen—her mother’s name is “Freaky Frederica.”
A year ago, Freddie ran away from home and (abusive) husband in Redding and found her way to some shelter (and a new name) with the hippie commune in the cave. For her, it was the best thing that ever happened—for her daughter, not so much.
She hates the dirt.
She hates the lack of privacy.
She hates the chaos.
People come in and out—the commune’s population is transient, to say the least. One frequent visitor to the cave is Doc.
He owns a house down in Dodge City, but sometimes he hangs out at the cave, smokes dope, and talks about the “revolution” and the “counterculture” and the revelatory powers of acid.
And fucks Freddie.
Kim lies there, still as a doll, pretending to sleep as her mother and Doc make love beside her. She shuts her eyes tight, tries to tune out the sounds, and imagines her new bedroom.
No one ever comes into it.
Sometimes the man with her mother isn’t Doc but someone else. Sometimes it’s several people.
But no one ever comes into Kim’s “room.”
Ever.
45
John likes living in the cave.
He started bunking with Starshine, but one night snuggled up with a runaway from New Jersey named Comet (presumably after the celestial phenomenon, not the household cleaner) and, as they were virtually indistinguishable, he didn’t care.
It’s just better than home.
The commune is a family in its own way, something John doesn’t have a lot of experience with. They sit down to meals together, they talk together, they do common chores.
John’s parents barely know that he no longer lives at home. He comes back every two or three days and leaves little traces of his existence, says hello to whichever parent is there at the moment, grabs a few clothes, maybe some food, and then goes back to the cave. His father is mostly living up in L.A. now, anyway, his mother is consumed with the details of the impending divorce, and it’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy.
John smokes grass, partakes in a little hash, but the LSD trips scare him.
“You lose control,” he tells Doc.
“You lose it to find it,” Doc says cryptically.
No thanks, John thinks, because he’s had to talk people down from their trips, or sit there during tedious acid sessions while people freak out and Doc reads from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Other than that, there’s nothing for a fourteen-year-old boy not to love living in the cave that summer. He goes down to the beach, Doc lends him a board to take out. He hangs out with the surfers and the hippies and gets high. He goes back to the cave and one of the hippie girls cuts him in on the free love buffet.
“It was like summer camp,” John would say later, “with blow jobs.”
Then summer ends and it’s time for school.
46
John doesn’t want to go home.
“You can’t live in the cave year round,” Doc says. Like, September through October would probably be fine, but then the weather changes and Laguna gets cold and damp at night. But cold and damp is exactly how John would describe the atmosphere at his house, his mother being remote and, more often than not, drunk.
What happens is, John moves mostly into Doc’s house.
It’s a gradual thing—John comes after school and hangs out, stays for the big spaghetti dinners, everybody gets stoned, John falls asleep on the couch or in one of the three bedrooms with one of the chicks who make up what is basically Doc’s harem.
After a while, John is just there, a fixture, a mascot.
Doc’s puppy.
He goes surfing with Doc, he helps Doc pass out tacos, he gradually comes to understand where Doc’s money comes from.
Dope.
Just hanging out, John gets an idea what the Association is and who they are. The boys make thinly veiled references around him to their runs down to Mexico and the bigger expeditions to South Asia.
One day John tells Doc, “I want in.”
“In on what?”
“You know,” John says.
Doc gives him that charismatic, crooked grin and says, “You’re fourteen.”
“Almost fifteen,” John says.
Doc looks him over. John is your basic grem, but there’s something special about him—the kid has always been this little adult—the chicks around the place sure as hell treat him like a grown-up—and he’s not so little anymore.
And Doc has a problem maybe John can help him with.
Money.
Doc has too much of it.
Well, not too much money per se—nobody has Too Much Money—but too much cash in small denominations.
So now you have to catch this image—
John skateboarding to banks in Laguna, Dana Point, and San Clemente with a backpack full of singles, fives, and tens that Doc gets from his street sales. John walking into the bank and exchanging the small bills for wrapped stacks of fifties and hundreds.
And John knows which tellers to go to, which ones get birthday presents and Christmas bonuses from Doc.
And if the cops see a skinny kid with long brown hair, a T-shirt, and board trunks pushing his street board along the sidewalk, he’s just one of dozens of pain-in-the-ass skateboarders, and it doesn’t occur to them that this one has thousands and thousands of dollars slung over his shoulder.
Some kids have paper routes—John has cash routes.
Doc kicks him fifty bucks a day.
Life is good.
John puts up with school, does his route, gets his fifty, goes back to the house, and slips into bed with girls who are now more often in their twenties than in their late teens and who are giving him an education he can’t get in the classroom.
Yeah, life is good.
But it could be better.
47
“I want to deal my own shit,” he tells Doc one day as they’re sitting out in the lineup waiting for the next set.
“Why?” Doc asks. “You’re making money.”
“Handling your money,” John answers. “I want to handle my own money.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“I do,” John says. “Look, if you won’t supply me, I’ll go to somebody else.”
Doc figures that if the kid goes somewhere else he could get burned or ripped off or walk right into a police setup. At least if I sell to him, Doc thinks, I know the kid will be safe.
So now, in addition to his cash over his shoulder, John has fat joints taped to the bottom of his skateboard and sells them for five bucks each.
Now John is making money.
He doesn’t spend it on albums, clothes, or taking girls out. He saves it. Not even sixteen, he hands Doc a pile of money and asks him to buy him a car.
A beautifully restored 1954 Plymouth station wagon.
48
Dig our brother John.
Seventeen years old, he rents not one but two houses in Dodge City.
One to live in, the other to store his dope in.
He makes more round-trips to Mexico than the Trailways bus, and he ain’t skateboarding five-dollar fingers anymore. (He has three other grems doing that, and happy for the money.) He is wholesaling now, selling in volume to street dealers, making real money. He has so much grass stashed in that second domicile it becomes known as “The Shit Brick House.”
He has a twenty-three-year-old girlfriend named Lacey living with him who has a sleek body, so flexible becau
se it doesn’t have a jealous bone in it. He can drive his own car now and has three of them, the Plymouth, a ’65 Mustang convertible, and an old Chevy pickup he uses to put his surfboards in. He has a quiver of custom-made boards. He hangs out with the Dead when they roll through town. He gets high on trips with Doc to Maui.
He’s still Doc’s puppy, but now they say that he “runs with the big dogs.”
John is a junior member of the Association.
49
Meanwhile, the country is going motherfucking insane.
While John is on the trajectory from taco-grubbing grem to successful young businessman, the United States goes McMurphy in the cuckoo’s nest, aka the years 1968–1971.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin, has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby, Tet Offensive, riots in Cleveland, riots in Miami, the riot in Chicago, Mayor Daley, Hippies and Yippies, we go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon (the Nurse Ratchett of the American political psych ward), the Heidi game, the last prince of Camelot takes a girl to the terminal submarine races, the Chicago Eight, My Lai, I came across a Child of God he was walking along the road, Altamont, Janis dies, the Manson family, Cambodia, tin soldiers and Nixon coming, Angela Davis, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Apollo 13, tie-dyed T-shirts, granny dresses, Attica.
With the exceptions of Woodstock and Janis dying, it pretty much all slides past John.
Come on, he’s in Laguna.
Laguna Beach
2005
Don’t let the Devil ride
I said don’t let the Devil ride
’cuz if you let him ride
He will surely want to drive
—THE JORDANAIRES, “DON’T LET THE DEVIL RIDE”
50
The Gold Coast is silver.
Laguna’s streetlights are shrouded in fog, and the lifeguard tower at Main Beach looks like it’s floating on a cloud.
Ben likes the town this way.
Soft, mysterious, nighttime.
He just dropped O at her place and is now considering whether to go out, go home, or give Kari the waitress a call.
Uh-huh.
He gets on the phone. “Kari? It’s Ben Leonard. From the Coyote?”
Just a short silence, then a warm answer.
“Hey, Ben.”
“I wondered what you’re doing.”
Longer silence. “Ben, I shouldn’t. I’m seeing somebody.”
“Are you married?” Ben asks. “Engaged?”
She’s neither.
“Then you’re still single,” Ben says. “A free agent.”
But she’d feel so guilty.
“Makes the sex better,” Ben says. “Trust me on this, I’m Jewish.”
She’s Catholic.
“In that case we have almost a responsibility to do this,” Ben says. “We owe it to sex.”
She laughs.
Ben drives past Brooks Street and keeps going toward Kari’s place in South Lagoo.
Except—
51
Things you don’t want to see in the rearview mirror:
(a) Your new cell phone crushed under your tire.
(b) Ditto your girlfriend’s dead puppy.
(c) A goalie mask.
(d) Flashers.
Ben sees (d).
“Shit.”
He pulls over on the PCH near the entrance to Aliso Creek Beach.
An empty stretch of road on a foggy night.
Looking in the mirror again, he sees that it’s an unmarked car with a flasher attached to the roof.
But he doesn’t have anything on him and the car is clean.
The plainclothes cop’s face appears at the window. He shows his badge and Ben rolls the window down.
“License and registration, please.”
“May I ask why you stopped me?”
“License and registration, please.”
Ben takes his license from his wallet, hands it over, and then reaches toward the glove compartment for the registration.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the cop says.
“Do you want the registration or not?” Ben asks.
“Step out of the car, sir.”
“Oh, come on,” Ben says. Because he just can’t help himself—it’s in his freaking DNA. “Why did you stop me? Do you have probable cause?”
“I saw marijuana smoke coming out of the driver side window,” the cop says. “And I can smell it now.”
Ben laughs. “You saw marijuana smoke from a moving car at night? And you don’t smell anything—I never smoke in my car.”
“Step out of the car, please, sir.”
“This is bullshit.”
The cop rips the door open, grabs Ben by the wrist, hauls him out, and arm-bars him to the ground.
Then the kicks start coming.
Ben tries to go fetal, but the kicks come into his ribs, his shins, his kidneys, his balls.
“You’re resisting arrest!” the cop yells. “Stop resisting!”
“I’m not resisting.”
Two more hard kicks, then the cop comes down with his knee on Ben’s neck and Ben feels the gun barrel press against the base of his skull.
“Now who’s the asshole?” the cop asks.
It’s such a weird fucking thing to say, but Ben isn’t focused on that.
Because he hears the hammer click back.
His breath catches in his throat.
Then the cop pulls the trigger.
52
O goes into her bathroom, turns on the exhaust fan, and lights a roach.
She’ll make this small concession to her mother’s sensibilities, but Paqu’s hypocrisy on the subject of drugs is nothing short of epic, almost admirable in its bold two-facedness.
Paqu’s medicine cabinet
behind the mirror mirror on the (bathroom) wall
is a pharmacopoeia of prescribed mood-altering drugs
a fact that O despises because it’s such a cliché, and all the more so because she becomes a part of the stereotype (hence the “stereo” if you think about it) by consistently running to the shelter of her mother’s little helper when the herb just won’t do the trick.
“Can’t you develop a blend,” she has asked Ben, “called ‘For Orange County Girls When Battlestar Galactica Isn’t Enough’?”
“Working on it,” Ben replied.
But so far to no result.
So O will occasionally raid CVS Paqu for
Valium
Oxy
Xanax or some other antidepressant
which makes Paqu’s lectures about her marijuana-smoking more bearable, lectures that come with greater frequency in the weeks after Paqu returns from rehab with new material and a fresh flock of Twelve-Step buddies who hang around the patio and talk about their “programs” and before Paqu gets bored with the whole thing and decides that the real answer lies in yoga, bicycling, Jesus, or scrapbooking.
(The scrapbooking phase was especially excruciating, featuring as it did Paqu gluing endless pictures of herself taking pictures of O into volumes arranged by year.)
Actually, one of Paqu’s lovers was a sad-looking guy from her “Friday meeting,” whom a sixteen-year-old O asked, “Are you ‘in recovery,’ too?”
“I have thirty days,” the guy said.
“Well, you ain’t gonna have forty,” O said.
Which proved prophetic on about day thirty-six, when O came out of her room to find Paqu and Sadly Sober Guy slinging (empty) Stoli bottles at each other across the living room before each departed to (separate) detox facilities, leaving O alone in the house to hold epic parties on the rationale that she was thoughtfully cleansing the house of alcohol in anticipation of her mother’s return.
Anyway, like goaltenders and quarterbacks, Paqu is blessed with a short memory, so none of this history stops her from getting on O’s case about her marijuana habit.
O’s not in the mood tonight, so she sits on the toilet under the exhaust fan to
get high and if Paqu comes nosing around she can just say she’s constipated, which will engender a suggestion about an organic remedy rather than a ball-busting.
Because she feels like she’s already had her balls, as it were, busted by Chon’s utter rejection of her blatant (and admittedly clumsy) come-on.
“I’m sort of Bambi-esque”?
Jesus.
I wouldn’t fuck me, either.
53
Ben hears the dry click.
His heart slamming.
The cop’s laugh.
He feels something being pressed into his hand, then taken away, then the cop pulls his arms behind him and cuffs him.
“Look what I found,” the cop says.
He shows Ben a brick of dope.
“That’s not mine,” Ben says.
“Yeah, I’ve never heard that before,” the cop says. “I found it in the trunk of your car.”
“Bullshit. You planted it.”
The cop hauls him to his feet, pushes him into the backseat of the unmarked car.
And reads him his rights.
54
Like he has the right to remain silent.
No shit. Ben doesn’t say anything except he wants his other right, the right to a lawyer.
Does Ben know a lawyer?
Are you fucking kidding? Ben sells the best dope in Orange County, ergo some of his best customers are lawyers.
(And doctors; as yet, no Indian chiefs.)
The fucked thing is that he doesn’t know any criminal lawyers—
—but he calls an insurance lawyer who calls a buddy of his who hustles over in the middle of the night.
But not before the cops file charges against Ben under California 11359—possession with intent to sell—and resisting arrest (a “148,” Ben learns), and throw in a 243(b) battery on a peace officer for good measure, and chuck him into central holding.
Forget the jail clichés.