The Kings of Cool

by Don Winslow

  The river of time is tough that way.

  Sometimes the current is so strong that you can never go back to who you used to be, even for a visit, but

  Dennis just nods.

  Filipo goes out the door, taking

  A big chunk of Dennis with him.

  79

  Who knows

  if

  faith cracks or

  erodes,

  the river of time eating away at its banks until it just

  crumbles.

  Looks sudden.

  Isn’t.

  80

  Chon hears the ululations of mourning.

  Lying on his back, he feels cold air rush over him.

  Then nothing.

  Laguna Beach

  1976

  Cocaine,

  Runnin’ all ’round my brain.

  —RED ARNALL, “COCAINE”

  81

  Doc pulls a rabbit out of a hat.

  Except it ain’t no rabbit and it ain’t no hat—Doc pulls a glassine envelope out of John’s surfboard.

  Magic.

  John just got home from a surfing trip with Doc to Mexico.

  It wasn’t Third Reef Pipeline or anything like that, but it was fine and they had a couple of girls with them and everyone had a good time. Except now they’re unloading their gear in John’s driveway in Dodge City and Doc takes one of John’s boards and busts it open and John is like, what the hey?

  “It’s the future,” Doc answers.

  John is pissed—for one thing, it’s one of his favorite boards. Two, he’s twenty-four now and eligible for adult felony time. If Doc wants to take crazy chances, why doesn’t he do it with his own board?

  Except Doc is like a god to him.

  And now God speaks.

  “You think there’s money in grass?” Doc says. “Grass is Junior Achievement. Coke is Wall Street. The hippie thing is over—peace, love, stick it up your ass. Jimi—dead. Janis—dead. It’s Sympathy for the Devil now.”

  The future is in money and the money is in coke. Stockbrokers do coke—movie producers, music executives, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs—they do coke, not grass.

  Grass is a house in Dodge City—coke is a place on the beach.

  Grass is a new van—coke is a leased Porsche.

  Grass is hippie chicks and patchouli oil—coke is models and Chanel.

  John gets it.

  John goes with it.

  It’s 1976, it’s the—

  BuyCentennial.

  82

  She stares into the mirror and slowly, meticulously draws the eyeliner pencil under her eye.

  The eyeliner is perfect, the mascara is perfect, the subtle blue eye shadow is perfect, the slight blush that highlights her porcelain cheekbones is perfect. She brushes her straight, lush blonde hair to a perfect shine.

  Coldly, objectively, critically, Kim decides that she is

  perfect.

  Getting up from the stool, she steps over to the full-length mirror attached to the door of her tiny room in the double-wide down in the flats of San Juan Capistrano near the strawberry fields.

  Kim straightens the classic little black dress and checks that it shows enough—but not too much—thigh, and enough—but not too much—cleavage. The dress represents months of waiting tables at the Harbor Grill in Dana Point for shitty tips and sidelong glances because Kim is a looker who doesn’t look

  seventeen.

  She decides that the dress is perfect.

  So is the black bra that pushes her breasts into the perfect globes she sees in Vogue, Cosmo, and even Playboy, which she studies to discover what men think a woman should be, and Penthouse to learn what men think a woman should

  do.

  Kim doesn’t otherwise know because she’s never had a boyfriend, never gone out on a date—she isn’t going to get into the backseat, she isn’t even going to get into the car.

  She is Kim the Ice Maiden, Kim the Frigidaire, and she doesn’t care what they say about her—she isn’t going to waste herself on high school boys who can’t do anything to make her life better or give her what she wants, which is

  Something better—much better—than the series of crappy apartments and mobile homes that her mother has worked her ass off to provide, better than the series of bedmates that her mother brings home and urges to leave early before her daughter wakes up.

  Kim has been saving herself, keeping herself to herself.

  Watching, watching

  Waiting, waiting for

  her body to grow into her soul, for it to be

  Perfect, and

  Perfectly irresistible

  Because you use what you have.

  The world didn’t give her money, or family, or position, but it gave her

  beauty

  And now she sees that she’s ready to go looking—hunting, really

  for a better life.

  Kim has a plan.

  83

  She’s been working on it for months.

  Okay, all her life, but this particular plan came to her months ago as she scanned the social pages of the Orange County Register that customers at the diner left on the table with their spare change.

  An annual fund-raiser for cancer at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

  She studies the photographs of the rich—their happy, perfect smiles, their coiffed hair, beautiful, stylish clothes, confident tilts of the head away from the camera. She sees their names, the Mr. and Mrs., Dr. and Mrs., and thinks—

  I am one of them.

  They just can’t see it because

  They can’t see me.

  Kim takes the society pages home, clips the photos, and pins them to the cork bulletin board above the small desk in her room. Studies them harder than she studies algebra or chemistry or English, because those subjects will get her

  nowhere

  and one day on her way home from work—her pink uniform dress smudged with grease stains and coffee spots—she stops at a fabric store and buys a dress pattern. Three weeks later, she buys black fabric.

  There’s a problem, though—

  She doesn’t know how to sew and anyway they don’t have a sewing machine, so the next morning she gets up, takes the pattern and the fabric, walks across the gravel “lawn,” knocks on the door of Mrs. Silva’s trailer, and asks,

  “Can you help me?”

  Mrs. Silva is in her early sixties. Her husband goes back and forth to Mexico and is often gone for weeks at a time, and Kim can hear her sewing machine from inside her room.

  Mrs. Silva smiles at the pretty guera.

  “Are you going to the prom?” she asks.

  “No. Can you help me?” Kim shows Mrs. Silva one of the society page photos. “It needs to look like this.”

  “Sonrisa, that’s a thousand-dollar dress.”

  “Except I want the neckline to be more like—”

  She draws her index finger from left to right in a diagonal line across the chest.

  “Come in. We’ll see what we can do.”

  For the next two months, Kim spends every spare moment beside Mrs. Silva at the sewing table. Her new tía shows her how to cut, how to sew. It’s difficult, complicated, but Mrs. Silva is a good seamstress and a wonderful teacher, and Kim learns.

  “You have an eye for fashion,” Mrs. Silva tells her.

  “I love fashion,” Kim confesses.

  She knows that she’ll need more than the dress.

  There’s a newsstand at the corner of Ocean and the PCH where the owner likes to look at her legs so he’ll let her stand there and browse and not buy anything while she goes through Vogue and Cosmo and WWD and takes notes.

  The makeup she sees is expensive, but she saves as much of her pay as she can (what doesn’t go to help her mother with rent and food) and all her tips, and she is so careful, so careful, about her selections, so when she takes the bus to the mall and goes to Nordstrom she knows exactly what to buy—and nothing more—for the effect she wants
to achieve.

  The calendar is not her friend.

  As Kim crosses off the days to the fund-raising event she does the unforgiving mathematics of time, her income, and what she still needs to buy.

  $2.30 per hour.

  Times twenty hours.

  Plus $15–$20 a shift in tips

  Times five . . .

  Minus $60 a week to her mother for household expenses . . .

  It’s going to be tight.

  At one of the (many) dress fittings with Mrs. Silva—

  Tía Ana, now—

  Tía Ana says, “The dress is coming along, but the dress without the proper foundation is nothing.”

  Kim doesn’t know what she means.

  Tía Ana is frank. “You have beautiful breasts, but they need the proper bra to make the dress look just so. An expensive dress with cheap undergarments? It is a beautiful house with a cracked foundation.”

  And then there are shoes.

  “Men look at you from the top down,” Ana says, “women from the bottom up. The first thing those brujas will do is look at your shoes, and then they will know who you are.”

  So Kim starts looking at shoes—in the newspaper, the magazines, in shop windows. She sees the perfect pair in the window of a snooty shop on Forest Avenue.

  Charles Jourdan.

  $150.

  Out of her reach, and while she can make a dress, she knows she can’t make shoes.

  It’s a problem.

  Then there’s jewelry.

  Obviously she can’t have the real thing—diamonds are as beyond her reach as the stars—but she finds that she has a flair with costume jewelry, and Tía Ana helps her pick out a few pieces—a bracelet, a necklace—that set off the dress.

  But the shoes.

  Kim goes home and looks at the waning days of the calendar—there are more X’s than blank squares—does the math, and realizes that she’s not going to make it.

  Her mother might have told her so.

  In the few hours between (scant) sleep and cleaning other people’s houses, the former Freaky Frederica, now just Freddie (her hippie days long behind her), sees her daughter’s activity—the photos on the bulletin board, the pattern bag, the comings-and-goings from Mrs. Silva’s trailer. Like Mrs. Silva, she misinterprets it as something to do with a prom or a dance or even (finally!) a boy, but she worries that her daughter is headed for

  heartbreak

  because she seems to be overreaching for a social strata in snobby Orange County that she can’t achieve.

  Most of the girls at Dana Hills High have money, have access, have, above all, attitude and will quickly sniff out that Kim lives in a trailer and that her mother cleans houses for a living.

  She doesn’t want her daughter to feel

  ashamed

  and, besides, she’s proud of who they are, who she is, an independent woman making it (just, but making it) on her own.

  Kim is smart, Kim could go to community college, maybe even a four-year school on a scholarship if she’d study, but Kim is too interested in the fashion magazines and the

  mirror.

  Freddie tries to tell her so, but Kim doesn’t listen.

  What she could tell her mother is that you don’t start your journey of Upward Mobility on the stairs; you take the elevator.

  But either way, you need the right

  shoes.

  84

  Stan accepts the rolled-up dollar bill from Diane’s hand—

  —oh, Eve—

  —leans over the counter at the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore, and snorts the line of cocaine.

  Doc grins at him. “And?”

  “Wow.”

  Diane is already grinning because Doc, chivalrous gentleman that he is, offered her the first line. Her brain buzzes and the little bees quickly work their way down to her pussy, industrious (“busy as”) and lascivious (flower-to-flower) creatures that they are.

  Doc has a sense of reciprocity—Stan and Diane turned him on to acid; now he’s returning the favor with coke. He and John have come over to the store with a sample.

  Fair being fair.

  Friendship being friendship.

  And business being business.

  (Not to mention alliteration being alliteration.)

  It’s good business to turn the owners of the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore on to a free sample of your new product, because while the bookstore ain’t what it used to be, it’s still a nerve center of the counterculture (read “drug”) community, such as it is anymore.

  (The community, not the drug.)

  It’s timely.

  Stan’s looking for something new, anyway.

  He’s tired of selling the hippie stuff, worried he’s trapped in a fading culture, and, truth be told, he’s a little bored with Diane, too.

  And she with him.

  And the political scene?

  The revolution?

  That they thought they won when Nixon

  —the Über Villain

  —the Evil Stepmother

  —be honest, the Scapegoat

  —(They are both conversant enough with their ancestral religion to know that the goat was loaded with all of society’s evils and driven from the town)

  fell from power

  and The War ended

  It’s come to Jimmy Carter.

  Jimmy Carter.

  Jimmuh Cahtuh.

  With his lust in his heart.

  Diane doesn’t want lust in her heart, she wants lust in her puss, in her yoni, if you must, and it’s been a while since she’s felt it with Stan. It’s all right . . . it’s pleasant . . . but . . .

  pleasant?

  Funny thing is, even in the free love days—when people were twisted around each other like worms in a coffee can in the bookstore’s back room—she didn’t participate. Neither did Stan. She out of reticence and he, she suspected, more from a fear of disease.

  Now they both wonder if they missed out on something.

  The other thing they wonder about is money.

  It used to be something you weren’t supposed to care about—

  bourgeois—

  but now people seem to

  want it and people seem to

  have it.

  Like Doc, for instance

  Taco Jesus has more than taco money, now, and he isn’t throwing it around or away. He’s buying things—clothes, cars, homes—and it looks good on him, and Diane can’t help but wonder—

  are they missing out on something, or worse

  have they missed out on something

  like they’re standing on the banks of a river watching the future flow away from them, and now

  Stan is looking at her as if he’s thinking the same thing, but she ponders if he is standing on the bank with her or floating away, and she also wonders if she cares.

  She turns and watches John “do a line”—in this new vernacular. All traces of his adolescent cuteness are gone. He’s lean, muscular, and powerful, and suddenly she realizes that she is ten years—a decade—older than she was. This boy, this child who used to sell joints from the bottom of his skateboard, is now a young man. And rich, if you believe the gossip.

  Gossip, hell, she thinks—certainly John owns the house two doors down from the one they still rent. And the parade of sleek young women going in and out screams of money, and one morning she saw Stan, his fucking teacup in hand, looking out the window watching one of John’s girls getting into her car, admiring—lusting after?—her long legs, her high breasts, her Charlie’s Angels blonde hair. (Who is the actress—the one with the fake, silly name?) And then he pretended he wasn’t staring, and she wished he had the honesty—okay, the balls—to come out and say, yes, he thought the girl was sexy, because she could see him chubbed up against his faded jeans, the ridiculous bell-bottoms, and if he’d been that honest she might have given him some relief, gone down on her knees and sucked his dick and let him shoot shiksa fantasy into her willing mouth, but inst
ead he said some mealy-mouthed thing about the “superficiality” of it all so she decided to leave him hanging, as it were.

  Now John hands her the rolled-up bill—it’s her turn again. Feeling a little silly, Diane pushes a finger against one nostril and inhales with the other and feels the coke blast her brain and then the acrid drip down her throat.

  They each do another line, then, far too restless to stay in the store, decide to go for a ride.

  Stan insists on driving and they all pile into their clunky old Westfalia van and she finds herself in the back with John as they cruise south on the PCH with her head and puss buzz-buzzing and she hears Doc talking to Stan about a “distributorship” like it’s Amway or something.

  “Even if you just buy for yourself,” Doc is saying, “we’ll give it to you wholesale, so you’re already ahead. Then if you decide you want to make a business of it . . .”

  Buzz buzz.

  “. . . serious money . . .”

  Buzz buzz.

  “. . . can’t be a lot of profit in leather bracelets . . .”

  Suddenly she watches herself turn to John and hears herself say,

  “Kiss me.”

  John looks startled. “What?”

  She repeats herself with some urgency, with some heat, with her husband two feet away, she offers her mouth, her full lips, and John takes them and she sucks his tongue into her mouth and sucks on it like a dick and she feels moist, wonderfully wet, and then Stan pulls off the road into the Harbor Grill because apparently the men are hungry and as he turns off the engine he turns and looks at her and she knows that he saw.

  85

  The waitress hands them menus.

  “I know that girl,” Doc says, watching her walk away. He turns to John, sitting in the booth beside him. “We know that girl.”

  John shrugs. They know lots of girls, and he’s still a little blown away by Diane kissing him with her husband right there.

  But if Stan is pissed, he’s not showing it.

  Not showing it at all, because his hand is under the table, stroking his wife’s thigh, and she’s looking across the table straight at John, her lips curled into a smile that wants to become a laugh.