Savages: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  There developed such a devoted following with such a religious loyalty that they even gave themselves a name.

  The Church of the Lighter Day Saints.

  23

  When it comes to the War On Drugs, Ben is a confirmed pacifist.

  An Unconscientious Objector.

  He simply refuses to participate.

  “It takes two to fight,” he says, “and I’m not fighting.”

  Anyway, he doesn’t believe that there is a War on Drugs.

  “There is a War On Drugs Likely To Be Produced And/Or Consumed By People Of Color,” Ben allows.

  White Drugs—alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals—deal enough of those, you can overnight in the Lincoln bedroom. Black Drugs, Brown Drugs, Yellow Drugs—heroin, crack, boo—you get caught, you wake up every morning in your cell.

  Chon disagrees. He doesn’t think it’s so much a racial thing as a Freudian thing. He thinks it has to do with anal/genital shame.

  “It’s about hemispheres,” Chon says one fine California day, standing on Ben’s deck sucking on a spliff. “Look at a globe, now analogize it to a human body. The northern hemisphere is like the head, the brain, the center of intellectual, philosophical, superego activity. The southern hemisphere is down there near the groin and the anus, where we do all those dirty, shameful, pleasurable id things. Where are most of your illicit—dig the word, B, “illicit”—drugs produced? In that nasty dick, vagina, and asshole southern hemisphere.”

  “But where,” Ben posits, “are most of those same drugs consumed? In your brainy, moral, superego region.”

  “Exactly,” Chon answers. “That’s why we need the drugs.”

  Ben ponders this for a loooooonnng time, then

  “So,” he says, “you’re saying that if we all took good shits and fucked a lot, there would be no drug abuse.”

  “And,” Chon adds, “no more war.”

  “We’d both be out of work.”

  “Okay.”

  They laughed for a long time.

  24

  Stan and Diane never asked, never ask how their boy got so rich. That, they don’t question or try to analyze. They don’t do the financial forensics on how a twenty-five-year-old buys a four-million-dollar crib at Table Rock.

  They’re proud of him.

  Not for that, for his social consciousness.

  His social conscience.

  And conscientiousness.

  His Third World activism.

  25

  Which explains (sort of) where Ben is now.

  Okay, Chon doesn’t know exactly where Ben is now, which, with severed heads bouncing around the blogosphere, worries him a little, but—

  —the boy does have a tendency to take care of other people’s business instead of his own. Ben has what they call a social conscience. Very aware, progressive dude. Chon likes that about him, but—

  —bro tends to houdini for months at a time, saving some group of people from something. Wells to prevent cholera in the Sudan, mosquito nets to save kids in Zambia from malaria, observation teams to keep the army from slaughtering the Karen in Myan-myan-myan-mar.

  Ben spreads his wealth.

  Call it what you want

  The Ben Foundation.

  The Hydro Institute.

  Dope Delivers

  Green Is Green

  Chon tries to tell him just send the money, let the cash fingers do the walking, stay and take care of business, but Ben is a hands-on kind of guy. Money isn’t enough, he says, you have to commit your heart, soul, and body. Ben puts his money where his mouth is but also his mouth where his money is, so

  —every few months he washes back up at Table Rock with

  dysentery—

  —malaria and/or—

  —Third World Heartbreak—

  (with which Chon is familiar)

  —and Chon and O take him down to the best doctors at Scripps and then get him well until he finds another cause and then it’s—

  Gonzo again.

  Off to rescue kids with tiny arms, big eyes, and

  swollen stomachs.

  Now Chon tells him via e-mail that he has a problem right here at home. He forwarded the video clip not to hurt Ben (he hates to hurt Ben), but Ben has to know that there is bad shit happening here.

  People being turned into Pez dispensers.

  26

  Ben’s disembodied head

  floats in the ether.

  Skype.

  Blurred background behind the focus on his face.

  Unkempt brown hair.

  Brown eyes.

  His lips slightly out of synch, a broken second’s lag behind the sound as he says,

  “Okay, I’m coming

  home.”

  27

  O is happy

  that Ben is coming back.

  Ben, her other bookend

  The two men—Ben and Chon—

  who mean something in her life.

  The only two who ever have.

  28

  Ben is warm wood, Chon is cold metal

  Ben is caring, Chon indifferent

  Ben makes love, Chon fucks.

  She loves them both.

  What to do, what to do?

  29

  When O gets up that morning (okay, afternoon), she looks out the window and sees a tall woman with close-cropped silver hair get into a BMW and pull out of the driveway.

  “Who was that?” O asks Paqu when she walks into the kitchen to look for the Cocoa Puffs that Paqu has probably thrown out. (O hijacks the shopping list that Paqu gives Maria and adds items like Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, Hostess CupCakes, self-heating lubricating gel, and Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits. But then Paqu goes on patrol in the pantry and throws these things out, save for the gel, which O whips into her room the second Maria comes back with the groceries.)

  “That’s Eleanor, my life coach,” Paqu says. “She’s wonderful.”

  “Your . . .”

  “Life coach.”

  This is just 2G2BT. This makes O really happy. Her skin gets all tingly as she asks, “Just what does a life coach actually do, Mom?”

  Sure enough, Paqu gave the Puffs the heave, so O has to settle for Frosted Mini-Wheats, then scans the fridge for real, actual milk, not the skimmed or 1 percent shit that Moms insists on stocking when she’s not completely antidairy, which is apparently now, so O pours the cereal into a bowl and eats it dry, with her fingers, a small measure of revenge.

  “Well, Eleanor thinks I have the makings of a life coach myself,” Paqu answers, placing some flowers into a tall, skinny vase. “So she’s going to help me actualize that potential.”

  The potential actualization of that potentiality gets O even zingier. “So your life coach is coaching you to be a life coach.”

  So you can coach other people to be life coaches. O almost hustles out the door right then because she just can’t wait to report this circle jerk of life coaching to Ben (Ben’s coming home!) and Chon.

  Paqu ignores the question. “She’s truly amazing.”

  “What happened to the skin-care product thing?”

  “Superficial, don’t you think?” Paqu looks at the flower arrangement and smiles with self-satisfaction. Then she has a revelation. “Darling! You could study to be a life coach, too! Then we could be mother-and-daughter life coaches!”

  “But then you’d have to come clean that you have a daughter over the age of ten,” O says, shoveling Mini-Wheats into her mouth.

  Paqu peruses her with what O guesses is meant to be life coach–level discernment.

  “Of course, you’d have to do something about that hair,” Paqu says. “And the … ‘body art.’”

  “Maybe I could start as a ‘life cheerleader.’”

  Rah.

  30

  Chon sits in the black leather chair and watches the inauguration of the new president of the United States.

  Who reaches out a hand to the Muslim world.

  Chon gets
that—he’s reached out to the Muslim world a few times himself.

  It’s good Ben is coming back. The new prez agrees. He’s telling the thousands in attendance and the millions watching on television that the feeding frenzy at the trough is over, the orgy has been put on indefinite hiatus, the Third World is closer than you think, in both time and space.

  Recession.

  Depression.

  Repression.

  Whichever word you use, there’s a smaller pie to slice up and the knives are out. (See Clip, Video.) Layoffs, lop-offs, the market self-correcting. Companies becoming more efficient and the Baja Cartel is at the cutting edge (oof).

  “How do you think we should respond?” Ben asks in the Skype session.

  “Reach out to the Mexican world.”

  “Violence is not necessarily the answer,” Ben says.

  It’s not necessarily not the answer, either, Chon thinks.

  This violent state of mind.

  This violent state of mine.

  As he watches the old president—aka the Sock Puppet—wave and get on the helicopter.

  The last time someone tried to muscle Ben and Chonny’s it was a biker gang. Those boys picked up one of their retailers and beat him to death with a tire iron as a message that Ben and Chon could no longer do retail in the greater San Diego area.

  Ben, natch, was off doing good somewhere, so this is how Chon took care of it.

  31

  Flashback:

  Chon rolls down the 5 in his classic black ’66 pony.

  Pointed toward Fun Dog.

  Etymology:

  San Diego

  Sun Diego

  Sun Dog

  Fun Dog

  In the backseat under a blanket sleeps a Remington Model 870 SPS Super Slug pump action, 12-gauge shotgun with a synthetic cantilevered slug and a rubberized pistol grip that “advances deer-leveling technology to farther reaches and smaller group sizes than ever before possible.”

  Right now it’s resting up for the big business meeting.

  32

  Chon likes to keep meetings short.

  Learned that in a book, Things They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School.

  A short meeting is a good meeting.

  He drives down to Dago, finds the house in Golden Hill he’s looking for, and parks on the street. Wakes the shotgun up (“We’re there”), crosses said street, and knocks on the door.

  Tire Iron opens it. Big wooly motherfucker, heavy hairy shoulders showing under the wifebeater.

  Chon puts the shotgun to T.I.’s throat and pulls the trigger.

  Guy’s head goes ballpark.

  (Fun Dog!)

  Something they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School.

  “Savages, How to Deal With.”

  Savagely.

  33

  Continuing in flashback mode:

  Chon goes back to the Tuna—

  Etymology:

  (And, by the way, Chon really likes the word “etymology,” the etymology of which is Greek and means “in the true sense.” Hmmmm …)

  Laguna, rhymes with

  Tuna—

  Holes up with a freaking arsenal, tells O not to come around until the biker gang responds.

  They don’t.

  He never hears from them again except by word on the California Bongo Drum Communications System that they’ve decided to get out of the herb business and focus their efforts on meth.

  A sound management decision.

  Do not expand horizontally until you have achieved maximum vertical capacity.

  Also: do not fuck with someone until you know exactly who the fuck you’re fucking with.

  And then don’t do it.

  34

  “Don’t fuck with people at all”

  Is a central tenet of Ben’s personal as well as business philosophy.

  Ben is a self-described Baddhist, i.e., a “bad Buddhist,” because he sometimes eats meat, gets angry, rarely meditates, and definitely does consciousness-altering substances. But the basics of Buddhism, Ben is down with—

  Do no harm

  Which Ben articulates as

  Don’t fuck with people.

  And he doesn’t think the Dalai Lama would argue with that.

  In addition to the interest-accruing deposits in the karma bank, it’s been a very successful business strategy, the very foundation of the very successful Ben and Chonny’s brand.

  A brand it is.

  You go into B&C’s as either a customer or a sales partner, you know exactly what you’re getting:

  As a customer—

  Top-o’-the-line, not-to-be-bettered, safe, healthy, organic, prime hydro at a fair price

  As a sales partner—

  a superb product that sells itself

  profit participation

  excellent working conditions

  day care

  health care

  Yes, health care, written through Ben’s corporation that e-markets Third World crafts made by Third World women.

  You see, Ben does adhere to the Buddhist belief in making a “right living,” which mixes in quite nicely with his childhood socialist indoctrination and his somewhat Reaganite entrepreneurial sense.

  Not for Ben the rigid, top-down vertical integration of the Baja Cartel. B&C (and the ampersand is everything, in Ben’s opinion) has a loosely organized, horizontal, flow-out (“Money doesn’t shoot upward to then trickle down, it flows out”) pseudostructure that allows for maximum freedom and creativity.

  Ben’s logic on this is that it’s impossible to organize marijuana dealers anyway (for reasons that are probably obvious), so why try to herd (cool) cats when they do better on their own, anyway. So—

  You wanna sell dope? Cool. You don’t? Cool. You wanna sell a lot? Cool. You wanna sell a little? Cool. Maternity leave? Cool. Paternity leave? Cool. You set your own targets, make your own budgets, set your own salary, it’s all cool. You just order however much you want from the Mother Ship and then do your own thing.

  This simple philosophy, plus the care he takes in growing his primo product, has made Ben a very rich young man.

  The King of Hydro.

  The King of Cool.

  35

  There are, of course, some critics—and Ben is one of them—who will say that Ben can be Ben because Chon is Chon.

  Ben acknowledges his own hypocrisy on this issue.

  (He is nothing but self-aware and self-analytical. See:

  Ben, parentage of.)

  He and Chon even have a noun for it:

  “Hydrocrisy.”

  The hydrocrisy is obvious—Ben strives to be nonviolent and honest in a business that is violent and dishonest.

  “But it doesn’t have to be,” Ben has argued.

  “But it is,” Chon countered.

  “But it shouldn’t be.”

  “Okay, but so what?”

  Well, so what is that Ben has taken 99 percent of the violence and dishonesty out of his business, but that other 1 percent is—

  —where Chon comes in.

  Ben doesn’t need to know what Ben doesn’t need to know.

  “You’re the American public,” Chon tells him.

  And Chon has ample experience with that.

  36

  Guys dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and the headlines are about

  Anna Nicole Smith.

  Who?

  Exactly.

  37

  Ben watches CNN in the airport.

  On his way home from the Bongo Congo.

  Etymology—

  The Congo River runs through it, and

  It used to be called the Belgian Congo, and

  It’s fucking nuts there.

  Otherwise known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  What was Ben the Baddhist doing there?

  Funding psychotherapy clinics for rape victims.

  Traumatized women, multiply raped and often mutilated—first by rebel soldie
rs, then by the soldiers who were sent to protect them from the previous set of soldiers. So Green Is Green writes checks for health clinics and counselors, for pregnancy and STD tests, and—

  —get this—

  —for instructors to go out to the soldiers and hold workshops to teach that rape and mutilation are—

  wrong.

  Ben leaves the plastic molded chair to hit the porcelain in the men’s room again because he contracted more in the Congo than just the usual Third World Heartbreak and he really hopes it isn’t dysentery (again).

  He sits Luther-like on the john and, in fact, (re)considers his own theology because—

  —while he knows as a Baddhist that men who rape and cut up women should be reeducated not to do that, he also has this impulse that the more effective thing to do would be to just—

  —shoot the fuckers.

  He knows (ever self-reflective) that there’s more to it than that.

  Maybe he’s just sick and tired but he’s also

  sick

  and

  tired

  of seemingly everything these days. He feels

  ennui

  depression

  adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because

  —dig a well in the Sudan and the janjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway

  —buy mosquito nets and the boys you save grow up to

  —rape women

  —set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army

  —steals them and uses the women as slaves and

  Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon’s opinion of the human species