The Marijuana Chronicles (27 page)

Authors: Jonathan Santlofer

BOOK: The Marijuana Chronicles

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He asks whether I want to crash for a bit and I answer by flopping backward onto the lower bunk. I’m expecting to plummet into sleep but once my eyes are shut I start counting money: Justin’s paying me twenty-five dollars an hour to trim. I have no idea how much I can do, but I’m hoping to clear a grand, which will put a small dent in my credit card and student loan debt. But with the canceled flight, my earning time has been reduced from five days to four.

I find a bathroom down the hall, take an overdue piss, splash cold water on my face, and go back to the trimming station, where Justin, giving guard-duty instructions to a young, rather stoned-looking guy, points out a pot of coffee and a free chair next to Dolly, a middle-aged woman wearing a tricorn pirate’s hat. The scene is more festive now, with beers being cracked open and the carbs of vaporizors loaded with one or another strain of Justin’s weed.

Billy, a young guy Justin met in Kauai and seems to have made his factotum, waxes on to no one in particular about how grateful he is to have been brought into the business, being able to help all the “patients” who need their “medicine”; it sure beats working in restaurants, though of course everything can get boring if you do it enough times, even giving massages to the cheerleading squad. At which point Justin sends him out to guard the garden for the night and I’m spared any more of the kid’s soft-porn philosophizing.

I watch Dolly’s chubby hands, the left holding a bud of kush and rotating it while the right snips rapidly away at the stems using short-sheered scissors with orange finger-grips. “You basically give ’em a haircut.” She holds the trimmed bud up for my inspection. “He’s in the army now!”

“So he’s going
back
to Afghanistan,” I say.

“Ha-ha!” she laughs after a beat. “Your brother’s funny!” she calls to Justin.

“So you’re a professor?” Josh or maybe Jai asks me from across the table.

“Sort of,” I say, starting in on a bud with my own pair of scissors. “I’m an adjunct professor.”

“What’s that?”

“A part-time fool,” I say with no more than the usual bitterness, but in this mild, agrarian company it sounds jarringly harsh. They stare at me blinkingly. Well, let them run around the city between two or three colleges for a decade, too worn down to publish and with no hope now of getting a tenure-track job. The only reason I’m “free” to be here is that one of my classes was canceled at the last second.

“Better than a full-time fool!” says a Deadhead Methuselah in a knit rasta cap. He barks out a laugh as if he’s startled himself with his own wit, then repeats the remark a few times lest anyone fail to savor it.

For a while I work well enough on coffee and cinnamon toast, and when that no longer stokes my brain fires I begin sniffing around for something stronger. Every month on payday I treat myself to a mingy half-gram from my dealer Richard or one of the local coke bodegas if Richard doesn’t pick up and I have a nose for who’s holding. As it turns out, no one is, but the verging-on-gaunt girl in the corner has a prescription bottle full of Adderall. She waves away my offer to pay for half a dozen and I’m soon buzzing along more or less oblivious to the tedium.

As people begin dragging themselves off to sleep, Justin pulls up a chair and trims alongside me. How he stays up I’m not sure—sheer drive to see the harvest through, from what I can tell. Dropping the finished buds into a Rubbermaid tub labeled
Willie’s Wonder
, we chat about this and that until he broaches the inevitable subject of our mother, who died of a staph infection in Hawaii three years ago, just when Justin was getting his pot plantation underway.

“I just wish she could’ve been here for a harvest,” he says quietly, though the other trimmers are listening to music on earbuds and can’t hear us.

“She’d be so proud of you, man,” I say.

Justin lets his head fall forward and his shoulders heave.

“She would have cooked for everyone round the clock,” I say, rubbing his back with resin-sticky hands, “and trimmed until she got carpal tunnel.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he nods. “I know.”

“And she probably would’ve wanted to be one of the runners too.”

“She would have, wouldn’t she?” he says, brightening.

“Which would’ve been brilliant, because who’d suspect a seventy-year-old lady?”

“Or a professor,” he adds with a wink.

“Yeah, right.”

We lapse into silence, each missing her in our own way, or perhaps in exactly the same way, who knows? Then Justin heads off to his room with Serena in tow and I’m left in the company of a few fellow speed-eaters.

As dawn breaks outside, Serena reappears bearing a large wooden jewelry display box. She’s making everyone gifts to commemorate the harvest. She has a few of the sort of silver heavy-metal rings I’ve secretly liked but have never even tried on, and I pick out a molten-looking one.

“Your hands are shaking,” she says, slipping the ring on my finger. She goes into kitchen and comes back with a mug of what looks and smells like herbal tea but almost certainly has some cannabis infusion mixed into it. I’m too whacked to care. “This will steady you up.” And it does.

Then in comes Billy-from-Kauai. He looks shaken but I don’t know him well enough to be sure.

“Billy, what’s up?” Serena asks.

He has trouble catching a breath. “Where’s Justin?” he says finally.

“Justin’s in bed. What’s
up
?”

“We got jacked!”

“Jacked? Where were you?”

“I was asleep!”

“Oh, Billy!”

“Where’s Justin, man?”

Serena rushes into the back of the house, followed by Billy, and they reemerge seconds later led by Justin, who runs out the back door with a pistol in his hand.

“Justin!” I shout, but if he hears me he doesn’t show any sign of it and is rumbling down the stairs to the ground floor. After a stoned pause to gather my wits, I go after them but make a wrong turn and wind up on the driveway in front of the house, and when I run around to the back and the garden, Justin and the other two have had a quick look at the scene of the crime and driven off with a snarl I can hear from where I stand looking at the stumps of the thirty plants. I call him on my cell phone but he’s not picking up.

Dolly and the Deadhead Methuselah join me. “Oh my God!” wails Dolly, and her tricorn slips off her head.

Methuselah covers his eyes with both hands. “Holy shit!” But there’s an undercurrent of excitement in their reaction too, the schadenfreude of hired hands.

“Well, he told us they were coming down today …” Dolly says, shaking her head.

“He just didn’t say who was cutting ’em down,” Methuselah finishes for her. Crouching bandy-leggedly, he points to sweeping marks in the dirt. “Look, they drug ’em off this way!”

We follow the trails to the edge of the woods, which have an innocent state-park character in the morning light.

Methuselah says, “I told him: put up a fence or leave the dogs tied up out here. Or both!”

“Didn’t want to listen,” Dolly says. At which point the dogs saunter up. “Where the fuck were you?” The dogs wag their tails happily at the acknowledgment.

“Folks live in these woods,” Methuselah explains, squinting into piney shadows crosscut with dim bars of sunlight.

“Sort of half-hippie, half-
Deliverance,”
Dolly adds.

A bit like you two
, I think.

When Justin, Billy, and Serena get home it’s late afternoon. Most of the trimmers have left. Justin dismisses the rest, including Dolly and Methuselah, who have been doing more smoking and jabbering than working anyway.

“Okay,” Justin tells us in the kitchen. “We need to go to Plan B now.”

“Which is what?” I ask. Serena and Billy look just as clueless. “And where’s the gun?”

Justin lifts the hem of his T-shirt: it’s tucked into the waistband of his jeans.

“Give it to me,” I say, and to my surprise he hands it over. I just want to get it away from him but I find I like the feel of it. Engraved on the barrel in stylized letters:
Glock
.

“Plan B,” Justin says, “is we sell the trimmed weed to folks we have in Denver and Detroit, pay off people we owe, and do a quick indoor grow to recoup the loss from the jacking. And I want Billy to make the run.”

Even Billy the fuck-up looks stunned.

“Billy deserves a chance to redeem himself,” Justin says.

Serena is staring pleadingly at me but there’s no need.

Two days later I’m driving into Denver with ten pounds in the trunk, triple-bagged, vacuum-sealed, wrapped in newspaper, and buried under sacks of organic fruit. After Denver, Detroit; and after Detroit, New York, the Big Apple.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This collection is comprised of works of fiction, with the exception of the nonfiction essays by Raymond Mungo and Rachel Shteir. In the fiction stories, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Illustrations by Jonathan Santlofer, except where noted

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