The Financial Lives of the Poets Page 15

  “Where’s Monte’s grandpa?”

  Jamie makes a kind of bug-eyed face that makes me think either Monte’s grandfather has gone crazy and is in an asylum or that Monte and Dave have choked him to death.

  “Monte got popped on a possession couple of years ago. Dave got him off and they been workin’ together ever since.” Jamie nods toward the kitchen. “Asshole on the cell phone? Monte’s brother, Chet. Real prick. Leeches off Monte, stupid motherfucker. Me ’n him are gonna go one day. And I can’t wait, yo. I’m gonna lay that punk-ass bitch out.”

  Even though this sounds like empty bluster coming from Jamie, I contemplate giving him my effective four-point nonviolence lecture, a version of which I delivered to Franklin earlier (…(1) Except in rare cases of self-defense involving hand grenades, violence is always wrong, even against stupid motherfucker punk-ass bitches…)

  Jamie looks around the living room. “So…you’re like a businessman and a writer?”

  “I covered business for the newspaper for eighteen years.”

  “And you write what, poems and shit?”

  “Mostly shit.”

  “So how’d you get into that? You get, like…a degree in it?”

  I’ve been sitting next to Jamie on the couch, but now I turn to face him—gaunt cheeks, straight, dyed-black hair, a stud through his nose and another through his lip and that tattoo wrapping partway up his neck, and at the top, a pair of downturned eyes. My drug dealer sidekick is like any kid venturing a tentative question. He blushes.

  I can’t help smiling. “You want to be a writer, Jamie?”

  He chews his lip nervously and looks down—unsure if my smile means I’m making fun of him. He’s embarrassed to aspire to something as low-rent as being a writer.

  “I don’t know,” Jamie says. “I’ll probably end up in sales…or law enforcement…or, I don’t know…I might be in a band? I’ll definitely have to do something else to make some coin.” He shrugs. “But yeah, I always thought I’d be a good writer.”

  Sadly, our career counseling session is interrupted when Big Parka Monte comes back in the room alone. I don’t know where Dave has gone. “Come on, Slippers,” Monte says. “I want to show you something.”

  Jamie and I follow him through a rustic kitchen—an open pizza box with half-a-veggie on the Formica table (stoned stock analyst side-note: Domino’s Pizza’s time-tested delivery platform and low price-point make it a solid recession buy)—to a padlocked basement door. Big Parka produces a janitor’s key ring and unlocks the door and we descend (Jamie: “Watch your head, Slippers.”) into a paneled rec room with two small window-wells. There’s an unlit pellet-burning stove in one corner and a ceiling fan moving the warm air around. It is surprisingly hot down here, stuffy even. On the other side of the room an air hockey table is pushed up against the wall. Big Parka grabs one side of the air hockey table and Jamie grabs the other and they pull the table away. Then Big Parka Monte takes a putty knife and wedges it into a seam in the paneling, pries away a door-sized section, sets the paneling against another wall and steps away to reveal a narrow, yellow-glowing hallway lit with strung Christmas lights along its dirt floor.

  “During Prohibition, there was a still down here,” Jamie tells me. “Monte’s great-grandpa was a rum runner.”

  I follow Monte down this narrow hallway. It’s warm. No windows. There are three small doors off the hallway, each one padlocked. A slender yellow strip of light burns beneath each door. Monte uses his key to open the first door and steps aside as I look in.

  Dave is nowhere to be seen; everything he does seems planned in advance for some later testimony: Mr. Prior, did you ever see my client in the grow room itself?

  I step into the narrow doorway.

  I’m not entirely prepared for what I see.

  The room is small, maybe ten-by-ten. It’s almost unbearably bright. There’s a low gurgling hum, the sound of water moving through pipes. Hanging from the ceiling are three banks of hooded lights, like a photographer might use, and the walls are papered in reflective Mylar. Space heaters line the bases of the walls, and temperature and barometer gauges are on the wall nearest the door. In the center of the room, beneath the lights, are what we’ve come here for: four rows of chest-high counters, each with a pot and rows of large cubes that look like steel wool, each of these cubes connected by plastic water pipes, and rising from each cube of steel wool, like rows of patients on IV’s, three dozen of the most glorious dark green hydroponic marijuana plants anyone has ever seen, their stems bursting into ferny leaves and sitting on top, like dirty Christmas tree toppers, gorgeous bursts of purple-green, scuddy buds.

  “Wow,” I say. There are rows and rows of these top-heavy, budding, dark green plants, and more plants hanging upside down to dry and I recall the old gray ragweed my friend Donnie used to grow and it’s like the difference between thoroughbreds and burros. And even though this is what I’ve come for, there is something vaguely unsettling about this room, like one of those chicken farms where the birds are kept indoors and given steroids to grow their breasts. And the low gurgle of hydroponic tubes connecting the plants makes it seem even creepier, like one of those body-snatcher movies, or the nest of dead bodies in the Alien movies. Monte puts a hand on my shoulder. “Come on.”

  The next room is similar, but with buzzing sodium lights and what Monte tells me is a carbon dioxide generator. And rather than growing in “rock wool,” as Monte calls the cubes I saw earlier, these stems emerge from a whitish-gray stuff that looks almost like packing material.

  “Shredded coconut,” Monte says. “It works great for this kind of plant, but you really have to watch the aphids. I lost a whole crop to aphids one year.”

  “I see,” is all I can think to say.

  In the next room, the lights are fluorescent and the plants grow out of a mixture of soil and sponges. “This is incredible,” I say. “You must have a botany degree or something.”

  From the rec room behind us, Jamie calls: “No way, yo. Monte’s self-taught. Dude’s like a genius, somethin’.”

  Monte shrugs shyly.

  The short hallway ends at a tiny iron door, like the hatch of an old coal furnace. Monte opens it and I peer into a crawl space leading to another glowing passageway. “This tunnel leads to my neighbor’s basement,” Monte says. He tells me that three basements in this block are connected by these tunnels, that each basement has a secret panel leading to other grow rooms. There are twelve grow rooms in all in his little underground maze.

  I think about the craggy old farmers I used to interview about falling wheat prices—and I wonder if any of them lived in these houses with moonshine basements converted into marijuana tunnels. Perhaps they’ve been growing pot in this maze of basements for decades.

  Monte tells me that his brother Chet lives in one of the houses. The other is a rental that he owns and the renters are friends who aren’t allowed access to the basement, which is boarded up and padlocked. Monte keeps the rent low and pays the renters’ high electrical bills. Every electrical appliance in the houses is the highest efficiency and all of the houses have empty hot tubs or RVs parked outside, in case someone starts sniffing around about the high power bills. Managing power bills is the key to the whole industry, he explains. Drug agents routinely look for big surges in the power grid to find grow operations, so Monte disperses the power bills not only between the houses on this block, but also to the two businesses behind his house, on Main Street: the small engine repair place and the camera and watch shop—both of which can hide higher power bills easier than a residential property.

  “So you own those, too?” I ask.

  “No, no,” he says, “they’re just friendly businesses. We run power lines from their shops to a few of the grow rooms. In exchange, I pay double their power bill every month.”

  “Monte keeps them businesses alive,” Jamie says from the doorway. “Dude’s like the last industry in town.”

  Monte’s high round cheeks
instantly go red; this amateur botanist drug kingpin is so easily embarrassed.

  The whole operation is fascinating to me, and yet there’s something about all of this that is bothering me, too—and not what should be bothering me, that I’m matter-of-factly taking a tour of a sophisticated, illegal grow operation. No, I can’t help wondering something else.

  Monte looks back down the dark hallway. “Come on,” he says. I follow him and Jamie back into the rec room. Then Monte closes up Weedland, and we move upstairs.

  Dave rejoins us and we sit around the Formica table—Jamie and me on one side, Monte and Dave on the other. Monte’s chair strains beneath his considerable weight.

  Chet circles back in, still on his phone, and opens the refrigerator again. “Bullshit…Come on…Not possible…It’s bullshit, that’s why…Come on.”

  I glance over at Jamie, who is glaring at Chet through angry, squinted eyes, like a dog about to pounce.

  “Chet!” Monte calls. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Chet turns to his brother, and shrugs. Then he closes the fridge and moves out of the room onto an enclosed back porch. “Bullshit,” he says on his way out. “Come on, no way.”

  When the door closes, Monte smiles. He rests his big red-raw steak-slab hands on the table. “When Dave and Jamie told me about you, I wanted to meet you right away. Nine grand is an impressive first buy.”

  “’Course we did a background check on you—make sure you weren’t a cop,” Dave says.

  Monte shifts nervously, as if afraid that I’ll be angry at this invasion of my privacy. “We Googled you is all,” he says.

  Drug Dealer Dave shoots a glance, perturbed at Botany Monte for popping the illusion of an intensive background search. These guys are worse than Lisa and me, with their glances back and forth, their miscommunications, halting awkward affection for one another. “Anyway,” Monte continues, “we’re excited by your contacts, the new markets you might open up. We’ve always thought there was a…a…”

  Dave finishes for him. “A demographic we weren’t reaching.”

  Monte glances at Jamie. “I mean, the people we use now are great, but Dave and I always thought there were people outside the usual smokers we know. Older people, people with good jobs and money, people who used to smoke and maybe would again if there was a safe place to buy it. And you’re just the kind of guy Dave says would know ’em: Respectable. Not flashy. No criminal record, no reason for the police to suspect you of anything, no tattoos or drug habits or unsavory associations—”

  As much as I wish I could stop myself, I can’t, and at the words tattoos, drug habits and unsavory associations, I glance over at Jamie. He is chewing gum, his neck tattoo twitching at every chomp. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and smiles at me.

  “—Like I told Dave, if you can come up with nine grand for a first buy? That’s a guy we should be in long-term business with.”

  “I appreciate that,” I say. This all seems oddly formal. “But I should tell you: I’m only going to do this a little while, until I get a few things paid off, get back on my feet.”

  “Sure,” Monte says. “Sure. But—” And then he leans back in his chair and the legs on the chair splay just a bit, gritting on the old linoleum floor. I worry the old chair is going to snap. “Dave, do you want to—”

  And with that, Drug Dealer Dave leaves again. This must be when I get my dope.

  Instead, Monte hands me a small pipe and lighter and I fire one up, feel that first hot burn in my throat and then the sweet smoke. Ah yes. There it is. Two hits and I set the pipe on the table. I feel better already.

  Monte holds out his hands.

  I take the envelope of money from my pocket—and feel a tug of regret (there it goes). Monte doesn’t count it. The money just disappears in his coat. Then Monte rises, goes to a kitchen drawer, opens it and takes out a quart Ziploc bag (Stoned stock analyst side-note: Watch for SC Johnson and Sons—makers of those popular Ziploc bags—to go public) with a big cigar-sized roll of rich green buds in the bottom. He also removes a baby scale, which he puts on the kitchen table. He sets the baggie on the scale and I see that it’s three ounces. Then he hands me the baggie and takes his chair again.

  “I need a little time to get the rest of it together,” Monte says. “You can’t just pull two-and-a-half-pounds off the shelves. And I needed to make sure you actually had the money.” He shrugs apologetically. “Tomorrow night, you pick Jamie up, come out here and get the rest. That’s a little taste. Three ounces. I’ll take it out of the two-and-a-half.”

  “Just enough for your glaucoma,” Jamie says, and laughs.

  I’m a little confused, and feel stupid that I let them take my money. I wonder if that’s why he had me smoke first—to loosen me up. And why’d they have me all the way out here if they were only going to give me three ounces? Why couldn’t I wait and pay him tomorrow? I shift…there’s a hole in my side where that big stack of money sat.

  Monte holds the pipe up. “You good?”

  I say that I am and he puts the pipe away in that giant file cabinet of a parka. “Put that away,” Monte says, and so I put the three ounces of weed in my messenger bag. Then Monte yells, “Dave!” and Dave comes back in with his briefcase again and I think, Oh great, more contracts, but instead he pulls out an envelope that is red-stamped Confidential. He slides it across the Formica table to me. “I trust you’ll keep this between us.”

  “What is it?”

  “A kind of…prospectus. A business plan. The real reason we wanted you to come out here tonight. Now, obviously, you can’t take this with you. You have to just read it here.”

  A prospectus? What kind of drug dealers have a prospectus? I glance over at Jamie. He is unflappable, never looks confused, but also never seems to entirely grasp what is going on around him. Maybe he should be a writer.

  I look at Dave, and then back at Monte, who has that same tentative, eager-to-please look on his round, red face. He runs bratwurst fingers through his side-parted hair. “Everything you’d need to know is in there.”

  Then, as I’m still trying to understand, Chet comes back through the room, eternally talking on the phone: “No fuckin’ way.” He opens the refrigerator and grabs a beer.

  “Chet!” snaps Monte again.

  “You gotta be kidding,” Chet says into his phone, waving his older brother off. “No fuckin’ way. You gotta be kidding.” And then Chet is gone. I’m actually starting to wish Jamie would crack his skull.

  I turn back to Dave. “Why do I need a prospectus to buy weed?”

  Dave pokes Monte in the big parka. Nods at him.

  “There’s something I’d like you to consider,” Monte says. And he looks at Dave again. “I’m looking for someone…I mean…Ask yourself this: why go on buying milk when you could have your own cow?”

  I look from Dave to Monte. “Because…I don’t want a cow?”

  Dave puts a hand on Monte’s arm. “What Monte’s trying to say is that you should think about buying the farm.”

  I laugh. But they’re serious. I look from Monte to Dave, to Monte again. Yes. They are serious. “I really just want a little milk. I don’t want a cow.”

  Dave shakes his head. “Look, that wasn’t the best analogy. But you really should consider this…it’s a once-in-a-lifetime offer.”

  And I don’t know what makes me ask this, maybe the bowl I’ve smoked, maybe simple curiosity: “How much?”

  “Well,” Monte says, a little embarrassed. “I’d like to get four million.”

  “Dollars?” And I laugh again.

  Dave sits back, crosses his arms. “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously, Slippers.”

  “No,” I say, “I’m certainly not taking it seriously. No way I’m going to buy a four-million-dollar drug business.”

  Monte looks hurt again, those cheeks venting pink. “It’s worth a lot more than that.”

  And, as I’m thinking of the falling value of my own home, Dave
taps the prospectus in my hands. “After costs, Monte nets upwards of a million a year. You’d recoup the entire purchase price in four years. With his old buyers, you increase the market even a little? You could do two million a year…pay it off in even less time.”

  I have no idea what to say. What do you say to an offer like this? You go in to buy a Chrysler and they try to sell you the whole lot, the whole company? “This is why you had me out here? To try to sell me your drug business?”

  “The four million includes equipment, property, plants, everything,” Monte says. “And two weeks of transition and training.”

  “And you’re not just buying a business.” Dave says. “You get all of Monte’s knowledge, his accounts, access to markets. You get an experienced lawyer—me. And Monte will agree to a noncompete clause so you don’t have to worry that he’ll just go start up another operation somewhere.”

  I stare at them. They’re serious. “Look, guys. Even if I was interested, which I’m definitely not, I don’t know what makes you think I have four million dollars sitting around.”

  Dave has a quick answer for this. “Monte would carry the contract. I’d arrange it through a foreign bank. You put something down as good faith, say fifteen percent, and after that, Monte gets a percentage of your sales until you pay it off. It would be like making payments, like any home purchase, except rather than paying your mortgage off in thirty years, you could pay if off in four or five. And make a sweet living in the meantime. Tax free.”

  “If it’s such a sweet living, why is he selling?”

  I think Monte might cry. He shoots a quick glance at Dave and then says, “I’m tired,” his voice cracking. “I’ve been doing this six years. It wears on you. It’s a young man’s game.”