“Yeah, well, motherfuckers love to jack right about now, when you’ve done all the backbreaking work and it’s ready to harvest.” He lifts his chin at a pup tent I hadn’t noticed. “That’s why I post somebody out here every night.”
“Armed?”
“Just with a cell phone. I don’t allow guns on the property.”
“That’s a relief.” Or is it? How does he impose his no-guns rule on gunslingers?
The highest buds are so tall that he has to stand on tiptoe to reach their drooping, bristling tips. If I were a pothead, I’d be salivating, but I have if anything an aversion to the cannabis high, which tends to maroon me in my own head. Tenderly thumbing back leaves, Justin peers at a bud through a kind of jeweler’s loop.
“The sugary hairs are made up of what they call tricomes—a bit like shrooms. Here.” He has me take a peek but all I can see in the dim light is something like blurred rice vermicelli.
“You want all your trikes to be cloudy; none clear,” he explains, as if partly to himself, peering through the loop again. “With the right ratio, amber mixed in with cloudy. Leaving them up for a single day can make a subtle but big difference.”
He steps back and surveys the plot. “These are coming down tomorrow.” His tone is so momentous I nearly let out a laugh. But I’ve never rolled the dice on anything of this magnitude. If the quality of the pot and therefore his reputation ride on this decision, I guess he has every right to be solemn.
And with that we turn back toward the house, all of whose windows are now cozily lit. Trotting ahead, the dogs seem as relieved as I am to be leaving the ominous outdoors behind.
The living room is cluttered with sleeping bags and knapsacks. The scent of high-grade weed hangs like incense in the air but vaporizers are the new bong and the air isn’t smoky. The crew of trimmers, ranging from teenaged to grizzled, sits at a long wood table in the center of which is a pile of dried pot. Placing a hand on my shoulder, Justin says, “Hey everybody, this is my brother Darius, all the way from New York!”
“The Big Apple!” a guy calls out as if it’s a password, though it’s something only tourists ever say—some crass, Tammany Hall–era image of plenitude and opportunity, “action.”
There’s the usual slightly puzzled smiles as they look from me to Justin and back. We have different fathers and bear little obvious resemblance to each other. They call out greetings and wave, then Justin points to each one and tells me his or her name—Jai, Toph, etc.—which I’m too tired to bother trying to keep straight.
Justin’s new girlfriend is tending a cauldron of ratatouille in the kitchen. I know her name is Serena and she makes jewelry but I’ve yet to see a photo of her. It turns out that she looks enough like our mother at thirty that I stand frowning as she delightedly sets aside a wooden spoon and comes forward to give me a long, tight hug.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispers in my ear. “Justin really needs you right now.”
A bit annoyed at her presumption, I pull back and smile insipidly into her soulful gaze until, with what seems like a sigh of slight disappointment, she releases me to Justin, who shows me to a bedroom down the hall, where his two kids by a former girlfriend must stay on their visits, given the bunk bed and stuffed animals and Nerf guns.
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.