Jamie goes on, sotto voce: “Big dude in the coat’s named Monte. He went to high school here with Dave. Played football together. You imagine those dudes playing football? Shit, I should’ve lived in a small town. I’d have been fuckin’ all-state. Definitely wouldn’t have gotten cut in eighth grade. After they graduated, Dave moved away, went to law school. Monte stayed around here. This is his grandpa’s house.”
“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
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
“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:
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
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
