Then the kicks start coming.
Ben tries to go fetal, but the kicks come into his ribs, his shins, his kidneys, his balls.
“You’re resisting arrest!” the cop yells. “Stop resisting!”
“I’m not resisting.”
Two more hard kicks, then the cop comes down with his knee on Ben’s neck and Ben feels the gun barrel press against the base of his skull.
“ Now who’s the asshole?” the cop asks.
It’s such a weird fucking thing to say, but Ben isn’t focused on that.
Because he hears the hammer click back.
His breath catches in his throat.
Then the cop pulls the trigger.
52
O goes into her bathroom, turns on the exhaust fan, and lights a roach.
She’ll make this small concession to her mother’s sensibilities, but Paqu’s hypocrisy on the subject of drugs is nothing short of epic, almost admirable in its bold two-facedness.
Paqu’s medicine cabinet behind the mirror mirror on the (bathroom) wall is a pharmacopoeia of prescribed mood-altering drugs a fact that O despises because it’s such a cliche, and all the more so because she becomes a part of the stereotype (hence the “stereo” if you think about it) by consistently running to the shelter of her mother’s little helper when the herb just won’t do the trick.
“Can’t you develop a blend,” she has asked Ben, “called ‘For Orange County Girls When Battlestar Galactica Isn’t Enough’?”
“Working on it,” Ben replied.
But so far to no result.
So O will occasionally raid CVS Paqu for
Valium
Oxy
Xanax or some other antidepressant which makes Paqu’s lectures about her marijuana-smoking more bearable, lectures that come with greater frequency in the weeks after Paqu returns from rehab with new material and a fresh flock of Twelve-Step buddies who hang around the patio and talk about their “programs” and before Paqu gets bored with the whole thing and decides that the real answer lies in yoga, bicycling, Jesus, or scrapbooking.
(The scrapbooking phase was especially excruciating, featuring as it did Paqu gluing endless pictures of herself taking pictures of O into volumes arranged by year.)
Actually, one of Paqu’s lovers was a sad-looking guy from her “Friday meeting,” whom a sixteen-year-old O asked, “Are you ‘in recovery,’ too?”
“I have thirty days,” the guy said.
“Well, you ain’t gonna have forty,” O said.
Which proved prophetic on about day thirty-six, when O came out of her room to find Paqu and Sadly Sober Guy slinging (empty) Stoli bottles at each other across the living room before each departed to (separate) detox facilities, leaving O alone in the house to hold epic parties on the rationale that she was thoughtfully cleansing the house of alcohol in anticipation of her mother’s return.
Anyway, like goaltenders and quarterbacks, Paqu is blessed with a short memory, so none of this history stops her from getting on O’s case about her marijuana habit.
O’s not in the mood tonight, so she sits on the toilet under the exhaust fan to get high and if Paqu comes nosing around she can just say she’s constipated, which will engender a suggestion about an organic remedy rather than a ball-busting.
Because she feels like she’s already had her balls, as it were, busted by Chon’s utter rejection of her blatant (and admittedly clumsy) come-on.
“I’m sort of Bambi-esque”?
Jesus.
I wouldn’t fuck me, either.
53
Ben hears the dry click.
His heart slamming.
The cop’s laugh.
He feels something being pressed into his hand, then taken away, then the cop pulls his arms behind him and cuffs him.
“Look what I found,” the cop says.
He shows Ben a brick of dope.
“That’s not mine,” Ben says.
“Yeah, I’ve never heard that before,” the cop says. “I found it in the trunk of your car.”
“Bullshit. You planted it.”
The cop hauls him to his feet, pushes him into the backseat of the unmarked car.
And reads him his rights.
54
Like he has the right to remain silent.
No shit. Ben doesn’t say anything except he wants his other right, the right to a lawyer.
Does Ben know a lawyer?
Are you fucking kidding? Ben sells the best dope in Orange County, ergo some of his best customers are lawyers.
(And doctors; as yet, no Indian chiefs.)
The fucked thing is that he doesn’t know any criminal lawyers — but he calls an insurance lawyer who calls a buddy of his who hustles over in the middle of the night.
But not before the cops file charges against Ben under California 11359-possession with intent to sell-and resisting arrest (a “148,” Ben learns), and throw in a 243(b) battery on a peace officer for good measure, and chuck him into central holding.
Forget the jail cliches.
No Mexican gang tries to turn him into a jerk-off sock. He doesn’t have to fight Bubba for his bologna sandwich. Closest thing Ben has to an encounter in his OC jail cell is with a Rasta dude who asks him what he got busted for.
“Possession of marijuana with intent to sell, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer,” Ben tells him.
“A 243(b), very cool,” Rasta dude says.
Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.
Mostly Ben just lies there-aching and angry.
At Detective Sergeant William Boland of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Anti-Drug Task Force.
Who put a gun to his head and pulled a dry trigger.
