The Marijuana Chronicles

Justin delivers a half-speed martial arts kick to my rib cage and I’m reminded that if he winds up going to prison he’ll be able to defend himself. He leads the way to the acreage behind the house and a pair of Australian sheep dogs I also know from photos falls into step with us—handsome but on the small, mellow side for guard dogs, at least compared to the New York pit bulls I’m used to. Irrigation lines run along ground littered with white plastic buckets, torn bales of hay, shovels, pitchforks.

We come to a kind of signboard affixed with what turns out to be ten or so medical marijuana certificates, each in its own plastic envelope: Patient, Caregiver, Registry Number, State Seal. They look like play money. The plants themselves are just beyond, enormous, bushy things wrapped in green plastic skirts, the bud-heavy stalks held aloft by lengths of twine tied to stakes. Beyond the pot, the forest primeval again, where night has already fallen.

It’s obvious at a glance that there’s more here than these notional ten patients could smoke in a lifetime, which I knew was the deal, but the surplus is so flagrant that my surprise must show.

“It’s the backbone of the local economy, so the sheriff’s not go

I nod as if reassured, but to my big-brother ears this sounds pat, like someone else’s words.

“Mold and thieves is what you worry about,” Justin says now, as if to add realist heft. I follow along as he makes a quick tour of the patch, pointing out the stumps of ten plants harvested a week ago.

“What about those thieves?” I ask. There’s no perimeter fence that I can see. In addition to being suddenly colder, it’s also gotten spooky out here, evergreens in thrusting, spiky silhouette against the midnight-blue sky, psychedelic foliage whispering in a rising breeze. Relatively small or not, this patch must be worth over a million. Past my mind’s eye flickers an image of Mexican cartel soldiers slipping balaclavas over their heads.

“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 ca

“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 a

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 fu

“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.