Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“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.