Don Winslow: The Kings Of Cool

They have candles for light and Sterno stoves for what little cooking they do. They have sleeping bags and blankets, rolled-up shirts and jeans for pillows. They shower and use the toilets at Main Beach, although they’ve dug a latrine down a path through the brush outside the cave.

The little girl, Kim, hates it.

Six years old, she already has a sense that there’s something better out there.

Kim imagines a room (of her own, Ms. Woolf) with walls, pink wallpaper and bedspread, dolls lined up neatly along the big pillows, and one of those Easy-Bake Ovens where she can make tiny little cupcakes. She wants a real mirror to sit in front of and brush her long blonde hair. She wants a bathroom that is immaculate and a house that is…

… perfect.

None of this is going to happen-her mother’s name is “Freaky Frederica.”

A year ago, Freddie ran away from home and (abusive) husband in Redding and found her way to some shelter (and a new name) with the hippie commune in the cave. For her, it was the best thing that ever happened-for her daughter, not so much.

She hates the dirt.

She hates the lack of privacy.

She hates the chaos.

People come in and out-the commune’s population is transient, to say the least. One frequent visitor to the cave is Doc.

He owns a house down in Dodge City, but sometimes he hangs out at the cave, smokes dope, and talks about the “revolution” and the “counterculture” and the revelatory powers of acid.

And fucks Freddie.

Kim lies there, still as a doll, pretending to sleep as her mother and Doc make love beside her. She shuts her eyes tight, tries to tune out the sounds, and imagines her new bedroom.

No one ever comes into it.

Sometimes the man with her mother isn’t Doc but someone else. Sometimes it’s several people.

But no one ever comes into Kim’s “room.”

Ever.

John likes living in the cave.

He started bunking with Starshine, but one night snuggled up with a runaway from New Jersey named Comet (presumably after the celestial phenomenon, not the household cleaner) and, as they were virtually indistinguishable, he didn’t care.

It’s just better than home.

The commune is a family in its own way, something John doesn’t have a lot of experience with. They sit down to meals together, they talk together, they do common chores.

John’s parents barely know that he no longer lives at home. He comes back every two or three days and leaves little traces of his existence, says hello to whichever parent is there at the moment, grabs a few clothes, maybe some food, and then goes back to the cave. His father is mostly living up in L.A. now, anyway, his mother is consumed with the details of the impending divorce, and it’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy.

John smokes grass, partakes in a little hash, but the LSD trips scare him.

“You lose control,” he tells Doc.

“You lose it to find it,” Doc says cryptically.

No thanks, John thinks, because he’s had to talk people down from their trips, or sit there during tedious acid sessions while people freak out and Doc reads from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Other than that, there’s nothing for a fourteen-year-old boy not to love living in the cave that summer. He goes down to the beach, Doc lends him a board to take out. He hangs out with the surfers and the hippies and gets high. He goes back to the cave and one of the hippie girls cuts him in on the free love buffet.

“It was like summer camp,” John would say later, “with blow jobs.”

Then summer ends and it’s time for school.

John doesn’t want to go home.

“You can’t live in the cave year round,” Doc says. Like, September through October would probably be fine, but then the weather changes and Laguna gets cold and damp at night. But cold and damp is exactly how John would describe the atmosphere at his house, his mother being remote and, more often than not, drunk.

What happens is, John moves mostly into Doc’s house.

It’s a gradual thing-John comes after school and hangs out, stays for the big spaghetti dinners, everybody gets stoned, John falls asleep on the couch or in one of the three bedrooms with one of the chicks who make up what is basically Doc’s harem.

After a while, John is just there, a fixture, a mascot.

Doc’s puppy.

He goes surfing with Doc, he helps Doc pass out tacos, he gradually comes to understand where Doc’s money comes from.

Dope.

Just hanging out, John gets an idea what the Association is and who they are. The boys make thinly veiled references around him to their runs down to Mexico and the bigger expeditions to South Asia.

One day John tells Doc, “I want in.”

“In on what?”

“You know,” John says.

Doc gives him that charismatic, crooked grin and says, “You’re fourteen.”

“Almost fifteen,” John says.

Doc looks him over. John is your basic grem, but there’s something special about him-the kid has always been this little adult-the chicks around the place sure as hell treat him like a grown-up-and he’s not so little anymore.

And Doc has a problem maybe John can help him with.

Money.

Doc has too much of it.

Well, not too much money per se-nobody has Too Much Money-but too much cash in small denominations.

So now you have to catch this image John skateboarding to banks in Laguna, Dana Point, and San Clemente with a backpack full of singles, fives, and tens that Doc gets from his street sales. John walking into the bank and exchanging the small bills for wrapped stacks of fifties and hundreds.

And John knows which tellers to go to, which ones get birthday presents and Christmas bonuses from Doc.

And if the cops see a skinny kid with long brown hair, a T-shirt, and board trunks pushing his street board along the sidewalk, he’s just one of dozens of pain-in-the-ass skateboarders, and it doesn’t occur to them that this one has thousands and thousands of dollars slung over his shoulder.

Some kids have paper routes-John has cash routes.

Doc kicks him fifty bucks a day.

Life is good.

John puts up with school, does his route, gets his fifty, goes back to the house, and slips into bed with girls who are now more often in their twenties than in their late teens and who are giving him an education he can’t get in the classroom.

Yeah, life is good.

But it could be better.

“I want to deal my own shit,” he tells Doc one day as they’re sitting out in the lineup waiting for the next set.

“Why?” Doc asks. “You’re making money.”

“Handling your money,” John answers. “I want to handle my own money.”

“I don’t know, man.”

“I do,” John says. “Look, if you won’t supply me, I’ll go to somebody else.”

Doc figures that if the kid goes somewhere else he could get burned or ripped off or walk right into a police setup. At least if I sell to him, Doc thinks, I know the kid will be safe.

So now, in addition to his cash over his shoulder, John has fat joints taped to the bottom of his skateboard and sells them for five bucks each.

Now John is making money.

He doesn’t spend it on albums, clothes, or taking girls out. He saves it. Not even sixteen, he hands Doc a pile of money and asks him to buy him a car.

A beautifully restored 1954 Plymouth station wagon.

Dig our brother John.

Seventeen years old, he rents not one but two houses in Dodge City.

One to live in, the other to store his dope in.

He makes more round-trips to Mexico than the Trailways bus, and he ain’t skateboarding five-dollar fingers anymore. (He has three other grems doing that, and happy for the money.) He is wholesaling now, selling in volume to street dealers, making real money. He has so much grass stashed in that second domicile it becomes known as “The Shit Brick House.”