Don Winslow - The Kings Of Cool

He has a twenty-three-year-old girlfriend named Lacey living with him who has a sleek body, so flexible because it doesn’t have a jealous bone in it. He can drive his own car now and has three of them, the Plymouth, a ’65 Mustang convertible, and an old Chevy pickup he uses to put his surfboards in. He has a quiver of custom-made boards. He hangs out with the Dead when they roll through town. He gets high on trips with Doc to Maui.

He’s still Doc’s puppy, but now they say that he “runs with the big dogs.”

John is a junior member of the Association.

Meanwhile, the country is going motherfucking insane.

While John is on the trajectory from taco-grubbing grem to successful young businessman, the United States goes McMurphy in the cuckoo’s nest, aka the years 1968–1971.

Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin, has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby, Tet Offensive, riots in Cleveland, riots in Miami, the riot in Chicago, Mayor Daley, Hippies and Yippies, we go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon (the Nurse Ratchett of the American political psych ward), the Heidi game, the last prince of Camelot takes a girl to the terminal submarine races, the Chicago Eight, My Lai, I came across a Child of God he was walking along the road, Altamont, Janis dies, the Manson family, Cambodia, tin soldiers and Nixon coming, Angela Davis, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Apollo 13, tie-dyed T-shirts, granny dresses, Attica.

With the exceptions of Woodstock and Janis dying, it pretty much all slides past John.

Come on, he’s in Laguna.

The Gold Coast is silver.

Laguna’s streetlights are shrouded in fog, and the lifeguard tower at Main Beach looks like it’s floating on a cloud.

Ben likes the town this way.

Soft, mysterious, nighttime.

He just dropped O at her place and is now considering whether to go out, go home, or give Kari the waitress a call.

Uh-huh.

He gets on the phone. “Kari? It’s Ben Leonard. From the Coyote?”

Just a short silence, then a warm answer.

“Hey, Ben.”

“I wondered what you’re doing.”

Longer silence. “Ben, I shouldn’t. I’m seeing somebody.”

“Are you married?” Ben asks. “Engaged?”

She’s neither.

“Then you’re still single,” Ben says. “A free agent.”

But she’d feel so guilty.

“Makes the sex better,” Ben says. “Trust me on this, I’m Jewish.”

She’s Catholic.

“In that case we have almost a responsibility to do this,” Ben says. “We owe it to sex.”

She laughs.

Ben drives past Brooks Street and keeps going toward Kari’s place in South Lagoo.

Things you don’t want to see in the rearview mirror:

(a) Your new cell phone crushed under your tire.

(b) Ditto your girlfriend’s dead puppy.

(c) A goalie mask.

(d) Flashers.

Ben sees (d).

“Shit.”

He pulls over on the PCH near the entrance to Aliso Creek Beach.

An empty stretch of road on a foggy night.

Looking in the mirror again, he sees that it’s an unmarked car with a flasher attached to the roof.

But he doesn’t have anything on him and the car is clean.

The plainclothes cop’s face appears at the window. He shows his badge and Ben rolls the window down.

“License and registration, please.”

“May I ask why you stopped me?”

“License and registration, please.”

Ben takes his license from his wallet, hands it over, and then reaches toward the glove compartment for the registration.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the cop says.

“Do you want the registration or not?” Ben asks.

“Step out of the car, sir.”

“Oh, come on,” Ben says. Because he just can’t help himself-it’s in his freaking DNA. “Why did you stop me? Do you have probable cause?”

“I saw marijuana smoke coming out of the driver side window,” the cop says. “And I can smell it now.”

Ben laughs. “You saw marijuana smoke from a moving car at night? And you don’t smell anything-I never smoke in my car.”

“Step out of the car, please, sir.”

“This is bullshit.”

The cop rips the door open, grabs Ben by the wrist, hauls him out, and arm-bars him to the ground.

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.

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.