Don Winslow - The Kings Of Cool

It’s business now, baby, it’s the eighties, it’s you do not fuck with the money, you don’t lust in your heart-you lust in your portfolio, Gordon Gecko ain’t quite there yet but he’s on his way, he ain’t heavy he’s my brother-bull shit, that fat lazy chucking-down-the — Quarter-Pounders-like-they’re-Necco-Wafers-motherfucker is heavy, he’s obese, and you ain’t carrying him anywhere, he can drag his own lard-ass into the gym, or not, whatever, he’s OHO

— On His Own Didn’t he listen? What did he have, cotton in his ears? Didn’t he hear the Great Communicator communicate that we’re back to the good old mythical days of

Rugged Individualism?

You drive your own Forty-Mule Team (not to be mistaken for forty acres and a mule-that’s for, you know, them) of Borax across the economic desert, you stand tall on your own two feet.

Commune?

Commune with my ass.

And trust?

I got your trust for you right here, motherfucker.

Unless you’re talking trust fund, keep trust out of your mouth, baby. “Trust”-the verb-is mostly for the past tense, as in

“I trusted him”

— ex-wife

“I trusted her”

— ex-husband

“I trusted him”

— guy sitting in the hole after selling dope to a trusted friend who had a mike taped to his shaven chest hence John and Bobby meet out in the ocean, where neither one of them can wear a wire. They let the next wave roll under them, then Bobby says, “I heard that Doc got busted.”

“Bullshit,” John says.

If Doc got popped, he’d tell me.

Wouldn’t he?

“I hear it’s federal,” Bobby says. “Serious weight, serious time.”

John knows that Bobby’s concern isn’t for Doc’s welfare.

“Doc wouldn’t flip,” John says. Even if he would, John can’t help thinking, Doc can’t trade up. He’s on the top of the pyramid, and the feds don’t trade down.

Bobby’s ahead of him. “Maybe the cops would go for quantity over quality. How many guys could Doc give up?”

The answer is a lot, but John doesn’t care how many, he cares who.

Like him.

“If Doc’s looking at fifteen years,” Bobby says, “maybe he gives us all up instead. Maybe he gives them the whole Association.”

“That’s not Doc.”

“That’s not the old Doc,” Bobby answers. “The new Doc…”

He leaves it hanging.

Doesn’t need to finish. John knows what he means.

Doc has changed.

Okay, who hasn’t, but Doc has changed. He isn’t the Doc you knew in the old days, springing for tacos. He isn’t the “this pie is big enough for everybody” Doc-he’s the “this pie is big enough for Doc” Doc.

It’s coke.

Coke isn’t grass.

Grass makes you mellow, coke makes you paranoid.

Grass inhibits your ambition, coke makes you want to be King of Everything.

Which is what Doc seems to want. More and more John hears Doc using the first-person possessive pronoun-singular-more and more he hears him use “my” instead of “our.” It’s Woodstock to Altamont-this ain’t our stage, asshole, it’s my stage. And you don’t come on my stage.

And Doc is starting to treat the Association like it’s his stage.

To be fair, other guys are getting weird, too. Mike, Glen, Duane, Ron, Bobby-all the Association guys are getting hinky with each other, starting to quarrel over territory, customers, suppliers. Guys who used to share the same wave can’t share the coke business.

And narcs love that. They exist on the divide-and-conquer, it’s their bread and butter. And now they’ve busted Doc?

“We don’t know if it’s true,” John says.

“Can we take the chance?” Bobby asks. “Look, even if it isn’t true this time, it’s going to be true the next. The way Doc’s going, it’s not if, it’s when. And you know that, John.”

John doesn’t answer.

The last wave of the set rolls through.

Being a shrink in Laguna is like being a fisherman at SeaWorld.

(What Chon would later come to call a Target-Rich Environment.)

You dip your line in those waters, your net is going to be full of thrashing, flopping, gasping creatures faster than you can say, “And how does that make you feel?”

Which is what Diane now asks the woman sitting (not lying) on the sofa across from her.

After the Viking funeral of the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore, Stan and Diane decided that society’s ills were more likely to be cured by Reich and Lowen than by Marx and Chomsky.

So they went back to school (UC Irvine, and if that ain’t irony for you, you haven’t been to Irvine) and became

Psychotherapists.

Stan and Diane soon developed a clientele of sixties refugees, acid casualties, strident feminists, confused men, manic-depressives (not “bipolar” yet), drug addicts (see “sixties casualties,” supra), alcoholics, and people whose mothers really didn’t love them.

It’s easy to make fun, but Stan and Diane turn out to be really good at what they do, and they help people. Except maybe not so much the young woman in Diane’s office right now, working through her (let’s face it, probably first) divorce.

“I don’t know if you can help her,” Stan said over dinner last night. “That kind of narcissistic personality disorder is almost impossible to treat. There is no pharmacological protocol, and schema therapy has its own problems.”

“I’ve been working more with cognitive techniques,” Diane answered, sipping the excellent red that Stan brought home.

They’ve built a nice, tidy life since she went a little crazy with John McAlister and Stan responded by burning down the store. They made enough money from the insurance settlement to buy the house in what was formerly known as Dodge City and use it as both a home and an office. They’ve made new “couple” friends, exchange gourmet dinner parties, and now Stan has become quite the oenophile with a small but sophisticated cellar.

If this life lacks excitement, it also lacks chaos.

“Have your cognitive techniques had any effect?” Stan asked drily, in regard to her difficult client.

“Not yet,” she answered.

Now she sits and tries to focus on Kim’s umpteenth and constantly changing repetition of her story-her upbringing in a wealthy albeit emotionally unavailable family, which provoked her young marriage to a “white knight” savior who was just another version of her remote father and who doesn’t understand or appreciate her and how she cannot seem to relate sexually no matter how hard she tries, and what Diane is thinking is I want a baby.

John takes a carpet cutter and methodically slashes the tires of the BMW.

Then he turns to Taylor and says, “ Now go.”

“That’s my car, ” she says.

A new silver 528i.

“I bought it for you,” John answers.

“That doesn’t mean you can just mutilate it.”

John shrugs-apparently it does. He bought the Beamer, he bought the Porsche 911 that sits next to it, bought the three-car garage that also holds the ’54 Plymouth wagon, bought the house on Moss Bay.

Cocaine been bery bery good to me.

“Now you’re just going to have to pay for new tires,” Taylor says.

Which means she isn’t leaving, John thinks with mixed feelings. She says she’s going to leave, she threatens to leave, she even starts to leave, but she doesn’t leave.

The coke is too good, the sex is too good, the house is too good. She’s not about to move back into some efficiency apartment in West Hollywood and blow producers for one-line roles on shitty TV shows.

John loves her in his own way, which is sort of detached.

She’s so fucking beautiful, will do anything in bed, looks good on his arm when they go out, and can actually be pretty nice when she doesn’t want to fight.