Don Winslow: The Kings Of Cool

About which Ben, Chon, and O are a little blase, because they grew up here and take it for granted.

Yeah, except Chon doesn’t right now because his leave is up and he’s about to go back to Afghanistan, aka Stanland.

Or, in the spirit of things Afgoonistan.

Chon tells Ben and O that he literally has to get packing.

He goes back to his efficiency apartment on Glenneyre and packs a baseball bat into his ’68 green Mustang — in honor of Steve McQueen — the King of Cool — and drives down to San Clemente, not far from Richard Nixon’s version of Elba and hence known in the latter half of the 1970s as

Sans Clemency.

(Nixon, poor Nixon, the only truly tragic hero in the American political theater; the only recent president more Aeschylus than Rodgers and Hammerstein. First there was Camelot, then The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, then Richard?)

Chon drives not to the old Western White House

The real name of which was, with presumably unintended irony,

La Casa Pacifica

“Peaceful House.”

There was Nixon in Exile, prowling around the Peaceful House chatting with paintings, while down on the actual Pacific, Secret Service agents chased surfers away from the nearby famous break at Upper Trestles lest they organize an assassination attempt, which is, it should be noted, probably the first time that the words “surfers” and “organize” have been used in the same paragraph.

Surfers? An assassination attempt?

Surfers?

California surfers?!

(“Okay, let’s coordinate our watches.”

Uhhhhhh… watches?)

Anyway, Chon drives to the hospital.

“Who did this to you?” Chon asks.

Sam Casey, one of their best “sales partners,” lies in bed with a broken jaw, a concussion, his right arm fractured in three places, and internal bleeding.

Someone beat the holy hell out of Sam.

“Brian Hennessy and three of his surfer buddies,” Sam says through his wired jaw. “I was selling them a lousy QP and they ripped me off.”

“You’ve sold to them before, right?” Chon asks.

One of Ben and Chon’s cardinal rules: never sell to anyone you don’t know.

Maybe only Chon would know that “cardinal rule” doesn’t come from the Catholic religious official, but from the Latin “ cardo, ” which means “hinge.” So a cardinal rule is something that everything else hinges upon.

Everything hinges upon not selling dope to people you don’t know.

And know well.

“I’ve sold to them a dozen times,” Sam says. “Never any trouble.”

“Okay, so look, the bills are covered,” Chon says. Ben has set up a shell corporation through which he offers health insurance to sales partners who are fully vested. “I’ll take care of Brian. Do me a favor, though? Don’t mention this to Ben?”

Because Ben doesn’t believe in violence.

Chon does.

It’s an age-old debate, not to be rehashed here, but basically Ben believes that to answer violence with violence only begets more violence, while Chon believes that to answer violence with nonviolence only begets more violence, his evidence being the entire history of humanity.

Oddly enough, they both believe in karma-what goes around comes around-except with Chon it comes around in a freaking hurry and usually with ill intent.

What Chon calls “microwave karma.”

Together, Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist.

Ben is the paci

Chon is the fist.

Rule of life Okay, more of a strong suggestion If you absolutely have to be an asshole?

Make yourself a little hard to find.

Go do your assholian bullshit and then lock yourself in your mother’s basement and put a towel over the Xbox to block the light, but don’t — beat someone up and then go surfing in your usual spot.

Just don’t do it, asshole.

First of all, try not being a dick for a change and see how that works out, but in any case don’t park your van where you usually stick the piece of shit while you’re out for one of your “sessions,” bra, because someone like Chon or, in this case, Chon might take a baseball bat to it.

Chon smashes out the headlights, the taillights, the windshield, and all the windows (baseball in the Steroid Era), then leans on the horn until Brian and his three buddies madly paddle in like “natives” in one of those old Tarzan movies.

Brian, who is a big freaking dude, comes out of the water first, screaming, “Dude, what the fuck?!”

Chon slides out of the car, drops the bat, and asks, “Are you Brian?”

“Yeah.”

Bad answer.

Seriously.

Bad answer.

Billy Jack.

You’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about, don’t even try to pretend that…

Okay, fine Chon’s sweeping inside roundhouse kick breaks Brian’s jaw and gives him a concussion before he even hits the dirt unconscious, little pound signs in his eyes like it’s a cartoon.

Chon steps over Brian’s prone body and drives his fist into the solar plexus of Buddy One, bending him over. Chon grabs the back of Buddy One’s head and pulls it down as he drives his knee up into Buddy One’s face, then throws him away and moves on to Buddy Two, who lifts his fists up beside his face, which does no good at all as Chon sweep-kicks him in the lower right leg, knocking him off his feet. The back of Buddy Two’s head hits the ground hard, but not as hard as the two side-blade kicks that Chon delivers to his face, shattering his nose and rendering him, as they say, unconscious, as Buddy Three…

Buddy Three…

Ahhh, Buddy Three.

Sad Fact of Life Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

Never.

Ever.

“You can come down the evolutionary ladder,” Chon has observed to Ben and O; “you can’t climb up.”

(Okay, there’s always that ya-yo in the mall trying to run up the down escalator, but that just proves the point.)

So Buddy Three, having witnessed the utter destruction of his three pals in a matter of single-digit seconds, flees to the inside of the van (where, if he were smart, he would remain) and emerges (see?) with a pistol.

And says to Chon,

“ Now what are you going to do, asshole?”

The prosecution rests.

God is God.

Darwin is Darwin.

EXT. BEACH PARKING LOT — DAY

An UNCONSCIOUS SURFER with a PISTOL (with the safety on) jammed in his mouth lies slumped out of the sliding door of a van. TWO OTHER SURFERS lie in fetal positions on the ground.

In their wet suits, they look like baby seals in a PETA clip.

CHON roots around in the console of the van and comes up with a plastic-wrapped QUARTER POUND of dope, which he jams into his jacket pocket.

Then he steps over to a fourth surfer, BRIAN, who is on all fours, trying unsuccessfully to get to his feet.

Chon kicks him in the ribs.

Several times.

Then grabs him by the collar and drags him over to the van.

CHON

Brian, let the word go forth from this time and place: It is not okay to steal our product. It is especially not okay to lay hands on our people. And one other thing Chon stretches Brian’s right arm over the edge of the van’s bumper, then picks up the baseball bat and

CRACK!

Brian screams.

CHON

— next time I’ll kill you.

Time to go.

O’s trying to get out of the fucking house.

Very expensive house in the exclusive gated community of Monarch Bay.

Except Paqu is, like, on it.