Don Winslow: The Kings Of Cool

“What are you going to do with your life?” she asks.

“I dunno.”

“Are you going back to school?”

“I dunno.”

“Are you going to get a job?”

“I dunno.”

Check Paqu out Blonde hair, perfectly coiffed.

Chiseled (not metaphorically) features.

Makeup perrrfect.

A couple of gr worth of clothing on her perrrfectly toned, sculpted body that features TTDF.

Tits To Die For.

(Many male ships have been wrecked on those cliffs, my friend. Crashed and broken apart. Y chromosomes flailing the crazy-bad whitewater waiting for a jet ski that ain’t coming.)

Now she turns her formidable tits and formidabler eyes on O. “Well, you have to do something.”

“I dunno,” O answers, wilting under the four-point gaze.

“You have thirty days,” Paqu says.

“To…”

“Get a job or go back to school,” Paqu answers, cutting up strawberries and putting the pieces into a blender with two scoops of protein powder.

She’s been into “power smoothies” lately.

“Oh God,” O answers, “have you been to one of those tough love seminars again?”

“DVD,” Paqu answers.

“Did Four put you up to this?” O asks.

She knows that Four put her up to it because he doesn’t want an “adult child” cluttering up the house he thinks is his just because he nails Paqu in it.

I was in this house before you were, O thinks.

Come to think of it, I was in Paqu before you were.

“Nobody put me up to it,” Paqu yells over the whirl of the blender. “I have a mind of my own, you know. And if you go back to school, you have to take it seriously.”

O had a 1.7 GPA at Saddleback before she gave up the charade entirely and just stopped going.

“What if I don’t?” she asks.

“Don’t what?”

“Will you shut that fucking thing off?”

Paqu turns off the blender and pours her power smoothie into a glass. O knows that in a half hour she’ll go to the gym to work with her personal trainer for two hours, then drink a “meal replacement shake,” then go to yoga before coming home for a power nap. Then she’ll spend two hours getting herself ready for when Four comes home.

And she thinks I’m a useless cunt, O thinks.

“You have a power-smoothie mustache,” O tells her.

“If you don’t get a job or go back to school,” Paqu says, wiping her upper lip with the back of her index finger, “you can’t live here anymore. You’ll have to find your own place.”

“I don’t have money for my own place.”

“That is not my problem,” Paqu says-obviously practiced from the DVD.

But they both know that it is.

Paqu’s problem, that is.

She’ll forget about it, O thinks, cognizant of Paqu’s Bipolar Approach To Parenting.

Paqu has wide swings between

Absent Neglectful Mother and

Smothering Controlling Mother

So, like, Paqu will take off on — a European vacation

Rehab

Spiritual Retreat or just

Another Affair

And totally forget about O.

Then she’ll come back, feel guilty, and go in the

Complete Other Direction

Micromanaging O’s life down to the tiniest details of clothing, friends, education (or lack thereof), career (see “education”), and protein-carbohydrate balance, and was literally up her ass during a truly unfortunate “colonic” phase.

It’s Either/Or

There is no middle ground, and it has been

Ever thus.

The worst is when Paqu comes back from rehab or a spiritual retreat. Having fixed herself, she sets out to fix O.

“I’m not broken,” O argued one time.

“Oh, darling,” Paqu answered, “we’re all broken.”

Indeed, O thought, Paqu does spend a lot of time in the body shop. Anyhoo, after a long discussion about O’s denial regarding her “brokenness” it was decided that self-realization was a river that simply couldn’t be pushed and that O would have to remain in the eddy of her own delusion. Which was just fine with O, although she was pretty sure that Delusional Eddy was a guy Paqu briefly dated.

But now this thirty-day thing.

O heads for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To join the Peace Corps,” O answers.

Or go see Chon.

Which is the

Exact opposite.

Actually it was the fact that O had no freaking idea what she was going to do with her life that led Ben and Chon into the marijuana business two years ago because it engendered a discussion of “vocation,” and wordsmith Chon observed that “vocation” is merely one vowel removed from “vacation” yet could be considered an antonym.

That is vocation (n., from the Latin verb “to call”): an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which he or she is suited, trained, or qualified vacation (n.): freedom from occupation

“But,” Ben asked, “do you want freedom from something to which you’re especially drawn? Probably not.”

So, on his next deployment, Chon came home with A Purple Heart

A new set of nightmares and

A seed.

The White Widow.

A particularly fine, THC-laden breed of cannabis.

When the seed of an idea meets the actual, physical seed it is

Seminal. seminal (adj.)

1. Pertaining to, containing, or consisting of semen (uhhhh, no)

2. Botany: of or pertaining to seed (obviously)

3. Having possibilities of future development (oh, hell yes)

4. Highly original and influencing the development of future events (well, let’s hope so)

Ben took this seminal seed and, actualizing the potential for future development, developed the hell out of it in highly original ways that would influence future events.

Ben started to breed a new plant.

First he separated the male plants from the female plants.

“Awww,” O said, “that’s kind of sad.”

“We don’t want accidental fertilization.”

“Couldn’t we just put tiny little condoms on the male plants?” O asked.

Ben told her that they couldn’t.

O asked, “How can you tell the male from the female plants?”

“The stamens look like balls,” Ben said.

“Well, there you go.”

“We choose a male plant,” Ben explained, “take its pollen, and pollinate the female plant.”

“I might need a few minutes to myself here,” O said.

O found it highly amusing that Ben created an Isle of Lesbos-a virtual Women’s Prison Movie-marijuana farm. She also took a certain neo-feminist pride that the most powerful, juicy, THC-laden buds came from the females.

Anyway, Ben used the seed produced by the pollinated female to create what is known in genetics as the F1 hybrid. Then he grew that plant, took its seed, and bred it back with the parent plant.

“With the parent?” O asked.

“Yup.”

“ Iiiiiccck,” O answered. “That’s, like, incest.”

“Not like. Is.”

“Cue the banjo.”

She came to refer to Ben’s marijuana crop as “L.A.”

Not “Los Angeles.”

“Lesbian Appalachia.”

Ben kept inbreeding like a European royal family, generation after generation, until he produced not a Tea Party member or a drooling pink-eyed idiot, but a female plant whose fecund buds veritably dripped (okay, not really) with THC.

Tetrahydrocannabinol.

Aka delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol.

Aka dronabinol.

The main psychoactive substance in marijuana.

(For the blazers out there-it’s why you’re too high right now to understand “psychoactive substance.”)

Ben the Mad Botanist didn’t produce a Porsche, he produced a Lamborghini.

Not a Rolex but a Patek.