Don Winslow: The Kings Of Cool

If Ben’s blend were a horse, it would be Secretariat.

A mountain, Everest.

Michael Jordan.

Tiger Woods

(before).

The max.

The ult.

Cherry Garcia.

Hydroponic cannabis.

“Hydro,” of course, means water, and there are many advantages to growing cannabis in water instead of in soil.

(For those of you paying close attention-it’s tetra- hydro cannabinol, remember?)

You get higher, faster yields because hydroponic cultivation bypasses the root web. A crop is usually ready in twelve weeks-four harvests a year-and you control your own “sunshine” and “weather.” Therefore, you can rotate your cultivation from grow house to grow house so as to have a continuous yield.

You don’t have soil-borne pests and parasites. You don’t have to worry that you’re going to wake up one morning and find that three months of work is being eaten or dying of a communicable disease. Ergo, you’re not going to spray your plants with toxic pesticides and other shit.

Because it’s more automated, hydroponic cultivation requires less labor. The greater automation requires a higher start-up cost, but it can be amortized over several years, and the higher yield more than makes up for the initial outlay.

Ben also had a philosophical reason for going hydro.

“Human beings are mostly water,” he told Chon and O. “So it’s like the hydro is going home.”

“That’s sweet,” O said.

“Or stupid,” Chon added.

In any case, it took a lot more than just water to get the business started.

It took money, and a lot of it.

Start-up costs.

They already had the big-ticket item-the primo plant-so then it was a matter of hardware.

The biggest item was a house.

The selection of which was tricky, because it’s not so much the house, it’s what they had to put in the house. Marijuana, yes, thank you-but to grow the marijuana required, among other things Grow lamps.

Metal halide for the vegetative stage.

(O assured them she could achieve a vegetative state without a grow lamp, although one of those sun reflectors was always nice.)

High-pressure sodium for the flowering phase.

Each lamp took a thousand-watt bulb.

Each bulb could light fifteen to twenty plants.

During the vegetative stage those lamps were going to be on sixteen to eighteen hours a day, so they were going to produce, in addition to light, a hell of a lot of heat, which, unless you’re intending to do Bikram yoga in there, is a problem.

(“I tried Bikram yoga,” O told the boys.

“And?”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Because?”

“They yelled at me,” she said. “If I wanted to get yelled at in high humidity, I’d just leave the shower on and wait for Paqu to show up.”)

You can’t have that kind of heat in a grow room because

(a) People have to work in there and

(b) It’s bad for the plants.

Primo marijuana grows best in a controlled temperature of 75°F, so what they needed in addition to-in fact, because of-all those lamps was

Air-conditioning.

Every one of those lamps required 2,800 BTUs (British Thermal Units) of cooling, and a fan to circulate the cooled air.

So a fifty-light grow room-that’s one thousand plants-needed 148,000 BTUs. Add to that the power needed to run the lamps and the fans, and you’re talking 80 kilowatts of power.

Your average residential living room is wired to handle a single thousand-watt bulb.

So-they had to not only rewire the house, they had to find more power and do it off the grid

Because the utility companies in addition to being rapacious, conscienceless sociopaths, are also…

Snitches.

If they notice an electric bill that is, say, twenty times what a normal house would use, they inform the police.

Oh, they’ll take the money (natch), but they’ll also drop a dime.

(The only dime to slip through their grasping grubby greedy fingers.)

Anyway, the grow house would need more power and would need that power secretly, so there were two ways to get it.

Steal it-which is a matter of drilling little holes in the meter (Google it), but the Gambino family is safer to steal from than the electric company, and Ben had a moral objection to theft.

(“You can’t steal from thieves,” Chon argued.

“They are responsible for their karma,” Ben countered, “I for mine.”

“Can we get ice cream?” O asked.)

So the alternative was a generator.

This was not cheap-the generator needed to power a thousand-plant grow room cost between $10K and $20K and it MADE NOISE

A lot of freaking noise

It practically screamed “Hey, there’s a grow house in here! Hey! HEY!!!! ”

So if they put that generator in the backyard, the neighbors were going to come over-and not to invite them to a cookout. They might have been able to assuage one or two of them with some homegrown product, but it was a drop-dead guarantee that one of the neighbors was going to make the call, not to mention some black-and-white happening to cruise by and hearing that thing rumbling “probable cause.”

No, they had to put that generator down in the basement, and how many basements were there in Southern California?

Some.

Not many.

Ben and Chon went house hunting.

For a rental, not a purchase.

(Apologies to Tom Waits.)

For one thing, houses in SoCal-with or without basements-are expensive.

But the other thing the other thing, the other thing is under the tangled bowl of day-old schizophrenic spaghetti that is the drug laws, if the cops bust your grow house and you own it, they can confiscate that $600,000 investment. So not only do you lose your dope and your freedom, you lose your down payment and every mortgage payment you’ve already made, and you still owe the bank the balance of the loan.

But if you rent the house and the landlord can reasonably claim he didn’t know you were using it to cultivate a felony, he gets to keep his property and you go to jail free of that karma, anyway.

So Ben and Chon went looking to rent a house that

Had a basement

Wasn’t too close to neighbors

Wasn’t anywhere near a school or a playground (maximum sentencing under the guidelines)

Or a police station

Could be rewired

And where the landlord wouldn’t be coming around every twenty-eight minutes

Or ever.

This narrowed down the possibilities.

You can’t just put an ad in the paper stating your requirements, because the police will be happy to rent to you-they have some of these houses in stock You ain’t gonna find it on Craigslist

(Well, not that Craigslist-see below.)

You need

A Realtor.

Fortunately, this was Orange County.

(Before the real estate market flopped like a European soccer player.)

Back in those halcyon “finance and flip” days, you could walk into any upscale OC hotel (the Ritz, St. Regis, or Montage) and drop something-anything-in the lobby Chances are, whoever picked it up would have been a real estate agent.

Or you could drive up (or down, didn’t matter) the PCH and rear-end your ride into any BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Audi, Porsche, Land Rover, Land Cruiser-actually any vehicle not a Mexican gardening truck. Just prison-shower that ride and the odds were that the person who got out of the other vehicle would have handed you a business card before the insurance information.

Everybody in the OC had a real estate license.

Everybody.

Every OC trophy wife who required a “career” for her self-esteem got a license. Every surf bum who needed a source of income (i.e., all of them) got a license. Dogs, cats, gerbils had real estate licenses.