Don Winslow: The Kings Of Cool

Anyway, this is all well and good verbal fun and games but what matters isn’t what Ben and Chon say to each other, it’s what they don’t.

Chon doesn’t tell Ben about Sam Casey getting ripped off and beaten up, and his response to said provocation, because Ben wouldn’t approve and he’d get all bummed out about the necessity of force in a world that’s supposed to be about love and peace, blah blah.

Ben doesn’t tell Chon about the weird interaction with OGR because, well, it’s just weird and random and probably nothing, and besides, what’s Chon supposed to do about it? He’s on his way to the Stan, he has enough to worry about (like staying alive), so Ben doesn’t want to bother him.

And so they miss this critical junction, this intersection of events, this opportunity to put one and one together and get

One.

One same problem.

They’re not stupid, they would have put it together, but “would have” is just another way of saying

“didn’t.”

They walk Chon as far as the security line.

Where O hugs him and won’t let go.

“I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you,” she says, unable to stop the tears.

“I love you, too.”

Ben pries her off, hugs Chon himself, and says, “Don’t be a hero, bro.”

As if, Ben thinks.

Chon’s on his third deployment with a fucking SEAL team. He is a fucking hero and he can’t be anything but.

Always has, always will.

“I’ll be cowering at the bottom of the deepest foxhole,” Chon says.

Yeah.

They watch him go through the line.

Boland gets on the phone.

“Good news,” he says. “Leonard is putting the hard case on an airplane. Looks like he’s deploying.”

“You sure it’s him?”

“He meets Hennessy’s description of the guy who trashed him,” Boland answers.

That is good news, Crowe thinks.

Very good news.

Well, not for Leonard.

Ben doesn’t see the car that follows him out of John Wayne-Orange County Airport and stays behind him all the way to Laguna.

Why should he?

That isn’t his world, he’s bummed about Chon leaving, and then O drops this bombshell:

“I threw myself at him.”

“Who?”

“Chon.”

Boom.

He’s not jealous-jealousy isn’t in Ben’s makeup-but Chon and O?

It’s huge.

But Ben is cool. Ben is always cool. “And?”

“I bounced off.”

The Wall of Chon.

“Oh.”

“Rejected. Spurned. Un requited.”

“You never hear about ‘requited love,’” Ben says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“ I don’t, anyway.”

“Pouting doesn’t look good on you.”

“Really?” O says. “Because I thought it did.”

A few seconds later she says, “I hate this fucking war.”

She was fourteen, watching TV that morning, stalling going to school when she saw what she thought was cheesy CGI come across the screen.

An airliner. A building.

It didn’t seem real and still doesn’t.

But Chon was already in the service by then.

A fact for which she blames herself.

Ben knows what she’s thinking.

“Don’t,” he says.

“Can’t help it.”

She can’t because she doesn’t know

It isn’t her fault

It goes back

Generations.

Laguna Beach, California 1967

John McAlister rolls his skateboard down Ocean Avenue, then puts the board under his arm and walks along Main Beach up to the Taco Bell, because sometimes guys get their food, then go into the men’s room and leave their tacos on the table.

The tacos and Johnny are both gone when they come out.

Dig young Johnny Mac.

Tall for his fourteen years, wide shoulders, long brown hair that looks like it was cut with hedge clippers. Your classic grem-T-shirt and board shorts, huaraches, shell necklace.

When he makes it up to Taco Bell there’s a crowd standing around.

Big guy with long blond hair is buying food for everybody, handing out tacos and those little plastic packets of hot sauce to a bunch of surfers, hippies, homeless drug casualties, runaways, and those skinny girls with headbands and long straight hair who all look alike to John.

The guy looks like some kind of SoCal surfer version of a sea god. John wouldn’t know Neptune or Poseidon from Scooby-Doo, but he recognizes the look of local royalty-the deep tan, the sun-bleached hair, the ropy muscles of a guy who can spend all day every day surfing and who has money anyway.

Not a surf bum, a surf god.

Now this god looks down on him with a friendly smile and warm blue eyes and asks, “You want a taco?”

“I don’t have any money,” John answers.

“You don’t need money,” the guy answers, his face breaking into a grin. “ I have money.”

“Okay,” John says.

He’s hungry.

Guy hands him two tacos and a packet of hot sauce.

“Thanks,” John says.

“I’m Doc.”

John doesn’t say anything.

“You have a name?” Doc asks.

“John.”

“Hi, John,” Doc says. “Peace.”

Then Doc moves along, handing out tacos like fishes and loaves. Like Jesus, except Jesus walked on water and Doc rides on it.

John takes his tacos before Doc changes his mind or anyone there makes him as the kid who filches food off tables, goes out into the parking lot, and sits down at the curb beside a girl who looks like she’s nineteen or twenty.

She’s carefully picking the beef out of her taco and laying it on the curb.

“The cow is sacred to the Hindus,” she says to John.

“Are you a Hindu?” John asks.

He doesn’t know what a Hindu is.

“No,” the girl says, like his question makes no sense. Then she adds, “My name is Starshine.”

No it isn’t, John thinks. He’s talked with plenty of hippie runaways before-Laguna is crawling with them-and they always call themselves Starshine or Moonbeam or Rainbow, and they’re always really Rebecca or Karen or Susan.

Maybe a Holly, but that’s about as crazy as it gets.

Hippie runaway girls annoy the shit out of John.

They all think they’re Joni Mitchell, and he hates Joni Mitchell. John listens to the Stones, the Who, the Moody Blues.

Now he just wants to finish his tacos and get out of there.

Then Starshine says, “After you finish eating? I’d like to suck you off.”

John doesn’t go home.

Ever.

Ka

Boom.

Stan’s head explodes.

It’s like the sun rises in his skull and the warmth of the rays spreads to the smile on his face.

He looks at Diane and says, “Holy shit.”

She knows-the blotter acid just melted on her tongue, too.

Not holy shit, holy communion.

Across the PCH, Taco Jesus is holding his daily service. Beyond that, the ocean rises in a blue so blue it outblues all other blues in this universe of blues.

“Look at the blue,” she says to Stan.

Stan turns to look.

And starts to cry it’s so bluetiful.

Stan and Diane

(“This is a little ditty about Stan and Diane

Two American kids growing up in…”

Ah, fuck it)

Stan isn’t your tall, stringy hippie-he’s your shorter, plumper, Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies hippie with a fat nose, Jewfro, full black beard, and beatific smile. Diane does have the skinny thing going-plus long, straight black hair that frizzes in the humidity, hips that hint at the earth-mother thing, and breasts that are at least partially responsible for Stan’s beatific smile.