T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I puttered round the apartment, half-listening, changing the record, lowering the volume on the TV, digging out an ashtray, four bottles of beer and a plastic envelope of pot. Vogelsang followed me, step for step, lecturing. Dowst and the girl sat on the couch. As soon as the pot hit the coffee table, Dowst snatched it up, opened the Baggie and sniffed it — breathed it rather, like a snorkeler coming up for air — made a disdainful face and tossed the bag back down as if it contained some unspeakable refuse on the order of dog turds or decomposing sparrow eggs. I caught this out of the corner of my eye as I was slipping Stravinsky back into his jacket.

“Boyd’s just finished up his Master’s degree at Yale,” Vogelsang said, easing down on the arm of the couch and taking a swig of beer for dramatic emphasis, “in botanical science.”

I pulled up a chair. “Congratulations,” I murmured, glancing at Dowst, and abruptly changed the subject — who wanted to hear about some overgrown preppie and his academic laurels? I’d been that route myself. I said something about the rain, then made a bad joke about the quality of the entertainment at Vogelsang’s party.

“You don’t understand,” Vogelsang persisted. “Botanical science: he can grow anything, anywhere.”

I nodded. The girl was looking at me as if I were a sandwich in the window of a delicatessen, and Dowst was squinting at a copy of Scientific American he’d dug out of the pile of newspapers on the floor. Muffled shrieks came from the TV. I glanced up to see the heroine trapped in a hallway made of flimsy plasterboard while the hairy arms of zombies — I marveled at their insatiability — punched through the walls to grab at her.

Vogelsang set the beer down, fished the mouth spray from his pocket and treated himself to a single squeeze, the puff of soapy atomized liquid like a cloud of frozen breath on a cold morning. “I closed a deal on three hundred and ninety acres in Mendocino County today,” he said. “Remote as the moon, with a cabin on it.”

Dowst looked up from his reading. “And with year-round water.” I noticed that he hadn’t bothered to remove the rain slicker. It billowed round him like an aniline tent, a glistening yellow barber’s gown tucked in at the neck. He pawed ineffectually at a strand of wet hair that dangled alongside his nose, then went back to the magazine.

“That’s right,” Vogelsang added, “a creek and two separate springs.”

It was twelve-thirty. I’d heard The Rite of Spring , it was raining, I was tired. I wondered what Vogelsang was driving at. “Sounds nice,” I said.

“We’re going to start a summer camp.” He was smirking, as if this were the punch line of a subtly developed joke. Dowst chuckled appreciatively. The girl sat hunched over her untouched bottle of Moosehead lager and stared through the wall. I got up and switched on the radio.

There was the sudden hollow thumping of a distant bass drum, some machine-shop noises, and then a strange detached female voice pushing ice through the speakers:

The best things in life are free

But you can save them for the birds and bees ,

Give me money, that’s what I want. ©

“Listen, Felix,” Vogelsang was saying, “how would you like to make half a million dollars, tax-free?”

I sat down again. All three of them were watching me now. “You’re joking,” I said.

“Dead serious.” Vogelsang was giving me his Charlie Manson stare. He used it when he wanted you to know he was dead serious.

“What,” I laughed, bending for my beer, “running a summer camp?”

“Cannabis sativa,” Dowst said, as softly as if he were revealing one of the secret names of God.

“We’re going to grow two thousand plants.” Vogelsang was studying the vial of breath neutralizer as if it were inscribed with the hieroglyphs of economic calculation, with cost-ratio tables and sliding scales for depreciation and uninsured loss. He looked up. “Figure half a pound per plant. One thousand pounds at sixteen hundred dollars a pound.” He raised the vial to his mouth, dropped his jaw in anticipation, then thought better of it. I said nothing. The plastic tube tapped at his pursed lips, mesmeric, lifting and falling to the pulse of the music. “I put up the capital and provide the land, Boyd comes in every few days to oversee the operation and you provide the labor. We split three ways.”

Suddenly I was wide awake, brain cells flashing like free-game lights in a pinball machine. Vogelsang didn’t make mistakes — I knew that. I knew, too, that he had a genius for making money, a genius of which I’d been beneficiary on two serendipitous occasions in the past. (The first time we went partners on a battered Victorian in the Haight, put out three thousand dollars on a twenty-thousand-dollar purchase price, refurbished the place for fifteen and sold it for a hundred. The second time he merely phoned, gave me the name of a broker, and told me to buy as much zirconium as I could. I had eight thousand dollars in the bank and I was out of work. I made more in a week than I’d made all year.) No: if Vogelsang was behind it, it would go. As certainly as Segovia had been born to finger a fretboard or Willie Mays to swing a bat, Vogelsang had been born to sow pennies and reap dollars. Thirty-three, and already independent of any visible means of support — he hadn’t held a job since I’d known him — he nosed out investments, traded in commodities both licit and illicit, bought and sold buildings and property and God knew what else — and all with the unshakable confidence and killing instinct of an apprentice Gould or Carnegie.

And his timing was exquisite, I had to admit that. He’d come to me at just the right moment, a year and a half after my divorce, a time when I was depressed and restless, a time when I was beginning to feel like a prisoner in solitary. Half a million dollars. It was as if the head of NASA had just asked me if I’d like to be the first man to walk on Mars. There were risks involved, sure, but that was what made the project so enticing — the frisson, the audacity, the monumental pissing in the face of society. Vogelsang wasn’t going to grow a hundred plants or a hundred and fifty, he wasn’t going to be content with fifteen or twenty thousand — no, he was going to grow marijuana like Reynolds grew tobacco. My blood was racing. When I looked up into the three faces intent on my own, I was already halfway there.

“I don’t know a thing about growing marijuana,” I said finally. Vogelsang was ready for this. “You don’t have to,” he said, lifting himself from the chair arm, “—that’s Boyd’s department.”

“But two thousand plants … can one person handle that sort of thing?”

“No way,” Dowst said, rustling his rain slicker.

“We figure you’ll need two full-time people to help out. Who they are and how you pay them is up to you. You could hire them on a straight salary, or split your five hundred into shares. But whatever, they’ve got to be willing to give up the next nine months of their lives, and above all they’ve got to be”—here he paused to come up with the right word—“discreet.”

Rain hit the roof like pennies from heaven, the icy voice on the radio was chanting Money, give me money,/Money, give me money. ©We were all standing, for some reason. Dowst and Vogelsang were grinning, the girl’s face had softened with what I took to be a sort of truculent amicability.

“How about your friend up in Tahoe,” Vogelsang said, as if he’d had a sudden inspiration (I realized at that instant he’d been playing me all along, like a street-corner salesman, a carnival barker making his pitch). “What’s his name …” (he knew it as well as I) “Cherniske?”