T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I met him at the base of the stairs, regarding him warily from my end of the security chain. He was wearing a skullcap and a pair of dirty striped pajamas that looked as if they’d been lifted from an internment camp, he was barefoot and his sleepy eyes were riddled with incomprehension. “What is happening here?” he said, his mouth working beneath the blue bristle of his beard. “This, this …” and he held his hands like claws to the side of his head, “this thrumping and bang-ing.”

I told him my mother had died and that my brothers and I were constructing the coffin ourselves, in deference to the traditions of the old country. Wired, beat, my apartment devastated and body sapped, I didn’t have much trouble looking appropriately distraught. “Old country?” he said. “What is that?”

“Boston,” I told him, sober as a motherless child.

He looked at me for a long moment, the whites of his eyes crosshatched with broken blood vessels, lids crusted and inflamed. Three-chord rock and roll and the boom-boom-boom of the hammer filtered down from above. Breath steamed from his big flared nostrils; he shuffled his bare feet on the wet pavement. He looked puzzled, disoriented, looked as if he were about to say something but couldn’t quite get it out. After a while he turned, muttering, and slammed into his apartment.

By dawn, my roomy Victorian had the look and feel of a curing shed in Raleigh, North Carolina, and smelled like the alley out back of a florist’s shop doused with agent orange. The atmosphere was stifling, barely breathable, the rank wet seething odor of the pot pungent as spilled perfume. It was 107 degrees in the living room. Desert winds roared from the vents, an electric space heater glowed in the corner opposite the crackling fireplace, the fans screamed for oil and we sweated like jungle explorers. As the windows were turning gray we strung up the last of the plants, nearly twenty-four hours after we’d plunged into the fields with our flashing sickles. We were worn out, frayed to the bone. We sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee from cardboard containers and staring off into space. I felt like Sisyphus taking a five-minute break, like Muhammad Ali at the end of the fourteenth round in Manila. Gesh’s head slumped forward, Phil lapped absently at a frosted doughnut. Outside, it was still raining.

I got up and made my way through the vegetation to the living room. Bending to my record collection, I thought back to the night I’d played The Rite of Spring and Vogelsang had thumped up the stairs with his mad proposal. The room smelled like a silo, sweat dripped from my nose. I straightened up and put on a record — Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. It could have been my theme song.

The crop dried in five days. During that interval Gesh lay roasting like a pecan on the couch, the perpetual beer clutched in his perspiring hand, while Phil and I escaped the deadly whirling sirocco breezes of the apartment by planting ourselves in the front row of the unheated ninety-nine-cent movie house around the corner, where we regaled ourselves with popcorn that tasted like Styrofoam and a succession of kung fu/slasher/biker/car-chase flicks with Spanish subtitles. Now that I had leisure for it, I also spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying. I worried about the steady wind wafting from my front window to perfume the entire block with the essence of torrefying pot, I worried about the dark looks my landlord gave me when I ran into him on the front stoop, I worried about the disposition of the U-Haul truck, which we’d somehow neglected to move and which had subsequently been towed away and impounded by municipal drones while we rested from the labors of our harvest. And then of course my personal finances were a mess: rent and utility bills on the apartment had pretty well eaten up my meager savings during the course of my exile, and we were a long way from realizing any profit on the marijuana that littered the apartment from floor to ceiling (we still had to trim, bag and peddle it). Nor could I forget my pending court appearance, though Jerpbak’s demotion could be expected to play in my favor.

I worried about Petra, too. I phoned her several times from the pay phone outside the Cinema Latina, my home phone having been disconnected in my absence, but was unable to reach her. Was she distracted by the roar of the kiln? Was she out digging clay in some remote streambed? Had she left town for good, found a new man, flown to Puerto Vallarta for two weeks in the sun? I didn’t know. Couldn’t guess. I just hung on to the receiver and listened to the flatulent busy signal as if to some arcane code.

Dried, that is deprived of the water weight that composed seventy percent of its bulk, the crop took on an increasingly withered and reduced look. Leaves shriveled, buds shrank. Plants that had been big as Christmas trees now seemed as light and insubstantial as paper kites. On the afternoon of the fifth day we gathered in the saunalike atmosphere of the front room to sample the product and determine its fitness for sale. Phil and I sat sweltering on the couch while Gesh broke a long squirrel’s-tail cola from a brittle branch and pared away the leaves that protruded like tongues from between the flowers. Then he plucked two of the neat fingertip-sized buds from the stem and crumbled them over a creased cigarette paper with a slow circular rub of his palms. No one said a word, the moment as drenched in ritual as a high mass at the Vatican. We watched as he rolled the joint with sacerdotal solemnity, sealed it with a sidelong lick and held it up before our eyes as if he were blessing the host. Sere leaves rustled overhead, the fans hummed and the heat swabbed at the back of my throat as Gesh struck the ceremonial match and held the joint out to me as to a communicant at the rail. I took it to my lips and inhaled.

After the smoke had been around three times, I found myself concentrating on the big trimmed cola that lay before me on the coffee table like one of those toy evergreen trees you get with model-railroad kits. It was worth, roughly, a hundred and fifty dollars. We’d grown it from nothing, from a seed you could barely see, from a speck of lint. Entranced by the marvel of it, I lifted the cola from the table as a diamond buyer might have lifted a gem from the tray, slowly turning it over in my hands. It was stiff as a bottle brush, the rich dark green of it touched here and there with the gold and white of the tiny stigmas. I exhaled and wiped my brow. Gesh was smiling serenely. The smoke was smooth, slightly sweet and minty, and as good as or better than what we’d been sampling in the field over the course of the past six weeks. I felt a rush of pride, discovering in that instant the exultation of the creator, the nurturer, the husbandman with the prize pumpkin: we’d done it.

“What do you think?” Gesh asked.

I didn’t need to consult Dowst for this one. I raised myself in the chair, astral specks and phantom amoebae floating unchecked through my field of vision. “It’s ready,” I said.

The final phase of the harvesting process — separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were — commenced immediately. We rose as one from our seats and threw open the windows, cut the thermostat, and unplugged the fans and space heater. Then we lifted down the skeletal plants, removed the flowering tops and arranged them on a folding aluminum banquet table I nastily set up in the middle of the front room, and fed the rest — leaves, branches and the horny fibrous stems that looked like the lower legs of storks or spoonbills — into the fireplace. (This gave rise to a steady spew of viscous black smoke that poured from the chimney for two days, casting an industrial pall over the neighborhood and twice prodding my landlord out of the garage with a garden hose.) After sampling another bud or two — purely for analytical purposes — we sent out for beer, turned up the music, sharpened our scissors and sat down to the tedious business of manicuring the tops.