T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Early next morning, Gesh called Rudy. I didn’t like Rudy — didn’t like the way he looked, didn’t like his locker-room humor and half-witted street talk, and especially didn’t like his connection with Jones. But Rudy, dealer in stimulants and sedatives, was going to do us a service. For five dollars an hour and all he could smoke, he was going to help us trim, weigh and bag our lovely top-grade sinsemilla, and then he was going to take our share on consignment at $1,400 a pound and peddle it to his clientele. We would take a beating to the tune of $200 a pound, but we figured it was well worth it to avoid the hassle of having to unload the stuff ourselves.

Rudy came sniffing up the stairs like a bloodhound. His eyes bulged as if under some abnormal internal pressure — as if there were something alive in there trying to get out — and the boneless dollop of flesh that passed for his nose was twitching in agitation. Under his right arm, cradled like an attenuated football, he carried an Ohaus triple-beam scale in a paper sack. “Hey man, how the fuck you doing?” he said, clapping Gesh’s shoulder with a hand shriveled like a bird’s claw. He greeted Phil with a “What’s happening?” and nodded at me in passing.

“Holy Christ,” he said, pushing his way into the living room, “what are you guys trying to do here with all this shit — get yourselves busted or what?” He hovered over the fire, warming his hands. Beside him, stacked up like cattle fodder, was the dross we’d yet to burn. “You know it smells like there’s a truck-load of pot on fire out there?”

I knew. My landlord, eager to inquire into certain disturbing phenomena (such as the irregular hours I was keeping, the prodigious belch of black smoke emanating from the chimney and the five-day period during which the oil burner never shut down), had cornered me half an hour earlier as I was coming up the front steps with a grease-stippled bag of fried wonton. He’d traded in the yarmulke for a faded Giants cap, from the nether margin of which a band of hair the color and texture of an Airedale’s projected at a peculiar angle. “I am not sleeping last night,” he said, delivering this information as if it were momentous, revolutionary, as if he were announcing the discovery of a new planet or the cure for cancer. I told him I was sorry to hear that. He peered at me questioningly out of his black perplexed eyes, and I had the feeling he was sizing me up, trying to reconcile his memory of me with the wild-eyed apparition standing before him. It was as if he weren’t altogether sure I wasn’t an imposter.

“So,” he said suddenly, glancing up at the fuming blanket of smoke that flew up from the roof as from the depths of a refinery, “you are cold? With open window?” Just then I caught a whiff of it, a smell reminiscent of rock festivals in packed concert halls. “The fire, you mean?” He nodded. A few months ago I would have made an effort, I would have soothed him with a flurry of apologies, promises and plausible lies — but now I found that I just couldn’t muster the energy. Instead, I ducked my head, gave him a grief-stricken look and told him we were burning my mother’s mementoes in accordance with her last wishes. “You know,” I added, “photo albums, diaries, old seventy-eights of the Andrews Sisters and whatnot.” He cleared his throat respectfully and told me I had one month to get out.

For all his loudmouthing, though, Rudy didn’t seem especially concerned. Smoke was smoke, and who was to say we weren’t burning sandalwood or green mesquite — or creosote telephone poles, for that matter? He knew it as well as we did. Unless you walked up the block thinking pot, you’d never notice a thing. Of course, the whole fiasco had been ill-advised from the start. Bringing a hundred pounds of pot into the heart of the city in a U-Haul truck was beyond mere fatuity — it was irrational, irresponsible, the act of desperate men. But whereas we’d spent nearly nine months in a state of perpetual xenophobic panic in an area that contained fewer people in ten square miles than lived on this very block, we now tended to view things more dispassionately. Perhaps we felt safe in the very absurdity of what we were doing (weren’t all the narcs out sniffing around in the woods, after all?). Or perhaps we just didn’t give a shit. At any rate, I took Rudy’s comment for what it was — a means of staking out the territory, setting the record straight: we were bunglers and fools, dangerous even to ourselves, callow freshmen in the school of pharmaceutical usage and abusage, and he was professor emeritus.

The first thing Rudy did was roll himself two joints. He tucked one in his shirt pocket for future reference and settled into the easy chair with the other. I watched him fuss over it like a cigar buyer in Havana — licking it, sniffing it, drawing deep and exhaling with a sigh — as he smoked the thing down to a stub. He sat there ensconced in the chair like a guru. After a while he said, “Good shit,” and pulled himself from the grip of the chair to set up his scales. First he weighed out a pound of the trimmed tops; then, for comparison, a pound of the raw stuff. I was sitting at the aluminum table with Phil and Gesh, doggedly snipping away with my scissors, my mind on other things: viz., Petra, my lack of employment or capital and my coming eviction. The TV was on, as it had been continuously since we’d stepped through the door (some soap opera rife with hard-drinking, tormented middle-aged men in Lacoste shirts and a host of apparently sex-crazed teenage women), and the radio pulsed softly to the thump of a synthesized disco beat.

Rudy nosed through the entire crop — colas big and small — poking around like a rodent, a big swollen two-legged rat come down from the mountain to take another bite out of our profits. I asked him when he was going to sit down and start earning the five bucks an hour we were paying him to trim pot. He didn’t answer, but a moment later he turned round and said, “You know, I’d say you guys got about thirty pounds or so here — plus maybe a couple pounds of shake.”

Thirty pounds. Gesh looked at Phil. Phil looked at me. No one said a word, but the calculators clicked on in our heads. Our share would be ten pounds, split three ways. At $1,400 a pound — that is, minus Rudy’s commission — we would come out with something like $4,600 apiece, or about $162,000 short of our original estimate. And oh yes, each of us would have to kick in $555 of that to cover the $5,000 Vogelsang had laid out for Jones, the extortionist. It was a shock. We’d known the figure would be low, but this was less by half than our most dismal estimate. After a moment or so, long enough for Rudy’s words to sink in and for the figures to materialize deep in our brains and work their way forward, Phil’s voice rose in a kind of plaint from the end of the table. “You sure?”

Later — it was nearly dark, the hills beyond the window cluttered with palely lit faécLades, houses like playing cards or dominoes — I was out in the kitchen opening a can of cream of tomato soup when Rudy sauntered in, looking for matches. He was stoned, big dilated pupils eclipsing the insipid yellow irises, his lower lip gone soft with fuddlement. “What’s happening?” he said. I ignored him, concentrating on the way the soup sucked back from the can; I reached for the Worcestershire, black pepper. Rudy circled the room, vaguely patting at his pockets, poking into drawers. Finally he stopped in front of the stove. “Got a match?” he said.

I was irritated. Pissed off. The place was a mess, I was a failure and Rudy was a jerk. I dug a pack of matches from my pocket and flung them at him without turning my head.

The soup was the color of spoiled salmon, carrots gone tough in the ground. I stirred it without interest or appetite, watching the spoon as it broke the murky surface, vanished and reappeared. There was the rasp and flare of a match, the stink of sulfur, and then the supple, sweet odor of marijuana. “Hey, man,” Rudy said at my elbow — I was stirring the soup, stirring—“no reason to feel bad about it. You guys at least got something out of it.”