LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF

I AM PABLO SCHWARTZ. PABLO, NAMED AFTER THE ARTIST, of course. I know, the palest Pablo you’ll ever meet—it’s an old joke that’s lost its punch for me. Let it go. My mother is “creative”. She still makes decoupage boxes with pictures torn out of magazines and gives them away as gifts. She’s just barely let go of her macramé and free form weaving. You know how some people get stuck in a certain time frame and never move on? My mother is waking up every morning on April 1, 1973 and there’s nothing I or anyone else can do about it. And she’s not the only one. There must be an entire 70’s nation out there because she keeps coming home with brand new outfits from that horrible era. Anyway, I tell you about her so you’ll understand where my name came from. Pablo’s not bad. I could have been Egon or Giacomo or Umberto or Otto or Piet. Yeah, I’m real happy she settled on Pablo.

My father worked for Rand Corporation. It always confused me, why we settled out here, because back in those days this little beach town was the end of the world. But my father was very cheap and you could buy land for nothing back in the early 60’s when my parents were newlyweds. He got almost half an acre right on the sand for $3,700 and built their house for not much more. It was strictly a matter of finances for him and living on the ocean made my crazy mother happy. So there you have it—how we ended up here. We were a pretty harmonious family as I recall but my father died in a freak accident when I was seven so there’s not too much to tell about him. Fell off the balcony and hit his head on the big rock in front of our house. No one ever said as much, but I’m sure he’d had one too many. A lot of big drinkers in the Schwartz family, God knows I don’t ever turn down a cold one. Anyway, I spent my formative years staring at the rock that took out my old man, looking for some sign of where exactly his head hit and cracked, a blood mark or a dent.

There was a life insurance policy that allowed mother, my older sister and me to stay in the house through my high school years. (My sister joined a fundamentalist Christian cult somewhere in Colorado immediately upon graduation and we haven’t heard from her in nearly a decade—she’s not going to be part of this story.) Once I was out of school, things got too expensive so mother sold and moved to Phoenix to live with her diabetic sister, Emile.

Me, I’ll never leave. This place is my home. And there’s plenty of business opportunities right here in these coastal hills, real career opportunities. In fact, business has really exploded since 9/11. The Mexican drug cartels started growing pot, on a large scale, in my mountains after the borders got tight. They’re growing all over the U.S., in national parks and on state land, billions of dollars’ worth of product. Check the papers. California is the epicenter but you can find them everywhere, especially the western states. Wonder how those Mormons over in Utah like their new neighbors. It’s a rough bunch, the cartel guys. They got a thing about cutting off people’s heads. It’s become like a trademark, company logo-type deal. Not good enough to just kill you, they’ve got to cut out your tongue then take off your head. Sometimes they chop you up into little pieces then float you in a tub of acid. Cartel Albondigas. Some people look at it as a real problem—and I can see their point. But it’s working out pretty well for me. I’m very careful. I simply tiptoe through the backcountry, collecting a modest tariff that will keep me in food and shelter for the rest of my life. Don’t let the camper and the ratty clothes fool you. I’ve got over a half a million stashed away, here and there. Yep, I’m sitting pretty these days. Stealing, you say? Hey, it’s a national recreation area, parkland. It belongs to all of us so I feel entitled. Plus, there’s a shit-load of product up there. I figure at least three different cartels are working within a twenty-mile area. Plenty to go around. And, most importantly, I was here first. This is my hometown. I’m entitled.

 

How did I get started down this career path? Glad you asked. I was twelve years old. Ellis and I were surfing the outer reef, sitting inside and picking off the leftovers. We were way too young to sit in the line-up with the older guys and we had to be careful to stay out of their way or we’d get pummeled. That’s how it used to be with surfing, a defined pecking order. There was etiquette. You had to work your way up through the ranks. Groms on the inside or over on a lesser break. Kooks didn’t even surf our beach. But that system has completely collapsed now that surfing is the answer to everyone’s need for adventure and identity. Anyway, Ellis and I were pretty hot when we were kids and she was the only girl in the water so the guys tolerated us. It was a small day and there was a long lull so, as usual, we were eavesdropping. Rod Burkles started talking about Dean Graulich’s garden and how big his plants were. Dean Graulich was meanest motherfucker around. He was in his early twenties and spent most of his free time doing target practice with throwing stars, learning how to kill or beating people up. He carried a crossbow in the back of his truck, we’d seen it, and he studied karate seriously. He was something like a triple black belt and traveled around for competitions. Pretty much the original Rambo but meaner. The thing was Dean could surf better than anyone in the water and so even though he was a complete asshole to us, even though he scared us to death, we had great respect for him. But somehow the idea of him gardening didn’t sit right. What did he grow, flowers? Vegetables? Did he wear a floppy hat and drink lemonade like my mother? What do you think?

Dean lived up one of the nearby canyons in a shack that looked like it had been built of Popsicle sticks and glue. There were a couple of crude windows flanking the front door that were covered by matching batik bedspreads and a chimney pipe sticking up through the roof that was often smoking even on the hottest days. Dean made a sort of fence in front yard from broken surf boards, stuck in the ground every three or four feet, linked together by a dense tangle of rusting barbwire. He kept three or four rottweilers on the property and it was rumored that he only fed them raw meat. Needless to say, he didn’t have a problem with trespassers. Ellis and I had ridden our bikes up by his house many times but never stopped because of those snarling dogs. There was always the fear that the fence wouldn’t hold and those dogs seemed hungry.

We were just kids but we weren’t stupid and quickly got a pretty good idea of what Dean must growing in his “garden”. The pot leaf was a favorite junior high school decoration on notebook covers, the inside of school lockers, the rubber sides of sneakers, backs of hands, brims of baseball caps. Pretty much any surface that would accept ink had a pot leaf drawn on it when we were in seventh grade. We talked about getting high, knew people who got high, but in our little group nobody had actually seen real marijuana yet, let alone smoked it. We were determined to be the first.

Ellis and I got up early one Saturday morning and rode our bikes up the canyon. We turboed it past Dean’s house, trying to ignore the barking dogs. Had he got a new one? Seemed like the pack had grown. We hid the bikes in some bushes then snuck down the driveway of Dean’s neighbor who had a huge property and never appeared to be home. There was a solid wooden fence on the property line that was well planted but we were able to climb up and look over. Dean Graulich really did have a garden. It looked like some kind of paradise and we were shocked. There were plum trees and apple trees, planter boxes with green things growing. Beautiful. No sign of the dogs in the back and the fence didn’t look that hard to get over. We threw a couple rocks and made a little noise just to see if the beasts would attack but nothing happened. It was perfectly quiet. So Ellis and I went in. The trees were laid out in rows, some of them flowering. There were drip-line hoses running throughout the planter boxes and a sprinkler working over on the other side of the yard. The place was as well organized and peaceful as any park we’d ever seen. Was Graulich really responsible for this green shady paradise? And where the fuck was he at this moment? If he caught us back there what would he do? The fear drove us on, or maybe it was Ellis. There was a path that led down into a gulley that we decided to follow but as we were passing underneath the trees, Ellis grabbed my hand and pulled me back. A huge black snake was dangling from one of the plum trees. We stopped and watched it but it didn’t move. Then we looked around and saw that all the fruit trees were full of black and brown snakes, thick things at least four feet long with heads the size of baby’s fists, coiled around branches and dangling down the trunks. I remember needing to pee, afraid that I was going to wet myself. It was some kind of biblical nightmare and I wanted out. We were backing towards the fence slowly, terrified that our short lives were about to be ended by a pair of fangs, when Ellis noticed that none of the snakes had moved. We stopped and watched. There must have been at least twenty of them. Nothing happened. They were fake. That Dean had a yard full of trees with rubber snakes somehow scared me more. What kind of sicko decorates his yard with rubber snakes? Of course now I know that he was trying to scare the birds but at the time, the whole thing seemed dark and evil and I was sure that human sacrifice was in our future if we were spotted. I was afraid that if we didn’t get over that fence immediately, I might start to cry, so I turned to run but Ellis stopped me. She didn’t find it frightening at all. In fact, she thought it was funny and wanted to see what else he had back there. She grabbed my arm and pulled me along, said she was going to steal one of the snakes. She was laughing, I remember that.

The path through the trees went down a hillside that eventually ended in a gulley where a little stream ran during the rains. We passed through a gate and the trail got narrower then led into the dense shrubs. Again I was frightened but Ellis insisted we were completely safe now since technically we were out of Graulich’s yard. We crouched down and crawled through a narrow tunnel of manzanita for about fifty yards and then the whole world opened up. The underbrush had been cleared but the canopy was intact for shade and privacy, and planted here was the true garden. It was like a natural greenhouse filled with over 100 marijuana plants. And they were big, at least six feet tall, all green and skunky with thick, sticky dense buds coming off every branch. Those leaves looked exactly like the ones we’d been drawing on our notebooks and for some reason that delighted us. It seemed like some kind of proof. “Are you there god? Can you show me a sign?”

We stole a couple of buds, dried them out and smoked them. It took a few tries to get high, it usually does, but once we’d figured out how the whole thing worked, we were hooked—potheads for life.

After that, I started snooping around the mountains and it turned out lots of people were growing marijuana, small, personal grow-sites that easily flew under the radar. Sometimes there’d be thirty plants, sometimes just two or three. I was careful, only took a little, maybe just a bud, from each garden. I was respectful and was never caught but I got enough weed to keep my friends and myself stoned all the way through high school. Plus I made a nice chunk of change. And during those formative years, I developed the finely honed skills that have allowed me to be such a success in my current occupation.