The Author's Cut discussion

I was always told it would start like any other day. Breakfast and coffee. Wash the dishes. Maybe roll a joint. And just as you’re lighting that sweet baby up, ten heavily armed cops come charging into every Goddamn opening they can fit their fat asses through. That’s how it happens. Other than the usual mind mauling paranoia that pot growers interminably experience, nobody ever feels any different the morning they are busted. Nobody.
I woke with a stuffy nose on the couch in the living room of the old ranch house, which rested unnaturally on the property my older brother, John, and I had bought eight months earlier. In the proper suburban setting, it may have been just fine, but surrounded by the wild hills of Humboldt County, it looked like a misplaced movie set. If you happened upon it on a hike, you might think you were hallucinating. The old couple who’d built it as a place to retire and live out their days, died within six months of each other, leaving the property to their junkie son. We bought it ten years later, when it had become nothing more than a giant rundown shack. For us, it was perfect. We wanted it to look abandoned.
John was cutting fat slices of the beer bread he’d baked the day before, laying them out on a baking pan. He looked up as I walked into the kitchen.
“Morning, Stinky. Seriously, Mike, will you take a shower today?” he implored. We had no hot water. Which basically meant showering was nothing short of barbarism.
“Shut up, man. I will, I will,” I said while smelling my armpit, trying to remember how many days it had been.
“Good. I’m gonna jump in the shower as soon as I put these in the oven, so do your deeds if you needs,” he smiled. John had a full-face smile that made him look like a gentle old man. Everything squished up from his mouth, his kind eyes appearing to close and his nose stretching out, so that his entire face crinkled. Other than our curly blond hair, he and I didn’t look too much alike. He got Dad’s face and I got Mom’s. At twenty-five years old—four years older than me—he had an air about him that made him seem much older than he was. He looked young enough. Like me (I must admit) he was handsome (thank you); but it became quickly obvious to people that John had lived a lot of life. He had. Fifteen years ago, our Dad was sentenced to fifty years in a Thai prison for conspiring to smuggle a boatload of heroin to Australia. Nine years after that, in 1986, our mom died of breast cancer. John stepped up. Among other things, he took good care of me. So yeah, he had.
“Nah. I’m cool. How’s the coffee?”
“Ready to plunge,” he practically sang. We were a week or so from harvesting, and because of that, except for the nasty colds we were both dealing with, we were in better than usual spirits. We’d been growing and saving for a long time and this was to be our first big payoff. Yes, we were happy. But we were saving money to bribe Dad out of prison, and we were still far from our goal. Bribing Thai officials took a lot of cash. A fucking dirty filthy shit lot of cash.
We’d certainly created a moneymaker. The old couple had built a three-car garage about fifty yards from the house. That was where we had set up a 60-kilowatt generator, thirty 1,000-watt halide grow lights, a series of intake and exhaust fans, a CO2 burner, a boom box looping Enya or Mozart, and every other high-tech growing device on the market in 1992. That was also where the feds would find enough plants to get John and me a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years in prison.
I poured two cups of coffee and began digging into a bag of weed, looking for a fine bud to start the day with. As I concentrated, I asked John if we could at least visit Dad once we’d sold the weed.
“Mike, you know he doesn’t want us to do that. He has his reasons. You know. You remember how that affected him, bro. We’re going to get him out. We’re doing it, Mike.” He released his smile, “We’re doing it!”
I held up a purplish bud, “I’m going to name this bud Sheri.”
He laughed. John was always quick to laugh. I remember almost puking when he had a three-inch fin gash opened up on the top of his head, while he laughed all the way to the hospital.
As I broke up the bud, I continued, “Oh Sheri, beautiful Sheri, we thank you for the joy you will bestow upon our day!”
We ate beer bread toast, finished our coffee, and smoked a joint.
All good.
I went to my bedroom to put on some clean clothes. I heard John stomp to the bathroom yelling, “Alarm! Alarm!” He followed up with an alarm sound, something he always did to announce he was about to take a shit. I chuckled as I dug a clean pair of underwear out from my bag of clothes. I heard an engine and looked out the window. That’s when I saw them: three or more white pickups and at least one Blazer speeding down the hill, just at the last cutback before the straight shot to the house. Before I had time to absorb the horror of what was coming, I raced to the bathroom door.
I threw open the door and whisper yelled, “Cops are here! We’re being busted, John!”
He reached for the toilet paper and told me to run. I froze, and John leaned over and pushed me, “RUN, MIKE!”
Buck fucking naked, I leapt through the screen door and over the deck rail. The edge of the woods was at least thirty yards from the back of the house, too far to run to without being seen, so I turned back and crawled under the house. When I turned to see if John was behind me, I heard men screaming and doors being kicked open. We got you, fucka! We got you, fucka! I quickly closed the small door and went for the farthest corner from the opening. I knew I was tearing up my bare knees on the gravel but felt nothing. I lay flat and began to listen. I couldn’t really make out what was being said but I could hear how they were saying it. I had never heard more f-bombs uttered in such a short period of time. They were obviously from the East Coast. I assumed they were DEA, but they could have easily passed for mobsters. I’d heard that about the DEA.
After about twenty minutes, I heard them come outside and muscle John into one of the pickups.
“Say goodbye, you stupid fucka,” I heard one of them say as the door slammed shut. And then somebody at the garage yelled: “How is it?”
“It’s still in the fuckin’ pots.”
I wondered why they cared about that.
“We shoulda known that fucka wasn’t being completely straight. Screw it, at least we got the guy, and we can dry this shit in the mission house. It’s just a bonus anyway. Let’s load it up.”
I scrambled to a vent to try and see something. If these guys weren’t true DEA, they sure as hell had a sophisticated operation. The pickups had decals and sirens. They all had the cop thing going—black shirts, guns, jeans, black boots—but I couldn’t see any faces. I watched as they loaded all of our plants into the truck beds and covered them with tarps. They did very little speaking while this went on. As they were getting into the cars, I heard one guy ask a third man who, up until then, hadn’t said a word, “What do you think?”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard him say, “That’s definitely him.”
Car doors slammed, engines started, and they drove away. I was physically ill at that point. I can’t imagine how I would have felt had I known what was really happening.

Excerpt #2: Rabbit
***

I woke with a throbbing head and neck ache. Rabbit jumped awake when I opened the car door.
“Shit, it’s freezing,” he whispered as he rummaged for the keys. He started the engine and cranked the heat.
“Did you sleep at all?” he called out the door.
“I guess,” I answered, my piss steaming as it hit the ground, “a little.”
“I’m starving! It’s after seven, let’s get down there, bro!”
“You think we should at least try driving past Ron’s house?” I asked.
“No, man, no way. If those dudes lost Ron and Nerd, they’ll be lookin’ for them. If they were-”
I interrupted, “OK, if Ron is gone, Jack Randall is gonna know. Jerry’s been running around for the last few days, so how many people you think he’s told? I’m just saying, I bet Randall already knows everything… we just gotta figure out a safe way to see him.”
Rabbit leaned back and gently nodded his head, “Mmm, maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right.” He flipped his wavy black hair off of his forehead—he’d already developed a modified shorter-haired version of the Rabbit hair flip—and began rubbing the stubble on his chin. I noticed that, more so than his short hair, it was his smooth shaven face that made him difficult to recognize, but with the black shadow of stubble surfacing, his face had begun taking on its old shape and character. “Let’s just see what Dara can tell us and go from there. For all we know, it’s already been blown up and everyone’s looking for us.”
Rabbit slowly eased the Explorer down King’s Peak Road, continually tapping the brakes, as he ranted on about a variety of things that really pissed him off. For example, it was turning out to be a sunny day, and that pissed him off because he thought we’d be less likely to be identified in the rain. We stopped midway down the mountain to pull off a redwood branch that had fallen prey to lightning. The sun shot through the trees like a film projector, creating slivers of light and half-light that shimmered in the moist air. Even with sunglasses on, I was occasionally blinded by the spectacle. Once we reached Shelter Cove Road, Rabbit had voiced practically his entire catalogue of things that pissed him off and seemed to be relaxing. Though he didn’t speak of it, I supposed the dead man decomposing in his living room was likely the chief culprit for his shitty mood, and with that thought, I had the first of what would become a lifetime of ugly flashbacks.
“You alright?” Rabbit asked. “You look like you’re trippin’.”
I wanted to say, I am. I wanted to say, we should have at least buried the Colombian, but all I got out was, “Let’s not talk about it, OK?”
“Mike, as far as I’m concerned we never have to mention any of that shit ever again,” he said, though we were both well aware that we probably would.
“Right on. Check out that buck!” I pointed to a decent sized deer standing on the hill ahead of us. Rabbit slowed down as we passed it. “Oh man, jerky for days!”
He shook his head, “I could never understand how dudes as mellow as you and John could kill a fucking deer. They’re like so… majestic.”
I shot my first when I was twelve, and since John put the big Native American, livin’ off the land, cycle of life spin on the whole experience, I didn’t hate it. We used to butcher them in the garage and give away most of the meat.
“You didn’t seem to complain when you and your mom were eating our jerky.”
“Those were good grinds. Still though, I don’t think I could shoot one.”
I reached up and touched my bullet hole, “Yeah, well… me neither… not anymore.”
“God, I’m fucking starving. I hope Dara’s got some scones this morning. That’s what I’m in the mood for. Oh hell, yeah! Maple scones. Doesn’t that sound awesome?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t really think about food. Rabbit was a master at distracting himself.

Excerpt #3: Drop the Doughnuts
***

They waited until I was back at the motel, struggling with my room key before grabbing me. Two of them, guns drawn, demanding I get on the ground with my hands behind my head. Oddly, I couldn’t bring myself to ruin my doughnuts, and I began to gently lower them down.
The cop closest to me—who looked just like John Denver—yelled, “Drop the box mother fucker, drop it right now!”
Wow, that’s no John Denver. Is that a Texas accent?
“Hands behind yer head, you li’l sunofabitch!”
Yep.
Within seconds, I was thrown into the back of a van with F. Bueller Electric painted on the side. I wondered if it was a Ferris Bueller reference—like some joker cop thought it’d be funny. It kind of was.
And then it hit me. Sheer terror. Rabbit had shot a man, killed him. We’re done. Close the fucking book on Mike and Rabbit. I heard John Denver talking on the radio. He told someone the address of the motel and the room number. We’d been waiting a few minutes, when a voice came over the radio and told the cops to go ahead, that they’d be there in a minute. John Denver told them to “be very careful with the other asshole; he’s extremely dangerous.” I desperately wished I could have sent some sort of message to Rabbit, but there was nothing I could do. As we passed the front office, I wondered what it all looked like to the lady who had replaced Lynette at the front desk.
Denver’s partner reached back and put a black hood over my head. After considering that for a moment, I became almost pants-shitting scared. I hoped I was headed to a real jail and not to the Oakland warehouse, but that hope was crushed the minute I recognized the rhythmic bumping of the Bay Bridge sections as we drove over them. John Denver and his partner occasionally spoke some random bullshit. A Tom Petty CD was playing, and they spent a good five minutes discussing his greatness. I felt like telling them that Tom Petty had undoubtedly been a drug user at some point in his career, as was every other rock hero they might worship. Maybe get them to see the light, soften up a little bit. Yeah, right. Cops have to avoid ambiguities and reject anything that might muddle their fervor towards their mission. If they didn’t they’d be lousy cops and probably end up fired. Or they wouldn’t be cops in the first place.

Excerpt #4: Maybe You’re Not Meant to Be An Outlaw
***

It’s been a couple of days. It’s not looking good. These DEA agents are definitely not on the up and up. I wake up this morning feeling as though one of my busted ribs is beginning to jam itself into my lung. I tell J.C. about it. Can you breathe ok? Yeah, I guess.
But really I can’t and I’m worried about it.
I think about Mike. If I don’t make it through this, he’ll be devastated. Ruined. Mike’s had such a tough go of it. I remember how often he used to cry. Sometimes, I thought he’d never stop. I know he’s really not cut out for the outlaw scene and I sometimes feel guilty for allowing him to be a part of it. He would have done just fine going to college. He’s a smart kid. But other than a short phase when he thought about law school, he was persistent in helping me put together what we needed for Dad’s pardon. Man, we were getting close. So fucking close. I’m sorry, Dad.
Mike’s always trying to get me to agree to visit him. Dad has strictly forbidden it. I tell Mike we have to honor that. But if we get out of this, I think a visit will be in order. It looks like it’ll be the only way we’ll ever see him again. Dad almost had a prisoner transfer set up just after our first and only terribly fucked up visit with him, but that got shot down after he stabbed another man in self defense. In his letter, Dad told me he could have killed the man but hadn’t, out of pity. Either way, the incident shot out his chances of ever getting into a U.S. prison.
My thoughts are interrupted by screaming coming from somewhere else in the house. I sit up. Start sliding myself towards the door when it’s thrown open by Dixon. He looks rabid, out of his fucking mind angry. Moving toward me. He kicks me in the ribs and tells me my brother has just fucked up big time, trying to shoot him and his men somewhere in the city. I’m in too much pain to speak. It becomes apparent that whatever happened, Mike has escaped unharmed and I’m happy for that. Proud, even. That’s two for zero, Mikey! Hell, maybe you are cut out for this. I wonder who’s with him. Hopefully, Rabbit. If so, maybe there’s hope after all.
Dixon takes a few more shots at J.C. before he stomps out of the room. I can’t help but curl up in the fetal position. Having trouble breathing. Something’s wrong with my lung. J.C. is crying. Dixon, that piece of shit psycho, would not care one bit if we die. I try to calm J.C., even though I’m on the verge of tears myself. Positive visualization is no longer working. Disneyland’s a blur. Get us out of here, Mike.

Excerpt #5: Agent Douchebag’s Abs
***

We got on the Bridge and Skye began telling me about the scene in The Graduate when Dustin Hoffman is racing back to Berkeley to pull the girl from the church. In the scene, Dustin Hoffman is driving on the top deck of the bridge while going east. We were going east, and we were on the bottom deck. Apparently, they thought it would make a better shot and a stronger overall impression on the audience having him on the upper deck. We wondered if they’d paid a lot of money to close the bridge for that shot and, if so, how they got the studio suits to go along with it. We passed the portion that had been repaired after the Loma Prieta earthquake and we each recounted our personal Loma Prieta experience.
Thirteen minutes later, we were parked less than a block away from Agent Douchebag’s house, sitting in the back of the minivan, taking turns watching for him. Even though it was in the hills, Marin Street turned out to be a busy motherfucker, and Dixon’s house was tucked beneath three giant redwoods, blocking our view of the entrances. He also didn’t seem to have a driveway or garage so, like many people in that area, he’d have to find street parking. That basically meant he could be parked more than a block away from his house.
To deal with the boredom we played games like Count the Volvos (we counted a lot) and Hacky Sack basketball. We tried to use the cell phones and learned that they were worthless up there. After two hours of nothing, Team Angus pulled up beside us and Jerry peered through the window.
“Dudes, pull up to Beck. We’ll take this spot. The phones don’t work up here.”
“We know. If he leaves, more than likely he’ll be headed towards the freeway. They’ll work down there. Whatever, there are only two directions he can go. We’ll head up. Did you find a spot at the circle?”
“Yeah, it’s mellow down there. Okay, later.” We drove up the hill a block and a half, had the same discussion with Team Beck, and sent them toward the circle at the base of the street. After counting Volvos got too easy, we began counting Free Tibet bumper stickers, and then ultimately a more difficult variation, counting Volvos with Free Tibet bumper stickers.
We’d counted seven by the time I saw him. Dixon was climbing up the hill with what appeared to be serious difficulty, looking every bit like the crazy asshole that he was. Wearing aviator shades and a tight tucked-in black t-shirt with a cartoon bulldog saying Lead, follow, or get out of the way, he struggled on in pseudo-tough guy mode, with his arms out as if they were Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. Watching his belly dance as it hung over his denim short shorts, I began laughing before I could point him out to Skye. More than the outlandish spectacle, it was seeing him out of uniform that caused my laughing fit. Without it, and the authority that came with it, he’d become much less threatening to me. He was just a man.
***
Deadman's Bust

If you've enjoyed the Deadman's Bust excerpts, the book is available in print and Kindle on Amazon: http://amzn.to/16Xsu0T