Humboldt (17 page)

Ethan pulled up a few minutes later.

“How was it?” he asked, as she climbed in the passenger seat, shut the door, and fastened her seat belt.

“You know what?” Emma said, as she turned and looked at him. “It was really, really good.”

She still loved Mike and considered him her brother, after all, and wanted to do what she could to help him and be there for him.

U
nder a waning August sun, Crockett stood outside his house in Marin County and peeled off a yellow reflective vest. He was wearing jeans, work boots, and a layer of dirt so thick it would turn his bathtub brown. He'd spent the day on a bulldozer scooping heaps of dirt out of the ground to build a pond. Crockett called the work eating dirt, because clouds of it would billow up as he worked and settle on his skin, float up his nose, invade his ears, and leave a gritty taste in his mouth. He had spent the past week running heavy equipment for the construction company he used to work for before he moved to Humboldt. He liked to play with big machines, like a boy with Tonka trucks, and the pay was decent and much needed. One of the best parts of his day was the strong, hot shower that came at the end of it, but that would have to wait. A call had just come in. His connection was ready to move some weed, and Crockett had to be in San Francisco, with the product, in less than an hour.

Crockett paused just long enough to run into his house, an old Western-style building that looked like it should have horses hitched out front. After taking a quick bong hit, he started up his Mitsubishi. Its unrestricted muffler rumbled to life like some kind of animal that needed to be put out of its misery. With Wyclef Jean playing on his stereo, and the radar detector he had bought at the Security Store in Humboldt firmly in place on his windshield, he pulled out onto the road. Almost all the hats Crockett wore were strewn around the car. On the seat next to him was his volunteer fire department radio. In the back, the reflective vest he wore while running excavators and bulldozers was resting on his backpack; and in the trunk, inside one of his smell-proof Watershed bags, were ten pounds of weed he had picked up a few minutes earlier from a friend's house nearby. All that was missing was a bag of fish emulsion or some plant stakes to represent the pot grower, but Crockett wasn't doing that this year.

Passing through town took all of fifteen seconds. There were a handful of homes, a post office, a general store, the firehouse, and the town bar, where Crockett's ex-girlfriend, the one he'd lived with for eight years, brought her new boyfriend after she and Crockett broke up, making Crockett miserable. Just outside of town, the hillside was covered with a spiny shrub with yellow flowers called gorse. It looked pretty from a distance, but up close, its thorns were thick and sharp. When Crockett was a teenager, he planted pot deep in those bushes. The thorns kept out deer, and prying eyes, and ripped Crockett's clothes to shreds. Later, more brazenly, he and his best friend grew some plants in the ditch alongside the road near the cemetery.

The pot in Crockett's trunk was grown in a greenhouse, with light deprivation, which meant it had been tricked into flowering earlier. It was a month before the start of the outdoor harvest season, and the black market would soon be flooded. Crockett's connection promised a good price: $2,400 a pound. Crockett figured whoever was buying it would probably pass it off as indoor weed back in New York City, or some other place back east where it would fetch around $4,000 a pound.

Crockett's trip to the city was a speedy example of how most California marijuana was moved around the state and across the country: as contraband in the trunks of cars. For every trailer that was intercepted by someone like Bob Hamilton, many, many more loads of pot slipped by unnoticed in car trunks, motor homes, false-bottom pickup truck beds, FedEx packages, and otherwise. Like the roots of the plant itself, marijuana distribution pipelines spread out in every direction. That was how the black market worked. It was unorganized crime.

For his three-hour effort, Crockett planned to shave $2,000 off the top. Not a bad wage for what was essentially a delivery service. All he had to do was make it there on time and avoid being caught.

The Mitsubishi was soon racing at around eighty miles an hour down a winding country road, past straw-colored hills and ramshackle barns that were skeletons of the area's once-thriving dairy and sheep ranching industries. Some of the old ranch homes had bales of fresh-cut hay piled outside like giant yellow bricks.

A truck pulling a boat that was going less than the speed limit forced Crockett to slow down and hang back for a moment. Normally he would have passed the truck around the last corner, but because of what was in his trunk, he had to behave. In Humboldt, there was even a saying about it: one crime at a time. In other words, don't commit a misdemeanor while committing a felony. His patience lasted only a few minutes, though, and soon he was gunning his engine, guiding the Mitsubishi across the double yellow line, and rocketing past the truck and boat.

He was late.

Crockett didn't return to Humboldt that spring. After the vote, at the end of harvest, he returned home, to Marin County. Then he took off on a tropical vacation. First he went to Thailand, where he spent the majority of his time at a clinic in Bangkok having some major dental work done for the princely sum of $300. Then he joined some friends on a surfing trip to Oahu.

Frankie had wanted him to return to Humboldt and work another season, but Crockett couldn't commit. He had missed his friends too much while he was away in Humboldt, and his comfort zone. He had felt stuck in that cabin, and had lost some of his pot-dealing connections while he was living there.

Then there was the small matter that Frankie still owed him $30,000 for work he'd done that harvest.

When Crockett had first arrived in Humboldt, the deal was that he would be paid around $100,000. Then Zavie was hired on, and the amount changed. Frankie and Crockett agreed on $50,000. Frankie paid him that, but Crockett was still waiting on $30,000 for transporting the product south. Crockett had made more round trips from Humboldt to the Bay Area with his trunk full of weed than he cared to remember. In the end, after the mold and the trimming, what could have been a $1 million garden ended up being worth around half that. They pulled in about three hundred pounds. The highest they were paid per pound was $3,700. The lowest was $1,600. Then Frankie lost some money in a festival he had invested in, and Crockett had to wait on the rest of his pay.

Without work contracts, and with conditions and rates that changed in an instant, it was easy to understand how most of the violence related to marijuana was business related.

Crockett, however, did not tuck his gun into his waistband and storm off to see Frankie. He was surprisingly calm about it. When friends asked him why he wasn't angry, he'd tell them that he and Frankie grew up together and he trusted him. Crockett figured that what was coming to him was like money in the bank. Frankie had built four additional greenhouses, and was growing more pot than ever. Crockett figured he'd get a cut of the coming harvest, without having to be alone in the woods.

Marijuana debt was also part of the business. Crockett knew that. He still could have used the money, though. He had been so broke over the past few months, before he landed the temporary construction job, that he struggled to make rent. He didn't grow any pot this year, not for any reason other than that he just felt lazy and didn't have the drive.

The last time he went to Humboldt to pick up some money, things didn't go so well. Before he left, Crockett got a call on his fire department emergency radio about a man experiencing chest pains. The man, it turned out, was the owner of the local coffee shop who made Crockett's mocha every morning. He was driving home with his two-year-old child in the backseat when the chest pains started. He pulled over to call to alert his wife about what was happening. By the time Crockett arrived on the scene a few minutes later, the man's feet were swelling and he was turning blue. Crockett pulled him out of the car and did CPR on him, but the coffee shop owner was dead.

Afterward, Crockett made the three-plus-hour drive north to Humboldt to get paid. When he got there, Frankie and Zavie were high on Valium and coke, and they didn't have his money. Crockett crashed out on the leather couch in the living room, but the guys were up till 3:00 a.m. making so much noise that it was impossible to sleep.

“Fuck, you guys are assholes,” Crockett told them.

Then he got back in his car and made the long drive home in inky black silence.

It was probably a good thing he didn't return to Humboldt to work with those two for months on end.

Crockett passed by Sausalito and was fast approaching the Golden Gate Bridge when his cell phone rang. It was his connection.

“Running late, hitting traffic,” Crockett told him, as he eased to a crawl. Only two lanes were funneling traffic into the city; the rest were full of commuters heading home to Marin, Sonoma, and the rest of the North Bay.

“All good as long as you're here by seven,” replied the voice on speakerphone, which belonged to a man who moved so much pot that Crockett had seen millions of dollars in cash stacked up at the guy's house. The man was tall and kind of dorky looking, not at all what you'd expect an interstate drug trafficker to look like.

But that was the marijuana industry: things were never what they seemed.

In another example of pot debt, this nerdy high-roller once owed Crockett $60,000. Crockett was fronting to him at the time, which meant he was bringing him a lot of pot and not getting paid for it until it was sold to someone else. Fronting was a pretty common arrangement in the industry, though it required a level of trust beyond the norm. Back when the economy was still strong, Crockett would usually get his money within a week and a half, no problem. Until the day he went to get paid and there was a problem. A girl arrived. He was expecting $75,000, and she didn't have the money. She explained that a driver had gotten busted in Arizona. The police had confiscated the pot and the money. Now, Crockett's connection could have shrugged it off and walked away; sometimes people got busted and did just that. But this guy didn't. It was the honor of the outlaw. He sold some property and eventually paid Crockett back.

In the meantime, under that same code of honor, Crockett had to come up with money to give to the people whose product he had fronted. He began making payments to them until the rest of the money came through. If he didn't, he knew that trust in him would be shattered and he'd never be able to work in the industry again.

Crockett's connection had paid him back by now, so a couple of weeks earlier Crockett had started working with the guy again. But only with cash up front—no more credit. Since he started back, Crockett had made $8,000 running loads to the city, just like this one.

The Mitsubishi passed through the Waldo Tunnel, just before the bridge, and emerged into an only-in-San-Francisco view. On this hot August evening, when temperatures in the North Bay were still hovering in the eighties, San Francisco's famous fog was rolling over the bridge so quickly it looked like steam bubbling out of a kettle. A thick band of mist had already moved across the bay, shrouding the water in a cottony veil that made the art deco downtown skyline in the distance look as though it were floating on a cloud.

“Ahh, I'm going in!” Crockett yelled, as he drove into fog that was so dense he couldn't see the bridge's trademark orange towers ahead.

The idea was to get in and get out.

Crockett didn't like to linger when he was moving weight, or other people's money.

In a residential neighborhood in the shadow of Sutro Tower, he pulled the Mitsubishi to a stop. He popped his trunk, pulled out the Watershed bag with the ten pounds of weed in it, and strolled down the sidewalk toward a nondescript row house. Crockett's connection wasn't home. Instead, a cute young girl handed him a paper bag that contained a box with $24,000 in cash inside. The bills were secured with rubber bands in $5,000 and $1,000 bundles. Crockett left the Watershed bag with the pot. The cute girl offered him a hit off her bong. It was tempting, but for once, Crockett refused.

People were waiting.

Crockett had just made it back over the bridge when his phone rang. It was his connection, telling him he'd be calling again in a couple of days.

“Coolio,” Crockett replied.

When that call came in, Crockett would get in touch with his grower friends, as he had earlier that evening. They used code words to discuss price and amount over the phone. Earlier, for instance, Crockett said he knew a contract worker who paid “$24 an hour,” which was $2,400 a pound. Often, given his proximity to wine country, he'd use wine terms. “Ten bottles of wine” would be ten pounds. In Humboldt, telephone code for pounds ranged from “firewood” to “puppies” to “produce,” or even “quilt squares.”

The speed limit on the highway in front of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin Civic Center was fifty-five. The Mitsubishi's speedometer hovered at seventy, then eighty. He zipped across three lanes in seconds, happy to be out of city traffic. The scanner on the windshield sounded one long beep.

“Laser alert,” its computerized voice announced.

Crockett downshifted and moved into a slower lane. Within minutes, he passed three highway patrol cars.

The last ticket Crockett had been given was just before Christmas. He was going seventy-four in the rain near his house. The fine came to over $800, including the fix-it portion for his funky muffler. He managed to fight it. When it came down to it, Crockett knew he drove like an asshole, and he knew that the money he was carrying could be taken from him if he got pulled over. Sometimes he'd even feel a little guilty about it. He knew he wouldn't be able to drive the way he did if he were black or Latino, because studies showed their rates of being searched by police were so much higher. He also knew he abused his commercial license because every time he got pulled over, the police officer would ask what it was for, and when he told them he was a firefighter, more often than not, they'd let him go.