The Kings of Cool Read online

  5

  “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal,” Ben says, lacing his fingers behind his head and tilting his face to the sun.

  “To have sex with a deer, or with a cartoon character?” Chon asks.

  “Both,” Ben says. “And may I point out that Bambi is an underage animated ungulate? Not to mention a male?”

  “Bambi is a boy?” O asks.

  “Again, Bambi is a deer,” Ben clarifies, “but, yes, he’s a boy deer.”

  “Then why are so many girls in Playboy named Bambi?” O asks.

  She likes Playboy and is grateful that Stepfather Number Four keeps them in his “home office” desk drawer so Paqu—

  Paqu is what O calls her mother, the

  Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe—

  —doesn’t see them and get pissy because she is an older version of the centerfolds who is constantly attempting to airbrush herself via expensive cosmetics and more expensive cosmetic surgery.

  O is pretty sure that the National Geographic Channel is going to do an archaeological dig on her mother in a futile quest to find a single original body part, a private joke that explains why O gave Four a pith helmet for his last birthday.

  (“Why, thank you, Ophelia,” a puzzled Four said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What’s it for?” Paqu asked, icily.

  “To keep the sun off your vagina,” O answered.)

  “Girls are named Bambi,” Ben says now, “because we are culturally ignorant, of even pop culture, and because we crave the archetype of childlike innocence combined with adult sexuality.”

  His parents are both psychotherapists.

  Ben, oh Ben, O thinks.

  Hard body, soft heart.

  Long brown hair, warm brown eyes.

  “But that’s me,” O tells him. “Childlike innocence combined with adult sexuality.”

  Short blonde hair, thin hips, no rack to speak of, tiny butt on her petite frame. And yes, big eyes—albeit blue, not brown.

  “No,” Ben says. “You’re more adult innocence combined with childlike sexuality.”

  He has a point, O thinks. She does view sex mostly as play—a fun thing—not a job to be performed to prove one’s love. This is why, she has opined, they’re called sex “toys” instead of sex “tools.”

  “Bambi is a proto-fascist piece of work,” Chon snarls. “It might as well have been shot by Leni Riefenstahl.”

  Chon reads books—Chon reads the dictionary—and also hits the Foreign Films/Classics section of Netflix. He could explain 81/2 to you, except he won’t.

  “Speaking of gender ambiguity,” O says, “I told Paqu that I’m thinking of becoming bisexual.”

  “What did she say?” Ben asks.

  “She said, ‘What?’” O answers. “Then I wussed out and said, ‘I think I want a bicycle.’”

  “To pedal to your girlfriend’s house?” Ben asks.

  “To pedal to your girlfriend’s house,” O counters.

  She could play for either or both teams and would be heavily recruited because, at nineteen, she’s drop-dead gorgeous.

  But she doesn’t know that yet.

  O describes herself as “poly-sexual.”

  “Like Pollyanna, only way happier,” she explains.

  She would consider going LTG—

  Lesbian Till Graduation—

  —except she isn’t in school, a fact that Paqu points out to her on a near daily basis. She tried junior college for a semester (okay, the first three weeks of a semester), but it was, well . . .

  junior college.

  Right now she’s just glad to have her guys here. As for ODB, they can have any women they want, as long as one of them is her.

  Check that, she thinks—

  They can have any woman they want

  as long as I’m the one they love.

  The pain of it is

  The pain of it is

  Chon flies out tonight

  This is his last day on the beach.

  6

  Specifically, Laguna Beach, California.

  The brightest pearl in the SoCal necklace of coastal towns that stretches down that lovely neck from Newport Beach to Mexico.

  Going along the strand (pun intended)—

  —Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, Laguna Beach, Capistrano Beach, San Clemente (interrupt for Camp Pendleton), Oceanside, Carlsbad, Leucadia, Encinitas, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Solana Beach, Del Mar, Torrey Pines, La Jolla Shores, La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, Ocean Beach, Coronado, Silver Strand, Imperial Beach.

  All beautiful, all fine, but the best one is—

  Lagoona—

  —which was the name officially given to the town by the State of California until someone explained that there was no actual “lagoon,” but that the name derived from “canada de las lagunas,” which in Spanish means “canyon of the lakes.” There are two lakes, up in the hills above said canyon, but Laguna isn’t known for its lakes, it’s known for its beaches and its beauty.

  About which Ben, Chon, and O are a little blasé, because they grew up here and take it for granted.

  Yeah, except Chon doesn’t right now because his leave is up and he’s about to go back to Afghanistan, aka Stanland.

  Or, in the spirit of things—

  Afgoonistan.

  7

  Chon tells Ben and O that he literally has to get packing.

  He goes back to his efficiency apartment on Glenneyre and packs a baseball bat into his ’68 green Mustang—

  —in honor of Steve McQueen—

  —the King of Cool—

  —and drives down to San Clemente, not far from Richard Nixon’s version of Elba and hence known in the latter half of the 1970s as

  Sans Clemency.

  (Nixon, poor Nixon, the only truly tragic hero in the American political theater; the only recent president more Aeschylus than Rodgers and Hammerstein. First there was Camelot, then The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, then Richard?)

  Chon drives not to the old Western White House

  The real name of which was, with presumably unintended irony,

  La Casa Pacifica

  “Peaceful House.”

  There was Nixon in Exile, prowling around the Peaceful House chatting with paintings, while down on the actual Pacific, Secret Service agents chased surfers away from the nearby famous break at Upper Trestles lest they organize an assassination attempt, which is, it should be noted, probably the first time that the words “surfers” and “organize” have been used in the same paragraph.

  Surfers? An assassination attempt?

  Surfers?

  California surfers?!

  (“Okay, let’s coordinate our watches.”

  Uhhhhhh . . . watches?)

  Anyway, Chon drives to the hospital.

  8

  “Who did this to you?” Chon asks.

  Sam Casey, one of their best “sales partners,” lies in bed with a broken jaw, a concussion, his right arm fractured in three places, and internal bleeding.

  Someone beat the holy hell out of Sam.

  “Brian Hennessy and three of his surfer buddies,” Sam says through his wired jaw. “I was selling them a lousy QP and they ripped me off.”

  “You’ve sold to them before, right?” Chon asks.

  One of Ben and Chon’s cardinal rules: never sell to anyone you don’t know.

  Maybe only Chon would know that “cardinal rule” doesn’t come from the Catholic religious official, but from the Latin “cardo,” which means “hinge.” So a cardinal rule is something that everything else hinges upon.

  Everything hinges upon not selling dope to people you don’t know.

  And know well.

  “I’ve sold to them a dozen times,” Sam says. “Never any trouble.”

  “Okay, so look, the bills are covered,” Chon says. Ben has set up a shell corporation through which he offers health insurance to sales partners who are fully vested. “I’ll take car
e of Brian. Do me a favor, though? Don’t mention this to Ben?”

  Because Ben doesn’t believe in violence.

  9

  Chon does.

  10

  It’s an age-old debate, not to be rehashed here, but basically—

  Ben believes that to answer violence with violence only begets more violence, while Chon believes that to answer violence with nonviolence only begets more violence, his evidence being the entire history of humanity.

  Oddly enough, they both believe in karma—what goes around comes around—except with Chon it comes around in a freaking hurry and usually with ill intent.

  What Chon calls “microwave karma.”

  Together, Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist.

  Ben is the paci

  Chon is the fist.

  11

  Rule of life—

  Okay, more of a strong suggestion—

  If you absolutely have to be an asshole?

  Make yourself a little hard to find.

  Go do your assholian bullshit and then lock yourself in your mother’s basement and put a towel over the Xbox to block the light, but don’t—

  —beat someone up and then go surfing in your usual spot.

  Just don’t do it, asshole.

  First of all, try not being a dick for a change and see how that works out, but in any case don’t

  park your van where you usually stick the piece of shit while you’re out for one of your “sessions,” bra, because

  someone like Chon

  or, in this case, Chon

  might take a baseball bat to it.

  Chon smashes out the headlights, the taillights, the windshield, and all the windows (baseball in the Steroid Era), then leans on the horn until Brian and his three buddies madly paddle in like “natives” in one of those old Tarzan movies.

  Brian, who is a big freaking dude, comes out of the water first, screaming, “Dude, what the fuck?!”

  Chon slides out of the car, drops the bat, and asks, “Are you Brian?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bad answer.

  Seriously.

  Bad answer.

  12

  Billy Jack.

  You’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about, don’t even try to pretend that . . .

  Okay, fine—

  Chon’s sweeping inside roundhouse kick breaks Brian’s jaw and gives him a concussion before he even hits the dirt unconscious, little pound signs in his eyes like it’s a cartoon.

  Chon steps over Brian’s prone body and drives his fist into the solar plexus of Buddy One, bending him over. Chon grabs the back of Buddy One’s head and pulls it down as he drives his knee up into Buddy One’s face, then throws him away and moves on to Buddy Two, who lifts his fists up beside his face, which does no good at all as Chon sweep-kicks him in the lower right leg, knocking him off his feet. The back of Buddy Two’s head hits the ground hard, but not as hard as the two side-blade kicks that Chon delivers to his face, shattering his nose and rendering him, as they say, unconscious, as Buddy Three . . .

  Buddy Three . . .

  Ahhh, Buddy Three.

  13

  Sad Fact of Life—

  Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

  Never.

  Ever.

  “You can come down the evolutionary ladder,” Chon has observed to Ben and O; “you can’t climb up.”

  (Okay, there’s always that ya-yo in the mall trying to run up the down escalator, but that just proves the point.)

  So—

  Buddy Three, having witnessed the utter destruction of his three pals in a matter of single-digit seconds, flees to the inside of the van (where, if he were smart, he would remain) and emerges (see?) with a pistol.

  And says to Chon,

  “Now what are you going to do, asshole?”

  The prosecution rests.

  God is God.

  Darwin is Darwin.

  14

  EXT. BEACH PARKING LOT – DAY

  An UNCONSCIOUS SURFER with a PISTOL (with the safety on) jammed in his mouth lies slumped out of the sliding door of a van. TWO OTHER SURFERS lie in fetal positions on the ground.

  In their wet suits, they look like baby seals in a PETA clip.

  CHON roots around in the console of the van and comes up with a plastic-wrapped QUARTER POUND of dope, which he jams into his jacket pocket.

  Then he steps over to a fourth surfer, BRIAN, who is on all fours, trying unsuccessfully to get to his feet.

  Chon kicks him in the ribs.

  Several times.

  Then grabs him by the collar and drags him over to the van.

  CHON

  Brian, let the word go forth from this time and place: It is not okay to steal our product. It is especially not okay to lay hands on our people. And one other thing—

  Chon stretches Brian’s right arm over the edge of the van’s bumper, then picks up the baseball bat and

  CRACK!

  Brian screams.

  CHON

  —next time I’ll kill you.

  15

  Time to go.

  O’s trying to get out of the fucking house.

  Very expensive house in the exclusive gated community of Monarch Bay.

  Except Paqu is, like, on it.

  “What are you going to do with your life?” she asks.

  “I dunno.”

  “Are you going back to school?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Are you going to get a job?”

  “I dunno.”

  Check Paqu out—

  Blonde hair, perfectly coiffed.

  Chiseled (not metaphorically) features.

  Makeup perrrfect.

  A couple of gr worth of clothing on her perrrfectly toned, sculpted body that features TTDF.

  Tits To Die For.

  (Many male ships have been wrecked on those cliffs, my friend. Crashed and broken apart. Y chromosomes flailing the crazy-bad whitewater waiting for a jet ski that ain’t coming.)

  Now she turns her formidable tits and formidabler eyes on O. “Well, you have to do something.”

  “I dunno,” O answers, wilting under the four-point gaze.

  “You have thirty days,” Paqu says.

  “To . . .”

  “Get a job or go back to school,” Paqu answers, cutting up strawberries and putting the pieces into a blender with two scoops of protein powder.

  She’s been into “power smoothies” lately.

  “Oh God,” O answers, “have you been to one of those tough love seminars again?”

  “DVD,” Paqu answers.

  “Did Four put you up to this?” O asks.

  She knows that Four put her up to it because he doesn’t want an “adult child” cluttering up the house he thinks is his just because he nails Paqu in it.

  I was in this house before you were, O thinks.

  Come to think of it, I was in Paqu before you were.

  “Nobody put me up to it,” Paqu yells over the whirl of the blender. “I have a mind of my own, you know. And if you go back to school, you have to take it seriously.”

  O had a 1.7 GPA at Saddleback before she gave up the charade entirely and just stopped going.

  “What if I don’t?” she asks.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Will you shut that fucking thing off?”

  Paqu turns off the blender and pours her power smoothie into a glass. O knows that in a half hour she’ll go to the gym to work with her personal trainer for two hours, then drink a “meal replacement shake,” then go to yoga before coming home for a power nap. Then she’ll spend two hours getting herself ready for when Four comes home.

  And she thinks I’m a useless cunt, O thinks.

  “You have a power-smoothie mustache,” O tells her.

  “If you don’t get a job or go back to school,” Paqu says, wiping her upper lip with the back of her index finger, “you can’t live here anymor
e. You’ll have to find your own place.”

  “I don’t have money for my own place.”

  “That is not my problem,” Paqu says—obviously practiced from the DVD.

  But they both know that it is.

  Paqu’s problem, that is.

  She’ll forget about it, O thinks, cognizant of Paqu’s Bipolar Approach To Parenting.

  Paqu has wide swings between

  Absent Neglectful Mother and

  Smothering Controlling Mother

  So, like, Paqu will take off on—

  —a European vacation

  Rehab

  Spiritual Retreat or just

  Another Affair

  And totally forget about O.

  Then she’ll come back, feel guilty, and go in the

  Complete Other Direction

  Micromanaging O’s life down to the tiniest details of clothing, friends, education (or lack thereof), career (see “education”), and protein-carbohydrate balance, and was literally up her ass during a truly unfortunate “colonic” phase.

  It’s Either/Or

  There is no middle ground, and it has been

  Ever thus.

  The worst is when Paqu comes back from rehab or a spiritual retreat. Having fixed herself, she sets out to fix O.

  “I’m not broken,” O argued one time.

  “Oh, darling,” Paqu answered, “we’re all broken.”

  Indeed, O thought, Paqu does spend a lot of time in the body shop. Anyhoo, after a long discussion about O’s denial regarding her “brokenness” it was decided that self-realization was a river that simply couldn’t be pushed and that O would have to remain in the eddy of her own delusion. Which was just fine with O, although she was pretty sure that Delusional Eddy was a guy Paqu briefly dated.

  But now this thirty-day thing.

  O heads for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To join the Peace Corps,” O answers.

  Or go see Chon.

  Which is the

  Exact opposite.