Savages

Chon is seriously twisted—no, she
knows
Chon is seriously twisted—but not like day-old-spaghetti-in-a-bowl twisted, like getting off on guys getting their heads lopped off, like that TV show about the British king, every cute chick he fucks ends up getting her head cut off. (Moral of television show: if you give a guy really good head (heh heh), he thinks you’re a whore and breaks up with you. Or: Sex = Death.)
    “Who
sent
this to you?” O asks him.
    Is it viral, floating around on YouTube, the MustSee vid-clip of the day? MySpace, Facebook (no, that isn’t funny), Hulu? Is this what everyone’s watching today, forwarding to their friends, you gotta check this out?
    “Who sent this to you?” she repeats.
    “Savages,” Chon says.

7
     
    Chon doesn’t say much.
    People who don’t know him think this is because he lacks vocabulary. The opposite is true—Chon doesn’t use a lot of words because he likes them
so
much. Values them, so he tends to keep them for himself.
    “It’s like people who like quarters,” O explained one time. “People who
like
quarters hate to
spend
quarters. So they always
have
a lot of quarters.”
    Okay, she was
ripped
at the time.
    But not wrong.
    Chon always has a lot of words in his head, he just doesn’t let them out of his mouth very often.
    Take “savage.”
    Singular of “savages.”
    Chon is intrigued by the noun versus the adjective of it, the chicken and the egg, the cause and effect of that particular etymology. This conundrum (
nice
fucking word) emerged from a conversation he overheard in Stanland. The topic was FundoIslamos who threw acid in little girls’ faces for the sin of going to school.
    Here’s the scene that Chon remembers:
    EXT. SEAL TEAM FIREBASE – DAY
     
    A group of SEALS—worn out from the firefight—stand around a coffee urn set on a mess table.
    SEAL TEAM MEDIC
    (shocked, appalled)
How can you account for people doing something so . . . savage?
    SEAL TEAM LEADER
    (jaded)
Easy—they’re savages.
    CUT TO:

8
     
    Chon gets what the clip is: Video Conferencing.
    In which the Baja Cartel makes the following deal points:
1. You will not sell your hydro retail.
2.
We
will sell your hydro retail.
3. You will sell
us
your hydro wholesale, and at a price.
4. Or—
—let’s go to the videotape.
    In this illustrative visual aid (an educational tool) we see five former drug merchants, formerly of the Tijuana/San Diego Metroplex,who insisted on representing the retail version of their product in contravention of our previously stated demands, and four former Mexican police officers, formerly of Tijuana, who provided them protection (or not, as the case may be).
    These guys were all fucking idiots.
    We think you’re much smarter.
    Watch and learn.
    Don’t make us go live.

9
     
    Chon explains this to O.
    The Baja Cartel, with its corporate headquarters in Tijuana, exports by land, sea, and air a shitload of boo, coke, smack, and meth into the USofA. Originally they just controlled the cross-border smuggling itself and left the retail end to others. In recent years, however, they have moved to vertically integrate all ends of the trade, from production and transportation to marketing and sales.
    They accomplished this with relative ease in regard to heroin and cocaine, but had to overcome some early resistance from American motorcycle gangs that controlled the methamphetamine trade.
    The biker gangs quickly grew tired of throwing lavish funerals (have you checked the price of beer lately?) and agreed to join the BC sales team, and ER doctors across America were pleased that meth production became standardized so they would know what biochemical symptoms to expect when the ODs came rolling in.
    However, sales figures for the three aforementioned drugs have sharply declined. There is a relentless Darwinian factor in meth use particularly, in which its users die off or become brain-dead so quickly they can’t figure out where to buy the product. (If you think you hate junkies, you haven’t met tweekers. Tweekers make junkies look like John Wooden.) And although heroin seems to be making a tenuous but noticeable recovery, the BC still needs to replace the declining income to keep its shareholders happy.
    So now it wants to control the entire marijuana market and eliminate competition from the mom-and-pop hydro growers in SoCal.
    “Like Ben and Chonny’s,” O says.
    Chon nods.
    The cartel will let them stay in business only if they sell