The Cost of The Game could by Your Mind, but Who Cares
By James Williams
“It’s the biggest rush. You feel the most masculine feeling, but you’re paranoid as fuck, so what’s the point? Dead honest, I’m paranoid right now, that’s why I asked you why you were on speaker phone.”
Garebear, a pseudonym, is a habitually early riser. Up at the perineal crack of dawn, that dreaded 5 a.m.. Up and moving at that special kind of witching hour set aside by God for those who have “some godammed work to do”, Garebear stood above his toilet, pissing himself into wakefulness. It was a 40-degree morning in Palasadro California when Garebear spotted the foreign objects parked in front of his mailbox. Peering with apprehension, he pressed his forehead against the bathroom window to get a better look at the two California Police Department vehicles stationed in front of his driveway, their yellow lights glowing like the eyes of a Goblin Shark. Garebear hustled out of his bathroom, and cat walked into his living room to find his phone. He stood, scrolling through contacts, breathing heavily, and hoping for a line, while 50 pounds of nearly dried Cannabis hangs from his ceiling in bundled trellis’s, nearly scrapping the floor of his living room, like a thick, dank curtain.
Since Garebear, all of 21 years old, woke up that morning and saw the Feds outside, he’s been swapping coin and moving people in and out of his house to trim and package his product, a necessary and tedious process of growing and distributing Marijuana, Bud, Cheese, The Devil’s Lettuce, Units, Elbows, all that sticky shit. He hired a crew, supposedly from the Asian Mob of southern California, who have been coming in and trimming for the past few days. “I’m watching people trim right now.” He says over the phone to me, “seven 40-year-old Asian women, supporting families, packing my shit.” He says he stayed up for three days watching them trim, to insure nothing went missing. He met his Asian connection through a hair dresser at a salon he frequents to trim his thick, wavy blonde hair. There’s a sort of familial cognitive bond between players of The Game, like a school of bait fish, moving in sync with each other. An unspoken knowledge that allows those deep in the groove to know exactly who to approach and speak to in order to progress their agendas. Garret must have that sort of face, or maybe it’s in his rounded posture, or maybe it’s the scars riddled deep into his forehead and cheek. Whatever it is, it’s in his blood. It’s something that you have to born into, if it is to be done right.
Garebear has been in the game since he was damn near eight years old. “I had to pay for my Beep-Beep,” he says, referring to a Nextel cellphone, a giant rubber brick of a walkie-talkie, hot stuff way back in the early 2000s. Even before that, Garebear had been involved in The Game, as a fly on the wall of a rural Bar and BBQ joint down off highway 951 in Naples Florida, called Porky’s Last Stand. Garebear was five years old when he witnessed his uncle get arrested for the first time; Poked at Porky’s for trafficking 30 pounds of low grade mids across the state. Garebear stood in the parking lot as the circus lights painted the back entrance of Porky’s blue and red, blue and red, blue and red. At that moment he caught his first glimpse of playing The Game, at the crucial point of the inevitable loss. He garnered a clear understanding of what it looked like, felt like, and smelt like to lose, all before being enrolled in kindergarden.
The biggest incentive to play the game is the constant flow of cold hard cash. When asked about how much he had seen at one time he answered, “$100,000. I had to transport it across the country between me and two partners. We got on a plane in Sacramento, and flew to Ohio with $50,000 split between the three of us. Then we booted down to Florida with the money. The rest of it had to be shipped via the U.S. Mail.” Garebear says he sat by his Nana’s mailbox for five days, waiting for either a yearly salary of any middle class American family to arrive in a box, or for the Feds to roll up in their shiny black Fords. Barefoot and in a tan unbuttoned Columbia fishing shirt, he sat on a white cooler within site of the mailbox, rolling though can after can of Copenhagen Longcut to calm his nerves, his blue eyes fixated on the end of his Nana’s driveway. “It was cool, but it’s not,” he said about the experience. He says his paranoia comes from the Feds, but also, when he’s home, his family members, who have subsequently “been around” when things start to go missing. “I’m not afraid to take losses you know, I’ve had people steal thousand’s from me. I’ve gone from 5 thousand dollars to zero dollars in a matter of days, then back to holding 25 G’s by the end of that week. I can’t be scared to take a loss.”
Recently, Garebear came clean to his family about what he’s been doing for a living, most importantly to his father, who we’ll call Redbear. “It was weird, I couldn’t be a man unless I was 110% with him, I told him straight up I was doing some outlaw shit over here.” Masculinity is an unquestionable certainty in the Bear household. It is assumed that there is no deviation when it comes to being a man’s man at all times. He comes from a family of roofers. Each man in his family has spent many long days on a roof in the Florida heat since late childhood, and each has the leathered farmers tan and forearms to prove it. A traditional Hog hunting, Dip spitting, Yee-hawing, backwoods, Anglo-Saxon family, running amok, and running from the county police since 1985. Garebear, by far, seems to be born the most rational of these men, and he is the only one out of the six that doesn’t have a record.
Redbear had played a part in the infamous Midnight Express, two distinct periods of time in the early 80’s and early 90’s in Everglade City Florida. During this time, Everglades city, population 526, the self titled “Last frontier of America”, named for its geographic position straddling the outskirts of the vast wetlands, peddled as much as 75 tons of Marijuana per week from Cuba to America. Many of the town’s male residents, mostly fishermen, were arrested in the early 90’s one morning when over 200 DEA and FBI agents raided the town. Redbear had not been caught that day, but many of his friends had. “I know what it’s like to want fast money,” he stated to his son,” but all those people are still sleeping in prison.”
“Lemme tell you something,” Garebear says to me,” I have memorized flight patterns of helicopters that fly around the neighborhood: diagonal flying helicopters are heading to the hospital, ones that fly straight over me are usually Park services heading to put out fires, and the ones that hover and camp, those Birdies are trouble.” Birds, an analogy for Police helicopters, accurately depicts the same kind of predatory hovering maneuver seen in seagulls and pelicans over a pod of bait fish.
Somewhere out on the Pacific, an alarm bell is rung. The ever moving surface of the great river explodes from the anxiety of panicked bait fish, corralled together underneath by their predators. The birds are alerted and their interests are piqued. The Seagulls and the Pelicans arrive.
At the first sign of surface disturbance, the birds begin to hover in packs, dive bombing into the breakage. Just like the Feds, the birds must wait until something alerts them of the fish’s position underwater, a different world for the birds. The baitfish are hidden just under the surface, like many grow ops in plain houses.
The bait fish, now being bombarded from the air, have formed a swirling sphere that might as well be a living creature all on its own. Each individual baitfish and grower takes his or her turn at the middle, top, bottom, and outside the sphere. Luck, anxiety and agility create the boundaries of survival for both parties, who will never not be paranoid, but will only stop panicking when their predators have their bellies full. The bait fish’s only defense being that their adversaries cannot eat them all. Some must be picked off to ensure survival for the majority.
Lastly, the unseen cause of the problem, members of their own kingdom, predators from their own world. Sharks, the Snaggle tooth dogfish, squealers, and informants. The envious, the ones who played the game and slipped,they are equally as threatening to growers as the birds are when the only positive outcome of The Game is surviving it.
“You find out who your friends are when you start doing better than the people around you, that’s one thing I’ve learned from all this.” Garebear says, referring to his old partner, one of the three that had helped him smuggled that $50,000 earlier. After months of being addicted to painkillers and anti-anxiety medication, Garebear and his remaining partner had to cut the third guy loose. A necessary procedure, but nonetheless risky as all hell. One can never know what a suffering human might do to those who cut him loose.
“I’m done, I’m out after this batch. I’m going legit.” He says. When asked when that might be, he replies,” I don’t know, maybe December,” sort of woefully. He plans on heading back home for Thanksgiving, and for his remaining partner to ship down Garebear’s share of product to Florida. There is some uncertainty in his voice after disclosing his decision to “retire”. It may be the right decision, and it may be the right time to do so, but the game is addictive and that cannot be discounted. “I havn’t slept in days because of the cops.”
What Garebear means by going legit is just the flip side of the coin of what he does now. In 2017, him and his mother started a company called Green Palms, which manufactures CBD oil for patients suffering from any of the number of ailments CBD is claimed to help ease and resolve, such as inflammation in joints and in muscle tissues, stomach problems, withdrawal symptoms of harder drugs, and all around wellness support. After this harvest, he claims, he will be focusing most of his attention on this business venture, as well as spending more time making his own brand of outlaw country music, a passion he has followed and held since he started playing guitar at the age of 10. Even after all the money and excitement of The Game, when asked about what he wants to do with his life, Garebear states simply, “I just want to make music and play guitar with my friends.”
Garebear inhabits just a single corner of the kaleidoscope that is The Game. Each twist and turn from any direction produces a different outcome at the end of the tube, and Garebear’s angle is as similar to all the rest, as it is unfamiliar to me. What he does is a necessity to all of us down here who want to enjoy the benefits of the game without taking as big of a risk. The right people have to do the right job correctly, in order for kids like myself to spark up and enjoy Jason and the Argonauts for the 10th time in a week. But hopefully, sooner than later, Garebear will be able to enjoy the benefits of the game without having to worry about the Birds and their shiny black Fords heading down his driveway.
Ending note November 27 2018:
“Hey, JR’s still in school, maybe he can use the supplies,” Says D.S.A, a local producer who’s house I frequent to record my own music and to just hangout. Piled on his kitchen counter is a red and white U.S. Mail shipping box surrounded by packs of loose leaf paper, eraser caps, and two plastic calculators. “You need any of this?” he asks me. I look closer into the box that he gesture towards, and I see two airtight plastic bags with the words “O.G. half” and “Tahoe Hell half” scribbled with a sharpie marker, a combined pound of home grown Indica weed. There was no return address, but it is safe to assume its from a little house in Palasedro California. “He never disappoints, he’s got a magic little touch for growing this shit man, he’s like a regular Garden Gnome,” says D.S.A. “How much did you say you needed again?”
