Volume 01, Story 7
Chino is slouched on the couch staring at his phone, and what’s on the phone is a photo of a redhead named Lucy he’s supposed to be taking on a date. Homeboy knocks (he forgot his key again) and gets the problem in one line: “I ain’t got no lana, dude.” So begins the brainstorm: donate plasma; get jobs at King Taco for the employee discount, which Chino kills on the grounds that a King Taco date runs twenty bucks with no drinks, she’s definitely ordering a drink, and water is expensive; sell mota, which doesn’t work anymore with a dispensary on every corner. Which leaves Homeboy’s actual plan: go ask Mr. Dealer for a job, because no one on earth is more of an expert on ganja than these two. Neither of them owns a car, so Mary Jane drives. On the sidewalk outside the shop Homeboy confirms, with the quiet dignity of a man announcing an engagement, that he and Mary Jane are officially fuck buddies now.
Mr. Dealer’s answer over the intercom is no, at volume, with reference to the fact that they never have money and they always break something: the Sasquatch they brought in last time broke his grandmother’s chair. (That’s Chuy, and Chino would like it on record that he is not an “it,” he has a name, and also sorry about the chair.) Then the intercom changes hands. Mrs. Dealer hires them on the spot, over her husband’s objection, on the grounds that he wouldn’t have this dispensary if it weren’t for half her money. She’s opening an edibles department and she needs some good helpers. Mr. Dealer catches Chino by the arm on the way in and gets a promise out of him (“Don’t fuck anything up”), which Chino gives sincerely, and which Homeboy underlines by barking at the man like a dog.
Through the back door is the factory, and the factory is enormous, subterranean, and staffed entirely by weed. Three-foot Kush Fairies in custom shirts with wing holes stir cauldrons of THC butter and dust the treats with sparkly cannabis sugar; four-foot Kush Monsters that look like ambulatory nugs drive the forklifts in packing and shipping and can lift ten times their own weight. The fairies came out of the forest when they harvested that illegal redneck weed, an explanation both boys accept on the spot; the Kush Monsters came from the forest too. Homeboy wants to know why the fairies aren’t singing. That’s Oompa Loompas, guey. Chino falls to his knees and weeps. After an orientation video narrated by a visibly suffering Mr. Dealer in a Mrs. Dealer’s Edibles shirt (which both of them sleep through), they meet their supervisor: Greg, six feet of cigar-chewing Kush Monster who calls them Twatterlings and splits them up onto separate stations. Chino gets the kitchen and a fairy named Trixie teaching him to knead cookie dough. Homeboy gets the hydroponics lab and a fairy named Lexi. Greg says he’ll be back after lunch. What happens before lunch is that Chino stops looking at the dough, and a fairy pops up in Homeboy’s face and gets dropped by pure hood reflex, and then every other fairy in the room comes for him at once.
While the hydroponics lab descends into fairy-on-Homeboy warfare, the kitchen has its own situation: Greg goes looking for his missing trainee and his missing fairy, follows the sounds to the custodian’s closet, and opens the door on Chino and Trixie mid-passion. “By the Kush gods, what the fuck?!” Neither of them stops. “Just five more minutes!” Greg shuts the door on the most unconvincing smile of his life and tells the gathered fairies they’ll give them five minutes. Then the alarms go off. Greg walks into the hydroponics warehouse to find dozens of fairies unconscious on the floor and Homeboy gone full feral, about to rip a downed fairy’s wing clean off, and talks him down with both hands up before Chino arrives with the only de-escalation tool that works on Homeboy: a fistful of edibles, which he inhales like a man possessed and immediately powers down. “I blacked out” is his entire incident report. Which is how they end up in front of the HR Kush Fairy, in a suit, in an office, braced for the firing that never comes. Mrs. Dealer likes them and she’s the one who feeds everybody, so instead they get reassigned to packing and shipping, a two-week wait for their first paycheck, and one rule: no more fighting or sexual acts at work. The shift ends with both of them quietly pocketing top-shelf nugs, Chino calling Lucy and Homeboy calling Mary Jane, and the night closing on the apartment couch: Chino, Homeboy, Mary Jane, and Lucy, redhead in a comic book shirt and jean shorts, passing a joint in a blissful haze, with Chino laying down the one house rule that matters: no swapping.
Featuring Chino, Homeboy, Mrs. Dealer, Mr. Dealer, Mary Jane, Lucy, Greg, Trixie, Lexi, Kush Fairies, Kush Monsters.
Read the full story in The Adventures of Chino & Homeboy, Volume 01