The D.A. grants few interviews, but his positions are well known. Over the past year, the Los Angeles City Council has drafted several proposals to attempt to regulate the 137 medical marijuana dispensaries operating with permits in the city of Los Angeles. On each occasion, the D.A. has said that he will prosecute those who attempt to sell marijuana. Compromises, addendums, even thousand-foot proximity limits from schools do not soften his political stance. Apparently, Mr. Cooley thinks of voter intent as more of a survey.
But what a survey. According to a Gallup poll, 54% of Americans in the west supporting legalization. With dispensaries facing a variety of perplexing legal issues, it may be simpler to just outright legalize it. As of January 2010, there is a bill in the state assembly to legalize marijuana and place a $50 tax on each ounce sold. People familiar with addition and multiplication vouch for the economic feasibility of the plan, and the subsequent financial boon to the state.
So what is the dark side?
Many people in law enforcement feel that medical marijuana dispensaries are perfect fronts for crime/terrorist organizations. Oddly enough, fronts are not exclusive to drug operations. Perfectly legitimate businesses can set themselves up as fronts for lazy retired crime families. An otherwise pleasant seeming coffee shop on the West Side of Los Angeles was, for years, run by an unscrupulous Asian crime family with very insecure hairnets. And was the coffee remarkable? No.
Then there’s the problem of setting up a board to regulate medical marijuana. Where does the money come from to appoint a board who will watch over the dispensaries? What about malpractice insurance? How will the law be written, if everyone is far too stoned to do it?
The state assembly has a much better plan. Legalizing marijuana without classifying it as a medical substance will eliminate thorny bureaucratic issues, close doors to Evildoers (who are currently battling to be recognized as a separate entity from jazz fusion band the EvildoneIts) and boost revenue.
Or will it?

Revenue: the law, and the growers

“You gotta look at how the government works,” Jeff Joseph, the owner of the dispensary Organica, explains. He’s been running Organica since 2007. The majority of his clientele are card-carrying cancer patients. As a State Board of Equalization tax-paying business owner, he has a sharp grasp of revenue, and the keen understanding of human nature that anyone dealing with the public on a regular basis must possess.
“[The government] has two different aspects. They have taxation, but they also have law enforcement. The laws that they’re enforcing, that’s their business. Their business is not law changing. That’s our job. The law makers want to represent their constituents. But until the constituents’ voice is loud enough, they don’t really want to do anything. It’s a hot potato. Law enforcement is going to interpret the law to benefit them. Everybody’s going to interpret the law to benefit them, whoever’s interpreting.”
When asked about the potential revenue provided to the government by taxation, Jeff says, “Let’s look at this way.
“They already have a revenue basis. The people who are able to actually enforce the law already have the revenue base. They look at the tax as a threat to the revenue base.”
But this fear about a threat to the revenue base is not purely on the side of the law. If legalization were to become a reality, how would large-scale marijuana growers feel about taxation?
It should be noted that interviewing large scale growers is a bit like using carrier pigeons; it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work, but it does, somehow. As it happens, large-scale growers in California are pro-legalization. They foresee that if marijuana is legalized, large-scale corporations will take over, and a “King of Beers” situation will result, turning homegrown growers into the equivalent of microbreweries, whose high-end product will attract the discerning buyers.
Since the first wave of dispensaries opened, these large-scale growers have witnessed an increase in their sales. In some places, such as Humboldt county, growers feel that legalization would “bring legitimacy to a very old industry.”
But taxation does not necessarily excite them. Much like law enforcement, they are somewhat reluctant to part with a revenue stream that is working for them, in favor of an untested method.
So what is the solution?
As Jeff says, “[The law is] enforcing the statues that are there. We get the other side saying, well, people voted for this, we want to see this happen. You got a conflict of interest. People need to make a clear law. That’ll be the first thing.”

Lawsuits and fees

Before a clear law can be made, however, it’s much better to start suing people. At least, as of March 2010, this seems to be the solution of city attorney Carmen Trutanich, who filed a lawsuit against Organica, among others, to prevent over-the-counter sales of marijuana.
But not to worry. Public advocacy group Americans for Safe Access filed a counter-lawsuit against the city on behalf of the dispensaries.
The lawsuits were prompted by the February 3rd signing of a city council bill limiting the number of dispensaries to 70. The law hasn’t quite taken effect, as its passage hinges on the city approving the fees that the dispensaries will pay to remain in operation.
It’s the revenue, stupid.

—Fool’s Errand, Louis Bayard

Although novelist Louis Bayard undoubtedly deserves a much longer introduction, all you need to know is that he’s as hilarious over the phone as he is in print. Enjoy.

Julia Ingalls: You’ve written five novels. Fool’s Errand was about the quest for love, Endangered Species was about the quest for family, whereas the novels Mr. Timothy, The Pale Blue Eye, and The Black Tower seem to be about the quest for identity.

Louis Bayard: Oh, wow! That sounds good.

JI: We’ll put it together as a blurb, I guess. But do you agree with that? What made you want to write in the past?

LB: You’re talking about binding all this together, that implies that I put much forethought into this than I really did. What happened is that I’ve written these two books. They were put out by a small press, and they sold decently for a small press book, but I got an itch for a larger audience. I had this particular idea about Tiny Tim, of all people. I’m not even sure where it came from. I was talking to my agent, and I mentioned it, and he got intrigued by it. This historical thing grew out of writing about Tiny Tim.
I didn’t set out to be a historical novelist. I’d never written that way before. I’d never written a thriller before. It was really a self-education to put that together. That’s the logistics of how that happened. Because the book did well enough, the publishing industry being what it is, they kind of want you to do more of the same thing. The next book was about a real-life French detective who inspired Poe [François Vidocq]. They’ve all been linked that way. There’s at least some tangential link. Maybe the second and third book, not so much. But I can see where identity plays a part, and where family plays a part in a lot of these books. Mr. Timothy is the creation of an alternative family. The Black Tower is about trying to reconnect with his parents after their deaths. I can see all of these things resonating.

JI: The Black Tower specifically seems to be written at a much more cinematic clip. The chapters come at you much faster. Was that intentional?

LB: Cinematic is probably a good word for it. I definitely wanted to keep that moving. I was just remembering a key thing in the writing of that book for me—I usually just write the whole way through, and then read it all whole way through, but because I was going on vacation and I didn’t want to bring my laptop—see, these are the way things happen, like these silly little things—so I just printed out what I had. I was astonished by how much fat there was in the book. There was a lot of larding—most of it, research. One the traps of being a historical novelist is you do a lot of research usually, and then you want to shoe-horn it in there wherever you can to reassure people that you’ve been working really hard, and you deserve a gold star for all your hard work, and then you go back and read it with an unbiased eye, and think, “I really don’t need that. Readers don’t really need to know that.” I wound up scissoring away a lot of that stuff, and the result was so lean that it forced the whole book in that direction. I liked that it was moving so rapidly.

JI: It really does accentuate scenes. For example, the scene in the morgue at the beginning at the book with the piano forte in the next room, is incredibly realized. It’s fun to read because you’re there, you know.

LB: Good. That came out of research, which is where a lot of great ideas come from. I read something about the morgue and how the morgue-keeper lived in the same building, and his family was next door, that was inspired by the reality of it. I was fascinated by that juxtaposition.

JI: It comes across really well.

LB: Good!

JI: To give you your gold star for all your research.

LB: [Laughs.]

JI: You got a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern. You must have always wanted to be a writer from when you were growing up. Why did you choose journalism as opposed to trying to write fiction directly?

LB: I should say my college senior year thesis was a book of short stories. If somebody had rushed a printed collection and turned me into the next David Leavitt—I’m trying to figure out who was the ideal at the time—um, I would have gone that way, but nobody was rushing to publish these, so I liked the idea of journalism because it I thought it get me out in the world and introduce me to some more reality than I had experienced at that time in my life. Since I had anticipated going into journalism, I realized I would need to get some clips. I thought a master’s program would be the best way to go about doing that. I left there fully convinced that I was going to become a newspaper reporter. But I couldn’t get a self-respecting newspaper to hire me. So I became a flack in Washington and stayed on there in that capacity for various people and organizations. And eventually became a freelancer, which is what I’ve been since ’95.

JI: Wow. Congratulations on that.

LB: I’ve served a lot of masters. A lot of the work I’ve done is not by-lined. I write junk mail, I write newsletters, I’ve paid the bills in a lot of different ways.

JI: Is that difficult to switch from one style of writing to another? How do you make sure that your writing remains what you want it to be when you do a lot of commercial work and then you get back to fiction?

LB: I do the fiction work the first thing in the day. I’m at my freshest. If you wait longer in the day, things always come up. It’s like those people who put off exercise until 4’o’clock, something happens, the phone rings. I write as long as I can, which some days is all day, and some days it’s just an hour, but I try to get at least an hour a day. The discipline comes in stopping and going on to the other stuff that is frankly less interesting but is more immediately remunerative. I’ve developed a pretty good balance over the years. I sit down and do it. Any professional writer just kind of has to do it. That’s how bills get paid. You don’t have time to futz around. But we all have our own procrastination tools.

JI: It seems like you consistently write really hilarious, wonderful columns. I’m thinking specifically of the work you do for Salon.com. Specifically, there’s an essay you wrote called “Attention: All You Memoir Fabulists.” My favorite example is Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ where you say, ‘Reviewers have flagged the following line: Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.’ And you say, ‘We should change the second line to ‘Sorry.’”

LB: That article was prompted by an example of a memoirist who had been fabricating her story. People saw it as a fabrication, but really, the issues we think are uniquely modern have an ancient providence. And the whole question of telling the truth about one’s life lies outside of time, because we all tell fictions about ourselves and our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We’re all fictionalizing. It’s a vexed area, trying to decide if something is fiction or non-fiction and where the line is.

JI: Would you consider doing a novel in a slightly more contemporary historical period like the 1960’s or the 1980’s?

LB: I would love to. I’m not wedded to horses and carriages by any means. The book I’m working on now, half the story is told in the modern day. It’s really quite refreshing not to have to ask myself, ‘What the hell would they be wearing?’ I have this basic frame of reference. On the other hand, I found to my surprise I had to do almost as much research about modern day stuff because there is only so much in the world I experience on a daily basis. It’s taken a lot more work on the front end than I thought it would.

JI: Is the book about the Elizabethan “School of Night?”

LB: Yes.

JI: And the contemporary period that you’re working in, is that literally modern day?

LB: It’s literally modern day. It’s like, now. And it’s Washington, D.C, where I live. In a way, I’m revisiting some of the terrain of my first two books. And using a little more comedy as well. Or trying to, anyway. It’s interesting; I’m right in the middle of it, and I’m conscious that I’m using different registers. The historical tale is set in 1603 England and has a more tragic register. The modern day is more of a caper, has more of an antic quality. I’ll be interested to see when I do the critical stuff of re-reading the manuscript, whether those different registers come together or clang against each other.

JI: How much time do you allow yourself to edit your work after you write it?

LB: Part of it is that when I have it to where I want it, I send it to my editor and she goes through it pretty diligently. I make response to her edits. The Pale Blue Eye was substantially re-written between the first and second drafts because of what my editor rightly suggested about structure and shape of the story, things like that. But I don’t know. I give myself a few weeks to go through it and hack away at it. Usually, it’s hacking away. Most writers are like that. We write more than we need to. There’s a great quote by Roger Ebert, in an obituary for Paul Newman. I think they quoted Roger Ebert saying, “He spent the first half of his career figuring what to put into his acting, and the last half deciding what to take out again.” I think that’s true. As you get older, you realize it’s much more of a taking out. You know the stuff, you know you don’t need as much. That’s the mistake I see in aspiring young writers. They blast you with words. They want their voices to be heard. It’s hard to convince them they could be heard much better if they just pare away a lot of that stuff.

JI: It seems it also has to do with structuring it so you don’t get lost in tangents—which, I suppose, is the same as cutting it down.

LB: Sometimes it is a plot fix. I honestly think plot is relatively easy to fix, or it can be. The stuff that can’t be fixed is if the voice is insecure. For that reason, I always take the longest time with the first chapter. The current book, I spent several weeks on the first chapter, because I wasn’t happy with the voice, and who the narrator was, and it took me a while to get fine with it. Once you get that in place, it goes much faster. There’s no substitute for a sure, confident voice. Plot–you can lift things up, move things around. In The Pale Blue Eye, I actually removed an entire character. Not a main character, but a secondary character. She served no plot or function, she was there really just to entertain me. And that was harder in a way than killing off a character, to remove a character entirely. It requires a lot of juggling. In the end it was worth doing.

JI: What do you think is your ultimate ambition—well, that’s kind of a strange question. Let me put it a different way.

LB: [Laughs.]

JI: Do you feel accomplished? Are you looking to write ‘The Perfect Novel’?

LB: I don’t know. I think I may have given up on writing the next “Great Gatsby.” I think that falls to one or two people in a generation. I like writing in genre, I like the idea of writing entertainments. I have no belief that my work will necessarily outlive me. But I think you can write some thoughtful things in the context of genre. Some of my favorite writers have been genre writers. Raymond Chandler, Ruth Randall, Patricia Highsmith, in the same way that Dostoevsky did, but they do it in the context of a particular entertainment form. The trends I like in literature today is that a lot of those genre lines are being blurred, and you’re seeing people like Michael Chabon writing detective novels.

JI: For a while there, it seemed that literary fiction was at an incredible remove from plot or narrative based fiction. I think it’s good to weave them back together. I think either extreme becomes dull, but if you somehow interweave them.

LB: I agree. I wonder how much of that had to do with academia. For a while, in parts of academia, the whole idea of a story was cast in doubt, the idea that fiction should tell a coherent story. I was rather frustrated with the idea that we should always remind our readers that this is fiction. I love the illusion of being swept up into a story, and not having the writer constantly nudge me and say, “This is just fiction you’re reading.” Well, I know that.

JI: Do you pick the cover art on your novels?

LB: I get to weigh-in. I suppose if I ever chose to exert it, I would have veto. I try to be open-minded about it, because I recognize that I don’t always know what works in the marketplace. If I truly hated a cover, it wouldn’t fly. It becomes more of a collaboration between me and my editor and my agent. I feel lucky to have a team helping with this stuff. Authors are frequently not good at anything but writing. We’re not good self-promoters or marketers, and certainly not visual artists.

JI: Why do you think that real-life 18th century French detective Francois Vidocq [a principal character in The Black Tower] is no longer as well known as his fictional counterpart Sherlock Holmes?

LB: That’s a question I asked myself. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to make him better known in America. He was back in the 19th century—his memoirs were best-sellers on both sides of the Atlantic—he was well-known enough that Poe and Melville and Dickens could allude to him, and readers would know who he was it. I’m not quite sure what happened to him. I’m not sure why he ended up in the dustbin of history. I sometimes wonder If it’s the funny spelling—the ocq at the end of the name—people don’t know how to pronounce that. Holmes, of course, is such an easy thing to spell.

JI: That’s sad, but you’re probably dead-on. I have to admit my ignorance: I had not heard of Vidocq before I read The Black Tower.

LB: I hadn’t either, until I read the Murders in the Rue Morgue. That was the first time I saw his name in print. Because the character Dupin was immediately at pains to elevate himself above Vidocq’s example. It’s like, who is this guy? It’s a slaying of the father impulse, saying ‘I’m better than this guy.’ Kind of like Holmes would later do with Dupin. There’s this whole history in detective fiction of the next generation of detective rising from the ashes of the previous one.

JI: Who is the 21st century’s detective? Who embodies that?

LB: Among the writers currently out there? I think the model is still Chandler and Hammet. I’m not sure we’ve had our 21st century guy yet.

JI: Do you think the prevalence of crime drama on television could be the template?

LB: Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the forensic scientists. All the CSI guys. The idea that we can solve crimes by putting attractive people in laboratories.

JI: Don’t forget the cool music.

LB: Yeah, the cool music. And these very dramatic lighting effects! Which I’m thinking in any laboratory would be like, “I can’t see.” These like, Chiaroscuro compositions. “Can anybody see through their microscope? I can barely see you.”

Louis Bayard’s new novel is The School of Night.

Perhaps the internet providers themselves are the new unavoidable force of reality; Verizon as a pivot point for your existence. Or maybe the social networking sites, the triumph of rapid misspelled banality, now control how one virtually moves. A part of me (perhaps the part of me not bothering to wear corrective lenses) has always thought of Facebook as ‘FoodSafing.’ If some sort of apocalypse happens in the 3D resource-based world, like a massive water shortage, what is the most efficient way of rationing those resources? Do you want to provide it to the unknown neighborhood dwellers, or the people with the most partisan-friendly INFO boxes? And what about email addresses? If you have no email, are you like an astronaut floating free in the void, unencumbered, but really, really fucked?

Gravity as an abstract concept is a little weird, I know. But I believe that each representation of a larger system invariably has to represent each part of that system, like scale in architecture. On a 40th scale model, the pool deck on floor 22 is just a blue dot; on a 1/2 scale model, you have to glue together some damn lawn chairs and scatter them convincingly around the simulated tile periphery. If the internet is a scale model of the human universe, what holds the virtual world together? Our faith in humanity? The promise of shiny things?

Or is it being held together at all?

Photo: Phillie Casablanca

A friend of mine from North Carolina maintains that all chiropractors are quacks. Admittedly, I’ve never walked into a chiropractor’s office without feeling like I’m entering the premises of a sketch comedy troupe. Invariably, pictures of context-free smiling children compete with ‘degrees’ from institutions that sound more like yoga poses than legitimate medical facilities. The equipment looks like an elegant corporate art installation: random spirals connect with clunky, thickly padded steel shelving. Once you’re dangling on something like that, you feel like you’ve lost something. Dignity, yes; critical discernment, absolutely.

But during this visit, I realized that chiropractors should really be termed non-invasive physical therapists. It’s a high-intensity, low-impact healing, both mental and physical. You don’t have to talk about your childhood, and you don’t have to stare at warning pictures of inflamed organs while barely warmed metal implements are shoved into your nether regions. The idea that your ailments could somehow be prevented by the proper alignment of your spine is classic. It has a basic, soulful appeal, a return to a pure universe of order. It’s win-win, unless of course you’re bleeding internally. Does it actually help? I’m of the opinion that it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Photo: “American Book Company, 1924″

Entire countries have been known to make the journey. Take Scotland, for example, which is currently debating outlawing a beverage known as “Buckfast Tonic Wine.” A clever combination of caffeine, sugar, and 30 proof alcohol, Buckfast appears to be a causal agent for diabetes, alcoholism, and very fast slurring. It’s kind of a reverse wonder drink, a toxic balm applied to healthy impulses. The Scottish government issues reports on the drinking of its citizenry, saying that “for a large section of the Scottish population, their relationship with alcohol is damaging and harmful.” Will Scotland take the hint and sober up, and start furiously coaching youth sports leagues? Anything could happen in the land that pioneered the deep-fried candy bar.

I know several people who have forever sworn off drink. I know others who have forever sworn off sobriety. And I know a great deal who, in their attempts to deal with a never ending deluge of reality, are once again drinking too much. One of these latter day drinkers is currently headed to an un-insulated mung-bean growing recuperation center in Northern California. It is unclear whether the recuperation benefits the mung beans or those who grow them.

Some people have effectively argued that writers are alcoholics, citing actual writers as examples. However, there is a distinction; alcoholics rarely win the Pulitzer Prize, unless of course they are politicians. Business owners are issued one bottle of Scotch when they pay their first worker’s compensation claim, and must submit to regular drinking exams by the State Board of Equalization, or, failing the availability of an inspector, especially insufferable clientele. Social drinkers would seem to have it right, but their jokes are never very funny. And the newly sober are as fanatic about being sober as they were about being drunk.

Wherever you are on the scale, here’s to your health.

Photo: ㋷㋓ ♥ ½’s