The Organic Underground

July 7, 2004

By Lyin' Judy Bridger

   Things haven’t been this paranoid around Mammoth since the summer of the Crash Buds.
    Actually, almost everyone says that this is even weirder: middle-of-the-night dead-drops of illegal tomatoes, onions so good they make you cry, green beans, turnips, “lids” of lettuce and dime bags of hard-to-get cheeses.
    We don’t ask where it comes from. Sometimes the dealers tell you. Sometimes they don’t.
    “But why?” whispered my girlfriend Spiffy.
    In two weeks she’s getting married, to a Bay Area food snob on top of Panorama Dome. Guy says it ain’t going to happen unless Spiffy comes up with really edible and tasty food—organic all the way.
    Spiffy has puffy orange-red hair. When she asks a vapid question—and she asks a lot of those—she sticks her chin right out. Spiffy is not burdened with pride. Nobody knows how her parents knew to call her Spiffy.
    We are standing under the stars, in the pumice, off a road that’s off a road, up on the Resurgent Dome near the Deep Well. Below us in the distance, we can barely make out steam rising from the vents in the ground.
    We are waiting for the Organic Underground.
    This was her first time.
    “First there was the supermarket strike,” says I, “which did a number on a whole lot of taste buds up here, and then the Village Market was taken apart piece by piece, leaving us with just the supermarket.”
    “Yeah?” says Spiffy. “Don’t the gas stations have food?”
Spiffy don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’ when it comes to food, I was discovering. All she knew was that her wedding was on the line if she didn’t come up with cucumbers that didn’t taste so much like wax on water.
    “Food’s supposed to taste like food, dearie,” I said.
    Spiffy scrunched up her face.
    “Since when?” she asked.
    I didn’t have the heart to answer with the truth and I couldn’t think up a lie quick enough, because below us I could hear a vehicle coming. I told Spiffy to crawl back into the pickup truck and lay freakin’ low.
    My dealer don’t have a name. They all are organized into cells, so one dealer doesn’t even know another. They all have chin fuzz. Even the women dealers. They are on the lam from their sworn enemy, the California Grocers Association.
    I call my dealer Mr. X.
    “I’m dyin’ up here,” I exaggerated once his vehicle stopped on the road. I held out my hand and made it tremble. “I haven’t had a tomato that tastes like a tomato in weeks.” This, of course, was an outright lie.
    Mr. X tossed me a Roma.  He calls this a “taste.”
    “And don’t even talk to me about cheese,” says I, slurping down the Roma. By God it was delicious.
    “Yeah, sweetheart, well, step in line,” says Mr. X. His eyes darted around. He was impatient.
    “Waddya need? I’m running on deadline. You mountain people all live so far apart.”
    Behind me, in the truck, I could hear a kind of snuffle, and I knew it wasn’t a bear.
    “Whoozat?” Mr. X said. “Whoozat in the truck?”
    He reached into the pocket of his jacket. Funny the details you notice in highly volatile situations. I couldn’t help but notice that his jacket was made out of hemp.
    His hand stayed in his pocket and it looked like he was pointing a gun at us from inside his pocket, like the gangsters used to do on late-night TV.
    “Whoa!” says I. “What the freakin’ freak?”
    Spiffy, bless her idiot heart, tumbled out of the truck.
And then the whole thing just kind of come flowing out of her yap, how her wedding was on the line, how her life would be ruined if she dared serve one of those plastic supermarket trays filled with carrots that don’t taste like carrots, celery that don’t taste like celery, radishes that don’t taste like anything at all.
    It was an impressive rant, and Mr. X lowered whatever it was that he had in his hemp jacket pocket. Coulda been an organic cucumber, now that I think about it.
    He walked over to Spiffy and put his arm around her. The Organic Underground is tough, but they’ve got hearts of romaine, you know?
    “Listen, you poor Delusional,” he says. “You gonna talk about this to anyone?”
    Spiffy wagged her baffled head. “No.”
    “Because you know what the Grocers Association boys will do to me, I get caught?”
    Spiffy’s eyes widened and she said nuthin’ at all.
    “They’d process me,” he hissed.
    Spiffy gasped.
    “They say they don’t do that, but I’ve seen the pictures,” Mr. X said. He still had his arm around her shoulders, and now he leaned close to her ear and whispered.
     “They’d make me stand on a box with a hood on my head, and they’d inject me with preservatives and artificial color. They’d Supersize me. And they’d take pictures and laugh about them. They’d tell people it’s just a few rotten apples who are in on the processing, but it’s not.”
    Spiffy, her mouth open to the size of the Lake Mary Road tunnel, appeared to be genuinely horrified.
    “I won’t tell nobody nuthin,’” she said.
    Mr. X looked at me and I nodded my head up and down.
    “I’ll vouch for her,” I lied, then added a good one. “She’s reliable.”
    Mr. X wrote down Spiffy’s order, which I had copied onto a piece of recycled paper.
    “See you in a week,” he said, then got into his rig and drove away, bouncing along the pumice roads, headed for Lord knows what other food-deprived mountain town, up here beyond the food belt.
    We clambered back into the truck.
    “That was SO WEIRD!” Spiffy said.
    I looked over at her. “I ever tell you about the Crash Buds?”

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