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Ross was ebullient as he bent down to one of the lower shelves and pointed at a random tray.
“Look at this one,” he said, his finger traversing the air as he spoke. “And this one, look at that.”
Julia saw that on each shelf there sat a white tray almost two feet in diameter—more than a
dozen in all—and that inside these trays were hundreds of tiny shoots sprouting into the air. From a
few feet away, they looked like platters full of baby porcupines. She moved closer, now peering
directly into one of the white trays, and was astonished at the sheer number of brown and white
mushroom stems. These were not normal mushrooms. She knew perfectly well that they were magic.
“Look over here at this one.” Ross beamed. She turned, seeing what he was pointing at; a plump
hazel and milky-colored button that looked like it was ready to be picked and sprinkled on top of a
salad. He was as proud as a parent.
As Julia inspected further, she started to estimate how many mushrooms he was actually growing.
It was easily more than a thousand, maybe even double that. Plucked from their rectangular white
plastic homes, the contents of these trays could probably fill a large black garbage bag, or even two.
“How much does this place cost?” she asked.
“It’s 450 dollars a month.”
“It’s a total shit hole.”
Ross laughed. This was fine with him. A shit hole, after all, was the perfect place to operate a
secret drug laboratory.
The entire operation—his massive shroomery, the seeds of what he hoped would be his
burgeoning Silk Road empire—would end up costing him more than $17,000, including rent and
supplies, which were endless. There were the petri dishes, tape, and glue guns; the ingredients,
including peat, gypsum, and rye; and the kitchen supplies, like the pressure cooker and kitchen timer.
All of it had added up very quickly. As for the return on his investment, he estimated he could get $15
or so per gram for the mushrooms. Given that there would be several kilos of product at the end of the
yield, he could easily make tens of thousands of dollars in profit. But—and this was a big “but”—this
was a lot of mushrooms to offload, and it wasn’t obvious that his Web site was even going to work.
Would people want to buy magic mushrooms off a stranger on the Internet?
“Aren’t you worried about getting caught?” Julia asked.
“Of course,” he replied, as if it were the most obvious question in the world. “But I need product
for my site.”
He reminded her that no one else knew about this hideaway. He had taken the proper precautions
to stay covert during his shroom-growing phase and even read the book The Construction and
Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories, which was essentially a Dummies guide for setting up
a felonious drug lab.
Though most people would have been shocked or distraught or entirely terrified to discover their
boyfriend managing a secret drug farm, Julia was intrigued by the idea—she felt like someone who
knew a secret no one else should know. In her mind, while she knew Ross could get into trouble if he
was caught, she didn’t envision the consequences being that severe; it wasn’t like Ross had driven her
to a secret meth lab or a heroin-making facility with a dozen half-naked workers. These were just a
few trays of mushrooms.
Ross, on the other hand, was fully aware exactly what could happen if he was caught. Texas’s
merciless laws could result in five to ninety-nine years in prison for four hundred grams of
mushrooms. Ross’s secret farm was currently growing almost a hundred pounds of hallucinogens.