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YOU CAN ALMOST PINPOINT THE MOMENT Elizabeth fell in love with Beau. It was the night following his first home invasion. Beau was busy telling the story of his survival to anyone who walked through the door, and Elizabeth was visiting with her boyfriend, Eric, a crackhead who delivered drugs for Beau. (Names in this story have been changed.) Like Beau, Elizabeth had lived alone since she was 15, after her dad--a convicted drug dealer--left her mom, and Elizabeth decided the best thing to do was drop out of school, find an apartment, and take a job waitressing. She was only 18 on that evening, and something of a loner, and looking back you could see why she was ready for someone like Beau.

At that time Beau had just moved out of the Dude Ranch--a ranch house just off Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood that he had shared with a half dozen roommates since he was 15 and his mom packed up for a new life in Orange County, leaving Beau suddenly responsible for himself. He ate Super Big Gulps for breakfast after that, lived on change, skateboarded until three in the morning, and stayed away from school and the five gangs and eight crack dealers on his street. He took in teenage roommates to pay the rent, and the house was dubbed "the Dude Ranch."

Anyone might show up at the ranch. The actor Jason Lee, who was a skating friend of Beau's, hung out there, and so did Giovanni Ribisi, and a DJ's daughter who is said to have inspired Tom Petty to write his ode to Valley teenage life, "Free Falling." One day a friend with FBI bulletproof vests and assault rifles stuffed in his trunk drove up to show off his car. It was a house run by teenagers with no parental oversight--the surest generator of vice and lawlessness you can find in Los Angeles. Beau eventually began a secret life dealing marijuana to make ends meet, and by the time the Mexican Mafia burst through his door and taped his wrists to his back and held a shotgun to his face, he was suspected of having skimmed 100 pounds of product off his wholesalers. He didn't even own a driver's license.

I began spending time with Beau on a hot and muggy Friday night, once he agreed to let me into his house to record the particulars of his job, illegally selling drugs. Beau is now 30. After his home invasion Beau moved again, and today he lives with Elizabeth in a house he believes is relatively "home invasion-proof." It sits in the San Fernando Valley on a quiet street of middle-class houses and stately elm trees. There is a good high school nearby, and better than average shopping, and a block of families and retired couples living on either side of his front lawn who Beau is hoping will call 911 should anything out of the ordinary go down. This idea can seem like wishful thinking when you consider Beau has dealt drugs undetected on the same street for more than a year. He lives a dual life not unlike Tony Soprano's. He shares a gardener with his neighbors, holds backyard barbecues, chats up the couple across the street about their son's new life in Israel, and follows the Little League batting average of the kid next door. He worries about his monthly bills, his credit rating, and how best to build up his equity. Three months ago Elizabeth became pregnant; she and Beau are now planning a family.

It is true that Beau is acquainted with some of the more interesting precincts of L.A. life: He knows a medical technician who will remove a bullet without informing the LAPD; he can hire a crew if he ever needs to sponsor a home invasion; he's familiar with the doctors of Beverly Hills who supply prescription script for a price; he knows the best way to smuggle $50,000 worth of speed through LAX (wrapped in plastic, stuffed into the crotch of Lycra bike pants).

Yet when you spend much time with Beau you realize he is little more than a middle-class businessman, stuck on a middle-class street, making a middle-class living--he's not getting rich--inventing a bizarre version of the American middle-class dream. Beau's largest purchase last month was not at a Ferrari dealership but at Best Buy, when he and Elizabeth went shopping together and brought home a new Whirlpool refrigerator. Beau's customers also comprise an aggregate of L.A.'s middle class: teachers, mailmen, plumbers, car salesmen, musicians, carpet cleaners, PR racks, waiters, and members of the Los Angeles Police Department. In Los Angeles, despite the drug trade's notoriety, most of the buying and selling of narcotics takes place on quiet streets and in comfortable homes like Beau's. It's not unreasonable to surmise that there are a hundred houses just like his scattered across L.A.'s bedroom communities, each known by 100, or 200, or 300 steady buyers, invisible to the rest of the city. Beau's customers show up at his door due to the risk aversion in most people; the trade couldn't thrive if drugs were sold only on worn-down blocks or the alleys of struggling neighborhoods. Drugs are sold and bought on your street, on your block, by your friends and neighbors.

MY FIRST NIGHT AT BEAU'S WAS BUSY. AT any one time there were as many as 15 waiting individuals milling about the place. Beau's house rule is that customers must spend at least a half hour in his home--feigning a friendly visit to ward off his neighbors' attention--and you could find visitors playing guitars, roughhousing with the dogs, reading Playboy, shooting hoops in the driveway, or watching the Angels on TV. Three women in tight dresses and spike heels were putting golf balls across the living room floor. It was the natural appearance of a completely unnatural home life--a dozen or so strangers pretending to be friends until Beau raised an eyebrow or called out a name, whereupon the chosen person could finally leave to get high.

By ten o'clock Beau was already running low on cocaine. He sat alone at the kitchen table, counting out $100 bills. Taped to the wall beside him was a three-by-five card reading PLEASE RINSE OUT ALL FOOD AND DRINK CONTAINERS TO PREVENT ANTS. Another read ELIZABETH'S LAWYER and included a local phone number. Beau was dressed in jammer shorts that revealed his muscular calves and a $30 T-shirt stretched over his broad shoulders. He has dark, expressive eyes, tawny skin, his head was recently shaved, and he looked casual and a little intimidating at the same time. He also looked slightly agitated. One of his cocaine wholesalers, a heroin addict named Billy was hours late with a second delivery that evening. A promised pound of marijuana was idling somewhere in traffic on the 405. And a cocaine wholesaler who had stopped by earlier--a small man named Smooth with a shaved skull and a bright down jacket the size of a beanbag chair--informed Beau that a Corolla filled with people was parked just around the corner.

"What I want to know," Beau said to no one in particular, weighing the presence of a carful of strangers and holding up a marijuana bud to help make his point, "is, What is a Toyota Corolla doing outside with people in it?" Beau's second house rule is that no one stays outside during a drug buy--it attracts notice.

A skinny guy in a bright Hawaiian shirt asked, "Who told you that? You want me to go fuck them up?"

Beau considered the idea along with the dead plant in his hand. "No--it's more like, Why is there a Toyota Corolla outside?"

"You want me to find the guy and fuck him up?" the skinny guy asked again, this time with an ironic flourish and a smile. "That's a great movie."

Beau raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"The Royal Tenenbaums. You know that line--`You want me to find the guy and fuck him up?'"

Beau shot a blank look at the man. The phone rang--actually the five phones tactically placed throughout the house rang for the 75th time that evening--and Beau growled, "Phone, I am going to kill you one day." Next, a big man in an Izod shirt bounded into the kitchen and announced, "Look what I got you, Beau--a green burrito! Got any Vicodin?"

Beau knew Matt was a recovering cocaine addict, someone not to sell a gram to. Vicodin, though, was different. Beau crossed his kitchen floor, peered into a drawer like it was a Magic 8-Ball, then asked Matt, "How many do you want?"

"I need 12, I need 12," Matt murmured excitedly, then as an afterthought said, "Hey--you should eat that burrito."

When Beau plans a Friday night--his busiest night of the week--he can sound like a chef piecing together a daily menu. For instance, on the phone the day before he had told me, "Well, tomorrow night I'm thinking of surprising everyone with some mushrooms because they're in season now, but I'll probably have an ounce of coke, maybe 200 Vicodin, some Ecstasy of I can get it, Valium, and maybe five or six kinds of weed, including Kush--which is what really brings them in." It was marketing in reverse: Beau lures customers to the kitchen table with his most expensive product--the rare Kush strain of marijuana, which sells for as much as $800 an ounce--only to get them buying large amounts of less expensive drugs upon their arrival.

Beau acquires his cocaine by the ounce for about $20 a gram, then sells it at $35 to $60 a gram, depending on the amount purchased. Vicodin he finds at $2.50 a tablet and turns around for $3.50. Valium and Xanax reach him at $1 a pill, which he sells for $2. The Ecstasy Beau buys averages $8 wholesale, a price he will double retail, and a pound of marijuana--with appellations like White Widow, Purple Star, Northern Lights, and Kevorkian--will cost him $4,000, profiting him $2,400. Presently Beau works with 15 wholesalers. Everything he sells out of his kitchen drawer comes on consignment. "I have great credit," Beau laughed. He estimates that with a few calls he can get his hands on $40,000 worth of product, fronted to him with a street value of $70,000. Beau has been in debt to wholesalers for as much as $80,000, and because of his inscrutable accounting practices--all of which exist only in his mind--it's impossible to tell what he is worth on paper. Beau constantly moves money to pay off wholesalers, selling 200 Vicodin quickly on a "special" of $3 to pay off an Ecstasy dealer he is in arrears with. On average he sells $1,500 worth of drugs every day, but because he frequently drops prices to unload stock, he nets less than one-third of his sales.

Like the head of any middle-class household, Beau frets about debt, about where the next "paycheck" is coming from, and about the idea that the money is already spent before it is earned. "Good credit with drug wholesalers is like having 15 different credit cards," Beau told me at the kitchen table. "You're always pulling credit from one to pay off the other." You are also always behind. Earlier this year Beau "borrowed" $20,000 worth of marijuana and cocaine, using the proceeds to build a recording studio in his garage. He just paid off the loan. Continually shifting debt balances, devising sales to move product, telemarketing over the five phones, Beau cuts the figure of the protean, self-starting entrepreneur, happiest in the spin of the deal. I thought he would make a great trader on the stock exchange floor. As with any couple on a fixed income, however, Beau and Elizabeth are forever trying to get ahead. A credit card was used to buy their new refrigerator.

BEAU SOLD MATT A DOZEN VICODIN tablets and then turned to a short man named Will, who was easily the best-dressed visitor in the kitchen; beside him stood a quiet man wearing a motorcycle helmet, smoking a cigarette through his visor. Will wore his hair close-cropped. His nails looked professionally attended to. He announced to the kitchen that he was an executive at Jerry Bruckheimer Films, working on a new TV series. "Real heroic shit," he said and then asked Beau, "Can you sell me a $20 rock of coke?"

Beau appraised Will's face, cocked his head, then raised another eyebrow. "I don't know," he said. "Can I? Should I?"

"I know my weaknesses, and I work with them," Will replied. At least he sounded like an executive.

When you are maintaining invisibility on a quiet Valley street, a guy who walks in the door and asks for a $20 rock of cocaine can turn out to be a real headache. "Rarely does someone come over because they love life," Beau told me. "There's always something wrong." He sees customers who have developed an addiction to the painkiller OxyContin after a terrible accident and find themselves suddenly cut off from a prescription. There are porn actresses seeking a steady supply of Xanax. ("These women and their anxieties!" Beau once complained to me, sounding like a therapist at wit's end.) Former cocaine addicts like Matt walk out the door to swallow as many as a dozen Vicodin tablets because, Beau says, it gives them a familiar high. And a buyer making a small purchase of cocaine may be someone who's signaling they can't handle themselves on the drug.

In any particular month the size of Bean's retail base sits somewhere between 110 and 200 customers. Beau could enjoy a larger, more financially rewarding trade if he sold heroin and speed--two drugs he never deals because of the unstable users who would show up at his door. He is constantly scrutinizing each person he sees for weaknesses that might threaten his existence. He listens for stories of small-time thievery, like a customer who boasts of lifting a set of golf clubs from a stranger's car and selling them for drug money He is wary of the caller who dials 10 times, 20 times in a day Beau estimates that in his career he has dropped 300 customers--cut them out of his life--for behavior patterns like these. He has a name for such behavior: "fiending." A golf club thief may turn out to be a drug thief in his house. A frustrated customer who can't get what he wants after a dozen calls may turn angry and threaten Bean's invisibility. An executive asking for $20 worth of cocaine may be back at Bean's door a half dozen times before the sun rises, risking detection by neighbors in his pursuit of just one more rock. "If they're that desperate for it--for anything," Beau says, "you never know what a person is going to do."

Beau weighed out and handed the rock to Will, who thanked him. He knew that Will lived on the Westside, relatively far away; and that proximity to his own house also dictates a buyer's behavior. The closer he is to Beau's kitchen, the hotter his desires run, because the easier it is to answer them. Will immediately turned away and chopped up the rock on a CD case, snorted it, then sat down to flip through a Playboy on the kitchen table. High, Will found that each page brought up a memory or detail about his life. On page 36: "We went out for drinks tonight to meet some girls someone said were hot and found these four trolls at the bar." On page 42: "I just don't like black girls--they don't do it for me; Asians on the other hand--I'd do them." And finally on the layout of actress Kristy Swanson, who starred as the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer and whose work Will was familiar with: "You know, she used to be a lot fatter. Wow! Rock of Gibraltar!"

OUTGUNNED AND KNEELING ON THE LIVING room floor, all Beau could think of during his home invasion--and this says much about him--was how to take control of the situation. Bean's impulse, I was to discover, is a central tenet of a drug dealer's life: Surrounded by addicts, or people who want to rip you off, or acquaintances who at any moment might turn you in to the police, a dealer must create order and control to be successful. The world around him is perpetually dissembling.

Bean's options were limited. A girl he barely knew--whose misfortune it was on that day to be lounging in his house--was duct-taped beside him with a shotgun pressed to her face. "It was an anything-I-do-she'd-get-it kind of thing," Beau remembers today. He was not much more than a kid. His formal education had stopped in the eighth grade. His role model was skateboard pro Tony Hawk. But prone on the floor, Beau was considering the near-stranger beside him--this, too, says much about him--and how he was going to get her safely through a really bad day.

Beau's pressing need was to keep the intruders off guard, busy the gunmen until they realized too much time had passed. He gently hassled his attackers. He jived them. He reminded them of the police presence on his street. They, in turn, kicked him. They pistol-whipped him. They knocked his front teeth back into his mouth so they flipped up like a porcelain lever. Beau responded by staring the gunmen in the eye, pushing his teeth back in place with his tongue, and squirting blood all over one man's pant leg.

Later every skater and stoner in the room would laugh at this point in Beau's story, all except for the quiet girl with the wild blond hair. Elizabeth sat alone, watching Beau's beaten, potato-shaped face from her corner, weeping to herself. Gazing at him she suddenly felt trapped by her boyfriend, Eric, fast on his way to making a profession out of losing. Here is Elizabeth describing Eric:

"He was ugly--just the ugliest person you've ever seen. I met him and was repulsed by him in every way To the point that when he kissed me I literally almost gagged. He was an addict and a crackhead. It explained the violent tendencies. If I talked to anyone he would call me a `fucking whore.' Of course he had a kid, so I had to pay his child support. He was a bad, bad, bad, terrible person. But I did love him for awhile. He wrote me poetry."

A few weeks after the invasion Beau and Elizabeth slipped out of the house and shared their first kiss. It was the most un-gross kiss of Elizabeth's brief life.

BEAU HAS NOW LIVED THROUGH THREE HOME invasions, including one attack in which he and Elizabeth were held at gunpoint while two men pinned Beau's roommate on the kitchen floor, trying to push a broom handle through his forehead. He has been arrested twice and convicted once of selling drugs. (The judge in that case sentenced him to three months of house arrest, whereupon Beau returned to the Dude Ranch and sold drugs for three months with a homing bracelet clasped to his ankle.) He admits to physically assaulting at least a half dozen people when business deals went sour. And he has long wrestled with a handicap of the dealer's profession--a simmering addiction to his own product, cocaine, that has even driven Elizabeth from the house for a short stay at her mom's.

Elizabeth's pregnancy, however, has changed their lives. Beau finds himself at a juncture where he can follow one of two paths. On one path he can attempt to move away from the random danger of his current life, push cocaine from his immediate reach, and establish a family life with Elizabeth--one unlike anything he experienced growing up. Here is Beau talking about his family:

"I got the tail end of a whirlwind marriage and a shitty dad who never paid any child support. He was gone by the time I was five--I never had a dad. I think my mom tried to do the best she could, but I want to raise a kid that's educated and has good morals. I want to be everything I didn't have. That means a dad who's there all the time. That means a dad who plays basketball with you, who helps you do good in school. It means something different than what I grew up with."

It also means a dad who keeps tabs on where his .45 is stowed while shooting hoops with his kid in the yard. Rerouting his and Elizabeth's life, Beau has no plans to stop selling drugs. Even Elizabeth knows this. "You try doing something incredibly well for ten years," she told me one day, "and then just stop cold to look for another job." Beau's idea is to drop the retail business, clear the 200 people who stop in every week out of his house, and become a drug wholesaler--leaving the drug trade's middle class for its professional class. He's been checking into bricks of pure cocaine he can purchase for $18,000 and then sell for $60,000, or maybe a steady supply of Kush. Beau and Elizabeth are ready to settle into their lives without the presence of 15 onlookers in the living room. They want to move up in the world, establish better credit, secure their future. "I have always thought," Beau told me once, "that owning property is the key to success."

In Beau's sunny vision of suburban child rearing lurks the constant possibility that a son with the best morals will be eventually, inexorably drawn back into his father's shadow--just as Beau himself seems to inhabit the shade of his absent father. Still, when Beau describes this future, you can almost see it--he exudes the genuineness of someone self-created at the age of 15. He is also that rare individual people refer to as a "natural," adept at almost anything he picks up: skateboarding, guitar playing, drawing, drug dealing. The neighborhood drug business Beau has created is a testament of sorts to his talent: On weekend nights Beau's house assumes a patina of "home." Waiting for cocaine and Vicodin, his customers actually seem happy to be hanging out there, as if the place were a weird rendering of their own home life, the buyers around them a mutated, instant family They obviously like Beau, too, like his genuine character, his warmth when he's not out of focus on a cocaine binge, his goofy laugh that trills up and then shatters as if Mel Blanc had momentarily stepped into his voice box.

Every once in a while, however, someone accidentally slams the door and a ripple of anxiety will cross the room, breaking the sense of safety their host has created. Beau lives and works in a world that predates common law. "This isn't a business based on contracts," he told me one day "It's not like if I'm owed $10,000 by someone I can just send their account to collections. It's real easy to get caught in this business spending money you don't have yet, flipping profit numbers in your head, thinking you can drop a grand here or there. Before you know It your credit card will be cashed out, and you won't have any maneuverability left at that point."

Beau once estimated for me that a home invasion--a method for recalling accounts--occurs every day in the Valley, the readjustment of capital flow between drug dealers in an old-world economy "But most people in this business don't want to harm others," he said. "Everyone wants things to run smoothly. I have a friend who just lost 50 grand on a shipment. But instead of sending out someone to kill the guy who lost it, he'll wait and see if payment eventually comes. I won't use a crew. If someone owes me, I'll cut my losses and that person out of my life. I figure that's how much It costs me to get rid of them forever."

Mistakes can still happen, I said. What would you do if you had a family and a crew burst through your door?

"If a crew came in here, I'd have the lead," Beau responded. "They're going to hit the first two bedrooms, and as soon as I hear those two getting hit, that prepares me for whatever I got to do."

But all they would have to do, I protested, is shoot your child in the elbow.

"Well, that's this game," Beau replied. "That's the worst-case scenario. If you have to start firing, you have to start firing."

Isn't it possible, I asked, that you could end up--due either to arrest or injury--becoming the father you had, an absent one?

"If anything happens and I'm arrested," Beau said, "the worst sentence I would draw would be a few years. I don't know if this is selfish, but I think that would be a lesson I'd have to learn then. I wouldn't be gone an eternity."

Yet even if you do your job well and avoid arrest, I said, there's still a chance of being killed because of the people you associate with--you would be gone for an eternity in that case.

"Nothing like that would happen with the people I deal with now," Beau answered. "And besides, danger like that exists in anything. Kennedy did his job well, and he was assassinated."

THE ALTERNATIVE PATH in Beau and Elizabeth's future--"Scenario B" Elizabeth calls it--goes something like this, according to her: "Nothing changes, he cannot stop selling drugs retail, he won't give up the cocaine, and I stay here through the pregnancy and then go live with my mom in Riverside after the baby is born. I won't have a baby in this environment."

On a Saturday night this fall Elizabeth's head was full of Scenario B thoughts. A dozen men and women were sitting around her house waiting for a late cocaine delivery, and she could feel her dread growing at the sight of them. "They're not here because they care about us," she told me. "They're here to get high."

Elizabeth was wearing a Black Death Vodka T-shirt under a fuzzy red bathrobe that trailed behind her somewhat regally Her wild hair streamed out like Cate Blanchett's in Elizabeth. Her figure was just beginning to change from the pregnancy, most noticeably her breasts, which are already buoyed by large silicone implants Beau bought for her some years ago. She was sitting on the back porch with a knot of customers and her friends Pamela and Janet. Her stomach hurt, she wanted to cry, and she seemed lost in a monologue of sorrow.

"This is really hard for me because I'm no longer a part of this," Elizabeth said, looking wanly around the porch. "I mean, we're talking five years of straight cocaine abuse that I've just ended, and I'm having to distance myself."

"I know, honey," Pamela commiserated. "Fourth of July was hard for me, too, when I decided to go sober." Pamela was waiting for a gram of cocaine.

"We're talking five consecutive years of partying," Elizabeth continued, landing on a theme and almost wailing. "Just solid partying. This is a whole other reality."

"Well," Pamela shrugged, "what are you going to do--join a nunnery?"

Elizabeth glanced at Pamela. She was tall, thin, blond, dressed in an expensive outfit. She appeared made up for a photo shoot, and she definitely wasn't pregnant and sober. Elizabeth liked Pamela, but she always thought Pamela was an attention whore: She wore too much makeup even on their hikes. Elizabeth could feel Pamela start to get under her skin.

A hunchbacked guy with a shaved head limped by looking miserable, the victim of a spinal cord injury waiting on a Vicodin delivery that would never show.

"Honey, don't get depressed," Elizabeth's friend Janet chimed in. Janet was wearing furry Eskimo snow boots and a miniskirt and holding a bag of pot in her lap. "I think it's just your hormones that are changing."

Elizabeth looked misunderstood and ready to cry "I'm talking about five years of nonstop cocaine, and suddenly I'm not numbing my annoyance to all this."

"Elizabeth, you are so strong," Janet said, taking Elizabeth's wrist while channeling talk-show conviction into her voice. "You will work with it. I've seen other families who deal drugs come to terms with this. They're still dealing, and their kids are full grown and great." Janet made a hopeful smile.

"I feel crowded," Elizabeth moaned, not hearing her friend. "This must cease to exist, and that's a sorry reality."

Janet, giving up, turned her attention to Pamela. "You feel sexy when you're on crack, don't you?" she asked.

Pamela stared blankly straight ahead. "I don't know," she replied. "I've never been on crack."

INSIDE THE HOUSE, AT HIS POST in the kitchen, Beau also looked frustrated. Last night's cocaine delivery didn't show up until one in the morning, and eight people had sat around for five hours, watching TV, drinking beer, and driving Elizabeth up the wall. She even had to answer his phone at five this morning while he slept--someone after a rock of coke.

Tonight was shaping up to be the same. At 7:20 a phone conversation with a cocaine wholesaler had gone like this:

"Billy? How's It going? I have all the cash. What ETA are we looking at? 8:20. Okay."

Now it was 10:20. The phone was ringing on average every 90 seconds--customers waiting on cocaine. Each ring pushed Beau closer to some edge. He sat at the kitchen table holding a phone up to his face, addressing It in a singsong reprimand like it was a child he was fed up with: "This is not happening. What time is it? 10:20? This is a cruel joke now. Did I just call Billy? I've forgotten. Who's that at our door? He said 8:20. That is right this minute two hours ago. is there a phone off the hook somewhere in this house?"

When you spend much time around Beau's five phones, you quickly understand they run his life. They pull him from room to room, send him out of the house after more drugs, anchor him to his kitchen counter. They provide his living, and they frustrate him no end. It's as if his customers were 200 satellites, constantly orbiting Beau's house, sending in messages from deep space, dropping their orbit into his kitchen only when Beau has created suitable landing conditions. He does this 14 hours a day, seven days a week. It's his whole life.

"This isn't like McDonald's, where you can order a number two meal anytime you want," Beau said. "A lot of people want their drugs on command--I'll get ten calls in ten minutes, each telling me they're going to be here in two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, two hours. I have to find this stuff when they want it. That includes my wholesalers, who call asking for cash to be paid according to their schedules."

If Beau ventures out of the house, it's almost always to buy more drugs or make payoffs. "I don't get out much," he continued. "I tried taking Tuesdays and Thursdays off once, but I kept missing 30 calls a day, and in my head I was like, `That's $1,200.' So now it's every day, roughly 11 a.m. to 1 a.m.--4 to 8 is the peak time for calls, 8 to II the peak time for visits."

Tied to his business, Beau is the consummate homebody "I think we've eaten out maybe twice in the last five years," Elizabeth complains f The couple doesn't patronize bars; they can't tell you the last time they saw a movie together at the cineplex. "To be honest," Beau said at the table, "I've done the home-life thing to death. I'd like to appreciate for once what I come home to. At least wholesaling," he finished, pointing at the ringing phone, "would free me up from this."

A Mescalero Apache named Leon who sells bongs for a living walked into the kitchen and showed off a spider bite he received on a recent sweat lodge retreat. "You know," he informed Beau with authority, "you need to knock the spiders in your trees back another ten yards. They're starting to get pretty close to the house."

Beau made a quizzical face and picked up the phone. "Hello? Yes. No. What? Dude, you're hurting my ears. Just quit the fucking code and come over."

Beau maintains a rotating Esperanto of drugspeak to ward off an arrest due to potential wiretaps. For instance, someone interested in buying a gram of cocaine would call and ask for "the Lady" A customer wanting to know if Beau is carrying Ecstasy would wonder aloud, "Is Xavier home tonight?" Often, however, Beau is stymied by his own code. It gets adopted by his customers, who modify It, then speak It back to him like broken English. Once It took Beau 15 minutes to figure out what a customer named Ed meant when he asked over the phone, "So what's up with that party with those three girls down on Front Street?" Ed, It turned out, wanted three grams of cocaine on the house.

Elizabeth appeared from the back porch, sailing through the kitchen in her robe, passing out sarcastic comments like royal edicts to a few waiting customers: "Hi, everybody! is everyone okay? Please make yourselves comfortable. Can I get anyone a Coke?" She disappeared around a corner into the living room, and Beau shot a look at the ceiling that said "I must be out of my mind." Next, an order of Italian food was delivered for dinner. Beau sold a handful of Valium, and then the last of his Kush to a big man who informed him, "This stuff is fun to drive on."

"This stuff is fun to drive on?" Beau repeated in an amazed voice.

"Yeah--it's just like driving on acid."

In the corner, someone peeked into a foil container of creamy white pasta and said, "I knew It was you, Alfredo. You broke my heart."

BEAU HAS WRITTEN MORE than 80 rock songs, including one called "Mind on the Run," which is about Beau or someone just like Beau high on cocaine, caught up in a car chase with the police. "I got cops behind me / I know that I'm dead / `Cause I got coke in my car / Yeah, all this blow in my head" goes the refrain. I once sat with Beau in his garage studio while he inhaled four bong hits of a marijuana bud named White Rhino and then played his recording of "Mind on the Run." As the song progressed, Beau's hands flew through the air: He mimicked drumbeats, played air guitar, pointed to speakers on chord changes. He made faces, giggled at his own guitar licks. I suggested that the song should end with the dying wail of a police siren, and Beau fell apart with laughter, saying, "That would be just so, so great." It was the happiest I'd ever seen him.

Beau has written some happy songs. For instance, there is his song "Mama," whose inspiration came after he partied all night on acid and Ecstasy with two women, woke up the next morning to see them sleeping on his couch, and thought, "Wow! Brazilian mamas!" Like all his music, "Mama" would be called old school--inspired by the Beatles and Hendrix, not Blink-182 or Nelly. Yet most of Beau's song titles have a more somber tone: "Life So Strange," "What It Means to Be You," "What I Say I Play," "Could You Believe," "I Wish," and "You'll See." They describe a man who feels buffeted by circumstance, who's been disappointed by others, who feels misunderstood and powerless sometimes, a man with a growing well of anger inside.

"You could say most of the songs I write are depressing," Beau told me one day. "I write about how people don't care the world is screwed up. It's like I'm telling them, `Have you forgotten? Do you care?'" Elizabeth believes Beau has "a tortured soul." "People know nothing of what lies beneath in him," she told me. "He is so strong, but he's just tormented--by life, by this world, by his job. I woke up the other morning and he was sitting outside, crying by himself. He was like, `I just want to write music, I don't want to do this anymore--I don't want to sell drugs.'" Beau had been up on cocaine for two days without sleep.

Beau once showed me a Polaroid taken of him on speed. High, he had drawn a demon mask with red and black paint over his face. He looked like a thing in Hell. "It's when I'm at my worst that guy comes out," he said. Beau was raised a Jehovah's Witness but abandoned the church around the time his mom left him for Orange County and a new husband. He still sees traces of the church in the outline of the universe, but they reveal a fallen world to him. He believes we are living in the End of Days.

"My view of the human race is that we're at the worst point in our existence, everything we're not supposed to be," he told me in the studio. "It's the end of something." in a fallen world Beau believes his occupation is no more immoral than the international oil business, SUV manufacturing, or Big Tobacco. "Everything has Its casualties in the world," he said. "And no one has ever OD'd from anything I sold them--I keep them in check. If a Valium user looks like she's heading for a seizure, I cut her off. It's all a matter of how much greed is involved."

Everything is corrupt in his vision, but Beau isn't comfortable with the idea of rejoining his church: They would condemn his life, just as they condemned him for dating without a chaperon as a teenager. "I can't return to my congregation," Beau said. "That would be good for me, but they wouldn't approve of my life--they don't even smoke cigarettes. For now I have to have a personal relationship with God." Lacking a congregation, Beau found that cocaine worked as a methadone for religion. It helped keep the Polaroid demon at bay "It was his ally," says Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had only tried cocaine once before meeting Beau. Within a few months, however, It became the most important thing in her life after him. She moved in with Beau, quit her job, went through her savings. Together the couple could inhale 15 grams a week; it was always in the kitchen drawer, right next to the coffee. Sex was incredible at first, but the remainder of the experience was not, and looking back, it's hard for an outsider to understand why Elizabeth fell into the drug. Explaining the overwhelming experience, she sounds like she's describing her first boyfriend, Eric:

"I was addicted immediately. It was the catalyst of every fight we had. It destroyed every aspect of our relationship. It does not agree with me at all. I am miserable on it. I just get weird. I can barely talk. I become incredibly lonely, very depressed. And for five years, if It was in the house, I couldn't say no to it.'

Elizabeth could also feel Beau slipping away from her. One morning, after a two-day binge with no sleep, she found him on the floor beside the bed. in daylight, he was sleeping with his eyes open--as if he were dead--his breath coming in short gasps like a fish thrown up on the shore. She held his head in her lap, listening to him breathe for the next 12 hours, crying the whole time.

Then Elizabeth OD'd. At the time Beau had a friend named John, who when high on cocaine developed an overwhelming fear of burning to death. John would obsess on lit candles or electrical outlets, or call the fire department if a light socket looked funny On the way to the airport one morning after a three-day binge with Beau and Elizabeth, John grabbed a cab outside their house, then called the fire department to report a nonexistent blaze.

At the sound of the sirens Beau began frantically concealing his product, running to and fro and shouting at Elizabeth to find hiding places. They could both hear the firemen running up the walk. On a table before Elizabeth was a large pile of cocaine. "I was thinking, `Oh my God--these are my last seconds with Beau.' He was yelling, `Put that shit away!' I was so panicked. I wanted to protect him." Elizabeth dropped to her knees and inhaled the pile.

Beau heard a thump at the back of the house, followed by the sound of Elizabeth screaming and choking. She was flailing across the floor when he entered the room, her eyes rolled back into her head. He jammed his fingers into her mouth to pull out her tongue, and Elizabeth bit through his hand, shooting blood over both of them. Her legs had a life of their own and were busy kicking furniture into the corners. Beau pulled his fist out of Elizabeth's mouth, punched her hard on the chest, and she came to.

Strangely, the firemen never reached his door. Beau had to dial 911 and ask for them to return.

In the emergency room Elizabeth wanted to cry and found she was too high to do so--the tears wouldn't come. Her memory was a black screen. She didn't remember snorting the drug, or her seizure. She was tied to a bed, covered in blood. The nurses asked if she was homeless, and Elizabeth found she was too high to even speak. in a bed on one side of her was a ghost of an elderly woman, quietly dying. On her other side an unhinged alcoholic convulsed in the throes of withdrawal, screaming of God and the Bible and redemption. Elizabeth thought, "Until I die this is the lowest point in my existence."

The alcoholic shifted his screams to calls for Elizabeth's own redemption. She wanted It then, to be redeemed, but she didn't know how--she didn't know how to save herself from desire. And then one day she became pregnant, and discovered that her body could deliver her from herself.

ON THE LAST NIGHT I SPENT watching Beau deal drugs he informed me he had begun reading the Bible again that morning. He was in Genesis, and he spoke of three sections that had struck him: the story of Lot's escape from Sodom and Gomorrah; the tale of Abraham's son Isaac finding a wife and promising to treat her like his own flesh; and the story of Abraham himself and his wife, Sara, finally having a child so late in an otherwise prosperous life. Isaac's tale struck Beau the most. "That is my lesson," he told me. "To take care of myself as I do Elizabeth--I already know she does the same for me." Beau was planning to quit the retail cocaine business the following week, moving the drug away from his grasp. All three biblical stories recounted by Beau, however, seemed to touch on his and Elizabeth's life, a critical juncture they now faced, and an uncertain future together. I asked Beau why he loved Elizabeth, why he wanted to change his life for her--even if It was only to a point few people outside his household would find acceptable.

"Because she brings out a side of me," he said, "an affectionate, mothering, loving side in me. I love her in a caring, compassionate way I've had all the hot girlfriends. I've had all the bizarre girlfriends. I just want someone that will love me unconditionally And that's what she does."

Inside the house It was another busy night. At the kitchen table Beau once again sat alone, methodically running through one of his favorite activities, counting out $100 bills. The holidays, the beginning of summer vacation, Labor Day weekend, and the first cold week of autumn are Beau's busiest periods. On a Monday he can make as little as $20 and on a busy Friday night as much as $5,000. Tonight, the first cold Friday of the fall, he was moving close to that figure.

"Summer's over," Beau announced, making neat stacks out of the bills before him. "This is going to be a very good night. Once you're stuck in your house, what are you going to do? Drugs."

Someone walking through the kitchen assented: "Yeah, dude, that's true. You know, when it rains, Jerry's Deli gets packed."

If Beau survives as a member of the drug trade's professional class, It will be owing to his inborn business skills. That, and not going to jail or getting murdered. "I definitely need to tighten this ship up, this house, this business of mine," Beau said. "But I could never be a car salesman. I could never work for someone else and wait for a paycheck every two weeks. At this point in my life I'm pretty far into this and too used to the lifestyle--to the freedom, making money fast, doing things on a whim. I need to always have something in my life where I can make my daily moves. I can even see myself dealing 20 years from now, after my son has gone off to college." This last thought seemed to appeal to Beau, and he smiled. "He'll probably buy his weed from me."

Elizabeth walked into the kitchen and hugged Beau. She wore a puffy gray sweatshirt, and her faced looked smushed, as if she had been sleeping on It.

"My stomach is relentlessly bothering me," she said. "I am going to bed. I can't deal with all these people unless they're tipping me."

A pear-shaped man wearing a goatee below heavy-rimmed glasses lifted a bong in the corner where he was getting high and said, "Next time I'll bring a dollar."

"What can I say," Elizabeth shrugged, kissing Beau good night and drifting out of the room. "I'm such a fucking recluse. I can't help It."

I followed Elizabeth into their bedroom before I left. It is a sparsely decorated room with a quasi-Victorian, '60s feel that matches Beau's music tastes. Elizabeth flopped onto the bed. I asked her to tell me why she loved Beau enough to start a family in this household. Gazing at the ceiling, Elizabeth told me this:

"I remember that night after the home invasion. He was walking through the house talking about how much he hated it-he hated the pain he was in, and he hated wanting to hurt people back for It. I fell so hard for him then. I loved how tough he was, and how sensitive he was at the same time. I wanted to love this man, and by loving him, to help him. I saw him in trouble, and I wanted to be in that trouble with him."

Doug Menuez's photographs ("Meet Beau," page 106) have been featured in several books, including The Power to Heal, The Circle of Life, and six volumes of the Day in the Life series (HarperCollins). Menuez, whose shots have appeared in Fortune, Time, and U.S. News & World Report, is currently working on a book about tequila.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Los Angeles Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group