Wages Of Sin
Lead Character, Penny, has survived several tours through hell and is starting to get an attitude. She works in an iconic Maui restaurant owned by mellow older hippies, Roy and Sally. As laid back as they are, they’ve grown weary of Penny’s clashes with their customers and other employees. Penny is dangerously close to losing her job, her friends, and nearly loses her life when she recklessly foils a robbery. For more than a minute she is legally dead. In that brief space of time she relives the events that brought her to that moment.
Stalked by a notorious gang, Penny takes a suggestion from the back of a T-shirt and buys a one way ticket to Maui. She is immediately adopted by a cave dwelling, pot growing Vietnam vet. Arjuna looks like Jesus but he acts like Charley Manson. He isolates her. He brutalizes her. He makes her steal for him. Her opportunity for escape arises. She takes refuge in the straight world, only to find that everyone in it is addicted to cocaine. Frank, the man she falls in love with, is addicted to heroin as well. As their lives spiral out of control, Frank is murdered. In a moment of drug induced desperation, Penny is arrested for breaking into a car. To be continued…
Cinderella Goes To India
Penny has been incarcerated for breaking into a car. Her friend, Clyde, bails her out. Clyde persuades her to join an ashram, on the ‘Hana side’, to get some ‘free rehab’. There, Penny is befriended by a motley crew of counter culture celebrities, also rehabilitating from cocaine abuse. Penny becomes romantically involved with the group’s darling, Armando, and is drawn into working in their pot-growing co-op.
Halfway to harvest Larry, the moneyman, decides to start a separate operation. Larry imports Stevie, a master grower from Humbolt. Stevie has perfected a short season strain that will mature at the same time as the ongoing crops.
Stevie and his wife, Rebecca, share close quarters with the group. They are made privy to all current growing locations. Larry and Stevie need a new location, for the ‘ninety day wonders’, and partner with Samuel Lee. What no one knows, or suspects, is that Stevie’s plan is to rip off everyone. In one night, he cleans out Larry, Armando and Samuel Lee.
Samuel Lee goes on a rampage, suspecting everyone but Stevie. Larry winds up getting busted. Penny and Armando are forced to flee the island. They go to Armando’s original home, New York City. They become intrinsically involved in the socially charged art scene, but blind sighting events force them to flee again. This time to India…
Daughter Of Woman
Exhausted, in the aftermath of her life changing experience in India, Penny returns to the United States. She wants nothing more than to go home to Maui, but she can’t afford the air fare from New York. She knows there are cheap fares from California and she has family there. Penny takes a cross country bus from
Port Authority, New York, to San Jose, California. She arrives a few days before the Thanksgiving holiday.
Penny’s cousins live across the Golden Gate Bridge, in Marin County. Penny loves Marin County and decides to look for a rental. Unfortunately, the impromptu family reunion, occasioned by her arrival, turns out to be a
colossal disaster.
Rejected and cast out Penny revisits her plan to return to Maui. En route to the travel agency she stumbles upon an advertisement for a house sitting position. Penny calls the advertiser, Scott. To her delight the position has not been filled. Essentially homeless, Penny thinks it’s her lucky day and takes the job.
All these activities are observed by Scott’s neighbor, a police officer named Matt. Matt immediately acquaints himself with Penny in an effort to warn her about Scott. Unfortunately, Penny is more apt to mistrust a police officer than seemingly harmless home owner, Scott.
What Penny is doomed to learn is that Scott has a sinister agenda, and that his ad is an ongoing lure for forgotten people.