hair smelled tragically of stale beer and smoke and even her tatas were exhausted. “We hit a point.”
“Let me guess…. She got tired of being a booty call?”
“Excuse me for not wanting to jump back into a serious relationship.”
Tana perks up considerably. “Let me see them again.”
I pull down the collar of my shirt, exposing the dimeshaped scar—the one I can show her while keeping my pants on.
“Dag,” she says. “Bitch was mental.”
“No argument here. But we had our moments.”
Tana sighs melodramatically. “And now you’ll never fall in love again.”
“On the contrary. I plan on falling in love many, many times.”
“True love is just a joke?”
“Jokes are funny. True love is not only bogus, it’s hazardous to your health.”
“Get stabbed by one psycho…”
“I’m serious,” I say. “Some chemicals in your brain trick you into thinking you’ve got feelings for someone. And that’s when the troubles begin. Let your guard down, and it’s like Lucy with the football.”
“You’re supposed to be cheering me up.”
“I thought that I was. Did you not catch the
“I think this new job is going to be good for you. At least you’ll meet some people you didn’t know in high school.”
My new job began the morning after my interview. As directed by the Pontiff, I met Rico near the ticket counter at Port Authority. My audition.
The work was, not surprisingly, illegal, but as far as I could tell, relatively low-risk, at least for me. The Pontiff had a system for pot delivery as innovative as it was audacious, allowing desirers of the devil’s lettuce to let their fingers do the walking whenever the need arose. An operator was standing by—Billy, the Sisyphus in a wife beater I’d seen at the apartment. One hour later, at a spot near but never too near their location, the happy smokers could trade $100 for what Rico called “a gentleman’s quarter.” I asked Rico what a gentleman’s quarter was.
“A convenience tax,” he said.
The operation wouldn’t have been possible without that modern convenience: the pager. In a way that I’ll admit is not altogether healthy, it’s what finally sold me on a job that, had I a gentleman’s quarter of moral judgment or common sense, I would have declined. But the Motorola Rico handed to me was a miniature homage to the state-of-the-art: a two-line, forty-character display (a feature Billy stubbornly refused to embrace, never straying from his standard “420”); the time and the date (I would finally get rid of the shitty Timex); eight selectable musical alerts (with strict orders to leave it on
“The tether,” Rico called it. Maybe. But after a year of wandering alone in the desert, I was ready to be tethered. Even if it was to an organization of criminal stoners. And for criminals—and more impressively, stoners— they were remarkably well-organized.
The most important part of being a “Face”—the Pontiff’s term for what most employers would call a delivery boy—was to maintain a bottomless supply of loose change and subway tokens. The rest of the job was staying near a pay phone, preferably someplace warm, and waiting for pages from Billy.
The ensuing conversations were short and to the point: two locations—the Pick-Up and the Meet-Up.
In its own way, the Pick-Up was even cooler than the pager. Billy, using some arcane logic understood only by Billy, directed the Face to what was typically a crowded meeting place. There the Middleman—more often than not Joseph, a wiry Rasta with a scar on his cheek—bumped into the Face, slipping a bag (the gentleman’s quarter) into his pocket. The entire interaction went down without greeting or acknowledgment—despite my couple of stabs at subtle nods and raised eyebrows, Joseph seemed intent on taking the “not acknowledging me” part of his job very, very seriously.
In the unlikely event that some eagle-eyed lawman happened to spot the transaction, the bag’s small size and the lack of any financial component meant, at most, a Class B misdemeanor, which Rico mentioned in a way that made me think it wasn’t very scary. But it never came to that. The city was averaging three murders and God knows how many assaults, rapes, and robberies a day, providing more than enough drama for a police force that was by its own estimation undermanned and overstretched. I’m pretty sure we could have made the Pick-Up wearing clown suits and playing tubas and brooked no interference from the men in blue.
Which allowed the Face a half hour, more or less, to get to the Meet-Up with the customer.
The Meet-Up never took place at the actual spot relayed by Billy. Throughout the first day, I watched Rico walk each prospective buyer to a nearby alleyway or secluded stoop, where he subjected them to a series of questions he later told me were written by the Pontiff’s lawyers. “Don’t matter how big a hard-on the judge has to put you away,” he explained. “A cop answers these questions, that’s stone-cold entrapment.”
But again, it never came to that. At the end of the shift—a closet traditionalist, the Pontiff broke up the workweek into five eight-hour stints—the Face and the Middleman met for a final bump. This time it was cash that changed hands—the day’s take minus the daily wage, which for me was $80.
It may not have been a foolproof scheme, but as long as no one acted like a fool, it might as well have been. Or so said the Pontiff, who promoted his business with a cheekiness bordering on the absurd—not even his most addled customers could forget the toll-free number he provided to them: 1-212-GET-WEED.
My new job.
“I’m a drug dealer, Tana. No one wants to hang out with their drug dealer.”
“Good point,” she concedes, curling into another yoga position. “I guess you’re destined to be friendless and alone, except for me.”
“You’re going back to school.”
“You could always get arrested. Three words for you: Hot. Prison. Sex.”
“Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” I say, sliding off the desk. “Speaking of work…” I toss her a gentleman’s quarter. She opens it and inhales the bouquet. “For your uncle Marvin. Don’t pinch too much.”
“Uh, I’m leaving tomorrow morning? I’m not exactly going to see him before I go.”
“Then give it back.”
Tana’s face goes pouty. “You don’t even like weed,” I say.
“I don’t. Usually. But Glenn said something about wanting to get high….”
“Why didn’t you say so? Consider it my donation to your erotic well-being. I’ll get Marvin another bag.”
“You see that?” she says, slipping the grass into her makeup bag. “That, my friend, is good karma. You just sit back and watch. The universe is going to reward you.”
4
NOT MEETING PEOPLE ISN’T THE ONLY THING standing between me and a social life. There’s also the fact that I’m still living at home.
My parents drove to Niagara Falls to pick me up from the hospital. We returned home in relative silence, which was fine by me; at least there weren’t any questions about Daphne. By the time we were pulled into the driveway, I’d decided that I could tolerate a week or two under their roof. Just enough time to get me back into the game.
But what game? As my wounds healed and my restlessness grew, I made two disturbing discoveries: (1) the U wasn’t in any hurry to take me back, given how badly I’d slacked off during my last semester there; and (2) I was an untouchable, at least as far as Nassau County’s food service industry was concerned. The events at Hempstead had turned me into a local celebrity. And while many free drinks flowed my way, the job offers did not. Only my old boss at Carvel, where I worked my senior year in high school, took mercy on me when I agreed to work for minimum wage. Which wasn’t going to rent me living quarters that didn’t have the name “Projects” attached to it.
I quit Carvel the night I returned from my orientation with Rico. In a couple of weeks, I’ll have enough saved
