God Hates Us All

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 Peanuts reference?”

“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 byBilly, 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-theart: 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 vibrate — Billy again); and a built-in alarm clock (a good idea in theory; unnecessarily jarring in practice). I felt like James Fucking Bond.

“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 wellorganized.

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.