God Hates Us All (3 page)

I begin a cautious ascent, encountering the source of the commotion, or at least a key participant, on the stairs between the second and third floors. He’s a kid about my age, Puerto Rican, wearing an oversized Tommy Hilfiger shirt and baggy, low-riding Girbaud jeans, plus scuffless Air Jordans that would set me back what I make in a week at Carvel. Noticing me, he spits on the ground. Then he rips a Motorola pager from the hem of his pants and smashes it against the wall.

“Nothing personal,” he says.

I nod and continue without further incident to the fourth floor, where Apartment 4D anchors the end of the hall. I knock on the door.

A peephole slides open, revealing an eye. “You a cop?” growls a voice from the other side.

“No sir,” I reply, figuring that even drug dealers appreciate good manners.

The eye blinks two or three times before the slot slams shut. From the other side, I can hear five locks unfasten in succession. Then the door swings open, revealing a second door.

“You packing?” asks the door, which I now recognize to be an extremely large black man in a dark blue warm-up suit.

“I’ve got cash, if that’s what you mean,” I reply. My palms are sweating.

“Good for you.” Suddenly his large hands are roaming up
and down my body. It’s all very clinical and detached, but that doesn’t stop me from squirming.

“Keep it up and you’re going to have to buy me a drink,” I say.

The Man-Door silently ushers me into a room about the size of a high school cafeteria, an illusion enhanced by fluorescent lighting and foldout banquet tables with built-in benches. Only in this alternate universe, high school is populated entirely by middle-aged Puerto Rican women.

The room, while fragrant, doesn’t smell anything like a cafeteria. The redolent piles of marijuana that blanket the tabletops make me think of freshly mowed lawns. The women tear off hot dog–sized chunks and plop them on scales, adding and subtracting nuggets to achieve some ideal weight before bagging the results in half-sized Ziplocs I’ve never seen at any supermarket. A fat man with squinty eyes—this Bizarro school’s assistant principal—waddles among the tables, keeping an eye out for any funny business and occasionally replenishing the grass from a more familiar-sized Hefty bag. At least a dozen more such bags form a hill in the room’s far corner.

The only other furniture is an old desk in the opposite corner, occupied by a thin man with a wife beater T-shirt and an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. The desk’s only adornments are a clean-as-new ashtray and a push-button telephone that seems to ring every time the thin man finishes a call. While I’ll later learn that, for reasons that should have been obvious, the room is subject to a strict no-smoking policy,
in the moment it’s hard not to think of Sisyphus, his never-ending task a perpetual roadblock to his nicotine fix. The thin man’s job doesn’t seem to involve much more than the repeating of addresses, which he inscribes without edits onto Postit notes and jams onto a subway map tacked to the wall.

“Wake up, boy. The Pontiff is waiting,” says the Man-Door. He doesn’t waste any additional time with words or gestures—his enormity simply eliminates every option other than a door in the back of the room.

I enter a small room whose only light comes from an hon-estto-goodness lava lamp, bathing everything in shades of red.
A lair
, I think, hearing the door close behind me. My eyes slowly adjust, revealing walls and ceilings lined with the kind of batik tapestries that were so popular at college among veterans of prep school and fans of the Grateful Dead. The room’s sole inhabitant turns out to be a Caucasian male in his fifties who would have looked out of place anywhere but at a Dead show. There’s a small soul patch on his chin and dread-locks, either bleached or naturally orange, extending halfway down his back. He’s dressed like a South American farmer, but everything else about him suggests royalty, from the plush velvet armchair he occupies like a throne to the way he tilts his head, almost imperceptibly, toward the throw pillows that line the room’s floor. I recognize the gesture as an order to sit down. Which I do.

The man in the throne—the Pontiff, I presume—peers at me as if I might not be real. “So,” he finally declares. “You’re the kid.”

I nod.

“And you’re ready for this.” His questions don’t have question marks. He’s not searching for answers; he’s confirming that which he already knows.

“I think so.” I reach into my pocket for the money. “Marvin didn’t tell me much.”

“Marvin.”

“Marvin Kirschenbaum.” I pick up one of the bills, which I’ve fumbled to the floor. “He said he wanted a quarter.”

“A quarter.”

“A quarter ounce?”

“This isn’t about the position.”

“Marvin didn’t tell me anything about a position,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t betray what is basically escalating terror bordering on trouser-soiling hysteria. Every instinct in my body demands that I get the fuck out of Dodge. But my mouth, for some ungodly reason, keeps moving: “Could you tell me a little more about it?”

“So you
are
here about the position.” The Pontiff turns his gaze toward a small wooden box, although I’m pretty sure he’s still talking to me.

I take a deep breath. “I’m not sure I have enough information yet to answer that question.”

The Pontiff nods, my fate seemingly decided, and opens the box. It’s full of weed. He removes a pinch of his product and crumbles it between his fingers into the bowl of a three-foot-high bong I’d somehow missed. “It was my original understanding,” he says, striking a foot-long match against its
cylindrical package, “that you were here to replace Carlos. Tell me why I should hire you.” He places the lit end of the match next to the bowl and inhales, causing the flame to leap to the powdery grass. The water at the bottom of the bong gurgles as the glass tube becomes opaque with smoke for maybe twenty seconds.

I take a deep breath.
Pull it together, kid.

“I am twenty years old,” I begin, “an age at which they say we’re supposed to be figuring it all out. And I’m taking them at their word. Following my heart. Pursuing that which interests me. Satisfying my
wanderlust
. It’s a philosophy that so far has led me to the food service industry, which I’ll be the first to admit isn’t exactly where I’d like or hoped to be, even before certain incidents—one incident, really, a solitary expression of youthful overexuberance—did considerable and more likely than not irreparable harm to my prospects in the trade. Another interest I have pursued is the opposite sex—the females, the ladies—and not to brag but let’s just say I’ve had a little more success than I’ve had with the food service industry. Good in the sack, or so I’ve been told. Seriously—I can get references—although maybe not my last girlfriend, who for reasons that are still unclear to me stabbed me with a knife and saddled me with trust issues. Those issues, plus my current job making ice cream cakes shaped like marine life, have led to decidedly fewer encounters with the ladies and, I’m afraid to say, a premature cynicism unbefitting my age.”

Only I don’t say any of that. Instead, I serve up a couple of platitudes about being reliable and willing to work hard.

“You can keep your mouth shut,” says the Pontiff.

I nod yes. Twenty minutes later, I’m walking out of the building with a new job, one that promises relatively high pay and easy work, fuck you very much Tom Carvel. It isn’t until I board the train back to Long Island that I realize I’ve forgotten to buy Uncle Marvin his weed.

“MAYBE YOU CAN JUST GET SO SMART THAT YOU don’t want to have sex anymore,” Tana says. She’s wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts and is bent over into some kind of yoga pose. A class she’s taking at school.

“Fortunately I’m not that smart,” I say. “Is it customary at Cornell to do yoga in your unmentionables?”

“Nope. For the girls it’s mostly Lycra and thongs. Who can we ask who’s really smart?”

I sit on her pink desk, studying a collage of handsome pop stars and teen idols that’s been tacked to her bulletin board for as long as I’ve known her. “While it’s true I’m no longer a college man, it’s been my experience that man developed brains to get
more
sex, not the other way around.”

“I mean, Glenn is totally brilliant,” she says, breathlessly, although that might be part of the yoga.

“He can’t be that brilliant if he doesn’t want to have sex with you.”

“Says you. His doctorate is on applied semiotics.”

“Can’t say I’m too familiar with the subject. Now applied
semen
-otics …”

“You mock,” she says, stretching for her toes, “what you don’t understand.”

“Welcome to the story of my life.”

“You have to listen to him talk about it. I get so fucking hot just hearing who he’s reading.” She rises and walks toward me, mock-seductive. “Lacan … Derrida … Foucault.” I growl appreciatively and she reconsiders her approach. “So enough about my misery,” she says, folding her arms. “Who are you boinking these days?”

“A mouth like a sailor, you.”

“Come on, fess up. What about that waitress? The one with the silky blonde hair and the perky tatas?”

“Heidi,” I say. A summer fling. We used to hook up after her late shift at Bennigan’s, when her silky blonde 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
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 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
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 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.”