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.
3
“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.”
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.