God Hates Us All Read Free Page B

by the complete lack of English signage. I stand in front of the address Uncle Marvin gave me, a five-story building anchored by a boarded-shut nightclub that doesn’t seem like it will be reopening anytime soon. I buzz Apartment 4D.
    “Yah?” crackles the response.
    “Marvin Kirschenbaum sent me. I’m looking for—”
    The buzzer buzzes and I scramble to push through the door in time. Inside a dimly lit hallway lined by mailboxes, I scan the names until reaching 4D: “The Pontiff.” Apparently this is a holy pilgrimage. I look up, drawn by a sudden commotionin the stairwell. Raised voices. A slamming door. A bilingual explosion of English and Spanish curse words.
    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 upand 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