The Golem

Posted on November 19, 2008

The phone rang, and for an instant, it was like calling anyone. The drug dealer’s line rang exactly the same. I don’t know why this came as a shock. What had I expected? Reggae? Actually, I didn’t know what to imagine. A woman picked up on the second ring. She spoke in sober, polished tones—not your traditional maryjane receptionist. I thought of the many Blazed-out-Bettys I’d been talking with in pharmacies lately. I’d been looking for pot work for almost a month, hitting up every smoke shop and co-op from Oceanside to Ocean Beach. Many of my cold calls had played out like this: Blazed-out-Betty answers the phone while coughing up a bong hit. I start to speak, only to hear a Bic flicker and water lowly percolate. “Who are you again?”

Ginger sounded more like a medical receptionist. First, she thanked me for my patronage, then identified the establishment, and then with a felicity that’s fading from the modern day, asked how she might be of service. A place with lucid employees was a twist I hadn’t expected. She wasn’t rubbing Maui Waui from the edges of her words. I heard no Spearhead in the foreground, just the double-jab of a stapler.

Funny the things we learn on the phone. I was learning, most likely, Maurice was not a part-time junior college student, running a collective out of his car. I’d met a number of pot-repeneurs who neatly fit this bill. They were young, enterprising, media savvy, able to quietly run their rackets with a Verizon plan and a Yugo. Theirs were bare-bone, nimble ops, that thanks to the magic of digital technology were able to present themselves in any way they chose.

My favorite was a delivery service where the website evoked a pastoral setting, as though this wasn’t the Mexican border, but the Irish countryside. There were offers for deep tissue massage and new age spiritual counseling. Marijuana and cannabis were not mentioned; the only way to know you had stumbled into a marijuana business were references to health and safety code 11362.5. But who isn’t up on their legal code, right?

There were other clues, if you knew what to look for. Many linked visitors to state Senate Bill 420, and its voter-mandated predecessor, Proposition 215. Back in 1996, California became the first state in America to decriminalize marijuana for the seriously ill. It didn’t come without a fight. Even in pinko California, this was a hotly contested race. Critics called it “backdoor legalization” while supporters trotted out the critically ill. A vote against medical marijuana, they said, was a vote against anyone suffering the scourges of things like cancer and AIDS.

I agreed, but still I couldn’t help notice a cheshire cat grin on some activist faces when I asked if total legalization remained their lattermost goal. I was in college at the time, so clearly weed wasn’t so hard to come by. What did I care if folks wanted to get stoned? What bothered me about “The Compassionate Use Act” was a sense it was dancing around the truth. “If you want legalization, then say it, fool.” There is no such thing as medical marijuana. It isn’t grown in special labs and the term “medical marijuana” refers not to any chemical properties, but to the people who are smoking it.

All marijuana is medical marijuana—if you have a doctor’s note.

I voted yes as an afterthought, more interested in girls on the quad and nickel beers at Jimmy G’s than nascent forms of political activism. And because of me, and others like me, marijuana was decriminalized in a portion of the United States for the first time since 1937. This made some I knew very happy, but it didn’t rock my world. And while I’m sure there were epic celebrations in Humboldt, Bacchanalian festivals lasting many moons, at the time I don’t remember thinking anything more profound than,

“Cool.”

Marijuana was legal, well, sort of. With thanks to old-fashioned grassroots campaigning, a mass collection of supermarket signatures, and a slew of television ads to slickly seal the deal, voters had approved a new law, which at a scant four-hundred words, presented more questions than it answered. Who was eligible for the new program? What if counties decided that Federal law should trump the popular imitative? How much bud could I legally grow? The new law set no limits. It directed the state to create a dispensary system, but when that didn’t happen, in neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, cannabis clubs opened shop. Some were headed by idealists—the spiritual descendents of Marijuana Mary, the Castro District nurse/granny who became the Mrs. Fields of pot. Mary Rathburn baked brownies by the bushel, then gave them to San Francisco men, many gravely ill. She called them her boys, and marijuana seemed to ease the disease that was taking so many in the 1980’s. Soon, underground collectives opened, many operating in the same good spirit, providing safe access to the sick, while attending to other health problems as well. Theirs was the bright side of the law. Though it plunged the state into legal chaos, it served as instant absolution for do-gooders on the down-low, now permitted to do their work as state-sanctioned non-profits.

The bad news would come later. Whether by accident, or design, the authors of Proposition 215 had written a law so utterly vague, they’d essentially dropped the allusional lever and brought to life a monster. Many will think of Frankenstein now—mad scientist, bolts of lightning. And this was where my mind went too, until I remembered Sunday school and stories of the Golem.

The Golem is a vestige of middle-age mysticism, sometimes a tormentor, other times a protector. Made by man so he is imperfect. Brought to life by the word of god. Able to do extraordinary good, but fallible, corruptible, and capable of evil. Golems are both angel and devil. They’re monsters of conflicted purpose.

Medical marijuana would soon become a Golem. Its diviners were an alliance of political and moneyed interests—some from top universities, others breaking out of the underworld. Together, farmers, doctors, and businessmen (henceforth known as potrepeneurs) collectively held the means of production, distribution and access. The more new patients a doctor signed up, the higher the demand; and the more patients a collective accepted, the more crop its favored farmers could grow. And the doctors needn’t worry; the new law shielded them from any form of punishment. Excellent news if you’re an oncologist, but also a mile-wide loophole for unscrupulous prescription-mills, some charging $200 for a doctor’s letter.

Things would soon fly out of control. As marijuana activists got to work outgrowing big brother, opponents had their own cards to play. Arguing the proposition violated federal law, many conservative California counties sued to overturn the result. They cited the Supremacy Clause, arguing that because marijuana was illegal on a national level, no state could make a law saying otherwise. This seemed straight-forward on the surface, yet it wasn’t the easiest case to make before a state judge: “Your honor, please rule that the federal government may overturn any law voters approve should the government disagree with it.”

Um…

As far as state judges were concerned, this was no longer strictly about medical marijuana—it was now a question of state’s rights. Should Washington be allowed to strike down voter propositions? Are states “laboratories of democracy” or should their excesses be reined in by a federal judge? And if so, who defines excess? Judges who never smoked a joint in their life weren’t about to compromise their legal authority. Both liberals and conservatives, time and again, ruled in favor of the proposition and against the dissident counties. Some gave way, and medical marijuana grew available in more parts of the state. But other prosecutors held their ground, turning the map into a checkerboard: legal pot in some places, while the county next door maintained zero-tolerance. And this is how it went for years—seven years, to pick a number—until lawmakers finally clarified things in the form of Senate Bill 420. The new legislation, at five-thousand words, established a voluntary state i.d. system; set rules for co-ops, collectives and caregivers; and among other things, instructed counties to set cultivation limits—to the anger of marijuana growers. The law also set statewide possession guidelines, effectively killing zero-tolerance. No one was celebrating this time. Many activists were livid at the new, tougher standards, while prosecutors bristled at enforcing a law they believed was unconstitutional. Once again, some counties sued, including where my parents lived, San Diego county.

Now, wait, hold on, I know what you’re thinking. “San Diego doesn’t like pot?”

You’d think California’s southern coast would be an ideal place to run a marijuana business. When I picture San Diego, I think of lazy, sun-soaked scenes like the introduction to Three’s Company—blonde and bronzed Suzanne Somers at the San Diego zoo. Or, Ron Burgandy (“Stay Classy, San Diego”) though lately such daydreams have tested my ability to watch the local news. And, yes, San Diego is plenty mellow, a sparkling, seaside Shangri La, where weathermen report surf swells and girls blading on the beach look to have rolled off of magazine covers. But don’t confuse the sun and surf, and endless chances for al fresco dining, as Seattle ney the clouds. San Diego, very quietly, is the most socially conservative big city on America’s west coast—a portrait clearly at odds with its easy-breezy mien.

When my parents retired, they sold our home near San Francisco and moved to a tract development in the north part of the county. Their new house cost considerably less—and that had been the plan. After a lifetime of nine to fives, they were ready for a change of scenery. Both had lived in the Bay Area for almost forty years, my dad originally from New York, my mom from Melbourne, Australia. Theirs were solid, practical lives, though it’s safe to say they were drawn to the border more out of wanderlust than planning. They’d come for a weekend and purchased a home right on the spot, lulled by dreams of eternal sunshine, easy living and endless rounds of golf.

They’d never spent time in San Diego, busy as they were, so it was easy to reduce the town to its chamber of commerce particulars. But there were other dimensions to their new home, less familiar permutations, though it took awhile to find this out. Mom would go for afternoon drinks at the Hotel Del Coronado and watch as Navy jets flew maneuvers, screaming over the antique cabanas en route to the northern part of the island. At night, from their new living room, they could hear the thunder of ordinance fire distantly off the Pacific coast. They were twenty miles east of Camp Pendleton, but still explosions filled the evening, a tangible reminder that we were at war.

San Diego, they learned, was a military town, a place that had gradually taken on a sort of Jekyl and Hyde duality: tasty waves in some quarters, Blackwater consultants in others. There were 95,000 active military personnel, including seven Naval and Marine bases, and on any weekday, driving north on I-5, you could look to your right and see the dust scatter on desolate plains of government property, chopper-blades reeling, sun striking Kevlar helmets, as soldiers board whirlybirds off in the distance.

When my health took a serious turn for the worse, I saw no choice but to move in as well. Just two hours from Hollywood, and less than a day’s drive from San Francisco, yet San Diego in many ways felt like a different world. It attracted old soldiers and D.O.D. contractors, most far more conservative than your average coastal Californian. Over the years, they elected like-minded representatives: Congressmen like Duncan Hunter and Duke Cunningham, who spoke to their craving for military readiness and a return to traditional values. With the Mexican border a dozen miles off, illegal immigration was a red-meat issue. Patriot militias guarded the border—but they weren’t the only ones. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) keeps its largest field office outside of Washington in San Diego county, mostly to address narco-smuggling out of Tijuana. But in the wake of Proposition 215, and with the approval of county elders, the DEA had doubled-down, launching a systematic effort to stem the spread of medical marijuana cooperatives throughout San Diego.

Together with local prosecutors, the DEA posed an existential threat. As the number of cooperatives grew across the state, San Diegians watched as their services were driven underground. In 2006, two years after S.B. 420, San Diego DEA agents conducted a massive countywide sweep, where every medical marijuana service was raided and shut down. Some went to federal prison, while others left town, and by the spring of 2008, there were less than a dozen services advertising—a pittance compared to the hundreds open in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Almost all of the survivors were delivery services; moving targets, so to speak, who delivered only to private homes and kept under the radar.

Even so, they lived under a federal microscope, and most behaved as such. Their hands trembled when the phone rang, their voices betraying a search for probity, but also a sad understanding that the stranger on the other end might not wish them well. It wasn’t like law enforcement was going to protect them from criminals plotting to steal their stock. Maybe bust them after offering a bum doctor’s letter and seeing if they make the sale. The point being simply, when you’re advertising marijuana over the telephone, anyone can call. Which made Ginger’s greeting so surprising and remarkable. The workaday malaise she captured was well-removed from the paranoia of her present business. I remembered her now from a cold call made the other week. I’d been on a patio near a state university, enjoying San Diego’s winter, while running through a list of calls. A throng of college girls sat close, gossiping as they sipped ice coffees. A few peeked over now and then, and I couldn’t help wonder what they were thinking: clean-cut, well-spoken, slightly-older guy sipping on a tall Starbucks, making a string of business calls. What job did they imagine me doing? Certainly not this one. Mostly, I left voicemails for men who didn’t sound far out of high school. Boys in their chem labs, for all I knew. The few who answered did so mostly to explain they acted more like sole proprietors, doing all of the work themselves. Employees were a drag on earnings, I heard this many times, and I assumed that Maurice would fall into this group, until Ginger answered that first day and made me believe I was talking with an actual non-profit.

When I said I was looking for a job, she didn’t brush me off. Sometimes the littlest things help our cause, and I got the sense she was impressed with how I handled words. She said there might be an opening soon and copied down my name and number. A few weeks later, Maurice called, and here we were once more.

“Thank you for calling Green Medical. This is Ginger. How may I help you?”

I introduced myself again, said I was returning Maurice’s call.

“Oh, the driver,” she said, as though it was a job of importance. “Maurice is in the back. One moment please.”

I smiled, happy to hear her voice, believing if someone so straight-sounding had been hired by Green Medical, maybe I stood half-a-chance. Ginger ran a good game. She was just who you wanted answering phones. She chose her statements very deliberately, while Maurice—I would discover—fired paragraphs at will. Somewhere in her past, she’d worked in traditional customer service. There were hints in how she handled things. Opening with the business’s name, for example, instead of hazily shouting, “Yo.”

But looks could be deceiving—as I’d lived in LA long enough to know. I wondered what Ginger meant when saying Maurice was in the back? I stood and wandered my parent’s living room. Nobody was home. My heart had raced as I dialed the number, as it often does when I call strangers. But now the page was filling in, though it only left me with more questions. I looked at photographs on the mantle—pictures of babies, weddings and proms. I was trying to picture the world I was entering, trying to put myself within it. But then I heard big feet approaching and knew reflection time was over. I felt the phone move into his hand, and then by way of introduction, “This is an intense, fast moving opportunity.”

“I understand.”

His voice was large and I tried to picture him and Ginger—but all I could piece together was a giant man holding a tiny phone. I didn’t even know where Green Medical was located. The area code was San Diego, but such fingerprints are obsolete in our brave new cellular world. Green Medical could be squared away in some godforsaken bunker—an abandoned shack out in the high desert; poor Ginger dutifully answering calls, while Maurice stands watch out in the back with a semi-automatic.

“This ain’t no come when you feel like it job,” Maurice said firmly. “Let’s be very clear about that. So if you’re going to take your pay, go to the bar, and wake up at three in the afternoon, face deep in your own spit, this ain’t gonna work. I need somebody reliable. Reliable.”

“Sounds fair to me.”

“Somebody who will do what I need them to do, when I need them to get it done. Even if it means coming here at eleven at night because I have carry issues and need another doctor’s letter. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I do.”

Maurice was saying that each doctor’s letter allowed a patient to drive around the state with half a pound of marijuana. Two doctor’s letters allowed one pound. Four doctor’s letters allowed two. I noticed the trace of a southern accent. He held his words very tight and close, but now he seemed to breathe a little.

“Good,” he said, and everything seemed to loosen up. I decided he’d been burned before, probably by family and friends. Which likewise explained his willingness to entrust such a delicate job to a total stranger.

“What kind of car do you drive?” he asked.

“I’ve got a 2006 Mazda 3.” It was leased but I wouldn’t tell him this. I’d been sick for years and the miles were low. I was willing to take the hit.

“Any alterations? Window tint, custom rims?”

“Nope. I’m just a boring white guy with a boring stock car. No bling on me.”

“Funny guy,” he chuckled, and now the rest of the edge left his voice, as if he had decided it was nearly impossible that anyone from the DEA could crack a decent joke. “The reason I have to ask these things is we get a lot of nineteen year olds wanting to deliver in their low-rider trucks with their blacked out windows. We can’t take on that kind of heat. That’s not the image we’re trying to project. We have to be the opposite of that.”

“I’m a thirty-three year old who drives a Mazda.”

“What do you wear? What kinds of clothes?”

“Boring. Just t-shirts and jeans. Sneakers. Shorts and flip-flops. Baseball caps.”

“Any writing on the shirts?”

“Some, but plenty just solid colors.”

“We can’t have writing on the shirts,” he said, and again you could cut meat with his words. His moods seemed to ebb and flow, one minute calm and conversational, the next wearily intense. Currently, he was intense about shirts, “Whatever it is, political, philosophical, religious, whatever, it’s not appropriate uniform attire. It might be funny, I’m aware of this, but we’re a patient service business, and we don’t want to offend our clientele.”

“Sounds fair to me.”

“Do you have a criminal record?”

My chest tightened. I didn’t have one, but there’s something about being asked this question.

“Some speeding tickets, nothing else.”

“Ok.”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, running a mile away from the subject, “I’m just a regular guy whose had some health problems and is looking to come in, work hard, and get back on my feet.”

“What kind of health problems?”

“I have a hormone deficiency, but I’m doing better now. I take a big hormone shot every week and I’m fine. I’m under full doctor’s care, good diet, all of that.”

“When you say hormones, that means….?”

“Testosterone.”

“Anabolic steroids?” Maurice whispered, and I could tell he was intrigued. Then he gave me the talk about answering him truthfully, and how he wouldn’t suffer fools. I nodded, let him go, stretched out and relaxed in full Beta-man mode. Maurice was a hurricane twisting close, while I would quietly stand firm. I would play the role of dream employee. All I wanted was a job, and the last thing I wanted was any trouble. I would be a team player, do as told.

Maurice gave out a few more details. During my probationary period, I would make twenty dollars an hour. With tips, more than a thousand a week. The longer we spoke, the better I felt about my chances. After hundreds of job interviews, I recognized the signs. I knew I would pass my background check and suddenly I had exotic intangibles: I was a regular guy, with a late-model car and a clean criminal record, which made me in some twisted way the industry’s dream candidate. But at the same time, it all seemed too good to be true. It felt far too easy.

“I’m about to take a gamble on you, Dann,” Maurice said. “I’m about to risk thirty-five dollars on a criminal background check. So last chance. If there’s anything I should know about, you have to tell me now. Because, trust me Dann, even if you don’t say nothing, I’m gonna find out later.”

“You’ll find some speeding tickets, that’s all.”

He wanted to believe me, and he said they’d be in touch. I would get a call in the next few days, assuming everything checked out, and be given an address. A few days later, it happened. Ginger called, but gone was the easy, velveteen voice, replaced by obvious concern. She gave me an address, released it to my pen and pad like a tiny test of fate, and told me to be there later in the morning. Maurice shouted eleven-thirty.

“Eleven-thirty,” Ginger said.

This much I knew as I got in my car. It was Monday morning, but late enough to miss the traffic. I was driving to an address outside of San Diego county—along a winding maze of highways and charming country roads. Green Medical wasn’t around the corner. It would be a rather long commute, assuming I got the job. Maurice had exhaustively explained that this was just an interview, that things could end right on the spot. But I also knew, if things went well, I might get to make a run. As I drove up the highway, I passed scores of price-slashed houses, their banners begging easy payments. The economy was going down while gas was surging toward three bucks a gallon. I no longer questioned what I was doing; I was doing what I had to do when there was nowhere left to go for help.

After an hour on the road, I pulled into a Central American neighborhood; bungalows cutting squat figures beyond rural driveways. I pulled up to a little house, lawn wild, fresh wire fencing nailed to the perimeter, killed the engine and got out. As I neared the front gate, I saw a big padlock, then heard dogs. There were two of them—one a pitbull, the other a mix of German Shepherd and wolf. They came at me barking, their bellies banging against the wire, their snouts poking through the holes. I’d smoked a joint shortly beforehand, so at least I didn’t panic. I sleepily took a few steps back and waited for the door. Maurice appeared a minute later, big as a continent, head shaved, tattoos running up his arms. He told me I should hop the fence, that the dogs wouldn’t eat me.

I put one foot in front of the next. If this was the end of my story, so be it. There was no turning back.

Next: Drug Runner: Day One

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