Will

Posted on January 4, 2009

Maurice was a man who could tear apart phonebooks. A big, menacing, mean motherfucker. I could tell this even over the phone. He had one of those booming auditorium voices, grandiose like a professional wrestler’s. But Maurice was young. He couldn’t be much past twenty-five, and while his roar was thick and imposing, his rumble was presently cloaked in despair. For the hundredth time in recent months, Maurice had lost his driver. Now, he wanted to discuss delivering medical marijuana: A career with good pay and excellent perks, if I could follow orders. But first questions. Character inquiries. All delivered in the hard-restrained voice of a special forces operative. “You should always answer me truthfully,” he said, the timbre of his words giving them an added urgency. “Because Dann, I’ll know. One way or another, I’ll find out. So save us both the trouble, guy, and give it to me straight.” “Ask whatever you want,” I said.

My last interview was with Ernst & Young. Their office was in downtown LA, seven blocks from my apartment. They’d had an opening for a writer, something stable, if not fun. I’d taken a hard shot at it: pressed suits, haircut, wind sprints through their company gauntlet—but like every classic losing streak, I was destined to go down. This time I lacked corporate writing experience, and H.R. feared I might get bored with earning a steady paycheck. All of which was true, I guess. I wasn’t a teenaged blushing bride nosing the Ernst & Young bouquet; I was a grifter after their health insurance.

Sickness, like addiction, can lead to places of desperation; settings like Maurice’s chain link fenced driveway. For me this was an unlikely career. I’m in my mid-thirties, feeling my age, and the thrall of fast cars and easy women seem better left to younger men, boys uncertain of who they are and still dependent upon their accessories. Running green wasn’t a plea for acceptance. It was a cold, financial calculation; a finger-in-the-wind of a failing economy; a conviction my health might not improve unless I escaped my HMO. Fate had brought me to Maurice, impelled that I consider rogue options. I saw two doorways, one heading downward, the other leading out. Which way was I going to go?

I wish I’d scored a cooler illness, something with some more cachet, maybe a telethon or benefit album. But I’d been hit with a hormone deficiency—a soul-castrating hormone deficiency. Even worse, because it didn’t sound painful, or at first glance appear worthy of pity. It was a fire on somebody else’s porch, no one took it very seriously. But for me, it was like life’s dark gray end, that moment when you question if you even want to be. At its worst, I slept sixteen hours a day, but all my doctor thought to do was prescribe a mild anti-depressant. Diet, exercise, none of it helped. My only real choice was anabolic steroids, but doc wasn’t ready to put me on these.

My friends, meanwhile, found it darkly amusing. Girls crowed when I listed my symptoms: Fatigue, moodiness, nocturnal sweating. “You, my dear, are living through your very own third trimester.” They were oddly thrilled by my spontaneous androgyny, like a mating call caught in reverse. Oh, look how he lies there, so cute and docile, like a toothless, sexless octogenarian. “You’re man-strating!” they cried. I’m often full of smart remarks, to the point you might want to hit me eventually, but at my very lowest point, nothing thinned the fog of my perpetual exhaustion. I watched everybody running around, as if their lives moved in fast-forward—marveling where they got their wind? I couldn’t think clearly for months at a time, or stay awake for more than three hours. And forget about work or earning money, so forget about love in its healthiest forms. One year lost and with no end in sight, I met an acquaintance at a Costco parking lot. It was late morning, early summer, and we sat in the front of his beaten-up car, sweating through the fabric seats. I was buying two bottles of testosterone enthanate, syringes and draws, all stuffed in a box of girl scout cookies. Cops patrolled a nearby street. We would have to move quickly; he’d give me the shot, right here in the car, and at the same time, he’d do his best to properly bring me up to speed.“I’m giving you a cc as a jumpstart—then one-half cc every week.”

He cleaned his hands with an antiseptic wipe; then opened another and told me to roll my shirt sleeve over the round muscles in my shoulder. He blotted a fleshy patch of skin, loaded the syringe with an amber colored oil. “Always inject into the muscle. Pull the plunger back to check for blood in the chamber. Wait to see bubbles, then push down.”He was thorough, generous with his words, far more competent than my physician. Within hours, the fog in my head began lifting, as though I was awakening from a long troubled sleep.

Maurice first called on a Thursday afternoon. I checked my messages later that evening, heard his bellowing, brooding, voice, and took advantage of the small hour to put off any decision til morning. I could see the dude wasn’t messing around. He was guarded, terse, wary of recordings, all of which was understandable. In a business where jobs go to family and friends, I was a guy flat off the street. As a move, it seemed reckless, even to me. And maybe it did to Maurice too, as he didn’t waste a lot of breath. He left two numbers and said to call. I wrote them down, turned out the light and sat in the dark unable to sleep. My mind grew thick with possibilities. Could I afford to turn this down? How long since I’d had steady work? Especially after I’d gotten sick.

The road runs fast from there to here: One lost job. One hard turn. It occurred to me that Maurice could be anyone. Cop, stalker, swindler, freak. He could have a dungeon under his grow room stocked with crates of rusty implements.He was also my only return call. And given the current state of the world, my phone didn’t promise to ring again. I called the next day, ready to work. It wasn’t one of my wiser moments, but I didn’t feel I was in a position to spit in the face of opportunity.

First Person is Walkabout Jones’ firsthand look into timely subjects. Currently: Medical Marijuana

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