The Marijuana Chronicles

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I MUST ALSO POINT OUT that while Abraham Ziegler is missing, there is as yet no evidence that he is behind these recent events, or any reason to go outside code or sidestep TCE investigations which are more than well-equipped to handle the case. I hold the commission personally responsible for any setbacks resulting from this affair

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3.

The strange smell of burnt toast.

Jose “Crash” Mendoza woke up in a room. A dingy bulb, a tiny window. A room of brick walls and stone floor. His brain was sluggish, his limbs rusty and slow. He stood up and looked around. A couple of tires. An old cajón. A dirty old mirror, half covered in a dark cloak. Crash gave himself a good gander in the spotted glass, as if to make sure he was still … “he.” His afro, wild and free, still in effect. His jeans jacket with the Puerto Rican flags on it, his street colors (and that included his prized Young Lords button and that Black Panthers patch). Made him feel good just from looking so wild, resistant, and Afro-Rican. It was Funkadelic, it was Hendrix. Reached for his afro-pick in his back pocket. (Yeah, reassuring feel of that plastic handle shaped like a small black fist.) Pulled it out to give his hair some flow action. But what’s with this room? A slow brain, like when he smoked bad weed. Weed, weed … he remembered smoking weed, right? He looked around the room again. There was only that steel door. The way out.

Crash opened the door slow. He was in a small courtyard between buildings. There was a narrow alley through which he could make out street. A line of trash cans. He walked down the alley carefully, the sight of street growing bigger. Through the steel gate, there were people walking along. Cars rumbled by. A bullet-shaped bus picked up passengers across the street.

Stepping out through the gate, Crash recognized where he was. Prospect Avenue and 149th Street. The hardware store, boutique, dress factory, and pizzeria that used to make up the block were gone, replaced now by a … “superette,” an auto parts store, and a restaurant of some Mexican persuasion. (Across the street was the same story. Whole buildings were gone, replaced by houses.) Walking over to Fox Street, he used to see rows of five-story tenements all the way to Avenue St. John. Only right now he couldn’t. Fox Street didn’t have buildings. It had funky two-story houses. Small green lawns. And that was as far as the eye could see.

It was Fox Street. But it wasn’t Fox Street.

“What the fuck?” he said to a woman who paused to look at him. All of a sudden he noticed the people, many of them looking at him as he went by. Black people, and some people that could’ve been Boricuas … there were a lot of Mexicans. Their clothes looked big, jeans baggy, clumpy fat sneaks, and then the fucking Yankee caps, so many damn Yankee caps, so many backpacks, it was like a dress code. The cars! What happened to them? They looked swollen, puffy fat monsters, stubby and gray. There was a general sameness about them.

He crossed the street, checked street signs, shook his shaggy head. He was in the South Bronx. But what South Bronx was this? It was home, and not home. It was Southern Boulevard, but with different stores and shops. A cluster of teenagers by a stoop, all wearing the same kind of big jackets and leather baseball caps, reminded Crash of gangs. Savage Skulls? Nomads? No way remotely they would dress like that, but it made him wary. Whatever was going on, this wasn’t his neighborhood anymore.

Back to the corner where the entrance to the subway still was, and there, a few feet away, was a newsstand, a funky metal booth with a guy inside selling newspapers. He picked up a copy and looked at the date: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2012.

Is this a joke? He checked the dates on the other papers and magazines. Words and pictures made him dizzy. Crash closed his eyes, caught his breath. Leaned against the cool metal of the kiosk’s side. Opened his eyes. The mad whirl of buses and cars and people all around him. Not real. Real enough.

Little bits were coming back to him. They were moving the stuff, just to be on the safe side. And Pachuco would take some, and Wage and Daniel and Mike, and then they got into a fight because a few days before, Wage had been packing product for sale and came across the briefcase full of Moon Dust. He figured it was product and that’s how some of it ended up out on the street.

The Moon Dust! The special glittery weed! Crash had started smoking it! He remembered being in his bedroom, smoking the Moon Dust … and then, FLASH … he started walking up 149th Street. Where was Daniela’s Hair Salon, and the cuchifritería that used to smell up the block with its fried pork rinds in the window under a lightbulb? PS 25 was still there, but he didn’t recognize anything on the way to St. Mary’s Park. Going there unlocked a whole mess of memories. What kind of stuff was this, this Moon Dust, that made his real life seem like murky images of a remembered dream?

Up the big hill. The spot was still there, the stone steps leading down to the street and the projects, all of it coming to him in driblets. Sure, he had been busted before. Seven ounces was the safe side, and he and his boys did a wild dance with the stuff. It was skill. It was the fucken Puerto Rican samba. And he didn’t care what anybody said about it, these lambe-ojo hijo de putas—what Jose “Crash” Mendoza was doing was resistance. Was the righteous war. Was a fucken crusade against an unfair, oppressive, and racist system. Being against it was as Puerto Rican as … mofongo, damnit. It was an act of survival to sell weed in the devil’s city. He and his boys were a tight band of resistance! Sitting around the pad on St. A

This one day they had cleared the bushes twice already and Crash had just sent Mike back to pick up some more product. No cops in sight so they were feeling pretty loose, just smoking cigarettes and talking with some dudes over by the benches. There was this white hippie dude there, popped out of nowhere. Young, long-haired, patched-up jeans. Just when they were clear that they were all on the same resistance wavelength, the guy got down to business.

“I have an offer to make you, bro,” he said. “I represent a select collective of heads who have cultivated a rare and precious weed.”

Now Crash was open to this. He had heard about honkies coming up here to make drug deals. Sometimes they wanted to buy. Sometimes they were offering a new co