IRONY

"ONLY DEAL IN HEROIN, PCP, and cocaine." Sheila* leans in; her eyes dart to each occupied table in the restaurant. "Okay. Now. You gotta buy cocaine when it's $15,000 or lower, and heroin when it's around $7,000. Don't ever buy acid, unless it's homemade and really cheap--like $400."

I try and keep the breakdown straight in my head. That's why I like it, because there's a system to be memorized. Sheila likes the system too; she's attracted to anything that makes you categorize your thoughts.

"If you start buying everything on the market, you can't really keep track of your profit. Only buy 'ludes when they bottom out. You'll know sweetie, don't worry. They'll be like three bucks. Forget about weed. Right? I never buy weed." She turns to Marcia,* a co-worker.

"No weed," Marcia concurs. "I'd buy a gun though. When the police start chasing you... I don't know how you couldn't invest in a gun."

Marcia's in it to be a bad girl. Her eyes get wild and patient at the same time; color spreads through her cheeks.

The three of us work together; we're on our lunch break. Professionally, we help kids quit these drugs and any other addiction they might gather up for comfort's sake while living on the streets. The organization we work for is a drop-in center for homeless youth. The intake, making, and availability of heroin, speed, crack, seems to be regulated by something that governs cycles--a moon or a sun; we are always aware of whether it is low or high tide.

We don't make any money doing what we do. When I saw Sheila with a Palm Pilot early in the year, I was suspicious. I found the device an immodest statement in a homeless shelter that can't afford computers made in the '90s. Risking my job, I grabbed the Palm Pilot from her one afternoon. She then guiltily admitted her hidden addiction to me: Sheila loved pretending she was a drug dealer. She was addicted to the computer game Dope Wars. She quickly informed me that she wasn't the only one who loved to play this game; it's the most popular downloaded game. The game, in fact, is wildly popular worldwide. There are others like her in Germany, England, France, Australia. (She admitted too that she never does anything else on her Palm Pilot.)

Soon (the next day), we were all addicted. All of us--drug counselors and social workers--loved being drug dealers on our 10-minute breaks and during our lunch hour. We would dance between conversations with clients about how their vices were destroying their lives and soft-spoken conversations behind closed doors about how to sell the optimum amount of drugs.

Independently, Sheila, Marcia, and myself started to have dreams about Benjamin.* Ben is the toughest, realest drug dealer we know. He comes into the center frequently. Something new started to fill the space between us. We all felt a protective veil start to shade his shady character. He began to look like an artist.

In my dream, Ben and I ride on old Schwinns that we just plucked from an empty parking garage. On our ride, the streets are empty in deference to our power. We park our bikes in front of a lone and unmarked building. We have business meetings with oddly dressed men and women from all over the world. And everyone wants our deal.

TRUTH

Fatboy Whitey doesn't know any real drug dealers. He's an IT specialist in Sydney, Australia, which means he's smart, and winter is upon him. He's "partial to '60s music." He's 28 years old. FB Whitey nearly ruined himself in high school by spending too much time playing computer games. "Even now, I can spend a total of 12 hours in one day playing a game," he told me in our e-mail correspondence.

I found Fatboy through his website, Veteran of the Dope Wars (www.geocities. com/fatboywhitey), an homage page to the great game. When I asked him if playing Dope Wars made him want to throw his life in the air and become a real drug dealer, he told me flatly that it had not given him the urge to do so. "For one thing," he wrote, "if I lost my glasses during a shootout with the police, I'd be a dead Fatboy for sure."

Although I prefer bouncing between the boroughs of NYC, buying heroin in the Bronx and selling it in Manhattan, Fatboy informed me that there are versions of Dope Wars that allow you to become a dealer in London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Indianapolis, Derby, and his hometown, Sydney. Some versions show detailed maps of the cities in question, honoring their streets, airports, and districts. Cities are the dead-center beauty of virtual and real drug dealing. The drug dealer has a private a map--a map we all long to get our hands on. The danger, the taboo, the fear, is derived from the city's character, not the drugs. Drug dealing and drug dealers respond to a city's authority, and not the inverse. A city wants to assimilate this power for itself.

Fatboy reminded me that "loan sharks can turn violent if you don't pay them back; police dogs can chase you and cause you to lose valuable merchandise; and most of all, police can shoot you dead." But a lot of good happens too: The price of 'ludes does bottom out, you can lose Officer Hardass in an alley, and sometimes, if you're really lucky, you can find PCP on a dead guy in the subway station.

ART

"The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped."

--Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Dope Wars is the artful reflection and reduction of this world into a world of its own, in which all parts are jumbled and reassigned. Addiction is to the game itself, not to the drugs within the game. Business acumen is relied upon as one is drawn into the rhythms of market price fluctuations. Violence is composed as a polite question: "Officer Hardass is chasing you. Do you want to fight or run?"

"Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world," Adorno says in his Aesthetic Theory, "one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity." Dope Wars, as artwork, manifests a city beyond either truth or irony. By reaching beyond the limits of our irony, it returns the player to his or her sanctified reality. To me, the city looks different after I've finished playing--less and more terrible, but meaningful. I'm amazed by structures, shapes, footsteps, what people say in casual conversation. I'm in tune with some rhythm I was accidentally ignoring before. I feel, too, like I've escaped the terror resounding in daily life that sums in death for all of us. This is the small pleasure granted me by my Palm Pilot, which fits snug in my jacket pocket and quietly refuses the empirical world.

* Names have been changed.