The Medicine Queen

“Everybody’s got to have their own hustle. Your hustle doesn’t have to be the same as my hustle, that’s fine. It can be school, work, family, whatever. But you got to have your own hustle.”

Ilayi was a warm, traditionally-built woman in a loud yellow hand-batiked print, with a different loud yellow hand-batiked print headband. She was loud, forthright, sincere, and so comfortable in her own body, she made everyone around her feel comfortable.

She used to be a pot packager. “I would sit there rolling and packaging joints eight hours a day and I’d come home and my Mama would be like, ‘Girl, why you smell like a Ganjafest!’” But the steady money was great. Then she was a pot deliverer, working just six hours a day, five days a week. “I’d be bringing home seven thousand dollar a week,” she said. “I loved my job. Those paychecks were beautiful. I was putting money in my savings account, I was relaxed, I was this big around — ” (holds up pinky finger) “ — ok, I was never this big around, but, you know what I’m saying.”

Then California legalized pot, and everything went to shit.

“I was one of the ones who voted for legalisation,” she said. “We all thought it would be great, you know, put that money toward schools, regulate stuff. But it ruined everything, for everyone, because since the regulations are constantly changing, nobody can stay in business. Also now the dispensaries exploit their deliverers, so they can stay in business. It’s impossible. I wish they’d make it illegal again. I lost five thousand dollar a week when they legalized.”

Apparently the Bay Area is constantly changing its regulations and nobody can keep up. Deliverers have to have a locked trunk, the evening curfew on order placement is always changing, the business is only legal if it’s all cash, you can’t use credit cards…it’s a mess.

“The deliverers got to use their own cars,” Ilayi said. “And since nobody can keep up with the changing regulations in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, the dispensers gotta open up their business to like Antioch, Dublin, places like that. And if you’re driving on deliveries and you run out, or you don’t have what they order by the time you get there, you have to drive all the way back to the city and get it for them.”

The schedules sounded ridiculous too. “If your shift ends at 4, and you’re in San Francisco, and an order comes in from Brentwood [a minimum hour and a half away with no traffic, and there’s always traffic] at 3:59, you have to take it, and you cannot end your shift until you’ve made that delivery. That’s how the suppliers stay in business.”

Their businesses sounded, if anything, even dodgier now than back when pot was illegal. “It’s super dangerous for the suppliers now, because by law it has to be all cash,” Ilayi said. “So you get these suppliers who are handling hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, and they got nowhere to put that money. Because although cannabis is legal in California, proceeds from it are still illegal on a federal level, so you can only put that cash in a bank that serves only California and has no business with the entire rest of the country. You tell me where you can find a bank like that. So the suppliers got all this cash sitting around.”

The young Chinese man in the sharp cobalt blue business suit shoulded, “you shouldn’t be driving a Lyft, you should be a cannabis consultant!”

Ilayi laughed. “No way, man! I did that, it’s a terrible job! Basically you telling people how to get high. Which way is right for them. That’s none of my business. It’s like, I don’t know, what you got going on? You want edibles, you want to smoke it, you need it for medicinal purposes — just get what you need, you know what I’m saying. That’s your thing.”

I chuckled, thinking about how preferring clients willing to claim responsibility for their own journeys was a big part of my own professional life.

Finally, now that it’s legal, the drug dealers all opened their own cannabis dispensaries, so there’s a surplus. So now nobody’s turning a profit, not the sellers, not the deliverers, and not the customers either, because the customers have to pay for all the regulations.

Which is how I met Ilayi driving a rideshare. She was a woman who enjoyed paying her bills, no matter how it had to be done.

“I’ve always had a hustle,” she said. “I like being able to pay my rent. So whatever it was. It was selling cars, it was the streets, it was the cannabis industry, now I’m a chef.”

Ilayi’s recipes sounded more far more magical than pot. I could see her ancestors smiling down at her with her own rich warm smile.

“So I made dinner for my friend of twenty-five years and my cousin, right, and that’s how they met. And then they had the most beautiful wedding, and I was the maid of honour and everything went wrong for me that day but I told her, that way, everything would go right for her in their marriage. And they have a beautiful marriage and are expecting their first baby. So you see, my food is magical.”

She also had a recipe for a chicken soup that would reduce the flu to a single day of suffering, and then you’d be back on your feet again. She made the soup for her boyfriend who had the flu, “and he was like, Woman,” she said, showing how he rolled his eyes in appreciation.

He was on his feet the next day.

….Ilayi respected that not everybody had her hustle. “That’s fine, if a guy is like, he doesn’t have my hustle, we can be friends, you know. But we’re not going to work as romantic partners. The one thing I ask though is that you don’t get in the way of my hustle. You don’t have to have your own, but you cannot stop mine. I’ve always been like this, and I’m always going to be like this. If I ever get married or have a baby, I’ll still be like this. Back when I was delivering pot, I used to bring my little nephew with me. He’d want to watch tv, and I’d be like, No, we gotta go to work now.”

And thus the bills got paid.

Ilayi’s Chicken Soup for a One-Day Flu

A lot of ginger, cut into small but not tiny pieces (“I really want you to eat the ginger,” she says)

Lemon slices

Garlic

Vegetable broth

Noodles, separately cooked in olive oil, salt, black peppercorns, and garlic

Sichuan peppercorns

Habañero peppers

Chicken marinated in vodka (or Jameson’s) and orange juice

“I want to heat up your system, with all those spices, is the point,” she says.

Ilayi’s Medicine Balls

“Because sometimes you just want to avoid the cold up front, you know what I mean,” she says.

Lemon

Tea

Vitamin C gummi bears melted into the ball