memoirs of a druglord: Part 1

I was at the budding age of eighteen. The brash smell of adolescent stink was still on me. It was in my clothes. I bought new ones with hopes that the smell could be purged into a corner in my closet, but after one night out, there it was again. I walked so fast, and with such purpose that those around me must have thought, “wow, that guy thinks he is the cock of the walk.” Truth be told, no, I was low and scarred most of the time, but wanted to fake it, like any other no good punk my age. I was low, but I wanted to be up. I was ready to climb. I had found highs all around me, in those high school days—highs that I would spend many years questing for. They weren’t just highs to me, they were small pieces of truth—the truth that life was good, and was going to be good.

I thought I had it figured out. Thought I had it all figured out. That is what we are supposed to say, right, when we are looking back on it? Well, its true.

I was itchy—real itchy. I was suffering from big fish little pond, un-restful adventurer in small town shit hole, rebel without a cause, and any other fiction hero syndrome that could be named. Problem was, no one would have believed it. I wasn’t that masculine, red-blooded, boy hero of my town. In fact, at this point in my life, I hadn’t been much more than a loyal sheep to good leaders, in the way of admirable qualities. Muscular and not un-athletic, but sensitive and sweet— not picked last for kickball, but for girls—I was the perfect shoulder to cry on, or the perfect ear to dump in. Up until then I liked it—savored all of it. Accepted the sympathy for being “that guy” and adored the power of being a drifter between worlds of gender. But I felt like the worlds best faker.

Maybe that was it. Maybe that was why I knew that I had to get out. Undeniably, that was one thing I was running from, if running at all. My reputation was anything but what I wanted it to be—what I expected it to be by that point. Yes, believe it or not, at eighteen my clock was ticking, and ticking loud! I only had a hundred years, right? A hundred, cause I figured a vegetarian nonsmoker would live at least that long. Depending on what side of the a imbalanced hormone fest I woke up on a hundred years felt like a long time, but not long enough. I would wager my bottom dollar if you asked an old man on his death bed, at seventy-nine, lets say, if his almost eighty years of life felt like a long time, he would tell you, “sonny/cutie, time flies by you like you wouldn’t believe, I tell you what. One day you just look in the mirror and see you have been robed! Robed outright, for your youth, you know. And there aint no point in looking for the damn thief, you know he long gone by now!”

I had graduated 1,818^th in my class of some two-thousand—and barely graduated; skimmed through it by the skim of my teeth, as my mother often liked to say. I attended night classes at the community college in my town, but I say attended tentatively, because I was there less than not. By that time I was working retail fulltime, selling big screen TVs, and flexing my newly developed charisma muscles. I loved my job, and it was beginning to pay well. I held, and lost, a couple of jobs part time kick around jobs before I found my knack for pushing technology. I was the neighborhood dealer, selling needles so people could push primetime TV straight into their bloodstream—straight into there veins. My company had the best financing in town, and a strapping young salesmen with a rash of ambition. We were a deadly combination. And that job, what started as after school gas money, was now giving me the means for what I already had the motivation for.