I accepted John’s offer. Just like that, I’d jumped a rung on the ladder.
As many teens are, I was easily impressed with the marks of success. John, my new connect, had accumulated a lot of wealth through dealing. While others got picked up by their parents after school or drove beat-up cars, John would come get me in his brand-new Acura 3.2 TL with enormous chrome rims and an upgraded stereo system bumping “Ether” by Nas or the new Jay-Z album.
Rap music had a huge effect on me. My parents and the media seemed to think the music was going to negatively influence the kids of my generation. Adults did everything they could to shut down the rap industry, going all the way back to when Snoop Dogg released Doggystyle. I’d grown up sneaking a listen to Biggie or 2Pac while my parents tried their best to shelter me from the music. But as soon as my dad left, rap became a core influence in my life.
The attempts to censor the music always seemed a waste to me. I believed people would make choices based on all different kinds of motives, not solely because of the music they listened to. In hindsight, maybe the lyrics—especially the parts that glorified drugs—influenced me more than I knew.
It was the most exhilarating feeling to drive around Milford selling drugs while listening to Jay-Z’s “Can’t Knock the Hustle” or “Ten Crack Commandments” as popularized by Tony Montana in Scarface and then ironicized for eternity with Biggie’s song. While I couldn’t relate to much of the dark content in the songs yet, the parts about drug dealing made me feel as though I was part of a culture. As a somewhat sheltered middle-class white kid, it was exhilarating and new. Anytime one of the songs referenced smoking weed, selling drugs, or partying, it gave me goosebumps. Slowly but surely, my lifestyle was beginning to mirror the lyrics in my favorite music.
Throughout my junior year, I continued to prolifically sell marijuana. At seventeen, I lived at home with my mom and my little sister, since my older sister was still attending college at UConn. Half my battle was trying to hide the smell of the weed from my mom. I was moving pounds at a time, and the stench was unbearable.
Privacy had always been a rare commodity at my home. As teens, we weren’t allowed to have locks on our bedroom doors, and my mother would randomly come in from time to time to snoop around.
This presented a problem due to my expanding dealing business. Through my ability to talk and build relationships, I’d grown my massive customer list to the point that it now stretched across multiple cities. With this expanded customer base came expanded opportunities on the supply side.
Because of my youth and inability to put up the $3,200 necessary to purchase a pound of weed to sell, the higher-ups had started “fronting” me the product—or giving it to me on credit—until I could off-load it and pay them back. They took the risk because they knew I was beneficial to their bottom line due to the volume of sales I was capable of making.
In the middle of my junior year, my connects received a major shipment from Canada of some of the smelliest, most pungent “BC Bud,” named after the area where the weed was grown, in British Columbia. We wrapped the stuff in Ziploc after Ziploc, but it was no use. There was no masking the skunky aroma no matter how hard we tried to disguise it.
One morning in my room before school, I split a pound of the BC Bud into two separate bags and double- and triple wrapped them. I hid both bags in the back of my closet inside my ski boots. I figured there was no chance my mom would look inside those boots.
When I arrived home from school that day, my mom was in my room, waiting for me. She held up the two giant bags of marijuana.
“What is this?” she screamed. “You’re selling drugs, aren’t you?”
“How did you get that?” I said, my voice rising. Anger surged through me. “What are you fucking doing in my room?” My questions deflected the fact that I’d just been caught hiding a felony-sized stash of weed in my room.
Up until then, my mom had only a vague notion that I was up to no good. She’d found stashes of money in my room, and she knew I was buying lots of new clothes. I often left at random times, sometimes during dinner, for no apparent reason. I’d rush out with a pound of weed, just as the meatloaf came out of the oven, and then return with $4,000 in my pocket right when dessert was served. My mom suspected something was going on, but she’d had no idea of the extent of my activities.
Now there was no avoiding the truth. For the first time, my mom realized the seriousness of the situation. Her son was selling drugs.
With her discovery came an ultimatum.
“I can either flush it,” she said, “and you can stay. Or you can have it back and leave the house today.”
I chose to leave.
As much as I wanted to stay, I owed a lot of money for the product. The consequences for non-payment would be harsher than a few weeks on the street.
In a rage tinged with a sinking feeling of sadness, I stuffed what I could of my belongings into my L.L. Bean backpack. I grabbed my pillow and headed down the stairs, knowing that leaving home at seventeen was a momentous decision.
My mom stood at the door and watched me with tears rolling down her cheeks. She was putting her foot down, but I could see she also didn’t want me to leave. Her face was etched in despair, and I could see in her expression that she hoped I would change my mind and turn around.
But I was resolute. I stuffed my belongings into the back seat of my 1999 Volkswagen Jetta and drove off as my little sister Gabby watched, sobbing, through the pane glass of the front door.
As I drove away from my family and the life I knew, waves of dark despair rolled over me. I knew I was making bad choices, but I felt unable to change the course of my life. I felt swept away on a tide I couldn’t control.
I stayed at a friend’s house for a week, until my mom called and told me I could come back home, as long as I stopped selling.
I came home with the intention to do right by my family and myself. I informed my dealers that I was done selling. I told my friends I wouldn’t get high anymore. But soon, those sentiments went out the window and I was right back to using and selling again.
After my mom went to sleep at 9 p.m., I would sneak out and make sales. I slid the screen door open and tiptoed out the back door to meet buyers under the streetlights.
The silence of the night was calm but eerie. There was the uneasy feeling that someone might be watching me or that at any minute, a cop might roll up on me and find enough drugs to lock me up.
I was getting away with something, living on the edge. It was exhilarating…an adrenaline rush. I was addicted to this high more than anything else.
And so the cycle began, the pattern of being kicked out of my home, then being let back in, being trusted again and subsequently betraying that trust—a struggle that would consume my life for the next ten years.
It was quite literally a fight between good and evil. The drugs and money had an inexplicable power to pull me back in, time and again.
They were forces to be reckoned with, all-consuming and without equal.
nine
I spent the rest of my junior year caught up in my chosen lifestyle. The parties were endless, and every weekend they seemed to get bigger. There were kegs and bottles, and people smoking weed, and none of our actions seemed to garner serious consequences.