I only spent a year and nine months selling heroin, but it changed me forever.

The money was good. I had recently given up my cocaine sales. I passed off my beeper (yes, a beeper) with all of the crack “stings” to a slightly younger associate, and dove feet first into the “boy” trade. In the ghetto, cocaine is the white girl, and heroin is the white boy; even though sometimes, heroin is brown, but that’s a story for another day.

The year was 1996. I was 19, and I was also a college student. Where I grew up, drug sales were commonplace, even for those of us that were plenty smart enough to do something less dangerous. A friend of mine got me into it, and he will remain unnamed. Just know that he is a successful businessman today, and no longer sells drugs. The person that got him into it is now dead, recently killed. His death is 20 years after these facts, and he spent too long in the drug trade.

In the crack game, there was always an older guy that would shepherd you through the forest, teaching you how to not get caught, how to save your money, and how to deal with the addicts and the police. You had to be unforgiving, if you gave people credit. If they didn’t pay you, you had to hurt them. I never had a problem with that. I had oversized fists on an under-sized body, and had no compunctions about using them to knock teeth loose, or out.

I had spent many summers slaving under the hot sun, carrying bricks and mortar for my grandfather.

The man had no mercy. He was from the deep South, Mississippi. In his world, if the black man doesn’t work himself to death, he’s dead anyway. Day after day, he worked me and my younger cousin. This started in the year 1989, when I was twelve. We would drive out to the suburbs of Indianapolis, and every day was a test under that hot summer sun.

He didn’t care if you blacked out. But I wanted school clothes, and money. I wanted to be a man. He was making me into one, and he was also making me worse for what was to come. He was hardening me, but it was a blessing and a curse at the same time. Skip to when I’m seventeen years old, after several summers of this hardening. The physical and psychological beatings I had taken had shaped me into a truly unyielding individual.

Ironically, an old police officer had taught me to box, and how to effectively hurt someone without a weapon. I doubt very seriously he expected me to use these skills in the way that I did. Add this to the tests my grandfather put me through, and you have a young man that doesn’t crack easily. But everybody has a breaking point.

I had a gun, too, though. I had a .380 caliber pistol when I was only 15 years old. My dad didn’t know, but he was a military veteran, and he allowed me to fire guns for as long as I could remember. He also let me drive his Dodge Magnum frequently when I was less than ten years old, but that’s a whole other story.

In my neighborhood, the only goal was to not be a victim. I saw so much violence that it became clear the only option was to be the predator. That mentality leads to savagery, and the vacation that we all took from humanity. Some people can’t understand that, and I’m happy for them. They don’t understand what it’s like to live in a place where half of the houses have wood panels where windows should be. Good for them.

The police that patrolled my neighborhood treated me like a criminal, anyway. I was an honors student, and all I wanted to do was paint and draw pictures because that is what made me happy. But nobody respected that. People respect a bloody nose or a wound that bleeds without medical attention. Or, they respect nothing after they’re dead.

Let’s go back to 1996. I had finished my time at Purdue, West Lafayette. But now I was back in Indianapolis, to finish my education at IUPUI. I was selling crack again, and it was so easy. I liked toying with police that knew what I was doing, but they couldn’t catch me. I’m lucky they never framed me, because I was guilty as sin.

They used to haul me in, and I would laugh. Somebody would say I was in the vicinity of a shooting or some other crime. They would try to get me to drink a bunch of sprite in the interrogation rooms, so I would have to pee real bad and answer their questions. But my grandpa had made me hard, to the core.The detectives would hover over me, hoping against hope that I would crack. All I did was laugh, until they had to kick me loose. The police weren’t used to mean little shits like me laughing at them, and refusing to say anything for hours on end. They hated me, and I hated them back.

Maybe if they had left me alone when I was just painting watercolors, I wouldn’t have been such an asshole.

To be continued...