LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DRUG DEALER

Earlier today I was looking through some boxes of books in my office when I found a program from a funeral tucked between the pages of an old hymnal. It was from the funeral of my drug dealer.

Perhaps a little background might be in order…

When the term “drug dealer” is used it often conjures up stereotypes manufactured in Hollywood. We tend to think of drug dealers as tattooed, greasy haired punks with nervous twitches hanging out in back alleys. Or perhaps we think of their bosses and picture rich men in sunglasses and finely tailored Italian suits, being chauffeured around in limos and accompanied by men who look like gorillas with a shave.

My drug dealer was none of those things. He was a seven year old boy.

I was an only child without a sibling to mentor, torment, or ignore, but I did have someone with whom I was very close, and that was my cousin Marty. Marty was six months younger than I was and as children we were pretty much inseparable. We often played in a vacant lot across the street from Marty’s house and one of our favorite games was “superhero”. We would find a broken piece of glass or a dirty pop-top ring and pretend it was a magic talisman that brought the owner unlimited super powers. We never seemed to tire of this game.

The only thing that Marty wanted more than superpowers was to be like his older brother Glen. Marty idolized Glen and as the years went by, Marty copied everything that Glen did. When Glen went out for football, Marty went out for football. When Glen started hanging out with a rougher crowd, Marty started hanging out with a rougher crowd. When Glen started dealing drugs out of the back of their home, Marty started dealing drugs right beside him.

Marty and Glen both became heroin addicts and began to steal to support their habit. When Marty was 16 he was caught breaking into a pharmacy and was sent to the Granite state correctional facility. Upon his release, he and Glen went right back to dealing drugs. In an attempt to clean up, Marty and Glen enrolled in a Methadone program for heroin addicts being administered in Kansas City. On a Friday night he and Glen picked up their weekend supply of Methadone and a couple of six packs of beer and went back to their hotel room. After drinking a six pack and taking his entire weekend supply of methadone at once, Marty went to sleep. He threw up during the night and choked to death without ever waking up. He had just turned 18.

I was a freshman music major at the time preparing for the ministry. I stood over the casket of my closest childhood friend and sang “It is well with my Soul.” I was most certainly singing a lie.

For all of the lives that were damaged by the drugs that Marty sold, I am very sorry. For all of the pain that Marty caused his family, I am very sorry. It wasn’t very long after this that Glen was killed in an automobile accident while driving under the influence. Their mother - my aunt; unable to deal with this kind of loss, sat down on her living room sofa one day after her husband left for work, pulled out a .38 caliber hand gun, pointed it at her heart, and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately, tragedy often begets tragedy.

Marty may have caused a great deal of pain, but I do know that he didn’t have greasy hair, he never owned an Italian suit, and he never went for a ride in a limo. He was just a little kid playing superhero in a vacant lot; a little kid who wanted to be like his brother.

Until today I hadn’t thought about Marty for a very long time. As I sit here at my desk, I’m looking at a broken key ring. I was getting ready to throw it away but I think I’ll hang on to it for awhile. Who knows, it might just be the magic talisman that could have given Marty the superpowers he never really had.