My Story, part 1

Good things have been said about me, and bad things have been said about me. I’d like to say that only the good things are true. But that would make me a liar. And the bad list is long enough for now as it is.

But if I could live my life over again, there’s not a whole lot that I’d do differently. I have few regrets. I’ve been through some rough times. But I’m alive, I’m (reasonably) healthy, and I’m happy. I’ve been married, and divorced; I’ve had children; I’ve been to court, I’ve been to jail; I’ve been a drug addict; I’ve been in hospital for an overdose, I’ve been to rehab (and not just once); I’ve been a drug dealer; I’ve been kidnapped and almost killed. What a long strange trip its been (and I’m only 35). And, to tell the truth, I don’t have any regrets. I’ve learned a lot from my experiences. Ill try to live life to its fullest and enjoy it to the max.

I’ve always been interested in making money and causing trouble. I was around twelve years old when I “went bad”. In PEI, the [magic] mushrooms grow wild. Magic Mushrooms. I kept hearing about the older kids taking the magic mushrooms. I was curious what happens when you eat these things?

I remember playing a game of baseball in my front yard when I was in Grade 7. I told my best friend at the time that I wanted to try magic mushrooms. He says, “No, you’re crazy …”. I didn’t listen to him. I never listened to anybody. I tried the mushrooms and it was the freakiest experience I ever had. I took them at lunch on a school day. A little while later, I was in history class and I thought the room was floating. I saw waves in the floor like it was made of water. The teacher was about ten feet tall. Then he was short and fat. Then he was tall and skinny again. I was stoned and I loved it. I found some new friends and we’d take mushrooms every weekend. First we’d just go stand outside the liquor store until we found us someone willing to buy us some beer. Then we’d take mushrooms and hang around by the train tracks just having a good time.

In the summer, my cousins would come down from Montreal and stay for a few weeks. They were older than me and I didn’t spend a lot of time with them. But one of them, Mike, was selling drugs and he would bring pot and hash down with him. He told me that if I would sell five joints for him, he’d give me one. For every five I sold, I’d get one. So I started selling pot. I was 12 years old. Mike also said that if I picked mushrooms with him, he’d buy them from me. That first year that I started picking, I got three ounces. I sold them to Mike for $100.00 each. That’s $300.00. My first drug deal. I was on my way. The next year, I picked about a half pound (eight ounces). The mushrooms would grow in the fall, from September to November. I’d pick them after school and sometimes I’d get up before school and go picking. I soon had enough money to buy a motorcycle – a Yamaha 200 street and dirt. With this I could travel around and find all the best fields for picking. Most years, I would get about 2 pounds. Instead of selling them for cash, I would mail them to Montreal and Mike would send back hash on trade. I would sell the hash by the gram. It was always good hash and I could get $20/gram. By the time that I was 16, I was making a lot of money. Enough money that I could afford cocaine. Soon, I was having that sent down from Montreal too. I was a sixteen year old cocaine dealer. This was in the early eighties in small town Prince Edward Island. Cocaine dealers were few and far between at that time. But I was headed for the big leagues.

But I was also a practical joker in high school. I used to use the mail a lot for my pranks. I would go to the drug store and take the subscription cards out of the magazines and put someone else’s name and address on them and send them off. My high school principal had a name that he didn’t like – “Hymie”. I think it was from an old tv show about a robot. Anyway, the high school had hundreds of dollars of subscriptions coming addressed to Hymie. I was a suspect in this case, I suppose because I was involved in all the trouble that went on in our school.

“Hymie” took me out of class one day. He wanted to compare my handwriting with the writing on the subscription card that one of the post office workers had given him (The investigation was on). It was quite obvious to me and I would think anyone else that whoever had filled out the card had printed with his other hand. Hymie couldn’t make the match and I was released, with a smile on my face and a gain in my ‘outlaw’ reputation. This was only one of many encounters with Hymie and I came out ahead.

But there was one prank that I don’t think that I’ll ever top. I used to hang around with my friend Jamie. He dropped out of school in grade 9 or 10 but we stayed friends, even after this devious prank. This happened when I was 16 or 17. One day, I was reading a magazine and I saw an ad in the back from a guy in prison in the states who was lonely and wanted girls to write to him. Now Jamie, as you know, can also be a girls name. So I composed a two-page letter from Jamie. I made it sound like I was a horny young girl without actually saying that I was a girl. I told the guy that what I’d like to do with him when he got out and I signed the letter with X’s and O’s (hugs and kisses). And off to the post office I went. I thought that Jamie would get a letter from this guy in prison who wanted to fuck him and this would be pretty funny. I could never have imagined what really happened. You see, a few weeks later, the letter comes back in the mail marked “return to sender”.

Jamie’s father picked up the mail. He saw that this letter from his son was addressed to a guy in prison, and, justifiably curious, he opened the letter. And, as it happens, my handwriting is very similar to Jamies. So Jamies dad reads the letter and he flips out. “My son’s gay! My boy’s a fucking faggot!” (Jamie’s father was a macho guy, spent most of his time out in the barn fixing motorcycles). He didn’t take the news well. I hadn’t ever told Jamie about the letter so he didn’t know what was going on and wasn’t able to put up much of a defense right away. So after hearing about this, I told Jamie what I had done. He wasn’t terribly happy but he saw the humor in it. He explained things to his mother, and after a few days, his mom was able to make peace with his dad and everything was ok. But only for a while …

Because not long after sending the first letter, I saw another ad for a homosexual correspondence club – “Hmmmm ….”, I though, “What if …..?” So, I wrote another letter (from Jamie). In the ad, they asked for $5.00 for membership fees so I put in a five dollar bill. Several weeks pass and, lo and behold, this letter comes back marked again, “Return to Sender”. And again, Jamies dad picks up the mail. Here we go again. This time his dad totally loses it. He goes to the liquor store, buys two quarts of whisky, and proceeds to get smashed, trying to drown his sorrows. This time no-one is gonna convince him his boys not queer. There’s a big fight at Jamies house which ends with Jamie moving out and going to live with his older sister. (I should also mention that Jamie didn’t have any girlfriends, so this, I suppose, makes the situation a little more believable, and the $5 bill looked serious too). It was about 2 years before Jamie moved back home again. Jamie wasn’t very talkative about this. Most of the info I got from his younger brother.

After I finished high school, I went to University – St. Mary’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but both of my brothers had been to university so my parents insisted that I go too. So off I went. I didn’t care about school but I wanted to live in Halifax – the big city compared to where I was from. I started selling drugs to the other students when I got there. I was taking trips to Montreal to buy hash by the kilo and coke by the ounce. At St Mary’s, I sold it by the gram and I made a lot of money – easy money. It was hard to be interested in school when I was making so much money selling drugs. Halifax was just one long party. I was going downtown to the bars almost every night, doing cocaine all the time. I could never get out of bed for my classes. I made it through my first year but then I pretty much gave up on school altogether.

In the second year, I pretty dropped most of my courses and focused on selling drugs. Too bad I got busted I guess it was bound to happen. There was so much drug use and drug dealing going on at school. I sold a gram to a narc. Funny thing is, I knew he was I narc, but I sold it to him anyway. I was so stoned I didn’t know what to do. I had just finished smoking a monster spliff when the narc came to my door. “Somebody said I could buy a gram here”, he says. I had about 20 grams in my pocket and the room was full of smoke. I thought if I didn’t sell it I probably get busted anyway. So I sold him a gram. He said thanks and walked away but I just knew he was a narc. Sure enough, about a week later I came home and my door was wide open, my clothes were thrown all over the place, and there was a card from the police sitting on my desk. When I left earlier that morning, I was just after buying a quarter pound of hash (4 oz). I weighed out 20 grams and put them in my desk. I put the rest of the chunk in a drawer, under my clothes. Then I locked my door and started heading downtown. Five minutes later, I came back thinking, “I should hide that better”, so I put it in a case of beer bottles. When I checked my room after the search, the 20 grams were gone but the big chunk was still there! Mixed feelings there. I was busted but it would have been a lot worse if they had found the big piece. This pretty much ended my university days. I was allowed to finish the year but I was kicked out of residence. I moved in (illegally) with a couple of friends who shared a room in residence. This was where I first tried heroin. One of the guys was from Hong Kong and every month he would get his friend to mail him a few grams. I snorted a big line of it one night and I got really sick. I remember standing up and it seemed like the walls took off in different directions. I fell down and crawled to the toilet and puked over and over again. I looked in the mirror and my skin was almost blue. I felt terrible but I wanted to try it again. For the bust, I got a $600 fine. No big deal really but I got a criminal record for it. That was the worst that happened.

After I wrapped things up at St. Mary’s, I moved back home to P.E.I.   That’s where I met Jean, who eventually became my wife. She and I were perfect together (or so I thought). She had a good sense of humor and she didn’t mind me selling drugs or handing out with my friends all night. She never complained about anything and she tolerated all my bad habits.

But I didn’t have a job in P.E.I. I didn’t want to work anyway. I could make a lot more money selling dope. But after getting busted there was a lot of pressure from my family to go straight so I decided to give it a try. Not in Souris, but in Toronto. I packed my bags and Jean and I moved to Toronto. I took a job there at a record and tape distributor making not much more than minimum wage. But I had over $10,000 in the bank when I was in Halifax so I was comfortable. We were only there for a month or two when Jean announced she was pregnant. Oh fuck. So she moved back home. I had some friends in Toronto and I wanted to spend the winter there. When spring came around I moved back to the Island. Jean had the baby, a boy – Steven (my middle name) and we rented a house and moved in together. With my place now I started selling coke seriously. I was buying it cheap by the kilo in Montreal and selling it by the gram. The money was good. This went on for several years with me amassing a small empire and a big habit. Eventually I moved to Charlottetown and opened my own business [Days of Wine and Beer], a retail store selling wine and beer making supplies. I was selling ounces and pounds of coke now, living the high life. I always had a roll of hundreds in my pocket. I had five cars and the money to do anything that I wanted. But nothing lasts forever … even cold November rain.

One night I got a call from my brother telling me that [my cousin] Mike in Montreal was dead. Somebody slit his throat outside a bar in downtown Montreal. I think this is when things started to go bad for me too. I was able to get another drug connection and the money was good for a few more years but I had gotten a look at the ugly side of the business and things were never the same as when I was getting it from Mike. We were family. With Mike, if I was late with the money it wasn’t a problem. With anybody else, it doesn’t work that way. After Mike died I did a lot of thinking. I stopped planning for the future and began to live more for the moment. What a mistake that would turn out to be.

By the time I hit 30 [1996], I was a fucking junkie. I was still dealing large amounts of coke but I could see that it was coming to an end. I didn’t care. I needed the junk so bad I didn’t care about anything. I’d go on it for 2 or 3 months straight and then I’d come off it and be sick for a month or two. But as soon as I’d start feeling better, I’d be on a plane to Montreal to buy another bag, for about $6000 an ounce. I’d tell myself that I’d only do it on weekends so I wouldn’t get hooked. But I couldn’t resist the high. It made me feel so good. Once I got that bag in my hand, I didn’t let go till it was all gone. And then I was sick again. And it’s every bit as bad as you see in the movies, probably worse. But there’s no better feeling than being high on heroin. It made me feel like I could do anything that I wanted.