Ode to a Drug Dealer
Most people close to us let us down one way or another. Whether it’s your spouse, a family member, a friend, colleague or your boss, sooner or later, when it really counts, they all leave you hanging. That’s been my experience, anyway. It's to be expected in the workplace, especially the office environment. When you get right down to it, what is an office but an artificially lit, climate-controlled synthetic enclosure where a bunch of people who would otherwise never have met gather for forty-plus hours a week to pretend to get along so they can do their job and earn that bi-weekly paycheck? Okay, some office workers get along, some even become friends, but man, the office space is one place where you do not want to assume the colleague in the next cubicle has your back.
I accept that. It’s harder to accept (and kind of sad) that you can’t truly rely on family and friends. Sure, some tight bonds are formed, but those bonds are conditional. I mean, is there really such a thing as unconditional love? What is the basis of love, after all, but a condition – who the person is – that makes us love the person? When the person changes, the condition changes, and the bond is broken. We won’t necessarily reject the person completely, but until the condition is restored, the love that was attached to it cannot be expressed and we simply do not rely on that person anymore.
There was one person who I could always rely on, however - my drug dealer. That’s why it breaks my heart just a little to say goodbye to him. I will call him Joe. We have been through a lot together, Joe and I. Enough to call each other brother and mean it. Whenever I needed relief from the tedium of the conventional world, I could always count on Joe to deliver that little plastic packet that made everything just right. They were usually a matter of clockwork routine, our street-level rendezvous. Sure, there were some occasions of waiting long, anxious hours for his confirmation text to hit my phone, but he never left me hanging.
And then came that time when Joe’s loyalty was truly put to the test.
A little backstory. My downward spiral into drug addiction started innocently enough, as such things usually do. I had a job (that’s right, an office job), and it paid the bills with a little left over. But it was such a drag. That daily schlep to the city, the obnoxious colleagues, the monotonous work. It’s not that I couldn’t have handled it without chemical relief, it’s that I didn’t have to. And isn’t that what all drugs offer, a tempting alternative to the uncompromising facts of reality? So, yeah, I turned to opioids and stimulants for relief (I will elaborate on that intriguing combination later). For a few weeks, it was manageable. Every few days around lunchtime the familiar itch would start, and it was an easy itch to scratch. Just a simple text message: Hey brother, got any tickets to the game? (That was our secret code: “tickets to the game,” – I know, juvenile). Anyway, within an hour or so, almost without exception, came his reply: Hey brother, got ya. Will let you know the time in a bit.
Hey brother, got ya. Oh, the exhilaration of those four words. The mere anticipation of our transaction would fire up my synapses. Suddenly, my job took on a rosy complexion. Those annoying colleagues I mentioned earlier - they could be tolerated, humored even, and it’s not like they could help it, so give them a little break. And the monotonous work? Well, it’s amazing what one can tolerate when sublime relief is imminent.
And then the follow-up text would hit: meet at our Starbucks in ten minutes or meet me at the corner of Church and Warren in 15 min or can you meet me outside Penn in an hour?
You bet I could, and did, without exception.
That’s when the cash-for-cache transaction took place. What’s that fantastic line from the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls album? Booze and pills and powders, you can choose your medicine. That’s the one. Well, booze is a given, and it’s licit. My illicit medicines were painkillers and cocaine.
I will elaborate. First the pain killers. Oxycontin – you’ve probably heard of it, it’s the brand name the devious marketers at Purdue Pharma slapped on their little blue lab-formulated monsters. What you may not know is that Oxycontin is a portmanteau, a made-up word coined from a combination of the words Oxycodone (synthetic opioid) and Continuous (release). Clever, huh? Equally clever were the street users who quickly discovered that simply crushing and snorting the tablets transformed “continuous” relief into instant rush. And with pill mills popping up like mushrooms in cow patties from Appalachia down to Florida and distribution networks leveraging the interstates NSE&W, there was plenty of product to crush and snort.
There has got to be at least a dozen street names for Oxycontin - blues, beans, Oxy, OC, Babe the Blue OX, etc., etc. - but whatever you want to call them, it all boils down to an innocuous looking round pill of robin egg blue with a score down the middle, a capitol M stamped on one side and the number 30 (i.e., 30 mg) on the other. That’s the backstory. Fact is, the “glory” days of Oxycontin flooding the streets of America are long gone. The Feds finally turned off the pill mill spigot in the mid-2010s and the supply of street-level pharma-grade Oxy went bone dry. However, this turn of events created a vacuum of enormous demand and scant supply. And you know who besides nature abhors a vacuum? Drug cartels, that’s who. Say what you want about those vicious Mexican cartels, but they sure hear opportunity when it knocks. And how, you may ask, did the cartels answer? Well, the best ideas are usually quite simple, and what the cartels did was incredibly so: they simply started manufacturing counterfeit Oxycontin, swapping out the active ingredient, oxycodone, with that high-octane newcomer in the long line of lab synthesized opioids to hit the streets - fentanyl - and it was goodbye to FDA approved oxycodone hydrochloride manufactured in sterile big pharma labs up in Yankeedom, and hello to Sinaloa cartel mandated fentanyl mixed in garbage cans with who-the-fuck-knows-what and pressed into look-alike pills in squalid tin-roof shacks down in ole México and snuck north across the border by every means imaginable.
Okay, that covers the pills. Let’s briefly talk powders. Namely – cocaine. To be clear, the blow on the street nowadays pales compared to the big rock candy mountain Scarface days of the ‘80s, but the stuff I was scoring still had enough moxie that a couple lines made me sit up straight in my office chair. The problem is, it’s a fool’s errand to start hitting the powder midday and expect to be able to function until bedtime. Cocaine is selfish – after the first line, it demands your full attention. Resistance is futile. And trust me – it’s no fun going into a 1 PM conference room meeting after two hefty blasts in the bathroom stall. Unless…unless you temper it with, say, fentanyl-laced counterfeit painkillers. Early in my progression to becoming a full-fledged drug addict, I discovered that mixing the Oxy with the cocaine offered a synergy: the edgy effect of the cocaine did a little tango with the dopey side of the fentanyl, and the result was a happy medium, the best of both worlds. The street slang is speedballs, and it originally referred to mixing heroin and cocaine and injecting it into the vein of one’s choice. These days, it refers to shooting, snorting or smoking any mix of a stimulant and a depressant. It’s a high wire act to be sure, but man, I was good at it. My cocaine-to-fentanyl intake ratio was roughly 4:1. Good thing, too, given that fentanyl is a mega-depressant and the reason why many an abuser’s last vision in life is of a bedroom ceiling, a tile floor, or the dashboard of an automobile.
Enter Joe, my faithful drug dealer. Joe was a short, wiry guy with a fringe of gray around an otherwise bald head, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and remarkably good taste in clothes. Always cool under pressure, Joe was, real street smart, and like any professional, he never dipped into what he was selling. It’s funny, the first time I met him one-on-one, in a coffee shop near Bryant Park, I fumbled the transaction. I had been introduced to him by a friend, which is usually how it goes (it’s not like you enter a Google search for drug dealer near me and get a list in return), and as I approached him to initiate my first independent DD, I took the cash from my pocket for all to see. That was a no-no. Yet Joe, gentle soul that he was, simply admonished me to put the money away and then he handed me his cellphone. I took the phone and saw that there was a bank envelope under it. Ah, now I get it. I swapped out the envelope for the cash, handed the phone back, we shook hands and parted ways. And that was the start of a long business relationship.
Now, every doper has a favorite place to get a fix. Mine was at the top of the stairwell of my downtown office building. There was a roof access up there with a sign on the door that read No Roof Access. Perfect. Nobody had any business going up that last flight of stairs - except me. It was my cozy place, a refuge where I could sit on the top step and do my thing without interruption, because interruption is anathema to an addict preparing a fix. And compared to a junkie cooking dope in a spoon and sticking a needle in his arm, my routine was easy. None of that milk-blood shit. In effect, I was an amateur apothecary: I would break a pill in half, break a half into quarters and use my Swiss Army knife (Be Prepared as my scout master told me) to crush a quarter-wedge on the back of my cellphone case. Next, I would mix that roughly 4:1 cocaine-to-fentanyl ratio I mentioned earlier, form two lines and snort! line one up the left nostril and snort! line two up the right.
And then the reward. There was a skylight up there at the top of that stairwell, and I would lean back against the wall and stare up through the glass and smile a little smile as a warm glow slowly permeated my entire being. Within minutes, all the rough edges at the office – hell, all the rough edges of my life – were smooth. I was that guy on a Life is Good t-shirt.
Here’s the kicker: at first, I thought the pills I was snorting were the real-deal-FDA-vetted pharmaceutical Oxycontin. The high felt legitimate, and the pills looked real. But then I started seeing news stories about drug busts of counterfeit Oxy around the city, and DEA-funded posters in the subway tunnels with side-by-side pictures of street pills next to the real thing, and it dawned on me that I was snorting fentanyl, not oxycodone, and I’d better be careful. Well, like I said before - I was careful, but I realized that even being careful might not matter when you don’t really know what you’re dealing with. On more than one occasion after a visit to the top of the stairwell I fell asleep at my desk, chin tucked down, arms crossed in my lap (good thing they were high-wall cubicles). A couple other times I nodded out on the subway and missed my stop, and once I passed out while standing at a urinal in Penn Station. If you could have seen the look the guy in the next stall gave me when I came around…he knew what was going on.
Aside from those occasional nod outs, however, I managed my new habit responsibly enough. For a while, anyway. A score here, an abstinence there. Then, the scores started outnumbering the abstinences until one morning I woke up, and I knew…I was hooked - on fentanyl. (Footnote: fentanyl is way, way more addictive than powder cocaine). I couldn’t believe it. I was indignant! How dare a drug coax me into addiction without my approval. But addictive drugs are seductive by nature, and to my brain, fentanyl was an irresistible seductress. As I watched helplessly, my brain eagerly welcomed this intriguing stranger that brought such pleasure - several times a day! And no wonder my brain threw a hissy fit whenever I was delinquent in inviting that sassy little bitch back in.
As is so often the case, other developments in my life contributed to my reliance on the pills and powder. The nature of my job changed, and I had to work more with people who I despised (and in all fairness, they weren’t about to invite me over for Thanksgiving dinner, either). And things were getting a bit tense at home. My wife knew something was off with me, I could tell, but that’s a funny thing about drug addiction – you convince yourself you’ve got it covered, that you can talk your way out of any bind. But when she asked me if I was alright, and I replied with a pat, “Yeah, I’m fine,” I saw it in her eyes – bullshit! Fortunately, the kids were in their own world and didn’t notice much of what was happening at the adult level.
That’s right, I have a wife and kids. A good wife, a fine wife, a wife who deserves better than a drug addict for a husband. And good kids, two girls, ages twelve and ten. Sweethearts, and they love their daddy. Yes, I know – how could I? And why would I, a husband and father? Well, I touched on it earlier – I turned to drugs for escape, from the day in-day out humdrum of life in the western world. That’s the reason, but it’s no excuse. I don’t know - maybe if I had taken a different career path, maybe if I had been a bush pilot or a race car driver, I wouldn’t have succumbed to such desperate behavior. The fact is I fell into the office space racket, and by the time I realized it wasn’t where I belonged, it was too late. I was locked in, and the only escape came at a steep price.
Well, after a few weeks of my wife’s sidelong glances, I decided that the escape wasn’t worth the price anymore, if it ever was. So, I confessed: honey, dear, sweetheart, love of my life, I’m addicted to painkillers. I know, you’re right - there’s no excuse - and I want to kick this monkey off my back with a vengeance. I just need to take a few days off from work and go cold turkey. First thing tomorrow, I will request a week off – ASAP. That’s right, I’m gonna cowboy up and face this devil head-on.
I did some research online, forums and such. The consensus was that cold turkey entails roughly three days of non-stop suffering and then the withdrawal symptoms start to ease. Gulp: Three. Fucking. Days. And yet, it did offer an extreme, and as you might have deduced by now, I like living on the extreme. I decided to give it a try. Of course I can do it, I thought, I’ve got Celtic blood flowing through my veins. Besides, I was sure that it wouldn’t be as bad as the hardcore addicts say it is in those online forums.
As I would soon find out, I was right - opioid withdrawal isn’t as bad as the addicts swear it is on the online forums. It’s worse – much worse. There are simply no words to effectively describe the pain and suffering that is part and parcel of withdrawal. But in the days leading up to my carefully planned cold turkey I was floating in a narcotic haze of denial, and in that state it’s easy to downplay just about anything. So, I submitted a request for a week’s vacation - half of my yearly paid time off - to kick the habit and clean up. Of course, as I waited for my “vacation” to begin, I indulged. My drug warped brain reasoned that I deserved one more binge and binge I did. My tolerance for the stuff was strong by then and while I still nodded out here and there, I had an intuitive sense of how much was too much and when to scale back. As Iggy Pop said when describing the excessive drug consumption of his youth: “I had good brinkmanship.”
As it turned out, I was forced to begin withdrawals sooner than anticipated. It was a chilly Tuesday in mid-November, lunchtime, when I pinged Joe from my cubicle and requested one more hefty delivery before my voluntary clean-up, which I had scheduled to begin on Saturday. It took a while for him to reply and when he did, my blood ran cold. I will never forget that message he sent: Hey brother, not today sorry. Try tomorrow.
Uh-oh. You see, I had only a quarter-pill left and the two lines I snorted for breakfast were starting to wear off. That meant I had to stretch that last quarter for at least 24 hours. Well, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men... midafternoon, I climbed that stairway, crushed my last precious quarter wedge, mixed it with the last sprinkle of cocaine, and dispatched it. I went back down to my desk and tried to get some work done as I wondered how long that last fix would last.
But I knew from experience. Sure enough, the first symptom – a gnawing anxiety - started creeping in during dinner. Thankfully, I had one Alprazolam (generic Xanax) that I had picked up somewhere along the way (probably from someone’s medicine chest). I popped that baby an hour before bedtime and, once in bed, I barely got through two pages of the book I was reading. I took one long look at my wife reading beside me and closed my eyes.
I awoke shortly after 3 AM and felt some achiness percolating up through the gauze of my sedation. I went to the bathroom, stepped into the kitchen, and looked out the window. A quarter moon was hanging just above the western horizon, and a light wind teased the bare treetops. I can do this, I told myself, but I had my doubts. Back in bed, I picked up my cellphone from the bedside table and checked the weather forecast for the upcoming day: cloudy and cool, high in the low 40s. I put my phone back and closed my eyes. Mercifully, the sedative still had some life, and I was able to get back to sleep. When the alarm woke me shortly after sunrise, the achy feeling was more pronounced, and I had a case of the sniffles. I got up, showered, downed a cup of coffee, shooed the girls off to school, told my wife I was working from home that day (lie), and kissed her goodbye at the door. Let me know if you need anything, she said before heading out to clock a day pushing residential real estate. I then logged onto my laptop, connected via VPN to my office, and sent my boss an email stating that I wasn’t feeling well and was taking a sick day (truth, kind of).
And there I was, alone in the house. It reminded me of that old black and white movie Wolfman, the one with Lon Chaney Jr., alone in his apartment the night of a full moon, pacing the living room and stopping to peer in the mirror with dread, knowing what was about to happen. Well, it started happening to me at around 9 AM. The achiness I had felt when I woke up began to double down. The effects of the sedative were long gone, and I sensed that the withdrawal symptoms, having been held at bay overnight, were eager to catch up for lost time. I was right. By 10 AM, I felt like I had the flu and 10:45 AM found me curled up on the bed, clutching a pillow and emitting random whimpers of agony. I dozed off, but one can only sleep so much and when I awoke at 11:22 AM, I knew I was in for it.
As any drug addict will tell you, time dials down when withdrawals set in. Seconds feel like minutes and minutes like hours, and for every second of every one of those hours, every nerve ending in your body emits a steady pulse of pain that culminates into one all-encompassing hell that makes Dante’s Inferno look like a day at the spa. The only fraction of relief is realized by getting under the covers and curling up into a fetal position. And that’s what I did, rocking back and forth and releasing a soft moan with every breath. I occasionally dozed, but the moment I awoke, the suffering pounced. Shortly after noon, I summoned the will to get up, and I went into the kitchen to warm a bowl of soup in the microwave. I wasn’t hungry but felt that I should eat something. When I returned to the bed and slipped under the covers, I stared out through the window at the flat, gray sky and I knew I wasn’t going to make it.
It’s no wonder the extremes to which the drug addict will go for that next fix. If money is the problem, you steal your neighbor’s silver, raid your spouse’s purse, rob a convenience store. If you have the money and need the stuff, you will, without hesitation, travel to the other side of the planet to get it. It’s not the craving for that next high that drives the addict to such drastic action; it’s the promise of relief from the unbearable symptoms of withdrawal. And as I lay there, gasping like a fish out of water, I knew there was no way I could handle those symptoms for three straight days. Not if I didn’t have to.
I reached for my cellphone and sent the following text to the most valuable phone number in my life: hey brother, are you available today? I closed my eyes and did some simplistic calculating: assuming he was available – oh, God, please be available - I would take the next train into Penn Station and track his ass down. There wasn’t a street in the five boroughs of New York City that was out of reach. Ideally, he would have come to me, but I knew that I was a small-time player and did not warrant such customized service.
Again, I dozed off. The ping of an incoming message woke me. Bleary-eyed, I cradled my phone in my hands and read Joe’s reply: hey brother, had time earlier but not now as heading across the river now for a delivery. Tom looks good. I dropped the phone on the bed. Tomorrow? I had survived twenty-four hours; there was no way I could last forty-eight. I sensed that there was an opportunity here, but my brain was in an opioid-deprived fog and all I could do was close my eyes. When I next awoke, the solution was obvious: he said he’s heading across the river – that means he's coming to New Jersey; I live in New Jersey, I will drive to him, whatever his destination. I picked up the phone and sent a text: hey again brother, where in nj are you going? maybe I can meet you there?
I waited. And waited. Finally, my phone pinged. I read his message, a flash of hope: he was on the train, and he was heading to an upscale town I knew well enough, about a 45-minute drive away, and it made sense; he was probably catering to some rich guy who bought orders in bulk, spread the booty among his well-heeled, likeminded friends and pushed the envelope in his mansion Friday through Saturday, woke up Sunday, screwed his wife, took a few more bumps, and headed to the club for eighteen holes of golf. Another comrade with good brinkmanship.
I typed my reply: I can meet you there, what time do you arrive? Another long wait, the minutes ticking by, and then that cathartic ping. His message: my train arrives at 3:58, meet me at the station. I checked the time: 3:08 PM. I sat up, locked eyes with my ragged reflection in my wife’s dresser mirror, gave myself a pathetic fist pump and jumped out of bed. I grabbed the car keys in the front hall and ran outside. As timing would have it, my 10-year-old daughter was walking up the driveway, knapsack over her shoulders, the yellow school bus pulling away up at the corner.
She smiled. Playing hooky?
Ha, ha, I’m working from home today. Running out on a quick errand. Your sister should be home soon, okay?
Okay was her reply as she walked up the front steps. Honestly, the house could have been on fire, and I would have simply said, hey, don’t get too close to the flames, as I got in the car and pulled away.
Well, the house wasn’t on fire, but I was. Adrenaline coursing through my veins, I started speeding through a patchwork of north-central New Jersey suburbs with a finesse that would have qualified me for a pole position at the Daytona 500. Suddenly, I felt so alive! As the zombies I passed went about their ho-hum routines, I was pursuing the shiniest object on my planet. I snapped on the radio - Lakshmi Singh was delivering the 3:30 PM world news report: stocks climbed today, strife in the Mideast, news from Washington. It was a crazy and exciting world, and I was right there in it.
About halfway to my destination, it became clear that I wouldn’t be waiting at the station when Joe got off the train. The evening rush hour had begun, cars were backed up at every red light and none of the other drivers seemed to understand how urgent my quest was, how urgent life was when one’s survival was at stake. I texted Joe, notifying him that there was a little traffic, and that I might be a few minutes late. His reply frightened me: I will be getting on the 4:15 train back to the city.
I, in turn, frightened some other drivers. I wouldn’t say I drove recklessly, but I was aggressive. At one point, I was zipping through a wooded area - one hand on the wheel, the other holding my cellphone - taking quick glances at the directions on the phone, when I came up behind a car that was moving way too slow. Now, I know that two solid lines running down the middle of the road mean no passing, no exceptions, but I had a long line of sight straight ahead and trust me, that car was a speck in the rearview mirror seconds after I passed it. At 4:05 PM I texted my brother from another mother - almost there - but I knew I wasn’t going to make it in ten minutes. His reply of okay was a source of some comfort. Truth be told, if he got on that train back to the city before I arrived, I was ready to race him to Penn Station, and the way I was driving I would have been waiting on the platform with a bouquet of roses when he pulled in, traffic be damned.
4:12 PM found me idling at a red light in the town’s moneyed business district, the slate roof of the train station visible two blocks away. And that’s when I realized I didn’t have any cash. Fuck! Fuck! There was a bank with an ATM up ahead on the right. I sent a text: I’m one minute away. The light turned green, I pulled up to the curb, jumped out and ran over. But the goddamn walk-up ATM was out of order! Plan B: the drive-through ATM. I raced around the corner of the building and saw to my dismay that a woman in a luxury SUV was parked at the machine, taking way too long with her transaction as she chatted on her fucking cellphone. I walked up behind her car and checked the time: 4:15 PM. There I was, shivering in my Aran sweater as the sun was setting, and there it was – the unmistakable ding-ding-ding of the city-bound train pulling out of the station two blocks over. Oh, no. I considered running over and jumping in front of the locomotive, hoping it would stop. Instead, I froze with despair. Time stopped. Then, silence. He’s gone. A moment later, my phone pinged in my pocket. I took out the phone, braced myself for bad news, and read Joe’s text: I’m still here, it’s cool and will wait for you.
And there you have it. Like a soldier in the heat of battle who knows the guy next to him has his back no matter what as the bullets whizz by and the mortars explode with reckless abandon, I knew that when the chips were down, I could count on my brother, my main man, my drug dealer - Joe. As I wiped a tear of gratitude from my eye, the entitled bitch in the SUV finally drove off. I ran up to the ATM and withdrew five twenty-dollar bills, got back in the car and whipped around the corner to where Joe was standing in front of the station, texting on his cellphone. He saw me coming and I smiled through the windshield. He flashed a tight smile and shook his head. I parked and walked over.
Hey man, sorry.
You’re lucky. My buddy who I just met wants to get a drink across the street, so I skipped my train and will wait for the next one.
Thanks, man. I owe you.
You owe me nothing.
He handed me his cellphone, I pocketed the enveloped and handed the phone back with the five twenties folded underneath, we shook hands and went our separate ways.
Back in the car, I drove to a space at the far end of the parking lot and shook two plastic packets from a bank envelope: one containing cocaine, one with two blue pills. I paused a moment and I pictured peasant farmers waking to the crow of a rooster and trudging into the fields to pick coca leaves under a tropical sun, and cartel foot soldiers in a kitchen mixing chemicals smuggled over from China on a stovetop and pressing the paste into pills, and of all the people who worked to get that powder and those pills into the hands of a dope fiend somewhere in bumfuck New Jersey. I gave an appreciative nod and got down to business: break a blue pill in half, break it again, crush a quarter on the back of my cellphone, add an equivalent measure of white powder and…left nostril – snort! right nostril – snort! I put the seat back, shut the engine and closed my eyes. It was the closest thing to a miracle I think I will ever experience (save the births of my two daughters): within minutes, the excruciating pain began to soften; within ten minutes I was smiling as a train pulled into the station. What a wonderful invention, I thought dreamily, and what a fine way to travel, no traffic, comfortable seats with a view, usually on time and they rarely break down.
It was dark as I pulled out of the parking lot and reversed course homeward. The traffic didn’t bother me, the red lights were cool, I was in no big hurry. I texted my ten-year-old, asking her to turn on the front porch light so mom could see the steps when she got home. The route back took me through a stretch of gritty urban landscape – check cashing shops, fast food outlets, liquor stores – and as I waited at a light, I looked up at a billboard that showed a picture of a blue pill with the word Real underneath next to a picture of another blue pill with the word Fake below it. I studied the two pictures: the pills looked almost identical to me. Impressive. At the base of the billboard was a toll-free number to call for Help. I grabbed a pen from the console and wrote the number on a scrap of paper and tucked the paper in my wallet. It was suddenly clear: tomorrow, I would call that number to ask for help. Whatever was required to clean up their way was fine by me. Would life be any better when I emerged on the other side? Probably not, but I had heard somewhere that one can find meaning in suffering, and all the meaning I needed to endure the slow-burn suffering of a conventional life was waiting for me back home.
The light turned green, and as I drove on, I knew that it was time to say goodbye once and for all to the one man I could count on more than any other, my brother - Joe, the drug dealer. If only he had been a soldier instead.