This will be even shorter than the prior one, but some of the changes that occured had a decided impact on me. I also made some last minute corrections here, so the audio won't have a portion that's been added on.
Age 25
I ran into a new crowd, new friends. The kind you don’t take home to your mother. They were hardcore tough, carried guns. I came to know them because of a fight I was in in Dorchester. A guy was getting mouthy to some woman that wasn’t even with him. He grabbed her, she struggled. I was sitting at the bar next to him when I said, “Leave her alone and just drink your drink.”
He spun around and without a word, swung at me. He barely grazed my chin, but it pissed me off. I laid into him and knocked him out and still beat on him for awhile. Somebody pulled me off him, and a few others took the guy outside and dumped him on the street.
I could have stayed out of it and kept my mouth shut as the woman’s boyfriend was on his way to save the day so to speak. It was him that gave me a job and where I met my new friends. Gerald was big and tough, but brilliant.
I became a driver, plain and simple. I delivered packages all over Boston and down into New York for about six months. If you guess marijuana, you are partly right. There were pills too; mescaline, opium, cocaine, and hash. It just varied. I would always get my cut plus some of the goodies. It was a plush job. Easy work, easy like breathing.
From there, my life went downhill … but I didn’t know it then. To me, it was rising higher and higher. I became a tough guy.
In 1974, I made another run but for something else … a truckload of cigarettes to bring up from North Carolina to Baltimore. Rigs weren’t inspected as badly as they are now, and besides, I’d never take the major roads. Less worries.
Then came the afternoon that killed me. Partied at a guy’s house, and everywhere you looked there were bowls filled with cross tops, yellow jackets, blue devils, red devils laced with PCP; all the pills to get you wasted. Another room had lines of cocaine cut and ready to snort. A few people had their own rigs set up and were shooting the juice into a well known vein. Hell it was a party. I loaded up on a little bit of everything, except LSD. Saw a guy awhile back ago get wasted on that crap and thought his gun barrel was a licorice stick. Thirty-eight slugs go in nice, but the coming out is ugly.
Something happened to me. I went from perfectly fine to ill. I stepped outside and started walking to get some air and then the whole world slipped away from me.
Next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance. I had the craziest dream. The paramedic who rode in the back with me was surprised when I asked him what happened to me. Just as we pulled into the emergency parking area, that’s when he told me he called in to tell them I had died … not more than eight seconds ago.
I broke into chills. It was the first time since I was 14, I was scared.
