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When I was twelve and my mother got pulled into the hospital for an OD, there was a knock on the apartment door. I ignored it, turning up the TV, fighting the swirling uncertainty in my belly I always felt when someone was at the door. In my experience, the only people who showed up at the door were cops and bill collectors. Neither were people I wanted to see.
"Rye, open the fuck up, kid," a deep, masculine voice called, making me start.
As far as I knew, bill collectors didn't know my name and the cops didn't curse at innocent kids.
I made my way toward the door. "Who is it?" I asked, reaching for the bat in the umbrella stand.
There was a pause and a sigh. "Ain't got no one to blame but myself that you don't know your own fucking uncle, huh?" he asked through the door, leaving me to pause for a moment before I reached for the chain.
I pulled open the door to reveal a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed man in a blue tee and jeans stained dark in places. If my mother wasn't thin to the point of starvation and her hair wasn't perpetually greasy from her forgetting to wash it, you might have been able to see the similarity between the two. Hell, he actually looked a lot like I imagined I would when I grew up.
I didn't know much about my mother's family. Her parents were dead and no one else was close. I did know from one of her manic moods that she did, in fact, have a brother. His name was Seth and they had been estranged since teenagers when he moved out.
"Christ," he said, shaking his head at me. "When the fuck was the last time you ate anything?"
"Mom has been in the hospital two days," I said, shrugging.
"Was there food before she went in?" he asked as if he somehow knew how screwed up she was.
"Not usually."
"Alright," he said, looking into the apartment with distaste. "Go pack your shit."
"Pack my shit?" I parroted, not even tripping over the curse. No one lifted a brow to a kid cursing where I was from.
"Yeah, pack your shit. Can't imagine you got much. What you do, throw it in a bag. You're coming with me."
"Until Mom gets back?" I asked, not moving out of the doorway.
"Until your mother gets her fucking shit together," he said, pushing inside, making me move out of his way. So then, with what seemed like very little choice, I went and collected my shit. Of which there really wasn't much, just a couple outfits, a skateboard I found abandoned in a park, and a couple books the library was selling for nickles one afternoon. That was all I had.
"Jesus fucking Christ," my uncle said as he stood in the kitchen, holding open one of the kitchen cabinets where I knew from experience that we had an impressive infestation of roaches. He turned back, hearing my footsteps. His eyes fell to the bag in my hand. "You overly attached to any of that crap?"
I looked down at the bag and shrugged. "Guess not."
"Leave it the fuck here. We'll get you new shit."
With that, I left my childhood apartment.
I never went back.
And I got a boatload of new shit.
Because he made a fair amount of money.
My Uncle Seth was a lot of things: a strong, alpha masculine personality, a moderate drinker, a vintage muscle car enthusiast, a fucking phenomenal shot, and a drug dealer. Not the illegal stuff, the heroin or meth, the crack my mother smoked. No, my uncle, better known as Doc Seth, peddled prescription drugs. You needed some Benzos or Percs, he was who you saw. Reds, yellows, blues, Poor Mans PCP, Schoolboys. You fucking name it, he fucking sold it.
"Just not that Special K or Mexican Valium shit," he told me one night as we put pills into baggies at his dining room table, referencing Ketamine and Rohypnol. "I might be a real son of a bitch, but I ain't selling shit some pussy-ass mother fuckers are going to use to rape little girls with."
My Uncle Seth, the drug dealer with a conscience.
For the next five years, he stepped up to the plate. He taught me how to avoid the good cops, pay off the crooked ones, know when a deal was going to go south before it did, how to pick men for their particular brands of skills to add to the 'team'. He showed me how to rebuild an engine, paint a car like a God-damn pro, drive a stick, appreciate good music, charm a woman, take a hit, then throw a devastating one back. And, last but certainly not least, he taught me how to shoot. Well. He made me into a man. And, granted, I wasn't a good man just as he wasn't a good man. But I was strong, smart, capable, skilled.
