It Happened To Me: I Dealt Drugs For My Dad At The Age Of Seven

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Hi Friday! Otherwise known as the first day of my High School reunion. I truly can't thank you all enough for your advice and wisdom and warnings leading up to this thing. I say “the first day” because I don't know if I mentioned that, this being a boarding school, it's not a one evening type of event. Me and my mom and Stepdad will be, starting today (breathe), at Andover (deep breath) through the weekend (deeper breath) leaving Sunday (deep breath and hold).

So here’s where I add this whole shenanigan to the top of the list of things I’ve done just to be able to come back and tell you the stories (getting a nose ring, skydiving, swapping lives for a week with a cheerleading coach from Arizona I had never met before, posing for Playboy, and I'm most certainly blacking out some of the most outrageous stunts). Not only are we staying there for the whole weekend, but to make this experience as potentially cathartic as possible and to get the most meaningful feedback for you – I am being embedded in a dorm in the middle of campus for the entire length of my stay. AND I'm eating all my meals while there in the very same dining halls where teenage me was so lost at having no one to sit with every day, that I stopped going altogether and lived off chocolate chip cookies from town.

Any further words of advice from you in the comments here are so welcome and appreciated, even if I can't write back because I’m downing cocktails at the class welcome dinner or hiding in the stacks at Oliver Wendell Holmes library. (Or whatever happens at these reunions – you know I've never done this before so I'm making it up.)

Wish me luck. I'm going in.

-Jane

PS Here’s where to get that Sassy shirt!

What a cute dealer I was. This is me in 1969 or so.

By Heather West

It all started at the kitchen table in my father’s swinging bachelor pad. It had beaded curtain doorways, a display of (empty) Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill bottles in the front window, and a stack of Playboys on the floor next to the bed that he “read for the articles.”

I remember this groovy place being a one-bedroom so, looking back now, I actually have no idea where my sister and I slept.

This was Daddy’s second place after he and Mama split up. The first one was a charming little vintage nook with features that fascinated me (like a garbage chute) but it was a block from our house, which Mama kept after the divorce. His apartment was so close that he would drive himself insane, hopping in the car and circling our block half the night in case someone wanted to break in and murder us. Yes, yall, it’s Texas, where people drive 1-2 blocks instead of walking.

So he had to get over to the other side of town. Just a couple of miles away north of campus, but Austin was so small back then, I felt like it was a real road trip just to get over there.

My class picture as a drug dealer, 3rd grade at Dill Elementary.

Anyway, I started my career as an assistant drug dealer at the age of about 7, alongside my older sister, Laura. Daddy marched in one day and slapped something the size and shape of a hairy brick in front of us, demanding,