Drug Dealer's Sonnet: People Helping People

A Shakespearean sonnet for all of the drug dealers through all of the years.

William Shakespeare with a needle and spoon on the table in front of him. Gencraft's free AI image generator delivers again!

Drug Dealer’s Sonnet: People Helping People

To the man whose number is branded on what’s left of my soul

Sorry for always blowing you up

Shall I cook a rinse while I wait for you?

Yesterday’s cottons fuse fever today

I’ll smoke a cig; nothing better to do

I’m five short, and I don’t know what to say

You text: On the highway back from homeboy’s

- as the city throbs; an expectant vein -

I thank my dread gods and set up my toys:

Rig, spoon, cotton; some leftover cocaine

Symbolic selves; invented protections

To ward off more lucid observations

You deliver death in small confections

Eighty-milligram raven vacations

This is all there is, and - frankly - it’s bliss

Got to focus now so that I don’t miss

Druggie Glossary

(1) Blowing you up: Messaging a dealer’s phone repeatedly while you’re waiting for him to call back or show up.

Hey man, I’m sick.

You around?

You back yet?

You on your way?

Just think of it as the addict version of "Are we there yet?"

I used to be the worst at this when I was in withdrawal. Legit dealers will hit ignore just to punish you if you blow them up too often.

I had one dealer named D in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, NYC) who would always tell me that he was “two traffic lights away” even when he hadn’t left his apartment yet. Used to drive me insane. 

I became much chiller with time, though. Part of being a junkie is learning to cope with the agony of withdrawal, which becomes quotidian.

(2) Rinse: Cooking up a shot using old cotton or used bits of cigarette filter from previous shots, which still have some dope absorbed into them.

This is dangerous because most street drugs are cut with sugars, which means that bacteria love to grow on them, especially after they’re wet. 

This can lead to cotton fever, a very high-temp, hard-hitting bacterial infection that will make you as sick as you’ve ever been for 12 hours. It can lead to sepsis, organ damage (especially endocarditis), and death. 

Don’t shoot drugs. But if you do, use clean needles and fresh cottons. Always.

(3) Short: Same meaning as common usage. Not having quite enough money. 

There is huge cultural and personal variation in how American drug dealers react to this. Some will refuse to sell to you; others will hurt you; a few will take a more Christian tact. 

It’s always a gamble. 

So is showing up with part of the money in quarters. Like strippers, serious drug dealers are likely to chuck them back at you. 

(4) Homeboy: Generic slang for friend, in this case meaning drug dealer.

Sometimes “dopeboy” is used for heroin / fentanyl dealers specifically, but obviously no one is going to put that in a text message about getting drugs. 

Experienced drug dealers will often not text at all.

You’ll call them, they’ll ask how much, and you’ll say either boy / girl for heroin / cocaine or m / p for heroin / cocaine (m and p are from the Spanish slang for these drugs used when you’re dealing with a papi). 

So, “50 boy 30 girl” is 50 bucks’ worth of heroin and 30 of cocaine.

It gets more complicated than that because heroin is often sold in bundles of 10 bags and coke in eightballs of 3.5 grams because drug dealers like to give bulk discounts just as much as Costco - but hopefully you won’t ever need to know any of that. 

The dealer will call you when they’re at the meetup point, and that’s it. 

Depending on where you are in the US, you might need to go to a trap house to pick up. 

My hometown is like that; the West Side is notorious. 

Back in the day, if you were a white guy walking or driving to / from the West Side, that alone was cause for a cop to pull over and make your day. 

The opioid epidemic hit us so hard that the cops around here don’t even bother anymore. 

(5) Rig: Needle, usually the orange-capped, 28-30 gauge variety used to inject insulin. And heroin / fentanyl / cocaine.

In the US, you used to need a prescription for these.

It can be illegal to possess them without a valid medical reason (you can be charged with possessing drug paraphernalia even if you haven't used the needles yet).

The explosion of HIV and Hep B / C during the '80s and '90s led to needle exchanges opening so that addicts could get clean rigs for free, which is a very controversial social program here. 

The decrease in HIV and Hepatitis B / C infection rates in areas that have needle exchanges is incontestable. 

(6) Miss: Not hitting the vein when you inject. 

Missing when you have just put your only 20 or 40 bucks into a needle is a junkie’s worst nightmare; a wail of “I just missed!” is part of the standard infernal trap house soundtrack. 

As your veins get damaged by years of abuse, it becomes harder and harder to hit. Plus, the further you are into withdrawal, the more your blood pressure rises, which tends to constrict them, as well. 

For this reason, even if I only had three or four bags, I’d always snort half a bag, wait for it to calm my body down, then shoot. 

Missing creates abscesses, which are walled-off infected areas that can lead to sepsis or amputated arms / legs. 

I’ve seen abscesses being popped - lanced in medical terms - where the pus shot across the room because of how pressurized it was. 

Form

I wanted to do something creative today because the Jessica Kent stuff was getting me down. I firmly believe that someone needed to write those articles, but it didn’t feel good to have that someone be me. 

Although I’m a high school science teacher, I’ve had to teach lit, including poetry, for Chinese college-prep programs in the past. 

I wrote a Shakespearean sonnet, a type of love poem that uses the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Fun fact: When you say “GG” at the end of the rhyme scheme in the way that a native speaker tends to, it sounds almost exactly like the Chinese jiji (鸡鸡), which means penis. 

So, I had to adjust my pronunciation to avoid saying “ABAB CDCD EFEF penis!” to my Chinese highschoolers. 

Shakespeare adapted the sonnet conventions from Italian; the original, Petrarchan sonnet in Italian had a different form. 

The meter should be iambic pentameter, which means ten syllables per line with alternating stress. Iamb is Greek for foot, so each iamb is a stressed-unstressed syllable pair. 

There. You learned your useless fact for today.

I didn’t confine myself to this meter too strictly because I’m nobody’s poet. 

If you ever want to read some legit poetry, Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are immortal. 

There is a fascinating body of lore around the Dark Lady who appears in them, and they contain as much ribald humor as they do ethereal beauty. 

Meaning

The “people helping people” thing is something that my first drug dealer used to say. 

As in: “There’s no drug dealing going on here, folks; just friends helping friends, people helping people.” 

That guy, who was a total chad, was really just a kid from my suburb who sold Ecstasy, weed, and different prescription pills to our high school. 

Over the years, I ended up dealing with progressively scarier / sketchier people. 

The, umm, higher message of the poem was fumbling toward a theory of depressant drugs as small-scale inoculation against the existential terror of death and nonexistence. 

Early psychologists theorized that all of society was an attempt to create symbolic selves that would outlast our mortal coils. 

Getting f*cked up helps with that angst, too. 

Just something fun and facetious for this epitome of a Saturday in June. 

Have text messages between Anne Boleyn and her ladies-in-waiting on the eve of her execution coming up, too. 

Plus, a breakdown of the direct and indirect costs of my drug addictions over the past 15 years, which is, ugh… a doozy. 

Thanks for reading! 

Be good,

Brian