A great man once sang, “Regrets, I have a few...”
But he’s dead. And I hear he wasn’t very nice to his mother. And when you don’t got nothing, manners can mean the world.
But he’s dead. And I hear he wasn’t very nice to his mother. And when you don’t got nothing, manners can mean the world.
We All Have Regrets by Daryl McKenzie
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My name is Terence Plumber. I’m twenty-four years old, but
I’ve seen so much in my life that I feel as though I’m eighty. We all have
regrets. I have mine and I’m sure you have yours. I should have joined the Navy
after finishing high school instead of becoming the neighborhood drug dealer. There’s
one regret. Too bad it took me three years and two felony convictions later to
figure it out. Oh well, Granny said, “If it’s the truth you can speak it.” That’s
one of a few hard facts that haunts me.
My Granny Becka and I lived in a small three-bedroom block
house nestled in a little rural town called Campbellton, Florida, twenty miles
outside of Marianna. The small dwelling sat on a dirt road, surrounded by
thirty acre of land that hadn’t been farmed in over forty years. The house was
in need of a new roof, the foundation starting to crack, and rats had infested
the old barn my granddaddy built fifty years ago. I had to buy rat poison by
the pound just to keep them from taking over the house. But that didn’t stop
the bank from wanting their fifteen hundred dollars every month. While most
were starting to recover from the financial meltdown of ’08, Granny and I were
still underwater. Every month was a struggle. I could have worked two minimum
wage jobs, thrown in my Granny’s SSI, and we’d still fall short. Over the years,
I’d seen many people lose their homes. I watched as the Sheriff Department
nailed plywood to the doors and windows leaving families nowhere to live. I felt
that I had to sell drugs to make ends meet. I’d promised myself that as long as
I had breath in my body those things would never happen to me and Granny.
My mother died of cancer when I was twelve and my father was
doing life for killing a man in a bar fight a few years earlier than that.
Thank God Granny was able to take me in. Of course over the years we’d seen our
share of hard times, but our financial situation hadn’t always been so dire.
Everything was different when I was hooked up with Diaz.
Diaz was from Dallas, Texas. He’d relocated to Jackson
County in 2010 to work for his uncle on his watermelon farm after his
wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. I guess he needed a change.
But in memory of his family he wore a wedding band engraved with Aztec writing
that he never took off.
I met Diaz at a club in Dothan, Alabama, one summer night.
He stuck out like a black man at a Nascar race, being the only Mexican in the
place, standing there, smoking a fat blunt minding his own business. Smelled
like Kush. There was a very bad drought in Florida so I had to ask him if he
had some for sale? He said yeah. That night he sold me a pound of some of the
best weed I’d ever smoked—for a mere four-hundred dollars. We became instant
best friends from that night on.
To be a drug dealer, some would argue, that you’d have to be
part human and part animal. Diaz never really had the animal part down. I doubt
it if he’d ever sold a ten sack on the street corner. I thought of him more as
a drug broker. He might as well be selling curtains. He just made plenty money
doing it. But no matter how much money he made there was always a pain in his
eyes. He still missed his family. I really grew to like the guy.
Soon after that Diaz graduated to bringing in pounds of coke
from Dallas every two to three months. I went from being just the nickel bag
weed man to the Birdman. I remember trying to count my take of more than a
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of dirty ones, fives and twenties, and losing
count at one-hundred-fifty with much more cash to go. (Boy my thumbs were
burning!) Then slowly it all started to fall apart.
First I got popped leaving Graceville carrying an ounce of
coke. My bond was one-hundred thousand. Twenty-five thousand for the lawyer. I
beat that case. Two months later I was stopped on 231 with two ounces. Another
hundred thousand twenty-five to the red. Before I knew it I was down to five
grand. And then the unthinkable.
I got a call one morning saying Diaz had been shot. He and I
used to stash our coke behind our homes, far enough to deny knowledge. That was
where he was found dead. They didn’t take anything but the dope he had stashed
in the yard and his wedding band. Someone was watching my buddy. Rumor was this
dope fiend named Dave killed Diaz.
One night a month later Dave gives me a call saying he had
ten dollars and a ring for sale. All he wanted was a quarter gram. I told him
no problem. He said he needed somewhere to shoot up. I thought about it a second,
then said that he could use the old barn out back. When Dave arrived and placed
the ring in my hand I knew it was Diaz’s. I gave Dave the coke; he proceeded to
the barn out back.
A few hours passed. I crept in the old barn and saw Dave
lying on the floor. He was dead. There was some coke in that pack I sold Dave.
But it was mostly rat poison. Like I told you, I have a lot of regrets. But
this wasn’t one of them.
