I don’t remember what the assignment was here, but I know I wrote it for a class. It could’ve been a really vague assignment like “write a 1500 word story with first-person dialogue.” I really don’t know. All I do know is that it was inspired by events going on at the time. 9/11 occurred just a few years before this was written, and we’d only been in Iraq for a year or two. One of my classmates that reviewed the story felt it was a completely unrealistic story, and I’m sure they are right. But cautionary tales aren’t supposed to be warm, fuzzy, and realistic. They’re supposed to be terrifying. It should also be noted that I wrote this years before the World War Z movie had zombies piling on top of each other to get over a wall, so the “human ramp” idea was my own. Not to say that the filmmakers took the idea from me, but I just want to be clear that I didn’t steal it from them.
The assignment for this piece was to read T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Hit Man” and rewrite it using any other profession. It was intended to be a humorous piece about the life of a drug dealer. Special thanks to Boyle for not suing me (yet) for borrowing the idea. Try not to take this piece too seriously. There are a lot of half-jokes and wordplay here that are supposed to mimic the original. It actually got a few good laughs when they read it in class. Hopefully, you will laugh, too.
Birth
It was the coldest and brightest day of the Drug Dealer’s short life. He would remember being pulled from his amniotic universe for the rest of his life, though he wouldn’t realize it for more than two decades. First he had some developing to do.
Church
The Drug Dealer’s grandmother tells his mother he will be a Baptist. They almost drown him when he is three years old. He always tried to convince people he remembered that.
Schooling
The kids at school introduce him to the world as it really is: cruel and unusual. Bullies pick on the little guy and girls hardly notice him. But he notices the girls and never forgets the bullies. Each one of their names (the girls and boys) gets stored away for a later day. For what reason, he did not know. He just knew that he needed to know.
First Job
The Drug Dealer gets a job at a video store, renting the latest hits and prolonging the lives of the misses. His boss is a stingy woman, docking his pay a few cents per minor infraction. But this was how the world worked, she told him. If you don’t do your job, you don’t get your pay.
He always made sure the movies were straight on the shelves.
The complete story appears in the 2026 revised edition of Ten Terribly Terrific Tall Tales Trying to Trip the Triune, coming soon.
