rant · moment 15 of 21
Growing Up Around Drug Dealers Renting Rooms in His House
from The Pilot! · #15
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
5 minTim describes his mother renting rooms to drug dealers in their middle-class Long Island home after his parents' divorce, treating it as a formative, community-building experience, and recounts hanging out in a neighborhood crack house doing various drugs as a young teenager.
- 41:18Tim learned about life and parenting from living around a crack house.
- 41:44Tim and his friend Shay had the nickname 'the two fat boys' given by drug dealers in the Bronx.
- 42:21A dealer told them: 'I don't hang out with anyone lower than me or anyone who can't do nothing for me.'
- 42:56At 13, Tim went to New Year's parties with big lines of cocaine while telling his parents he was at a friend's house.
- 43:24Kids with overprotective parents who know their whereabouts end up boring, but those good kids later go wild in high school and college.
- 43:41Tim came home coked out at 3 a.m. at age 14, and his mother caught him repeating 'drug addicts, alcoholics' over and over.
- 44:24Tim's mother didn't know initially what the dealers were about, but once they moved in and paid rent, it was hard to get them out.
- 44:58She didn't care about morality once the drug dealers started paying her rent instead of her living on the street.
- 45:37Tim says listening to other people's stories now feels bland compared to the real living and nightmares he experienced.
- 45:51He knew older people who had given up on life—people like Bud and Claire Munster, who became like second parents to him.