What Makes Me Me

This piece is being written to explain to people why they’ve never seen my drink or smoke. To put it simply, because I don’t do either of the two. I’ve even turned down communion at church because the wine was real. It’s THAT serious. Since I was a child, I’ve always tried to thrive on being different. I never hung out with anyone who was “like me”. Quite a few of my friends growing up were the ones who would grow up to be residents in our state’s correctional facilities or they’d eventually end up pursuing careers in street pharmaceuticals. And I, a clean cut kid from a good home, felt right at home with them. I never tried to do any of the things that they did (i.e. smoking, drinking, stealing, fighting, etc.) and they never tried to influence me to. They respected my stance on all of it. That just wasn’t my thing. And if I would’ve ever tried to do anything like that, I don’t think that they would’ve allowed me to. They understood that what I had going for myself could’ve easily been taken away with one wrong decision.
But ultimately, there is one person who is responsible for me deciding not to indulge in any of those vices. One would assume that it would be my mother, but it’s not. Perhaps a grandparent. Nope. Or was it the guy that graduated from L High as Valedictorian, and went to Chicago, where he smoked with some people he didn’t know, and they laced his joint with PCP, and now he’s legally retarded? Nope. Not him either. It’s not even Nancy Regan, whose anti-drug campaign slogan “Just say no” was at its peak during my wonder years. The person solely responsible for allowing me to resist the temptation of drugs and alcohol goes by the name of Eddie Warrant.
His name was Eddie Warrant, but we simply called him Ed. He lived two houses down from me. That is, of course, if you could call his place a house. It was more like a stack of wood nailed together just to protect him from the weather. From the time I was able to remember anything up until I was 15, I’d never seen Ed sober. He would walk the streets of our tiny community drunk beyond all human reason, and just sing all night. He’d knock on his neighbors’ doors asking them if they could cook a meal for him, because his place didn’t have power, gas, or water or anything else. It was just him. And the crazy thing about it is that Ed would work. He worked all week, and he made really good money. Now being that I’m from a rural area (the country as some of you people who swear to God that you’re from a major metropolis like to refer to it as), there was a lot of work to be done in fields and pastures. That’s where Ed worked. He’d do odd jobs for people who owned farms. And he made really good money from doing it. But once Friday came and he got paid, he had to go and re-up his stash.
This cycle went on for all my early life. But one day during the summer when I was 15 years old, my uncle and a couple of the guys from around the neighborhood were trying to put a radio into a car. Ed just happened to be walking by, and jokingly, we asked if he could come and help. We’d read the instructions, and had been out there since 11 am (it was around 5 pm by now). So Ed came over, and told us EXACTLY what to do with the wiring, and the radio was on and playing in less than 3 minutes. And when he walked off, we all realized that that was the first time that we’d EVER seen that guy sober. Over the next 3 years, before I left for college, I’d sit down and talk with Ed while he was sober, and the brother was deep. He had a really good head on his shoulders. And he’d ruined it all because he couldn’t kick his habit. Unfortunately, the year that I left, liquor started to get a little too weak for him, so as I understand it, now he’s shoving syringes in his veins. One of the things I never got to ask him while we talked was what made him start to depend on the bottle so heavily. And perhaps now, it’s too late.
I’m a firm believer that everything happens according to God’s perfect plan. My father wasn’t around when I was growing up, but there were a lot of men in my community that I would see and mimic until I got just the right mixture of all of them to make me who I am. Ed was not in those ingredients that made me me. Perhaps God put him in my life to show me how NOT to be and what things NOT to do. So I subconsciously made up in my mind very early on that that would NOT be me. On one of the best Southern Rap albums of all time, 8-Ball & MJG’s “On Top of the World”, Memphis-based rapper, 8-Ball, said one of the realest lines to ever be spoken when it comes to how time changes things: “That same brother that used to pimp that ‘fro and wear them stacks, he’s that brother today starving trying to buy some crack.” (think Fast Freddie from “Jason’s Lyric”). And I just could NOT allow that to be me. I know some people say that they can control their drinking binges and they can control how dependent they are on a certain drug. OK. Fine. Do you. But I have a better way of controlling mine: by not doing them at all. And for being able to say that and not really care what someone else thinks, I say THANK YOU EDDIE WARRANT.