I used to blame the devil.
That’s what men like me do. We invent a villain with horns because it’s easier than pointing at the house we grew up in.
But I built the lab myself. Only I didn’t know I was building it.
I was nine. Nine is supposed to be tree forts, baseball cards, and scraped knees; the smell of dirt, grass, and sunburn.
Nine is not supposed to be lust. Nine is not supposed to be keeping lust filled secrets.
Nine is not supposed to feel like hunger that has no name.
The first time I saw Playboy, it wasn’t hidden very well. It wasn’t guarded. It wasn’t treated like something dangerous.
It was treated like a joke. Like a rite of passage and entertainment.
And when I reacted the way a confused, overstimulated, unformed brain reacts to something it cannot metabolize, there wasn’t concern.
There wasn’t any correction. There wasn’t, “Hey, this isn’t for you.”
There was laughter. My father laughed.
That sound, more than the magazine itself, became the ignition point.
Because laughter told me something important:
This is normal.
This is funny.
This is who you are.
He didn’t pull it away.
He didn’t say, “You’re too young.”
He didn’t shut the door.
He watched.
And then he laughed again when I passed it to Patrick and Mitchell like contraband candy in the woods behind the house.
I wasn’t just consuming it.
I was distributing it.
There’s a reason the song says:
“I pushed pain like candy,
And I called it just a dream.”
That was the first sale.
Not because I understood sex.
But because my nervous system lit up like a slot machine.
A nine-year-old brain is all wiring and no brakes. Dopamine without wisdom. Fire without a fireplace.
And instead of someone saying, “That fire will burn you,”
The adults struck another match.
No child should be lusting at nine.
Curious? Sure.
Aware? Maybe.
But lust, the kind that hijacks the body and turns it into an engine, that doesn’t grow naturally at nine.
It’s introduced. It’s modeled. It’s fed.
And here’s the part that took me fifty years to understand: this was not common.
I was my mid-fifties, sitting in rooms full of men confessing everything from addiction to betrayal, that I started asking a strange question:
“When did you first start masturbating?”
The room would shift.
Most answers were awkward but ordinary.
“Twelve.”
“Thirteen.”
“Maybe fourteen.”
And when they were caught?
“The magazines disappeared.”
“My dad yelled.”
“My mom freaked out.”
“It was embarrassing.”
There were boundaries. There was discomfort. There was a correction.
No one, not one, told a story like mine. No one said their father laughed.
No one said it was encouraged. No one said it became a performance.
I thought what happened to me was typical male development. It wasn’t.
It was grooming by normalization. It was an addiction seeded through approval.
It was a child’s arousal being stamped with a parental seal of humor.
And humor is powerful.
If something makes Dad laugh, it must be good.
If something makes Dad proud, it must be right.
So I built the lab. Not in mama’s kitchen like the lyric says.
But in my nervous system.
“I kept a stash in my trauma,
Right behind my daddy’s rage.”
The stash wasn’t just the images. It was the wiring.
Arousal + secrecy + approval.
That’s a potent chemical compound.
Because no one intervened, no one detoxed me, no one shut down the supply line, I learned to manufacture it myself.
Fantasies became inventory.
Shame became a cutting agent.
Silence became packaging.
By the time I was a teenager, I wasn’t just consuming.
I was dealing. To myself.
To my thoughts. To my loneliness.
To the ache that never got named.
When the song says:
“Built a corner in my mind
And stocked it full of rape.”
It isn’t glorification. It’s a confession.
Because what starts as stimulation without guidance turns into distortion.
When you introduce gasoline to a nine-year-old and laugh at the flames, you don’t get warmth.
You get wildfire. And the most dangerous part? I thought it was normal.
Over four decades, I carried that wiring like it was standard male equipment.
It wasn’t until I started comparing notes, real, raw notes, that I realized something chilling:
My origin story wasn’t about puberty. It was exposure plus endorsement.
That is not the same thing. And here’s the part that matters most:
I am not writing this to indict a man. I am writing this to expose a blueprint.
Because if a child’s first experience of arousal is paired with:
Adult approval
Shared secrecy
Peer distribution
Humor instead of protection
You are not just raising a boy. You are stocking a trap house.
The chorus says:
“I am my own drug dealer,
Feeding ghosts I can’t escape.”
The ghosts were not sexual. They were relational.
I wasn’t chasing women. I was chasing that first chemical cocktail:
Excitement
Connection
Permission
And it was delivered by the one person who was supposed to install brakes.
When you introduce a substance too early, alcohol at seven, pornography at nine, you don’t just create curiosity, you create an appetite without infrastructure.
And appetite without infrastructure becomes compulsion.
By the time I realized what happened, I was in my fifties.
Midlife and gray in the beard.
Finally asking: “Wait… that wasn’t normal, was it?”
No. It wasn’t. And that’s why this book is called I Am My Own Drug Dealer.
Because no one held me down with a needle. No one forced a pipe into my mouth.
But someone did laugh. And sometimes laughter is the first hit.