I grew up in a rough neighborhood.

Rough neighborhoods are kinda funny, based on what I've heard from other people with similar experiences, in that you tend to have a really polarizing effect. You have your ghost neighbors, people that never talk to anyone and for all intents and purposes don't exist, you have your neighbors from hell, and you have your awesome neighbors that you keep as close to you as possible because in that kind of setting, you need to.

The neighbor on either side of the house I grew up in was pretty good. On the right was a ghost neighbor who eventually started talking to us and being pretty cool, and on the left were my godparents.

Across the street was a family of meth addicts, two doors down from them on the corner was a guy who cooked and sold meth. He had a network of users and sellers all down the street, and damn near one corner house at every intersection was involved with him.

This guy was a fucking icon. People in the area called him a number of things, "Tweaker Dan" was one nick-name, "the White Guy" was another.

He had a make-shift auto-shop in his garage, and he worked on cars from around 5am until about midnight every day, loudly, punctuated by people coming and going from his house to buy meth or shoot the shit or whatever. Sometimes he would have loud arguments with people outside, and sometimes he would have gunfights with people he argued with. More often when he went for his gun people left.

Dan rode his bike everywhere. He had a car, and it worked, but he generally just rode his bike all over the place.

Now, growing up, I just saw him as a shitty neighbor, to be feared and avoided.

The thing was, Tweaker Dan was actually a pretty friendly guy. He would wave to everyone, neighbors, anyone who lived in the neighborhood, anyone he recognized, really.

It wasn't until I was older that I learned a little more about Dan and his operation because of some mutual friends I ended up knowing.

Dan didn't just supply meth to the neighborhood users and sellers, Dan controlled a large amount of the local supply chain. There were two major gangs in the area, but our neighborhood fell directly in a kind of neutral area between their territories. One gang probably could have taken our neighborhood if they had wanted to, they were big enough, and powerful enough, but for Dan.

Dan was their supplier. They knew him as "the White Guy," and part of their arrangement with him is that he sold to them, but they stayed the fuck out of the neighborhood. This was his arrangement with anyone "affiliated" that he sold to. He would sell to pretty much anyone, but if he dealt with you, you kept your shit out of his neighborhood. "Don't shit where you live" sort of thing.

Turns out, this is also why he rode his bike everywhere and waved to everyone. Dan was keeping an eye on who came and went. He waved because he wanted you to know he was watching. It wasn't so much that he was being friendly, though he was, but that he was communicating something very important: he was watching.

To those of us that weren't involved with him, we didn't know. We didn't know about his rules, who he said was allowed to come and go, the arrangements he'd made that basically kept our neighborhood from getting worse as the city around us turned to shit. We only knew about his erratic and peculiar behavior, that he never slept, that he dealt drugs, that he did them.

A lot of the clean houses in the neighborhood vilified him, but it was always peculiar to see which houses were friendly with him, because it was not always who you'd expect. For a guy who had so much interaction with the meth heads, he was also friends with the prison guard, the family who lived a few doors down, my godfather. People you'd have thought would have avoided him.

But they knew. Fuck knows how, but they did. I asked my godfather about it after I found out and he said yeah, he knew, he just didn't see it as something that should be talked about.

So that's Tweaker Dan. One of the best and worst neighbors I've ever had.