Wannabe Mr Big: Liam Pieper as a teenager, during his years as a drug dealer. Credit:Courtesy of Liam Pieper The next day, I felt dazed and hungover, but I could feel the loneliness that had spread over me since childhood burn off like a morning fog. My combination of shyness and snobbery had made me solitary, and spending the night smoking and laughing with acerbic, witty kids my own age was a turning point. They knew music and books and the phone numbers of girls I was too timid to talk to. They'd also insisted on paying me for the weed. Word got around, and classmates started calling me up to ask for weed. Then I started to get hit up for grams by older kids at school, then by people outside of school. At first I stole a little at a time from my parents' stash, then, after my older brother Ardian got busted doing the same thing and was grounded, I started buying in bulk from a local dealer and moved into retail. I got out of school at 3.10pm, went home to eat and change, and then I would be on the road, pumping the pedals on my BMX bicycle from 4pm until late at night, making deliveries. I always made sure that I met clients at their places. Deals on the street made me nervous and when I had the chance to see how someone lived, it was easier to judge what kind of person they were: whether a client was just socially awkward or if they were visually measuring me as a fit for the chains in their dungeon. Most of the time, things were civilised.

There was one time when a local gangster thought I had ratted him out to the cops and took me for a ride in his car with a bunch of heavies. Another time, I followed a dodgy contact to Camberwell, into a room full of Cambodian smack dealers with sharpened machetes who stared me down and muttered in Khmer. I bought my bag of weed and did my best to smile as broadly as possible, with lots of pleases and thank yous, like a tourist trying to order coffee in Paris. Mum and Dad had no problem with my smoking weed, provided I did my chores, but they were sniffy about the act of selling pot. One school night when I was in year 9, a stranger knocked on the door, looking for me, and Dad opened the door. "Hi!" he said to Dad. "Can I buy some weed off you?" "I don't know what you're talking about," replied Dad unconvincingly. "Are you Liam? I wanted to buy some weed off Liam."

Dad stopped closing the door and turned to look at me. There was a long, excruciating silence as the stranger walked inside, pushing past Dad to shake my hand. "I can't help you," I choked out. He looked confused. "But everyone said you could." "They were wrong." I took the stranger by the arm and walked him to the door. "I don't sell weed. I'm very sorry." I started to close the door and gave him just enough time to yell out, "What about pills?" I turned back around. Mum and Dad were angry. Ardian was grinning mirthfully. I was in trouble. "We don't want our child to be a drug dealer," said Mum.

"Some of your best friends are drug dealers." "Those aren't our friends. Those are our drug dealers. We want more for you than to be a drug dealer.' Ardian stepped forward. "You don't bring home the grades, and you're not really making a lot of cash from this, so you may as well give it up and do some f...ing homework." He was only half right. I was a terrible student. I was, however, making a fortune, at least relative to my classmates. I tried to explain this to my family, starting with words before fetching a paper and pen to supply a diagram of the logistics. I'd stepped up my operation after the first few months, when my business had expanded to the point where I couldn't handle it on my own any more. I took my ounce bags of weed and divided them into quarters to sell on to other dealers who I'd subcontracted. I would give the bags to a roster of neighbourhood burnouts who would then on-sell the product and pay me the wholesale price.

It also plumped up my little ego. I handed out bags of dope along with platitudes about life on the street that I'd learnt from Wu-Tang Clan records, and bristled with pride when my underlings nodded and scurried off to do my bidding. I didn't keep weed in the house and only had it in my possession for a few hours at a time. Anything I had to hold on to for more than a day or two was stashed at a friend's place, for which I paid him a retainer. On the rare occasion I got into trouble, I had people who would sort it out for a small amount of money or else they took payment in trade. Some of my team offered to pay me in kind: pills, bags of speed, bushels of raw tobacco they'd scored from the Philip Morris factory. While I would occasionally pass these goodies on to friends who'd asked for them specifically, they held no interest for me. I partly assumed, as with asparagus, I would learn to enjoy them once I was a little older and my tastes had matured, but for now I felt too young. Dad was a crusading moralist at times, but a miser first and foremost. He wasn't happy that I was pushing drugs, but he admired the economics of the cottage-industry mafia I was at the helm of. He sat down and ran through the sums with me, carefully double checking the profit margins. "When you buy in this amount, how much does an ounce cost you?" he asked. I named a figure.

He smiled. "And what would it cost me?" So I started selling weed to my parents. Turns out they didn't mind that I was selling drugs as long as it looked as though I was doing my homework, I kept the gear away from the house, and I gave them easy access to cheap, good-quality weed. Mum at least knew how to talk in gangster slang. Anyone who's spent a couple of decades getting high picks up the trick of talking casually about contraband. If Mum wanted to buy a bag, she would call and ask, "Hey, Liam, have you seen my umbrella?" To which I would reply, "The big one?" "No, the little one. The one your father uses at the weekend." And I would bring home a quarter bag of grass.

So helping Mum and Dad to score was ideal, although it made negotiating pocket money awkward. I thought I should get more as I was dealing to them at cost price, but they didn't see it that way. In the end, I took it as an overhead. I had plenty of pocket money, anyway. I was just 18, and Sarah and I had been going out for more than a year, but there were a hundred reasons why I was reluctant to introduce her mum to my folks. At 10.30pm one night, Mrs Lubow parked out the front of our house and knocked on the door. I ushered her into the hallway, where my parents stood freshly scrubbed and clear-eyed, and there was a round of handshaking and awkward smiling. Dad cracked a dad joke and Mrs Lubow nodded politely. For a couple of minutes I thought that maybe the whole thing wouldn't be as difficult as I'd feared, when the police raided. As it turns out, officers in unmarked cars had been watching the house, waiting. They were hoping to catch me in the act of selling drugs, before swooping in and busting me. When Mrs Lubow pulled up out the front of the house in her nicely appointed coupe, the surveillance team decided that she must be my dealer. A heavy-set man in a polo shirt advanced up the driveway. I saw him coming and left my parents and Mrs Lubow making chitchat to meet him.

"Can I help you?" I asked. "Are you Liam Pieper?" "Yes, I am, but ... this isn't a good time." "No," he agreed. "It isn't." Just before he grabbed me, I caught a flash of the Lacoste logo on his shirt and my heart sank. I'm not sure when or why the undercover officers of the world decided that the mid-tier designer polo was the cloak of urban invisibility, but every time a cop has sprung out of the shadows at me, it's always been there, faithful as a hound, that crocodile.

Poor Mrs Lubow. One minute it was all, "Isn't it unseasonably cold?" and the next it was, "Where's the dope, bitch?" The police, after charging her down, realised that this 40-something divorcee wasn't the drug lord they'd been angling for. Disappointed, they let her go. Mrs Lubow gathered up Sarah and stormed out as I stood staring forlornly after them. This was going to be hard to explain. The consensus among my friends and legal advisers was that I would be going to prison. My parents and girlfriend accompanied me to court. To show the judge what a normal, upstanding family we were, my folks had worn their finest office-party-in-1987 outfits, and Sarah looked dressed for synagogue in a modest ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse. Sarah: "I'll wait for you - for a while." Dad: "Many fine books have been written in prison." Mum: "Your brother wants to borrow your leather jacket until you get out."

My barrister didn't try to plead innocence - he didn't deliver a fire-and-brimstone courtroom address. He just stood up and spoke quietly and intently. "This young man - this child - has freely admitted that he was a drug dealer, that he engaged in criminal behaviour. But he is not a criminal. No, he is a child. The child of a family torn apart by tragedy, by the very drugs which now threaten to ruin this boy's life." The magistrate took a few minutes, shuffling papers and then looked at me. She had a soft, kindly face and sharp eyes. Those eyes were truly terrifying. Imagine eyes staring from the slit of a World War II pillbox bunker, or the gloom of a childhood closet. I started trembling under their gaze. "You've done some bad things, committed serious crimes, but I am not unaware of your extenuating circumstances. Tell me something, Liam. When you started smoking cannabis, did you know it was addictive?" "No, your worship. Not until it was too late." She banged her gavel and made her judgment. I got lucky. I was free.

That night I got high as a kite at a party that a buddy threw at her apartment in town, where my friends lifted me up on their shoulders and gifted me a shirt that read, "I got booked for trafficking and all I got was this stupid T-shirt." The next morning I stood on the roof of the apartment, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun rise over Melbourne. For the first time in forever, I was looking forward to whatever was coming next. "Okay," I said out loud to the sunrise. "That's enough." I had been rattled, and had decided that I was done with crime. That said, in the six months of terror preceding my trial I'd learnt that when feeling anxious and having to do something taxing, such as, say, drive to uni, the best thing was to enjoy a bottle of vodka and a bump of coke. I wasn't going to sell drugs any more, but I sure wasn't done taking them. Another lesson was that maybe I wasn't the hard-boiled gangster I had assumed. This was confirmed for me when, a few months later, Sarah went to art school and took up with a guy in her class: a tall, skinny Nick Cave doppelgänger who painted portraits of himself as Jesus on the cross. I walked in on them making out, started a fight and had my arse handed to me. I walked away bleeding and downhearted. It hurt to catch Sarah with another guy, but I was more upset that I'd gone to defend my honour and been whipped. For years I had based my persona on being a kind of suburban ronin, whose deadly wit was matched only by his fists. Now I'd been dragged into the front yard of an Ormond townhouse and tenderised by a guy who painted with acrylics. Acrylics. I wasn't cut out for a life of crime, and slowly, as my virtuoso-inflicted bruises started to fade, I began to realise this.

I started moonlighting as a music critic and supplemented my income by working at a pizza shop. Once I had a few bucks, I set about to find myself, in all the usual ways. I hitchhiked up and down the east coast, wrote a terrible novel on an old laptop that was stolen from me by a burglar, thankfully before I had a chance to send the manuscript anywhere. Slowly, I healed what I was telling everyone was a broken heart but was really just a bruised ego. Little by little, I learnt how to suffer minor slings and arrows without emptying my house of drugs and booze and getting caught breaking into the neighbours' house in search of a bottle of Tia Maria to send me off to sleep. Between new friendships reminding me that people aren't born scheming and cretinous, getting sober, falling in love, and the slow drift of time, the various bruises to my heart and ego started to heal. I had sobriety, work, a relationship. I took up gardening as a hobby. Instead of spending my weekend swerving drunkenly across roads or trying to cauterise a knife wound with a bottle of rum and a Zippo lighter, I pottered around my courtyard, composting and re-potting basil. Instead of dreading the cold snap that meant winter was coming and the hours that I would have to spend camped out in the rain waiting on dealers, I saw an opportunity to plant garlic and beetroot. I kept paying back the money I'd stolen here and there, and made apologies to the few people who would still pick up a call from me. I felt guilty about having distanced myself from my family for so long and vowed that I would do anything for them, except see them. When I did, it was under sufferance, and I was insufferable. The problem with getting clean was that, along with sobriety, I found sanctimony. I had the born-again's zeal against sinful things, and took umbrage at the fact that my family all still really loved weed.

I got over that in time, though. I've learnt that there aren't any hard and fast rules on how to live your life. That is what I got from my folks, and all the rest is on me. Someone once told me that a family is a group of people thrown together by fate who become weirder and weirder until nobody else can understand them. And we are, after all of it, still standing. Edited extract from The Feel-Good Hit of the Year by Liam Pieper, published by Hamish Hamilton this week.