Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  I figured Shane had gotten himself into some shit, or was about to, and needed someone to watch his back. This had happened a time or two before, so that was what I was expecting when I got there. Either that or he would be wanting to borrow some money that he’d never repay.

  Shane met me in the parking lot, and when I asked what was up, he just started walking towards the club and said, “Follow me.” We walked in, and I walked to one of the bars to get a beer, so I would have a bottle for a weapon, if I needed it. This also gave my eyes some time to adjust to the light, so I wouldn’t get jumped from behind. I was fully prepared for a bar fight, if one were to ensue.

  It was a little after 9 p.m. and the live band was just starting to play. They were the Sharkadelics from over in Asheville, North Carolina and were a great band that was very popular at The Sound. The place was already crowded, and Shane stood by the railing of the raised platform we were standing on where the bar was located. There were three bars in the club, and they were all raised above the floor level, so you could sit at a table and see across the entire place.

  Finally, Shane pointed and asked, “Do you see that group of girls right there?” I did. “Do you see the tiny little girl with brown hair?” I saw her. “I need you to find out what her name is for me.” I wanted to hit him with my beer bottle.

  This was my friend. Call me and ask me to drop what I’m doing to come to the club. No explanation, just come. Which I did, out of friendship, and the goodness of my heart, and this asshole asks me to ask some girl what her name is..? What the fuck was this, high school? What else would he ask me to do, pass her a note?

  We walked over and Lisa excused herself from the group and joined us. Shane asked her if she wanted a drink, which she did, then he walked off to get it. I introduced myself, and she did as well. Mission accomplished. I could leave now, but once I got a good look at Lisa, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere until closing time.

  Lisa really was tiny, about 4 foot 11, and around ninety pounds. She had long light brown hair and hazel eyes. I could see that, although small, she had a nice body; hourglass figure, with a great ass. Something I really liked about her was that her nails were long enough to be sexy without being obnoxious. I have a thing for long fingernails.

  The three of us hung out together all that night. We walked around the dance floor when the band was taking a break. When the band was playing, we were standing by the stage and dancing. Well, Lisa was dancing, and Shane was doing something similar to having an epileptic seizure. I just drank beer.

  Lisa was a lot of fun and full of energy. She was very flirtatious, but I didn’t take any of it seriously since she and Shane were making plans to go out. I had a good time simply watching Lisa have a good time; this was a girl I could get used to being around, at least, that was my impression of her by the end of the night.

  Right before The Sound had last call I decided it was time for me to head home. Shane asked Lisa for her phone number, and since he didn’t own a cell phone, he asked if I’d put the number into my phone. I didn’t mind, and to be honest, I kind of liked the idea of having Lisa’s number.

  I handed the phone to Lisa and she punched in her number, and then decided to call her own phone to be sure that it worked. When her phone rang, she held it up for me to see. “And now I have your number,” she said with an angelic smile. Then she added, “in case I need to call you to get a hold of Shane.” Damn! My heart sank at those words.

  I left the club and headed towards home. When I got to Elizabethton, I stopped at a Taco Bell for something to eat. While I waited for my order, I picked up my phone, and noticed that there were several missed calls from Lisa’s number. I must have had the stereo turned up too loud to hear the phone ring.

  I called Lisa’s number back to see what she, or more likely Shane, wanted. When Lisa answered, she said that Shane had wrecked his car and needed me to come back to the club to help him. I said I was on my way, and hung up.

  On my way back to the club, I found myself getting kind of excited at the thought of seeing Lisa again. I knew I wanted her for myself, and knew I was going to have to figure out a way to get her before Shane did something stupid enough to run her off.

  I got back to The Sound, and saw that Shane’s little Celica was trashed. The entire passenger’s side was smashed in and he had two flat tires. He had gotten it back into the parking lot, so it was good until morning when we would come back with some tires.

  When I asked what happened, Shane said he was taking Lisa for coffee before she drove home. Lisa was already drunk when I got to the club, and we had been drinking for hours since then. Shane said that as he was pulling out of the parking lot, he decided to show Lisa “What my car could do,” as he put it.

  He revved the engine and popped the clutch. As the bald tires spun and he pulled onto the road, Shane reached down to blast the radio through his one good door speaker. That’s about when he side-swiped the telephone pole. This was one of those stupid things I did not need Shane doing.

  Lisa left in her own car, and I took Shane home. As we drove toward Shane’s mother’s house, he told me more about Lisa. He seemed to be able to remember an awful lot about her for someone who couldn’t remember her name earlier; idiot.

  The most surprising thing Shane told me about Lisa was that she had four kids, and that two of them, Tina and Faye, “The Twins,” were fifteen years old. Lisa didn’t look a day older than twenty-one herself, but she was actually thirty-one at the time. Lisa’s other kids were Joy, who was about to turn nine, and Levi, who was about eighteen months.

  Lisa currently did not have custody of any of her kids because of a little legal trouble she was having. Apparently, she had several counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for letting the twins have a party at home with several of their friends. A neighbor noticed a couple of drunk teens outside, and called the cops.

  Lisa had temporarily lost custody of all the kids, and they, with the exception of Joy, were living with Lisa’s parents in Hampton, Tennessee. Joy was with Lisa’s oldest sister, Katy, who lived right down the road from their parents, with her husband, Rupert.

  Lisa had also been charged with trying to run over a Unicoi County sheriff’s deputy. The cop was blocking the road with his car in a blind curve, when Lisa came down the road a little too fast, and almost ran into him, as he stood in the road behind his car. The charge would eventually be dropped down to “failure to control a vehicle.” Lisa was given a ten dollar fine. It was too funny to watch the cop get mad and storm out of the courtroom.

  The day after Shane wrecked his car, Lisa called me to see if he was okay, and to see if we had gotten his car moved, which we had. We talked for a little while, and then Lisa said that she was on her way to Shane’s house to see him. I told her I was going over there myself, and that I would see her there.

  I wasn’t really planning on going to Shane’s, until Lisa said that she was going. There was no way in hell I was going to leave her alone with Shane if I could help it.

  Going to Shane’s house to cock-block, became an every day event that entire week. Lisa would call me to see if Shane was home, (I usually knew if he was), and to let me know she was on her way to see him. Just in case he stopped by my place before she got to his house, she said.

  I would immediately drive over to Shane’s house and when Lisa got there, we would all hang out together. Lisa and I got along great. We were always talking shit to one another, and the jokes would regularly turn to a sexual nature. This always embarrassed Shane, because for all his supposed wild, sexual conquests, he was shy when it came to talking about kinky sex.

  Shane never seemed to think of Lisa and my joking around as anything more than a couple of friends cutting up together. Not everything I said to Lisa was a joke, and I was pretty sure she knew it. I never could tell if she was ever being serious with me, so I took everything she said as a joke.

  Since I was working the 11pm to 7am shift, I wasn’t getting
much sleep that week, due to spending so much time at Shane’s keeping Lisa’s attention diverted. So, when Lisa said she was about to leave town for a week with the twins, I was happy. I could catch up on some much needed sleep.

  I decided that I was going to try to hook up with Lisa when she got back. Since I didn’t just want to take her from Shane, I decided to try to get him to think it was his idea for me and Lisa to get together. This was a pretty brilliant plan, in my eyes.

  I started working on Shane’s insecurities. I told him that he should realize, before he got too involved with Lisa, that she was probably looking for a whole lot more than he could provide. He didn’t even have a real job, so how could he afford to take her out?

  Between his two kids, and her four kids, that’s six kids he would have to try to support. I told him that, since Lisa had lost her apartment and job after her arrests, she would need a place for her and her kids to live. There definitely wasn’t room for all of them in Shane’s mother’s little trailer.

  I strongly suggested to him that he get out of the situation before he got too attached to Lisa. Shane agreed that I was right, but he said he was in love with her. Of course he was. He fell in love with anyone who hung around for more than three days.

  Okay, time for me to change tactics. I told Shane that I hoped things worked out for him, but, if things did go to hell, would he consider suggesting to Lisa that she would be doing good to hook up with me? The dumbass actually called her and told her to hook up with me if things didn’t work out between them. He said he wanted to tell her now, in case she didn’t believe him at the time of the breakup.

  Lisa was due to return from her trip on Halloween day. I had four days of vacation time left for the year, so I put in to take them, starting on Halloween night. I was going to spend every minute of these days off trying to steal Lisa away from Shane. Little did I know then, that Shane was about to hand her to me on a silver platter.

  Chapter 9

  Lisa called me early, around 8am, the morning of Halloween day and left a voice mail saying she was back, and on her way to Shane’s house. Maybe I should mention at this point, that I have never been around Lisa when she wasn’t high, or drunk. She seemed to always be on something, and when I woke up and got the voicemail she had left me, she sounded completely wasted.

  I got dressed and drove over to Shane’s. Lisa was already there, passed out on the couch. Shane said she came in drunk, and laid down to sleep, without so much as saying even “hello” to him.

  I sat down in a chair across the coffee table from Shane, who was sitting at the end of the couch away from where Lisa was laying. We talked for a while, and finally, Lisa woke up. She went to the bathroom, then when she was done, walked outside to her car. When we heard the car door close, we figured she was leaving, but she came back in with a beer in her hand.

  Lisa drank her beer, without saying a word to us, then laid back down. When she did, Shane took a pillow and playfully hit her with it, and told her to wake up. Lisa jumped to her feet and quickly assumed the form of Satan himself, as she went fucking psycho.

  She started screaming at Shane and throwing shit, (“shit” as in her beer bottle, the ash tray, books, etc.) at him. She was telling him she wasn’t just going to sit there and let someone beat on her. It was insane. Lisa stormed out the door and told Shane never to call her again. It was over. I had thought, “Great. Now I’ll never see her again, either.”

  I told Shane to forget about it, and we jumped in my truck to go to the beer store. It wasn’t even noon yet, but it seemed like a good time to go ahead and start partying. After all, it was Halloween.

  Shane actually had one legitimate talent, he was good at tattooing. One day, when he was really hard up for money, I bought all of his tattooing equipment from him for a hundred and fifty dollars, with an agreement that he could use the equipment to make money. In return, I get any work I wanted done for free.

  Once we got our beer, we headed back to my house. We spent the day drinking and burning CD’s off the internet. We were getting pretty buzzed when I suggested Shane should give me a tattoo. He actually does his best work drunk.

  We got everything set up and he started working on my tat at around 5pm. Soon after he started, my phone rang. “Hey, what are you doing?” It was Lisa! I told her I was getting a tattoo, and she asked if she could come over and watch. I told her she could, then I gave her directions to my house. She had never been to my place before.

  When Lisa got there, she acted as if nothing had happened earlier with the demonic screaming and all, and as a matter of fact, was laughing and joking with the both of us. She got up and roamed around the house, checking everything out a few times and commenting on what a nice house I had.

  My house was three bedrooms with one and a half baths, living room, dining room, kitchen, and breakfast room. All of the floors, except the kitchen, were wood. The kitchen had white tile and the ceilings throughout were nine foot high. There were also nine ceiling fans scattered about and a set of French doors separating the living room from the dining room; all in all, very nice digs.

  The house had a full, unfinished basement. That is where the laundry room was. I had new countertops and custom made birch cabinets in the kitchen. The front yard was small, but I had a large back yard, and there was a huge deck the width of the entire house in the back. My dog; a long-haired, black, German Sheppard named Pica, lived in the big backyard.

  When Shane finished the tattoo, he ended up falling asleep. Lisa and I kept drinking and started snorting Lortabs we had crushed up on my coffee table. We were both pretty relaxed. She launched into a conversation about her kids, and I told her about my son, Damian, who came to stay with me from time to time.

  Around midnight, Shane woke up and said he needed to go home. Since he had ridden to my house with me, he didn’t have his car, so he needed a ride. Jokingly, I looked at Lisa and asked, “Do you want me to take him while you wait here, or do you want to take him and come back?” She laughed, got up and said she would take him.

  After Shane and Lisa left, I turned out the living room lights to watch a movie that was just coming on. After about 10 minutes, my phone rang. It was Lisa again. She asked if I still felt like having company, or was I going to bed. I said I was just watching a movie, and she was welcome to come watch it with me, if she wanted. We sat on the couch and talked for hours with no lights on, except the TV. Around 4am, Lisa got up, sat in my lap, and started kissing me. We headed towards the bedroom, fucked for a couple of hours, and went to sleep.

  About 7am, I could hear the sliding glass door that led out onto my deck open. I knew it was Shane, because I had shown him how to open that door when it was locked, in case he ever needed to get inside when I wasn’t home.

  I sat up and started putting my jeans on. Lisa woke up and asked me where I was going. “Nowhere,” I said, “Shane’s here.” Lisa sat up quickly and asked, “Why the fuck is he here? Is he in the house?” The knock at the bedroom door answered her question.

  I turned the door knob as I walked by on my way to the bathroom in my bedroom to take a piss. “Come on in,” I invited as the door opened. Lisa looked like she was about to freak out.

  Shane stepped in and just stood there for a second before he looked at Lisa and said, “I figured you were on your way back over here when you dropped me off last night.”

  “It’s none of your business where I go,” Lisa pointed out to him, “we aren’t together” meaning her and Shane.

  I walked back into the bedroom and told Shane to go wait in the living room while Lisa gets dressed. I told Lisa to take a shower, while I went to handle the situation with Shane.

  I went into the living room and Shane looked really upset. He said he had a feeling he would find Lisa at my house, so he got up early and drove over. I told him simply, “If you didn’t want to find her here, you shouldn’t have come looking.”

  He started to whine about me knowing how he felt about her and how he was
really going to try to make it work with her. I pointed out the fact that he told me he was cool with me getting with Lisa, if it didn’t work out between them, which, apparently, it wasn’t since Lisa had told him it was over between them. I also reminded him that he had told Lisa he wanted her to hook up with me if it wasn’t working with them, so, my bases were covered.

  Shane didn’t like it, but he had to agree that I was right. When Lisa walked into the living room a few minutes later, being the friend that he is, Shane walked up to her, gave her a hug, and said, “Be good to my best friend, and we can all be friends. I just want my buddy to be happy.” Then he left. I think he was crying like a little bitch.

  Lisa and I spent every second of my vacation time together. I got to meet Tina and Faye on the second night, when they called Lisa to ask her if she would go buy them some beer and liquor. I met Joy and Levi when we went to Lisa’s parents’ house to drop off Joy’s lunch money for the school week.

  The night I was to return to work, I asked Lisa what she was going to do. She said that she wasn’t sure, so I suggested that she just stay at my house. She said she wasn’t sure if she should stay there while I wasn’t there but I told her I would feel better knowing she had somewhere to stay. She finally agreed.

  The next night, Tina and Faye stayed at my house with Lisa. As I was leaving for work that night, Lisa kissed me goodbye and said, “I love you.” The twins heard her and both of them had a funny look on their faces as I left. I was thinking that, although we seemed to get along good, maybe the girls didn’t think I was good enough for their mom.

  On November 6th, seven days after Lisa basically moved in with me, six days after Shane caught us in bed together, and only three weeks since I first met Lisa, we got married.

  I don’t know how it happened. One minute, we were having breakfast at IHOP, and the next, we were at Wal-Mart buying a couple of wedding rings. Shane called me as Lisa and I were leaving Wal-Mart and I told him what we were doing. He said he wanted to go with us and he would meet us at my house.