Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  I watched as he would adjust the temperature up and down. I had never realized the temperature could be lowered at certain times to make the cook do what you wanted it to do. Joey would also point out the times of certain temperature changes. At one point, he even set the timer on the microwave and walked away, to let it cook untouched for a while.

  After about an hour and a half, the cook was done, and we were sitting around smoking the meth that Joey had just made. Joey never spoke a word until the cook was finished, and everything was cleaned up.

  Now that he was talking, and Lisa and myself were permitted to speak, I asked Joey, point blank, what was up with him knowing how to cook like that? He got serious, and said that the only people in the state of Tennessee who knew he was a cook were sitting in this room, and he expected it to stay that way. He said that the cook he helped out, and even his own wife didn’t know that he could cook. To them, he was just Joey the dumbass helper.

  When I asked him why he decided to show us that he could cook, he said it was because I offered to teach him what I knew, without asking for anything in return. He said that I was the only person to ever do that, so he decided to return the favor.

  One of the most important things I learned from Joey was that, especially when it comes to a Red P cook, the more you handle the cook, the more dope you lose during the various processes. Joey showed me several shortcuts that saved time, and increased yield.

  I asked Joey if he would hang out while I did another cook, that way, I could be sure I understood everything and could repeat the new things he had shown me. He agreed, and we started setting things up and doing some prep work, while Lisa went out for more pills. I didn’t know it then, but my lessons for the day weren’t over yet.

  The cook went great, and as I was getting ready to gas off the dope, Joey said he was going to show me something else. Joey took an electric skillet I had, and laid a wire rack across it. Then, he told me to gas the puller lightly so that there was only a thin layer of dope in the coffee filter when I filtered it. I would repeat this step with a new coffee filter, over and over, until no more dope could be gassed out. This was only a half ounce batch, but I ended up using about forty filters.

  As I got a filter ready, I handed it to Lisa, who would dry it on the rack over the hot plate, which was turned up pretty high. When the filter was dry, Lisa would set it in a stack with the rest of them. Joey never touched anything.

  When we finally finished, we dumped all of the dope onto a plate. There was a huge pile. When I weighed it, I was surprised to find that there was only barely over a gram of dope there. This wasn’t possible! How could all of this dope weigh only a gram? I changed the batteries in my scales and weighed it again. No difference. Finally, Joey started laughing his ass off. This was an old scam used by old school cooks when they would “help” a newer cook out.

  The scam begins when the old timer makes an agreement to teach the newbie a new trick in exchange for the coffee filters when the cook is over. Coffee filters that have been used for filtering meth, are often used to make coffee with, because there is meth still embedded in the filter. I would sometimes sell filters for five dollars each to someone wanting dope, but who didn’t have a lot of money.

  The first trick to the scam is to get the newbie to use brake parts cleaner, or some other puller that makes the dope extremely fluffy when it’s dried. This way it looks like there is more dope than what is really there.

  The next trick is to be sure you, as the old cook, never touch anything. That way you are never suspected of ripping anyone off.

  Once the newbie gasses the dope, the filters are dried over heat. The heat draws more of the dope into the filters. After all of the filters are emptied, the old cook leaves with the filters, and most of the dope.

  Joey showed me how to soak the filters out in alcohol to retrieve the meth. We ended up getting about ten more grams of dope out of the filters, to go with the pile of fluffy dope. This was dope I had never realized I had helped screw myself out of. It was a pretty cool trick, and I was just glad he did it to teach me, and not screw me over.

  It had taken about six months to teach myself how to make meth, and I didn’t even want to try to imagine how much money I had spent during that time on chemicals and other supplies. I think the worst part of it all was knowing that most of those cooks I had dumped down the drain were actually good cooks. I just didn’t know at the time that they were good, because they did not, at least according to all of my research, do all of the things they were supposed to do.

  If I had just had someone to tell me, “Mix this with this, then do that.” like most meth cooks, I would have been cooking a lot sooner. Instead, I spent my time learning everything I could about cooking, and that is what I did wrong.

  While the knowledge I acquired during those early months made me a better meth cook later, it slowed my progress during my learning period. I knew more than I needed to know, and that caused me to make things too complicated. I guess Lisa was right when she said I knew too much about it to do it.

  I learned two more things that day I cooked with Joey. The first was that he had dropped the hint about the cooking temperatures on purpose. He said he figured that info would help me. He only hoped I would be smart enough to pick up on the hint when he threw it out there. Thankfully for my meth cook career, I was.

  The second thing I learned was kind of weird at first. Joey got me off alone and told me not to trust those closest to me. He looked towards Lisa as he told me this. I figured he was just speaking generally, but if I had known what he already knew, I would have considered shoving Lisa’s head into a bear trap.

  Chapter 15

  My motivation for learning to cook meth was to save money by supplying Lisa and myself with what was basically “free” dope. Forget the fact that knowing how to make it was just cool. Selling dope was never really part of the plan, because I didn’t need to sell. I had a great paying job, and Lisa was working as well, so we had plenty of money coming in.

  Now that I could manufacture meth, I wanted to cook every chance I had. This was costing money, although not as much as I was saving by not having to buy dope anymore.

  Lisa and I were pretty heavy users, but we couldn’t even come close to putting a dent in all the dope I was generating on a daily basis. I decided that it might not be a bad idea to start selling a little bit of the excess product I was producing. I just wanted to be sure I didn’t get the reputation of being a cook in the process.

  At first, there were only a few people that knew I could cook; me, Joey, Lisa, Shane, and the twins. That was everyone who knew, and that is how I wanted it to stay. I also didn’t want anyone at all to know I was still cooking at home.

  We came up with a story that we were cooking at one of Lisa’s meth world friend’s houses. When I was going to cook, we would tell everyone we would be gone from home for a few hours. We would hide one of the cars at the mall, or at a grocery store parking lot somewhere, then go back home and do the cook in the basement.

  We covered all the basement windows and stayed down there until the cook was finished. That way, if someone came by the house, one of the cars would be gone, and the lights would be out.

  I still didn’t know anyone in the meth world other than Joey. Shane was just getting into smoking and didn’t know anyone except for Lisa and me because we were the ones who got him on it in the first place. Tina’s boyfriend, Bernie, was a smoker and knew a few people who bought some from time to time, but it wasn’t much. That left us with Lisa’s friends for us to try to build a market with.

  Lisa took about a half ounce of meth one night and headed out. The plan was to distribute the dope to as many people as she could, for free. She was letting people know there was a new cook around, and giving away free samples was the best way to get a lot of people to try it without asking them to put out any cash for it. If they wanted more, they could call.

  The plan worked great, and I began selling everything I co
uld make. Money was rolling in, and Lisa and I were using more than we ever imagined possible. Cooking meth seemed to be taking over both of our lives. Lisa quit her job, and I changed from night shift to day shift, so I could cook at night to keep up with demand. When I was at work, I was constantly on the phone with Lisa to be sure she was doing all of the prep work, and moving product.

  My using was way out of control also. I spent so much time at work in the restroom smoking, that people thought I was sick. Since working out was a thing of the past, and I wasn’t eating at all, my weight loss added to the sickness theories.

  Several times during my shift, I would duck down under my casting machine with my meth pipe to take a few hits. A few times I even went as far as to bring glass tubing to work so I could blow my own meth pipes using the torches on the assembly line.

  I would be getting ready for work and smoking so much, that by the time I ran out the door and hauled ass to work, I was clocking in with only seconds to spare. On the days I did manage to leave for work on time, I would sit in my car, in the parking lot, smoking meth until I had to run inside to clock in for work just in the nick of time.

  The company I worked for had a points system when it came to attendance. If you were up to four hours late, you get half a point. If you were more than four hours late, you got a full point. Once you hit ten points, you lost your job. Because of being late, and sometimes not even coming in at all, I was up to nine points in early November of 2004.

  Lisa and I had been up all night arguing about something. I had not been to sleep in a couple of days, and I hadn’t cooked, so I was out of dope. Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly happy or motivated in any sense of the words. I was so tired, I was about to fall over, but I had to go to work.

  As I was getting dressed, Lisa pulls out a gram of ice. Ice is the crystallized form of meth, which I was not making. I wasn’t sure where she got it from, and I really didn’t care, I had to wake up.

  We smoked the gram in record time, and I left for work wired out of my mind. I was halfway to work, when I noticed I had five minutes to get there and I still had ten minutes of driving time left to go. Suddenly, it seemed like a great idea to call in and quit my job. Hell, I was going to end up fired within a week anyway with the way I was going. Besides, I could make more money than I could spend if I cooked full time. That again, would be another example of the mind of a meth addict’s logic.

  So, I called in, quit, then turned around and headed home. When I got there, I told Lisa I had been fired, then I went to the basement to cook.

  There were several problems with this idea that I didn’t foresee happening. One of the problems was that the yield on my cooks weren’t very high. Red P cooks are notorious for producing low yields as it is. With me still being a new cook, I didn’t yet know all of the tricks I would learn later on that would get me more dope out of my cooks.

  In those early days, I was getting about a 40% yield. That meant, for every ten grams of pseudo I started a cook with, I was getting four grams of finished product. That isn’t very good when you consider the fact that Lisa and I were doing three to four grams each a day, every day. We were also smoking with the twins, Bernie, Joey, and Shane.

  We had a lot of bills, with the mortgage payment, three car payments, and insurance on everything. I was also paying $100 bucks a week for child support. It didn’t take long for us to start missing better than $1200 bucks a week between the two of us from what used to be our jobs.

  Another huge drain on our supply was Lisa smoking with, and giving dope away to, everyone that she was supposed to be selling to. She would go on a run with several grams to sell, then come back several hours later with no dope and enough money to pay for about a half a gram.

  Her excuse was always that she had smoked it with “this” person, or “that” person, to try to generate more customers. This normally would have been okay with me, and not bothered me at all. Unfortunately, this dope was now our only source of income, and we really needed the money.

  Even though meth addiction is a lifestyle, I was treating it as a business, and trying to live life by the everyday rules of a working man, where home, family, and paying the bills come first. Since I did not work my way up the hierarchy of the meth subculture to become a cook, I didn’t really understand how things were done in that world. I was about to watch two worlds collide, and I don’t know how I ever survived it.

  Chapter 16

  Lisa and I were starting to argue all of the time. The arguments were always about the dope she was giving away and the amount of time she was staying gone from home when she was supposed to be out selling dope. I was never allowed to know where exactly she was going when she left to go sell and that was a huge issue for me as well.

  When Lisa would get a call for some dope, she would say she was going to see “her friend on the mountain,” or, “running over to Milligan Highway”. These trips, that used to take less than an hour, started turning into four and five hour ventures, and I’d never hear from her.

  There was always an excuse about why it had taken her so long. One night, while the twins were at the house, Lisa left to sell some dope. As soon as she left, I told the girls she would be gone at least two hours, and when she got back, she would have one of three excuses:

  The person wanting the dope had to go somewhere, and she had to wait for him to get back.

  By the time she got there, someone untrustworthy had shown up and they had to wait for the person to leave before doing the deal.

  She was waiting on the money to be delivered.

  When Lisa walked through the door, about five hours later, she started with her excuses. She gave not one, but all three of the excuses I told the twins she would be using. The girls started laughing their asses off, and when I told Lisa why they were laughing, she got mad and left. She didn’t come home until the next day.

  With so much dope going out, and so little money coming in, I was really in bad financial trouble. My truck, and one of the cars had been repossessed, and the house payment was two months behind. I told Lisa we needed to make some changes. It was time for me to meet some of her “friends”, so that I could take over the business end of things, since she didn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it herself.

  Lisa said that she would talk to her people and ask if they would be willing to meet me. She told me these people were very careful about who they let into their little circle, and that the only reason they dealt with her in the first place, is because she had grown up around most of them. They knew she could be trusted.

  That was good, because, as I explained to her, since they knew she could be trusted, then they should have no problem at all trusting someone she trusted herself. Especially since that person is her own husband.

  I gave her a few days, and she finally said that a few of her friends would be willing to meet me. It just couldn’t happen right away. These people were mostly truck drivers, or had out of town jobs, and they would all be gone for a few weeks. But once they got home, we could meet.

  I know, I know. Could I really be that stupid as to believe a bunch of bullshit like that? You’ll have to understand, around this time I was so strung out that I was pretty easily convinced of anything. I accepted her story as fact, and it went back to business as usual. It never even crossed my mind to wonder where Lisa was going with all of the dope, if everyone was out of town.

  One day, Lisa gets a call from someone wanting to trade some ice for some of my dope. While ice is supposed to be a purer form of meth, mine was definitely stronger, and you got a more intense high from it. I told her to go ahead and make the trade, since we had not done any ice in a while.

  Lisa left, and after a few hours, I started calling her cell phone to ask where the hell she was at. Her phone was off, but I kept calling anyway, and leaving voicemails. Finally, Lisa calls me back and says she is almost home. I asked what was taking so long, and she said she would explain when she got home. There was something weird a
bout her voice, so I didn’t ask any more questions.

  Lisa got home a few minutes after we hung up. When she came in the door, she looked really freaked out. I asked if she was okay, and she said she was, but she just needed to think for a few minutes. “Did you get the ice?” I inquired. She did, and she handed it to me.

  We sat and smoked the ice, while Lisa told me what had taken so long. She said that she had stopped to pick up Faye to ride with her. Once they got to the friend’s house, they had to wait for her husband to get there with the ice. He had gone to North Carolina to get it. A fairly short drive from where they lived.

  While they waited, the husband had called. The truck he was in broke down, and he asked for them to bring a tool box. They all got into Lisa’s car, and headed to where he had said he broke down. When they got there, there were two cop cars pulled in behind the truck.

  The friend gets out, then walks over to the truck with the tool box. After a few minutes, the friend walks back to Lisa’s car. She leans in the window, and drops a package with two ounces of ice in it onto the floor, and tells Lisa to “go wait at our house.” So, she did.

  Once the people got back, Lisa did her trade, then dropped Faye off on her way home. The reason she was so freaked out she said, was because her friends had almost been busted. That sounded reasonable, so I left it alone.

  Later that night, Lisa said, that while she was at her friend’s house, they told her to tell me to stop buying so many pills at the Wal-Mart in Elizabethton. They also said I needed to get all my cook stuff out of the house.

  I asked Lisa, how the hell do they know I’m cooking at home? No one but me, Lisa, and the twins, knew I was cooking at home. She said she didn’t tell anyone I was cooking at home, and she could not explain how they would know where I was buying my pseudo pills. I decided to ignore it, despite the fact that this would turn out to be an unwise decision on my part.