Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  I spent four days in jail, before Lisa’s mom and sister could get me out on a property bond. When Lisa picked me up at the jail, she said that the drug agents had called her and told her that nobody was allowed to go inside our house until I got out of jail. They didn’t care that Lisa was my wife, and had every right to go in and out whenever she wanted.

  Surprisingly, the cops didn’t fuck up my house when they searched. They did however, take every piece of Pyrex, and every glass jar out of my kitchen.

  I found a binder that had all of my meth recipes, as well as other related research, lying on a shelf in the linen closet under a blanket. Lisa said that was where she had hidden all of my Uncle Fester books. I’m guessing, some idiot, had found the recipes and then found the books, and had gotten so excited with his find, that he laid the binder down and completely forgot about it.

  That was absolutely retarded, because the binder was excellent evidence against me, where as the Uncle Fester books could simply be reordered right off the Internet. There isn’t a law that I know of against owning books.

  There were a few weird things we did notice right away though, once we got to looking around. The first was that someone had removed a drawer from our dresser and put it on the bed. The drawer contained Lisa’s lingerie, so we just figured some of the cops were just being pervs and sniffing the crotches or something.

  Since Lisa didn’t know who had their grubby little dick beaters on her undies, she decided to wash everything. When she picked the stuff up, a bag, full of various pain pills was lying on the bottom of the drawer. We had lost this bag a couple of weeks earlier, and thought that Tina had stolen them. Once we found this bag of pills in this drawer that was purposefully left out, we figured it was some sort of message.

  Our second “message” came when Lisa found a dope baggie, ripped open, floating in the toilet. We both recognized the baggie as one we had some dope stashed in for hard times. When we checked our little stash spot, the dope was missing. This was crazy, because I was not charged with possession of any drugs, yet here was proof that they could have charged me several times.

  The strangest find, was the 8-ball, (One-eighth of an ounce) of meth that Lisa found in the vacuum cleaner. There was a large area rug we had put in our living room. Instead of having to move the coffee table to roll up the rug so it could be taken outside and shaken out, Lisa would just vacuum it with an old vacuum cleaner I had in a storage closet.

  When Lisa went to vacuum the carpet, she noticed a large lump where the vacuum cleaner bag was. She unzipped it, and found a large ball of aluminum foil. When she unfolded the foil, there was an 8-ball of meth inside. We smoked it, and discovered it was anhydrous ammonia made dope. I was making higher quality Red P based dope, so I knew it wasn’t mine. This was a set up.

  We straightened up the house, and Lisa went out to the car to get my lab. I couldn’t believe she had brought it with her to pick me up at the jail. I figured the last thing the cops would even expect me to do when I got home, would be to cook up a batch of dope. So, that’s exactly what I did; business as usual.

  Chapter 19

  Not long after the bust, Lisa and I more or less split up. I wouldn’t call what we had a marriage anymore anyhow, so it wasn’t surprising when Lisa had told me she thought we should just have a business relationship.

  Things for me got even worse. The electric and water were turned off because the bills hadn’t been paid in a couple months, and the house was being foreclosed on. My truck got repossessed, and my car went soon after that.

  It was getting into the middle of December, and it was getting very, very cold. I moved a futon out into the dining room with my computer desk, and a kerosene heater. I hung blankets over the doorways to keep the heat in the dining room, and the heater also happened to be my source of heat for cooking meth.

  Every couple of days, Lisa would stop by the house for a few hours. We would get cook supplies, something to eat, and we would get a two and a half gallon kerosene can filled. The can would last about forty-eight hours in my little heater. I also had several gallon milk jugs that I would fill with water at the car wash. This water was used for bathing, flushing the toilet, and washing jars, and anything else that needed cleaning. I sure was living high on the hog at this point in life.

  One day, when Lisa showed up, I took her phone and keys from her. I was tired of her fucking around. I was tired of never getting anything but excuses for my dope. When Lisa was at home, all I ever heard about was “Bob this” and “Bob that.” I was getting tired of that shit too. FUCK BOB!

  Although I had never met Bob, I hated the man. This motherfucker, in my way of thinking, was the reason my life was going to shit. Who the fuck did this dude think he was, running around with my wife? I wasn’t going to take this anymore, and I made sure Lisa wasn’t going anywhere.

  Lisa tried to convince me that I was only hurting myself by not letting her leave. She was suddenly worried that we were about to lose the house, and she said she wanted to get our lives back on track. Of course, this could only be accomplished by me letting her go back to the same shit she had been up to, whatever that was.

  While we argued, Lisa ended up dropping a bombshell on me that I wasn’t expecting. Lisa informed me, that not only did she know how to cook now; she had already done a very large cook for Bob. I didn’t believe her, but decided to test her, so I set up the lab, did all the prep work, then told her to have at it. To my surprise, she pulled it off. Now, I’m not sure if she had learned from Bob, someone else, or if she had just seen me cook so many times, that she figured it out, but, regardless of how she learned, I was a little bit impressed.

  We talked for a while, and Lisa seemed to honestly want to go back to a normal life. I ended up telling her she could go sell the dope she just cooked, but she had better bring back all of the money from the dope she was taking. I also told her, if she saw Bob, she could tell him she wouldn’t be around anymore. Lisa said she would be fine with all of that, so I gave her the car keys, and she left.

  I really didn’t expect Lisa to show back up for at least a couple of days, no matter what we had just talked about. That’s why I didn’t know what to think when she actually pulled back into the driveway just a few hours later. She said she had dropped the dope off with someone, and that she’d have to go pick up the money later.

  While we waited, Lisa gave me a few boxes of pills that she had gotten while she was out, so I started a small cook just to kill time. While I was finishing the cook, Lisa’s phone rang. I figured it was someone calling to tell her to come pick up the money. Lisa walked into another room to talk, and I couldn’t hear what was being said.

  When Lisa got off the phone, she said it was Bob. I was immediately pissed off and asked her if she told him to fuck off. She said she didn’t get a chance to, because he had called to ask a favor from me.

  According to Lisa, Bob needed four ounces of dope cooked right away. Since Lisa didn’t have much experience, he didn’t want to trust the cook to her, so he wanted to know if I would do the cook. He said he had a camper set up in a secluded area with everything I needed. All I had to do was cook, then leave. I would be paid fourteen hundred dollars per ounce when the cook was completed. The only catch was Bob wanted to be there for the cook.

  I was a little skeptical about this whole thing. Bob, supposedly, was a cook himself, so why not do his own cook if it was that important? According to Lisa, Bob was an anhydrous ammonia cook, not a Red P cook, and he needed Red P dope for his customer. Red P cooks were rare in our area, and I was actually considered to be the best they had in the area, so I was the one he wanted for the cook.

  This brought about a new question. If Bob didn’t know how to cook Red P dope, who had Lisa been learning from? This started one hell of a fight, because Lisa’s only answer to that question was, “Don’t ask me a question you don’t want the answer to.”

  Finally, I told Lisa to tell Bob I would do the cook. She had convinced me that
this money would be what we needed to save the house and start over. That’s all I wanted anyway, so the rest was unimportant.

  Lisa was about to go pick up Bob. As she was about to leave, I was getting my 9mm out of my curio cabinet, so I could get it loaded and ready to go. Lisa asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I didn’t know or trust this “Bob” dude, so I was taking my gun. That way, if he tried something stupid, I could protect myself. She seemed a little freaked out about it, but she left to get Bob. She never showed back up to go do the cook. I wasn’t surprised, and luckily, I still had all of the dope from the small cook I had done earlier.

  Lisa disappeared for about a week after that. During that time, I got a hold of my old workout partner, Harley, to see if he could give me a ride to The Sound, so I could move some dope myself. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to, but I figured Shane or Joey would help me out once I got there. Shane and Joey had stopped coming around my house. I’m guessing this was in part because of my bust, and probably in part because of my overall condition. I was in pretty rough shape with the weight loss, and going days and days without sleep.

  Since Joey had been a meth user for so long, he knew that staying awake as long as possible is just a part of being a meth addict. Something else common among meth users are hallucinations. These hallucinations are more of a side effect from lack of sleep than from the actual drug use. While it would be difficult to find a meth addict who has not experienced at least one, very real seeming, hallucination, a lot of meth users do not like them at all. Fortunately for me, I enjoyed them very much.

  Chapter 20

  When meth addicts get together to talk, the talk always turns to the things they have seen after days of partying with no sleep. Some hallucinations are so common that they are experienced by meth users everywhere. The most common of these are universally known in the meth world as “Shadow People.”

  Shadow people come at night when all the inanimate objects take on a whole new life of their own. To a person who’s been up a little too long, shadow people can be anything from a cop, to a nosy neighbor, to a roving band of ninja assassins. In reality, all the person is seeing is nothing more than the shadows cast by cars, bushes, garbage cans, and other things you’d expect normal casting of shadows from.

  When we get in this mental state, we can get pretty delusional; most of the time, we think we are being watched. Sometimes, we even think there are other people in the house. I’ve even thought there was someone in the same room with me and I just couldn’t turn around fast enough to catch him standing behind me. As ridiculous as this sounds you will never convince us that what we are seeing isn’t real, because, well, we can see it.

  It is not uncommon for others to start to feed off of someone else’s hallucinations. An example of this is one night when Lisa and I were “geeked out” together. If you are geeked out, you have been up long enough to be seeing shit, hearing shit, and most likely, doing really stupid shit. If you are “shot out,” you are just basically a zombie in retarded mode. I tend to get shot out on occasion.

  This particular night, we were doing a cook in the dining room, on the kerosene heater. Lisa got it in her head that someone was trying to break into the house through the basement door. She would say, “Shh.... listen, can you hear that?” It didn’t take long for me to “hear it.”

  I went quietly into the basement and tied a string to the door, then ran the string up through a water pipe access panel in the upstairs linen closet. I then took the opposite end of the string and tied it to an empty soda bottle, and once I pulled it tight, I laid the bottle in the middle of the dining room floor. Thus, my Meth-Addict-Platinum Security System was complete.

  I took the cook pot off of the heater and Lisa and I laid in the middle of the dining room floor, staring at the fucking bottle, all throughout the night. Every few minutes, one of us would say, “Did you see it?! It moved!” I don’t know what the hell we would have done if that bottle would have actually took off across the floor right in front of us. I’d venture a guess that crapping our pants would come to mind.

  There was another incident that happened, during the day, where an intense paranoia and hallucination were caused by an outside force. Lisa and I were arguing, she was in the kitchen, and I was in the living room. Suddenly, there was this incredibly loud sound from right outside the dining room window. It sounded like someone was tearing a hole through the wall.

  The problem with actual sounds is, when they really happen, we can’t tell when it’s an actual sound, or just another hallucination. Following this logic, Lisa grabbed a large knife from a kitchen drawer. I had my gun. Lisa climbed into the cabinet under the sink to hide. I got in the fireplace. The fireplace didn’t work, because the chimney liner was falling apart, so I was “safe” there.

  We stayed like that for hours, whispering back and forth, then decided to try to make it to the dining room without whatever it was that had made the loud sound “getting” us. We agreed, tactically I might add, to meet up again under the dining room table. By the time I belly crawled to the French doors that separated the dining room and living room, Lisa had made it safely to the kitchen doorway. We agreed, on the count of three, we would make a break for the table. One. Two. Three. GO! GO! GO! Crawling as fast as possible, we made it. (Phew.)

  We stayed under that table all afternoon. Finally, gun in hand; I decided to try to get outside to see what the hell the noise had been. For some reason, I had felt that if I could get out the door and onto the front porch, (Where “it” was,) I would be safe. The tricky part was just getting out of the house without “it” knowing.

  Keeping my back to the wall and pistol at the ready, I slowly made my way towards the front door. Once I was at the door, I unlocked the deadbolt, and backed out onto the porch to “safety.” I walked around the porch to the side of the house, to find that one end of the vinyl soffit had fallen down. This pulled the rest of the soffit down, and it was still attached at the far end of the house. As the soffit fell, it scraped down the side of the vinyl siding, causing a hell of a lot of noise.

  Now that I knew we were safe, I couldn’t help fucking with Lisa. I walked over to the window and started beating on it, while yelling as if a bear was eating me. Lisa started screaming, then her face appeared in the lower panes of the window. She looked terrified, and I started laughing. She got mad, and called me every kind of motherfucker she could think of, but we were both relieved that the tension was over.

  Chapter 21

  Harley picked me up at my house and we headed to Johnson City. Harley said he had heard about my bust. No big surprise there, as it had been all over the news for at least a week. “The Big Bust,” is what it was being called by the local media. Biggest meth lab bust in the history of Carter County, TN., as of then, 2004. Five years later, the feds would refer to that bust as one of the largest recoveries in the eastern United States. Whatever the hell that means.

  Harley asked me how much I actually knew about the bust. “Well, quite a lot, actually. I was there after all.” I had told him. He said that what he meant was, do I even know how the cops got onto me? I admitted that I didn’t. All I really knew was that the news had said that the cops had been trying to pull me over to bust me, for five weeks now, but each time, I had “eluded” them. I didn’t even know that they had tried to get me; I didn’t even know I knew how to “elude” anything. Hearing all this, made me feel like a real criminal. Mama would have been proud. Sometimes, I even impress myself.

  Harley had a lot of friends who ride Harley’s, and Harley was a good bike mechanic, so several of his friends would bring their bikes to him for tune-ups and repairs. Some of these friends are cops, and one of these cops told Harley, (Not knowing we were friends,) a story about my bust.

  According to the cop, Lisa, and one of her kids, was in Unicoi County conducting a drug deal, when SHE got busted. The cops threatened to throw her in jail, and take her kid, if she didn’t give them some info. She gave th
em a cook. I’ll leave you to guess who that cook might be, but in case you’re mistaken the first time, it was ME.

  At first, I didn’t believe it. Then I remembered that night she told me “her friend” almost got busted. She had Faye with her that night. That night was also about five weeks before I got busted, and if the story was true, it would explain why “a friend” knew so much about where I was cooking, and buying my pills. Was Lisa trying to warn me with that story? I don’t know.

  We got to The Sound, and Harley dropped me off, telling me to call if I needed a ride home. I started walking around the parking lot until I found Joey who was sitting in his car getting high. Unfortunately, he had a shitload of dope he was trying to sell for his cook, so he couldn’t move any of mine.

  We talked for a while and I told him what Harley had said. Joey told me he believed it. He also told me that the day he had shown me he could cook; Lisa had told him that she would be willing to work with him instead of with me to try to break into the meth market, but he had refused. Joey said he had “heard things,” and that I needed to avoid Lisa if I could.

  I went into the club and found Shane. He was able to sell a couple grams for me right away. We hung out and drank a few beers, then I hooked up with someone else I knew from the club, and we decided to go out to his car to smoke a little dope. As we walked out the door, a large, bald dude was coming in. He stopped, and said to me, “Hey man, you need to call me. It’s been a while.” I didn’t know who this guy was, and figured he was drunk, and simply mistaken me for someone else, so I just said, “Alright, I’ll do that,” and kept walking.

  Jerry (the person I was going to get high with) and I, got to his car and he said something like, “I’m just going to go ahead and leave.” Or something to that effect. I said that was cool, and we could get together some other time to get high.