Meth A Memoir

  I went back inside and found Shane. We were standing by some pool tables with a few other guys when that bald dude yelled my name and waved at me with a smile. I looked at Shane and asked, “Who the fuck is that?”

  He said, “Drug Task Force cop...” I then noticed everyone in our little group looking at me a little funny, so I decided to leave.

  I had to walk everywhere I needed to go buy cook supplies, so I was really limited on how much I could buy. This meant I had to do small cooks, which was barely enough to cover my own use.

  I went out and bought supplies for a cook one day with the last of my money. When I got home, I realized I had forgotten to buy kerosene. There was still a little in the heater, so I just hoped it would be enough. Of course, it wasn’t. I ended up having to take an aluminum pot out of the cabinet, put a roll of toilet paper in the pot, and then poured in some acetone. I lit the roll of toilet paper, and used the flame to finish the cook. It worked, so I was pretty happy with that.

  Once the cook was finished, I stashed my lab outside. I started doing this after my bust. I put the cook trash in a bag to dump in the dumpster at the car wash and after doing so, I went to the store to sell a gram of dope to the girl working there. She had wanted some, and this was the first chance I was able to get back to her.

  After the sale, I was walking back home, when the cops stopped me. They searched me, and said they had orders to detain me. They claimed they didn’t know WHY they were supposed to detain me just that they were told to do so; your tax dollars at work. After waiting almost an hour, who else would pull up, but good old Agent W. He jumped out of his vehicle and immediately started accusing me of going to Johnson City to buy several cases of meth cook supplies.

  Agent W and I argued for a few minutes about his accusations, and I pointed out the very obvious fact that I had no fucking vehicle to go to Johnson City in. Lisa and I were split up, and she had her car. The rest of the cars had been repo’d.

  This, as you might expect, wasn’t convincing enough for Agent W. He said that he believed I had been cooking at the house again, and he wanted to search my house. I said he could, so we got in the car and went to my humble abode, followed by the two local cops who had detained me.

  When we got to my house, I signed yet another “Consent to Search” form, and we all went inside. Agent W walked around and slowly made his way to the closet where the vacuum cleaner was. Mysteriously, he knew exactly where specifically to search, and decided to pull out the vacuum cleaner and unzip the bag. I then knew, if it wasn’t blatantly obvious in the first place that the dope left in there had been a set up by the cops.

  When Agent W didn’t find the dope, he went down to the basement for a few minutes, then came back upstairs and told the cops they could leave. Once the cops were gone, Agent W and I had a nice little heart to heart.

  He said, “I guess you think you’re pretty slick finding that dope.”

  I told him, “Well, you shouldn’t have left it there if you didn’t want it smoked.”

  Agent W sat down and was quiet for a few minutes. Finally, he asked me if I realized he had done me a favor on the night I got busted by not charging me for the drugs he found. I did acknowledge, (although I didn’t really want to) that yes he did do me this favor, and I thanked him. Agent W said I could thank him by returning the favor. “How?”

  Agent W began to ask how well I knew Bob. “Not at all,” I had said I told him I knew his name, but that’s about it. Agent W said that Bob had once offered to work for him, in exchange for getting a walk on a meth charge several years earlier. Once Bob got his walk, he screwed him over, refusing to work for him. Agent W wanted revenge.

  I told Agent W, I couldn’t help him with that. I simply didn’t know the guy. Agent W then told me he knew Lisa was screwing around with Bob. If I would be willing to set Lisa up, he could get Bob through her. I told him, that wasn’t happening. Our marriage was shit, true, but she was still my wife, and I loved the whore regardless.

  Agent W said I had two weeks to think it over before he’d be back to throw me in jail, if I didn’t cooperate. On his way out, he told me that Lisa had been going around, claiming that all of the dope she had been selling was made by her. That kind of pissed me off, her taking credit for my dope.

  The last thing Agent W told me that day freaked me out. He said that word had gotten back to him that Bob was planning on killing me. Instantly, I thought back to Bob’s “generous offer” to do his cook for him, and how Lisa’s stories just weren’t adding up. If I had not insisted that I was going armed that day, I might have gotten killed, instead of paid.

  Agent W left, and I was fucking pissed. I walked to the store to call Shane, and basically told him to get to my house right then, or I would kill him. He got there pretty quick. Shane’s cousin Frank knew Bob. We went to see Frank to find out where Bob lived. Frank said that Bob lived at his parent’s house on Rockhouse Road in Johnson City. That’s the sign of a high roller right there, still living with Mommy and Daddy. My Hero.

  Shane and I went to find Bob’s house. It ended up being an old trailer that sat back off the road a little ways. We pulled in the driveway, and Lisa’s car was there. I jumped out of the car and told Shane to keep it running. I walked to the door and started kicking the shit out of it. After about all of a minute, Lisa opened the door, ran out, and grabbed a hold of me as someone else slammed the door behind her.

  Lisa was crying and begging me to calm down, saying Bob’s parents were old, and I was scaring them. I kept kicking the side of the trailer, and yelling for Bob to come out. “You wanted to fuck my wife, now come on out and face me, you pussy! You want to take me out? Here’s your chance!” I was lividly screaming.

  Shane got out of the car to help Lisa drag me off the deck before someone called the cops. Once I was off the deck, Bob walked out the door yelling “What’s your fucking problem?” I pulled my gun, pointed it at him, and that pretty much let him know that my current problem was him.

  Bob froze, as you’d expect one to do when a gun is pointed at you, Lisa backed away, and Shane kept saying, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.” over and over. I really don’t know how long we stood there; seconds, half-seconds, milliseconds. I don’t remember what, or even if, I was thinking. All I know is that right in that moment, I wanted this dude to die. Slowly.

  Bob’s mom walked out the door then. She started talking to me, but I don’t remember what she was saying. I just remember something about them not knowing Lisa was married. She then turned to Lisa and said, calmly, “Please leave, and don’t come back, if you have a husband.” I told Lisa to get her ass home, then Shane and I left. We took back roads to my house, in case they called the cops. When Shane dropped me off, I told him to hang on to my gun for a few days. Again, in case someone called the cops.

  Lisa got home right after I did, and wanted to know if I had lost my fucking mind. I told her what Agent W had said about Bob planning to kill me, and that I believed she was trying to set me up that day she tried to get me to cook for Bob. I also told her what Harley and Joey had told me, and of course, she denied everything, just like I knew she would.

  Finally, I told her about Agent W wanting me to set her up, to get her, to help him, get Bob. Out of everything, above all else, this was the thing that worried her. Of course, I should know that, because this would involve her going to jail, and not me for once. She said that Bob was leaving his parent’s house, to go to a house owned by a friend of his, named Mark, when she was leaving. Lisa wanted to go tell him all of what Agent W had said. It was only right to let someone know the cops were out to get them, she reasoned.

  Everything Lisa owned, except for a duffel bag full of clothes she kept in her car, was still in the house. I told her she could go warn the piece of shit, but if she wasn’t home, in one hour, I would burn all of it; every single thing that was in my house that she owned. She was back, in forty-five minutes.

  Chapter 22

  Lisa and I ended up g
etting back together again for a little while. I think Bob told her to stay with me as a spy to be sure I wasn’t trying to help the cops bust him. That was fine with me; I didn’t care why she was back, just as long as she was there. Ah, the joys of marriage.

  Shane was moving a little dope for me, and I had started selling some to Lea, a friend of mine I had worked with for about five years. Lea was also the person I had bought my house from, and she was planning on getting it back from the bank, once it was foreclosed on.

  Joey was buying a little dope for personal use also. Between him, Shane, and Lea, we were doing a lot better financially than we had done since Lisa started fucking around with Bob. Of course, every time I would bring this fact up, which was every chance I had, it would end up in a huge argument.

  The two weeks were up, and I was expecting the cops to show up at any moment. Lea came by one day to buy our 60” Big screen TV. It was a few days before Christmas, and we were going to use the extra money to buy the kids some presents. As Lea and I were loading the TV into her truck, I saw three undercover cop cars drive by. I knew this was it, and I told Lisa we had to get out of there, so we jumped in the car, leaving Lea to lock up for us, and we hauled ass. We went to Bristol, VA., where we spent the day buying pills and other supplies to do a big cook.

  We got home late that afternoon. I ducked down in the seat as we drove down our street. After Lisa parked, I waited for her to go inside, then I got out, and crawled into the house through one of the basement windows. Within minutes, two cop cars pulled up in front of our house. Lisa answered the door when they knocked, and told them they could not come in without a warrant. They then proceeded to show her the warrant. At least they were prepared this time. The cops came in, led by Agent W, and arrested me.

  I asked Agent W what I was being charged with, and he said I was charged with “Manufacture of Methamphetamine.”

  I said, “You can’t do that. The grand jury already changed my drug paraphernalia charge to ‘Attempt to manufacture meth’ which was true; either I was doing it, or I was attempting to - it couldn’t be both.

  Agent W agreed that I would get it thrown out when I went to court. The only problem, for me currently anyway, was that I was going to have to sit in jail through the Christmas holiday before I got to go to court to see the judge. I guess this was revenge for me not agreeing to work with the cops.

  It was three days before Christmas when I went to jail, and, due to my bail being set at thirty-six thousand dollars, I wasn’t getting out before I went to court a couple of days after Christmas. Once I finally got in front of the judge, he agreed with me that I should not have been charged and arrested twice for the same incident.

  The D.A. said that there was nobody from the Drug Task Force (DTF) available for court that day. She asked the judge to continue the case until the next month so she would have time to get some answers about why I was charged the way I was. The judge agreed to the continuance, then he dropped my bail to a thousand bucks, so I could afford to get out.

  Lisa was in court and said she was calling a bondsman right away to get me out. I expected to be out within an hour, but by early evening, I was still in jail. I called Lisa to see what was up. She said everyone she tried to get to bail me out would take her money, go in to get me out, then come back out, give her the money back and leave. No explanation.

  Finally, Lisa got someone who was willing to get me out. As I was signing out, I was telling the bondsman about the trouble Lisa had been having all day. That’s when the bondsman told me that the trouble was a DTF agent out in the office telling them they shouldn’t get me out. He told the DTF agent that no one was going to tell him how to run his business, or who to get out and who not to. I thanked him and left.

  I met Lisa in the lobby, and after a hug and a kiss, she looked at me and asked, “Are you ready to go cook?”

  Hell yes I was!

  We tore out of the jail parking lot and Lisa headed towards Johnson City. “Why are we going to Johnson City?” I asked.

  “We’re going to Pigeon Forge,” she replied.

  Chapter 2 3

  Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, in the heart of the Great Smokey Mountains, is a great summer vacation location for families from all across the United States. During the fall season, tens of thousands of people descend on the small town and the surrounding area to see the turning of the colors of the beautiful foliage on the mountains. The Christmas season brings visitors who want to shop at the hundreds of specialty shops, craft shops, and manufacturer outlets. The Christmas decorations and lights alone are almost worth the trip.

  After Christmas, everything in this town dies. The tourists all leave and many of the motels close their doors until spring. Most of the motels that do stay open drastically reduce their room rates for nightly, as well as weekly, stays. These low rates draw meth cooks to Pigeon Forge like moths to an open flame.

  Lisa knew that it probably wasn’t going to be a good idea for us to cook at the house again, at least not right away, so she brought the lab and some cash with her when she came to get me out of jail. That was fine with me, because the DTF obviously didn’t want me out of jail, and they weren’t going to be happy I was out.

  I knew our house was most likely going to be watched closely for a while. Pigeon Forge was just far enough, about ninety miles, from home for both of us to feel safe, so off we went, making a few stops along the way for pseudo pills for the cook. Once we picked a motel, we checked in, asking for a room in the rear of the building. We wanted to be as far away as possible from anyone else in the motel, in case the smell from the cook escaped our room.

  We brought the lab into the room and hid everything we didn’t immediately need as we did some prep work. This included making the iodine crystals, breaking down the pills, and getting fresh red phosphorus from matchbook covers. Once all of this work was completed, we put everything up until we were ready to do the cook. I wanted to wait until late before starting the cook, that way there was less of a chance of anyone being awake to wonder what the hell we were doing.

  Lisa had a little dope with her, so we got high and relaxed while we waited for time to pass. Once I felt like it had gotten late enough, I set everything up in the bathroom. I hung a blanket over the door, then closed it to make a seal around the cracks in the door. This was to reduce the chances of any smell getting out. Since I wasn’t used to cooking in motels, I was being extra cautious.

  I planned on doing most of the work on the back of the toilet. Since the ventilation fan was directly over it, setting up there took care of most of the fumes. The bathtub was there for water, and to wash anything that needed to be washed. The toilet would dispose of any liquid or paper waste I generated during the cook. I hoped I didn’t have an episode similar to the one I had not long after I first learned to cook.

  It went like this. It had been a long night, and I was doing a really big cook. Big enough in fact, that I actually did it as two simultaneous cooks. I had finished up around four in the morning, and started to clean up. This cook, because of its size, was being done in the kitchen.

  I had several jars of leftover chemicals that included, camp fuel, lye water, denatured alcohol, and iodine, just to name some of them. I poured all of the chemicals down the sink drain as I loaded the jars into the dishwasher. Lisa was there, and I told her to open the front door to air out the house. She opened the door and said, “Come look at this, what is it?”

  I walked to the door and looked outside to see a layer of what looked like fog covering the street. The fog only existed from our house, to about three houses down. Then I noticed the “fog” was coming from the sewer drains along the curbs. This wasn’t fog; it was the chemicals I had just dumped!

  I told Lisa to turn on all of the water faucets in the house, while I got a water hose and started to run water through the sewer drain. Then, I jumped into my car, and drove up and down the street as fast as I could to try to blow the fog away before anyone, like a cop, noticed it
and got suspicious.

  In case you have been wondering, this incident is the main reason why I had all that cook trash, which included many gallons of chemicals, built up in my basement. There just wasn’t anywhere safe to dump the stuff.

  Back in the motel, it was Lisa’s job to sit and listen for anything unusual going on in the parking lot. She was also supposed to tell me if she could smell anything from the cook. This system worked great. When the cook was finished, I put all of the glassware in the tub and turned on the shower. The hot water would wash the glass, while the steam, along with a can of air freshener, would get the smell out of the bathroom.

  We spent the next day in the motel room smoking a whole bunch of meth, and fucking. In the late afternoon we headed out to collect a few boxes of pills for another cook. We did the cook the same way as the night before, and everything went perfectly. The next morning, we cleaned the entire room with some cleaners we had bought, and checked out to head home.

  After we got home, we got some kerosene for the heater and a few cook supplies with the last of our money, and Lisa took off to sell some dope. I knew she would be gone for a while, so I didn’t get in much of a hurry to do the cook. Besides, I was still nervous about the DTF watching the house, but I had thought that since we had been gone for a couple of days, then maybe they’d still be thinking that no one was home.

  Lisa’s dad and brother had been by the house and had moved just about all our stuff to storage, because we were down to just a few days before being evicted due to the foreclosure. All that was left was some of our clothes, the computer desk and chair, the futon, and the kerosene heater. There were sheets hung over the windows to replace the curtains that had been removed and packed up.

  To my surprise, Lisa showed back up about an hour after she had left. I was laying on the futon, about to get some sleep before cooking, when she came in. She was messing around in the bedroom, then I heard her go back outside, and heard her car leave shortly thereafter.