Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  Occasionally, Lisa and I would chase each other around town. I honestly don’t know why I would chase her, which is how it usually started, because when she would finally pull over, I would keep going. Then she would chase me; probably to ask why I was chasing her.

  One night, for no reason, Lisa blocked the road I was driving down. I stopped and rolled down my window. “Move,” I said. She just sat there and said, “Go around me.” I started to pull around, but she backed up to block me again. Okay, so I just rammed her car and pushed her out of my way. That obviously pissed her off but that was kind of the point. Well, that and I just wanted to show her that I could act just as ignorant as she could.

  Once, Lisa picked up three grams of meth from me to go sell. I met her at a mobile home sales place to get my money. She pulled in, and parked her car nose to nose with mine. I got into her car, and she gave me the money for two grams, then handed me a gram of the dope back. I got back in my car, and was about to leave, when I looked up and saw Lisa laughing her ass off in her car. She put her hands up to her face, as if she were holding a camera, and taking a picture. I freaked out thinking the cops were watching, and I left in a hurry. Lisa says she doesn’t remember doing that, but I damn sure remembered it.

  Lisa came by Donny’s house one afternoon while we were getting ready to do a cook. She had some dope, maybe half an ounce, with her and started smoking it with us. It was anhydrous ammonia dope, which meant it didn’t have the same kick as what I was making, but it was free, so I didn’t bitch.

  Lisa asked if I was moving any dope, and I told her that I was. She assumed the twins were moving it for me, but in reality, her cousin David was buying a lot of it. Shane was selling some for me as well. My sources in the meth world were still extremely limited at this point. Before Lisa left us that day, she asked me if I had any dope I wanted to sell. I said I had a little I would sell, but she had to have cash. I let her know that I didn’t need to get rid of it bad enough to have to front it to her. She said she had cash, and I sold her three grams.

  I don’t know why she was buying my dope, especially at full price, when she had so much of her own. Maybe it was like I said; her anhydrous dope didn’t have the same kick my Red P dope had. I guess it didn’t really matter all that much to me, even then. Money was money, and nothing else mattered to me at that point.

  While I was out running around town, I would often run into Lisa. During one of these encounters, we were both at the same store buying cook supplies. Lisa asked what I thought about getting a motel room and splitting a cook. I was all for it, and we agreed to split the dope evenly, with a gram off the top for whoever paid for the room. We did this, and the next morning we left the room as... friends... maybe. Well, we were laughing and parted in good spirits at least.

  Lisa had a court hearing over the custody of her kids coming up, and we went together as a united force. She got her kids back, but unfortunately she had no home of her own to bring them to. I think this bothered me more than it did Lisa. I hoped that getting her kids back would make Lisa want to go back to having a family, but all she did was take Joy from her sister’s house and dump her off at her mom’s with the rest of the kids. Sorry to say, I didn’t have a place for them either, I was still staying at Donny’s.

  Chapter 26

  The more I think about it, the more I want to say, “Fuck Lisa, I LOVE TAYLOR SWIFT!!!!!!!!!!!”

  Chapter 27

  One day, in April of 2005, I began to cook at Donny’s. Donny and I had been awake for about a week straight with no plans of slowing down. We were both pretty much shot out at this point.

  Just about the time I got the cook started, Lisa showed up with Faye. We all sat around bullshitting for a while and Lisa asked if I was going to want to sell anything out of the cook when it was finished. Sometimes I did cooks that were for personal use only, and since this was a small cook, she must have thought this was one of them.

  I told Lisa I could sell her some when it was done, if she had the cash. Even though Lisa had been buying a lot of dope from me, I still didn’t trust her.

  I know it seems unusual for Lisa to be buying dope from me all the time, when she was a cook herself, but the truth is, she wasn’t a very good cook. That’s why she liked to split cooks with me. She did the prep work and the clean up, and I did the actual cook. We really made a great team back then. Many times, Lisa would pull out a wad of cash and pay me full price for as much of my share as I wanted to sell.

  Anyway, Lisa said that she and Faye had to go somewhere, but they would be back by the time the cook was done. As they were leaving, I had a thought.

  “Where’s your lab?” I asked.

  “In my car,” she replied.

  I told Lisa that I didn’t think it would be such a good idea for her to be driving about with Faye in the car and a meth lab in the trunk. Lisa said she didn’t have anywhere to stash it, so I told her she could put it in my car until she got back. Since I obviously wasn’t going anywhere for a while, the lab would be safe with me. Lisa agreed, and they left.

  I finished the cook a few hours later. Lisa and Faye showed back up about the time we were airing out the house, and I was bagging the dope up when they walked in. Lisa walked over to the bar stool I was sitting on in front of a window, and said she wanted two grams. I handed Lisa two baggies, each containing a gram of meth. Lisa held the baggies up and asked, “You sure there are two grams here?” I pointed to the scales and told her to weigh it herself if she didn’t believe me. She weighed it.

  Something about Lisa is she’s a creature of habit. If she does something different than what is normal for her, I pick up on it pretty fast. When Lisa opened her wallet to get the money out to pay me, I didn’t realize I was expecting her to pull the money out of the top of her wallet, until she pulled it out of the side of her wallet.

  I knew something wasn’t right, but since I had been awake for so long, I guess it just wasn’t enough for me to worry about. Lisa had a stack of brand new twenty dollar bills. I held my hand out, and Lisa started counting out two hundred dollars by holding up each bill as she counted out my money and laid it in my hand. I thought she was just being stupid at this point, and all I wanted was for her to pay me, and get the fuck out.

  Lisa’s cousin, David showed up and I was about to break out some dope for all of us to smoke, when Lisa suddenly said she had to go. As she and Faye were leaving, I had asked her if she had gotten her lab out of my car. She had said “yes”, so I forgot about it. After all, a meth cook’s lab is their livelihood, and even though Lisa wasn’t a very good cook, it was still her way of making money, and dope, when there was no other way to get it anywhere else. She also had money invested in that lab.

  As they were leaving, Faye walked over to me and asked what I was planning on doing the rest of the night. I said that I had to go see someone, and I also had to pick up some more pills for a cook I was going to do the next morning. Faye started acting a little strange, and started telling me that she thought I should go to sleep. I insisted that I was fine, but she asked me to promise her that I would go to bed and not go anywhere that night.

  Faye was more than my step-daughter, she was my friend. Even though my life was crazy as hell, I could always count on her to be the same, and I would not lie to her by making a promise I wasn’t about to keep.

  Finally, I said that I would go meet who I needed to see, and then I would come back and go to sleep. I would worry about the pills in the morning. She didn’t like this, but she knew it was the best she was going to get. Faye asked me something strange then, she asked me to go through Carter County, instead of Unicoi County when I left. When I asked her why she wanted me to do this, she said it was because some of her friends had said there were road blocks out and she did not want me to get into trouble.

  After Lisa and Faye left, Donny, David, and I started talking about getting some liquor. It was getting late, so Donny and David decided to go to the liquor store before it closed. While the
y did that, I was going to go drop off four grams of dope to someone.

  Since it had been raining, Donny’s driveway, which was dirt, was too muddy to drive up, so everyone had to park at the bottom of the hill. While Donny locked up, David and I walked on down to our cars. Just as we got to the bottom of the hill, we both heard something take off running through the woods. I thought it was a deer, but David had said it was a person.

  David grabbed a flashlight out of his car to take a look, but whoever, or whatever, it was, was gone. I was just about to ask David if he thought it might be Donny messing with our heads, when Donny came down the hill behind us. It wasn’t him. When we told Donny what we heard, he thought we were imagining things. I don’t think we could have imagined the same thing, at the same time, but it’s possible, so I quit worrying about it. They got into David’s car, and left.

  Something I never did at Donny’s was shoot up, my preferred method of doing meth. While I sat there in my car, I decided I needed to go do a shot of dope. I went over the hill from where I was at, and started to drive to a secluded area at the end of a road on Escape Mountain. As I drove, I passed two vehicles that were parked on the side of the road. One was Lisa’s piece of crap Buick. The other was Agent W’s Explorer.

  Needless to say, seeing those two cars together sent me into another world. I drove to the secluded spot I was heading to, as fast as I could. Once I got there, I just sat there, remembering. Remembering that Lisa held the dope up in front of the window, and asked if I was sure there were two grams there. Remembering how Lisa held up each bill as she counted out my money.

  I knew something was up when she pulled that money out of the wrong place in her wallet. I just wouldn’t have thought she would set me up. Not in her own brother’s house, anyway. I wondered if Faye was in on it then. If it was a controlled buy, then Faye would have been there when Lisa got the money from the agent.

  I needed a shot of dope; I was beginning to wig out. I drew up a big shot, and did it. I sat there waiting for the dope to calm me down, but it wasn’t having any effect on me at all. I did a second shot, and then forgot whether or not I actually did that shot, so I did another, just to be sure. Now I was high.

  I was calming down quite a bit, but I was still extremely paranoid. I was looking down through the trees at these three street lights a ways down the road. Suddenly, I thought there were three people walking towards me through the woods. Each person standing at least ten feet tall, and each carrying a flashlight.

  I told myself I was seeing “tree people,” but that did no good, because I didn’t believe me. Tree people are kind of like shadow people. The difference being, tree people move around because what you are seeing are tree limbs that in a sleep deprived mind look like people moving through the woods when the wind moves them.

  One night, Donny was looking out the window. He hadn’t moved for several hours. Finally, I asked him what he was looking at, and he said. “These two guys at the end of the road are the hardest working people I have ever seen. They’ve been digging that hole all night.”

  I had him point out what he was looking at, and it was nothing more than a tree limb bouncing because the overflow pipe for his parent’s water reservoir was tied to it. I told him this, and pointed out that no one would dig a hole in the middle of the night. He just said, “I know, but I still see them,” and he kept watching ‘til daylight, when he announced, “they’re gone.”

  I once watched what I thought was a ballroom dance, complete with 1800’s era ball gowns, tuxedos, and horses, going on in Donny’s neighbor’s backyard.

  That’s the way of the mind of a meth addict. You know what you are seeing can’t possibly be real, or isn’t logical, but that doesn’t matter. You know it’s just a hallucination, you tell yourself it’s just a hallucination. You remind yourself of the thousands of other things that you’ve seen that turned out not to be real, but in the end, you never convince yourself because what you think you see is right in front of you. If it’s not real, how can I see it?

  I started my car and hauled ass off of that mountain. When I passed the area where Lisa’s car had been, there was no one there. The vehicles were gone. Once I got to the bottom of the mountain, I made the biggest mistake of the night, I didn’t trust Faye.

  Chapter 28

  I’m not really sure if I thought Faye was in on setting me up, or maybe I wasn’t thinking at all, but I turned towards Unicoi County, despite her advice. This was when the three shots of dope started to kick my ass.

  Aided by being awake for days and days, I started to hallucinate that I wasn’t even in my car. In my mind, I was sitting on the couch in someone’s house. I’ve no idea whose house it was I thought I was in, but I wasn’t driving down twisting, turning, mountain roads anymore. I don’t even remember driving to Johnson City.

  After I made the decision to go through Unicoi County, I must have just shut down mentally, because the next thing I would remember is stopping at a red light by the One-Stop liquor store in Johnson City. There was a cop right behind me. Oh shit!

  I made a right turn towards Elizabethton, thinking that if I got to the county line, the cop would turn around. I was being very careful not to speed or swerve. The cop stayed right on my ass, so I just had a feeling that he was going to pull me over for something. I was approaching the Milligan Highway exit off of the Elizabethton Highway I was traveling on, and decided to pull off the highway.

  As I turned up the exit ramp, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the four grams of dope I was on my way to sell. I also got out my personal stash. I ate all of it, as I turned right off the ramp, then turned into the Shell station. When I parked at the Shell station, the cop pulled in behind me and turned on his blue lights. He walked to my window and asked me, “Sir, are you on drugs?” I responded that I most certainly was not on drugs, and then he asked me to step out of the car, which I did.

  The cop wanted to know where I was going so late, (it was about midnight.) I told him I was on my way home from a friend’s house or some shit, and that I was stopping at the store for some cigarettes. The cop then asked if he could search my car. “Sure, go for it,” I said. Hell, my lab was at Donny’s and I just ate my dope. My syringe was tucked into a hole in between the front seats, where he would never find it. I didn’t have shit to worry about.

  The cop instructed me to step to the rear of my vehicle while he searched.

  He opens the back door of my car, and asks, “What’s this?”

  “What’s what?” I asked.

  That’s when he held up the bright pink duffel bag. I almost shit my pants on the spot. It was Lisa’s lab. The one she had already said she had gotten out of my car.

  I told the cop it was a meth lab, and he arrested me. After I was cuffed, the cop got on the phone. He was on the phone for less than thirty seconds, which I found unusual, then he hung up and informed me that the DTF was on their way. I shit you not, less than two minutes later, there came a line of four cars, three Drug Task Force, one DEA, and an SUV pulling a trailer, with the “STOP METH” mantra printed all over it; pretty fucking convenient that they all arrived so quickly. And, at the exact same time, even.

  One of the DTF agents, dressed in a chemical suit and respirator, took everything out of my car, and laid it all out in the parking lot. Everything was sealed in metal drums, then locked in the “STOP METH” trailer. After it was all cleaned up, I was taken into the trailer, where I was ordered to take off all my clothes, and throw them in a metal drum, which was then sealed up. I was given a paper suit to put on, then I was locked in a police car.

  I’m not sure how long I was in that cop car before I started to shake and jerk violently and uncontrollably. The cop asked if I was okay, and I said I wasn’t sure. I started nodding out, and the next thing I remember was being taken into the Washington County Detention Center, in Jonesborough Tennessee.

  The cops took me into a room where the arresting officer filled out the arrest affidavit, and asked
me basic questions, (address, employment, etc.) I was sitting in a hard plastic chair, and from time to time, I would look over to say something to the twins, whom I saw sitting there with me. This freaked the cop out, and they brought in a nurse to see if I was nuts.

  Sometime during the night, I was put into a holding cell. I would be held in that holding cell, for five days, but I only remember maybe an hour or so of it. There was one day when I remember looking out the window, and I saw Lisa’s car pull into the parking lot. Later, a cop told me she was trying to get me out, but she didn’t have enough money. I was also told that she said she would get me out after I went to court and my bond was lowered.

  Just to be clear, I didn’t sleep during any one of these days that I was being held. Once the hallucinations really kicked in, I saw Lisa crawl in the window of the holding cell I was in. A few minutes later, this girl named Michelle crawled in also. Michelle was a cute little meth whore with beautiful, long, brown, wavy hair that went down to her ass. She was really, really sexy.

  Lisa and Michelle sat on the bunk, and we talked for a while. I had always wanted to have a threesome with Lisa and Michelle, and although I had done this with Lisa and other girls, I never got the chance with Michelle. I’m so happy that I didn’t get the chance then. I can only imagine what the cops would have seen if they looked in that cell while I thought I was having a threesome. It wouldn’t have been pretty.

  After the five days, the cops finally decided I had come down enough to go to court. I got a pretty good lawyer, and when I walked into the courtroom with him, I saw Lisa sitting in the front row behind the defendant’s table. She held up some cash to let me know she was going to get me out. That was quite a relief to know, after what I had thought I was going through.