Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  After I bought the clothes, I went into the bathroom to change. I was in a stall, and someone else was in the other stall taking a shit as I was tearing the tags off of the new clothes. Apparently, the guy in the other stall thought I was stealing, because he left, and when I came out of the stall, there were two cops standing there waiting to see my receipt for the clothes. Unfortunately, I had just flushed it down the toilet with the tags from the clothes. Luckily, the cashier remembered me, and what I had bought, since it was so early in the morning, and she hadn’t had a lot of customers.

  When the wrecker company opened, we were waiting at the front gate. I got all of the lab stuff packed up, and we headed back to Grand Bay.

  Chapter 35

  Once I was back in Grand Bay, my cooking kind of died off a little. I didn’t have a vehicle, so I didn’t have any way to get around to get supplies. Jimmy would come by on occasion with a few boxes of pills and I would cook. My sister brought pills a couple of times every week also, and that gave me a chance to cook too. I just didn’t have enough dope to sell. Everything I cooked went to pay for the pills, or other supplies I had to get through other people, and what was left went to mine and Timothy’s own habits. I really needed a vehicle, but since I had just bought a shit load of furniture, and I was spending money like it was water on bullshit, my cash situation wasn’t good.

  While I was wondering how I was going to get a vehicle, I got a call from Faye. She said Lisa was on the run, because she jumped bail on the charges that she and Winter got on Christmas Eve. Faye asked if I would come and get Lisa, and bring her to Alabama with me. I wasn’t going to do it, but Faye said the only reason she called me, is because she felt like I was the only person that would help. I couldn’t tell Faye no, so I said I would come pick the bitch up.

  My mom came to the rescue again, by offering not only to drive me to Tennessee to get Lisa; she also paid for gas for the trip. Mom and I got to Johnson City around 7 a.m. and we met up with Lisa in the Wal-Mart parking lot. We took off from there, and drove straight back to Grand Bay. Along the way, I told Lisa that Timothy was living with me, and that he was family, so I didn’t want her to come off with some shit later about wanting us to live alone. She understood, and it never became an issue.

  We got back home, and things were fine. I was still pissed off at Lisa over the shit she pulled the last time I had seen her, but she was being decent, so I tried to let it go. Kevin and his wife, also named Lisa, found a Saturn at a local car lot, and paid the down payment on it for me, so I would have my own ride. I had been using Kevin’s truck when I absolutely had to go somewhere. Now I could go when and where I wanted.

  The next time I got paid, I took Lisa on a pill buying spree. We drove to Ocean Springs, Miss. and worked our way back to Grand Bay, hitting every pharmacy we came to along the way. Once we got back to Grand Bay, I took Lisa on “The Loop.” The Loop, was a circuit around Mobile where you could buy pills at about 10 different locations and end up back at your starting point in about 1 hour’s time. It was great when you had 4 people in the car making the loop together.

  I used to go to these day labor places about 7am to get pill buyers. By 7am, most of the people who are going out on a job that day, already know when and where they are going. There are always a few people hanging around, hoping for a late call, or they just don’t have anywhere else to go. I would show up, and grab a couple of guys needing money, and I would give them $100 each to make the loop with me. It’s the easiest money they would make all week so people were always happy to do it.

  I always looked for people that really were in need of money, so I could get them to buy pills for me. I worked with a young kid who was dating an older girl. He would spend his paycheck on her every week, and be broke by Monday. To get gas money, he would buy pills for me. It was a win-win situation. When I had people buy pills, I always paid for the pills myself. I usually had about $15 in a box, $10 for the person buying them, and then the cost of the pills themselves, which varied from store to store.

  One evening, I was going to get a hamburger on my lunch break from work. I saw someone who looked like he was having car trouble, and I drove over to see if I could help. It turned out he was just out of gas. His wife and kid were in the car, and he said he was trying to get someplace where there was a job waiting for him, but he had run out of gas money. I couldn’t leave him stranded, so I told him I would pay him if he would buy me some pseudo pills. He agreed, and I took him to buy a couple boxes. To help him out, I paid him about $15 per box. I would give him a $20 bill and tell him what I wanted. He would buy it, and I let him keep the change from the $20. After we finished, I told him to get a gallon jug full of gas, so he could get his car to the gas station. It was a good night for both of us.

  Once Lisa got to Grand Bay, we started doing massive amounts of meth again. I was cooking every day and sometimes twice a day. It wasn’t unusual for me to take my cooking beaker to work with me. There was a pond that was kind of hidden by some trees, beside where I was working. After work in the morning, I would drive over by the pond and mix my Red P and iodine, so it could smoke all it needed to during the initial reaction and nobody would notice. Before I left, I would add my pseudo and put a stopper in the beaker, and when I got home, I would do the cook.

  The initial reaction of a Red P cook is usually the worst part, because it smokes so much. One morning around dawn, I kicked off a cook in my kitchen. I used the vent fan over the stove to pull the smoke out. This was one of those old vents, where you pulled the chain loose and a flap on the side of the trailer opened and the fan turned on. After getting the cook going, I opened my back door, so I could see anyone driving down the road towards my house. When I looked out, there was a huge cloud of smoke just hanging in the humid, windless morning air. Since I was within viewing distance of my landlord, I flipped out. I ran inside and turned on the fan, and started spraying air freshener through the fan. I’m not sure what I thought this was going to do. I ended up making Lisa and Timothy come out in the yard and we started smoking cigarettes. The plan was, if anyone looked and saw the smoke, they would think it’s just from us standing there chain-smoking.

  Once I started cooking regularly again, I started getting pretty strung out. Lisa stayed paranoid; she thought the law was going to find her at any minute. This worked to my advantage, because I could still take off and hang out with the people I had been running around with, and Lisa wouldn’t ask to go. Lisa became so paranoid, that at one point when she developed a toothache in one of her back teeth, she refused to let me take her to a dentist to get it pulled. Instead, she got in my tool box, and found a pair of pliers. She grabbed the tooth with them, and just as I was about to tell her she wouldn’t do it, she did it. Lisa squeezed the pliers so hard that the tooth shattered. I damn near passed the fuck out. She never said a word. She went and got a pair of needle nose pliers out and started plucking the pieces of broken tooth out. That’s one tough bitch.

  Jimmy started staying at our place most of the time, and before long, his girlfriend, Tara, started staying with us too. I had one other buddy, Bull, who used to come by a lot, and that was just about the only people in the meth world in Alabama that Lisa had met for the first couple of months she was in Grand Bay.

  Most of my cooking was done in my own kitchen or in one of the bedrooms if there was a chance someone might come by. When I got finished with the cook, I would either give the dope to Tara, Jimmy, or Bull to go sell, or I would just take off with them. Not all of the meth got sold. I was always willing to trade for anything of value. Sometimes I wanted certain items, and I would put out word that I would give top dollar trades for these items.

  One day, after I had passed out for about 24 hours, I woke up to Lisa standing beside me with a gun in her hand. It was a little .25 caliber auto pistol. She was asking me if I would take the gun and $200 for an 8-ball of meth. If you’ll remember, an 8-ball is 3.5 grams, or 1/8 of an ounce of meth. I told her I would, so she did the
deal while I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I had this weird urge to trade for all the .25 autos I could get my hands on. I guess I just wanted to see how many I could get.

  It didn’t take long for me to get quite a collection of .25’s. We had a night stand beside our bed with a drawer in it, and that’s where we would store the guns. Late one night, after being awake for way too long, Lisa said something that had me convinced that she had called the cops on me. As a felon, and with a meth lab in the house, I didn’t want to get caught with all these guns. I got them out and piled them in the passenger’s seat of my Saturn, and left to hide them someplace where they wouldn’t be found. I still haven’t found them.

  Chapter 36

  Lisa would venture out on occasion with me to buy pills, and to call her kids, who were back in Tennessee. Since Lisa’s brother-in-law was actively helping the cops try to find her, she didn’t want to call from close to home, for fear of them figuring out where she was. I came up with the idea of driving over to Pensacola, Florida for her to make her calls. We would get there in the morning, and spend the entire day driving around buying pills. On one trip, my sister went with us and bought pills for me too.

  After several trips to Florida for phone calls, Lisa started wanting to go get the kids and bring them down to Grand Bay with us. Lisa called her mom, and told her she was going to come see the kids. Lisa’s mom was one of Lisa’s cosigners, and was in danger of losing her home and land if I didn’t get Lisa back in jail before the six month grace period was up. She trusted me to bring Lisa back, and trusted Lisa to turn herself in, and that says a lot about the lady. She really is good people.

  It was late evening when we got to Lisa’s parents house. The twins were there, and I gave them a little dope while Lisa talked to her mom and dad. We only stayed at the house for a few minutes, and Lisa had told her mom we were taking the kids to go get something to eat. While Lisa got Joy and Levi strapped in, I was saying goodbye to the twins. As I was walking out the door, Lisa’s mom stopped me and said, “Please, don’t let me lose my home.” I assured her Lisa would be back, and we left for Grand Bay again.

  Along the way back to Alabama, we stopped at a couple of Wal-Marts, so we could buy new clothes for the kids. Lisa was high, and I guess she thought it would seem normal to be in a Wal-Mart in the late evening/early morning hours, buying clothes for the kids.

  A few days after we got back home, a trailer that was in a lot nicer condition than the one we were living in became vacant, so we decided to move into it. There were two other young couples that wanted to go in together to rent it, but since I was already a tenant, I got first option to rent the place, so I took it. The kids got the run-down place. They weren’t really happy about it.

  The night before we were supposed to be moving to the new place, I decided to do a cook. Lisa said she didn’t want any cooking going on in the new place, so I had to get it in while I had the chance. About halfway through the cook, the people moving in to our old place showed up with a moving trailer with all their shit in it. They knocked on the door, and asked if it would be okay to go ahead and leave the trailer there so they could be ready to move in as soon as we left. Timothy and Lisa were talking to them, and before long, they invited them inside. All of a sudden, all these people I didn’t know where sitting in the living room, while I was in the bedroom cooking dope. I just worked quietly, hoping that they wouldn’t figure out what I was up to.

  Timothy kept coming in and out of the bedroom, and I told him to get rid of those people. The next time he came in, he had the two guys with him. Apparently, they knew what I was doing, and asked if they could watch me do the cook. Timothy took it upon himself to let them in. These guys ended up being good customers for a little while. One night, while I was especially paranoid, I paid one of the guys to lay under his trailer with a walkie talkie to watch the road while I cooked. For half a gram of meth, this guy laid in the dirt for three hours, staring at the highway to see if any cars came down our road.

  The good will finally wore off, when one of the guys owed me for a half gram of dope, and I was having a hard time tracking him down. One night, while I was prepping for a cook, I saw the dude’s truck pull into his driveway. Jimmy saw him also, and he ran out the door with Bull to get my money. When Jimmy and Bull came back, Jimmy said they had made it clear that I had better be paid no later than the next evening.

  The next day, the dude’s girl showed up to trade pussy to clear the debt. She was cute but she was also six or seven months pregnant. Since it was only half a gram, I let her “make payment.” Afterwards, the dude got pissed off over it, and kicked the girl out, then called the landlord and told her I was running a meth lab out of my place. The landlord didn’t believe him, but I sent Jimmy and Bull back to “speak” with the dude about the situation. He “apologized” by “giving” me his DVD player, his Fossil watch, all of his tools, and the JVC stereo out of his car. He also “agreed” to move by morning. That’s the explanation Jimmy gave me *when he came back and gave me all that stuff he got from the dude, and I didn’t question him.

  Something I didn’t really understand until I got in the meth game in Alabama is that, as a cook, I had a hell of a lot of power over people. In Mobile, people who are closest to cooks will act almost as personal servants, in order to keep their dope connect happy. Jimmy used to wash my car, and clean my house, so Lisa didn’t have to. He would go to the grocery store for me, go on resupply runs for chemicals anything I needed was done for me. If I was cooking in the bedroom, and Lisa cooked dinner, Jimmy would make me a plate of food and bring it to me. Dope cooks in the Mobile meth scene weren’t just cooks, we were kings.

  There would also be a lot of back-stabbing going on to try to push someone to the side, so a cook could be taken over by someone else. One night while Lisa and I were spending a quiet night alone, there was a knock at my door. I answered it, but didn’t recognize the person standing there. He said his name was “Fat Head” and that Jimmy had sent him. Sounds like an Italian mob kind of thing, doesn’t it?

  I had heard of, but never met, Fat Head. According to rumors, Fat Head had a degree in chemistry, but preferred cooking meth to legitimate work. It was easy to see where Fat Head got his name. He was of average height and build, but he had this huge head that was way too big for his body. He also spoke very softly and more mumbled his words than actually spoke them, so it was hard for me to really understand him, at least until I got to know him.

  I invited Fat Head in, and he said that he had bought some of my dope from Jimmy, and loved it. He said he had several grams of lab grade Red P, and he wanted me to have it. Fat Head gave me about 10 grams of pure Red P, and I gave him some dope in exchange. He left with an open invitation to stop by again anytime he wanted. As it turned out, Jimmy never told Fat Head to come by my place. He didn’t even know how he had found out who I was or where I lived. All we could figure was that Tara must have told Erica, his girlfriend, about me, and Erica told Fat Head.

  Fat Head started coming by to trade pills and Red P for meth. Although he was a cook himself, he only cooked using the anhydrous ammonia method. Since he preferred Red P dope to anhydrous, he was happy to trade me some of his pills for a supply of my dope for his personal use. Jimmy was not happy at all that Fat Head came straight to me, because that cut into Jimmy’s supply and distribution chain. This would happen many more times, but sometimes there were consequences for side stepping Jimmy.

  Chapter 37

  At that time, I was the most important thing in Jimmy’s life. I was his friend, I gave him a place to live, food to eat, and I was basically his employer. Although I didn’t pay Jimmy for his services, I did give him enough extra dope for him to be able to skim a little for himself, or trade for pills, that he would trade back to me, for even more dope. I was also supporting his and Tara’s dope habits, along with mine, Lisa’s and Timothy’s. Jimmy had a lot to lose if I started working with someone else, and he knew it, so he guarded my iden
tity jealously.

  Jimmy also wasn’t your average dope fiend. In another life, before meth became his life, Jimmy regularly competed in every tough man contest he could get into. Jimmy loved to fight. Since Lisa wasn’t allowing any cooking at the new trailer, unless it was an emergency “Lisa’s-out-of-dope” type situation, I had to find new places to go cook. This kept me out of the house for days at a time, and eventually I ended up quitting my job. Jimmy was great at getting me places to go cook.

  One night, I was at a house in Grand Bay, cooking. The owner of the house, B.J., was one of Jimmy’s oldest friends. B.J. set me up in an empty bedroom to cook, and I would use this room several nights a week. This particular night, I had Timothy with me to help me out, because this cook was unusually large. There were a lot of people at the house that night, and I knew everyone except for one person. The person I didn’t know was named Bruce. I would end up being introduced to him by Timothy, who I thought knew him, but I would find out later that he had just met him that night also.

  Bruce let me know that he had a good supply chain for pills, and he had a permanent cook spot I could use if I was interested. I got his number, and met up with him in a parking lot later that night. He had a lot of pills on him, and more at the cook house. I followed him to the house, and it really was a good spot, with woods in the back, and windows facing every road. The house was a nice brick home, in a nice area, the kind of place you’d never think to find a meth lab. There was a large garage for our cars, so we could park there, and nobody would see several strange vehicles parked out front.

  I started going over to Bruce’s place about 3 times a week, for about a month. Bruce couldn’t really sell any dope for me, but he was good at getting pills and supplies. I still had Jimmy to move the dope, although I couldn’t tell him where I was cooking it. When I was at Bruce’s, Jimmy would constantly be calling me. He was worried to death that he was about to be replaced.