Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  One night, I was out of iodine, and Bruce had several boxes of pills for me. Jimmy also needed me to cook, but I told him the same thing I told Bruce, I couldn’t cook without iodine. Jimmy had an idea. He called Bruce and had him meet us in Grand Bay. I know Bruce was nervous when we met up, because he never got out of his car, or even turned it off. I was kind of wondering if Jimmy was up to something myself, but I just waited to see what was up. As it turned out, Jimmy did have a good idea. We were right across the street from a feed and seed store that sold the iodine I needed. Jimmy had scoped the place out the last time he was in there to buy iodine, and had discovered that there was no alarm on the door. He told Bruce to go over to the store, kick in the door, and steal all of the iodine on the shelf. This was the kind of thing Bruce loved to do, so he agreed to do it, and meet us afterward at B.J.’s house. Timothy had said he wanted to go with Bruce to be sure he showed up at B.J.’s, but I think he just wanted in on the fun of kicking in the door.

  We got to B.J.’s and waited. Bruce and Timothy got there not long after we did, and they said there were no problems with the job. As they stepped on the porch, Jimmy hit Bruce in the mouth, knocking him off the porch and on the ground. Jimmy started beating the hell out of Bruce and told him he better never go around him again to try to steal his dope connect. Jimmy told him to get the hell out of there and never come back. As Bruce left, I told him, “Great work, dumbass. The iodine is still in his car.” Jimmy then jumped into Tara’s Mustang and somehow was able to get Bruce to pull over and give him the iodine.

  I kind of felt bad for Bruce. He wasn’t actually trying to “steal” me. I was just using supply lines other than Jimmy, but local politics in the meth world of Alabama didn’t allow for Bruce to deal directly with me. It wasn’t anything I engineered, it just was.

  There were times when I did exercise my power over Jimmy. I got a call one day from someone I knew through Fat Head. This was Chris, and although I knew Jimmy and Bull knew Chris, they didn’t do any deals with him if they didn’t have to. Chris was very heavily connected with the Vietnamese who were bringing in a lot of ice into the area. You don’t want to step on any toes when the Viets are involved. That is why Jimmy stayed away from Chris. Chris was a middleman. He didn’t cook, and he didn’t nickel and dime deal. Chris liked to buy quantity, and sell quantity.

  When I got the call, Chris said he wanted to meet at his house. We set a time and I showed up alone as requested. Chris told me he wanted me to supply him with Red P dope. He wanted everything I made. I told him that there was no possible way I could do that, because I had suppliers to pay, with dope, and a lot of my cook supplies came through Jimmy or Fat Head, who would go elsewhere if I cut their dope supplies too much. I finally agreed to supply Chris with a substantial amount of dope on a weekly basis to see if it worked out.

  When I told Jimmy about my deal, he was pretty pissed off, but I told him I wasn’t changing teams, I was just adding to what was going on. Since I needed to cook a lot more dope, I needed Jimmy out there hustling more pills, and a few more different cook spots.

  Jimmy ended up taking me to one of his best kept secrets, Amanda’s crack house. Amanda was a crack whore who inherited a house after the death of her parents. You could find crack heads and dealers there at any time of the day or night, whether Amanda was there or not. When Jimmy would get hard up for pills, he would go to Amanda’s, buy some crack, and give it to crack-heads to walk up the street a block to a CVS to buy a box of pills. Now that we needed a lot more pills, we needed all the crack-heads we could get.

  At first, we set the lab up in the garage, but there was way too much traffic in and out of there, with crack whores going in there to fuck for crack. I would be trying to concentrate, while some crack dealer was getting his dick sucked 5 feet away from me. It was disturbing, to say the least.

  We ended up moving the lab to one of the bedrooms in the house. I would be cooking a supply of pills, while Jimmy was driving crack heads around in my car buying more pills. One day, I pulled into Amanda’s, and Jimmy ran outside and jumped into my car with a gym bag, and yelled, “Go! Go! Go!” I hauled ass, and when we got down the road, I asked what was up. Jimmy opened the bag and it had several dozen boxes of pills in it. When I asked him where he got them, he said he sent a crack head to the store to jump the counter and grab all of the boxes of pills. I don’t know if that’s where the pills really came from or not, but I never went back to Amanda’s after that.

  Chapter 38

  For a couple of weeks, my deals with Chris were great. I would give him the dope, then pick my money up the next day. Then, I tried calling him one day for my money, but he wouldn’t answer or call back after I left voicemail messages. I gave him till the following day, then, when I still couldn’t get a hold of him, I told Jimmy to go get my money. This was a very dangerous job for Jimmy, because Chris was protected by the Viets, and was supposed to be “untouchable.” Jimmy took Bull, and they got a promise from Chris to have my money later that night.

  When we showed up at Chris’ that evening, the door was open, so we just walked in with Jimmy in front of me, and Bull behind me. As we walked in, I noticed that right in the center of Chris’ beloved big screen TV, there was a perfectly round bullet hole. I just laughed and shook my head. It was obvious how they convinced Chris to come up off my money.

  We walked to Chris’ bedroom that he practically lived out of. As we all sat down, Chris handed me a stack of 20’s Without a word, Jimmy took the money out of my hand and threw it back at Chris, saying “We don’t want that shit.” What I didn’t know, but Jimmy expected, was that Chris had just tried to pay me with counterfeit bills he had been printing off of his home computer. Jimmy told him to pay with legit cash, but he said he didn’t have any. Without a word, Jimmy and Bull started packing up Chris’s laptop and printer he was using for the funny money. While they did this, with Chris asking for one more day to get the money, another car pulled in. Chris went out to the living room for a few minutes, then came back in the bedroom with a wad of cash, which he handed to me. I checked it, and it was real, so we walked out of the room to leave. As we walked through the living room, we encountered several, very unhappy looking, Vietnamese gang bangers. It was a tense moment, as we all nodded to one another, while Jimmy and Bull escorted me out the door. That was the last time any of us ever went back around there.

  Things between Lisa and I were getting bad; again. I was gone from home almost all of the time, and the more strung out I got, the less I cared about being home. I came across an old Coleman camp stove and decided to try a few outdoor cooks. I took Lisa along with me for a couple of these, so we could spend some time together.

  I was taking a couple of days off to sleep, which I did once ever couple of weeks. Usually, when I took my sleep days, I could count on not being disturbed. Lisa or Jimmy would basically stand guard at the door the entire time I was asleep. They started “guard duty” after I fell asleep one day with a Pyrex dish, full of dope, laying next to me on the bed. Lisa came out of the front bedroom to catch my sister standing at the bedroom door, with her cell phone, taking pictures of me. This was just too strange, because my sister definitely could not be trusted, and any pictures she took would most likely find their way to the cops.

  Anyway, I’m not sure how long I was asleep when I woke up, but I suddenly went from a blissful slumber to wide awake in a split second. Lisa was sitting on me, straddling my waist, asking if I was awake. I just nodded my head to indicate that I was awake and aware. Lisa then held up a syringe and said, “I had to give you two shots to wake you up.”

  I had only been asleep for a few hours, but Lisa said Jimmy needed me awake right away. He had called to say he had a huge supply of pills from another cook, that the cook wanted me to cook for him. In return, I got to keep half of the dope. This is a common agreement meth cooks will make with someone who has a quantity of pills, but no desire to sell them straight out. Jimmy wanted me to meet him at B.J.’s
as soon as possible. Lisa had even taken it upon herself to ask if she could come with me. B.J. told Jimmy he was okay with it, so against my better judgment, I took her with me, leaving Tara at the house to babysit.

  We got to B.J.’s, and when we went in, I told Lisa to go in the living room. I headed to the bedroom and started setting up. I had Jimmy and B.J. helping me get the pills broken down and the lab set up. Lisa kept coming in the room, generally being loud and getting in the way. I knew we would end up getting into an argument before the night was over. Lisa needed to sleep.

  Once all the pills were broken down, and I was ready to start, Lisa asked if she could do the cook. I told her no, because this wasn’t my cook, and I didn’t trust her with it. This pissed her off, and she started yelling about how she was a good cook, and so on. I just simply locked her out of the room and cooked.

  It took until morning for me to finish, and Jimmy, B.J., and I sat in the bedroom for an hour or two, smoking some of the dope. I split the dope, and gave Jimmy half to give to the person he got the pills from. I gave some to Jimmy for helping, and a few grams to B.J. for letting me cook at his house. Lisa was still being a bitch, and I packed the lab up and put everything in the car, while she stood there and continued to bitch.

  When I was ready to leave, I told Lisa to get in the car. She started screaming about me being a “sorry son of a bitch” and how “she hoped I got busted cooking dope,” and so on. When she started yelling about cooking dope, Jimmy and B.J. were both ready to kill her. I just grabbed Lisa by the neck and shoved her in the car, telling her to shut up.

  I had to go to the Wal-Mart in Pascagoula. Along the way, Lisa kept on and on about anything and everything she could think of to bitch about. At one point she started saying shit about how I had never done anything for her, or her kids; that was way too much for me to put up with. I told Lisa I was going to pull over, and beat her ass. Since I had never laid a hand on Lisa before, I guess she felt confident I still wasn’t going to do anything to her, so she looked at me and said, “I wish you would.”

  I pulled over and put my car in neutral. I just sat there for a second, trying to calm down. Lisa looked at me and said, “I thought you said you were going to beat my ass? You ain’t shit.” I remember backhanding Lisa once. The next thing I remember is putting my car back into gear, and pulling back onto the road.

  Lisa was on the floorboard, knocked out. After a few miles, she got up off of the floorboard, and sat in her seat. She put her seatbelt on, and sat quietly the rest of the way to the store. When we parked at Wal-Mart, I looked at her and asked, “Are you going in?” She simply said, “No!” After I finished shopping, I drove back to Grand Bay. The more Lisa sat there pissed off, the more I couldn’t stand to have her near me. I pulled over at a convenience store, and told her to get out. She did, and I took off, leaving her in the parking lot.

  Once I dumped Lisa off, I got tired. I went to the truck stop, and parked in the parking lot to get some sleep. I put the seat back, and laid back. Just as I was about to go to sleep, a truck pulled in behind me. I got up and looked. It was the repo man. I hadn’t made a payment on my Saturn in a month, and they wanted the car. Fine. Fuck it. I didn’t give a shit at this point. I just wanted to be away from Lisa, and I wanted some sleep. I grabbed the gym bag with the lab in it, and took off walking down the road to a house I figured that Jimmy would be at, on his way back from dropping the dope off he was delivering.

  I got there about the same time as Jimmy, and he took me to see a friend of his. It was actually his ex-girlfriend, but she agreed to let me stay at her house and cook for a few days. When Jimmy and Tara picked me up to go do some running around a couple days later, Tara said my brother had went and picked Lisa up after she had called him. Since our rent had not been paid in weeks, (We paid by the week,) we were being evicted, so Lisa and the kids were staying with Kevin and his Lisa. I was told that Kevin had sent me a couple of messages to “come get your wife.” Fuck her! I didn’t have a car, and she only had a couple of days to turn herself in, but I didn’t give a fuck. I was done with her for good.

  For a couple of days, anyway.

  Chapter 39

  The day before Lisa had to leave to go back to Tennessee, she tracked me down. By then, I was out of dope, money, cook supplies, and with no vehicle, I had no way of getting my hands on anything to help my situation. I was pretty much screwed as far as cooking dope went, but I didn’t really care anymore. I was getting tired of the lifestyle.

  I was tired of having money today, and being broke tomorrow. I wanted to go back to work and have a home again. The last 4 years had been crazy, and I had lost everything I had going for me, over and over again. It was time to get the hell out of Alabama, and head back to Tennessee, where life wasn’t so insane. It was time to start over - again.

  Lisa and I talked about starting over and getting away from the lifestyle together. She said she wanted the same thing I did, but first she had to take care of her charges back home.

  My step-dad, Elwood, was driving Lisa and the kids back to Tennessee, so I packed up and went with them. The plan was to get back to Johnson City, spend the night with the kids, and then Lisa would turn herself in the next morning. Lisa’s parents would be helping and taking care of the kids.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a place to stay. The twins said I could stay with them, but they lived so far from town, that it would be impossible for me to get to work, if I could even find a job from there.

  We got to Johnson City around 8pm. Before we got to town, Lisa had called Tina and told her to meet us at the Red Roof Inn. She was waiting with her friend, Leanna, when we got there. We packed all our stuff into the trunk of the car, and headed to Lisa’s parents house.

  When we got to the house, I went to the twin’s bedroom to see if they had anything for me to get high on. They had a little dope, and they smoked it with me, while Lisa told her parents what she was going to do about turning herself in, in the morning.

  Lisa eventually came into the girls’ bedroom to see them and change clothes. While we were talking, Faye pulled a meth pipe out of a small plastic container. She asked if it was Lisa’s, and Lisa said it was. She took the pipe and container and slid it into my pocket. This becomes important later on in this particular night’s activities.

  After an hour or so of visiting, I was ready to go somewhere. Tina suggested we go to Johnson City and grab something to eat. Faye didn’t want to go, so it was Leanna, Tina, Lisa, and I, piling into the car to go eat.

  We were only gone about two hours, when we decided to go back to the house to hang out. As we turned onto the road that Lisa’s parents live on, Leanna slowed the car and yelled, “I can see a UFO through the trees!” I looked, and sure enough, there was a huge, bright light hovering in the air. Just as we took a sharp curve that would put us in view of the house, I realized what we were looking at; a helicopter.

  I pushed Lisa down in the seat and I ducked down. Tina said the helicopter had a spotlight shining on the house, and that there were cops everywhere. I asked if there was room to drive past there, and Leanna said there was. I told her just to drive slowly, and pretend she was just trying to see what was going on. She did, and we made it past without raising suspicion. Once we got out of sight, Leanna hauled ass back to Johnson City.

  We didn’t know it then, but Joy or Levi had called Lisa’s sister, Katy, who was the other co-signer on Lisa’s bond, to tell her they were home. This alerted Katy’s husband, Rupert, who had been trying to track down Lisa ever since she had left town. Rupert called the cops, and they tried to catch Lisa at her parents.

  Since Elwood had gotten a room at the Red Roof Inn for the night, we decided to have Leanna and Tina drop us off there. We would hang around until morning, and then wake Elwood to have him take Lisa to the jail.

  Lisa could have just went ahead and let the cops have her, but she just didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of catching her. Also, it would look bet
ter in court if she had self-surrendered.

  Lisa and I laid low, in a small tree line that separated the Red Roof’s property from that of another motel. About 4 a.m. a cop car came in through the parking lot, and I got a bad feeling. I told Lisa we should go ahead, wake up Elwood, and get out of there. Lisa wanted to wait a little longer, so we waited until 5a.m.

  We walked over to the motel, and got on the elevator to the 3rd floor. When the door opened on the 3rd floor, we were surprised to see two cops standing there with their backs to us, and Rupert, Lisa’s brother-in-law, standing there as well, talking to them.

  I pushed Lisa against the wall, so nobody would see her, and pushed the door-close button. Before the doors were able to close though, Rupert saw me, and started jumping up and down, literally, while screaming, “There they are! There they are!”

  As the doors slid shut, one of the cops turned and saw me. He grabbed the door to stop it from closing, and said, “Step out of there.” We got off the elevator, and the cops handcuffed us.

  Rupert was bouncing around like he was on crack or something. He kept yelling at Lisa, saying that he knew he would get her, and he was saying that I was wanted for violation of probation. The cops told Rupert to shut up, before they arrested him for disturbing the peace; small consolation.

  I’m not sure why Rupert thought I had a warrant on me for violation of probation. While it’s true that I had not reported to my P.O. in several months, but since I had a work-travel permit, I was allowed to miss reporting.

  The cops got my Alabama driver’s license out of my wallet, and ran my name. There were no warrants, so the cop in charge told one of the others to let me go. As the cop was about to uncuff me, he said he was going to pat me down. I didn’t mind that, since I was going free and I had nothing on me. When the cop checked my jacket pocket, and pulled out that plastic container with the meth pipe in it, you should have seen the look on my face. I had totally forgotten about it during all the activity, and right then, I knew I was in trouble.