Meth A Memoir

  I finally made it back to Jackie’s house. Luckily, I saw my tank sitting in the kitchen when I walked in the door. I had been worrying about leaving it there while I was gone so long. John, Kid, and Billy Jean were there when I got there, too. Billy Jean was asleep on the couch. Kid asked me if I wanted to sell any dope, which I did. We went into another room and I sold him an 8 ball.

  It was almost day light out and I was pretty tired. I told everyone that they could hang out, if they wanted to, but Jackie and I were going to bed. After spending so much time around Angel, I was ready to screw something and Jackie was it. I woke up at about noon, to someone knocking on the bedroom door. Jackie got up to see who it was and Davy walked in with Winter. Always happy to see them, I got up and loaded up a foil. It was time to get high.

  Jessie, Christy, and John were there also, they came into the room to get high with us. Christy had just gotten home from somewhere and had the urge to go someplace else. She suggested we all go to North Carolina to buy pseudo pills. We all agreed that she had a good idea, so we started planning how we were going to make the run. Suddenly, I had a really bad feeling about something.

  I asked John where Kid and Billy Jean were. He said they had left right around sun up. I told Davy to go into the kitchen to see if my tank of ammonia was still there. He walked into the kitchen, then yelled back that the tank was there. That didn’t do much for me to shake the feeling I was having. I told him to take the blanket off of the tank and bring it to me. He was quiet, then he appeared in the doorway, without the tank. Davy had a funny look on his face. When I looked at him, he just shook his head.

  The tank was gone and I was pissed. I jumped out of bed and ran into the kitchen just to be sure Davy wasn’t fucking with me. He wasn’t. Someone had taken the tank, then they set a bag of garbage on the floor and covered it with the blanket, to make it appear that the tank was still there. Looking back, it was a pretty slick way to steal it, so I can’t be too mad about it now.

  I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to assume for a moment that it’s no fun to find one’s self looking down the barrel of a loaded .45. Especially, if that .45 is being held by a really pissed off meth cook. The situation would be made even worse, I also assume, if that meth cook thinks you had something to do with $5000 worth of anhydrous ammonia being stolen from him. Well, that’s the position Jackie suddenly found herself in.

  I ran to the bedroom, grabbed my gun, and stuck it right between Jackie’s eyes. Davy came to the room, saw what was going on and froze. John wasn’t saying shit, and the girls were starting to cry, like girls do. Jackie, to her credit, was being very, very calm. She didn’t move, and she was speaking very slowly and clearly as she tried convincing me that she had nothing to do with the tank being stolen. I didn’t believe her.

  Finally, John spoke up. He told me that Kid had gotten him to go into one of the other bedrooms to smoke some dope. Kid told him he didn’t want Billy Jean to know he had bought the 8-ball, for whatever reason. John suggested that, maybe Kid was keeping him busy in the other room, while Billy Jean stole the tank. That, I decided, was a good possibility. I put my gun up and Jackie changed her underwear.

  Chapter 54

  While we were gone to North Carolina pill shopping, I called Mark to let him know I was going to need a new tank of ammonia. He said he would get it for me, but I would have to wait. He wasn’t going to be home until sometime the next day. Since I didn’t want to have to dig up my other tank, just to do one cook, I decided to make some home-made gas.

  I took all of the pills we had bought that day and went to Angelina’s. Everything I needed to make my home-made anhydrous was stored at her house. All I needed was some dry ice. I gave Angelina some cash, then sent her to the store to get me twenty pounds of ice. I stayed at the house to make a gas generator I would need to make the ammonia.

  When Angelina got back, she handed me my cash back. She said she put the ice on her food stamp card. That is why I loved that girl. Anyone else would have just pocketed the money, but not her. She looked out for me. If it wasn’t for me having that whole Lisa thing going on, I would have probably married Angelina. She was that awesome.

  I put everything I would need into the Bronco. In the interest of saving time, I had Angelina drive me to Mitch’s house while I sat in the back and started making the gas. I know the cops would have loved to have pulled us over with that shit going on in the back but we made it to our destination safely.

  Mitch and I went out to the work shop to get the cook going. Not long after we started, we heard a vehicle coming down the driveway. Mitch said he wasn’t expecting any company so, I told him to go see who it was and get rid of them. He left, and when he came back he said it was someone looking for me.

  I walked out to the truck that was sitting in the driveway and saw that it was Kid. I got in the passenger side and the first thing I wanted to know was, where was my fucking tank of ammonia? He said that he didn’t know but he was fairly sure Billy Jean had stolen it. According to Kid, Billy Jean was in a big hurry to get rid of him after they left Jackie’s that morning. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure it had to be Billy Jean who stole it. Kid didn’t know how to cook but Billy Jean did. I let Kid off the hook, for the time being.

  While we talked, Kid said he knew where we could get our hands on a big tank of ammonia, but we had to go get it right away. This was the whole reason for his coming to find me at Mitch’s. I started asking him a few questions about the tank. It didn’t take long for me to figure out where the thing was, and why we had to hurry if we were going to steal it. I told him to forget about it if he was thinking about stealing Marks tank while he wasn’t home.

  He really wanted to go get the tank and kept trying to talk me into it. Finally, I told him that I already own that tank. It was the one I was splitting with Mark and Will. Kid was quiet a few seconds, then he asked, “I just fucked up, didn’t I?” I told him that everything was cool, as long as he didn’t fuck with my tank.

  After Kid left, I went back in to finish the cook. Neither of us ever mentioned it again. Something I didn’t think about at the time, but bothered me later was, I don’t know how he found me at Mitch’s house that night. They didn’t know each other, as far as I know. Maybe Mark really wasn’t out of town and he sent Kid over to see if I would double cross him by stealing the tank from him. That sounds paranoid, I know, but Mark would do some shit like that.

  As Angelina and I were getting ready to leave Mitch’s, John pulled in. He had Angel with him. We talked for a few minutes then I told them to follow us to the house; Angelina’s house. When we got there, John asked me if I knew of anywhere he could get some iodine. Apparently, all the local shops were out. Since it wasn’t being produced anymore, they wouldn’t be restocking. I made a couple calls and found him one pint. His cooking days were about to come to an end.

  The next day, I took yet another propane tank to Mark’s for him to fill for me. I just dropped the tank off with instructions for him to call me when it was filled. I took a small tank he had with me in case I decided to cook again before he got my tank ready. It began to snow that afternoon, so I went to Mitch’s house to relax and take the day off. Something I rarely did.

  Around 10 p.m. that night, I got a call from a very pissed off Mark. He said that Queeny had dropped off a small tank so that he could buy a gallon of ammonia. Occasionally, we would sell a little gas for $500 a gallon. Queeny was attempting to learn how to cook so, he needed gas. We were the only people he knew who had any for sale.

  According to Mark, he told Queeny to come back in a few hours; his tank would be ready then. Sometime later on, Mark left, to go to the store, leaving the garage unlocked. When he returned, he discovered that, not only did Queeny take his tank, he also took my tank, as well as a tank Mark had just filled for himself. Mark wanted to kill Queeny, literally. I had to find him before Mark did.

  I began calling everyone I could think of that might have some idea of whe
re Queeny was at. Several hours of searching had turned up nothing. Finally, I got a call from someone saying that Queeny was at Jackie’s house. That definitely was not a good place for him to be because I knew Mark would eventually go there.

  I got to Jackie’s just as Mark was getting out of his truck, gun in hand. He stormed through the front door with me right behind him. He asked Jackie where Queeny was. She said he was in the bathroom. Mark walked to the bathroom door, pointed the gun, kicked the door open, then fired six shots. Queeny was screaming, Jackie was screaming, and I was thinking to myself, “damn, now we are going to have to kill Jackie too, and I don’t even know yet if she’s really pregnant.”

  For a couple seconds, there was complete silence. Then, I heard Queeny say, “You made me piss all over myself.” Mark busted up laughing at him. He had use blanks, just to scare the shit out of everyone. It certainly scared the piss out of Queeny. That is not the only time Mark has used that little prank. There was one night when he started to pull it on Jackie and it almost ended really badly. Looking back now, I have to wonder if it really was an accident.

  Marks wife, Teri, was a lot like Lisa, in some ways. Mostly, she liked to disappear for days, even weeks at a time, to go screw around. In all fairness I should say that this was not always her fault. Many times, Mark would just kick her out, so he could move a little dope whore in for a while. Sometimes, he would try to keep the dope whore, even after Teri moved back home. That never worked out and it was exactly the reason Teri hated Jackie. He had tried that shit with them.

  One evening, I had stopped by Marks, while Jackie and I were out. I had been in the house for a couple hours, completely forgetting that Jackie was outside in the truck, freezing her little ass off. Finally, she couldn’t take the cold anymore so she blew the horn to remind me she was there. Mark asked who was in the truck and I told him. Teri jumped up to run outside to beat her ass. Mark grabbed her and got her to calm down. Teri hates Lisa just as much, but then, so do most of the women who know her.

  So, Teri calms down and says she won’t beat Jackie up, but she wants to scare the shit out of her. Teri tells Mark to give her the blank gun. The blank gun isn’t actually a blank gun. It’s a western style, .22 caliber revolver with a six inch barrel. Mark had two of them. One he kept blanks in, the other he kept real bullets in. You never know which is which.

  Teri wanted to walk out to the truck, point the gun at Jackie’s head, and start firing away. Without a doubt, Jackie would have shit her pants. Mark said he had an even better idea. He wanted me to run out the door, screaming bloody murder. He would run out behind me, shooting at me. I would pretend he killed me. It sounded like a great idea to me, and Jackie would have fallen for it because, people had been waiting for something to happen between Mark and me for a while.

  Although Mark and I had never argued, or had any kind of problem for that matter, there had always been a tension between us. I can’t really explain way. Shawn used to say, it was because I refused to basically bow to Marks will, like everyone else did. I, in Marks mind, had as much control over what he considered to be, his people, as he did. Shawn said that this made Mark uneasy around me.

  Anyway, that was our plan. Given everybody’s expectations of an impending conflict between us, it would have worked beautifully. I say, “Would have”, because Teri wanted to be the one who terrorized Jackie. She grabbed the gun out of Marks hand, discharging it accidently as she did. Everyone in the room stared in silence at the little, round hole in the floor beside Marks foot. The hole left by what was supposed to be a blank. Mark freaked out that he had grabbed the wrong gun for the prank. Or, did he?

  I have always wondered if that really was an accident. If we had gone through with what we had planned, I would have been shot for real. It was a perfect way to get rid of the competition, and since I was in on it, no one would ever suspect it was anything but what it would have appeared to be, an accident. That is how things went in my world. When you are awake for days and days at a time, you start thinking of ways to take out people you feel threatened by.

  Back to Queeny. It turns out that he didn’t actually steal the tanks. What had happened was, when Queeny got to Marks house, Mark wasn’t there. Queeny see’s the tanks sitting out, for anyone to come along and take, so he decides to hide them. Once they were hidden, and not knowing Mark will be back any minute, he left. We asked him where he hid them and he said the tanks were in the back of one of Marks trucks. The very truck Mark decided to use to hunt Queeny down. We went outside and sure enough, there they were. It’s a damn good thing Mark didn’t get pulled over that night.

  Chapter 55

  A day or two after getting the new tank of ammonia from Mark, I ended up hooking up with Angel. She was a fireball. Mean, tiny, and couldn’t sit still, or shut up, for five minutes to save her life. Nothing scared this girl, and in truth, she did shit that scared the hell out of me sometimes.

  I had her driving me up and down I-81 one evening, around 8 p.m. I was doing a small cook in the back of my Bronco. I wasn’t really paying attention to where we were going, but I felt the truck slow down as she exited the interstate. Assuming she was just exiting so she could turn around and go the other way, I kept concentrating on what I was doing.

  Angel drove for about half a mile, then she pulled the truck to the side of the road and stopped. This got my attention so I looked around to see what was going on. That’s when I noticed we had just stopped in front of the state trooper’s office. I flipped out on her, asking her, not too nicely, what the fuck she thought she was doing.

  I believe my exact words were, “what the fuck are you doing? That’s the goddamn state trooper’s office.”

  She just looked at me and said, “I know, let’s fuck.”

  Now, I’ve done a few stupid things in my life, but I was not about to fuck, on the side of the road, with a cook going on in the back of the truck. Especially, not in front of a fucking cop shop. No way in hell! Angel pretty much had her mind make up about this, and I hated to tell her no. I finally said I would let her give me a blow job, a very quick blow job. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

  Luckily, and I never thought I would call this lucky, my dick wouldn’t cooperate, no matter how hard she tried. After a minute or so, she abandoned the idea and we got back on the road. That incident proved to me that Angel was a little too addicted to danger. But, I liked her even more for it. Unfortunately, I also learned that my pecker wouldn’t work in dangerous situations. Well, not when cops are involved, anyway.

  Hooking up with Angel was really good for me, in a way. The one thing it did, for sure, was make me want to step back from “the life” for a while. I wanted to spend more time with her than I spent running around, chasing money and pseudo pills. I also lost interest in the other girls, for the most part. There were a couple I had to keep sleeping with for awhile, but that was business.

  I took Angel with me to Mitch’s house, one night in mid-January, 2008. I had planned on staying there for a few days with her, while I did several large cooks, then we were talking about going out of town for a week or two. We didn’t plan a destination, we just wanted to get away and spend some time together, without all the normal bullshit that seemed to follow us around.

  The first night we were there, I did two, simultaneous cooks. One cook was with pills collected by Mitch and myself. The second cook was for Mary, Mitch’s girlfriend. She had gotten her hands on a bunch of pills and asked me to cook them without Mitch knowing about it. I did as she asked, and Mitch never found out she had more dope than he did. It wasn’t my business why she wanted me to do her cook; I just took my cut and forgot about it.

  After I finished cooking, I left my lab set up in the shed. There was no sense in packing it all up when I was going to keep cooking out there. We partied until sometime the next afternoon, when I told Mitch that Angel and I were going to use his bedroom for a few hours. We screwed then slept until that night.

  When I woke u
p, it was to my cell phone ringing. It was one of my regular customers, Ricky, who live only a few miles from where we were. I answered and Ricky told me that he was in need of some dope, right away, if I could bring it to him. I said I would be right over, then I woke Angel up and told her to get dressed.

  When I walked into the living room, Mary and her friends, Larry and Linda, were there. I asked Mary where Mitch was and she said he was in the shed, with John, doing a cook. I ran out to the shed, to make sure they weren’t trying to do a cold cook; especially with my gas. They weren’t. John had gotten his hands on another pint of iodine and was doing a Red P cook. Probably his very last, he said, because there was absolutely no more iodine to be found in our area.

  I told Mitch, I had to leave to take care of something at Rick’s. I told him that I was leaving my tank in his shed, and for him to keep a close eye on it. He said it would be safe, so Angel and I headed over to Ricky’s house. It was only a five or ten minute drive to Ricky’s, and we had only been there a couple minutes, when my phone rang. It was Mary, so I hit the “ignore” button. I had no interest in talking to her.

  My phone kept ringing and kept ringing, so finally, I answered it to tell Mary to stop calling. I didn’t have time for her shit. As soon as I answered, Mary started babbling on about crazy shit.

  “The house is on fire. John is on fire. The dogs are dead,” - all kinds of weird stuff.

  I told her, she needed to lay it down and get some sleep, then I hung up on her.

  When my phone rang again a minute later, it was Mitch.

  “No shit, the house really is on fire and John really is burnt up pretty badly. We’re on our way to where you’re at”, he said and then hung up.