November 28

The traffic at our apartment began to pick up slowly but surely.  I remember seeing people sitting on our couch and using the phone to arrange drug sales or purchases and wondering “Who is that?”  It just wasn’t that uncommon.  My brother had a large set of scales in his closet and was regularly weighing out twenty-five and fifty dollar bags of weed.  I would occasionally buy seventy-five dollars worth of speed, sell three-fourths of it for seventy-five and have my very own quarter-bag of speed left over for free!  When that happened I considered it to be the perfect way to start the weekend.  We were certainly never big-time, but you can’t have that many people in and out of your apartment without getting a bit of attention.

One particular weekend Linda’s brother Floyd, his friend Rene (a hispanic dude) and Claude were all over at our place for drugs and booze and cards.  Claude not only kept up with everyone but sometimes exceeded our intake, all the more amazing considering that he wasn’t quite four feet tall.  Claude was the first dwarf I had ever spent any significant time with.  It was very interesting just to talk and interact with him, but even more so to see him slam speedballs of speed and cocaine into his veins.  He and Floyd and especially Rene were hooked on that combination.  Considering his body size he shouldn’t have been able to take the same amount of drugs and alcohol as the rest of us, but he partied like the rest of us which is probably all that he really wanted; just to be like the rest of us.

I think it was that same weekend that word got back to us of an arrest.  Someone that had been hanging around a bit, someone that no one really knew that well, had supposedly been arrested by the White Settlement police not long after leaving our apartment.  Unfortunately he had at least a pound of marijuana under his front seat.  We were sure that he would squeal and send the police straight to us so we held off on parties for awhile.

Speaking of large quantities of marijuana, I am reminded of Mike, one of my brother’s old schoolmates.  Mike had spent some time muling money down to the border for some dealer.  He would have the money in his trunk, pull into a Del Rio motel and park the car then stay overnight.  The next morning he would get back in the car and drive back to Fort Worth.  The supplier would cross the border in the middle of the night, take the money, replace it with weed, and then go back to Mexico.  It was evidently an efficient system.  Mike was no longer making these runs, but he seemed to have a good supply source.  When we were hanging out in his living room and needed a joint he would just drag a thirty gallon trash bag out from under the couch.  It was full of dried leaves.  It was something akin to rolling your own from scratch.  That is when his drug mule stories went from the realm of possible to probable in my opinion.

Another potentially jumbled memory surrounds a particular band.  I remember partying at this guy’s house, and I’m pretty sure we knew him through Linda.  He was supposedly in this band.  But then when we actually saw the band I think my brother was with Gail, because he flashed her tits at them.  I think these were two separate incidents, but again the memory is fuzzy.  The location was a place that was the epitome of the term ‘dive joint.’  The bathrooms had holes in the walls, probably made by a body being shoved into said wall.  The floors were coated in urine.  An outhouse would have been cleaner.  There were a few foosball tables and very few chairs, and not a damn dime had ever been spent on paint or decor.  The name was Joe’s Garage in White Settlement, and it is memorable only because it was so shitty and also because Pantera used to play there.  I can truly say ‘I knew them back when.’

I got a phone call one day and was surprised to hear my now ex-wife on the other end of the line.  I was even more surprised to hear she was on her way to Fort Worth and wanted to know if I could hook her up with some speed.  I managed to scrounge some up and went to meet her and David at some motel on the south side of town.  They were nice, but it was a bit awkward.  Deeanne seemed bent on impressing me with both her familiarity with the drug and her utter lack of fear of needles.  This was quite a change for her.  She melted and filtered the speed into a syringe, and then skipped the whole “find a vein” step and startlingly plunged the needle into her upper forearm!  I might have jumped a little.  I didn’t stay long, but it was a friendly meeting.

Somewhere around that same timeframe I received a visit from my ex-father-in-law.  He had legal papers with him and he wanted me to sign.  The bottom line was that they had been taking care of our kids for awhile and were incurring a lot of expenses with little hope that either Deeanne or I would soon be showing any sign of responsibility.  They also wanted to get them covered on their health insurance policies and were unable to unless they were their own dependents.  Deeanne and I were both adrift and making little progress on any sort of promising jobs or careers.  They basically gave us an ultimatum.  We were to begin paying three hundred dollars a month in child support each or sign them over for a full legal adoption.  Frankly I don’t think I had that much money left each month after food and rent.  I was barely making more than minimum wage.  On top of that, what would I do if I regained custody?  Pay for their daycare?  Provide them a stable home by myself?  They had already experienced a year or more of the relatively stable and nurturing and well-funded lifestyle that my in-laws could provide.  It truly did not seem like it was in their best interest to fight to keep my technical status as legal guardian.  I thought of myself as a very bad parent, if not a bad person, and I gave in and gave up.  I signed.
At the time it felt like a Catch-22 situation – damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and I felt very, very damned.