Hiding Out In The Open

On the night that Jane was arrested, she only had to stay in jail overnight.  She was released on bail and was awaiting her trial.  So when I got back to Louisiana, she thought I should just stay with her instead of staying in a hotel.

Her trailer was just outside Ft. Polk in Leesville.  There were always people coming and going and so everyone was told that they would have to keep quiet that I was back around.  First, because I had brought a shipment of Ecstasy with me.  Second, was the fact that several law enforcement agencies were hunting me down.

My main goal was to get rid of what I had and get back to Houston as soon as possible.  This was usually not a problem because no one could get it in Leesville or Alexandria unless someone brought it from Houston.  I was one of the few people doing this.  Plus I made more money in Louisiana than I could in Texas.

So the pattern started up again.  Buy “X” in Houston and hang out in the clubs there for a week, drive to Louisiana for the weekend and deplete my supply, go back to Houston.  The trips back and forth were sometimes with other people and sometimes alone.

In Alexandria, my main place of business was in a club called Late Nite, the place where I first tried “X”.  Entering the club presented its challenges.  The regular buyers would recognize me and they would all start swarming towards me.  This made the reason for my presence, blatantly obvious.  Drawing attention to myself was not what I needed.

So a couple of my friends would quickly intervene while notifying them to stay cool and back off.  Working my way around the club, one by one people would give me money and I would hand them pills or they would give money to one of my friends and they would get the pills from me.

Another challenge was the fact that I was constantly using while selling.  My tolerance had gotten pretty high and so it took more to keep me going.  I had been mixing different types of drugs together trying to intensify the effects of one or the other.  Sometimes “X” with acid, or “X” with cocaine.  Alcohol had no effect.  Most of the time there was not a lot of difference, just a really messed up guy.  Somehow, I still was able to make my sales and leave with money.

By the end of each night, taking the hour trip back to Leesville was a struggle.  You did not want to be on the road anywhere near my car.  It is a good thing no one else was really ever on the roads.  I distinctly remember many nights, slamming on the brakes in the middle of the road because the mixture of drug cocktails and exhaustion from not sleeping caused me to have hallucinations.

At this point, I was pretty far gone.  Just medicating myself, and becoming numb.  There really was no cost to me and so my supply was unlimited.  If there was something I wanted that I didn’t have, I could just trade for it.  I began to lose sense of time, purpose and reality.  Faces, drugs and money blurred together.

The fact that I was a soldier was a joke. The fact that I had a family that was worried about me was getting fuzzy.  The fact that I had a relationship with my God was absent from my memory, even though God had not given up on me….