Gods of Mischief (5 page)

Not me. Not yet, anyway. I trusted Kevin Duffy, but I wasn't so sure about his colleague. Something about that gung-ho lawman just didn't sit right with me—a nagging gut-sense that somehow, someway, he'd get my ass buried next to David.

No, I wasn't ready to answer that sheriff's call for help.

But I did take his phone.

A
much wiser man than me once said that every saint has a past and every sinner a future. Well, this sinner knows the exact moment his future began. It's scorched into my brain like a cattle brand. And it wasn't that night on Warren Road, nor was it David's disappearance. Nope. The game-changer came years before that, when an eight-year-old boy asked a question that shook me to the core.

“Daddy, are you a drug dealer?”

Was I a drug dealer?

Are you shittin' me? Is a frog's ass watertight?

I was twenty years old when I discovered drugs, a late bloomer, but once I got rolling there was no stopping me. A habit that started as recreation soon became a full-time occupation. I went from smoking pot and snorting cocaine to dealing it on the streets, then shifted into cooking methamphetamine in the desert.

Nasty stuff, crystal meth. Crazy addictive. Eats you alive. I was over six feet tall and weighed 148 pounds back then, a walking corpse that never slept, lit up and buzzing like a neon light. During one particularly brutal binge I was spun for a month straight before finally crashing
out. After that I got myself a tattoo on my left arm of a grotesquely distorted face: the face of crystal meth.

That was the monster that lived inside me.

On crank my ego was out of control. I thought I was God Almighty, and to the customers I serviced maybe I was. After all, Ol' George had the big bag—everything those tweakers needed. I was making a ton of money off their addiction and spending even more. My pockets would be stuffed with twenty grand one day and empty the next. I'd blow it all on toys or loan it out to friends and customers. Sometimes the money came back, sometimes not. And when it didn't there was hell to pay.

I became a feared man around town. An amped-up beast with a chip on his shoulder and a .380 strapped to his ankle. A friend once told me that he loved to see me coming but couldn't wait for me to leave. Yup. I was a real badass motherfucker. Couldn't pay me? Fine. I'd screw your old lady. And believe me, I screwed plenty. Methamphetamine will turn a righteous woman into a whore. She'll trade what's between her legs in a heartbeat if it means a dealer in her pocket.

Sex for drugs. Don't mind if I do.

And if I didn't want the pussy, I'd haul everything you owned until I got paid. Around the valley they had a name for me; the U-Haul Bandit. If a customer stiffed me, I'd back a U-Haul truck to his front door and strip the house right to the walls.

Hell, I'd even take the cat.

There was a time when I had close to seventy U-Haul storage units jammed with the personal belongings of customers who owed me money. Imagine the cost to rent those units every month and you'll get some idea of the cash I was banking as a drug dealer.

Over in neighboring San Jacinto stood a little nondenominational church called the Pottery House. During my years selling dope, the preacher there was bound and determined to salvage my soul, railing against the evil of my drug-dealing ways. Well, that preacher might have been a man of God, but he was also a man with a serious heroin addiction. Doctors were pulling veins from his legs to rewire his neck,
because all his main cables had collapsed and he had only that one place left to slam the junk. This Bible-thumping hypocrite knew all about the U-Haul Bandit, knew about those storage units packed with property I'd confiscated. He called it “Satan's stuff” and warned I'd suffer eternal damnation unless I purged myself of those ill-gotten gains.

I wasn't concerned about eternal damnation at the time, but I do know my life as a dealer was hell on earth. All I have to do is stand naked in front of a mirror to be reminded of those dark days. There's a bullet scar on my left shin, put there by a nervous tweaker who shot me through his car door, and old knife wounds on my bicep, hand and left forearm, which is where a blade got stuck in bone and had to be surgically removed. Turn me around and there's even a scar on my ass where a buck knife went through my buttock and into the scrotum, tearing my testicle in half.

I was never afraid of knives. Any man who showed a big knife on his belt was usually a coward. I kept mine hidden on my backside, a 120 buck in a custom sheath that went crossways across the belt and pulled from the side. I seldom used it. Whenever someone came at me with a blade, I got inside of him quick, grabbed the wrist and broke his fuckin' arm.

In the drug world I stood out because I knew how to make money. But there were people just as ruthless as me who wanted to take away what I had. It was a stressful way to live, constantly watching your back, and after a while I started thinking that maybe the better play was to turn to manufacturing and leave the slinging to others. Cooking was where the real money was, anyway. Hell, I was already snorting the shit, why not profit on that nasty habit?

It was a Hells Angel who first taught me the Devil's trade. He was a friend of my buddy Freight Train, and I badgered that Angel for two years until he finally agreed to take me under his wing and teach me how to cook meth.

Our first classes were held in a garage, where the dude had his equipment set up like a small laboratory. There was a large glass globe
with nipplelike cooling towers used to cook and separate ephedrine, the prime ingredient in the manufacture of meth. Nowadays methheads are forced to boil down Sudafed to extract the same shit, but in those days I could get my hands on big drums of it. Breeders actually mixed ephedrine with chicken feed to make their birds crank out the eggs faster. The nation's henhouses were clucking with hopped-up chickens.

After seventy-two hours of cooking, when the brew had finally boiled down and separated, the garbage was skimmed off the top and the choice stuff harvested from the bottom. That's where the money was. That's what I was after.

Following my graduation from the Hells Angels Cooking Academy, I took my little operation into the Mojave Desert, where I set up shop in a rat-infested shed near the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms. Out there in the blast-furnace heat of the Mojave, where inside temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees, I truly felt like I was plying the Devil's trade in Hell.

Every batch of meth I cooked yielded twelve pounds of high-grade dope, which I sold to a Mexican drug dealer I trusted. To every pound of pure meth, that Chicano added four pounds of cut, which meant that forty-eight pounds of product went into the San Jacinto Valley and beyond. God only knows how many lives I helped destroy with that toxic shit.

It was around this time that I was introduced to a woman named Darlene, a single mom, twelve years my senior, with a house and three sweet kids. Darlene would teach me more about love and life than any other woman I've known before or since. But back then, in the midst of my drug phase, I wasn't exactly writing sonnets and looking for soul mates. Up to that point in my life I'd managed to torpedo just about every relationship I'd ever been involved in, including a long-suffering girlfriend who supported my addictions while I ruined her credit, and two brides in short-lived marriages—the first, doomed from “I do,” when I was a dumb kid with a cocaine problem, and a second, which I
have absolutely no fuckin' memory of . . . the whole blessed event lost forever in a haze of cheap bourbon, fake tits and psychedelic mushrooms.

Now there's a horror story.

My mother and little
sister, Lin Ann, had moved from Hemet out to Laughlin, Nevada, where the heat really cranked in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The Colorado River cut right through town, and during the baking summer months Laughlin turned into a rolling party of racing boats, getting laid and getting wasted.

I was fresh off a stint in county jail for grand theft auto—which, in the interest of accuracy, was really grand theft motorcycle. One of my meth customers owed me a shitload of money, which, of course, she didn't have. I was ready to bring in the U-Haul when she bought me a Yamaha 900 crotch rocket with a bad check. When the authorities came to collect the bike I basically told them, “Fuck you, that's on her, not me.”

The judge didn't agree. One year in county, three years probation.

I was still under that probationary cloud as I headed for Laughlin for a weekend party on the Colorado River. I was dealing meth and blowing a ton of money on expensive toys back then, and that day I was hauling a real beauty. Two beauties, actually, both exceptionally fast: a flat-bottom racing boat with a 660-horsepower motor and a twenty-year-old hottie with synthetic tits.

On our way through Laughlin to the Colorado River, I stopped to visit my mother and little sister for the first and last time. As much as I detested Mommy Dearest, that's how much Lin Ann loved that woman. She loved Mother's bawdy sense of humor, how she would drop her shorts on the highway and moon passing cars or rip a loud fart in a crowded restaurant. Noble traits to be sure, but our perceptions of that hateful bitch were far apart. On Mother we would never agree.

The two of them were living with Mom's recently retired husband, Bob, who must have heard stories about me, because I caught attitude the moment I walked in the door. My first offense was sweating on the man's furniture. My second was raiding the fridge and stealing his baloney—which, in my defense, my sister later copped to.

Anyway, by the time I'd allegedly eaten Bob's baloney I was already plastered on Wild Turkey and, unbeknownst to me, my date had lifted a MasterCard from his wallet as a honeymoon present. I don't remember that. I don't remember the wedding that must have preceded the honeymoon. Hell, I don't even remember the weekend. All I know is, when I finally sobered up Monday morning I'd run up the credit card and married the brick shithouse.

My mother and younger sister, Lin Ann.

When she informed me we were husband and wife, I thought it was a joke—until I saw our wedding photo. There I was, alright, me and bazooka tits getting hitched in a Nevada chapel. One look at my face and you knew the wheel was turning but the hamster was dead. I had this foolish half-cocked grin and eyeballs the size of silver dollars, like I'd just sat on a red-hot poker. A friend of mine later explained I'd eaten psilocybin mushrooms that day, which explained a lot. Apparently mushrooms, chased by mass quantities of Kentucky bourbon, can make a guy do funny things.

Like get married.

I had the charade annulled a
few weeks later, but making MasterCard go away was not quite as simple. Bob pressed charges, and Mother testified against me—testified in court against her own son. And when the trial was over, the judge nailed me good.

Grand larceny. Probation violation. Sixteen months.

I was back in the slammer again.

Most of that stretch was served in Riverside County Jail, but near the end I shared a cell with a Mexican behind the walls at Chino—a California state prison that's louder than a fucking kennel at dinnertime.

Chino was primarily a receiving center where cons are held before getting shipped to long-term destinations. I never got shipped, and I wasn't there long, but during my stay I was forced to listen to the Chicanos barking at each other and singing their songs from sundown to sunrise, which made for some very long and sleepless nights.

It took years after my prison release to forgive my mother for all the misery she'd put me through, but by then she was gone. The woman died in 1999 after decades of drug and alcohol addiction. Her death devastated Lin Ann.

I skipped the funeral.

My new girlfriend, Darlene,
had heard plenty of horror stories about the U-Haul Bandit. She knew all about my less-than-stellar reputation in the valley. But instead of running the other way, she was intrigued. Believing there was good in George Rowe even if I couldn't find it in myself, that woman took me into her home and shared her family and affections.

Unfortunately, instead of returning that love and trust, I abused the hell out of it in my usual fashion. Unbeknownst to Darlene, I was storing the meth I manufactured in her garage. And if that wasn't underhanded enough, I was sneaking around behind her back and screwing anything with a pulse and a legal pair of tits. It took a birth announcement
in the local paper to finally expose my cheating ass. There it was, spelled out in black and white for Darlene and all of Hemet to see.

Guess who the father was?

Darlene was devastated.

“You don't know what love is,” she told me that night. “You think love is fucking? Two dogs can fuck. That's not love.”

Darlene was right. That woman was always right. But I was so messed up and out of control I didn't know what I was doing or what I had. I'd done hard drugs and hard time, fucked up bad men and fucked over good women. Deep down, I knew the madness was destroying me and just about anyone within reach, but I didn't know how to stop it.