Speed Kills

(I learned this story from a big gentle guy who had the Harley bar and shield tattooed across his entire back and always had a bible close on hand. He told this tale while we were cutting firewoood, after we'd known each other for a year. Eventually, Will died of Hep C complications.)

"Before Jesus stepped in and jammed the gun, I considered myself to be one big bad outlaw. I know now that I was nothing more than an addict, a thief, an armed robber, liar, fornicator, and money-hungry drug dealer. I broke all the Commandments but one. I never directly killed anyone.......... but I tried.
"Speed does kill. Everybody I used to know is dead, killed by crystal meth and crosstops and booze and stupidity and greed. My little brother got me started on speed on the streets of Seattle, when he was twelve and I was fourteen. We were walking down along Pike Street and he walked up to this dude, gave him five bucks, and we went into the alley. My little brother was packing the works, man, at the age of twelve. First time meth hit my guts, I messed my pants.
"A year later I was popping myself in the side of the neck, getting the rush that much closer to my brain. When I turned legal to drink, I weighed a third of what you see before you. Look. I ground my molars smooth, just walking around and gnashing my teeth. I was busy.
"Speed freaks need money. No money, not funny. In the early years I got a lot of my cash out of adult video stores. You walk into the back room of a girly joint, you rip back one of those little curtains, you put a gun to the head of some guy who has his unit in his hand, then you take all his money, his watch, his eyeglasses, sometimes his shoes. Nobody who gets heisted in a porno shop is going to complain to the cops. There were twenty seven of those places between Seattle and Portland. Couple of times I got chased when I came back into the same place too soon, but I never got caught. Plenty of money for drugs and candy bars. There wasn't anything else to life.
"My little brother, he always was smarter than me. By the time he was nineteen he knew how to manufacture the stuff, so we moved to Spokane and started the Bros in the Basement crystal meth factory. It took us eleven days to build a batch, then we'd haul back to Seattle, and down I-5 as far as Oakland. Two years later we were big time wholesalers, rolling high. Everybody knew the bros. My little brother was into late-Sixties Cameros, big block, tuck and roll. I liked big motorcycles and bad dogs. I kept pitbulls.
"Our trouble was that we were dealers and users, didn't separate the buzz from the bucks. On the day we got busted we had been drinking and shooting up for six steady days, getting a delivery ready. We were lost and crazy. My little brother was driving his candy-apple green fast ride. I was in the backseat with my big pitbull, Breedin' Butch, and a sixteen-guage Winchester pump shotgun, sucking on a fifth of Black Jack. Lost and crazy, man, cruising down I-5 through the armpit of Oregon and I am blowing away freeway signs with the shotgun at seventy miles an hour, along the busiest commercial route in the world.
"My little brother was even crazier than me. He wheels out an exit in Roseburg, leaves me and the car idling in front of a Payless drugstore, then comes running out five minutes later, tosses a whole garbage sack of prescription drugs in my window, downers mainly, seconol, demerol, codiene, then peels back onto the freeway. I mean, you don't do that, man. You don't stick up a chainstore pharmacy then make a getaway in the only candy-apple green automobile north of Pasadena. We never even thought about that. We were so far gone we were invisible.
"Then, ten miles down the road, south of Myrtle Creek, my little brother decides he has to piss, twists off into a Texaco station and runs for the head, leaving me and Butch, the trunkful of meth, the garbage sack and the shotgun just sitting out in the open, like turds in a punchbowl. First thing I see in the mirror is a bubble gum machine on top of an Oregon State cruiser, pulling up right behind us. I get sober and cranky and scared real fast.
"The windows of the Camero are smoked, way smoked, so I know that the cop doesn't see me. I pump a shell into the shotgun. When the cop steps out of his car, I level on him, through the back window of the Camero, and fully intend to remodel his life with safety glass and number six shot, but when I jerk the trigger there's just a big hollow click. I'd fired a thousand rounds through that gun, and that was the first dud shotgun shell I'd run into. I believe now that Jesus Christ came into that car and saved me from the gas chamber and the fiery furnace of Hell by seizing the gun and causing it to misfire.
"Meanwhile, my little brother comes out of the toilet, spots the cop, and splashes, man, faints dead to the world on the sidewalk, before Allard, the arresting officer, even realizes my little brother belongs to the green car. I gotta hand it to Allard. He was careless and stupid and very lucky, but he took us alone.
"While Allard is leaning over my little brother, I decide to call it quits myself, so I open the car door real easy, sticking my hands out first, talking fast. When the door comes open far enough, Butch blows through the hole and takes Allard by the hamstring, big time. Pitbulls earn the reputation. This one was stout and awful close to mean. Allard is screaming and pounding Butch with the butt of his revolver. Butch ain't letting go.
"There is only one sure way to get a pitbull to stop biting. You grab it by the tail and you put about this much of your finger straight up its butthole. That is what I did. Butch reached around to snap at whatever was buggering him, and Allard shot him through the head, then formally arrested us.
"Four counts of manufacturing a controlled substance, four of intent to deliver, one of armed robbery, one of illegal use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, one of interstate flight. I was looking at thirty years, fixed, before Allard testified to the sentencing judge about Butch, and about how I had saved his leg. As it was I got five to fifteen, indeterminate, and spend six years and four days, working in the print shop, reading the Holy Word. My little brother is still in there. Praise Jesus."