Pill-Billies (Discover this Summer's naughtiest read...) Read online

  David really never stood a chance against drugs. Big Dominic was a big brown man with a huge round head and little Bernie Mac looking glasses. He was a solid 350 pounds and stood six four. They said he could have gone anywhere for football. Instead he became the gangster incarnate of Al Capone except in Charlotte in a deserted white neighborhood now black, poor, and desperate. Big Dominic had several houses around the neighborhood. He had that kind of money. None of them were in his name. He had bought the owners out. It was his house on Squirrel Road where that party was where David overheard the conversation. He did what he had to do. He told Dominic, who gave him a lot of money and a big hug, and told him to get out of town. David's sheltered, country Uncle lives right outside Vinson. He moved in with him. He told the uncle that that neighborhood was too rough. He didn't want to get shot. He wanted to move to the country to be safe and make some changes in his life. The uncle was a big Baptist and David easily tricked them into thinking they had saved him before it was too late. They got him a job at the Costco. David told them that he needed to change his name and not be called David no more. These boys from Gastonia said they were going to hunt him down and kill him for hanging around the gangsters in the Hyde Valley gang that some of the friends from high school he had were a part of. David convinced them that he was just guilty by association and that he had done nothing or had never harmed anyone over anything. They started calling him by his middle name, Christopher. He also lied to them and said that he wanted to keep his dreadlocks because they were a good disguise. They let Christopher keep them because they were good God-fearing Baptists. They were going to save their nephew from a fate certain to end behind bars.

  David said he was so happy to meet me and to be able to come to my house. He had a hard time sneaking off to party at his aunt and uncle's house. They trusted him and were naïve about pot. David said he was smoking a woo and his stupid uncle came out there and stood next to him thinking it was a cigar that was stale. David made him take a puff of it. He laughed and loved it. Pretty soon David swears he had made his uncle a crackhead for them woos. He said his uncle would knock on the door in the middle of the night and tell David please get up that he wanted to "pray" with him on the porch. David could not say no and for his trip all the Pee-wee's were made to roll him about 20 boxes full of woos. That's a whole lot of weed and a whole lot of crack. If David would've gotten pulled over driving from North Carolina to Kentucky he would've not only been going to jail for several murders and assault charges. He would have drug sentences that in Kentucky would've taken his whole life to complete. He said his uncle was a fiend. The aunt thought he was going crazy. He told her that he just loved cigars. David had to gradually wean him off of crack by breaking open a bunch of woos and re-rolling them with less and less crack until they were just weed to get his uncle to calm down and quit tripping so hard all the time. The uncle figured out it was weed that they were smoking when he failed his drug test at work.

  Thankfully, David had moved out by then. He had taken his uncle to a reggae Festival in Louisville. They smoked the whole time. There were people smoking joints and pipes. David told his uncle to tell his boss that he accidentally inhaled some weed at that concert from all them people smoking. The boss believed it. After all, David's uncle was the most pious man he had ever met. He knew David's uncle was two-dimensional. He loved church and he loved Wildcat football and that was it. David even showed up at the job site and apologized to his uncle's boss. He put his dreads in a ponytail. He put his Tar Heels hat on forward and had his workout clothes on. He looked real nice while doing it. He told his uncle's boss that he was just bonding with him. He never had his father. He wanted him to see one of his favorite bands with him in Louisville that weekend. He even teared up when he said it. He went to wipe his eyes and his Rolex slid up and down his wrist. David had a lot of money when he first got here. The guy felt really bad. He thought David played football for the Tar Heels or something. He could tell by all the really nice jewelry that he was authentic.

  The truth is David is a master manipulator. He has been the most vicious, brutal, abusive, intolerant, psychotic boyfriend I have ever had. I have scars from him. He calls them love marks. I don't know why I stay with him, well, not anymore but I don't know why I stayed with him as long as I did before he got popped. The truth of the matter is when we used to run pills for Paul and Richard back up from Florida we always let David drive. We got pulled over even though we were driving U-Haul trucks and we couldn't speed. David sweet talked every single police officer without exception. He had one of his homeboys back in Charlotte send him his ID. Apparently, that guy owed his life to David for one of the shootings David had to do. So, his name on the ID was Trent Lockard. If the ID was not clean, ever, David's other homeboy was instructed to kill the real Trent Lockard. So, it was cool. David decided before we left for the first trip to cut his dreadlocks off and cover his tattoos. Right before we left he took it a step further and had his tattoos removed by laser.

  That's what the last bit of money was spent on; erasing his past from his body even though with that ID he had morphed into Trent Lockard overnight. I thought he looked more attractive without the dreadlocks. When he had them, he looked like a podunk Lenny Kravitz with a big old Luke Perry peanut head. It made his face look long. It made his chin stick out. I was glad to see them go. Strangely, he became a lot nicer after that haircut. It sort of weirded me out. It was as if he was trying to become white enough for me. The good news was that was around the time we were getting a lot of Vicodins and a lot of Xanax. He was always in a good mood. Until he drank liquor, then he would blackout and become crazy David. Nobody liked crazy David. Crazy David had a tendency to shoot his .357 at people. Somebody cut us off on the way to go get some pills. They were about to be all sold out so we were in a hurry. It was some white dude with a Clemson sticker after the Kentucky and Clemson game. Kentucky had won. The guy was being an asshole. He picked the wrong person to cut off. I think he found that out as David shot through that sticker, right in the middle.

  I had an accident that day. David was repulsed by it and didn't care about my mom's evil abuse of me that made me have that reaction. The reason why he didn't feel sorry for me was because he met Daddy and Shannon. Daddy and Shannon disowned Burt, after they found out about Brooke. Burton didn't care. The strange part was my little stepbrother Ben still lived with Daddy and Shannon. Mama and Terry didn't give a shit. Poor Ben was such a nice kid. He was perfect for them. He did great with school. He never acted up. They got along great as a little family of three. Nobody seemed to say anything or to care that Tater Tot's two biological children had moved out and that he was footing the bill for his kids's stepbrother. Terry, Daddy, and Ben would go to Kentucky games together to root for the Wildcats. David and his Uncle would meet them. They'd tailgate and then watch the games. It was a strange assembly: my wonderful freelovin' Dad, grumpy drunk Baptist jerk Terry, poor Ben, my sociopathic, serial killer beau, David. That was when we were making runs all the time and raking in the dough.

  One time, Ben even followed us down to Florida to watch the Gators dismantle the Wildcats in Gainesville. He was smart. He knew that it would be stupid to ride in a cab with David driving me in the middle and Pig Paul in the passenger seat. He knew we were all druggies and that there was a reason that had nothing to do with moving antiques that we were going to Florida a lot. We always had tons of money and new stuff. David made me buy a lot of stuff for us because we couldn't use his name. He paid off my credit card debt when he first got here. He always rubbed that in my face if I was hesitant to sign for a Ducati or a new Escalade with all the latest features for lease.

  I bought a house with the money we made. I bought it from somebody we know in my family. I paid daddy to fix it up and add a bunch of rooms. At first, it was just a single wide. By the time we finished adding on to it Daddy had built a deck on top that we closed in and made a second story. Him and David built a grow room together. We ended up sel
ling it instead of moving in. We had no choice with all the debt we had piled up. David loved Daddy after building with him. They got real close. Daddy is literally David's only visitor and pen-pal these days. He drives to North Carolina to visit him on death row. Daddy was real disappointed when David told him the stuff he did when he was in the game. Daddy is so loving and such a friendly old hippie that he convinced himself that David was no longer like that and that David just needed love.

  One of the only times I ever saw David cry was when we went over there for Christmas and Daddy bought him something really nice as a gift. He bought David a guitar so that David could learn to play reggae. That part was cool but Daddy also paid in advance for six months of guitar lessons from a private instructor that he used to get pot from that worked at the music store. David hugged his neck. The tears started coming and they didn't stop. Daddy started crying and then Shannon started crying. I started sobbing. Burton just stared into space. Brooke was not allowed to come over that Christmas Eve but her brother Ben walked over and put his arms on Daddy and David. It was so beautiful.

  The good news is David can play reggae, a little. The bad news is he can't carry a tune in a bucket. He thinks he can sing and he does, all the time. One of the rules when we were driving up and down from Kentucky to Florida to get pills was that David was not allowed to sing. It used to piss him off so bad but as soon as he started singing even under his breath, even whispering it, me and Paul would go crazy until he would shut up. He used to say that we were haters and that he could sing just like KC and JoJo as they were from Charlotte. They used to party with some of his homeboys. He got to meet them. Richard came up with the plan to get pills legally because Paul has all kinds of medical injuries and problems. He qualifies for a lot of pain medication at the dispensary-like pain clinics that cancer Florida. He carries his medical records around. We go into one of the dozens of places. He walks up to the counter (most of them have a walk-in policy, if you have the right paperwork). He disappears into the back part of the place to get the script and pills. They call themselves "pain management" clinics which I find ironic. They are just a legal drug dealer. Whenever Paul comes back out we leave. We just go to the next one and the next one. We go to the next town and grab a newspaper. We hit up as many as it takes until we reach capacity. We drive back to Kentucky and Paul takes apart the compartment that he welds in (it's a false front of the little step up thing inside the U-Haul) and unfurls it's pharmacy size payload. My job is to talk on the phone to the pain clinics since I'm a nurse or I was. I sound legitimate and know what I'm talking about. I make all of Paul's appointments for the places that require them from the hotel rooms that we get. One time we were driving back and we got pulled over.

  Another rule we had is that you don't smoke pot inside the cab. That's a really great way to get caught. And, all three of us thought that was stupid and not worth it to go to jail for the amount of pills we had stashed away in the back. David barely managed to sweet talk his way out of a ticket. We were pulling off after being warned that the left lane is for passing only in Kentucky and as soon as you pass a car you're supposed to get right back over in the right lane. I almost got nervous enough to have an accident but I didn't, thankfully. We all needed to chill out. We pulled over in this town called Paducah.

  We found a little park and rolled up a blunt and smoked out, glad we had stuck to our rule. Then, we each took a couple of Rush Limbaugh's pills. When that OxyContin kicked in and we were halfway through our first 40 we indulged dear sweet David as he mauled a Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song to death. It wasn't really that he couldn't sing it was that his voice was too raspy from smoking so much weed. He always had to stop and cough and then he would always want to start over. He did the same thing on the guitar. He would start singing a song. It would actually be going pretty good then he would either get the words wrong or he would mess up on the guitar part. He would literally start the whole thing over because his guitar teacher told him to do that as punishment so that he would learn the songs without making mistakes. That teacher didn't realize how fucked up David gets and how sloppy the pills make him. We would applaud furiously at the end of a song not because it was good but because it was finally over. It got on Paul's nerves so bad I thought he was going to kill himself or jam Ice-picks into his ears. David would be sullen and hurt. His bottom lip would stick out like a little kid. He would pout when we would make fun of his sad attempts at being a minstrel. Both of us knew not to push it too far. That gun could come off his hip, at any time. After hearing him try to sing "Here and Now" by Luther Vandross from start to finish in perfect syncopation with the tape and having to sit through him rewinding it every time he screwed up I didn't care anymore about the gun or his fist or his mouth or his pouty bottom lip.

  I remember saying all the time at the same time as Paul when we were on those trips going back and forth, "David! David? Dude, seriously, shut up. We are so not kidding. If you touch the tape deck one more time, I'm going to wreck this hunk of shit U-Haul into the side of this mountain and kill all of us. Seriously man, I just can't take it anymore. Let Luther have this one. Please. For god's sakes, give it up!”

  David would always reply with one of his long tirades, "Man, fuck y'all. Yo, man, let me put it to you this way. The Lord put me here to sing and to play music. That's why he let me escape my past. He did not want me to be a rapper, which is why he didn't give me the gift of rhyme. He gave me a voice. I'm just trying to make it perfect. Y'all are so negative and jealous that y'all won't let me practice. And Sissy, you are my worst critic. You act like you're offended or something every time I sing. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of you making me feel like that. Because one day, you and Paul with your fat self, eating all the pills you do, looking like Matthew Perry when he was on pills while that show Friends was on the air…one day, goddammit, you and Paul are going to say, I knew him when… I sat next to him and didn't even know who I was sitting next to and how great he was going to become.”

  Pig and I laughed so hard at this to which David replies, "Y'all are messed up. Y'all are messed up. Y'all don't even care that you hurt me and you hurt my feelings when you dog me like that. Sissy? I'm going to break up with you if you can't accept me for who I am now and what God put me here to do. I'm a born natural. Y'all better recognize.”

  That just made it worse. Paul and I could not stop laughing for like 300 miles. David stopped singing around us. He just goes over there with Daddy and does it to him and Shannon and poor Ben. Daddy and Shannon have gotten to where they have to limit the amount of time David comes over there. If he could he would stay all night and leave right when they went to bed. Daddy added flames to the fire by getting David a book of Bob Marley's songs with all the guitar instructions and all the lyrics. It was like being a parent of a two-year-old after somebody that you thought liked you gave your kids toys that made a whole hell of a lot of noise and they just kept pushing that button or pulling that trigger to make it make the noise it makes. Except it was worse, because David never ran out of batteries just pills. Unfortunately, the Bob Marley book was "misplaced" shortly after he got it when we were on the road. I threw it in the garbage while David was in the bathroom taking a shower.

  I walked to the gas station next door to the hotel to do it so that there would be no chance he would find it. He literally tore the hotel room apart looking for it. He went back in the bathroom and closed the door. He turned the little fan on. Me and Paul heard him crying in there. We were laughing so hard tears were streaming down our cheeks. I had to pretend like I was having an allergy attack because my eyes were so red. That didn't work for very long. We made up a story that when we checked out of the hotel, Paul farted in the lobby in front of this family and it was hilarious. David smiled as we clutched our stomachs and died laughing knowing the real reason is we heard him crying in the bathroom about losing the Bob Marley book. He has no idea that we threw it away on purpose and that we heard him. I don't think I've ever laughed that hard s
ince certainly not lately not in this place. There's nothing funny about being here.

  The worst part is the therapy. They just tell you how to feel. It makes me so angry like they know how it feels to lose a brother. It might be more common to lose one's parents but not your siblings. Not when you are as young as we were. Nobody could tell me how it felt to lose the part of me that Burt took with him. Nobody could tell me how it felt to lose myself in drugs. Nobody could tell me how it felt to be a bed wetting sex addict. Nobody could tell me what it was like to be locked up in this place. Nobody could tell me why I hadn't tried to kill myself maybe by running my car off the mountain road up here somewhere. Mama could care less about me. She never stopped by. I didn't want her to see me in here. It would give her great satisfaction, her and Terry. She would just blame me to everybody at Church. She told basically the whole congregation, in hushed beer breathy whispers at the Cantata, that I gave Burton the extra pills that killed him. That is a complete, utter lie. My mother is a sick woman. Terry is no saint . She tells them that I did not call the police. She says I waited until my brother was no longer breathing and then I called. That is completely untrue. I had no idea he had died. He just sat frozen blue. I screamed for him over and over before kicking through the ceiling to get to where he was. He had barricaded himself in. He was so tweaked out he was convinced that there were D.E.A. Agents watching him. They had pantyhose pulled over their faces. He said they looked like snarling foamy-mouthed Vietnamese potbelly pigfaces in all black, coming for him. That was days after I left to get away from David. It was the second to last time I ever saw him.