My entire world was catapulted into chaos when I started dealing meth.  Becoming the plug just kind of fell into my lap. It was nothing I sought out.  A random series of events occurred where overnight I went from a casual smoker to larger quantity dealer.  I didn’t come up in the meth game, I didn’t pay dues or cut my teeth dealing.  I took a Candyland-style shortcut straight up the meth supply chain as a result of a chance encounter with a pretty girl.

This all went down after I had moved into my bachelor pad, but before I left my job.  I used to seek out tweaker girls a variety of different ways.  I had no interest in spending time with a square and proper girl no matter how hot she was.  I had zero interest in them.  I wanted a bad bitch that had a similar mindset of mine at the time.  A mindset of fuck all. At this time, daily, I was pinging(gambling) in the gamerooms of South Houston and Pasadena, TX.  I typically went with my escort friend, “Vanessa.”  I call her my friend because that’s exactly what we were. We had never fucked or hooked up, but we got high together and spent a lot of time with each other. She was super sexy and cool, but we just didn’t have that type of relationship and it worked well for both of us.  We joked around a lot and made each other laugh mostly.  Vanessa was a half Mexican/half white girl that was born and raised in Pasadena.  She came from a pretty good family that had money, but her inheritance from her grandfather was being held from her due to her going to prison for a few years and basically fucking off.

Vanessa introduced hot rails into my life, which I absolutely loved doing. It’s my favorite method for doing ice. A hot rail is taking the mouthpiece end of a meth pipe and scorching it with a torch lighter.  You hold it by the round bowl end and place your nostril up to the hole on the bowl to inhale the ice through the heated stem of the pipe.  The glass must be extremely hot.  Like almost glowing red hot.  We would lay out fat line of crushed ice and snort it through the upside-down held pipe. The heat from the glass vaporizes the powder, so even though you are snorting powder, it enters your nose as smoke and you exhale a super thick cloud of white smoke. Imagine snorting up powder and then breathing out the thickest and whitest exhale of meth smoke you can imagine.  Mesmerizingly beautiful in a fucked up way. Hot rails hit you hard and quick and the high lasts longer than smoking ice the regular meth pipe way.  Vanessa and I would do a bunch of hot rails and then go pinging together.  She had been doing this for years.  She knew ALL the good game rooms. 

Protocol at these illegal gamerooms is that you can’t get in unless they know you already or you are with someone that they know.  Like an exclusive club/membership type situation.  A modern-day speakeasy if you will. There are thousands of them across the city and are located on nearly every block in South Houston and Pasadena. Hidden right there in plain sight.  They may be as small as a handful of machines in the back of a gas station, or they may be full blown electric casinos with several hundred machines.  The big ones serve free food and non-alcoholic drinks.  Hot dogs, candy, pizza, snacks.  All “free” for the patrons. The industry standard machines are Pot of Gold and Life of Luxury, but it wasn’t uncommon for the bigger gamerooms to have the brand new fancy machines with spinning wheels and huge LCD screen displays.  Michael Jackson, Wizard of Oz, Dragon Eggs, Richie Rich, and the ever-addicting table fish game. Having later opened a gameroom I know these big machines can cost upwards of $15,000 apiece.  Vanessa loved pinging as much as I did.  Along with being super sexy and pretty, she was also very outgoing and personable.  She has a magnetic personality, always dressed sexy-style, and since she was an escort she almost always had a lot of cash.  All of the security guards absolutely adored her and I became cool with them by my association with her.  If/when we won, we would also break them and the floor attendants off some cash.  One time when I hit $3,000 I gave the guard like $150 and the floor attendant $100.  Over time, it got to the point where I could visit any of these many game rooms on my own, without Vanessa.  I was now a member of these clubs. Most people that ping only know one or a couple of gamerooms.  Tweakers, however, practically live in the gamerooms and tend to know dozens of underground places to play.  Pinging and ice go together like listening to music and weed. You get stuck in front of those machines for hours. I would max withdraw my daily ATM limit just about everyday.  Maybe one day I will sit down and calculate just how much I pissed away in those machines.  For now, its better just to not think about it.

This one night I decided to put up a personal ad on Craigslist asking for a “cool, young, chick” that wanted to hit up some gamerooms together.  No too long after posting that some random girl responded to the ad. “Arielle” was visiting Houston from Dallas.  Her ex was undergoing some type of medical procedure in the hospital and she had come down to help him out.  Being from Dallas, she didn’t know where any of the gamerooms in Houston were.  She typed “gameroom” into the search box of the Craigslist personals section and bam, there was my post.

We talked on the phone a bit. She sounded young and somewhat cool so I told her to meet me on the south side later that night.  Lol, we later joked that she got freaked out because I told her to meet me at some random restaurant I picked off of Google Maps and I didn’t know that it had been shut down. It ended up being this super dark parking lot in front of this boarded up restaurant in the ghetto of South Houston.  Super sketchy. She called me and nervously asked if we could meet at a well-lit Waffle House instead.  I laughed and said that was fine.  When I rolled up, I was pleasantly surprised to come upon this pretty blonde girl driving a fairly new BMW X5.  I was like wtf is this girl doing here.  This girl is too fine to be running around on the south side of Houston in the middle of the night alone.  Shit, it takes some guts to meet someone like this. I walked up to her window and said what’s up. We chatted a bit and I had her follow me to one of my favorite gamerooms.  This particular one was across the street from Show Palace, a notorious south side Houston strip club. This was one of the biggest gamerooms in Pasadena.  Hundreds of machines including the big ones with spinning wheels and flashing lights.  The flashy shit.  Mind you all of these are completely underground and illegal operations. However, the penalty for getting caught operating one is only a class C misdemeanor.  A slap on the wrist.  You can pay a lawyer $1,500 and make it go away.  The amount of money you make operating a gameroom is well worth this risk.  There are way too many of them for the police to control.  Whenever they shut one down, a new one opens up, sometimes in the exact same location.  It’s a wild west type feel and these guys are taking in tons of unreported and untaxed income.  Some of these are absolutely killing it. Millions of dollars a year I am sure.  The rooms would be jam packed on the weekends.  Whole neighborhoods would be there.  You gamble with real cash and when you win the floor attendants walk up to you and count out and hand you your cash on the spot.  They walk around with thick stacks of cash in aprons to pay out to the winners .

The windows of these places are always boarded or covered up.  There are never any signs outside.  They are bland looking buildings with security cameras outside of them and foil on the doors.  There’s no way to tell it is a gameroom unless you already know it’s there.  They run 24/7/365.  Perfect for the tweaker schedule.  This picture below is one of me sitting in my own gameroom that I had later opened on my own in Alvin, TX near south Houston.  I operated about 36 machines in this room.  I had a full time armed security guard and 3 floor attendants.

Arielle absolutely loved the rooms I took her too.  She was impressed and I felt like a bigshot taking her around the hood and chatting with all of the security guards. We gambled together and started to get to know each other. I told her I worked and had a good job and had recently divorced, she told me she worked at Texas Instruments and was single as well. We ended up leaving my car at that first spot and went gameroom-hopping across south Houston in her car.  We hit a couple of big wins and had an absolute blast together. Towards the end of the night we were talking in her car. Lots of flirting and playful banter type shit.  We were both still bright eyed wide awake at 3:30 AM when the topic of ice came up.  She asked if I smoked ice and I said yeah. She said she did too. She asked if I did G (GHB) as well.  I said yeah, I loved G. GHB and ice also pair well together. For those that don’t know about G it’s extremely potent and very very easy to overdo.  It looks like water, tastes like ball sweat, and a dosage is about 3-5ml or a “capful.”  As in fill up the small plastic twist cap of the water bottle for a dose.  It is very dangerous, but when you know what you are doing it’s one of the best drugs to counter the effects of meth.  Taking G is like a warm, silly, happy alcohol drunk type feeling that also makes you want to fuck… like bad.  Mixed with the ice it’s a perfect combination because the G will take the edge off of the harsh and icky ice comedown.  It will put you to sleep and you sleep well and deep and wake up feeling like a million bucks.  No hangover or residual bad feelings.  When I found out she did both ice and G, I remember thinking “fuck yes, I hit the jackpot with this girl.”  

Arielle ended up following me back to my place when we were done pinging. My place at the time was a quintessential bachelor pad.  I had rented a big loft in the Heights and the entire top floor was a huge attic bedroom.  I had a big flatscreen TV mounted flush high up near the ceiling.  I had surround sound with a large subwoofer for the music.  I also had a lot of Phillips Hue Smart bulbs.  The complete starter kit with additional LED strips and bulbs in every light socket in the ceiling of my room.  I could hit a button on my phone and activate an underwater theme and the entire room would change colors to a dark deep blue and greenish tones.  It was absolutely sick.  There was a red sunset theme, a white snow-capped mountain theme, you could mimic fire flames etc… Any color spectrum of the rainbow was at my fingerprints.  I also had paired my iPhone to the Flatscreen and surround sound so I let her DJ and put on whatever songs she wanted to.

I was feeling good about meeting Arielle. This girl was hot, she was cool, and she was down to fuck off the same way I liked to.  That first time we went back to my place, we talked and laughed a lot. I think she would agree with me if I said that first night hanging out we both knew we were going to be friends for a while. We made out a little bit, but Arielle wasn’t an easy girl that would fuck right off the bat.  It was never awkward that first night, but I could tell she had her defenses up just a little bit.  I didn’t press the issue because she was cool and I was having enough fun with her just getting to know her.  We talked about Dallas and she said she wanted to show me all of the gamerooms up there (which she eventually did on multiple occasions.)  She ended up leaving around sunrise to go meet her ex and we planned to meet up as soon as she was done with that. Neither of us wanted to leave each other at that point. Later that day I ended up going to her exs place where she was staying while he was in the hospital. We smoked ice and drank some G.  We dipped our feet in the water off the dock in the back of her ex’s place.  We made silly cellphone videos that she still has to this day.  We then hooked up right there in her ex’s apartment (I know.)

Initially, Arielle had told me she worked for Texas Instruments.  After we hooked up and were pillow talking, I asked her how she liked working at TI.  She said, “well, actually that’s not entirely true about me working there.”  I was like “oh?”  “So what do you do?” This shit-eating grin came across her face and she looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I kind of deal ice”   

“Uhhhh…what?”  She definitely had my attention.  She laughed and said something about how I should see my face.  I thought she was joking, but it turns out she wasn’t.  I wasn’t too sure how to respond to that.  I also felt a bit like a dumbass.  Here I thought I was kind of a big shot with my couple of grams stash, bong, and hot rails. This pretty, sweet, little blonde honey dip had been neck deep in the Dallas meth game for over a decade.  She had done some time too.  About 23 months on a 4 year bid for manufacturing and delivery of meth a couple of years ago and was pretty much right back at it.

Arielle liked the fact that my attraction to her had nothing to do with her position as a meth dealer.  She thought a lot of guys in Dallas only wanted her for her drugs and so it was hard for her to trust them.  With me, that wasn’t the case.  I had no idea she was into all of that when we hooked up.  This night was the start of a long-term friendship between us.  She made multiple trips to Houston and I made multiple trips to Dallas to see each other over the next couple of years. We did a lot of business together.  I picked up a lot of G and ice from her and we also got into a whole big DMT phase.  At one point we both learned how to extract DMT from Mimosa Hostilis ordered online.  We both got way into that drug, but she kind of lost herself in it.  I’ll share more about the whole DMT episodes in a later post.  As Arielle talked to me about what she did, it fascinated me for some reason.  I wanted to know more about the specifics of what she did and she completely opened up to me. 

At this point, I feel it necessary to break down the bullshit that is the meth pricing system.  Meth pricing is absolutely ridiculous. I spent hundreds of hours studying financial markets in developing countries, macro and micro economics, and advanced portfolio risk and reward analysis and I had never come across anything quite like the erratic pricing of meth. For comparison purposes lets look at weed pricing.  To make the math easy, let’s say a gram of weed will cost $20, an eighth (3.5 grams) could be $50, a quarter ounce (7 grams) might be $100.  And an ounce (28 grams) would be $350.  It makes sense that the price would drop as you purchase more.  Economies of scale with a sensible gradual decline of price as you purchase more supply.  With ice, instead of a gradual decline of price, there is a significant steep decline in price as you gradually increase the quantity purchased.  There is also an ignorance factor that can be exploited as the purchasers inevitably ends up buying more and more as their addiction progresses.

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With ice, I could charge $60 for a gram and with Arielle’s pricing that she was now hooking me up with, I was able to buy ounces (hereafter referred to as zips) for $450.  My first purchase she sold me 4 zips for $1,200. Meth pricing punishes the customer for purchasing small quantities.  If I was able to sell a whole zip in grams to people, that’s a total of (28 grams x $60) $1,680.  Multiply this time 4 zips and that’s $6,720 I could make off of a $1,200 investment.  Of course, I never sold it all in just grams.  My people bought teeners (1.75 grams) for $100 up to a quarter (7 grams) for $250.  With Arielle, I all of the sudden leapfrogged multiple places up the meth supply chain.  She bought her shit in bulk directly from the Mexican cartel and had for years.  She would get huge amounts of ice straight from the Mexicans.  I am talking pounds of huge shards as big as my fist.  I remember at my loft I had one of those zen mini-rock gardens with the sand and little mini-rake.  I would stick two big ass shards upright in the sandbox and it looked like it was part of the landscape, lol.

I have mixed emotions about meeting Arielle.  I am glad that I met a cool person that I could trust in a strange and confusing time of my life.  However, I am not sure if meeting her was ultimately a positive or negative factor in my life.  I guess time will tell.  Part of me thinks that my meeting her accelerated my addiction and cycle in the streets.  In other words, meeting her pretty much shot me faster and deeper into the chaotic tweaker world than I would have gone on my own.  I went from being a noob gram-buyer paying out the ass to having more better quality shit than anyone I knew.  Word got around fast once that happened and the quality of people that I engaged with on a daily basis took a dive. My life became fast paced and hectic.  Adventures every fucking day.  A meth dealer in today’s society holds a very real and tangible power over addicts.  Everybody wants to be your friend.  Girls that are way lost in their addiction turn to you and become addicted to spending as much time with you as possible.  Their eyes would pop and mouths would literally drop when I casually brought out a huge bag of shards. I am ashamed to say that I felt like a rock star on some levels.  Like a celebrity.  I had never encountered this type of attention before and I am disappointed to say that I became hooked by the whole concept.

I am beyond fortunate to have never been caught dealing. They don’t fuck around with ice and especially GHB in Texas.  Holding over 4 grams in itself is a third-degree felony punishable up to 10 years in prison. You have to get caught holding over 5 pounds of weed to hit a third degree felony.  4 grams of ice or 5 pounds of weed.  That’s not even counting the intent to delivery or possible manufacturing charges that dealers often get on top of sole possession.  I was rolling around Texas with 112 grams of ice.  My god I could have really fucked myself bad getting caught with that shit.  Right when I was getting into the game, a huge meth ring had gotten busted.  I was very close friends with an escort girl whose sister went down in it and she is serving 22 years federal time.  Fed time is different than state time.  Federal sentences you won’t serve 11 on 22, you will serve closer to 75-80% of the sentence.  With state jail felonies, you could easily be out in less than 10 years on a 22-year sentence.  In other words, the risks that I was taking were nowhere near the reward involved.  Not by a long shot. 

During this time, I would typically stay up multiple days in a row.  By day 4 or 5 of no sleep, just being awake in itself is a high that I kind of enjoyed.  Its almost a delirious dream-like state.  I went hard until I was physically unable to just stay awake.  I had never been a drug dealer like this before.  I wasn’t in it for the money.  I still had plenty of money at this time.  I started dealing because it sounded fun and I felt it would be stupid to not take advantage of Arielle as a connect.  As word got out, people started to refer their dealers to me and I started dealing to some dealers.  These guys knew they could cut my shit and it would still be better than what they usually had.  Everyone in Houston steps on their ice and cuts it with bullshit filler.  This is Hustletown and everyone has a hustle mindset.  It was kind of rare to see ice like this without any cut whatsoever.  Don’t get me wrong, Arielle did cut her shit at times, but I was on her inner most circle.  I spent a lot of time at her place and listened to what she charged other people that came over.  She was giving me the best pricing reserved for her closest circle of best customers.  No one else was able to get the pricing on the small amounts I bought relative to her other customers.  As my supply was pretty much limitless, I set out to find more customers. My bread and butter process to get new clientele was typically to call escorts over and flash a couple of huge shards in their face.  Let them take a sample with them when they leave, and then wait for them to call me.  This was a pretty effective technique.  They became customers, then referred me to their friends, and friends of their friends etc…  This market of clientele became beneficial to me when I didn’t have a place of my own to stay anymore.  I had a network of escorts available to lean on.  They liked when I came over.  I wasn’t trying to rip them off, I gave them good pricing, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to just toss a couple of extra shards their way when I took off.  A tip for their generosity and a method to try and train their brains to associate myself with being a positive and desired commodity in their lives. 

Once the dealing started, it never stopped until I went to jail.  I have many fucked up stories of people, places, and situations that I encountered as a result of this decision.  As my mind is getting back to a more normal state, the gravity of some of the shit we did weighs more and more on my mind.  My circle of college-educated, successful, professional friends was replaced by a large network of hardcore addicts, escorts, and drug dealers.  These aren’t weed smokers or pill poppers or alcoholics.  People that do meth regularly are in a completely different mindset than potheads.  They aren’t all chill and hippy happy-go-lucky.  They are usually deep in their addiction and in a bad mental place.  There were definitely some outliers though.  There were a couple of rich successful business men that I gained as clients as a result of dropping shit off to the escorts while they were in the middle of their sessions.  One of these guys was a top lawyer in the city and ended up becoming a good friend of mine.  He offered me to stay with him in his upscale townhome when I needed a place to stay at one point.  I appreciated that.  There definitely are good people out there that do meth regularly, but they are few and far between.

One of my favorite parts about dealing was bartering. People bringing me stolen laptops, speakers, watches, jewelry, shit anything that they could finagle.  I would pay for whatever they had with ice.  This made my out-of-pocket cash cost minimal.  One time this dude had robbed a gas station and I bought a roll of unscratched lottery tickets off of him (I later found out that they void these when they are stolen.)  With this roll of scratch-offs I ended up leaving them in the magazine rack of my bathroom for people to scratch off while they took a shit, lol.  It didn’t matter if they won, they were all voided anyways, but still a fun thing to have in a bathroom in my opinion.  A large roll of scratch offs.  Tweaker girls LOVE scratch offs. I also had this one dude that had people on the inside at Home Depot and Wal Mart.  I could get whatever I wanted and pay with ice.  More Phillips Hue lights, security cameras, Nest thermometers etc… I would send them a shopping list of shit and they would come back, many times, with every single item I asked for.  I offered them 75 cents on the dollar in ice for it. If they brought me $500 worth of electronics, I would owe them $375 worth of ice.  They weren’t big ice purchasers at that time so I exploited that fact. Ultimately, I would end up paying about 8.75 grams for the $500 worth of electronics. At my price point my cost for 8.75 grams was around $100.  I ended up with stacks of phones and laptops and computers at my place.  I am very lucky that no one robbed my ass.  I have a feeling if I would have stayed there that would have eventually happen.  I tend to believe the best in people and am very trusting of who I let into my place.  This no doubt would have eventually bit me in the ass.

My biggest mistake here (besides dealing and getting involved with meth in the first place,) was that I had people come to my house to pick up shit.  I should have never revealed where I lived to any meth clients. I never got ripped off, but after a couple of months I started getting very fucked up people stopping by my place all hours of the night.  They would knock on my door, yell to my window from the street, and see how much of my kindness they could exploit. 

More than once, girls that I had invited over would get too comfortable and do whatever they could for me to let them stay with me.  I offered a nice crib and unlimited drugs.  What addict girl wouldn’t do almost anything she had to in that case to stick around and take advantage of that as I took advantage of them.  A pretty fucked up situation all around.  I’ve had tweaker girls tell me they slipped a disc in their back and couldn’t physically leave. This one girl told me she saw a friend of mine pour sugar in her gas tank and so she couldn’t leave because she couldn’t start up her car and it was my fault.  I also had a couple of bad heroin users that would show up in really bad shape.  Smacked the fuck out and laid out in the backseat of the car. Begging for me to spot them some ice to get up and going again.  If I did it once, I surely must do it again.  I would toss them a gram to get them the fuck away from me.  That was probably the worst possible way I could have handled that type of situation.  My place quickly became a hotspot of illegal activity and shady people much faster than I could control it. 

One day a few months after I had started dealing my landlord called me and said we needed to talk. He came in and sat down on my couch and told me he had multiple complaints of people and loud noises all hours of the night. He also told me that the Houston Police Department had started watching my place and that there were suspicions of drug dealing. I don’t know if he was just saying that, but it definitely sounded like it could be true.  When me mentioned the police, that was all I needed to hear.  I apologized immediately and told him that I would be out by the end of the month. I had a half gallon of G, a few ounces of meth and about an ounce of weed about 5 feet away from where he was sitting.  Fuck no I didn’t want any police anywhere near me.  I decided to move out and figure out what to do later.  I called a couple of tweaker girls over and paid them in ice to pack up my place for me.   

My relationship with Arielle was pretty solid over the next couple of years.  She went through ups and downs.  One month she would have a nice and stable place to live, next month I would go to Dallas and she would be with a group of people squatting in a townhome.  I think living in different cities helped us to become closer over time.  We didn’t get tired of each other because we saw each other sparingly.  One night while I was staying at her place for a bit, the cartel showed up and needed her to add some cut to some ice (basically add a non-meth filler to the product.)  This was kind of surreal.  They rolled in like 3 or 4 Hispanic guys around my age.  Nice cowboy boots and well dressed.  They had called Arielle ahead of time and made sure she was alone.  She referred to me as her “boyfriend” and said that they could stop by and didn’t need to worry about me.  I ended up having to make a run to GNC to but some supplement that they used to cut this batch of dope.  I ran an errand for the Mexican cartel, like wtf.  What was even stranger was when I started talking to the boss guy.  He and I were the around the same age and as we chatted we found out that we both lived in Los Angeles at the same time and played basketball in the same YMCA rec league when we were kids.  We didn’t know each other, but probably played against each other. You would have never thought this guy was cartel.  He spoke good English, dressed well, and was polite.  I could literally have seen myself hanging out with him.  I was tempted to ask him if they had any openings in middle management, lol.  I don’t know what I was thinking. 

Overall, I wasn’t a very good dealer as far as maximizing profits was concerned.  I cared more about having fun, staying high, and living the fast lifestyle than making money.  It did open up some pretty unique doors for me though.   I met and did business with multiple high-level dealers in Houston.  The meth circles at that level really aren’t as big as one would think.  I developed a pretty solid reputation for having good ice and being one of the only ones in Houston at that time that had a steady supply of large quantities of GHB.  I was the guy with the Dallas connect.  I also did good business.  I charged fair prices and always did what I said I was going to do.  I didn’t fuck around with other people’s money and treated the other dealers with a certain level of respect that I feel was reciprocated.  I got to the point where I could get a large amount of any kind of drug imaginable.  I filtered out the bullshit dealers and ultimately had connections for really good coke, weed, wet (sherm or PCP), heroin, molly, prescription meds of all kinds.  You name it, I had it stored in a connect somewhere in my phone.  If I didn’t have it, I could get it, and it would no doubt be good quality.

Arielle is sitting in Denton County jail at this very moment.  She is probably going to be there a while, if not sent to TDC (state prison.)  She had fallen on tough times and had started fraud shit in addition to dealing.  Like me, all of her cash went into the machines.  This photo shows her doing what she did best.  Piss her money away in a gameroom.  This fish machine is fun as hell, by the way.

She made a lot of money, but still found herself cash poor.  She pissed away any and all money she had in the gamerooms. We have a lot in common in that regard.  I saw her before I went to jail, but haven’t seen her since.  She went in about 10 months ago.  From her charges online they must have busted her in her room or in her car with all of her shit. I am not in touch with anyone that used to run with her anymore so I haven’t heard the story of how she got popped.  She has 4 different controlled substances charges, fake credit card charges of over 10 and less than 50 cards, and tampering with government documents charges (fake IDs.)  She’s pretty much fucked.  I have been thinking of writing her a letter and maybe going to visit her, but I haven’t brought myself to actually do that yet.  I am not sure if that is a good idea or not.  I guess if she gets like 10 years or more I will reach out to her, but if she is getting out anytime soon its probably better for me to keep my distance.