Coming in after NYC, LA, and Chicago; Houston is the fourth largest city in America.  Since it is the most spread out of the ten most populous cities in the country, Houstonians spend a lot more time in their vehicles than the average American.  As a result, people in this city have developed very personal and deep connections with their cars. What you drive matters in this city. More so than any other city I have ever lived in.  Houston rap classics are chocked full of lyrics repping their iconic “slabs” (slow, loud, and bangin’) and everyone from the up and coming street hustler, to the multi-billion-dollar oil and gas executive sees their vehicles as an extension of their personalities. 

A majority of tweakers deep in their addiction drive cars that are falling apart. As the drug does its thing and slowly consumes their lives, car maintenance and upkeep becomes less and less of a priority.  I have seen tweakers driving cars with missing bumpers (guilty), trash piled up to the ceiling hoarder-style, and quarter panels being kept in place solely with duct tape. If a tweaker is driving a nice car, it’s usually the result of a sugar daddy, early noob-level addiction, or some level of criminal mischief.  Stolen, borrowed, and unauthorized vehicle usage become pretty common place in Tweakerville, USA. Whether it’s from stealing a set of hanging keys from the YMCA weight room or frauding your way through the Uber vehicle purchase program, the creativity undertaken to obtain a set of wheels through literally any means necessary holds no boundaries.   

I didn’t spend a large percentage of my time hanging out with Sawyer’s crew, but I was over there quite a bit and became more involved with certain ventures.  As an ice dealer with gameroom income and savings at the time, I was able to serve as a somewhat consistent resource of drugs and money. I had high quality meth and cash available for whatever was needed when Sawyer’s resources ran low. He would often hit a ridiculous lick and then blow through all the cash and need me to spot him ice or cash to bridge the gap until his next payday.  Being that we became friends, and also due to the fact that he usually owed me money, he pretty much let me come and go from his townhome as I pleased. Business and money-wise, we had a mutually beneficial relationship and while I rotated through multiple female interests, Sawyer fucking fell in love and developed feelings for one dude…hard: “Tyson.”

Tyson could pass for an NFL running back. Dude was jacked on that level and probably around my height 5ft. 9-10ish.  Swole as fuck. You could tell he worked out a lot before falling in with this group. He was right around 19/20 years old when I first met him.  Girls were always gushing over his green eyes and were disappointed when they heard he just didn’t swing that way (Jess, lmao.) Tyson was living with Sawyer in his townhome when I met him.  I am pretty sure that Sawyer would agree with me when I say that their relationship was just… unhealthy.  

Their relationship wasn’t super dramatic or intense, it was more like a one way street of Sawyer constantly providing high end shit and support for Tyson, and Tyson destroying or consuming said support.  I didn’t sense that Tyson was a bad or evil person. Just a young kid lost in the game and trying his best to survive and find happiness while lost deep in hardcore drug addiction. He was always asking if he could come work for me and he always wanted to make ice deliveries for me, lol.  He thought it was cool. Sawyer talked me into letting him make a delivery and he totally got lost delivering it and fucked it up. He ended up getting “distracted” and lost and never made the drop. Sawyer ended up covering for the lost dope. It wasn’t much though, maybe about $120 worth.

In addition to providing Tyson with unlimited drugs, cell phones, a place to stay, clothes, shoes, food, and Xbox’s; Sawyer also let Tyson borrow his cars. Tyson would inevitably get high and crash them.  This happened multiple times. After loss of yet another Beamer, a random unrelated attempt by “Jayson” (the young man who brought the forced authorization to the table) to obtain a high-priced vehicle via Carmax got further than expected.  He called me over and we discussed how Carmax didn’t have any type of security process in place to catch a fake ID and check made by a false joint owner on a legit individual account. A minor tweaking of the process mixed with some dumb luck led to the obtainment of a fairly new 2015 Audi S6.  The purchase was almost completely untraceable back to the individual that did that. The sale price on the Audi was just over $60k. The S6 was the first big ticket item that was achieved via fraud and when word got out that an Audi was purchased without any connection or paper trail to the person that bought it, the sharks came circling and everything escalated quickly.  

• 

• 

Within a few days, one of Sawyer’s ex’s came all the way down to Houston from Dallas with a couple of his friends to try and forcibly acquire the S6.  They came with a vengeance violently breaking into Sawyer’s house on more than one occasion. Sawyer’s townhome had a decent security system set up at this time. Tweakers love security cameras.  Like a moth to a porch light, tweakers will get stuck in front of surveillance footage for hours on end. I can’t tell you how many hours were spent stuck staring at various recordings and pointing out vehicles we were sure were circling undercover cops or people out to get us. Most of the time, its non-sensical paranoia.  Early onset of meth induced psychosis type shit. However, what can fuck with your head, is when you are doing shit on a level to where there is a very real, legitimate, and justified reason to assume someone would be watching you. 

I would notice that sometimes people that were not involved with any type of fraud or illegal shit other than smoking ice, would get more paranoid than me.  This one chick would get high and then stand in front of the peephole on the door or keep looking out from behind the drapes and it was so fucking annoying to have to keep calling her away from there.  Meth induced psychosis is very real and very scary shit. I have heard of individuals trying to dig worms out of their face with a knife, people riding a bike for hours running away from the non-existent FBI agents on their tail, and even a pair of girls who, in their own words, fled across half of the US “running from shadows.” 

This one girl I knew taped an extra cell phone she had to her hotel room door so that the camera lens on the phone was looking out of the peephole on the door.  She would then use a surveillance app called Alfred, that would enable her to look out the peephole from her cell phone on the bed.

When Sawyer called me over telling me I had to check out the recent break in that he captured on camera, I was half expecting to see someone sneaking in a bush or the outline of a shadowy figure in a vehicle across the street. He called me over after it happened and we all crowded around the TV in his attic to review the footage his home security system had captured.

This is a picture of the townhome from Google Street View in 2016 around the time that all of this shit was going down.  The garage door had been totally destroyed by this point and you can see a lot of bullshit in his garage. This would have been after the luxury rentals because the garage was able to fit a car in it when we had them.  The vehicle parked out front is not familiar to me, lol.

This first robbery attempt took place in the middle of the day.  On the screen, a small SUV pulls up and three dudes wearing black bandanas over their faces hopped out of the car and ran up the driveway to the side of the house where the main entrance was.

“See Alphatweaker! Look! Here they come running up the driveway to the house!”

“What the fuck?! Are they wearing bandanas on their faces!?  Is this for real?”

“Yeah it’s Happy and his friends from Dallas.  I recognize his car! He was yelling at me to open the garage and give him the keys to the Audi.”

Happy was an ex of Sawyers and also friends with Tyson.  Another younger black dude from Dallas. Pretty sure Sawyer met Tyson through Happy, but I’m not totally sure of that.

“Dude…wait…what? These guys came rolling up in bandanas to rob you and broke inside the fucking house?”

I was shocked.  It was pretty surreal that I was involved with this type of shit.  This is the type of surveillance footage you see on the 10 o’clock news.  Not at your friend’s house. 

I’m sure that Happy and these guys thought Sawyer was going to just roll over and give them the keys.  Sawyer is very polite and speaks properly. It would be easy for someone to mistake his kindness and soft-spoken demeanor for weakness.  I know for a fact that he is anything but. He can be ice cold (heh) and ruthless at times. I have witnessed him on a level of not giving a fuck that rivaled Italian mobster level shit.  As I continued to watch the footage from that day play out, I started to see why they were so eager and excited for me to watch this video.

Before I continue, I need to share that Sawyer and Tyson and their whole crew had this inside-joke where they would all of the sudden start talking gibberish in a really high-pitched tone/voice.  A comical high-pitched cartoon character-type voice. It caught me off guard the first time I heard this. I have no idea where it came from or how it started, but we were at IHOP late one night and placing our order when I first witnessed this.  Someone at the table had just successfully pulled off a fraudulent check transaction for a good amount of money earlier that day. We were ordering our food and one of the dudes just busted out to the server in this high-pitched voice.

 “Hmmmmm I don’t supposed you guys take CHECKS for payment..hmmm?!?!?!”

Then Sawyer and Tyson both started laughing and reciprocated.  They each did this same high-pitched ridiculous cartoon voice:

 “Hmmmm!!! Sawyer, wouldn’t it be lovely if they took CHECKS!!”

 “Hmmmm!! Tyson!! Why yes it would!! We would like five of everything on the menu to go please!!!”

They all thought it was just the most hilarious thing in the world.  Again, this it the first time I heard this voice and it came out of nowhere.  It was at such a high volume that it startled me.  The server and I both went:

OK… So, Sawyer and his merry ice thugs loved speaking this high-pitched voice and were quite liberal in their usage of it.  I have to admit, after you kind of got it, it was pretty fucking funny. It seemed to get funnier the more I heard it. Something about lightheartedly joking about serious crimes to people that are in the dark is funny to me. Anyways, as I am standing there in his attic watching the footage, Sawyer busted out in the high-pitched voice:

 “Uh oh here I come!  They won’t catch meeee!”

The camera out front of his house was pointed down the sloping driveway and the shadow of his balcony was visible on the driveway pavement, but not the balcony itself.  The balcony was out of range of the camera, but the sun was at such an angle that you could see a clear outline of the balcony’s shadow on the driveway. When Happy and his accomplices broke down the front door and gained entry into the townhome, Sawyer ran out to his second-floor balcony. 

(Sawyer’s regular voice) “Look! Look! See this is where I jump Alphatweaker! You see me!?”   

The silhouette was undoubtedly him.  He is tall and lanky. You see this lanky shadow open and walk through the door onto the balcony. You could see the shadow of his head turn around to look back into his house to see if they were coming and then forward again and you see him leaning over the railing looking below.

(Sawyer’s regular voice) “Look see you can see my head glance over the edge.  See Alphatweaker! This is where I noticed I had my trashcans right underneath the side and I figured they would cushion my jump.”

(high pitched voice) “And here I go ahhhhhhh!!!!  You’re not gonna get me!”

LMAO.

This whole situation was absurd, hilarious, and scary all at the same time.  The tweaker world in general tends to be just that. Your level of what is deemed to be normal slowly becomes skewed as your addiction worsens, and before you know it, you look up and are in a fucking ridiculous surreal world of twacked out and crazy non-sense.

At times, this absurdness on tweaker life borderlines on absolute insanity and chaos.  Situations like what happen at Sawyer’s manifest themselves into existence every day in Tweakerville.  A sober and sane person would make some serious changes after a day like this; we chose to mock it and laugh.  Objectively speaking though, taking away the seriousness of the whole situation and fact that Sawyer was fleeing out of fear; if we just look at his jump off the balcony in its own right, it was pretty fucking funny.  I can still see his silhouette in my head. When he jumped off the balcony, his lanky ass legs did this quick scissor kick/split mid-air and then he fell almost all the way out of camera range, but the top of his head is still visible as he has now landed in his garbage cans and is wriggling his way out. 

As he hops out of his trashcans, he runs down his driveway and his body comes more into camera range running away.  Pretty sure he yelled that the cops were on the way and that was enough to get Happy and the dudes that broke into his house to take off.  Sawyer ended up hurting his elbow pretty bad in that jump. Months later, when he went to jail for unrelated charges, the people in the Harris County jail clinic told him that he had fractured his elbow.  Since he was spun out and high on meth 24/7, he never felt the pain. I do remember seeing it swollen and telling him it looked bad, but he just went on without doing anything about it. Happy and his friends weren’t going to just give up though.  They returned about a week later, but this time, I was there; and I was strapped.

During this phase of my run in the streets, it was not uncommon for me to roll around with two pistols.  I had my gameroom popping off and my partner on my first gameroom, Kevin, suggested that I get my conceal and carry permit.  Kevin and I were often leaving the gameroom late at night with large amounts of cash so it was a prudent measure to take for our own safety. 

Even though I have lived in Texas since 1999, I am not one of these Texas “country” hunting gun-type boys.  I didn’t know anything about handguns at this point, but that certainly didn’t stop me from picking one up at a random pawn shop off Shepherd Dr. in the Heights.  

The first gun I purchased was a black .45 Smith and Wesson.

Ugh, soon after purchasing the .45 my ex-wife and I had to switch cars for some random reason and I had forgotten that I left the .45 jammed in between my driver’s seat and middle console. She took my car and called me 10 minutes later screaming at me that there was a gun in my car and what the fuck is this doing in here.  “Ohhhhh yeah, sorry about that. Come back and I’ll take it. Sorry!” When she pulled up, she didn’t even want to touch it. I reached in and pulled it out.

I’m not sure what my ex must have thought about that.  She knew I was up to no good, but she had to be caught off guard seeing that gun.  I still need to apologize to my ex about all of this shit I put her through. I have had a formal apologizing session and attempt to make amends with her parents (my ex mother and father-in-law,) and I have told her I owe her an apology, but I just haven’t done it yet.  Maybe typing this out will help encourage and remind me to get it done and help me stop procrastinating on it. Ugh… so much to say.

I carried the .45 around in my backpack with me wherever I went. On occasion an random chick would catch a glance at it and their eyes would widen and I would feel like a big shot tough-guy ice dealer. I wasn’t really though, I was just acting the part type shit. Over time, I decided that the .45 was too heavy and bulky for my comfort, so when my homegirl Saria told me she would sell me her ex-boyfriends .380 with a red laser site on it for $250, I jumped on it.  I liked this .380 because it was smaller and had a cool-looking laser site on it.

I was unbelievably stupid to have been carrying these two guns around with me.  This was also when I was dealing ice so these guns were in my car along with multiple ounces of dope.  Getting caught with guns AND controlled substances is a much harsher felony charge than just sole possession. I would have gone straight to prison for at least a couple of years if I had been caught.

I remember thinking that the guns added to my whole drug dealing and game-room owning persona at the time.  Guns completed the whole run-in-the-street mentality. I saw myself as a real-life video game character. Like I was the protagonist of some Grand Theft Auto gangster type bullshit.  I thought it was OK. I thought it was more than OK. I thought I was really living life and going for it all on some weird and fucked up levels. I saw and knew that I could make it in the corporate world and the “right” and legit way. I already knew that.  Maybe I could make it this way too. Maybe I was just that smart. Or maybe that was just delusional thinkings of a lost meth addict desperately trying to rationalize the day-to-day chaos that now made up his average day.  

Riding around with loaded guns is one thing, pulling them out and using them is a whole new ballgame. When I was at Sawyer’s house and saw that same small SUV pull into the driveway again, I knew it was Happy and I knew they were going to try to take the Audi again. When I saw them roll up, I walked outside on the balcony and hid so that when they ran into the house and up the stairs, they didn’t see me. Sawyers room is on the third floor, one floor above the living room and balcony.  When he and Tyson heard they had gotten into the house, they immediately closed and locked the bedroom door. Happy and his two cohorts ran quickly up the stairs to the third floor unable to see me hidden on the side of the door on the balcony.

When I heard them running past the balcony and up to the third floor, I pulled out my .380 and went inside. There is a long narrow staircase that leads up to Sawyer’s bedroom.  From the bottom of the stairs, I saw Happy and the other two banging on the bedroom door yelling and telling Sawyer to open up and give them the keys.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and illuminated the laser site so that the small red target dot appeared on the door.  I wiggled the red beam back and forth bouncing right in front of their faces on the door. From Happy’s point of view, all he knew is that one second they are banging on this door and the next second a red bouncing dot appeared right where they were knocking.  All three of them turned around:

“GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS UP AND GET YOUR ASSES DOWN THE STAIRS!”

They all froze.  They were not expecting this.  I remember their eyes opened up and they all immediately shut up and put their hands up and started walking down the stairs. 

“Whoah whoah whoah. Don’t shoot. Alright player, we coming down homie, damn chill.”

“Come on, get the FUCK down!”

I am well aware of the fact that this is merely a story of someone pulling a gun on someone else, but this memory will be etched into my brain forever. This is so unlike me and not the way that my parents raised me.  From the surface, I must have given off an appearance like I knew what I was doing, but on the inside, I had absolutely no idea what the fuck was going on. I had lost complete control. I was no longer the one making decisions in my life, the drug was controlling everything and I was just a bystander watching my entire life slowly trainwreck from the sidelines.

And while just pulling a gun on someone is not that big of a deal to a lot of people in this country, to me, this was some of the craziest few minutes of my life.  With one squeeze of the trigger, I could have ended a man’s life. Three, if I really wanted to. I remember thinking “What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck am I doing? Am I about to kill this guy?  How the fuck did I get in this position? How the fuck did I end up here?”

The two other guys ran down to the first floor, but Happy stayed there talking to me trying to get me to put the gun down and saying shit like I didn’t understand that this is supposed to be their car. Tyson peeked his head down into the living room from the top of the stairs and saw me holding Happy at gunpoint.

“Whoah whoah whoah Alphatweaker, put the gun down man! Let me just talk to him.”

“Man…WHAT?!?!”

Tyson walked in between Happy and myself and turned his back to me to walk and talk with Happy towards the stairs where they both walked down.  I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I was now very confused and very angry that these dudes who were supposed to be these robbers were now all buddy buddy with Tyson. Like, what’s really going on here?

Looking back, I am pretty sure that Happy had been communicating with Tyson and that Tyson played some type of role in trying to help Happy get the Audi.  When they went in a room downstairs together and later went up into Sawyer’s room together, I assumed that Sawyer was cool with all of this and got pissed off and just left.  Happy and his friends left without the Audi.

Sawyer later told me that he was upset that I backed off and left and didn’t squeeze off a couple of rounds at these dudes. He made some comment later like “Yeah, well if they come back, we need someone that is going to actually use their gun and not be scared (glances at me.)”  Like bro, really??? Your fucking lover boy is talking to the motherfuckers that are trying to rob you and telling me to not do anything. The fuck was I supposed to do?

From a legal standpoint, I was well within my right to kill all three of these guys.  They would have been caught on camera illegally breaking and entering the townhome. This is motherfucking Texas.  If someone breaks into your house, you kill them. I have gun-loving friends here that want so bad for someone to break into their house just so they can legally shoot someone.

I sometimes think if I would have killed someone that day, what kind of angle would the news take on it? Burglars shot dead in daring daytime robbery attempt-type shit

2nd Amendment advocates would tout it as another situation where having a gun saved the day, lol.  They wouldn’t know that it was really a meth dealer fraudster protecting stolen property amongst thieves and caught up in some weird gay lover’s quarrel.  

I never saw Happy again after that day. I heard he went back to Dallas.  After they left, things calmed down a bit and we worked to convert the Audi to cash.  It took some wading through a lot of bullshitters and Craigslist ads, but eventually a cash buyer was found for the Audi.  For $26k cash money, someone bought the S6 with no title and no paperwork. Someone hit a fucking lick with that shit.

While that was a decent payday, the method for obtaining the Audi was a onetime fluke and unable to be consistently repeated with a high degree of confidence. Being that the bread and butter scam at the time was the force authorization, a decision was made to try and leverage that method to obtain some exotic car rentals now that Tyson had wrecked Sawyer’s third Beamer and the Audi was sold.  Calls were made and we started probing the different luxury rental car agencies in Texas. We found one that accepted the payment on the card, but they wanted us to provide a phone number to our auto insurance agency to confirm that the coverage limits on our policies had been raised to the high limits needed to rent the luxury cars.

I was told that if I wanted one of the luxury car rentals, I needed to call my real-life auto insurance company and increase the dollar amounts of my personal auto insurance plan.

“We can’t find a workaround for that?  We have to use our real auto insurance for these cars?!”

“Yeah, they will call them to confirm it too, so just call your insurance and raise the limits.  It’s easy and doesn’t increase your monthly payment much at all.”

“I’m not worried about it being hard or costing a lot of money.  You don’t see a problem with tying the rentals to your real-life auto insurance policy?  You know that creates a fucking paper trail literally right to you.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, they won’t figure anything out for a long time anyways.  They won’t know about this for months and we can always just say that it wasn’t us.”

I am pretty sure that their attaching of insurances to the rentals is what led to an individual being arrested for this one.  I really should have tried to talk some more sense into them, but once a decision is made on something like this, its nearly impossible to change their mind.

The payments processed as expected and the checks to the insurance companies were passed.  When we got delivery of the first vehicle, it was a brand new Range Rover Evoque Autobiography.  We went for a ride in it and it was nice and all. I mean the digital speedometer thing was pretty cool.  But I remember thinking this was just not a good idea. I mean riding in it was kind of fun, but stealing one of these was impossible now that real names were mixed up in the rentals and we couldn’t rent them out to anyone else to make some kind of side money off of them.  It was purely for flash and show.

About 4-5 of us went for that first ride in the Range Rover and immediately everyone in that circle now wanted one.  An order was placed for something like 4 or 5 more cars and the payment was processed by the same credit card used to get the first one.  I don’t know how they handled the insurance part because I know for a fact that not all of these guys had insurance.  However, when the 4 cars were delivered, I was pissed at myself for pussying out and not just updating my insurance policy. I was jealous for sure. These cars together all looked so cool.  I pulled up to Sawyer’s place in the middle of the night and this motherfucker now had a Bentley Continental GT, a Maserati Ghibli, the Range Rover Evoque Autobiography, and a Rolls Royce Phantom Coupe all parked outside.

• 

• 

• 

We went for a spin in the 2015 Bentley Continental GT right away.

“This thing is pretty nice huh Alphatweaker?”

“Dude, this car is sick.  I still can’t believe y’all got these things.  Hey man, I need to charge my phone, where is the USB port?”

“Hmm…I don’t know, maybe in the glove compartment?”

“Nooooo, it’s not there.”

I looked all over the inside of this car and was shocked to find out that this $250,000, 2015 Continental Bentley GT (that was a fairly new car at the time) DID NOT have a simple USB charging port.

“Dude, what the fuck? This $250,000 piece of shit doesn’t even have a USB charging port?!?  Are you fucking kidding me?” Lol, I was salty and jealous that I hadn’t gotten one of the cars, so naturally I hated on the fact that this car didn’t have a simple USB charging port.  From that moment forward whenever I was around or rode in the Bentley, I made sure that anyone that happened to be riding with us or gawking at it knew this vehicle had no USB port. I am still flabbergasted by that fact.  A quarter of a million dollars and no USB charging port? Da fuck?

So now there was a fleet of luxury cars, everyone that had asked for one pretty much got one.  Within this same month or two of the rentals coming in, the establishment of our business front had developed as planned and leveraging this business, we were able to acquire three separate apartments in pretty nice complexes, near downtown, that were all rented out under this business name.  Two of these were in midtown and were three story Townhome rentals. Sawyer let Tyson and the crazy kids have free reign in these. We kept a separate third badass downtown loft apartment kind of secret from that crew and that became my residence as this was after I had left my loft and didn’t have a place of my own.  The process to get these was a lot easier than we had thought it would be.

Using LegalZoom.com, we registered a C-Corporation with the state of Texas.  We launched a website with this company name and included a description of our services, pictures of big computer servers, and a description of services provided.  It was all bullshit, but who really would know what a company that provides computer servers geared towards oil and drilling software platforms should actually look like?

We included pictures of big computer servers and named it similar to a real existing company, only ours was a regional US version of that company.  We listed ourselves on the Executive Leadership page. We filed an Articles of Incorporation that included identification of majority and minority shareholders.  We created a Board of Directors and even e-mail addresses with the business domain. Using all of this and an individual with outstanding credits personal information we applied for and received a corporate tax EIN. 

Using these documents, our website, and some trial and error, we found a luxury apartment rental company with a weakness in their pre-approval and verification process that we were able to exploit.  This apartment rental company is very well known in Houston and nationwide. 

We learned that they have a process geared specifically for corporate renters that enabled us to enter into a legally binding rental agreement for multiple apartments with same-day move in.  We paid the bare minimum required to get the signed rental agreement between the apartment company and our company. Once we got the keys to the property and permission to move in, we ghosted them and took on the rights of a tenant.  More or less squatting now and forcing them to undergo the lengthy and heavily tenant-favored eviction process. 

When they called us over and over again inquiring on rent, we would not answer for about a week or two and then when we did answer, we would tell them that our CFO just got fired and we will get them their money soon. But of course, we still wanted and needed the rentals.  Shit, we had important clients already living in them.

When they started calling again, we would ignore their calls for a while and then finally answer and now tell them our CEO now got called out of the country for an emergency and didn’t have any time to deal with this issue.  Lastly, after they started leaving letters and notices to vacate, we told them that our entire company was being sold and acquired in a hostile takeover and we weren’t sure if we were still going to have jobs or not, but that our new CFO will be in touch with them and we still currently have business associates using the apartments.

One of the three apartments, the one that I moved into and the one Sawyer and I hid from Tyson and the others younger tweakers was right downtown and a pretty cool loft style apartment.  This ended up being my place for a good 3-4 months. It was on the first floor and had an entrance right onto a busy street. Sawyer’s house was right down the street and for a while our routine came to be that he would come pick me up in a different car every time.  I had my own car, but the parking at this place was a bitch and he was literally down the street and always wanted a reason to drive these things anyway, so he didn’t mind one bit coming to scoop me.

This downtown loft apartment was at the end of the block and to get to it, Sawyer would have to drive the length of the block down a narrow street with apartments stacked up closely on both sides of the street.  It created somewhat of an echo chamber and it was always a trip waiting to see which type of vehicle was going to turn the corner and come down this street to come and pick me up.

A memorable pickup was the time Sawyer came to get me in a Polaris Slingshot.  This was 2016 and I had never seen or heard of a Slingshot before he turned the corner in one.  I was standing outside waiting for them to roll up and I hear the thumping bass of whatever car was making its way down the alley to get me.  

I am standing out on the curb and smoking a cigarette and as he turns the corner, I see this crazy angled white Batman looking open-air cockpit three-wheeled space car rolling my way.  

Sawyer was behind the wheel with a big goofy-ass grin on his face.  For those not familiar with them, a Slingshot is a three wheeled and two-seated motorcar.  No windows, the driver and passenger are right out there in the open. Super flashy and attention grabber for sure.  When he pulled up in front of me, I literally busted out laughing. 

“Bro, are you fucking serious?! What the FUCK is this thing!?”

“Awww man you haven’t seen the Slingshot yet Alphatweaker?!”

Shaking my head…”Nooo, man this is pretty outrageous”

My neighbors in this complex had seen me getting picked up in a Bentley, Range Rover, Rolls Royce, and now this Slingshot.  Always rolling up blasting loud rap music and literally at all hours of the day. From the outside it must have looked like we were doing something right.  From the inside though, it was a mad scramble to stay high and try to convince ourselves that we had not become exactly what we both were; lost in addiction and grasping for validation that we hadn’t gone completely mad.  It was amazing how much fake validation the jets and the cars provided. Maybe, just maybe, we could harness the power of meth and wrangle it into success. Show our families and loved ones that we know what we are doing. Stop bothering us with your cries of rehab and coming back down into reality.  Don’t worry, just sit back and watch this type shit.  We were not typical tweaker meth addicts.  We were different because we still dressed in nice clothes and drove nice cars.  We weren’t thugs, we were sophisticated white-collar crime motherfuckers. 

Unfortunately for us, things didn’t pan out like we had hoped. For all of the nice cars, private jets, designer clothes, and department store shopping trips, I made it out of the game with only 4 items. I have a Diamond Braun Sonicare toothbrush, two Bose Stereo speakers, and a touchscreen laptop that I am actually type this out on right now.  Most people lose everything so I consider myself lucky to have even just these few artifacts from that time in my life.  I must say though, every time I see a Rolls Royce, Bentley, or Slingshot, my mind goes immediately back to these days.  I am hoping one day to run into a 2015 Bentley Continental GT so I can hate on whoever is driving it, lol.  “Excuse me sir, but are you aware of the fact that your car has no USB ports?”