Wasted (11 page)

He reached one hand out to her raft, barely touching the plastic as he thought about what he’d do to her. The kisses, the touches, the caresses, the being loved, the passion. He could stroke his hand up and down her thighs, between her legs.

Justin popped up out of the water and pushed his sitter from her raft. She fell on top of him, her dark, oiled skin rubbing against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her.

They had sex by the side of the pool. He wasn’t even sure if he did it right, but the experience made him go softly quiet, like his father after a joint.

 

 

Except for lust, Justin Thomas didn’t have any other sexual contact until he was fifteen. After that day at the pool, he knew what masturbation was.

 

 

At fourteen, Justin fell in love. Every inch of his being felt it. When Justin Thomas was in love, he was in love. He’d do anything and everything for the woman, fly to the moon and back.

However, at the same time, his mother’s third marriage fell apart. Per the usual pattern, when his mother’s marriage fell apart, Justin’s and his mother’s relationship also fell apart. She went off on a Pentecostal Christian kick and got tough on Justin, forcing religion down his throat. He didn’t like it or the extremeness of it.

He got a cross tattooed on his left arm. He was fourteen years old, and his mother didn’t like it.

“Either get rid of it or you go,” she said.

So Justin got rid of it. He took a pair of pliers and a needle. He got the needle hot, and touched it to his cross time and time again until he had burned the tattoo off and it was no longer visible. More than a decade later, the burn scar is still visible, though, barely—hidden beneath new tattoos.

But back then, burning off the tattoo didn’t stop the fights. Justin and Judy argued about his school work, about his school friends, about his pot-smoking.

“Leave, just leave,” she yelled at him.

He started smoking pot in the house. They argued about his behavior, about how he spent his time with his friends, about his performance at school.

He told her off. She had no control over him.

“Leave, just leave,” she yelled at him.

They fought more than her child could handle, so Justin called Jim Thomas, who was then living in a small town in central Oregon.

“I want to come live with you,” he said.

“Come on up here,” said Jim Thomas.

Justin and Jim Thomas lived in a trailer house parked on the butte of a volcano near Bend, Oregon. Justin’s aunt Bonnie and her former teenaged sweetheart, now her husband, lived nearby with their children. It should have been a beautiful time in beautiful country.

But Justin hated it. His heart ached because he missed his girlfriend, but most of all, Justin was bored.

He was a spoiled, rowdy, wild, party boy who loved to boast tall tales and hated school. The only things he liked were football, fishing, and getting high. As far as football went, though, Justin couldn’t play in the games—he didn’t maintain the required B average.

Just like in California, Justin wouldn’t handle the responsibility of school. Nor could he handle the fact that Jim insisted he do household chores—like making his own bed, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, washing his own clothes, and doing a little cooking.

“You gotta carry your own weight around here,” Jim told Justin in one of their many arguments. “Just ’cause you say ‘gimme,’ don’t mean you always get what you want. You have to work for what you get.”

Justin didn’t buy it. He already had his mind set on his ways and what he wanted. His family in California had always given Justin everything he ever wanted, materially at least. He thought attempts at death and gifts like good cars and great stereos were a part of life, normal for any family. Justin Thomas just didn’t know any differently.

His teachers constantly phoned Jim. “Justin’s not here to learn,” they complained. “Justin’ s here to be the class clown.”

With that, Jim demanded that Justin pull out his school work and do it in front of his dad. Justin didn’t like that. He spent his time bragging about alleged drug, alcohol, and sexual victories back in Southern California.

“Me and my buddies, we used to go downtown cruisin’, and we’d pick up these girls, eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds,” said the fourteen-year-old, “and, you know what I’m saying, we’d party all night, drinkin’, fuckin’, fuckin’ all night long, and smokin’. You know what I’m saying, we had us some high-grade pot. The highest-grade shit you can get.”

Jim didn’t buy it. Instead, he went out, bought some low-grade pot, and brought it home. “I tell you what, son,” he said to Justin, “we’re gonna smoke this, and we’re gonna get high together, and we’re just gonna see.”

Justin puked his brains out all night long.

 

 

That wasn’t the norm. The norm was Justin handling his drugs.

Each morning, on his way into town, Jim dropped Justin off at Aunt Bonnie’s. Then Justin and his younger cousin J. R., his “number-one cuz,” spent the day fishing. They got high and fished. Sometimes, they got drunk and fished. It didn’t really matter as long as they were doing the two things they loved most—fishing and getting wrecked.

But Justin didn’t like the taste of alcohol. To him, liquor was good for only one thing—to get blitzed. He much preferred pot . . . or something stronger.

And it was there, in Oregon, on the side of the volcano, where Justin Thomas’s life began erupting out of control as drugs went from a recreation to a dependency.

 

 

Justin Thomas and his friends were going out, just hangin’ with the homeboys. A few blocks from the trailer, he realized he’d forgotten something, so he turned around and went back home. He walked in the back door, which was closest to his bedroom, went into his room, got what he’d forgotten, and then heard his father in another part of the trailer. It sounded like Jim Thomas was in the kitchen.

Both Jim and Justin Thomas loved to cook. It was one of the few things they had in common. Justin was a growing, hungry fourteen-year-old, so he decided to go see what his dad was cooking. He walked into the kitchen, and there, on the table, was a scale and a pile of crystal methamphetamine—the poor man’s cocaine, a drug that can turn a boy paranoid and violent in a matter of months, that can turn him into a murderer in no time.

“What’s that?” Justin asked innocently, meandering over to his dad, staring down at the white powder. “What are you doing?”

Young Justin was just playing dumb so he could play his father. He knew exactly what his dad was doing.

Jim Thomas looked up at his son, sat there, and laughed.

“Is that meth?” Justin asked, his voice sweet.

“Yeah.”

Justin Thomas knew meth from his friends in California, from the parties he frequented. “Can I do a line?” he said.

The fourteen-year-old Justin did, and from then on, it was on.

“Twice a week Jim Thomas drove to Eugene and Salem to get crystal meth. He sold meth, his son sold pot . . . and, in between, anything else that came along ... including cocaine and acid.

On occasion, Jim provided Justin with the pot. But “on occasion” wasn’t enough. Justin needed it every day. Every day, like an old, western, coal train rounding the Oregon mountain, Justin smoked.

He smoked to kill emotional pain—to try to kill feelings, to try to fill an emptiness, a void.

Ever since Justin Thomas could remember, he knew there was another plane of consciousness or another reality right next to the one he was in at that very moment, one just over his shoulder, and that confused him. It confused him as a kid. It confused him as an adult—because he didn’t know what that other plane of reality was.

He only knew that there was something more to him, his person, his being. There was just no book of directions that told him how to find out what that was. A toke of pot, a hit of meth, and that confusion and emptiness magically went away.

Justin became addicted to meth and pot. Jim was addicted to meth and booze.

Addiction was a Thomas family tradition.

 

 

Justin phoned his mother’s parents in Riverside County. “If you’ll come back,” they said, “we’ll buy you . . .”

And Justin was gone.

Jim later moved back to Texas and his mother.

 

 

But the one good thing that came of Oregon was football. Justin Thomas loved it, and he wanted to make it his career.

High school was the “funnest” time of Justin Thomas’s life. He was sixteen years old, good-looking, popular, a blue-chip football player with a letterman’s jacket and a car, and girls fawned over him. It was a time when his easy, sweet smile often slow-danced across his face and changed an angry, young man into a Prince Charming of a pussycat.

His future wife Dawn saw both sides of Justin Thomas.

The first time Thomas saw Dawn was at a post-football-game party, one given by mutual friends. Dawn was with another guy when Justin walked in wearing his letterman’s jacket, sweats, and tennis shoes and carrying a case of beer under each arm, looking like a typical jock.

Dawn, a 5’2”, petite, brunette beauty who often modeled and won beauty pageants, took one look at Thomas and turned away. “What a loser.” Dawn didn’t like guys who drank.

But Justin took one look at Dawn and instantly fell in love. “Wow,” he said. Maybe it was lust. First lust, then head over heels in love so that he would try to do anything in the world for her. Love was becoming another drug.

At the party, they drank, they ate, people carried on, music blared. Justin tried to make sure he was always in the same room as Dawn. He wanted to watch her and look at her; she was so beautiful.

He drank some more, he smoked too much marijuana, he showed off and showed out, he got louder and louder and louder, and he started acting like an ass.

“You’ve gotta leave,” he was told.

“Back off, you asshole,” Justin responded, and he shoved the boy who had told him to leave.

The boy shoved back. He and Justin got into a fight.

“What a loser,” said Dawn.

Justin’ s repertoire of emotions consisted of two: extreme love and extreme anger. That’s the way it is with an addict.

Wipe away his sweet smile with a flash of anger, and the 6’4” star football player became an imposing, big-browed Frankenstein’s monster of a character. It was a turn-off to Dawn, but it was a turn-on to drug dealers. And Justin Thomas was equally attracted to them.

He met a few people who introduced him to a few people who.... He remembered the cash that flashed through his father’s hands in Oregon. He wanted to see that cash flash through his own hands. Justin Thomas, after all, had his mother’s love for the material. Visions of riches danced in his sweet, hazel-green eyes.

Some of those people who were attracted to him made him an offer Justin Thomas couldn’t refuse.

Justin Thomas became a drug dealer.

 

 

The next time Justin saw Dawn, he turned to a friend and said, “I’m gonna make her my wife—watch. I’m gonna marry that girl.”

 

 

Justin Thomas started living a split life. For his family and everyone who was important to him, he tried to do good and be good—go to school, make good grades (mostly Bs, a few Cs, an occasional A), graduate, go to college, play ball, play pro football.

To his friends, he was making his first steps toward being an influential person in the drug world. He thought,
I’ll make it big in playing football or I’ll be the boss telling everyone else what to do. I’ll be the boss of a part of something that’s a money-making operation.

Drugs and money became his lord.

He sold pot then graduated to selling coke, heroin, acid, and pharmaceuticals. When he found out he could get crystal meth, too, Justin Thomas got very, very happy. He knew what kind of money he could make from that. He knew he liked to snort crystal meth. So as quickly as he could tap out a fat rail, he chose that track.

 

 

Justin and Dawn continued to run into each other around town, and each time Thomas ran into her, he tried to talk to her.

“Wanta hook up with each other for a while?”

Dawn ignored him.

That drove Justin nuts. To him, the blue-chip football player, it seemed like hundreds of other girls fought to get close to him, to touch that hard body of his. But Dawn played hard-to-get. That intrigued Justin, and it made him fight harder to get her.

On a hot summer day, during football practice, one of Thomas’s homeboys phoned. The sweet, high pitch of girls’ voices drifted over the line and Justin smiled that sweet smile of his. “Whataya doing? What’s going on?”

“There’s a girl here who wants to talk to you,” said the friend.

“What girl?”

“Dawn.”

“Dawn?” There were too many girls chasing Thomas. “Who’s Dawn?”

“You know,
the
Dawn. The girl from the party.”

“What party?” Justin’s brain just wouldn’t snap into gear.

“The girl you’ve seen around town.”

“Where around town?” Brains don’t snap into gear after too many parties, too many beers, too many joints.

“The girl you say you’re gonna marry.”

It can wreak havoc on a young man’s sex life.

Dawn got ticked when she realized Justin didn’t remember who she was ... after following her around at the party, after pursuing her around town, after claiming he was going to marry her.

She yelled in the background.

Thomas heard her voice. “Oh, shit, yeah.” His brain had finally kicked into gear at the sound of her voice. “Lemme talk to her. Stick her on the phone. Lemme talk to her.”

“No, I don’t wanna talk to him now,” she said, still in the background.

In Justin’s mind, Dawn was playing a little game with him. He could play back. He sweet-talked her into getting on the phone and smooth-talked her into getting together—that day. There was no winning against Justin Thomas. He could be a charmer.

 

 

On the way to meet Dawn, Thomas stopped at a liquor store.
Okay, we’re gonna party,
he thought.
I’ll get some party favors.
He bought two pints of vodka. He left his stash of pot behind—that split life.