Methhead Boyfriend
Ruin your household with one simple trick
Bryan was my mother’s boyfriend, who loved smoking meth in our garage.
He was 47, around 5’10, and skinny-fat. He wore Walmart graphic t-shirts and dark grey jeans littered with holes. He looked like the guy from Tiger King if you poured water on him and painted him pink.
In 2020, my father requested to be part of a series of Covid layoffs at his out-of-town job. He’d been working there for about 12 years, was nearing retirement age, and was simply tired.
Within six months of living with my mother full-time, he grew very bitter, constantly irked by my mother’s behavior. He wanted her to leave, but couldn’t make her. He started doing shit like LARPing as a dementia patient who’d yell in public about the "snakes biting at his legs.” Anything to scare her off. But she stayed, so about two days before Christmas, he decided to leave instead.
My mother had won the war, but the issue of Who’s Going To Pay For The House Now came up. She shut down and laid in bed all day, putting me in the role of caretaker, which consisted of me driving to McDonalds in her Ford Explorer—which my dad also had paid for—and bringing home a Quarter Pounder or a box of fried chicken and getting yelled at if the dysgenic 85lb Latino woman on Methadone at the speaker rung up the order wrong.
Somewhere along the line, she met Bryan. They hit it off, and started becoming romantically involved. I opposed this, because this guy gave off total Rapist vibes. Not the “dubious consent Substack writer” kind, more like “Grab you off the street and knock you out and inject you with heroin while you’re unconscious kind1.” But everything I said fell on deaf ears, because no 16yo has ever been right about anything.
Eventually, he moved in with us. Not in the house, thank God, but in the carport/garage in the backyard.
He also brought his son Dylan along, a high-school dropout who sperged-out a lot and was really into guns and who’ll probably be the next face of TCC someday.
Most of my memory from this time is hazy, since it becomes very hard to focus when you’re around these kinds of people. Here are some of my fondest memories of this great period:
Waking up, walking into the bathroom and finding a loaded handgun on the counter. It apparently belonged to Dylan, who said Sorry… it’s a really personal item for me and I like bringing it places…
Waking up, walking into the bathroom and finding a pipe with a baggie of meth(?) on the counter. I showed it to my mom, because at that point I still had a little faith in her, but she just took it and put it in her purse and said she’ll “take care of it.”
Having the police come out to our house three times in a month after heated arguments between Bryan and my mother. By the third, the officer was practically begging my mother to press charges on this guy, but she declined.
Bryan walking into my room as I was playing GTA V. Aw man, I love Grand Theft Auto! He kept trying to say which one was his favorite but was completely stumped, even though he could’ve just said a number.
Trying to watch the movie Skinamarink in my room, but failing because Dylan was on the phone in the living room sobbing loudly about supposedly his girlfriend breaking up with him. I rewatched it later and it did kind of suck, so maybe he was doing me a favor
Dylan locking himself in the garage shortly after with his gun, firing several shots. Everyone rushed outside to see if this guy had blown his head off all over the concrete, but I guess he was just shooting at the wall.
My mother’s car getting repo’d in a Dollar General parking lot after she title-pawned it for drug money. I came home one day from school, and Dylan looked up at me and said Dude did you hear about your mom it’s so funny. He was honestly right.
Bryan and my mother purchasing a run-down trailer to try and turn it into a meth-lab. They claimed it was just a fixer-upper that they were going to sell/rent for cash, despite the fact that this place was literally falling apart. They tried it once, got really fucking sick afterwards because they were using lots of chemicals in a very enclosed space.
I was supposed to go on a date around this time, and my mother was supposed to drive us—because I made the mistake of getting into a relationship as a freshman/sophomore, and it’s awful because nobody can drive yet—but she couldn’t, so we sheepishly had to ask my girlfriend’s parents to do it instead. We went to Olive Garden and both of our orders sucked so we swapped plates midway through, but it was fun.
She was very mid
Waking up, walking into the living room, and finding a giant brown pitbull curled up in a blanket on the couch. Her name was Daisy, and She’s Super Friendly Dude, Don’t Even Worry About It.
But while all of this was thrilling, it wasn’t something they could keep up and unfortunately, this is not a tale of Trve Love persevering over all. When my mother ran out of money for house payments, she just threw her hands up in the air and sold it.
A few weeks before this, though, Bryan was picked up by the law for illegal possession of a firearm during a traffic stop. He was being held in the local jail for a $20k bond. My mother hadn’t bothered to secure a place to stay for us before selling the place, so we were staying in this drab, pungent motel owned by a family of Indians with little golden elephant trinkets littered around the front office.
She was contemplating if she should bail him. He said he had Found The Bible and changed his ways. He said things would be different from then on, and she believed him.
Somehow, she put the ALREADY SOLD house up for his bond. She suffered zero consequences for this. They were reunited at last, and they chose to take their resurgence in wealth to the great state of Florida.
They went on a journey to Tallahassee, having heard about some “underground gambling rings.” They didn’t manage to find any, because if there was one they didn’t have any connections to it, so I imagine they were just walking around asking homeless people Do you know any good places to gamble? and getting told to fuck off because you look like such a narc right now.
Many, many, many drugs purchased later, they ran out of money. That oh-so wonderful thing (besides meth) that had kept the two together through thick and thin was gone.
They bounced around the Northside of Jacksonville—where Blacks on parole sleep in the floors of abandoned houses by candlelight with an 8-ball2 in their pocket—trying to find something, a reason, to keep this going. But since there was no more money to leech off of, there was nothing, and he became openly antagonistic towards her.
The final culmination was a domestic battery charge, one he was not bailed out on. He remained in jail, and my mother went her own way. After nearly 2 years, it was over.
And I want to say I felt bad for her, my mother, throughout all of this. But she did it all to herself, and really, it probably turned out exactly how she expected.
Because there is no other way that relationship could’ve ended. Because, in a way, they were a perfect couple. Two chronic fuck-ups leaning on each other so they can reach for a wallet, grab the Capital One card, max it out, and sneak it back like nothing ever happened. That’s the methhead’s brand of love.
I actually do know a guy who [ALLEGEDLY] did the heroin part once. The woman died and he got away with it, and everyone knows he did it but nobody cares.
1/8th of an ounce of drugs, usually cocaine. I learned this term from my dad.
Having this sort of childhood and not doing meth plus being literate and intelligent enough to articulate this is the equivalent of an asian kid graduating Harvard. Excellent job
I’m so sorry you had to stay in a motel owned by Indians 🥀