Local Meth Head Takes Radio Apart, Puts It Back Together, Takes It Apart, Puts It Back Together

Story by Will Sharpe 

| Published Dec 1, 2009

Through bloodshot eyes, local meth head and compulsive tinkerer Randy Hugo examined the final product, admiring the small radio from different angles under a fluorescent light, too captivated by his own disassembling and reassembling prowess to care that he was four hours late to his daughter’s birthday party.

“Well, God damn it!” Hugo snarled through his rotten teeth. “That was today, wasn’t it? Shit!”

The dejected Hugo, always quick to rebound, returned his focus to the radio and began muttering synonyms for “flawless” under his breath.

A Lincoln native who had always had a knack for weaseling his way out of family oriented events, Hugo never needed meth to be a bad father. No — he needed meth to stay awake for weeks on end, to get the same kind of rush from the comfort of his greasy couch that a racecar driver gets from barreling around that last curve at 240 mph.

“Except the racecar driver just took a blast of meth to boot,” Hugo specified before erupting into a high-pitched laughter that only someone who had just smoked paint thinner out of a light bulb could laugh. “That’s the idea behind the lifestyle.”

The realization of his capability to so masterfully disassemble and reassemble a small radio he had stolen from Goodwill came during one of those cherished two-week “racecar driver” binges. Hugo insisted that nothing in particular prompted him to endlessly take the radio apart and put it back together, noting only that when he picked up the radio, “things just happened,” likening the situation to the first time a Jedi picks up a light saber.

To date, Hugo is believed to have assembled and disassembled his radio more than a dozen times, nearly quadrupling the amount of times the average Midwest meth addict is expected to take a radio apart for the sake of putting it back together by the end of 2009.

“Those things aren’t going to take themselves apart,” Hugo cautioned.