Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll
Before he got busted, my friend Huey Meaux was the top record producer in Texas. Nobody knew about his sordid secret life—not even me.
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At home, it was another story. The trouble was that the Crazy Cajun was overly protective of Ben to the point of smothering him. As a teenager, Ben, who has a near-genius IQ, grew to resent Huey’s interference. Huey was old. He was a hypocrite. He showered Ben with material goods, but he couldn’t offer the compassion and tenderness of a parent. When they had their differences, both displayed stubborn streaks. By the time he was fourteen, Ben was complaining that he couldn’t bring his friends over to the house because of the way Dad talked around them, especially the girls. Huey must have found it hard to keep his other life secret. Once he ruined a video camera using a screwdriver to remove a tape starring one of his girlfriends because he feared Ben would discover it.
In November 1994 Huey was almost killed when he crashed his car into an embankment on a poorly marked highway detour near his old hometown of Winnie. His nose was split in two and stitches ran from his forehead to his stomach. When I spoke with him a month later, he was heavily medicated and complained that his head wasn’t right. But he said the wreck was nowhere near as bad as the troubles he’d been having with Ben. Because of their fighting, Meaux had sent him to Winnie to live with Meaux’s stepdaughter, Georgia LaPoint, who was the daughter of Hilda Meaux, Huey’s long-estranged wife. That didn’t work out, and neither did Ben’s eventual return to Huey’s house. The two kept fighting; after one heated argument, Ben pulled a knife on him. In September 1995 Meaux sent Ben to Utah for a two-month Outward Bound wilderness training camp, but before he went, a girl who remains unidentified shared with Ben her dark secret about Huey’s cocaine use and the sessions in his hidden back office, where Meaux had taken many young girls over the years to pose for videos and photos in exchange for coke, booze, jewelry, and money. The girl’s account of her time in the playroom stunned Ben, and he contacted the police. In December, after Ben returned from Outward Bound, Huey enrolled him at the Fenster School in Tucson, Arizona, a small, expensive private school for difficult children. It was recommended to him by Londa May, a school-placement counselor in Houston. Meaux paid the $18,000 annual tuition in advance.
A month later, Shannon Brasher went to the police and Meaux’s secret life was exposed. The hideaway functioned as a party room where, with drugs, jewelry, and perhaps the promise that he would make them stars, Huey enticed dozens—maybe even hundreds—of young girls to pose for him and allegedly to have sex. The pictures of nude children are sufficient to convict Meaux of possession of child pornography, a third-degree felony that carries a two-to-ten-year sentence. If Meaux was trading photographs across state lines, as Officer Wright suspected, the charges could be stepped up to a federal offense, with a maximum sentence of twenty years. If the prosecution proves that Meaux had direct sexual contact with a minor—there are many of the confiscated videos that do so, Officer Wright has indicated—Meaux could face life in prison.
Shannon Brasher’s $10 million civil suit alleges that Meaux molested her as early as the age of nine and that the abuse continued for sixteen years, until 1995. For six years, Huey lived with her and Stacy and their mother, Nancy. After Huey and Nancy spilt up in 1984, he still saw Shannon frequently. Many times he said he loved her, and he always referred to her as his daughter. Her picture was on his mantelpiece at home, and he encouraged her sibling relationship with Ben, often asking her to take Ben to the movies. When Huey took Ben to Disney World, he took along Shannon and her sister. Brasher had had her share of hard times, including a serious cocaine habit. People around Sugar Hill remembered her frequently showing up in a disoriented state and asking Meaux for money. He would cough up the dough and always blamed the guys she was dating and the bad crowd she ran with. He even paid for some of her drug rehab sessions (Brasher has been through eight rehabilitation programs). But Brasher tells a different story of her relationship with Meaux. She attributes her drug addiction and her dependence on Meaux to years of abuse by him. “He used his closeness to her as well as drugs later to literally get in her pants,” said her lawyer Dick DeGuerin. Nor were Shannon and her sister, Stacy, necessarily the only family members abused. Following Meaux’s arrest, 48-year-old Georgia LaPoint told the Houston Press that she had been fondled by Meaux between the ages of six and twelve. “He’s always been a very warped, perverted man,” she said. “And he still is.”
Ben hasn’t spoken to Huey since last September. Although Huey wrote Ben almost every day while he was at Outward Bound, Ben never replied. Officer Wright told me that when informed of his father’s arrest, the boy said he was glad. The kid had finally beaten the old man. But with his dad in jail, the guardianship of Ben became hotly contested.
After he was arrested, Meaux met bail bondsman Edd Blackwood to sign papers and discuss the situation. When Ben’s name came up, Meaux appeared to be in denial. “He’s mad at me. He won’t talk to me now,” he told Blackwood. Even though Huey knew that Ben had turned him in, his son’s welfare was still foremost on his mind. He instructed Guy “Buddy” Hopkins, a Montgomery County lawyer he’d known for thirty years, to take care of Ben’s guardianship and protect his inheritance. A Montgomery County court appointed Hopkins temporary guardian and appointed another attorney, Elizabeth Woodward, to represent Ben’s interests. Woodward went to see Ben in Tucson, along with Londa May, the counselor hired by Huey last summer.
According to Wright, the three met in an office at the school, and Woodward asked Ben to sign papers appointing Hopkins his temporary guardian. When May asked Ben to accompany her to the airport, supposedly to drop off Woodward, Ben became suspicious. Wright had told Ben to call him if anyone tried to get him to sign anything or to take him away. Ben went to another room to call Wright. Wright asked him if there was a way out. Ben said there was and ran down a hallway and hid while Wright called the Arizona police.
At the urging of Dick DeGuerin—who has since called the incident an attempted abduction and alleged that May, Woodward, and Hopkins, among others, were co-conspirators—Ben was brought back to Houston and placed in a shelter by Child Protective Services, where he visited with Shannon Brasher almost daily. He insisted that he didn’t want one of his father’s friends or lawyers as his guardian. He wanted Shannon. After six weeks at the shelter, Ben returned to school in Tucson while the court continued to search for an appropriate guardian. DeGuerin’s proposal that Brasher be named temporary guardian was turned down.
The legal dog pile shows no sign of ending. Obviously one of the issues in all the civil litigation is Meaux’s net worth, which was initially reported in the newspapers as $30 million. It is now thought to be between $2 million and $3 million. Hilda and Huey’s divorce is proceeding, and she is being considered for guardianship of Ben, who has no other family in Houston besides Shannon, Stacy, and their mother. The criminal trial is not expected to begin for several months.
The End of Innocence
IN THE HISTORY OF ROCK AND ROLL, the list of incidents involving older men and underage females is long, beginning with Chuck Berry, who served time for violating the Mann Act; wild man pianist Jerry Lee Lewis, who almost destroyed his career when he married his 13-year-old cousin; and Elvis Presley, whose future wife, Priscilla, moved into his Graceland mansion when she was 15. The twisted dynamic persists: More recently, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones at 53 was briefly married to 14-year-old model Mandy Smith, and Eagles member Don Henley was inspired to write “Dirty Laundry” after a well-publicized incident involving illicit drugs and a female under the statutory minimum.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll stood for an entire generation’s rebellion against the music and morals of the past. Back in the seventies, we were enjoying ourselves too much to notice that Huey was already in his forties. We all grew up eventually; Huey never did. Of all his friends in the music business, Jim Dickinson, summed it up best: “When you met Huey, you sensed something greasy and criminal about him. It was always there. Now we know what it is. The music and the sex were inseparable. He was still producing. He couldn’t let go. He was still at the studio, still auditioning in his own way.”
In early April I went back to Sugar Hill for a last look at the secret world of Huey Meaux. Papers were strewn all over the place. Snapshots were still tacked to the walls. A photograph of Ben was framed behind his desk. A gag license plate on a wall read “Of All My Relations, Sex Is Best.” The scene inside the playroom was chilling. I could see two jars of mannitol, a white powder diuretic frequently used to add bulk to cocaine; a bar with bottles of grain alcohol and cherry-flavored sloe gin on the top shelf; a happy face and a message scrawled in pen on the wall-size mirrors—“Shannon, Denise & Lorinda friends for life + after"; and a metal box containing empty bottles of Percodan, Tylenol 3, and Valium. Everywhere, there were piles and piles of photographs.
I had wanted to believe in Huey Meaux’s innocence. Now I felt repulsed. “Damn it,” I hissed through my teeth. I was damning Huey and damning myself for being conned. I walked into the light of day with the feeling that I couldn’t bear to see him. It was a sad conclusion to a fabled career and to a friendship. And it wouldn’t help to hear a song sung in the heartbreak key.
My Library
