Nick Reding (10 page)

The toll it had taken on him was nowhere more evident than in the garage of his house when I went to visit him the first day;
in one corner, there were three enormous trash bags full of beer cans. Most nights that he wasn’t on call, Clay drank a twelve-pack
by himself, pacing in the garage and smoking cigarettes, just to try to calm down. Then he tried to get some rest.

When you drive into Independence, Iowa, fourteen miles south of Oelwein, with the windows down on a warm late-June day, you
feel the fullness of small-town America’s pastoral charm. Despite its proximity to Oelwein and its comparable size, In dependence
feels both bigger and cleaner than its neighbor to the north. On Main Street, the antique buildings house no closed storefronts.
People are everywhere, walking in the sun. There is a feeling of purposefulness, even in winter, when the warm lights of the
restaurants shine invitingly in the dusk, and the snowplows patrol well in advance of impending storms, giving the impression
that all is not only well, but also that things are accounted for and under control even before they happen.

I went to Independence in order to meet a recovering meth addict, his son, and his parents. I wanted to see the kind of generational
effects about which Clay had spoken—the “multidimensional expansion of pathology,” as he put it, that a drug epidemic engenders.
In trying to understand the difficulties caused by meth addiction in just one family, I felt it appropriate to go to In dependence,
which is so much less rough around the edges than Oelwein. The lack of obvious corruption in In dependence made that town
feel decades behind its neighbor to the north in terms of economic or drug-related complications, as though one might get
a peek at what Oelwein had been like when Clay and Charlie Hallberg first started playing the bars back in the 1970s.

That a large-scale social ill infects individual lives and relationships is certainly not news. Indeed, I had already begun
to appreciate the effects of Oelwein’s fate on Clay. Over more time, I’d see how the town’s difficulties seemed to accord
with Clay’s growing abuse of alcohol. And while it’s not fair to say that social divisions directly split individuals, testing
marriages and relationships, it seems reasonable to consider the added stress of a larger difficulty when looking at the various
human pieces. What came into view in Independence was the inverse of this: once a community has shattered, not only will families
splinter, too, but members will feel compelled to look for succor in surprising places. Meth doesn’t just drive people apart;
it drives them together.

The recovering addict I’d come to speak with is known as Major to other members of the Sons of Silence motorcycle gang, or
what he refers to as “the Family,” of which he is a former member. The name seemed appropriate, given the comparatively astounding
effect Major had had within his fairly limited realm. Then twenty-five years old, Major lived with his parents, Bonnie and
Joseph, in a pretty redbrick home on a quiet tree-lined street five blocks off Main. At six feet two, 180 pounds, Major had
wide shoulders, sinewy arms, strong calves, and a slim waist. His natural blond hair and blue eyes must have served him well
in the Family, for the Sons of Silence are an Aryan Nation organization, and Major has
SS
tattooed onto his left deltoid. Fourteen months ago, at the peak of his meth addiction, he weighed 130 pounds.

The day I went to meet Major, we sat on the porch of his parents’ house. Major had been clean for nine months by then, though
he was still given to an addict’s hyperbolic monologues punctuated with firecracker explosions of laughter. I found him to
be personable, self-deprecating, and funny, a kiss-ass and an intimidator, someone who would say what ever it took to get
out of trouble. He was obviously highly intelligent and low on self-esteem, which made for a kind of cartoonish charm. Everything
about him seemed to be in a state of contagious turmoil, the result, I guessed, of his years of brainwashing by the Sons of
Silence. To witness the fights that raged in him—between meth and staying clean; between remaining with his blood-parents
or returning to the Family; between self-loathing and self-aggrandizement—made it almost impossible not to sympathize with
Major.

In northern Iowa, the Sons of Silence, once the foremost bike and drug gang, are today essentially a mom-and-pop meth-production
outfit, making a few pounds of Nazi dope here and there, with access to a built-in retail force in the form of their few remaining
riders. Their leader, a man named Bob, is the father of Major’s ex-girlfriend, Sarah. Sarah is the love of Major’s life and
the mother of Major’s son, Buck. Bob, along with his wife and Sarah, lived on a farm in nearby Jesup, Iowa, where he continued
to make meth. Bob’s presence just twelve miles away, along with the memory of the life that Major lived with him, was a weight
that Major couldn’t seem to lift from the day-to-day drudgery of his sober existence.

At the time of my visit, Buck was two. He had white-blond hair, expressive dark blue eyes, and red lips that stood out against
his rich, alabaster skin. His ruddy cheeks and already defined musculature seemed the marks of an older child. All around,
in fact, Buck seemed developmentally ahead of the game for his age. He was personable and curious and talked a blue streak.
He was anything but quiet, moody, and distant, often the marks of a so-called meth baby. And Buck is not just a meth baby,
he is
the
meth baby of Iowa. When the Department of Human Services and local prosecutors, under the auspices of the Child in Need of
Assistance (CHINA) statute, took him away from Major and Sarah, Buck’s hair had the highest cell-follicle traces of methamphetamine
ever recorded in state history. Number two on the list was Buck’s half sister, Caroline, who was six at the time she was taken.

From where Major and I sat at a table on the porch, Major looked at his mother, who was inside the screen door, listening
to our conversation. Buck was in the middle of yet another circumnavigation of the table via the four benches surrounding
it. Major was clearly not going to say anything else while his mother was listening, and we all waited for several uncomfortable
moments. I passed Buck over my lap so that he could go to the next bench, where, if his formula held true, he’d stop briefly
to bang out a quick tune on the Tunnel Tuner—a plastic locomotive that whistles as it follows yellow tracks in a circle, one
whistle per one push of a big blue button. Then he’d continue as before along his circular path.

“Mom,” said Major, “can you just not stand there, please?”

Major watched Bonnie leave the doorway and retreat into the kitchen. Then he said that in 2003 he and Bob developed a way
to increase their yield from batching meth by microwaving the coffee filters through which they strained the dope’s impurities.
Heating the filters yielded a good deal of powdered crank that had been absorbed by the paper. The problem was that the powdered
crank also spread over the inside of the microwave, where Bob and Major cooked Buck and Caroline’s food, thereby permitting
the children to ingest untold amounts of the drug.

The long-term effects of infant methamphetamine ingestion were unclear in 2005 when I met Major and Buck, and remain hazy
today. Only one researcher, Dr. Rizwan Shah, of the Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines, has studied the problem for a
significant period of time, twelve years, which is long enough to see trends but too short to track their continued effects.
Buck did, said Major, exhibit some of the symptoms that Dr. Shah associates with children exposed to meth in the early years
of their lives. Buck shook violently in the morning when he woke up, had trouble sleeping, and suffered from acute asthma.
He was also quick to revert to violent anger as a form of communication and was maddeningly picky about his food, often refusing
to eat. Whether these latter attributes were an indication that Buck was simply entering the terrible twos and beginning to
exert his will or were related to his monumental exposure to meth was anyone’s guess. So far Buck didn’t seem affected by
another common problem with meth exposure, which is an inability to interact with other human beings, a result, it is supposed,
of long periods of frenetic, haphazard attention followed by days of lying helpless in a crib while parents sleep off their
binges.

It’s meth’s long-term effects, though, that are potentially the most disturbing, in part because those effects are theoretical
and based on observations made only among adults, many of whom suffer from liver and kidney failure, weakened hearts and lungs,
high blood pressure, and severe anxiety. The worry is that whatever physical disabilities an adult suffers, a child, by definition
weaker and smaller, will have these same deficiencies visited upon him manifold.

Meth’s power, said Major, had never been more clear to him than the last time he was in jail. Major was panic-stricken without
the drug. By turns he couldn’t sleep or couldn’t wake up. He couldn’t eat. He had hallucinations. His body hurt as though
he’d been in a car accident. And he, by a long stretch, had it pretty easy. According to an undercover narcotics agent in
Ottumwa, Iowa, one addict became convinced in his jail cell that the impurities in the meth he’d been cooking and injecting—particularly
the lithium battery strip used as a solvent in the drug’s manufacture—were actually inside his body. Thinking that one of
the veins in his arm was a strip of lithium, he sat on his bed and spent hours using his long fingernails to dig the vein
out. Talking to Major made it clear that meth’s physical withdrawals were only the beginning of his problems with quitting,
for what was most striking about him was that he seemed to have no idea who he was now that he no longer used meth.

Buck was ready to cross my lap again in order to complete another turn around the table. “Hi!” he said. He picked up a lighter
on the table and held it out to me. “For you,” he said. He was wearing little red shorts that bulged with a fresh diaper.
For Major, waiting to see what price his son would pay for his transgressions was a daily reminder of why he had to stay straight.
But his anxiety and guilt were also an hourly motivation to get high. Major, when he allowed himself to think of what he might
have done to his boy, wanted nothing more than to kill himself with a final, euphoric overdose of crank.

“Not for you,” said Major, grabbing the lighter from Buck’s hand.

Buck began crying. At first Major spoke soothingly to him. When Major picked him up, Buck hit Major in the face. Bonnie came
to the doorway again, watching. Major looked at her, his face first registering the need for help, and then anger. Major looked
back at Buck, who tried to bite his father’s nose. Major shook him furiously as Buck howled. That’s when Bonnie swooped in
and took Buck away. Bonnie and her son stared at each other, Buck between them like a shield. Or like a threat, for Bonnie
could at any time banish Major from her home, and Buck would have to stay with her.

“He’s hungry,” said Bonnie finally. “That’s all.”

A few days later, I met Joseph and Bonnie in the bar of a restaurant in Independence that looked like a T.G.I. Friday’s done
up with telltale small-town signs of color. Kitty-corner from a print of John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in
The Blues Brothers
was a walleye mounted on an oak plaque bearing a gold plate engraved with the angler’s name, the lake where the fish was caught,
and the weight: seven pounds, three ounces.

It was July 5, and Joseph and Bonnie had come to talk to the owner about their youngest son’s wedding rehearsal dinner, which
they wanted to have in October in the restaurant’s small reception room. But before reservations were made and the menu decided,
they had a long talk about the owner’s recent trip to a lake in Canada, where the owner had enjoyed the best walleye and northern
pike fishing he’d ever imagined. Joseph and Bonnie had been to the same lake many times—they are both avid fishermen—and were
clearly sorry they’d missed the action. They hadn’t been fishing in over two years, which is about as long as they’d been
taking care of Buck, who for all practical purposes had become Bonnie and Joseph’s fifth child.

Technically, Bonnie, a social worker, and Joseph, a county magistrate, have custody of Buck. That they allow Major to live
in their home is a circumstance that exists outside the bounds of custody litigation. It can be, to say the least, an awkward
arrangement. Bonnie and Joseph were fifty-three years old when I met them in 2005. They had not planned to raise a two-year-old
at this stage of their lives. Just a year earlier, Major and Sarah, still living at Bob’s farm, would break into Bonnie and
Joseph’s house to steal what ever they could, then sell it to buy more cold medicine from which to make meth. One night Major
stole his mother’s pan ties and bras and hocked them at a bar. During another break-in, Major and Sarah decided to stash a
large amount of meth in the air vents of Bonnie and Joseph’s home. When Bonnie and Joseph turned the heat on, the meth-tainted
air that blew through the vents made them ill, and they had to spend ten thousand dollars, or a quarter of Joseph’s yearly
income, to have the whole system replaced. That there was some resentment beneath the surface of their every interaction with
Major was not surprising.

More surprising was how little resentment there was. Joseph, a heavy smoker with an ashen complexion, is an intensely quiet
man given to wearing khakis, short-sleeve oxford shirts, and simple ties with no jacket. When he speaks, his words come out
with the blunt force of body blows. Bonnie is soothing and kind, a tall, thin, pretty woman of Swedish descent with sharp
features and a stately bearing. That day at the restaurant, Bonnie’s articulateness was magnified as she sat next to her brooding
husband. Since adopting Buck, Joseph and Bonnie have put their lives on hold. Retirement is no longer an option, never mind
a goal. They cannot leave Major at home alone for more than a few hours at a time, so afraid are they that he will relapse,
or that Bob will make good on the threat he has leveled in dozens of late-night phone calls: that he will kidnap Buck, murder
Major, and burn down Bonnie and Joseph’s home.