Nick Reding (5 page)

It’s stories like this, told and retold every day among the farmers at Hub City Bakery or while shopping at VG’s, that had
begun to fray the sense of civility in Oelwein by summer 2005. Two years after a consolidated effort to rid the town of meth
was begun, patience was waning. The police chief mandated—with Nathan’s and Murph’s full support—that his men pull over cars
for almost any reason in hopes of finding meth. He had recently lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance outlawing bikes
in town. The hope was that the cooks who brazenly cycled around making meth in their soda bottles would at least do so somewhere
out in the country instead of right on Main Street. In reaction, there was talk in Oelwein that Murph and Nathan and the chief
were infringing on people’s civil liberties when they ought to be doing something about the meth labs, which regularly caught
fire in residential neighborhoods, sending toxic plumes of smoke in whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing. Meantime,
an Oelwein officer named David Bloem was being investigated for assaulting a meth addict named Jason Annis. According to the
West Branch
(IA)
Times
, the accident began when Bloem arrested Annis with a meth-filled syringe “sticking out of his arm.” Later, a video camera
in the police station appeared to show Bloem shoving Annis to the floor, where he suffered a broken orbital bone at one eye
and a compound fracture at his left cheek.

The effect was partly desperation, even panic, and partly a reversion to the overly simplistic version of events, which is
that meth, and meth alone, was responsible for all that was bad in Oelwein. The addendum to the postulate is that whoever
becomes hooked is weak. There’s something wrong with them, and because of them, there’s now something wrong with us. Even
Nathan, whose own contradictions made him adept at looking at things evenhandedly, was quick to talk about the “shitbags”
and the “scum”: those whose addiction made everyone else pay the price. After three years as assistant county attorney, during
which things had gone from bad to worse (in Oelwein), he found it harder and harder to see the nuances of life after meth.

Nathan’s office is in a squat three-story brick building at the corner of Highway 150 and Route 3, across the street from
the Oelwein Public Library. On the first floor of the building there is a small bank. The second and third floors, like so
many commercial spaces in Oelwein, are empty. The basement is occupied by a two-man law firm, Sauer and Sauer LLC. The younger
Sauer, Wayne, is, in addition to being a partner in the firm with his father, the county attorney. Nathan, every day that
he’s not in court, goes to his office there, which is ample, if not extravagant. There is a large desk and three chairs, two
of them stacked with boxes of depositions and police reports. On the wall hangs the beard of a turkey that Nathan killed last
spring, ten inches long and black and coarse, like the tail of a tiny horse. Next to that is a framed certificate of thanks
to Nathan for one of the many cleanups he has organized on the nearby Volga River.

It’s lunchtime, during which Nathan, who is proud of his frugality, would normally go home and eat last night’s leftovers
while watching TV. A second reason Nathan hardly goes out to eat is that he is constantly running into people he’s prosecuted.
Today, though, is Friday, the end of the workweek, and the May sun is finally out following five solid days of rain. Leo’s
Italian Restaurant, just three blocks away, has a special every Friday on the fried pork tenderloin sandwich with mayo and
tomato and a side of broasted potatoes. It’s still an expensive sandwich, if you ask Nathan: $5.95. But today it sounds too
good to pass up. So Nathan reaches for his suit jacket, walks up the stairs, and heads out the glass door of the building
into the warm sun.

Leo’s is packed. Fronted by large windows that look onto Main Street and across at the movie house, Leo’s feels as old as
the building, built in 1907, that it has occupied for forty years. The tin ceiling is original, as are the wood walls. Business
is good every lunch and dinner, twelve months of the year. At the tables sit farmers in their clean jeans, and technicians
from the Tyson plant, along with some men in town to discuss the opening of an ethanol plant down the road.

Taking his place in a red Naugahyde booth against the wall, Nathan is feeling a little philosophical, perhaps because the
waitress, Brigitte Hendershot, represents for him the difficulties faced by his town. Brigitte works five days a week. She
is fifty-four, and what Nathan calls the salt of the earth. Her son-in-law is a sheriff’s deputy; her daughter works for the
state’s Department of Human Services. It is people like Brigitte, says Nathan, whom the meth epidemic hurts the most. They
work hard all their lives only to see their towns go to hell and to worry that their grandchildren will fall prey to a drug.
In a sinking economy, he says, it’s as though the harder they work, the farther behind they fall. It makes Nathan crazy.

“I think about the credos that I admire: Kant’s call to action for the betterment of man; Aquinas’s belief that every man’s
job is to help every other man achieve his ends. When I grew up,” says Nathan, “everything in my parents’ house had to be
black and white. No interracial marriage, no booze, no sex, no voting for Democrats. I went to law school, and I thought:
How does this narrow-minded horseshit aid in the callings of Kant and Aquinas? It can’t, because it’s too marginalizing.

“But now look where I am,” he continues. “I’ve come full circle, because I see the people that I prosecute as case files,
black ink on a white page. There’s so fucking many meth-heads, I can’t differentiate. I don’t get a chance to see them in
their homes. I don’t really have time to see them even as people, because that’s not how I’m trained. So how have I evolved?”
he asks, rubbing quickly at his nose before answering his own question. “I haven’t. I devolved.”

Brigitte comes over to take Nathan’s order. Her hair is dyed black to hide the gray, and she wears dark glasses that turn
darker in the sun when she goes outside. When she leaves, Nathan leans forward onto the table and clasps his hands.

“Let’s try to look at meth scientifically and economically,” he begins. “First, there’s the part of your brain that’s evolved
over thousands of years to reward you for doing the things that will regenerate the species. Have sex, feel good, in a nutshell.
Then there’s meth, which is twenty times better than sex. So, basically, meth becomes more powerful than biology.

“So you can put a tweaker in prison, and the whole time he’s in there, he’s thinking of only one thing: how he’s going to
get high the day he’s out. He’s not even thinking about it, actually. He’s like, rewired to
know
that everything in life is about the drug. So you say, ‘What good does prison do?’

“Meanwhile, whether he’s in prison or out on the street tweaking, he’s disengaged from the economy. There’s a whole sector
of the blue-collar workforce that’s just gone around here. So what we have as an alternative is these state-mandated halfway-house
things, where for two months you have to check in and check out each day; you have to hold a job; you have to take piss tests.
Fine. But two months,” says Nathan, “isn’t shit. Two months clean on meth is nothing. Why not make it five years? Put money
into building and staffing those places and try and keep people straight for years at a time while giving them something to
lose—a job, a sense of security.”

Nathan leans back. The pork tenderloin is here. Brigitte says warmly, “Enjoy, honey.” Nathan has known both her and her children
all his life.

“Thanks,” Nathan says. As she walks away, Nathan looks at her. He says, “The problem is, no one who works an honest job wants
to give the tweakers any more chances to fuck up.”

He sits back and looks at his sandwich. Suddenly he’s not hungry.

“Dealing with meth logically is a difficult sell to the people of this town. I understand why. It’s hard, knowing that the
same dirt-bag is going to be in court tomorrow for the third time this year. I mean, I’m sorry, but I leave work and go to
the farm to work more. And sometimes I look at the guy who can’t stop doing crank, and I just think, ‘Fuck. It’d be easier
to shoot the son of a bitch.’ ”

The thought makes him laugh. He laughs so hard that people turn to look. At the table next to us, an old farmer in blue jeans,
his green John Deere windbreaker hung over the back of his chair, stares angrily at Nathan. Nathan coldly returns the favor.
For a long moment, one of them might do something, if only he knew what.

CHAPTER
2

THE MOST AMERICAN DRUG

O
n a cold winter night in 2001, Roland Jarvis looked out the window of his mother’s house and saw that the Oelwein police
had hung live human heads in the trees of the yard. Jarvis knew the police did this when they meant to spy on people suspected
of being meth cooks. The heads were informants, placed like demonic ornaments to look in the windows and through the walls.
As Jarvis studied them, they mumbled and squinted hard to see what was inside the house. Then the heads, satisfied that Jarvis
was in fact cooking meth in the basement, conveyed the message to a black helicopter hovering over the house. The whoosh of
the blades was hushed and all but inaudible, so Jarvis didn’t notice the helicopter till he saw the heads tilt back on their
limbs and stare at the cold night sky. By then, Jarvis knew he had to hurry: Once the helicopter sent coordinates to the Cop
Shop, it would be only moments before they raided the house.

Jarvis ran downstairs to the basement. He was wearing a Minnesota Vikings tank top, a pair of boxer shorts, and white tube
socks. A divorced thirty-five-year-old father of four who’d been making meth since the mid-1990s and using the drug since
he was sixteen, Jarvis had been in jail all but three of the last ten years. He did not want to go back. So bottle by bottle
and container by container, he poured down the flood drain in the floor of his mother’s basement the chemicals he had stored
there: anhydrous ammonia, Coleman lantern fluid, denatured alcohol, and kerosene. Finally he poured two gallons of hydrochloric
acid down the drain. Then he lit a cigarette.

People around town like to say that Roland Jarvis blew himself up. The sound Jarvis heard immediately following the click
of his lighter, though, was not anything like an explosion. It was a very distinct and very quiet sucking sound. It took about
a quarter of a second for the ionized hydrogen in the hydrochloric acid to propagate from the lighter’s flame and into the
drain. This made the entire basement into a vacuum. Jarvis heard a soft
Whoomp!
Then came the blast, the force of which blew out the windows and singed Jarvis’s body wherever it wasn’t covered by clothing.
In the space of several more tenths of a second, all his exposed body hair burned off. When he looked down, he saw that his
tube socks were somehow no longer on his feet. When he looked up, he saw that the wooden ceiling was consumed by animate,
expanding rivulets of blue flame. His mother, who was something of a packrat, had stored her deceased husband’s books, clothes,
and fishing equipment in boxes in the basement, alongside old furniture she couldn’t bear to sell, for it had been in her
family since the days before her grandmother left Sicily. Now all of it was on fire. Oxygen poured into the basement through
the blown-out windows, feeding the flames. Jarvis’s tank top was burning, so he took it off and went running up the stairs
and out onto the porch. He stood there a while, thinking. Then he decided to go back into the house.

For forty-five minutes, Jarvis made one trip after another into his mother’s home, even as the fire spread from room to room
and floor to floor. He filled a plastic mop bucket over and over, and fought the fire relentlessly, stopping every now and
again to bring a couch or a table outside into the brutal Iowa night. At one point, dissatisfied with the water output of
the kitchen sink, Jarvis claims that he harnessed the superhuman strength afforded him by the dual effects of his meth high
and his panicked adrenaline rush to pull the sink from its housing in the counter and throw it against a wall in a blind rage.

Jarvis says he wanted to save the house. It’s considered a foregone conclusion by the police that he was trying to retrieve
the remnants of his meth lab, along with the formidable amount of dope that he had been making, for Jarvis, in a town full
of meth cooks, was considered one of the finest and most prolific of their number. That, or he was attempting to spread the
fire himself in order to burn as much evidence as possible. It’s conceivable, too, that he was in such a state of psychotic
disarray, emotional bankruptcy, and physical disembodiment that he was doing all three of those things. What stopped him,
in any event, is that he began to melt.

Following one of his trips outside, Jarvis looked down and saw what he thought was egg white on his bare arms. It was not
egg white; it was the viscous state of his skin now that the water had boiled out of it. Jarvis flung it off himself, and
then he saw that where the egg white had been he could now see roasting muscle. He looked at his legs and his abdomen. His
skin was dripping off his body in sheets. Panicked, standing there in the frigid night outside the inferno of his mother’s
home, naked but for his boxer shorts, which he’d inadvertently soaked in water while fighting the fire, Roland Jarvis began
pushing sheets of skin from himself, using his hands like blunt tools, wiping and shoving the hide from as much of his body
as he could reach. He’d have pulled the melting skeins of skin from himself in bigger, more efficient sections, but for the
fact that his fingers had burned off of his hands. His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the
gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat.

The police, says Jarvis, just watched. Jeremy Logan was still a sergeant, and a man with whom Jarvis had gone to high school.
When Jarvis approached him, Logan moved away like a matador avoiding a bull, not because he took sadistic pleasure in Jarvis’s
plight, but because, as Logan later told me, no one knew what to do. Jarvis begged in vain for someone to shoot him. He was
burning alive, and the pain was unbearable. Not even the paramedics knew how to respond, says Jarvis. He says everyone watching—the
gathered neighbors, the police, the entire Oelwein Fire Department—wanted him to die. “And I don’t blame them,” he says. “What
else could you do with a man like me?”

Methamphetamine is synonymous with the kind of deranged behavior exemplified by Roland Jarvis both that night and in the nineteen
years leading up to it. The stories that Jarvis tells would hardly be believable, were it not for corroboration among his
friends and within the pages of police reports that exist solely to catalog the known exploits of a single Oelwein, Iowa,
meth cook. Jarvis is just one of many local legends around Fayette County famous for, among so many things, staying high on
crank for twenty-eight days straight, an entire lunar cycle. Meth is also responsible for the physical destruction that Jarvis’s
body exhibits. By the time I met him, he’d had four heart attacks. He couldn’t sleep and rarely had an appetite. Almost all
his teeth were gone, and those that remained were black and decaying. He was in almost constant pain; his muscles ached, and
his joints were stiff. Meth’s destructiveness extended, said Jarvis, to his children, one of whom, born at the peak of his
parents’ intravenous meth use, was wearing a colostomy bag by the age of ten. Unable to shoot up with the finger nubs left
him by the lab explosion, Jarvis had taught himself to hold a pipe and lighter so that he could resume his meth habit once
again.

So, too, had there been by 2005 thousands of stories across the country blaming meth for delusional violence, morbid depravity,
extreme sexual perversion, and an almost otherworldly, hallucinogenic dimension of evil. In 2004, an Ojibwa Indian named Travis
Holappa in Embarrass, Minnesota, had been tied to a chair in a rural swamp, tortured, shot eleven times, and then decapitated
after running afoul of meth dealers. In a suburb north of Atlanta, in the space of one week that same year, thirteen bodies
were found, bound and murdered execution-style in a single home used as a meth stash house. In Ottumwa, Iowa, a ten-year-old
girl’s stepfather was jailed for his habit of getting high on crank and then repeatedly forcing the girl, at gunpoint, to
perform oral sex on him, an act that he justified, in his hallucinogenic, psychotic state, by saying to police that the girl
was the devil and that she had begged him to do it. In Oelwein, in June of 2005, a man high on meth beat another with a glass
vase, and thinking he was dead, rolled him in a blanket, then shoved his body behind the couch, where his teenage daughter
found him the next afternoon. And yet, methamphetamine was once heralded as the drug that would end the need for all others.

Nagayoshi Nagai, a Japanese chemist, first synthesized desomethamphetamine in 1898. Almost from the beginning, the drug was
celebrated for the simple fact that it made people feel good. It was not, however, until Akira Ogata, another Japa nese chemist,
first made meth in 1919 from red phosphorus and ephedrine, a naturally occurring plant that grows largely in China, that mass
production of the drug became viable. Red phosphorus, the active ingredient on the striker plate of a matchbook, can be mined.
Ephedrine, like coca or poppies, can be farmed. By 1933, meth was heralded in the United States as a drug on par with penicillin.
In 1939, the pharmaceutical giant Smith, Kline, and French began marketing the drug under the name Benzedrine. In Japan, meth
was sold as Hiropon; in Germany, it was marketed under the name Pervitin. In addition to narcolepsy and weight gain, methamphetamine
in 1939 was prescribed as a treatment for thirty-three illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, the common
cold, hyperactivity, impotence, fatigue, and alcoholism. In a world in which the winners were defined by the speed with which
they could industrialize, meth suppressed the need for sleep, food, and hydration, all the while keeping workers “peppy,”
as the ads read. The miracle cure could even aid in the nightmare of war, once the industrializing nations of Germany, Britain,
Japan, and the United States began fighting for world dominance.

According to a presentation given by former Harvard sociologist Patricia Case, reports authorized by the U.S. government in
1939 suggested that meth had “psychotic” and “anti social” side effects, including increased libido, sexual aggression, violence,
hallucinations, dementia, bodily shaking, hyperthermia, sadomasochism, inability to orgasm, Satanic thoughts, general immorality,
and chronic insomnia. Nonetheless, Japanese, American, British, and German soldiers were all given methamphetamine pills to
stay awake, to stay focused, and to perform under the extreme duress of war. Methedrine, according to Case, was a part of
every American airman’s preflight kit. Three enormous plants in Japan produced an estimated one billion Hiropon pills between
1938 and 1945. According to a 2005 article in the German online news source
Spiegel
, the German pharmaceutical companies Temmler and Knoll in only four months, between April and July 1940, manufactured thirty-five
million methamphetamine tablets, all of which were shipped to the Nazi army and air corps. A January 1942 doctor’s report
from Germany’s Eastern Front is illuminating. Five hundred German soldiers surrounded by the Red Army began trying to escape
through waist-high snow, in temperatures of sixty degrees below zero. Soon, the doctor wrote, the men began lying on the snow,
exhausted. The commanding officers then ordered their men to take their meth pills, at which point “the men began spontaneously
reporting that they felt better. They began marching in an orderly fashion again, their spirits improved, and they became
more alert.” In an interview with the
Chicago Tribune
in 1985, one of Hitler’s doctors, Ernst-Günther Schenck, revealed that the Führer “demanded interjections of invigorating
and tranquilizing drugs,” including methamphetamine. It’s widely believed by many that Hitler’s subsequent and progressive
Parkinson’s-like symptoms, if not his increasingly derelict mental state, were a direct result of his meth addiction.

Even into the 1980s, methamphetamine was widely prescribed in the United States. Ads for “Methedrine-brand Methamphetamine—For
Those Who Eat Too Much and Those Who Are Depressed” appeared all during the 1960s, largely in women’s magazines. Obedrin Long-Acting,
according to another ad, was there to help a woman “calmly set her appestat,” a particularly apt pun given that meth is well
known to raise one’s body temperature to dangerously hyperthermic levels. In 1967 alone, according to Dr. Case, thirty-one
million legal meth prescriptions were written in the United States. In Dexamyl ads in
Life
magazine throughout the 1970s, a woman wearing an apron could be seen ecstatically vacuuming her living room carpet. How much
legal pharmaceutical methamphetamine was being sold illegally, or without a prescription, during the period from 1945 to 1975
is hard to imagine. Headlines from the
New York Times
circa 1959 give some indication, however, citing multicity FBI stings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix, Denver,
Indianapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.

Curiously, the fate of towns like Oelwein, which for one hundred years had been places of great prosperity, began to change
at just about the time that meth’s reputation began to disintegrate. Even as those towns started feeling the early effects
of changes to the food-production industry, which would all but bankrupt them thirty years later, meth during the late 1970s
and early ’80s was being illegally produced by bike gangs like the Hells Angels in California and the Sons of Silence in the
Midwest. The change, which can be characterized by the shift from pharmacy to “lab,” is what would precipitate the modern
American meth epidemic, itself only a large piece of the global meth pandemic. As Methedrine and Benzedrine became crank and
speed, production moved from the controlled environment of corporate campuses to the underground production sites of bikers
and outlaw chemists. The new form of meth, a drug that has always been popular among men and women doing hard labor, became
both purer and vastly more available. It was no accident that just as rural economies were at the peak of their suffering
in the mid-1980s, meth’s place in the United States was becoming more entrenched than ever.