Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  Bonnie lit one of Joseph’s cigarettes, took a drag, and handed it to him. Referring to the day I’d spoken with Major on the porch, she said she didn’t believe a lot of the things she’d heard him tell me about his time living with Bob and Sarah. Bonnie called her son by his given name, Thomas. Thomas had told me several stories about his and Bob’s murdering rivals and making millions of dollars. “I think a lot of it is exaggerated,” Bonnie said. “The things about how powerful and smart Bob is. Thomas likes to imagine he was so important and so marvelous. In truth, Bob is a putz.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Joseph, shaking his head. “By the time Thomas moved back in with us, he literally didn’t know his name. He’d gotten so used to lying that he’d stumble over any simple fact.”

  “I think between the drugs and the games they played with him, they really got into his mind,” said Bonnie. “That so-called family will stay at a farm for a while, never paying the rent, and then just leave and go to a new place. They’ve done that their whole lives. And if you talk to Bob, there’s nothing at all scary about him. He’s this little guy, and he’s a total brownnose. He’s like a weasel. Nothing Thomas says adds up.”

  It was the questions that were killing them, said Bonnie. Not just what had really happened while Major was with the Family but also how to help him recover. Even as a social worker, Bonnie knew comparatively little about how to aid in this process or what kind of outcome could reasonably be expected. In lieu of a blurry future, Bonnie and Joseph constantly replayed the past, looking for clues.

  Bonnie said, “I mean, I keep thinking, ‘What did we do wrong?’ I breast-fed Thomas. I didn’t smoke or drink when I was pregnant. After he got out of jail the second time, we rented him an apartment. He was back on meth overnight. So we moved him and Sarah into our house. In response, her father beat her up. Bob beat the absolute hell out of his own daughter for moving in with us and trying to quit meth. Once we got custody of Buck, Sarah tried to get DHS to take him away from us because we smoke. She said we were endangering her child. She told the police that we kidnapped him. She still calls thirty times a night, sometimes, and hangs up.”

  Bonnie paused to light another one of Joseph’s cigarettes. This time she didn’t give it back to him. The whole time she’d spoken, Joseph had silently rubbed his forearm with his blunt fingers, the way you might rub a favorite blanket or a piece of cloth. Bonnie said, “So that’s what we get for trying to help.”

  Staying busy amid these circumstances, said Bonnie, was a blessing. What busied them more than anything else was overseeing a kind of in-house rehab for Major while they waited to see what, if any, problems Buck might develop. This was not Los Angeles, or Tampa, or even Poughkeepsie. There were no residential chemical abuse facilities around there. None that Bonnie and Joseph could afford anyway, despite making twice the median income for the area.

  By law, Major had to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings each week; meet with his parole officer twice a month; and hold down a job, which meant working construction. Had Buck still been in his custody, a DHS worker would have visited every week to assess the situation and to offer help, for an hour at a time, with the dizzying array of adjustments, however prosaic or monumental, that Major faced in his attempt to live a sober life. “That’s as much as can be done for meth addicts and their children,” said Bonnie in regard to comparatively well-off Independence, Iowa.

  When Joseph finally broke his silence to offer his opinion on what should be done with meth addicts, it reflected this lack of available options. Brutally, dispassionately, quietly, he said that all addicts ought to be sterilized. While in jail, they ought to be put to work on behalf of the community they have sullied, milking cows and building roads. Then, echoing his wife, he said, “That’s as good as can be done in In dependence, Iowa.”

  Bonnie let him cool down. Then she reminded Joseph that while Major was last in jail, his third time, Joseph went to visit him every night. Furthermore, Joseph leveraged his position as a county magistrate in order to get Major out early. Had Major been sterilized during one of his incarcerations, Bonnie went on, they would never have had the profound pleasure of seeing Buck learn to walk. When she was done talking, she put her hand on his.

  Joseph shook his head. Then he nodded in agreement. “Whatever happens,” he said, “we’ve got the boy.”

  For a moment, it was unclear which generation of his progeny he meant: his son or his grandson. Then he said, “No matter how badly he screws up from here, Thomas can’t change that.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DO DROP INN

  Before my second two-week stay in Oelwein during the summer of 2005, I’d spent ten days driving from town to town in southern Illinois, western Kentucky, and northern Missouri. In Benton, Illinois, a poor black-earth farm town in the sweltering hollows of Franklin County, I’d ridden around for a few days with J. R. Moore, who was not only the Benton police department’s sole narcotics officer, he was also Benton’s interim mayor and the owner of one of the town’s three restaurants. All day, J. R. drove a black Mustang GT with tinted windows and an arsenal of shotguns in the bucket backseats, smoking Marlboro Lights and rolling down his window at stop signs to say hey to people he’d known all his life. In Chillicothe, Missouri, in the cattle-and prairie-rich heart of the state’s northern river breaks, I’d spent the night in a motel and listened while, in the room above me, a man beat the woman he’d married that very evening, at that very motel. Like the hill country around Benton, the area around Chillicothe, 350 miles away, had a monumental meth problem, and the bride yelled loudly that her new husband would not have been doing this to her had he not been high on crank. When I called the police, a female officer talked to the groom outside the window of my ground-floor room. After he convinced the officer that nothing was wrong, she wound up her investigation by wondering what kind of out-of-towner had mistaken a good time for domestic abuse.

  By then, it was no longer a question in my mind whether meth was a bigger problem in small-town America than in larger cities. San Francisco undoubtedly has many, many more meth addicts than the Central Valley town of Merced. There are thousands of meth addicts in Des Moines, while in Oelwein there are barely more than six thousand people total. Los Angeles is meth’s ancestral home in the United States. Like New York, San Francisco, and Miami, Los Angeles has a large population of gay meth addicts. In the past five years, HIV and hepatitis C rates have increased among the gay population, and meth is widely blamed. The meth problem in those cities is significant, if not monumental. The difference is that Los Angeles can absorb the associated costs of those problems more easily than Oelwein or Merced or Benton. And the recourse of small towns in confronting meth seemed only to be growing bleaker.

  The question was how to portray the meth problem in the rural United States without stereotyping—and ultimately trivializing—the places to which meth had called such attention by the summer of 2005. Beavis and Butt-Head, Smurfers, mom and pop—meth users had entered the lexicon as caricatures, which ultimately stemmed less from the drug and more from the environs with which that drug was associated. Oddly, nowhere were the prejudices against—and parodies of—small-town meth addicts more explicit than in Oelwein itself, the town that, according to Clay Hallberg, Jay Leno once referred to in a Tonight Show monologue as “possibly the worst place in the world.” Even Nathan Lein struggled with the temptation to see the people he prosecuted as “shitbags.” In some ways it seemed that the meth epidemic only added to a sense of isolation in Oelwein, as though the world was happening everywhere but there.

  Viewing meth as a crime story vastly oversimplifies the problem. Similarly, Clay Hallberg had made it clear to me in our very first conversation that there was a lot more to this story than a drug and its effects. That drug stood for something. Now I was beginning to see what Clay had meant. Meth represented, in the words of Craig Reinarman, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz and an expert on drug epidemics, “sociological fault lines.” Bac
k-to-back nights—one at the Do Drop Inn and the next at a party at Clay Hallberg’s—painted these fault lines in stark distinction. What became particularly clear was that, despite one’s best intentions, the divisions fostered by a drug epidemic seem to run along the lines of class—or at least along the perceptions of class. Major is not what’s considered to be a “typical” meth addict, since he’s from a successful family. And yet, because he was drug-addicted, he’s considered to be less by his own father and by Nathan Lein, who grew up far poorer than Major.

  Douglas Constance is a rural sociologist at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Constance puts Reinarman’s point in a different context when he says that the United States is “psychological, not a sociological nation.” What he means is that we will always hold the individual responsible over the group, blaming the drug addict instead of investigating the environment in which he grew up, and (conversely) celebrating the quarterback above the team following a win. In a small town, the distance between the winner and the loser is negligible, though the instinct to insulate is just as strong as it is in New York City. What connects people in New York and in Benton, Illinois, in fact, is that both resist believing that they have anything in common. Major’s father seemed to associate himself automatically with his grandchild over his son. In a similar manner, what Nathan Lein must every day remind himself is that he does, in fact, share many things with Roland Jarvis.

  The extension of Constance’s analysis is that during a drug epidemic, instinct demands that we find something wrong with those who are addicted; the epidemic in effect tricks us into thinking that the relatively small number of addicts are anomalies, even as we acknowledge the drug’s large-scale presence. In August 2005, Newsweek printed a now-famous series of photos of meth addicts, whose faces first seemed to age and then practically to disintegrate over time. I remember thinking the pictures looked like propaganda paintings from World War II of German soldiers, or “Huns,” who had been deliberately dehumanized. Similarly, the addicts shown in Newsweek were so gaunt and lifeless that they seemed utterly disengaged from humanity. Those photos served in some way to distance not only the addicts themselves but also the rural United States, from which the addicts invariably came, from the nation at large. For me, a true chronicle of the height of the meth years from 2005 to 2008 must begin with a town and all its people. If meth alone were to define Oelwein—and through it, the entire small-town United States—the truth would be hopelessly obscured. And the truth is, Clay and Major, Nathan and Roland, Murphy and Lori and the people in the Do Drop Inn—these people are us.

  Among the regulars at the Do Drop Inn are Josh and Ben, two obese, bike-riding nineteen-year-olds who more or less control the two seventy-five-cent pool tables. There is also Lisa, an unemployed, near sighted epileptic known on the Oelwein karaoke circuit as Flipper; and Sophie, who by twenty-four was in a coma following a car accident, from which she emerged a year later having to once again learn to talk, walk, and eat, and whose social outlets are composed of walking her cat on a leash every night to McDonald’s and then heading over to drink Diet Pepsi at the Do Drop Inn. Add to this a rotating gallery of white supremacist skinheads, tweakers, whiggers (the local moniker for white kids who wear the long, baggy clothing associated with urban blacks), bikers, and farm kids, and the Do Drop, in Clay Hallberg’s formulation, can feel at times very much like an unsupervised outpatient clinic.

  There is method to the mayhem, however. The Do Drop’s owner, Mildred Binstock, is more den mother than boss, and knows pretty much everything about everyone who comes in. Mildred has pretty olive skin and dark brown eyes. She wears blouses in wild, colorful prints, has appliquéd eyebrows, and is not someone who shies away from lipstick. At five-feet-eleven Mildred is what might be described as well fed: not fat, exactly, but not without a predilection for chicken tenders either. She is sixty years old and has never married. She does not drink, and she’s never smoked a cigarette, despite having worked from five P.M. to two A.M. nightly at the Do Drop Inn since she bought the place in 1984. That, says Mildred, was two years before what she describes as the “schnapps revolution,” which accounts for the prodigious amount of flavored DeKuyper’s behind the bar in peach, blackberry, and butterscotch, which she maintains nearly doubled her liquor sales.

  Back in 2005, someone at the Do Drop Inn was getting busted—for assault, selling meth, fighting, or contributing to the delinquency of a minor—about once every two weeks on average. Most recently, the police went upstairs to one of the three floors where Mildred rents rooms weekly and monthly and kicked down the door to find a seventeen-year-old girl in flagrante delicto with a forty-year-old man. On the table next to them was the eight-ball of crank she’d just sold him. When Nathan Lein took me to the Cop Shop on my first day in Oelwein, I told him my plan to hang out at the Do Drop, in hopes of meeting any of the addicts and dealers as they appeared in mug shots on Chief Logan’s computer screen, Nathan said, “Good luck. Even cops won’t go in there alone.”

  Mildred watches the Fox News Channel whenever she is not asleep. She can tell you what shows are on at what times on a twenty-four-hour schedule. She refers to her decorating style as either High Amish Kitsch or Late Victorian Clutter. In front of an enormous television flanked by red lace curtains, Mildred’s customers sit at formal dinner tables complete with high-backed dining room chairs decorated with Christmas lights. Behind the bar is a smoke-glass mirror in which, if you’re observant, you can see the ever-frugal Mildred stealthily reuse the straw from one customer’s finished whiskey and Coke in the fresh vodka tonic of another. The walls represent five decades of yard-sale finds: mounted fish, vintage pieces of bank china, calendars dating back to the Johnson administration. A sign stapled above the door to the kitchen reads “My office! No one allowed but ME!” Above the door is another television, which is often tuned to the man Mildred refers to as “my number-one honey”: Geraldo Rivera.

  In Mildred’s estimation, Mayor Murphy and Chief Logan were crooks. They were what was wrong with Oelwein, pure and simple. The more ordinances they passed trying to rid the town of meth, the more Mildred considered them to be infringing on her civil rights. She was not alone. From an anecdotal perspective, Oelwein back in 2005 was deeply factioned regarding the police, the mayor, and Nathan Lein and his boss, county attorney Wayne Sauer. The upshot was that, in a poor town where half of all commercial space sat unoccupied, Mildred Binstock was not going to take kindly to police action in her bar. She was barely making it as it was, working seven days a week in an unending series of shifts that lasted deep into the night. Clay Hallberg, Nathan Lein, and Roland Jarvis all told me that more meth got sold at the Do Drop Inn than at any other bar in Oelwein. When I pressed Mildred about this, she insisted she was being set up. Then she added cryptically that, in her opinion, “The police are canoodling with the bad elements of this burg.”

  One early evening in particular brought home the complexity of the divisions in Oelwein, as expressed in its most notorious bar. It was a Sunday, and Mildred and I were the only two in the place. We were watching the news, which at the time was concentrated on the case of a young Mormon girl who’d been kidnapped from her Salt Lake City bedroom while her sister slept next to her; police suspected the handyman. Into the Do Drop Inn walked a man and a girl. The girl looked sixteen or seventeen, and the man over thirty. He was wearing denim Carhartts and a matching work jacket, each dirty enough to have been through a long day of building road in a dust storm. He had long, dirty, sharp fingernails, and he smelled like sour milk. The girl’s hair was bobbed and greasy, and her body was lost inside an enormous gray sweatshirt that read “Duluth Is a Cool City” across the front, in homage to the brutality of Minnesota winters. It was immediately obvious to me from their dilated pupils and the man’s aura of violently aggressive confidence that they were high on meth.

  “You can’t be twenty-one, honey,” Mildred said to the girl as she studied her driver’s license. Mildred then loo
ked at the girl sternly with one appliquéd eyebrow raised, waiting for her to admit her true age. When the girl didn’t respond, Mildred said brightly, “But if the state says you are, then you are.” She looked at the man. “I know you’re over,” she said to him coldly. She gave them the drinks they’d ordered. Then, even though no one ordered any food, Mildred hurried into the kitchen, leaving the three of us alone in the empty bar.

  The man was named Chad and the girl Ella. There was a computerized Keno machine at one end of the bar, and Ella went with her drink, sat down, and started tapping at the screen. She was four stools away from me, and seven away from Chad; I was between them. Chad and I talked about one thing and another, looking for some common ground. For instance, when I said I was born in Missouri, he allowed how he’d been in jail there once. His pupils completely obscured the blue of his irises.

  Chad said, “Where’s Ella?”

  Ella was still four seats away, playing Keno. With her back arrow-straight and her feet dangling below her, she looked like she might actually be taking a computerized grammar test in a virtual high school. She wore no earrings, no jewelry at all, and she didn’t blink as the light from the machine brightened and dimmed in the dark bar. Chad was looking right at her.

  “Where’s Ella?” he said again.

  I started to say that Ella was sitting right there when I remembered what a woman in Cedar Rapids had told me about her ex-husband—that after he’d been using meth for a couple of years, he’d lie next to her in bed and ask where she was. Other times, he would mistake pillows and couches and dressers for his wife. If she would countermand his claims, she said, he would first panic and cry, sinking to the floor, begging her to reappear. When she did, he would accuse her of infidelity and beat her savagely with anything he could find: a lamp, an ashtray, and one time with a broken table leg.