Chad asked if Ella was with me. Then he scratched the wooden bar with his long fingernails, as though the bar had an itch that Chad could feel.
He asked me, in all seriousness, if I was having sex with Ella.
I said, “Right here?” When he picked up his empty beer bottle by the neck, I said, “She’s playing Keno.”
Chad said, “I can’t believe Ella’d fuck you. I can’t believe you’d do this right in front of me, Ella.”
Ella, hearing her name and looking up from the Keno machine, said, “Coming.” It was like a child’s response when being called for dinner.
“He’s a total fucking stranger!” said Chad. “How can you just fuck him like this?”
At that point, I got up and brought Ella to him. I asked her to hold his hand.
“See?” I said. “Here’s Ella. This is Ella’s hand.”
Chad looked at her for several moments before he actually saw his girlfriend. When she let go of his hand and walked off a few seconds later, Chad looked at me and said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
I told him I was just passing through.
“You’re a liar,” he said. He stood up to his full height, a good six feet two. He appeared to weigh two hundred pounds. I looked down the bar at the kitchen, into which Mildred had disappeared ten minutes before. There was no sign of her.
When Chad asked me if I worked for DEA, the window of diplomacy seemed to be closing once again. He said he’d be honest with me: he hated DEA. Nor, he said, would it be any skin off his teeth to make sure I never came back to town again. I was drinking whiskey; I wrapped my fingers around the tumbler so that if need be I could use it to break one of Chad’s eye sockets.
That’s when he sat back down. “Come on,” he said. “Are you a narc or not?” He seemed genuinely interested. It was suddenly posed as a cordial question. He wanted to know, very sincerely, if I worked for DEA, for the reason that he had never actually met an agent, and had always kind of wanted to.
I told him I was sorry, but that he was out of luck. In general, meth dealers and the people trying to catch them often seem to dress in the same manner. Both constituencies are given to hair cut close to the scalp and a few days’ growth of beard. I’d followed suit.
“Boy,” said Chad confidentially, “you sure look like a fed.”
“So much for fitting in,” I told him.
Chad laughed, and so did I. He slapped me on the back. We shook hands. The agony he was in just a few minutes before was gone without a trace, replaced by a sense of euphoria that seemed to lift the heavy air of the bar. Both of us, I think, felt not just relieved, but elated. Chad was back up on the shoulder of his tweak, and he gathered Ella and rode the smooth wave out the back door of the Do Drop Inn into the alley across from the abandoned roundhouse. Right then, as though by magic, Mildred reappeared. She been watching all along through the space of the doorjamb. She said, “Isn’t that terrible, the way people act?”
In some ways, it’s true that, as people say around Oelwein, meth is confined to a few places. But it’s just as important to see the places where meth is not in evidence, at least in its physical form. For even as the difficulties caused by the drug are an everyday part of life in Oelwein, so, too, are the rhythms of life there extant with or without meth. In this capacity, Clay and Tammy Hallberg excel. Much of Oelwein comes through Clay’s office on a weekly basis, or past him in the emergency room. Or, as happens on several holidays a year, into the Hallberg home to celebrate.
Clay and Tammy’s house sits just across a narrow wooded gully from their neighbor’s home, off a long gravel driveway half a mile west of town. Because Clay is not a farmer does not mean he doesn’t grow corn on a couple of acres of his property, or raise a few chickens in the barn alongside his house. In front of the barn is the stable where Tammy keeps her horses, with which she has won riding competitions as far away as Kentucky. They can see most of their fifty-acre spread from the eat-in kitchen of the split-level ranch, with its big north-and south-facing windows.
It’s July 4, 2005, and Clay and Tammy are having their annual hog roast. It’s an occasion to be happy and to remember that life is indeed good, if only people would take the time to eat well and drink a little bit and enjoy one another’s company. Gathered in small groups in the backyard beneath a looming eighty-year-old live oak, city employees from the water company mingle with bartenders and high school teachers, waiting for Tammy to give the word that a 250-pound pig provided by the local UPS driver is, after six hours, finally done roasting. Clay’s twin brother, Charlie, is here, along with his wife. They’ve brought with them another friend, a Chilean expatriate who works as a translator at a windowpane plant down in Cedar Rapids.
While the UPS man stands beside his custom-made hog oven, a submarine-shaped barbecue so large it had to be towed behind a pickup, the Hallberg twins hold forth on their latest gig, which took place last night in a bar in Wadena, Iowa, where the hundred or so listeners twice asked them to reprise Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a crowd favorite for a quarter century. Meanwhile, Tammy advises a group of women on the finer points of her famed beer-can chicken recipe, the gist of which is to insert an open, full Bud Light into the gutted cavity of a homegrown broiler, then to stand the chicken, legs down, on the grate of a charcoal grill. For the best results, says Tammy, use a medium-hot fire. And if your M.D. husband isn’t looking, brush that sucker every fifteen minutes with a warm bath of salt, melted butter, and—as ever—more beer. After an hour of that, she concludes in her thick drawl, you’ll never eat so good.
What unites the partygoers beyond the obvious bond of community is that Clay, all the while with Tammy working as his receptionist, delivered most of the guests’ children. As the children grew (many of them were now adults themselves), he was their pediatrician, even as he treated their parents for problems ranging from skin cancer to gout. During his tenure as assistant county medical examiner, Dr. Clay made official the pronouncements of their parents’ deaths. Oelwein itself is a crossroads in northeast Iowa, and Clay’s and Tammy’s lives together serve as a point of intersection of Oelwein’s socioeconomic and cultural axes, the coordinates of which remain unchanged, even as Oelwein’s demographics have shifted further and further toward a baseline of poverty. Oelwein, with its familiar and often complex social circuitry, is much like a family, and Clay and Tammy are in many ways at the center of it. Regardless of the trends in community health in the last thirty years, and in the corresponding changes in the chief medical complaint (it had once been sore muscles and broken bones; now it is depression and meth), if you have a problem or a reason to celebrate, you go to see the Hallbergs.
The Chilean translator, whose name is Jorge and who goes by George, is at once the party’s most curious guest and its most affable curiosity. He left Santiago de Chile when General Augusto Pinochet took over the country from Dr. Salvador Allende, the socialist pediatrician who’d been elected president in 1970; had given over the vast holdings of Chile’s elite to the underclasses; and had been killed three years later (while barricaded in his office at the Chilean White House) at the hand of Pinochet’s coup. In a sea of Levi’s, Dockers, and short-sleeved polo shirts, George stands out in his Wranglers, denim shirt, and shiny black cowboy boots. His wire-rim glasses and instinctive command of Marxist economics brand him a left-wing, idealist intellectual of a certain era in Latin American history, one heretofore unknown in Fayette County. The nephew of Salvador Allende’s secretary of education, George (by far) defines the furthest edge of the gathering’s largely centrist political agenda, which hinges on keeping taxes moderate and crop prices high; putting more money in the public education system; and keeping God in your life, but out of the government. By his mere presence, George also embodies the party’s, and the town’s, intuitively inclusionist sensibility.
Nonetheless, most people think George is Mexican. In a place where everyone has a grandfather whose native language was Norwegian or German or It
alian, George represents the latest in the history of American immigration, complete with its unexpected quirks and hard-to-understand accents.
George, once he’d been exiled by Pinochet under the threat of death, had somehow ended up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From there, a marriage took him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of Memphis, Tennessee. Divorced now, he spends his weekends playing music in local jazz ensembles. By day, he registers workers’ injuries to management at the windowpane factory on behalf of the mostly Mexican and mostly illegal labor force, a job he likens to selling Bibles in Kabul. Tammy Hallberg allows how all of that is “pretty darned interesting.” What she wants to know, though, is why more Mexicans can’t learn English. Even the Amish, she says, can do that.
Clay, seeing an opening, offers his explanation in terms of Hegelian dialectic and Whorfian hypothesis. Basically it amounts to this: If you’re not allowed to integrate into society (i.e., if you move from abusive job to abusive job, with no standardized manner of tracking your movements), then your choice of language will reflect this. It is a response with which George agrees so vehemently that only his native language can provide the right word to express his enthusiasm.
“Claro,” says George, nodding. “Claro.”
Tammy, too, relies on her native skills of communication, which are hammer-blunt. “Clay,” she says, “stop talking—right now.” And Dr. Clay does.
The food, excluding the hog, is potluck. When the UPS man is done carving the pork and heaping it on platters, he takes the platters to the kitchen. Tammy goes to the deck above the yard and rings a brass dinner bell. Surrounding the platters of pork are every manner of dish and container—Tupperware and Ziploc and microwaveable glass. What the containers lack in continuity, the foods make up for in their consistent use of corn as an ingredient and an equally consistent use of the loosest definition regarding the word “salad.” There is corn on the cob and corn that has been boiled and then shaved from the cob and mixed with butter and salt; corn bread with jalapeños; and roasted corn tossed with onions and chives. There is Idaho Red potato salad, and next to that, an enormous bowl of the same dish, this one made with baby Yukon Golds. There’s Jell-O salad, and bean salad, and a pot of boiled collard greens. For dessert, there is more Jell-O, this time molded like a wheel and resting on a seashell-shaped dish, and slices of warm, thick-crusted rhubarb pie with homemade vanilla ice cream.
When it’s all gone, except for the unending mounds of pork, the women stay inside, smoking in the kitchen or helping with dishes while Tammy divvies up twenty or so pounds of leftover hog meat into large bags, to be handed out to the guests when they leave, like door prizes. Meanwhile, the men retire to the yard. There, the drinking, in the finest Lutheran tradition, becomes steady and workmanlike as they sit in their chairs and smoke cigarettes and tell jokes, their voices hushed in the still night.
George the Chilean sits next to Charlie and listens while Clay tells the one about Earl and Maynard down at the VFW.
“Maynard,” begins Clay in his smoke-scarred voice, “is drunk as usual, sitting on his stool at the bar with Earl. And the next thing you know, Maynard pukes on himself.”
“I love this one,” says Charlie, leaning back in his camp chair. “This is a good one.”
“So Maynard says to Earl, ‘My wife just bought me this shirt. She’ll kill me.’
“Earl says, ‘Don’t worry. Just tell her I did it.’
“Earl reaches in his wallet, takes out a twenty, and puts it in Maynard’s chest pocket. ‘Tell her,’ he says, ‘that I gave you twenty dollars for a new shirt.’ ”
Clay reaches out his hand and acts out the exchange by pretending to put something in the breast pocket of George’s cowboy shirt.
“So,” Clay continues, “Maynard goes home, and his wife gives him hell. ‘But, honey, Earl did it!’ says Maynard. ‘And he gave me twenty dollars for a new shirt.’
“Maynard reaches in the pocket, pulls out the money, and hands it to his wife.
“She says, ‘There’s forty dollars here.’
“ ‘Right,’ says Maynard. ‘That’s because Earl pooped in my pants, too.’ ”
PART 2
2006
CHAPTER 6
MIRROR IMAGING
During 2006, meth, combined with America’s complicated reaction to it, began to accomplish what sociologist Craig Reinarman had said is the central function of drug epidemic: to “trace a culture’s sociological fault lines.” This happened in several ways. First, the American media made meth a cause célèbre. Second, state legislatures, tired of being ignored, began passing their own meth laws. This, in turn, drove the federal government to react to a drug it had ignored since Gene Haislip’s first failed campaign against meth at DEA, back when the Amezcua brothers were turning the drug into a blockbuster industry. Between the newspapers—mostly the Oregonian, in Portland—and the anger directed against Congress by state legislatures, a history of the federal government’s complicity in the meth trade was unearthed. What came into view is that pharmaceutical industry lobbyists had blocked every single anti-meth bill in the last thirty years with the help of key senators and members of Congress. Moved by so much bad press to do something immediately, Congress passed its first ever blockbuster meth law, the Combat Methamphetamine Act, in September 2006.
In some ways it was as though the United States was looking in a mirror, seeing itself in the rural towns to which methamphetamine had drawn the nation’s and the government’s gaze. Ironically, meth made Olwein’s connection with the rest of the country stronger and more visible than it had been for a long time. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Washington, D.C., where the drug’s effect on small-town America was now a salient political issue. The effect, as it registered in the public pages of national newspapers, was the kind of broad-scale unity that had never before existed, given that the drug had for ten years been regarded as a regional, not a national, phenomenon. Suddenly people in New York City knew what—if not exactly where—I was talking about when I mentioned meth in Oelwein, Iowa. The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Des Moines Register, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Los Angeles Times in running stories about crank almost daily. The nation seemed to feel a shared and equal sense of outrage, whether over meth-induced increases in HIV among San Francisco’s and New York’s gay populations, or the apocalyptic violence that resulted from shifts in the meth market along the Texas-Mexican border. The message was that civilized society was falling apart, that people were going crazy, and that the proof was no longer just in the hinterlands; it was everywhere.
When Congress began debating the Combat Meth Act, it was without a trace of bipartisan rancor. Indiana Republican congressmen Mark Souder stood next to California Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein as they declared their moral obligation to take on meth and win. This seemed to be a macrocosm of what was happening in Oelwein, where Mayor Larry Murphy and the heretofore divided townspeople began to put aside their differences and rebuild. The message was that what was bad for the towns was bad for Washington, D.C., too; when it came to meth, everyone was working for the same thing. On a clear day, flying from New York to Los Angeles, or from Chicago to San Francisco, you might have looked at the small communities beneath the airplane in a different way, understanding better what they were up against, and in that way, you might have understood something of their vanishing place in the nation.
And then, just as suddenly as it started, the meth epidemic—along with the chance to understand what that epidemic really meant—was over. President George W. Bush’s National Drug Control Policy director, or so-called drug czar, John Walters, announced in August 2006 that “the war on meth,” for all intents and purposes, had been won. Shortly thereafter, the same newspapers that had briefly made the drug a cause célèbre began questioning whether meth had ever been an epidemic or just the creation of an overzealous media hungry for a g
ood story. The popular media’s brief but intense exploration of meth in rural America, highlighted by several documentaries on both cable and network television, also ended. As the drug went back to being a regional bogeyman, the rural United States went with it, taking its place once again in anonymity.
What remained, however, was a town (and a nation) with a drug problem. The need to keep looking remained as well. In meth’s meteoric rise into the national consciousness and its subsequent fall, there were many clues to its deeper meaning in American culture. The fault lines, whether or not they made headlines, still overlaid the national topography just as completely as before. And maybe more so. What continued to take shape for me was the portrait of a town that stood as a metaphor for all of rural America and its problems. That’s to say that the evolution of the meth epidemic had occurred in lockstep with the three separate economic trends that had contributed to the dissolution of small-town United States. By looking closely at the events of 2006, one can see the parallel trajectories of meth and small-town economics—the one rising, the other falling—dating back to the days of the Amezcuas. And the things that spurred this simultaneous rise and fall: the development of Big Pharmaceuticals, Big Agriculture, and the modern Mexican drug-trafficking business. To look closely at the history of meth from 1990 to 2006 is to see more clearly than ever what Nathan, Clay, Murphy, Jarvis, and Lori Arnold have always been, and continue to be, confronted by.
It’s important to understand how a government that had for upward of a decade completely ignored meth’s spread from the West Coast into the Midwest and the Gulf States suddenly became alarmed. And how, just as suddenly, newspapers with only sporadic interest in reporting on the drug became obsessed with it. In some ways, the driving force behind each was the same: Steve Suo’s work at the Oregonian. Suo had written his first crank story back in 2003 when, in researching Oregon’s foster care system, he came upon a statistic that startled him: Eight in ten children under the state’s care admitted that their parents used meth. It’s in that way that Suo’s interest in the story changed. At first his question was, “Why is there so much meth in Oregon?” Eventually Suo turned his attention to how the drug had gotten to Oregon. Answering that question led him to Washington, D.C., where he uncovered the causal connection between meth, the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. government. By the time Suo left the meth beat at the end of 2006, he’d written, along with other reporters, a combined 261 articles for the Oregonian in less than two years.
Nick Reding Page 11