Nick Reding

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

  Music visibly calms Clay, who smoked a pack and a half a day and drank heavily when I met him in 2005. Conversations could be measured not by minutes and hours, but in pots of coffee or cans of Bud Light. The breadth of his knowledge is staggering; keeping pace with the abrupt, multidimensional movements of his thoughts is like trying to keep track of a hummingbird. He is apt, say, while riffing on the history of Sioux medicine men, to be reminded of his favorite philosopher and to ask if you would like him to “distill Kant into three sentences, so that you’re with me here”—all this as an addendum to a Chomskyan critique of the critical-care program at Mercy Hospital. Clay’s is both an all-consuming and a consumptive energy; without music, he would be consumed for sure.

  Eighty-five percent of what Clay does as a doctor is to minister to one form or another of the mental illness that he says ravages Oelwein. Mostly, he says, it’s depression or anxiety, though there are plenty of bipolar people walking around town. In this way, says Clay, Oelwein is no exception; one in three Americans, by his estimate, suffer from some sort of psychological malady. It’s just that, in places like this, where there is no money for proper help, the effects are magnified. Every year, Oelwein’s population dwindles. The senior class at the high school shrinks, on average, by five students each fall. In 2004 alone, Oelwein lost $147,000 in tax revenues. It cannot absorb the social and financial cost of malady in the way that Waterloo (which lost $2 million in revenues in 2004) can. Nor is the problem aided, Clay says unapologetically, by the inbreeding and lack of education endemic to a place that is literally shriveling up: “How ’bout the first people to leave are of course the smart ones, and the people with enough money to get out. What you’re left with—and I’m sorry, okay?—doesn’t qualify Oelwein High as a feeder school for Harvard, okay?”

  What Clay laments more than anything is that there is so little recognition of the complexities Oelwein faces. No one wants to talk about what’s right in front of their eyes, a direct result, he says, of the tight-lipped, stolid stock that helped settle this area. A hundred years ago, it was socially advantageous for people not to speak of hardship, to act instead of to think. Now, says Clay, there’s too little money to act. Talking, at a minimum, he says, would help alleviate the sense of helplessness. Looking for ways to cope, many people head to the church, where the best intentions of a wonderful man like Darwin Moore, the minister at Grace Methodist, cannot be mistaken for real job training in social and psychological programs. Or, unable to afford a visit to Clay, never mind the antidepressants he might prescribe, people self-medicate in one of Oelwein’s eleven bars. That, he says, is where the meth dealers have easy pickings.

  The methamphetamine problem, along with the sense of desperation that had developed in Oelwein, is what finally drove Clay’s brother, Charlie, away. He got tired, he says, after seven years as public defender, of addicts showing up at his house at two o’clock in the morning, wondering why Charlie hadn’t gotten their friends out of jail. He didn’t feel that Oelwein was a safe place for his two middle-school-aged children to grow up. Charlie’s wife, says Clay, was ready to leave him. So Charlie moved an hour and twenty minutes south, to the city of Cedar Rapids, where he went into private practice. As Clay tells the story, his jaw muscles flex, as though he could chew his way through the details in order to come to an understanding of how this had happened. They’d come home together, after all, to be part of a solution in Oelwein. Now Charlie was gone. The town’s meth problem was the first thing that had separated the twins since medical and law school.

  Charlie left in 2003, the same year that their mother was killed in a car accident. Clay was bereft. With his own children now out of the house and Charlie and his mother gone, he felt totally alone. He poured himself into his work, redoubling his efforts to help his increasingly beleaguered patients. But with his insurance rates rising each year, he hasn’t found it easy. “Even if we get a hold of meth next month,” Clay told me in our initial phone conversation, “we’ve already got three human stages of history to clean up. But seeing that we won’t have it under control next month, we’re going to have four, five, maybe six generations to deal with: the medical problems, the psychological ramifications—we don’t even know what else. We’ve only settled into a long-term siege.”

  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 tur
moil, 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 circums
tance 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.