Clay Hallberg had labored during much of 2006 and part of 2007 to shore up Oelwein’s critically thin addiction-counseling alternatives. He’d succeeded in helping to convince the Iowa Child Health Specialty Clinics to open an office just two doors down from the Hallberg Family Practice. Staffed with four women, all of whom were capable of offering help to children whose parents were addicted to meth, the clinic had quadrupled the available assistance in a town that—though it had come a long way in three short years—still had little recourse for addicts and their families. But it was a start, and by playing a role in getting the clinic to Oelwein, Clay felt involved in his town’s revival. It was also a means by which Clay alleviated the guilt he felt for resigning as chief of staff at Mercy, and for his increasing desire to shut the doors of the seventy-year-old Hallberg Family Practice.
Clay had been sober for over eighteen months. It lent him, he said, increasingly clear insight into things, some of which was quite painful. Part of that insight was that he’d been, as he put it, cutting his nose to spite his face regarding medicine. So instead of fighting two battles he couldn’t win—namely, against the insurance companies and against what he saw as immoral hiring practices at Mercy Hospital—he’d rolled up his sleeves and gotten back to basics, working on a contract basis in a couple of rural emergency rooms. The money was good, the excitement level was high, and the rewards were immediate. Rather than having too little time to treat someone living through the prolonged hell of meth addiction or cancer, Clay could concentrate on just getting someone through the afternoon, or keeping him alive till morning. It was the medical equivalent of the Alcoholics Anonymous philosophy that had saved Clay’s life: one day at a time.
Despite these developments, in the harsh, fluorescent reflection of Clay Hallberg’s continuing sobriety, his life did not look the same to him as it had when he’d been drinking. Some aspects were worse than they’d ever been, said Clay. His blood pressure had gotten so out of control that he began fearing for his well-being. What was becoming clear to him in his sobriety, too, he said, was that his marriage needed some serious attention. Or rather, it had long ago to him begun needing attention, and he was just now able to see this. The man who promoted Whorfian linguistics and the fluid communicative harmonies of music had found he’d lost the ability to speak meaningfully to his wife of twenty years. When they talked, he said, they made no sense to each other.
One evening after dinner at Las Flores, Clay and I went across the street to Von Tuck’s Bier Haus. More than any other place in Oelwein, Von Tuck’s captures the town’s desire for upward mobility by taking the drinking tradition of the northern Midwest and elevating it to a level of finery unseen anywhere else in town. Even a sober doctor can feel at home there. Top-shelf whiskeys line Von Tuck’s polished bar, it’s not loud, and the bartender is nice even if he doesn’t know you. It was here, while drinking a Diet Coke and chain-smoking Marlboro Lights, that Clay described his most recent epiphany.
“I’m a bastard, okay?” he said.
I waited a moment, thinking there was more. There wasn’t.
“That’s it. That’s the deal: I’m a shit, and now I can stop.”
This insight wasn’t visited on him in a blinding flash of light, said Clay. There was no collision, the likes of which had killed his mother three years ago. This leap of understanding did not, like the Clydesdale, bolt unseen from the highway ditch in the middle of the night, crushing the vehicle of Clay’s intellect, shattering the emotional windshield through which he’d long viewed himself. It was not a euphoric realization, not like taking all his neurotransmitters and putting them in a shot glass and swallowing them at once. Biochemistry, hydrology, genealogy, physics, Egyptology—the truth was so much more real to him than any of that had ever been.
His blood pressure, he said, had gone way down. “I’m like a fucking lizard, it’s so low,” he said. He was focused in the ER, not worrying about making mistakes, or about trying to save people who hadn’t even walked in off the street yet.
“I drove myself to drink,” he said. “I probably drove everyone around me crazy. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m not anyone but me. When you’re a shit, you think you’re other people. You think for other people. All I have to do is not that. The rest’ll work out.” He lit another cigarette. “The thing is, I could never believe that. I didn’t know how. But now I do.”
A few more businesses had opened in Oelwein by that December, including Lou Ann’s Quilt Garden over by J & L Sports, across from the building where Marie Ferell had been bludgeoned to death by Tonie Barrett back in 2005. Lou Ann ran quilting classes out of a building that she and her husband bought, spurred on by the promise of tax breaks that the city council had passed the year before. Now Lou Ann not only had her shop but also rented the two apartments above it. Her quilting retreats were booked three years in advance, mostly by middle-aged women who went with Lou Ann to Minneapolis or Chicago or Kansas City to quilt, see movies, and eat at good restaurants for a few days at a time. The Quilt Garden made for some nice cross-traffic with the nearby Morning Perk, which had expanded its coffee and breakfast business with an adjacent knitting and collaging shop.
Out at the Industrial Park, the Oelwein campus of Northeast Iowa Community College and the accompanying Regional Academy for Math and Science (RAMS) were nearly complete. Classes were scheduled to start in the fall of 2008. With the call center still hemming and hawing about whether to set up shop in India or Oelwein, Murphy had begun construction of a Tech Spec Center, as it was called, just east of the RAMS building. Meantime, the old 160,000-square-foot Donaldson factory, across the street from the Cop Shop, had two brand-new occupants after being empty for nearly two decades. One was a wind turbine company called Sector 5; the other was a battery manufacturer called East Penn. Between them, they employed nearly one hundred Oelweinians at hourly rates of fifteen to twenty-four dollars, which is way above the county average.
In reward for his efforts, Larry Murphy had been elected to his fourth mayoral term on November 2, 2007. Murphy’s renewal efforts were far from done; if anything, his conviction had redoubled, and he was more consumed than ever by his town. Next on his agenda was to expand what he’d come to call the “downtown streetscape” to twelve blocks from the present seven. This would include more sewer and water improvements, new plantings and repaired streetlights, and converting more abandoned buildings into attractive new commercial spaces. Murphy wanted trails in the parks and two city-run indoor swimming pools to help his “community wellness” agenda. He also wanted the twelve-block area to have more efficient geothermal heating and cooling, in order to cut energy costs. He wanted to begin several more housing initiatives, which was still a euphemism for razing abandoned and low-income rental properties. To this end, Murphy was pressuring Nathan to run for city council. Land ordinances had, under Murphy’s direction, been enforced by the police. If Nathan became councilman, Murphy would have an ally in supporting his initiatives.
The idea that Nathan would run for city council was obviously another step toward grooming him to “someday run this town,” as Murphy once told me. Nathan was undecided. For one thing, he insisted that he was an intensely private person and that politics would never suit him for that reason alone. For another thing, Nathan liked to say that he disliked almost everyone he met, though to see Nathan smile his way through a crowd is to be certain that quite the opposite is true. In fact, his insistence on playing the cantankerous outsider is precisely what would give Nathan a chance in the April election and beyond, if he—as Clay Hallberg posited—ever decided to run for state congress.
It is worth noting that Nathan’s is an inherently rural sensibility, insofar as he cultivates a quiet dissatisfaction with the outside world from a self-conscious remove. The defensiveness in his insistence that he “doesn’t like people” is as palpable as the yearning in his habit of saying, “This is just Oelwein; it’s not New York.” Watch Nathan work a meet-and-greet at Von Tuck’s
Bier Haus in the preelection season as he weighs his desire to run for city council, and you’ll know that, far from not liking anyone, he likes everyone, and wishes not to be made vulnerable for it. It’s his longing for approval and inclusion that makes him distrustful.
Here Nathan’s behavior is allegorical. A decade ago, Oelwein was the butt of one of Jay Leno’s jokes on The To night Show. In the intervening decade, meth came to signify the distillation of poverty and disenfranchisement in America to which Leno spoke, which is to say it came to signify the rural United States, and ultimately, the fullness of its outsider status. Oelwein was the standard bearer. In the wake of this, the town’s—like Nathan’s—posture is a careful balance of pride and defensiveness.
Not long after Jay Leno’s joke, Larry Murphy began trying to find a place for Oelwein in a new world. It took Murphy a considerable amount of time to build consensus for his first, giant step, which was to regain some balance—via large-scale economic reforms—against the unmovable weight that a drug had come to represent. The town’s fight for balance can be seen everywhere—in the downtown improvements and the dark streets at night in the Ninth Ward, and in Nathan’s and Clay’s and Jarvis’s and Major’s private lives. Jarvis had ruined his life for inclusion in the glamour of all that Oelwein wasn’t in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the Corvettes and the money and the promise of what people like Lori Arnold and Jeffrey William Hayes seemed to offer. Major had nearly ruined his life a decade later for inclusion in the Family. Clay Hallberg, in reward for having come home, wanted inclusion in his father’s world, in which a town GP didn’t have to fight the hospital and the insurance companies. In a way, it seems that, like all these people, the rural United States has been fighting for balance since the early 1980s and for acceptance in a nation intensely divided between the middle and the coasts. In the last decade, meth has become an apt metaphor for the division. And those conflicts even exist within Oelwein, where meth once again provides the lexicon: either you are a shitbag tweaker or you aren’t. And while there is no reason to be unfriendly about it—no reason, that is, not to exchange pleasantries on the way into court—every time Nathan put a tweaker in jail, it pushed the balance slightly more in the right direction.
In November 2007, Murphy had organized what he called a Community Burial Ceremony of Gloom and Doom. What was contained in the coffin carried by a procession of townsfolk were the symbolic remnants of Oelwein’s economic and social helplessness. What Murphy wanted to make clear, however corny it seemed, was that people should no longer take suffering as a precondition of their lives. Murphy wanted people to fight, and to be aggressive and prideful about the rebuilding. As far as what the change in one town might do relative to the direction of the rest of the country, Murphy and Nathan and Clay were all too aware that what happened in Oelwein was just a drop in the bucket. There was a feeling akin to that of a city-state under siege. Oelwein was repelling the invaders, but that didn’t mean they were going away. The lack of good jobs was certain to remain, drug traffickers were likely to keep gaining a foothold, and the population would dwindle, whether or not corn prices stayed high and the local businesses all switched to geothermal heating.
As Nathan and I talked about this one evening, I asked him if he’d consider running for mayor once Murph was no longer in office. We were in his garage. The fire in the stove was out, and we were cutting kindling to get it going again.
“Yes,” said Nathan, “I would.”
It was one of the only times in two and a half years at that point that I heard Nathan speak of the future with an utter lack of equivocation. Larry Murphy had changed things, indeed.
CHAPTER 15
INDEPENDENCE
One night on that last trip to Iowa, I drove down to In dependence to see Major. When I arrived, he was babysitting his son Buck, who was now four years old. Major was still living with his parents, Joseph and Bonnie. That they trusted Major enough to go to a party that night was a great improvement since the summer of 2005. Back then, fresh off a horrible three years during which Major and his girlfriend would break into Steve and Brenda’s home to steal what they could in order to sell it to buy more meth, Major’s parents were afraid to leave him alone for even fifteen minutes. Now his parents were once again considering something they thought they’d never again have the chance to do: take one of their beloved fishing trips to Canada next summer.
When I got to his parents’ house, Major was drinking a beer and chewing tobacco as he prepared Buck’s supper of micro waved tomato and cheese pizza. Buck, once the child with the highest hair-follicle count of methamphetamine in the history of the state of Iowa, was watching TV from inside a fort he’d built by anchoring one side of a blanket beneath the couch cushions and the other side beneath heavy books on top of the coffee table. On both sides, he’d stacked cardboard bricks from the floor to the blanket-roof to make walls. Buck peered at the television out of a hole he’d left in the bricks. On TV, Bugs Bunny attempted to outwit Yosemite Sam, who in this version played the part of a French chef hell-bent on fricasseeing rabbit for dinner. Presently, Buck destroyed the fort he had created and marched into the kitchen.
“What?” said Major.
“Dinnertime,” said Buck.
“Because you’re the boss?”
“Yes,” said Buck. “And boss hungry.”
As Buck sat on the couch and ate, Major updated me on all that had been going on. Words like sex and beer and meth had to be spelled out, since Buck was in the stage where he repeated everything he heard, and was beginning to ask questions with difficult answers. All in all, said Major, Buck was doing very well. Developmentally, he was still ahead of the game. What two years before had been a personable habit of making eye contact and smiling shyly had morphed into a practice of holding one’s gaze while asking a question—“Who you?” he’d asked me when I walked in—and then maintaining eye contact while the answer came: the habit of a boss, for sure.
What had not changed since I’d last seen him, said Major, was the fear that one day, out of the blue, Buck would develop some kind of problem that was a direct result of Major’s heavy meth use. The idea of this—and that it might, no matter how many strides Major made in his life, become a sudden and crushing reality—grew inside Major like a benign tumor that could, at any moment, metastasize into an inoperable cancer. The very notion that innocent, tiny Buck might be victimized by his father’s past was still enough to make Major want to go and finish himself off with one last, superlatively freeing crank overdose.
Research regarding the long-term effects of meth exposure in children was, as it had been in 2005, still inconclusive. University of Toronto pharmacology professor Dr. Sean Wells told me, “It’ll be two decades before there are any firm findings,” since “long-term effects cannot be studied in the short term.” For Buck and Major, no news was good news. But the same lack of information also allowed Major’s imagination to reinforce his sense of guilt. It was a cruel fate for someone like Major, who so badly wanted to be liked that he had easily fallen under the sway of the Sons of Silence, to whom he still referred as the Family. Major was alone with his self-loathing, which at times extended to Buck, the bearer of his father’s sins, the vessel holding the despicable remnants of his parents’ all-too-present past.
Major said he still felt far from accepted by people in Independence. With the help of meth and the Family, he said he’d put himself at a far remove from most of American society, and this at times only further tempted him to return to his old life. The help Major got from his parents was remarkable, though their relationship continued to be fraught with difficulties. Buck’s mother was still meth-addicted and still living with the Family. Major knew it would be his undoing to have any contact with her, but he missed Buck’s mother horribly. Who else, really, could even begin to understand his situation?
Major was still on probation, still attending mandatory Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and still working a construction job to which he
was always having to find a ride; his license would remain suspended for another six months. The good news, he said, was that he had a job, and that each day he stayed clean, he was a step closer to being free of meth forever (he hoped) and to getting off probation. Once he could drive again he hoped to find a house for himself and Buck and maybe to pick up his studies at the community college where he’d left them for dead six years ago. One day, he said, he still hoped to become a machinist.
The bad news, said Major, was that he lacked anything in which to believe. He was working hard—at staying clean, at raising Buck, at making money. But without meth, Major found it impossible to feel, as he put it, “happy.” It was precisely the dilemma that Clay Hallberg had seen so many times in patients like Roland Jarvis. Even when Major did the right thing, he couldn’t quite believe in its rightness, for that thing didn’t satisfy him—meth did. The first time I spoke to Clay on the phone, he’d said that an entire generation of people was suffering from this, and that meth was less the culprit than the perfect metaphor. To get back to normal—that is, to begin once again to derive meaning from the humdrum facts of life—might take years. Clay’s own recent epiphany was essentially that intellect cannot substitute for instinct—knowing is not feeling. In the same way, Major’s self-admonishment that he ought to be grateful is no substitute for the neurotransmitters—and the feeling of well-being they create—that he can no longer produce. In the meantime, the gravitational pull of meth, with its pyrotechnic promise of biochemical ecstasy, could be overwhelming. Major, standing in his kitchen on a Saturday night, seemed to be searching aggressively, almost violently, for order, even as he was resolved to the fact that he would not find it. I asked him if he was ready to revert to his given name, Thomas, or if he still preferred his nickname.
“It’s not a nickname,” he said. “It’s who I am.”
Nick Reding Page 23
