One day in May 2005, Roland Jarvis sat in the living room of his mother’s tiny new two-bedroom house in a wobbly three-legged La-Z-Boy covered in what looked like orange and brown carpeting. Outside, the world was fairly ecstatic with the first temperate, blue-skied day of spring following so much rain in northern Iowa. Nonetheless, Jarvis was watching TV with his back to the windows, the heavy curtains drawn tight against the warm sun. His face was thin beneath the baseball cap that he wore over his short blond hair. Visible in the semidarkness were fine bones and bright, shining blue eyes around which Jarvis’s skin had liquified and reset in swirls. He rubbed at where his nose had been and coughed violently. Jarvis had just smoked a hit of meth by holding the glass pipe with his rotted teeth. Using what was left of his right hand, he jostled the lighter until it wedged between the featureless nub of his thumb and the tiny protrusion of what was once his pinkie, managing somehow to roll the striker of the red Bic against the flint. Suddenly, his eyes were as wildly dilated as a patient waiting in the low light of an ophthalmologist’s office.
At thirty-eight, Jarvis had become a sort of poster boy around Oelwein for the horrific consequences of long-term meth addiction. Like Boo Radley, he hardly ever ventured out, though his was nonetheless a heavy presence in town. In two months, Jarvis was going back to jail, this time for possession of drug paraphernalia. (His sixty-year-old mother would be joining him in the lockup for the same offense.) He wore warm-up pants and wool socks. He was always cold, he said, and hadn’t slept more than three hours at a time in years. His skin was still covered in open, pussing sores. He had no job and no hope of getting one. The last time he “went uptown,” as he calls going to a Main Street bar, was eighteen months earlier. That night he was in his old hangout, the Do Drop Inn, when another customer hit Jarvis in the face because he wanted to know what it was like to slug a man with no nose.
“That,” says Jarvis, “kind of put a damper on my Saturday night fever.”
Nowadays, the one thing that could get him up and moving were the weekly visits he was allowed with his children, two girls and two boys, ages sixteen to nine. For the most part, he would accompany them to the town lake, out past the Country Corner Café, on the way south to Hazleton. There, weather permitting, Jarvis and his kids would fish for a few unsupervised hours, hoping to catch some bullheads and bluegills to fry for supper. Sometimes he would accompany the kids back to their mother’s home for that purpose. He and his ex-wife were, he says, still on pretty good terms, given what he’d done to their lives.
Jarvis speaks in a metaphorical language of addiction, honed over decades of repeating the same scenes in his mind like tapes on interminable loops. Tweakers are rats, crank is cheese, cops are cats. At the end of each story, all three end up in the same house, the same motel, or the same barn, where invariably something either very bad or very funny, or both, has just occurred. The venues for these stories are small towns and middling cities, from Oelwein to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Often the stories are compendiums of rural kitsch that, though they unfold over the course of many years, appear to stretch the year 1987 into several decades. In them, everyone drives a Corvette or a Trans Am and wears Porsche driving glasses. For Jarvis, it’s the memory of the cars, more than that of the days at a time spent having sex with teenage girls, or of the houses he bought and sold, or of the thrill of outwitting the cats, that remains the enduring emblem of how once—a long time ago, and however briefly—he’d finally arrived.
Jarvis’s mother has been listening from the kitchen as he speaks. Seen through a pall of cigarette smoke, backlit by the rays of sun pouring through the kitchen window, with her greasy black hair worn back off her steep, leather-brown face, she looks like a nineteenth-century Apache in a sepia-tone portrait. For the past few hours (if not the past few years), she and a neighbor have been playing gin rummy and drinking cans of Hamm’s beer. Looking at her son now, she calls out, “Tell the man the truth, Roland.”
Summing up his years as a batcher, Jarvis says dutifully, and loud enough that his mother can hear, “It was all a big mess. I lost everything of any value.” His face, however, tells another story. For, as he remembers, it’s the first time in hours that he has smiled.
CHAPTER 3
THE INLAND EMPIRE
As the weeks that I traveled around the Midwest, the Southeast, and California turned to months in the summer and fall of 2005, I was beginning to see meth in America as a function not just of farming and food industry trends in the 1980s and ’90s but also of changes in the narcotics and pharmaceuticals industries in the same period. It would take a few more years of watching what happened in Oelwein, and in the United States at large, before I completely understood what I was seeing. That, for instance, as economies had dwindled throughout the Great Plains and the Midwest, they had aligned a certain way in Southern California, and that the electrical current sweeping between these two increasingly unrelated American places, the coast and the middle, would presage what came to be called the “meth epidemic” thirty years later. So, too, would it take a while to see that the changes that linked Long Beach and Los Angeles with Oelwein were in fact changes tied to the emergence of the global economy. And that meth, if it is a metaphor for anything, is a metaphor for the cataclysmic fault lines formed by globalization.
Back in 2005, these things were just coming into focus as I went to Ottumwa, a town in southeast Iowa. It was in Ottumwa that the Midwest’s principal meth wiring had been installed, and to which the drug’s early advancement into Oelwein could be traced. If Oelwein was shaping up to be the face of meth in modern America, and an indicator of life in modern, rural America in general, then in Ottumwa there was a picture of Oelwein’s skeletal forebears. And eventually a picture of Oelwein’s future, though that part of the story was yet to evolve.
Like Oelwein, Ottumwa had for most of its history been a very prosperous place. Also like Oelwein, Ottumwa was a kind of economic outpost, a wealthy waypoint on the trade routes running between St. Louis, Chicago, and Omaha. Thanks to the Des Moines River, which runs right through the middle of Ottumwa, industry and transportation came quickly to the area once it was settled by a land rush in 1843. In 1850, John Morrell and Co. opened a flag-ship, state-of-the-art meat-processing plant in the center of town. By 1888, there were 10,500 miles of railroad track in Wapello County. Fifty-seven passenger trains on seven lines, the Burlington Railroad being the most famous, crossed the county every day. By the turn of the twentieth century, factories in Ottumwa made everything from boxcar loaders to cigars, and corn huskers to violins. By 1950, Ottumwa was home not only to over fifty thousand people but also to the largest air force base in the Midwest. Almost half the working-age men in town were in the employ of Hormel (the modern incarnation of John Morrell’s packing plant) or John Deere, the farm-equipment manufacturer, where workers could hope, at a minimum, to maintain a lower-middle-class existence.