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 turmoil, 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.