The question was how to portray the meth problem in the rural United States without stereotyping—and ultimately trivializing—the places to which meth had called such attention by the summer of 2005. Beavis and Butt-Head, Smurfers, mom and pop—meth users had entered the lexicon as caricatures, which ultimately stemmed less from the drug and more from the environs with which that drug was associated. Oddly, nowhere were the prejudices against—and parodies of—small-town meth addicts more explicit than in Oelwein itself, the town that, according to Clay Hallberg, Jay Leno once referred to in a Tonight Show monologue as “possibly the worst place in the world.” Even Nathan Lein struggled with the temptation to see the people he prosecuted as “shitbags.” In some ways it seemed that the meth epidemic only added to a sense of isolation in Oelwein, as though the world was happening everywhere but there.
Viewing meth as a crime story vastly oversimplifies the problem. Similarly, Clay Hallberg had made it clear to me in our very first conversation that there was a lot more to this story than a drug and its effects. That drug stood for something. Now I was beginning to see what Clay had meant. Meth represented, in the words of Craig Reinarman, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz and an expert on drug epidemics, “sociological fault lines.” Back-to-back nights—one at the Do Drop Inn and the next at a party at Clay Hallberg’s—painted these fault lines in stark distinction. What became particularly clear was that, despite one’s best intentions, the divisions fostered by a drug epidemic seem to run along the lines of class—or at least along the perceptions of class. Major is not what’s considered to be a “typical” meth addict, since he’s from a successful family. And yet, because he was drug-addicted, he’s considered to be less by his own father and by Nathan Lein, who grew up far poorer than Major.
Douglas Constance is a rural sociologist at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Constance puts Reinarman’s point in a different context when he says that the United States is “psychological, not a sociological nation.” What he means is that we will always hold the individual responsible over the group, blaming the drug addict instead of investigating the environment in which he grew up, and (conversely) celebrating the quarterback above the team following a win. In a small town, the distance between the winner and the loser is negligible, though the instinct to insulate is just as strong as it is in New York City. What connects people in New York and in Benton, Illinois, in fact, is that both resist believing that they have anything in common. Major’s father seemed to associate himself automatically with his grandchild over his son. In a similar manner, what Nathan Lein must every day remind himself is that he does, in fact, share many things with Roland Jarvis.
The extension of Constance’s analysis is that during a drug epidemic, instinct demands that we find something wrong with those who are addicted; the epidemic in effect tricks us into thinking that the relatively small number of addicts are anomalies, even as we acknowledge the drug’s large-scale presence. In August 2005, Newsweek printed a now-famous series of photos of meth addicts, whose faces first seemed to age and then practically to disintegrate over time. I remember thinking the pictures looked like propaganda paintings from World War II of German soldiers, or “Huns,” who had been deliberately dehumanized. Similarly, the addicts shown in Newsweek were so gaunt and lifeless that they seemed utterly disengaged from humanity. Those photos served in some way to distance not only the addicts themselves but also the rural United States, from which the addicts invariably came, from the nation at large. For me, a true chronicle of the height of the meth years from 2005 to 2008 must begin with a town and all its people. If meth alone were to define Oelwein—and through it, the entire small-town United States—the truth would be hopelessly obscured. And the truth is, Clay and Major, Nathan and Roland, Murphy and Lori and the people in the Do Drop Inn—these people are us.
Among the regulars at the Do Drop Inn are Josh and Ben, two obese, bike-riding nineteen-year-olds who more or less control the two seventy-five-cent pool tables. There is also Lisa, an unemployed, near sighted epileptic known on the Oelwein karaoke circuit as Flipper; and Sophie, who by twenty-four was in a coma following a car accident, from which she emerged a year later having to once again learn to talk, walk, and eat, and whose social outlets are composed of walking her cat on a leash every night to McDonald’s and then heading over to drink Diet Pepsi at the Do Drop Inn. Add to this a rotating gallery of white supremacist skinheads, tweakers, whiggers (the local moniker for white kids who wear the long, baggy clothing associated with urban blacks), bikers, and farm kids, and the Do Drop, in Clay Hallberg’s formulation, can feel at times very much like an unsupervised outpatient clinic.
There is method to the mayhem, however. The Do Drop’s owner, Mildred Binstock, is more den mother than boss, and knows pretty much everything about everyone who comes in. Mildred has pretty olive skin and dark brown eyes. She wears blouses in wild, colorful prints, has appliquéd eyebrows, and is not someone who shies away from lipstick. At five-feet-eleven Mildred is what might be described as well fed: not fat, exactly, but not without a predilection for chicken tenders either. She is sixty years old and has never married. She does not drink, and she’s never smoked a cigarette, despite having worked from five P.M. to two A.M. nightly at the Do Drop Inn since she bought the place in 1984. That, says Mildred, was two years before what she describes as the “schnapps revolution,” which accounts for the prodigious amount of flavored DeKuyper’s behind the bar in peach, blackberry, and butterscotch, which she maintains nearly doubled her liquor sales.
Back in 2005, someone at the Do Drop Inn was getting busted—for assault, selling meth, fighting, or contributing to the delinquency of a minor—about once every two weeks on average. Most recently, the police went upstairs to one of the three floors where Mildred rents rooms weekly and monthly and kicked down the door to find a seventeen-year-old girl in flagrante delicto with a forty-year-old man. On the table next to them was the eight-ball of crank she’d just sold him. When Nathan Lein took me to the Cop Shop on my first day in Oelwein, I told him my plan to hang out at the Do Drop, in hopes of meeting any of the addicts and dealers as they appeared in mug shots on Chief Logan’s computer screen, Nathan said, “Good luck. Even cops won’t go in there alone.”
Mildred watches the Fox News Channel whenever she is not asleep. She can tell you what shows are on at what times on a twenty-four-hour schedule. She refers to her decorating style as either High Amish Kitsch or Late Victorian Clutter. In front of an enormous television flanked by red lace curtains, Mildred’s customers sit at formal dinner tables complete with high-backed dining room chairs decorated with Christmas lights. Behind the bar is a smoke-glass mirror in which, if you’re observant, you can see the ever-frugal Mildred stealthily reuse the straw from one customer’s finished whiskey and Coke in the fresh vodka tonic of another. The walls represent five decades of yard-sale finds: mounted fish, vintage pieces of bank china, calendars dating back to the Johnson administration. A sign stapled above the door to the kitchen reads “My office! No one allowed but ME!” Above the door is another television, which is often tuned to the man Mildred refers to as “my number-one honey”: Geraldo Rivera.
In Mildred’s estimation, Mayor Murphy and Chief Logan were crooks. They were what was wrong with Oelwein, pure and simple. The more ordinances they passed trying to rid the town of meth, the more Mildred considered them to be infringing on her civil rights. She was not alone. From an anecdotal perspective, Oelwein back in 2005 was deeply factioned regarding the police, the mayor, and Nathan Lein and his boss, county attorney Wayne Sauer. The upshot was that, in a poor town where half of all commercial space sat unoccupied, Mildred Binstock was not going to take kindly to police action in her bar. She was barely making it as it was, working seven days a week in an unending series of shifts that lasted deep into the night. Clay Hallberg, Nathan Lein, and Roland Jarvis all told me that more meth got sold at the Do Drop Inn than at any other bar in Oelwein. When I pressed Mildred about this, she insisted she was being set up. Then she added cryptically that, in her opinion, “The police are canoodling with the bad elements of this burg.”