Free Nick Reding by Methland: The Death, Life of an American Small Town Page B

attempt to analyze how acceptable a drug is. For eight decades, from the time Nagayoshi Nagai first synthesized
     meth in 1898 until the early 1980s, meth was a highly acceptable drug in America, one of the reasons being that it helped
     what Nathan Lein calls “the salt of the earth”—soldiers, truck drivers, slaughterhouse employees, farmers, auto and construction
     workers, and day laborers—work harder, longer, and more efficiently. It’s one thing for a drug to be associated with sloth,
     like heroin. But it’s wholly another when a formerly legal and accepted narcotic exists in a one-to-one ratio with the defining
     ideal of American culture. Meth’s most disastrous physical and psychological effects develop more slowly than its rate of
     addiction; one’s lucidity and ability to concentrate actually increases short-term. Add this to the fact that ours is a culture
     in which the vagaries of hard work are celebrated as indicators of social worth, and the reasons to do crank are in fact quite
     often—initially, at least—more numerous and compelling than the reasons not to do it. So much so that Patricia Case calls
     meth “the most American drug.” In the metric that took hold of Oelwein at the beginning of the 1980s with the farm crisis—and
     extended through the next decade with the complicated demise of Iowa Ham—the ability to make something in your basement that
     promised work, success, wealth, thinness, and happiness was not necessarily too good to be true.
    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,