Fear and Anxiety in the Speed Lab: My Disastrous Attempt at Meth-Making

By John Dolan, Buffalo Beast. Posted April 9, 2009.

But then came Reagan and we all changed our minds. I don't know how or why, and when I try to recall nothing resembling argument comes to mind. The movies instructed us, the columns in the SF papers instructed us, and cars and houses and sheer funds became sexy, in a couple of years. You had to adjust.

Hence me, sitting in my parents' house in Benecia all alone with three boxes of retorts, the chemical kind, and beakers, and other glassware that we'd bought in disguise at the chemical wholesaler on that freeway access road. Butler helped me unload them when we drove up in my parents' old purple cop-surplus Plymouth, and then he'd had me drive him back to Bongoburgers in Berkeley. He was going to stay there for the seven days it would take to cook up the stuff. I had his recipe, photocopied from an old German chemist's notes, now banned by the DEA. I'd stay in Benecia while he held the fort in Berkeley.

That's how dumb I was. Mister Felony, sitting there cooking up the stinkiest and most toxic drug known to man by myself while Butler had cappuccino and read the paper at Mediterraneo on Telegraph.

The excuse I gave Terry and Marian and the rest of my friends at Bongoburgers was that I needed to work on my Ph.D. dissertation in seclusion. It made no sense to any of them, but they were busy at their own avid, senseless lives, all of which have turned out at least as badly as mine.

I was halfway through the Sade dissertation. I'd been planning to write on Wallace Stevens, whom I loved, whose poems I'd memorized long before anybody else thought they were any good, but I talked myself out of that wimpy topic and into one that would guarantee no hiring committee would ever even touch my application: the novels of the Marquis de Sade. Nobody else had really admitted reading them as porn, which I'd been doing since the lesbian couple who kept me as a platonic pet had given me Justine as a consolation prize, something to wank to while they shut the bedroom door and went about their strenuous business. By this time I'd taught myself to read, though not speak French and had worked my way through the seven different versions of Justine Sade wrote in prison, sometimes one-handed because I was making notes in the margins, and sometimes one-handed for the more usual reason. That was my career plan, prove what a bad person I was by doing a dissertation on Sade, and not a clean distant "theory" one but a very hands-on approach. It did not occur to me, and remember I've titled this little opus "Stupid" for good reason, that this might not impress the hiring committees of Midwestern and southern universities when it came time for them to choose a new Rhetoric and Composition teacher. I thought they'd think the way I had: that it was brave and noble to have switched from the cheap easy topic of Stevens -- a man who wrote in my native language, in my own century, for God's sake! What wimpiness, level of difficulty zero! -- to a mad pervert prison scrawler who specialized in torture murders done in eighteenth-century French. How could anyone fail to hire the man who'd chosen the path less traveled by? Well, less traveled by anyone who cared to admit it, though I'm sure Sade has been read by a thousand times more people than have read Stevens as avidly as I did.

So there I was, all set up in the house in Benecia. I drove myself back to our house in Pleasant Hill, grunted at my father to drive me to Benecia, and was dropped off by him on the cracked steps of our "investment property." Even by the standards of that town, it was a sad house in the warm twilight. The cracked steps led up to a wooden porch that was dangerous, especially for someone like me (most of it was muscle, but not all). It creaked in criticism of my eating habits. My mother had warned me tactfully to be careful. I was about 225 at that time, and to keep myself from breaking the 230 barrier I worked out as often as I could make myself on a rowing machine, which I'd brought up in the Plymouth. There it was, through the warped old glass of the front windows, where I'd pushed aside some of the antiques to make room for it. My mother had tried to run this house as an antiques shop, with my insane fat Uncle Fred as her storekeeper, but that hadn't worked out too well, so it became a storehouse for all the antiques that couldn't be sold. It was crammed with them, sad things made of glass, incredibly sad old posters, sad old toys, sad furniture piled to the ceiling in some rooms. And the ceilings were falling down, spotted with mould and water damage. A paradise for spiders.

I went in and cleared a little space for my sleeping bag in the middle room, moving things out of the way, trying not to look at them too much because they broke my heart. Every old unsold and unwanted thing in the world. Every single defeat for whatever thousand years. Little spiders and not so little spiders crawled away from the mass of old whatever, was that some kind of Victorian baby carriage with a swollen-faced albino doll in it? Don't look if you can help it, just shove some room for the sleeping bag before the sun goes down. There was a kind of writing desk from some dead people that would do for writing my Sade chapter I'd promised to do this week. And there was a big bathroom at the back with a huge tub where I could cook the more flammable materials. Butler had warned me that "some are flammable and some are explosive, but flammable is actually worse." I didn't follow up on that information; I was planning mainly on hoping for the best.

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John Dolan is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).

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