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

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

I'd warned my parents to stay away for the week it would take to cook, but what if they decided I needed a break from all that study and dropped in to see me? If they found me among the bubbling retorts … I'd just kill myself. That even had a certain appeal.

Or if the cops … that was far, far worse. Even killing myself might not expiate that. It was so awful it crushed my head like a recycled can every time I thought of it. So I wouldn't think about it. It didn't seem to happen in the movies much. The cops hardly figured in either Scarface or Risky Business. Surely that was some consolation.

Step one was to tape paper over all the windows. Step two was to explain the suspicious taping of the windows with painting. I'd brought paint for the outside of the house. The paint would disguise the smell, I hoped, though I had no idea what cooking speed smelled like and Butler had been oddly reluctant to dwell on that particular issue. He had said enthusiastically in the beginning that there were some really excellent sophisticated ventilation systems you could buy that totally masked the smell, but when he heard how much money I had to invest in the scheme -- he had none, the money and the house were my contribution while he supplied the know-how -- he'd changed his tune and said we'd just tape up the windows and hope for the best. I had a private plan, in addition to this: I would personally try to inhale as deeply as I could for the week the stuff was cooking so that I could process as much as possible of the fumes through my own lungs so they wouldn't get out and draw cops.

That was the longest week of my life. Pure terror, and I’m a fear specialist. There is no terror like the terror that follows a loud knock on the door while you’re cooking up a batch of speed.

And the knocks kept coming, the whole long seven days I sat there leaning over the bathtub checking the thermometer in the potion bubbling over the bensen burner. Because the local paper, the Benecia Herald, was having a circulation drive. So several times a day, as I decanted some toxic precursor into some other highly flammable solvent, there would be an apocalyptic banging on the old front door. The knock that says: Cops. DEA. San Quentin. Maximum security. Life as the bespectacled bitch of your cellblock.

With each knock I had to go through the options. You could kill yourself immediately to avoid further embarrassment. We didn’t have a gun or anything; my silent (and absent) partner Butler wanted this to be the cool, non-violent kind of drug operation; but if you really wanted to die, there were about a dozen containers marked with skull and crossbones sitting around me. Just inhaling that stuff moved you up the actuarial tables, so if you actually drank it you’d probably start squirting black slime from both ends and finish up like a salted slug, a melted wad of poisoned mucus.

But each time, after considering the quick chemical quit option, I got up on wobbly legs and wobbled to the front door. A long walk. The bathroom where I was cooking was at the back of the old shotgun shack, and it took about a geological era to get to the front door. In my head I could hear the crackle of cop radios, but in retrospect that was probably just the first overtures of undiagnosed hypertension, tinnitus. Expecting to see big blue heavy-belted cops wavily reflected through the old pioneer glass of the front windows.

And every damn time, I’d open the door to find a a slackjawed hick brat reciting his Benecia Herald spiel in one memorized blurt. Each time I’d listen, fear-sweat from head to toe, to the wonderful opportunity I was being offered. Two months’ subscription for the price of about ten years off my life. If the Norns were watching, the old Swede bitches must have laughed themselves into a stroke at the door gag, then wiped their smoke-bleared eyes and snipped about a third off my life string. When I’d close the door and listen for the kid going away, I could actually feel my heart for the first time in my life, feel it scrambling to get out like a rabbit in a sinking sack.

A few years later, New Zealand Immigration forced me to go to a cardiologist before they’d let me immigrate, and the doctor, this mean, loud, conceited bastard, would check my chest and then yell, “You’ve hurt your heart! How did you hurt your heart?” He made it sound like a felony. There was no way I could play him that scene, of the paperboys banging on the front door while the Bunsen burner bubbled up a life sentence for me in the tub. I just shrugged, reinforcing his clear belief that I was not just fat and defective but stupid as well. “How did you hurt your heart?” Sounds almost like one of those soppy eighties lyrics, but not the way he said it. More like, “Did you break that vase?” Stout denial. After a while he got bored yelling and signed the papers, noting only that “Mr. Dolan could benefit from several lifestyle changes.” Doc, you don’t know how right you were, you miserable runt martinet pig.

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

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