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

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

The smell from the tub was so awful I tried to avoid opening the door at all. The first thing I did, after shoving my mother’s unsellable antiques aside to make a place for my sleeping bag, was to tape all the windows shut from the inside. That was our security system, our fume-reduction scheme. And of course I slyly started painting the house to offer a visible excuse for any chemical fumes -- which also allowed me good reason to tape cardboard over all the windows. Made the place a little dark -- there was no electricity -- but safety first!

But cooking speed doesn’t smell much like paint. It’s more like cat piss, if the bladders of all the stray cats in Golden Gate Park were squeezed into a pot left on high on the kitchen stove for about three days. Every piece of old furniture in that place, every inch of the peeling wallpaper, was basted by those sickening fumes, rendering the whole house unsaleable forever. Oh yeah, I was going to be Robin Hood of the Meth Cookers, buying my poor parents new cars with the proceeds. All I ended up doing was ruining the only investment we had, that house in Benecia. The first time my parents came in, after we’d semi-cleaned up the evidence, they retched and staggered out the door. “What did you do in here” A reasonable question, answered, as usual, with a shrug and a sneer. Purgatory is a sweet idea, but I don’t believe in it. A few eons in Purgatory and I could make up for that scene -- too late now. We couldn’t sell it; robbers took every last “antique”; the city bought it for nothing, some weed violation. My fault. Live with that and see what happens to your blood pressure.

The cooking was simple enough. It was the noises. Sirens. When you’re legal, you don’t even hear sirens. When you’re leaning over a speed cooker, you become somewhat sensitized to them. The Doppler effect becomes what Stevens would call “a major reality”: if the howl is dropping into tenor range, then your heart can subside to a mere 200 or so beats per minute, but if it’s rising, you have to die one of those thousand deaths the coward is heir to. It’s actually more like a hundred thousand, if you were to count. How did you hurt your heart? Sirens, doc. See, the Benecia Hospital was just around the corner. Not so easy, when you’re cooking speed, to tell the difference between ambulance and cop sirens.

When Butler showed up halfway through the week to see how my felony cooking school was going, he made light of my siren anxiety. He had a way of laying down the law in his pedantic-nerd accent. He was the only Californian I’d ever met whose accent was even more pretentious than mine. The first time he showed up with Doug (trash of a feather), I tried to figure out what country he came from, asked Doug: “Uh, I think Daly City?” It was the accent of Pretentia, and we’d had many a chat in its high nasals, decreeing the proper line on many aspects of existence as we sipped Terry’s instant coffee at the Bongoburgers table and negotiated our little plan to become crime lords. When I told Butler about the sirens, he sniggered -- you don’t see much sniggering, but he was an old hand at it -- and explained, “Oh no. No, no, no sirens. There wouldn’t be sirens. They’d come in both doors at once, front and back, with battering rams! Through the windows, too. Dozens of them. Sirens!” he chuckled at my naivete.

Butler’s cleverest little scheme was what ruined us completely. He was like that, just clever enough to wreck everything he touched. He and his fellow genius Pink Cloud the Dealer had this brainstorm: let’s cook Benzedrine instead of Meth! They’ll never know the difference! And Benzedrine only takes seven days, not eight like Meth! That had a certain appeal to me, since I was the one with the fingerprints all over the glassware. Any reduction in days spent listening to the sirens and going to the door to refuse subscription offers seemed like a good idea to me. And I didn’t know the difference between Meth and Benzedrine; I didn’t like speed back then. Strictly business.

Butler’s clinching argument was classic nasal nerd pedantry: “Besides, studies have shown that Benzedrine is better than Meth, I like it better anyway. Studies -- Benzedrine increases IQ by 25 points and Meth only by 15.” He was one of those fuckups with potential, jerks who hit their peak at the SAT and talk a lot about IQ because you always find them leeching somebody else’s pizza and coffee. He looked like Clark Kent, a saleable look with girls at the edge of the postpunk deal, but he was a Clark Kent who never turned into much.

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

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