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

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

True, such things did occur in some books but those subplots, bumps in the road. Besides, those weren't the books I was using as my Lonely Planet Guide to Suddenly Meeting Other People at Age 23. I'd been expecting something a little warmer, like the way the superwoman adored the dork in Get Smart and Bewitched. That was the rule as far as I knew: be a total passive dork and the superwoman will attach herself to you no matter how stupid you act, in fact the stupider the better.

All of which was going according to plan. So to see her that morning, her and that Deadhead dishwasher she worked with at Fondue Fred's, coming out of the breakfast place all stumbled over each other … I mean, a Deadhead! A dishwasher! Not the done thing at all! Who do I kill now? You can't kill a Deadhead dishwasher because he doesn't even count. Killing Heidi was the obvious answer, but that would have been like killing the last warmth in a cold world. Back to my room, back to reading Wodehouse and National Geographic for the tenth time in a row.

Therefore, Q.E.D., I was going to become a speed dealer. If one stupid fairytale turns out to be total nonsense, what does the young man do? If you answered, "Wake up and face reality," you don't remember what it was like being a young man. You just go to the next entry in the catalogue of lies you can use to destroy your life.

So much lying, so much self-serving crap, that even while borrowing my parents' car to commit a felony, I saw myself as their avenger against the horde of hick philistines who had outcompeted us in the California economy. I loved them, now that nobody else wanted me. Boo-fucking-hoo. All kinds of weepy selfpitying fantasies. With the money from the first batch of meth that Butler and I were going to cook up, I'd get them a new car. No, two new cars. My mother always wanted a Cadillac, and though I would have preferred something foreign, she and my father were loyal to the end, in this as in the Church, Detroit believers. So a Cadillac it would be. A Cadillac of revenge, a Sinn Fein, Catholic Cadillac that would radiate denouement and retribution and a lot of other Latinate stuff that they'd be sorry about. Heads would roll, as they did before I could get to sleep at night.

Of course Butler was sitting across from me, front seat of my parents' wretched surplus cop Plymouth, indulging all this crap because he needed a backer. He didn't have the cash to start a lab of his own. Or the courage. He'd been running a speed lab for that annoying San Francisco band Animal Things, the one-hit wonders behind "Wanna buy some fucking heroin, wanna buy some fucking junk?" It was a catchy tune, remember? No? Local hit, I suppose.

I saw Animal Things once at Berkeley Square, pasty white kids, sneery. The singer had brown dreadlocks. Then after the first song he took them off. A wig! I couldn't get over it. It wasn't his hair at all.

See? That could've clued me in if anything was going to. It didn't. I was going to call this story something fancy but I think I'll go with the real title: Stupid. In fact, there's an Ernest movie with the best title I ever saw: Scared Stupid. That, as they say, is what I'm talking about.

If it hadn't been for Bongoburgers there would have been no speedlab for me. Bongoburgers was my first gang, my first friends. It was the apartment where Paul and Terry split the rent, and it was right above this Bongoburgers place. The first time I went there, Terry, who was Asian and therefore wellbred, made me a cup of coffee and gave it to me. There I was inside somebody's apartment and they were giving me coffee, like in a movie. And it got better from there.

It was a happy time. It really was. Funny, I have no problem going on and on about any stupid gory misery you care to name, but it makes me very queasy using that word "happy." It's not my field, as academics say. There's a lot of that kind of lying going around, people who were happy once pretending their lives have been all grim. You don't see that with people from really awful places. That's why African music is always cheerful; they don't need to compare scars. They'd rather dance.

So I'll try to describe what happiness was, at Bongoburgers. I can tie it back to this miserable story in the end, because if I hadn't been happy there, I'd never have had the ego to decide to become a bad person. Back when I was alone and despised by the hippies, even suicide seemed too good for me. But when people have liked you, people outside the doomed family that stands for Ireland and the Church and the Ice Age mammals and everything else great and gone -- then you can dream of doing bad things.

Bongoburgers was actually Persian Burgers. A fast food place on Dwight Way in Berkeley. The name Bongoburgers came from the Free Speech days, probably, the whole bongo-drums beatnik era celebrated in bad murals south of campus, cops teargassing hippies and all you could think was, "Good, good, aim for the heads with that canister, you wimps!" That's what I thought anyway, walking to the train alone every night.

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

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