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

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

He told me the cooking was going fine and ate his KFC dinner -- I had no money and even in the catpiss fumes of that place, I was slavering over the smell of that chicken skin, but the bastard ate every last flap of back skin, even the heartshaped twin lozenges of fat over the neckbone. I was living on Safeway bread and peanut butter.

How I managed to stay at 225 with that diet, God knows. Even the rowing machine didn’t help: every day I mounted it and shut my eyes and imagined myself on one of the galleys for the required 22 minutes, then toweled off. And never seemed to get any thinner, just squatter. Strong, sure; most people couldn’t even do one pull of that machine at my settings; but without aggression strength like that is just a heart attack in progress. And I had no aggression. Teach your kids aggression; keep them lean and tell them to use weapons. Skinny is fine if you have an eye for sharp objects and your own advantage. Shoulders are for peasant suckers, hewers of wood and drawers of minimum-wage.

It did turn out handy later, in the scaring-Butler-to-death phase. But we were still allies now, though we hated each other even then, or rather despised each other. He bragged at me and I in my disingenuous way bragged at him and we both considered the other pure trash. While still fearing each other in different ways: he knew I was insane, after Heidi laughed at my wooing, and could have crushed his skull, and I knew he had been on his high-school marksmanship team and knew a lot about poisons. What a team.

He came back again on the seventh day and took over for the final stages of the recipe. We moved the works into the living room and performed the sacrament. It was the only time I ever saw Butler show any respect for anything. He clearly loved this moment, the ritual hush of it. He held a test tube over the beak full of what I’d made and said slowly, “OK, watch this: it’s gonna make little flakes, white little flakes, and every flake, just -- OK, think of every little flake as a $20 bill. That’s how much they’re worth.”

He poured and whispered it again, praying to the liquid, while the little flakes began to drift toward the bottom of the jar:  “Every one a $20 bill.”

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

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