Nick Reding Read Free

Louis. There, they meet with great masses that have moved north along the Mississippi
     River, just as thousands of people have done, my grandmother included: she left an Ozark mountain subsistence farm along Ebo
     Creek, Missouri, and came looking for a better life on the fertile floodplain that surrounds St. Louis. Not far from where
     the two strands of my family came together, there’s Carlyle Lake, and the little town of Greenville, where I have always felt
     at home. Somehow, despite having run across meth in small towns all over the Mountain and Middle West, I had persisted in
     thinking that the area where I grew up was somehow immune to its presence. That all changed one night in Greenville.
    I was in Ethan’s Place, a bar to which I’ve retired for many years after duck hunting. There, I met two men whom I’ll call
     Sean and James. Sean was a skinhead. He’d just a few days earlier been released from the Illinois state penitentiary after
     serving six years for grand theft auto and manufacture of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute. He was a thin and
     wiry six feet one, 170 pounds, with a shaved head and a predictable mixture of Nazi tattoos. He was twenty-six years old.
     James was black, twenty-eight years old, and a heavily muscled six feet three. His frame was less sturdy, it seemed, than
     his burden, for James moved with a kind of exhausted resignation, like someone who suffers from chronic pain. For the last
     six years, James had been serving with the Army Airborne, first in Afghanistan, where he participated in the invasion of that
     country; then in Iraq, where he was also a member of the initial offensive; and finally, as a policeman back in Afghanistan,
     where he’d found himself in the curious position of protecting people who had been shooting at him a couple of years before.
     Like Sean, James had been in a sort of prison, and he was finally home.
    Shared history is stronger than the forced affiliations mandated by jail or the military, and pretty soon James and Sean,
     the black and the neo-Nazi, talked amiably about all the people they knew in common. They drank the local specialty, the Bucket
     of Fuckit, a mixture of draft beer, ice, and what ever liquor the bartender sees fit to mix together in a plastic bucket.
     As they played pool, James stalked around the table, shooting first and assessing the situation later, each time hitting the
     balls more aggressively. The contours of his face formed themselves into a look of desperate perplexity beneath the shadow
     of his St. Louis Cardinals cap. Why, he seemed to be thinking, will the balls not go in?
    Sean, too, moved around the table with a kind of pent-up aggression. Whereas James’s muscular shoulders sagged in defeat beneath
     his knee-length Sean John rugby shirt, Sean’s movements were fluid and decisive inside his Carhartts. His confidence was palpable.
     The enormous pupils of his blue eyes brimming with lucid possibility, Sean easily crushed James in the game of pool. Sean
     was riding the long, smooth shoulder of a crank binge.
    As I shot pool and talked with James and Sean over several nights, it hit me with great force that meth was not, in fact,
     following me around. Nor was it just a coincidental aspect of life in the places I’d happened to be in the last half decade,
     in Gooding or Los Angeles or Helena. Meth was indeed everywhere, including in the most important place: the area from which
     I come. There, it stood to derail the lives of two people with whom, under only slightly different circumstances, I could
     easily have grown up.
    Meeting Sean and James took away the abstraction that I’d felt regarding meth since 1999. In the wake of what I’d seen in
     Greenville, writing a book about the meth epidemic suddenly took on the weight of a moral obligation. Around that same time,
     after a decade in New York City, I’d begun yearning to return to the Midwest. My desire to understand the puzzle of meth