dope fiends and crack-heads aren’t going to be as forthright with the police as they might be with someone else. I offered to drop Charlie home first. He insisted on coming along. Fine by me. I didn’t want to deal with this freak show all on my own.
Turley was right, I knew the spot. Taking the old Pearl Street exit off the Desmond Turnpike, we dipped into a heavily forested gully, and the surrounding scenery began to take on a vaguely familiar appearance, like the edges of a repressed, unpleasant dream. When a dilapidated red shack came into view, I clearly recalled driving by the place on the way to Coal Creek. Never ate the food, though. Even back then, you’d have to have had a death wish to go in there.
It always had been an odd location for a restaurant, since there were few other stores in the vicinity, and you’d have to be literally wandering, starving in the woods to stumble upon it. You could barely see it from the road with all the overgrowth around it.
As we pulled in the small parking lot, a big man with a shaved head, slathered with tattoos and dressed in only a tank top, flicked his cigarette butt in the snow and ducked inside. As the door closed he caught it with his hand and eyed my truck, before gently easing it shut.
The shack projected that creepy-crawly, frenetic energy of amphetamine abuse and long nights spent picking at invisible bugs. Grinding, industrial music droned inside. I could see single tire tracks, like the kind a motorcycle leaves, etched through high snow, curling around back. Long slivers of faded red wood curled from the exterior like whittled plastic.
In a particularly depressing touch, someone had actually taken the time to set out a sandwich board, using portable letters to spell “Computer Solutions,” and, below that, “Electronic Recycling.” Only, instead of the letter
t
, they had substituted the number
7
, and the word “Recycling” was missing the
y
.
The entire setup played like a rabid, ugly porcupine, whose quills and foaming mouth said, in no uncertain terms, stay away.
Charlie and I sat in the parking lot. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. Certainly not this.
“What the fuck is your brother into?”
I knew a little about the local drug scene, only because I had to, but I didn’t know what these people did behind closed doors, and I wasn’t itching to find out.
Chris would inject, inhale, or imbibe anything you put on the table, although he seemed to have a special affinity for uppers, primarily speed, one of the many sordid particulars I had gathered from all the times I’d brought him into rehab, stuck as I was playing the parental role. Talking to doctors and psychotherapists about my brother’s various treatment options, I learned that methamphetamine wasn’t mass-produced up here or controlled by organized crime like it was out West or in the South. Meth up here consisted mostly of the bathtub variety. Small, independent pockets of ambitious individuals who cooked batches in toolsheds or suburban basements, crushing antihistamines to strip pseudoephedrine from over-the-counter cold medicines, before cleaning it with acetone and plopping copper pennies into stainless steel bowls to reverse polarity, in order to bond the right ionic charge. Like a science project for sleep-deprived zombies. Gun bluing and industrial-strength ammonia, miner’s coal and jet fuel, corrosive chemicals you find under a sink. Basically, the very last kind of ingredients you want to put in your body, and this had been my brother’s primary diet for years. No wonder his brain was oozing out his ears. In a few years, he’d be draped in garbage bags and talking to beer cans at the bus station.
I stared at this shooting gallery, this crack den, this drug house, this whatever the hell it was in the middle of nowhere, and steeled my nerves to open my eyes to a part of my brother’s life I would’ve preferrednot to have seen. For years, I’d put up a hand
Turley was right, I knew the spot. Taking the old Pearl Street exit off the Desmond Turnpike, we dipped into a heavily forested gully, and the surrounding scenery began to take on a vaguely familiar appearance, like the edges of a repressed, unpleasant dream. When a dilapidated red shack came into view, I clearly recalled driving by the place on the way to Coal Creek. Never ate the food, though. Even back then, you’d have to have had a death wish to go in there.
It always had been an odd location for a restaurant, since there were few other stores in the vicinity, and you’d have to be literally wandering, starving in the woods to stumble upon it. You could barely see it from the road with all the overgrowth around it.
As we pulled in the small parking lot, a big man with a shaved head, slathered with tattoos and dressed in only a tank top, flicked his cigarette butt in the snow and ducked inside. As the door closed he caught it with his hand and eyed my truck, before gently easing it shut.
The shack projected that creepy-crawly, frenetic energy of amphetamine abuse and long nights spent picking at invisible bugs. Grinding, industrial music droned inside. I could see single tire tracks, like the kind a motorcycle leaves, etched through high snow, curling around back. Long slivers of faded red wood curled from the exterior like whittled plastic.
In a particularly depressing touch, someone had actually taken the time to set out a sandwich board, using portable letters to spell “Computer Solutions,” and, below that, “Electronic Recycling.” Only, instead of the letter
t
, they had substituted the number
7
, and the word “Recycling” was missing the
y
.
The entire setup played like a rabid, ugly porcupine, whose quills and foaming mouth said, in no uncertain terms, stay away.
Charlie and I sat in the parking lot. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. Certainly not this.
“What the fuck is your brother into?”
I knew a little about the local drug scene, only because I had to, but I didn’t know what these people did behind closed doors, and I wasn’t itching to find out.
Chris would inject, inhale, or imbibe anything you put on the table, although he seemed to have a special affinity for uppers, primarily speed, one of the many sordid particulars I had gathered from all the times I’d brought him into rehab, stuck as I was playing the parental role. Talking to doctors and psychotherapists about my brother’s various treatment options, I learned that methamphetamine wasn’t mass-produced up here or controlled by organized crime like it was out West or in the South. Meth up here consisted mostly of the bathtub variety. Small, independent pockets of ambitious individuals who cooked batches in toolsheds or suburban basements, crushing antihistamines to strip pseudoephedrine from over-the-counter cold medicines, before cleaning it with acetone and plopping copper pennies into stainless steel bowls to reverse polarity, in order to bond the right ionic charge. Like a science project for sleep-deprived zombies. Gun bluing and industrial-strength ammonia, miner’s coal and jet fuel, corrosive chemicals you find under a sink. Basically, the very last kind of ingredients you want to put in your body, and this had been my brother’s primary diet for years. No wonder his brain was oozing out his ears. In a few years, he’d be draped in garbage bags and talking to beer cans at the bus station.
I stared at this shooting gallery, this crack den, this drug house, this whatever the hell it was in the middle of nowhere, and steeled my nerves to open my eyes to a part of my brother’s life I would’ve preferrednot to have seen. For years, I’d put up a hand
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