By Jacob Hancock
Methamphetamine is a long name, but it”s no match for the length of its list of ingredients: For best flavor and texture, add paint thinner, battery acid, ammonia, gasoline and 26 other compounds with a pinch of table salt.
“I know how it sounds,” said Daren, 19, under the bright lights of a Salt Lake convenience station. “But it”s not that bad.”
“You would never eat straight shortening … or salt alone,” he said. “But they”re in cookies. I don”t just go and chug antifreeze, but when it”s mixed right, in a batch of glass [meth], it changes. It”s good.”
Daren refused to give his last name but wasn”t shy about giving what he calls his “damned fairytale.” It”s a story of lost jobs, wrecked relationships and molestation – all seemingly clich? in the world of meth. Clich? too, are the destroyed lives common to the drugs addictive manacles.
He spends his nights (many sleepless due to the drug”s effects) under an enclosed patio a few blocks from State Street. A widowed 60-year-old man Daren met at a construction site has allowed him to stay there for the last few days.
“[My life] was supposed to turn out so many times, like something from a child”s book, but it”s like a … Stephen King story now,” he said.
But King”s demons have a home, even if it”s just one to haunt; Daren”s home is a bad memory.
He started using meth when he was 14 in Bristol, Tenn., where his drug-using brother and a neighbor seriously abused him after his father left the family. His 17-year-old girlfriend handed him meth for the first time and called it a “super sex drug.”
“And it was,” he admitted. “We used to take it together. … Now, I”m pretty much impotent too.”
Though every story is somewhat similar, Daren”s meth friends do differ. Some are dealers with stories of traveling from state to state, hiding from the cops and other characters in their paranoid minds. Two of his friends from back home ended their story with death by fire.
“All the guys I know that died, died making it,” Daren said. “It [the meth] blew up in their … face. The rest [who don”t die] just get uglier.”
Daren is just passing through Utah. He said the cold weather is pushing him to Arizona or Los Angeles, Calif., where he said he knows a friend.
“Besides, both those places are warmer to be homeless in,” he said.
Daren said he”d been on the quitting track a couple of times before but derailed after his life didn”t immediately mend. He said he still might try to quit again when he gets to where he”s going, but he isn”t sure now”s the time.
“The highs are still too high,” he said. “Even if the lows are getting lower.”
He sipped a Diet Coke, ripped open a Zip-lock bag tucked in his winter coat and tossed a yellow-brown crystal between his chapped lips in show-off fashion.
“Don”t try that at home,” he said with a smile. “These ingredients will kill ya.”
