Cinderella Story

I walk up the rickety stairs of the Cleveland Boxing Academy and into a movie set straight from Sylvester Stallone or Clint Eastwood.

The same peeling paint, the same tattered poster of Muhammad Ali, the same punched-out speed bag. A lean guy skipping rope and an empty sparring ring. In movies, back-alley gyms like this are where nobodies become contenders and where has-beens become legends.

If Melinda Woody’s life were a screenplay, I’d be meeting her at the end of Act One…in which the Unknown Kid shows Great Potential.

We sit down by the vacant ring. Her trainer Mike Lewis looks on, along with her manager Jeff Yarber. They’re clearly very fond of her. She’s blonde, a bit petite, what my grandmother would have called “homespun pretty.” Her nickname is “2 Cute.”

“Why boxing?” I ask. I don’t realize until later what a stupidly chauvinistic question this is.

Melinda tells me her story.

She was a three-sport athlete in the PCHS class of ’98, but a few short years later found herself soft around the middle and working a desk job. Her glory days were long gone. She made what some might call an unusual decision.

“I heard of a Tough Woman bout,” she says, “and just wanted to do something to stay back in shape. I was always athletic, and after three kids what can you do to stay in shape?”

Hmm…work out at Curves? Go paddling? Buck hay? Anything besides get punched in the face?

Melinda grins. “My neighborhood was all guys. I played football with all the guys in the back yard. Got beat up a bunch.”

When she smiles, her teeth are all there. I notice that she’s brick-solid. I wonder exactly who was beating up on whom.

Jeff Yarber, a former Golden Gloves champion and current Bradley County Commissioner (insert many jokes here), soon got her in touch with Mike. But Mike refused to train her. Everybody wants to box until they find out how much work is involved. Mike wanted to see if she had talent, and more importantly, that mysterious and essential quality called “heart.”

So…“A year and a half, I fought Tough Woman,” she says. Tough Woman, if you haven’t heard, is a sort of loosely organized amateur fighting series where women the size of wildebeest try to mash one another into giblet gravy. It is to professional boxing what slam-dancing is to Swan Lake.

“I only trained for two weeks before my first Tough Woman fight,” Melinda remembers. “I actually beat a former Tough Woman champion. Then I fought again in East Ridge and won that one. I fought again in Alabama against a woman that was fifty pounds heavier than me and I won a belt in that one.”

I whistle. Melinda weighs maybe one-twenty, so as a relatively inexperienced amateur she beat a hundred and seventy-pound belt-holding brawler—a woman I wouldn’t approach without a tranquilizer gun.

And this turned out to be talent and heart enough for Mike. “After she went and fought—” he says, chuckling—“we began to recognize that this is actually something she can do.”

Jeff speaks up. “I’ve worked with Mike now for fifteen years. Over those fifteen years I’ve probably seen five hundred people come to events who want to be fighters—they say. Until they see it’s a lot of guts, a little glory. People don’t understand how hard it is to come here five days a week and work out, how bad you feel. Your hands are always aching. Your body’s always aching. Then when you actually get in the ring and get hit a couple of times, that heart leaves.”

Melinda does have heart, that’s for sure. I watched a tape of her second professional fight, from last March, and I saw right away how Melinda used her wits and her training. As the four-round fight progressed, she wore her opponent down with good guarding, quick punch-volleys, and nimble footwork. By the final round her opponent was dragging and Melinda was still dancing and jabbing. Inspiring stuff.

But her heart goes beyond the ring. After that fight she decided to quit her day job to train full-time. I think about this very hard.

“I don’t get,” I finally say, “why some people think it’s easier to work a job they can’t stand for not enough money to get by on. And when they have a dream, they won’t pursue it…they’ll settle.”

Melinda starts nodding. “When I’m in the ring and I get hit, it’s just so easy to think ‘I don’t have to do this.’ You have to be hungry for it. You have to want it. I want to give my kids what I didn’t have. I want for them to be able to go to college straight out of high school. I want to be something, you know what I mean? I want to look back and say, ‘I did something.’”

Melinda, a single mom, could have easily relaxed into the security of a day job. For that matter, she could have easily relaxed into a drug habit, gone on the government dole, found evil companions, and squandered whatever potential she might have had.

In that light, what do a few punches in the face matter?

Will Melinda make a million bucks? Maybe, if she keeps winning. She’s marketable, but still ten or so wins away from the big purses. Those fights are Act Two, in which Cinderella Goes Dancing. Jeff and Mike are bringing her along gradually so she won’t peak out before she matures. The peak comes in Act Three, the Title Bout. Things get dark and heavy in Act Three, and there are no guarantees.

I hope she wins it, because I admire anyone with the guts to chase dreams. Meanwhile she’s got a good fall-back plan. She’s engaged now, starting school to be a P.E. teacher. Hopefully at PCHS. I like that idea too, because that’s where I’ll be sending my daughter someday. By then my daughter might need a few pointers on how to roll with a punch.

And on how to beat up the neighborhood guys, come to think of it.

Bean Mountain

Mornin Jerry.
Mornin.

Them pigs Ricky run off has shown up agin.
Where at?
You know up air
the foot a Bean Mountain
overlookin the river?
That acreage Bowater sold to that bunch from
what was it? Cincinnati?
Yep.
Well, they are rootin it all to pieces.

Pretty up air. Me and Irene dug sang in them woods.
Yessir. Good country for pigs.
It is that.
Aah. Whole thingll be posted fore ye know it.
I reckon.
Work crew up air layin in a golf course.
No shit?
Yea verily I shit you not. Nine holes.

Heh. Pitchur them hawgs snufflin a golf green.
Ricky said they was prowlin his corn pastures.
Least till he come out with a shotgun.
Ricky shot at em?
Run em right off. Said they was
nosin around of a night.
figurin the lay of the land.

And son, theyve done hired a all-Mexican crew
puttin down that sod.
That aint the only grass theyll be growin.
I heard there was whole trucks haulin quicklime
t sweeten up th soil. Bulldozers everywhar.
The law. Bulldozin
Bean Mountain
for a gat dam golf course.

How many houses they buildin?
Paper said a hundred. Big uns.
Sauners and walk in closets.
On how many acres?
Nine hundred and some
not all of it buildable.

We oughtta do somebody a favor.
Whats that.
Finish what Ricky shoulda done.
Ride up air one mornin
sit on one a them bulldozers
wait on a hawg to come along
and shoot him between of his eyes.

Well. Hear bout the woman needed hep with breakfast?
Aint heard thatn.

Woman needed hep with breakfast.
Asked the chicken and the pig for hep.
Chicken said hep y sef to eggs.
Pig didnt say nothin.
Knowin the only hep he could give was
a piece of his ass.

Heh. Thats a goodn.
Piece of a pigs ass.

The Nature of Rich(es)

or

The Second Annual Carpetbaggers’ Ball

or

Bless Their Hearts


The early Tennessee sun has baked my black plastic mailbox hotter than a skillet-load of biscuits in a wood stove. I go to pull the door open and then jerk my fingers away.

Hatcha hatcha!

Fortunately, the heat has mummified the spring black widow crop. Behind their shriveled little bodies I find a thick stack of mail. Utility bills, credit card statements, and slick glossy catalogs of slick glossy models in slick glossy lingerie. Sad evidence that for the past several days I have been Neglecting my Duty.

So I open one of the catalogs.

Hatcha hatcha!

~

Thus preoccupied, I fail to notice the letter from Noah until after I’ve walked up the hill, through the woods, and past my tomato garden. But before I can open the envelope I meet my friend Rich in the driveway. He’s sweating and shoving a kayak into the back of his SUV. He shoves and shoves and eventually shoves it right on through the windshield.

Rich is doing his darnedest to destroy this vehicle. It is, after all, a Rental. People’s Exhibit A: on the way home from kayaking at Rock Island he and Kenny contrived to explode one of its massive off-road tires doing an illegal U-turn through a cactus garden donated to the City of Dayton by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

But Rich and Kenny and Mark and Sue—and all the other Carpetbaggers who have come to my refuge in the hill country to kayak and shoot the breeze and drink beer for a few days—all of these people are strangers in Dixie. They do not understand our ways.

Bless their hearts.

~

Written letters are a treat. Nobody writes anymore.

Noah and his wife Sarah live in a Mennonite community a short distance away from my house. Well, their community would be “a short distance away” in Rich’s SUV, but it’s more like an hour in Noah’s horse and buggy.

I’ve found them to be honest, hardworking farmers who eschew modernity, praise God in High German, and grow vegetables to shame the Devil. Perhaps Noah writes such good letters because he’s never owned a telephone.

When I get one of his letters I sit on the porch and unfold it in my lap and read it. And then I rock in the sun for a while before reading it again.

My wife and I first met Noah at the Mennonite community’s little produce market, where I was buying tomato seedlings. Noah invited us to visit his home. We did so, and learned the following:

Noah and Sarah have thirteen children.

Adam was the first farmer. “Be fruitful and multiply” was one of God’s first commandments to him.

Hatcha hatcha!

~

One of the Southern Ways the Carpetbaggers are slowly learning is that down here you can say anything you want about anyone as long as you bless their heart immediately afterwards.

Kenny comes out on the front porch carrying a dripping box of neoprene gear. “You got my boat loaded yet?” he hollers at Rich.

“I’m working on it,” Rich hollers back. “Only thing heavier than your boat is your fat ass that rides around in it!”

On the other end of the porch, Sue and Mark are rocking and observing. “Rich, you have to bless his heart now!” Sue calls. A quick study, our Sue.

“Bless your heart, fatass,” Rich says to Kenny.

Mark, wise in the ways of warfare, only reaches into his cooler for a beer. In Tennessee it’s been five o’clock since April 9, 1865.

~

But I’m ignoring Rich and Kenny. I sit on the steps reading Noah’s letter.

I’m fairly atheistic and Noah has taken me on as a project. As if I were a prize vegetable, you might say.

We talk a lot about the nature of happiness.

“I can tell you’ve thought the thing of riches through & through,” he writes in his simple, spare hand. "Certainly happiness does Not come From Riches.”

I shake my head. Oh, if only he knew the Riches I know.

He writes further down: “There is prob. also tooo kinds of happiness. One comes by Faith and contentment, the other is always short Lived.”

And at the end: “Love is stronger than Hate!”

~

Later that day Sue and Mark and Kenny and Rich and I are high in the Tellico Gorge. We’re paddling one of those clear, moss-rocked rivers you see on wine labels. The water is strong and cold. It fountains sweetly off sandstone shelves into shady pools, where rainbow trout surf the riffles slurping caddis flies like sommeliers.

I am so tranquil I am damn nearly floating.

But suddenly Rich is not. He blows his line entering a nasty ledge and he gets rolled over by a foaming curler wave. From fifty yards downriver I watch him jarring as the water slams his body against the sub-surface rocks. He tries to Eskimo roll and he misses once, then twice. He washes over the main body of the ledge, inverted. There’s a gut-wrenching boom as he bottoms out in the pool below.

Whereupon: nothing. He’s not trying to roll up at all.

It occurs to me that Noah’s list isn’t quite complete. There is a third kind of happiness. As I watch Rich’s boat go still, I wish I had some of it.

~

But there I go, wishing for more stuff when I’ve already got so much.

Noah’s comment about “the thing of riches” is his response to something I had written in my last letter to him.

“Very few of the ‘rich’ people I know are actually happy,” I wrote. “A few are, but their happiness seems to come from non-material sources: family, art, faith, and so on. I’d say that knowing the difference between riches and wealth is akin to knowing the difference between knowledge and wisdom.”

Well.

This is what passes for deep thinking when you’ve been fizzing your brains with booze and chemicals for twenty-five years. It’s been five o’clock for me since junior high.

Bless my heart.

~

Kenny digs his way across the pool so quickly that he literally leaves a wake. He’s a big guy and he puts every bit of his muscle into his paddle strokes.

Rich’s boat starts jostling around in that funny way that indicates he’s trying to swim free. If Rich swims, though, the water’s going to grind him through a hundred feet of boulders and tree limbs.

It’ll be cactus garden vs. tire all over again.

But then Kenny’s on him. Kenny leans down and with one arm he manhandles Rich and his boat upright.

Rich coughs and gags. There’s snot all over his face. He doubles over. His rib cage works like a blacksmith’s bellows.

“Pull it together, fatass,” bellows Kenny. His smile is wider than the Mason-Dixon line.

~

The reason people should write more often is that the stuff on the paper winds up being more factual than what actually happened.

We all know that Rich survived this year’s Carpetbaggers’ Ball, of course. And we all know that Kenny and Rich are the best of friends, despite their Floyd-and-Ethel routine.

On the other hand, as long as I’m making up stories, I’m sure Rich had rather read how he hooked up with one of the slick glossy models from the lingerie catalog in my mailbox. This screed about him getting skull-cracked in an imaginary rapid is probably giving him the jeebs in his teeth.

And my hippy-trippy harangues about how I’m getting stoned on raw happiness in the wilds of East Tennessee…well, that shit would bore the aphids off a tomato plant.

But since I’m the one writing this: tough titty. Write something yourself and see what happens to it.

~

In closing I leave you to speculate on the difference between riches and wealth. Here is one hint:

On my Wealthy People list, Noah and Sarah are numbers two and three. Rich and Kenny are four and five.

And with friends like these, guess who’s number one?

Bears and Little Girls

My daughter isn’t quite two. In a few minutes she’ll wake up from her nap and she’ll want to watch “Little Bear” on the cartoon channel. I don’t know if I can stomach that. I’ve been thinking about little girls and bears all day.

The first time I took my daughter to Benton Falls was late last August. We swam in the lake together, watching the bluegill school up in the clear water just off the beach, and then I hiked her down the hill on my shoulders so she could wet her head in the spray from the falls. She giggled, surprised by its chill. Afterwards she wandered down the creek searching out just the right pebble to give Daddy. I still have it, right here on my windowsill. It’s smooth and glittery. Heart-shaped.

Five years ago, a lifetime before my daughter came along, I was backpacking in Utah and a ranger warned me to avoid a certain canyon. There had been a juniper berry famine or some such thing, and hungry black bears were roaming down out of the mountains to forage in low-lying areas. Tents had been invaded and food bags torn loose from their hangings. Savvy hikers should stay well clear.

This was roughly the same time Elizabeth Smart was abducted from the safety of her own bed in Salt Lake City. A self-styled polygamist “prophet” snatched her away into the desert and kept her as his second wife for nine months. Eventually an alert woman tipped off the Salt Lake police that the cloaked, veiled teenager wandering about with the bearded lunatic was suspicious and needed investigation.

Bears seem harmless to children. They’re cute and fuzzy and their best friends are Christopher Robin and Boo Boo. But they’re also scavengers, predators. When the honey pots run dry and the juniper berry crop fails, they range around looking for picnic baskets to raid. They get narrow-minded and mean. A bear can turn on you in a flash, charge from zero to thirty in a matter of seconds, knock you sprawling, claw you to ribbons.

What to do when attacked by a bear: roll into a ball and pray.

The biblical prophet Elisha—a praying man of some renown—was hiking in the wilderness near Bethel when he was waylaid by a gang of forty-two kids. They jeered him, as kids will jeer anything old and strange. Elisha cursed them and—so the story goes—God sent two she-bears from the woods to rip the kids to bloody scraps.

Elizabeth Smart was rescued from her predatory “prophet” and reunited with her sobbing parents mere hours after police received the tip-off. If there’s any justice in Utah, and I suspect that there is, the delusional wingnut who abducted her will still be in prison when Smart’s granddaughters are grown.

But if there was any justice near Bethel the day Elisha trekked through, I’m sure the sobbing parents of those forty-two kids had harsh words for it. I like to think the story about the prophet and the bears is metaphorical or even mis-translated. I like to think the God who said “suffer the little children to come unto me” and “better for him that a millstone should be hung about his neck than he should offend one of these little ones” isn’t a God who sends bears to kill children.

When I see my daughter playing with her teddy bear I’m surprised by the ferocity of my own love for her. Get this: somewhere out there is a two year-old boy who’s going to break her heart in fifteen or twenty years. Where is the little varmint? I’ll scalp him right now. I’m her dad; I’m supposed to keep her safe.

To protect the public the Forest Service has shut down the Chilhowee Recreation Area for a while. Trappers and trackers are out there. Dead bears can’t kill little girls, so there’s a hunt on.

I’ve heard bullets only make bears madder, and I seldom hike with a gun these days. The keeping and bearing of arms is prohibited in the Cherokee National Forest, save during hunting season. Even then, I could no more pass my Ruger P-89 off as a hunting weapon than I could pass my daughter off as Goldilocks. So what can I do?

For one thing, I can take back my anger at that little boy who’s going to break my daughter’s heart someday. I can’t protect her from everything. I don’t want to; that’s not how a good father plays it. She’s going to have to learn a few things the hard way. Probably more than a few things. Don’t believe cartoons are real. Tread carefully around weirdness. Give wild animals a wide berth. Fight when you have to.

How to fight off an attacking bear: scream and yell and hit him with anything you have.

Reports say Susan Cenkus waded in swinging on the bear that was mauling her son. Imagine this woman lighting after a fanged, clawed beast three times her size. Mama Bear versus Mama Bear. And saving her son’s life. I’ll always admire her for that. She’s Mother of the Century material.

Sitting here, as I hear my daughter waking up, I wonder if I could do that. I hope I could, even if it was someone else’s child being mauled.

But other possibilities occur to me. There’s always one more delusional wingnut out there in the wilderness that’s today’s America. Perhaps he’s going to invade my home someday, maybe to snatch my daughter and make her one of his wives. Or worse.

I guess I keep this Ruger handy so my daughter can sleep in peace.

Instead of resting in it.

There’s only one more thing I can say, and that’s to Susan Cenkus. Susan: I mourn your daughter. I aspire to your courage. I celebrate your strength. And I congratulate you on the life of your son.

The Polk County Meth War, Part Three

Working the Steps

The newcomer says he doesn’t have a problem. I’m forbidden to describe him to you, but I can tell you that he’s acting like he’d rather be back in the state penitentiary. Instead he’s here, at Action Counseling…with a circle of recovering addicts scrutinizing his every word.

“I shouldn’t have to be at this,” he tells everyone, “except I flunked a [urinalysis] test; my parole officer found marijuana and cocaine and opioids and meth. I don’t know how it got there.”

“You don’t know how it got there,” repeats Dr. Linda Wells. “Right. Sir, it got there because you put it there.”

“Are they processing meth with that stuff now?” he asks. “‘Cause I smoked a joint and some meth, but I don’t remember the coke or anything else.”

A woman shakes her head. “I’ve done plenty of stuff I don’t remember when I was high.”

Others nod as he frowns. “Well, ice is bad stuff, I won’t argue that,” he says. “But I want to smoke marijuana ‘til the day I die. I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

Dr. Wells stands up. “Sir, do you see that poster behind you?”

He turns and studies the cutaway view of a human body that’s taped to the wall. Organ systems are outlined in lurid colors; each with an arrow highlighting marijuana’s ill effects on it. His jaw drops as Dr. Wells describes the harm he can expect if he keeps toking up. He stays deep in thought for the balance of the meeting and leaves with a troubled look on his face. Perhaps he has a problem after all.

Afterwards, Dr. Wells muses on the episode in the privacy of her office. “Did you see him turn?” she asks me. “He turned in a matter of just seconds. He says he was in prison for years without fully understanding the dangers of marijuana. They’re not teaching well. They’re not giving them adequate tools. Yes, I think incarceration is great, but what are we doing? The state is literally going in the hole to try to keep these people in prison, and they’re coming back out and they still don’t have the tools to keep them from using when they get home.”

Criminals deserve punishment, and lockup is great detox, but counseling is the best cure…if you want to call a lifelong struggle against relapse a cure, that is. Maybe this fellow flushed his stash down the john when he got home, or maybe he rolled the fattest joint of his life. Either way, a seed of motivation was planted in him.

Unfortunately, Dr. Wells is right about the lack of substance abuse counseling in prisons and jails. There is some access to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous in state prisons, but the Tennessee Department of Correction’s Substance Abuse Services Delivery Policy reveals how tight funding and high inmate substance abuse rates necessarily limit the availability of in-depth therapy. Too many addicts, not enough cash. The DOC winds up depending on the community to get users into long-term recovery after release.

And the Polk County Jail can’t even host AA and NA meetings. I’ve asked Sheriff Bill Davis about that, and though he understands their value and he’s looking at offering such services in the new jail, the old jail’s simply…you guessed it, too old. It’s often overcrowded and not set up for secure group sessions. Even Sunday church can be tough to pull off. So the Sheriff is trying the best he can, but for the moment…

…it falls to Sessions Court Judge Billy Baliles to haul on every line he can reach to pull community resources into the boat. He’s gotten approximately forty local pastors enlisted to offer counseling through Drug Interdiction Court. He’s worked with AA and NA and Al-Anon to increase the number of twelve-step meetings in Polk County—to one or more every day. And he’s partnered with Dr. Wells and Action Counseling to earmark a portion of $17.5 million in federal money granted to Tennessee from the Justice Department’s Access to Recovery Program, so the funds will flow through the Tennessee Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services and directly to the treatment of local addicts.

The judge favors organizations like AA and others because they work from a twelve-step plan; a disciplined ladder to recovery. Substance abusers admit their lives are out of control, place faith in a higher power, ask that power for forgiveness and strength, take inventory of themselves, list their offenses, make amends, work toward daily progress, and commit to helping other addicts recover.

The degree of these groups’ success correlates to supervision—Dr. Wells will tell you, for instance, that 60 percent of her heavily-monitored clients stay clean. How successful AA, NA, and Al-Anon are depends on individual persistence, but it’s hard to argue against the idea that one Polk County addict placed on the road to recovery is better than none. In the words of Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

I drop by an open session of a recovery group one night at—oh, it doesn’t matter where—to see how it goes. I also want to answer a question that’s been nagging me: how come I’m not an addict? I’m no saint; I’ve wrestled every temptation in the Book and succumbed to more than a few. The addicts I know are much like me—good folks, mostly, who have had bad choices turn on them and rend them some.

It’s a heavy scene, at first. Sad eyes, worn faces, the sense of the reach being longer than the grasp…and one tired toddler in the back, who’s tagged along with mom. The group murmurs its way through an opening ritual of affirmation, which I can barely follow. They’ve done this so often that they’ve mouthed the words beyond familiarity and into indistinction.

But then various ones testify to their Trials & Tribulations since the last meeting they attended. One woman says she’s been so worried about the safety of her children that she hasn’t slept in days.

Horrible insomnia…brain won’t shut off…her kids were breathing when she put them to bed, but are they now?…what about now?…and now?…and it’s the holidays, so she’ll be driving…what if she nods off and crashes?…no way she’ll be able to sleep, worried about that…unless she scored a few painkillers…not such a bad idea, in fact…knock herself unconscious, find the sweet peace she craves…or pour a drink or two…not enough to get drunk…just enough to…

And I start getting it. Maybe I’m not an addict because I can cope with my fears without self-medicating—lucky me. Or maybe it’s something else. Who knows? People use drugs for many reasons, but this is what they all mean when they talk about One Day at a Time.

Others in the room console her, tell her to hang in there, and when she leaves she’s smiling. Actually smiling. She knew there was a meeting coming up, that she’d be able to get some support, and she resolved not to use until then. Which worked. Whatever else there is to say, she worked the steps and the steps worked.

There’s nothing shameful about going to recovery meetings, and if you think there is, get thee hence and meditate on Galatians 6:2. Some of the strongest people in the world are in these meetings; people who got strong grappling with a beast every second of their lives.

Afterwards, a man catches my eye. “You know,” he says, “I’m glad Judge Baliles forces people to come here, but…”

“Is it working for you?” I ask.

He ponders the question for a long time. “My heart’s not in it, but my butt’s here, ain’t it?”

“Do you think you’ll keep coming after your supervision is up?”

He pauses again. “I don’t know. Maybe, if I still have a problem.”

The Polk County Meth War, Part Two

The View from the System

Detectives Brian Epperson and Mike Monteith are waiting on a phone call, and when that call comes they’ll stand up and shake my hand and this jailhouse interview will be over. They’ll be driving somewhere to tape a wire to somebody’s chest, so this somebody can go to some house and buy some controlled substance from some dealer about to get his…er…something anatomical busted—which is nothing out of the ordinary for drug detectives.

“[Meth] is a dead end,” says Epperson. “If we don’t catch you, somebody is going to…whether it be a state or federal authority. A lot of people think me and Mike Monteith and the deputies of Polk County are the only ones working and watching ‘em.” He ticks off the jurisdictions that overlap here: DEA, FBI, Forest Service, TVA, TBI, State Troopers, the State Park Service, the 10th Judicial Drug Task Force, and so forth…proving there’s a stove-full of heat in Polk County, to be sure. But like street cops everywhere, he and Monteith rely mainly on The Word.

“If we don’t have the help of the people it makes things a lot harder for us,” Monteith tells me. Anything can be significant; a sharp-eyed neighbor who spots an unfamiliar car with North Carolina plates on Monday, smells an odd odor on Tuesday, and sees an unhappy kid burning a barrel of starter fluid cans on Wednesday…well, with one phone call that neighbor can do more to clean out the neighborhood than Epperson and Monteith can get done unaided in an entire year. They’ll check out such tips, do a “knock-and-talk,” maybe ask for consent to search…and put the cuffs on if there’s cause.

But then they tell me that locking a man up isn’t always about incarcerating him.

Sandra Donaghy, the Chief Assistant District Attorney for the 10th Judicial District, elaborates on this concept as she fills me in on how DAs work the cases detectives like Epperson and Monteith make. (Incidentally, Matt Dunn, the Assistant District Attorney in Charge of Rolling the Rock Back Up the Hill Every Morning, was so busy prosecuting Polk County drug cases at the time of this interview that he couldn’t spare me a few minutes to talk about them…an ironic reminder that as meth steamrollers users, the users steamroller the system—a dynamic bewailed by everyone in the legal community, even high-dollar defense lawyers, but not by anyone who peddles meth for a living.)

At any rate, the DAG’s office draws a hard line on meth manufacture and possession. The class B manufacturing charge carries a sentence of eight-to-twelve, the class C three-to-six, and DAs crack heads even for simple possession, asking for four months. And these aren’t the bulk trafficking cases, where the interests of the community are often better served by elevation to federal jurisdiction—a grim country of mandatory sentences and nary a hope of parole—no, this is how much time the 10th Judicial DAG wants mom-and-pop, Joe Eightball types to serve…in short, average Polk County users.

Jail ain’t fun. Even an addict suffering his own living hell will fear it, but sending offenders there is only half the DAG’s game plan. “If [convicts] haven’t had the benefit of any treatment within the system,” says Donaghy, “we’ve basically put them away for four months, put them right back into the community where they’re with the same friends, the same suppliers, the same everything, and we’ve just inconvenienced them for a while versus really changing their lives.

“Hopefully, that time in the jail will be the time where they can detox…and then if we put them on probation and give them supervision, where they’re drug-tested and the consequence is that if you use drugs you’re gonna go back to the jail, it’s hopefully been a bad enough experience that they don’t want to go back, and they’ll keep going to therapy.”

In other words: Recidivism Bad, Rehabilitation Good…a mantra Donaghy and 10th Judicial Public Defender Richard Hughes chant in unison. Which seems a bizarre convergence in the court system, where by definition the DA and the PD are opponents—at the left and right hands of the Judge, as it were—and where at least on TV their rivalry spins on the lock ‘em up/spring ‘em axis, with no middle leanings. But though he believes in consequences, Hughes is a strong advocate that substance abuse requires a different approach; that it’s not so sheep-or-goat.

“That’s the simple catch-phrase,” Hughes says. “‘Just put ‘em in jail.’ In the abstract that’s fine, but we’re dealing with real people, that live in the community, that have families, that have children, and some of them can be helped. The key is, identifying those that can be helped…that really want help.

“The whole point of this is trying to get people back into the community so they can be productive. Go to work, take care of their family, their children, pay child support. You’ve got the trickle-down; you help the offender, you’re helping his family.

“I admire what Judge Baliles is doing [in Polk County Sessions Court.] He’s an activist judge; he’s trying to do some different things that haven’t been tried before. And that doesn’t always go over well with people…but I think that Judge Baliles strongly believes that substance abuse is the underlying problem of so many people that come through his court. He’s very determined to give them an opportunity to change their life.”

When I sit down with Judge Baliles, he tells me—in the neutral, measured tones of a doctor informing a patient that his cancer is malignant—why he thinks substance abuse is so unrelenting, and why he feels compelled to change Sessions Court’s approach to it.

“The first thing you’ve got to recognize: there’s nothing the medical profession can do for an addiction. The second thing you’ve got to do: you’ve got to understand addiction. Now, a lot of people say: ‘Well, they started, why don’t they quit?’ The answer is simple—they can’t quit. They can’t quit without help and without a system.”

And Judge Baliles, an ex-pharmacist, is at the hub of The System. He tells me he now allows qualifying offenders to enter conditional guilty pleas, thereby arming himself with a heavy hammer…jail time should they fail to complete court-ordered treatment. Such treatment may include counseling with any of forty different local pastors, AA, NA, and even intensive in-patient at Valley in Chattanooga or intensive out-patient with Dr. Linda Wells at Action Counseling in Cleveland.

But he can reward those who succeed by forbearing to enter a Judgment of Conviction against them; enormous leverage, because for some offenders the difference between checking “Yes” or “No” in the “Any Convictions?” box on a job application may very well mean the difference between a productive career and a ruined one—a fact the Judge is keenly aware of, as a man committed to breaking the cycle of addiction.

“What you’ve got to fight is that relapse,” he says. “If you don’t get these people in an AA or NA meeting following their thirty days of rehab, their outpatient rehab, what-have-you…they’ll slip back into their old ways.”

As I listen to the Judge, I notice how the study of meth in specific keeps circling back to the problem of substance abuse in general. The cob wrapped in all of this…which is worth shucking on, for a minute…is that to cops and attorneys and courts, substance abuse is very different from possession, manufacture, trafficking, or any of a dozen other drug-related violations, and isn’t connected to any single drug in particular.

Addiction is a cause of criminal activity, not a crime, and in this context methamphetamine, per se, could just as easily be cocaine or alcohol or even Galapagos Giggling Gas…just another chemical compound that’s been access-controlled through the legislative process. It’s the irrational and unhealthy lust for a compound that drives the collateral damage—case-gluts, epidemics of substance abuse, wrecked health, neglected children—and not the compound itself.

Mangle the root and the weed will soon wither…and people who get this distinction between cause and effect, between sickness and wrongdoing, are much more likely to support court-supervised treatment programs, and much more likely to support the addicts themselves as they struggle to get clean.

And what are these programs like? That's where we're headed next week.

The Polk County Meth War, Part One

The Parable of the Snake

In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Six I’ll have good reason to remember a lesson from my grandfather. When I was a boy a copperhead ambushed me from a cornrow and he shoved me out of the way and lit after it. It fled under a stone and he cursed it and kicked the stone away and crushed its skull under his bootheel. He toed it to make sure it was dead and then gave me a long, thoughtful look, but he didn’t have to explain a thing.

“Addiction is one of the biggest secrets in our area,” Dr. Linda Wells tells me. “No one wants to say that ‘my mom or my dad is an addict.’” Her practice, Action Counseling in Cleveland, treats hundreds of addicts from East Tennessee but she’s especially worried about Polk County, where the explosion of substance abuse and the scant access to addiction treatment are problems decent folk don’t discuss—like a chancre on a pretty girl’s face or a snake under a stone.

Others…boot-shod cops and judges and prosecuting attorneys…shake their heads and mutter disease-words like “plague” and “cancer.” They talk about stomping it out, crushing its skull before it poisons anyone else.

Trouble is: how?

On December 7th I sat in Judge Billy Baliles’ monthly drug court in Benton as he ordered more than fifty people—sullen-eyed moms, dads in orange jumpsuits and leg shackles, petrified teenagers—into a new state-funded substance abuse program at Action Counseling. The day before he’d done the same with twenty from Ducktown, making December’s tally approximately seventy people who’d run afoul of state drug laws and been ordered into treatment as a consequence.

And a mere seventy people would be bad enough, but if December was an average month—and Dr. Wells thinks it may ultimately be proven to have been below average—by next Christmas one out of every seventeen men, women, and children in Polk County will have been court-ordered to attend treatment for substance abuse …most on methamphetamine-related charges. What’s more, that one-in-seventeen only counts those “unlucky” enough to have been arrested—not active users or those struggling to get clean on their own. So what’s the true scale of the meth problem in Polk County?

God only knows. “[The addicts’] family members are coming, and they’re not mandated to be here,” says Dr. Wells. “And the first thing they’ve said, is ‘I’m gonna get off of meth.’”

One recovering addict tells me crystal meth is cheaper than liquor, and like the moonshine of yore, fairly easy to cook. But the Meth-Free Tennessee Act of 2005 has made it tougher for personal-use and small-scale manufacturers to lay hands on sufficient quantities of the ephedrine and pseudoephedrine-containing cold medicines that are its main precursor, and indeed, South/East Tennessee Methamphetamine Task Force statistics show the number of Polk County lab seizures in 2005 is one-third what it was in 2004—implying labs are fewer and further between.

So…what’s up? I applaud the Act’s accomplishments—any hole in a tornado, right?—but if meth’s ingredients are harder to procure these days, why does clinical experience suggest an increase in addiction rates? Where are users getting it now? District Attorney General Jerry Estes’ office has made cases on Mexican methamphetamine coming up from Atlanta and Dalton—I’ll leave the reader to connect the dots on that one—and I hear stories of meth from neighboring counties, telling me many users are simply sending next door for what they used to make themselves…which makes me wonder: what else are their new delivery boys selling them?

Dr. Wells’ eyes flash when I ask her this. “We’ve got more addiction right now from meth, and now we’re picking up cocaine,” she says. “We’ve not had that much heroin in this area, and I’m beginning to see that.”

Judge Baliles is worried too. The users he gets are often haggard and poverty-ridden, with little access to proper medical or psychological care. They’re self-medicating with anything that comes to hand…grass, oxy, crack, and especially crystal meth…perpetuating a lifestyle based solely on day-to-day survival. All they know how to do is use. It’s a poor-man’s solution to a poor-man’s problem—addiction as both cause and effect.

As a pharmacist by trade Judge Baliles has a scientific perspective on the subject, and he tells me his extensive study of substance abuse—thirty-eight books, at last count—has convinced him the best long-term solutions are twelve-step programs, like Action Counseling’s, that intercept users in the early stages before they become too dysfunctional, too entangled in the court systems, and that get them clean so they can care for themselves and their kids.

Which brings me to the Sharpest Fang, as it were…viz, that meth trouble has caused dozens of Polk County kids to wind up in the custody of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services or in juvenile corrections. On July 26th, 2005 a DCS case manager—Betsy Dunn of the Upper Cumberland Region, an area not so different from Polk County—testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources on meth’s effects on children’s lives. You want chilling prose, forget Stephen King…have some of this instead:

“The adults who are supposed to be these children’s caretakers have become totally consumed by this drug and have turned their backs on these youngsters.

“These children’s worlds have been totally destroyed. They breathe toxic fumes. They endure physical and sexual abuse. We see children that are actually participating in the manufacture of methamphetamine.”

“I’ve had children say to me, ‘Miss Betsy, my mom’s making that rock candy on the stove and it caught fire and we had to leave the house.’

“When a child is taken out of a meth environment, this child loses everything that is familiar. They lose their clothes. Their toys. Everything. Because it is all contaminated. That is what makes this so tragic. These children lose everything. They’ve lost their parents. They have to start over.

“What do you say when the parents tell you, ‘I can give up my children, but I can’t give up the drug?’”

I think that question would kindle holy fire in my granddaddy. He’d mull things over for a while and then he’d fix me with his stern eye and rise up and get to stompin’. I miss that old man; he’d be ninety this year. The lesson he taught me the day he trampled that snake was that there are bad things in the world, and those who can have a duty to protect those who can’t—meaning kids of course, but also meaning addicts powerless to protect themselves.

And in weeks to come I’ll write more about how Polk County is struggling to do that. Meanwhile, I have to go hug my daughter.