Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men

Ball Lightning Reported


Two days into a full-on ice storm, I drove the forty-five miles north and east from Burlington to Red Green's house in Newport, Vermont. All along the way, the woods were shattered. Trees splintered from the weight of the ice, scattering limbs and trunks on the frozen snow. Blue sparks arced out of severed high-tension wires, onto the icy blacktop. The temperature shifted by the minute, changing from rain to snow to ice, back to rain. My mind mirrored the storm, fierce addiction raging, beating my brain with baseball-size hailstones of chemical need. I thought about turning around, then thought about getting high at Red's and kept going. The drive, normally fifty-five minutes in good weather with a crystal meth tailwind, took six hours.

For four years I'd made the drive from Burlington to Newport twice a week. A friend of a friend, that worst of all bridges, had hooked me up with Red again. The friend of a friend mentioned the name and said I should go see Red, that he'd been asking about me.

The first time I saw him again I said, "How'd you find me "

"I've never lost anything," Red said. "Not a penny, not a memory. Never lost anything. I've gotten rid of some crap, some people, but I don't allow myself to lose things."

I'd just started working at the medical waste facility in South Burlington. Red suggested he might be able to salvage some pharmaceutical-quality drugs from the plastic biohazard containers I stuffed into the industrial autoclave every night. Twice a week, I made sure two full waste containers found their way into the back of my truck.

Red was always happy and so was I -- four containers a week paid for all my drugs, mostly a lot of hash and a little hillbilly heroin, OxyContin, with the occasional jolt of some high-octane crank to make sure I functioned during the day. All with as much beer as I could swallow for a chaser. Red stuck to harder stuff than that. Angel dust and liquid cocaine, mixed with dental anesthesia. He was a tweak freak too, and then he'd apply the heroin brakes for a week. The containers I brought would sometimes yield a gold nugget -- a half-used bag of morphine, a Haldol drip, or a pound of brightly colored, professional-strength get-high Chiclets. Red had connections and customers for all of it. I never really knew where he got his other stuff. Anybody with crystal meth usually has biker friends, but I never saw any bikers at Red's. Twice weekly, I'd get high at his house, then take the rest of my new stash back to Burlington. Four years of this arrangement had bumped me up to angel dust and meth, until I needed heroin to dampen the evil hum that became my internal theme music.