Nick Reding by Methland: The Death, Life of an American Small Town Page B

and a longish, blunt nose, like a skinning knife. With Tom, she shares a toothy, crocodilian smile and the low center
     of gravity and powerful legs of a middleweight wrestler. Since 2005, I have corresponded with Lori, who’s in federal prison—coincidentally,
     at the medium-security women’s work camp in Greenville, Illinois, just a few hundred yards from where I met Sean and James
     during November 2004.
    One of seven step-and half-siblings, Lori was born and raised in Ottumwa in a family that she describes as studiously normal
     and benign. Despite this, Lori dropped out of high school as a freshman and began living in an Ottumwa rooming house where,
     in the evenings, there was a running poker game. The landlady was also a madame. In exchange for room and board, Lori and
     her young cohorts could either agree to sleep with the men who played cards or deliver illegally prescribed methedrine pills,
     an early form of pharmaceutical meth, to the landlady’s clients. Lori chose the latter; thus her career (along with her legend)
     was born.
    Lori kept herself housed by delivering and selling “brown and clears,” as pharmaceutical meth was called during the 1970s,
     when it was prescribed by the millions as a weight-loss aid and antidepression drug. The landlady got most of Lori’s profits,
     though, and to make ends meet, Lori still had to work six days a week at a local bar. (In Iowa minors can serve alcohol despite
     being legally unable to buy it.) By fifteen, Lori was married. By sixteen, she was divorced and was attending high school
     once again. By seventeen, she had dropped out for good; her peers, she says, seemed to her like children. By eighteen, she
     was married to Floyd Stockdall, who had come to Ottumwa from Des Moines in order to retire, at the ripe old age of thirty-seven,
     as the president of the Grim Reapers motorcycle gang.
    Lori and Floyd moved into a cabin along the Des Moines River outside Ottumwa, where their only child, Josh, was born. Left
     alone to raise a son while Floyd pursued his retirement hobbies of drinking, playing pool, and selling cocaine, nineteen-year-old
     Lori became suicidally depressed. The bar, she now realized, had been her lifeline. In addition to the money she made, the
     people there were her people, the only family of which Lori ever felt a true part. Without the bikers and the factory workers
     with whom she had all but grown up, Lori felt horribly lost and alone; her life had become an interminable slog. Worse yet,
     Floyd was an alcoholic, and beat her whenever he drank.
    Then one day Floyd’s brother stopped by the cabin. He, too, was a Grim Reaper, and he had with him some methamphetamine, a.k.a.
     biker dope, which had been illegally synthesized at a lab in Southern California. This was 1984, and the Reapers were just
     beginning to sell meth whenever they could get it from Long Beach. There, according to DEA, former Hells Angels had gone into
     business with maverick pharmaceutical company chemists in order to produce saleable quantities of highly pure, powdered methamphetamine.
     Lori’s brother-in-law cut her two lines on the kitchen table inside her run-down shack on the Des Moines River on a sunny,
     clear Saturday afternoon. Of the experience, Lori, who was no stranger to narcotics, says simply that she had never felt so
     good in all her life. The singularity of that feeling is what would soon connect Ottumwa to a nascent California drug empire.
     In doing so, a major piece of the meth-epidemic puzzle would fall into place.
    The first day Lori got high, she went to the bar. She says she’d been given a little meth to sell because Floyd’s brother
     wanted to see what kind of a market Ottumwa might prove to be. Lori gave away half the meth, knowing intuitively that this
     would help hook her customers. The other half quickly sold out. In the process, she made fifty dollars. What she found, though,
     was worth millions, for Lori Arnold knew almost