A Day in the Life of a Culinary School Graduate in a Bad Economy by Matthew Dexter
12:00 PM
Stucco walls closing in; air thickening, toxic sickness seeping into our pores. Cooking crystal meth in the Arizona desert during summer monsoon season, brutal, giving “dry heat” an added meaning. The swamp cooler is useless, my cook is toothless, and he’s been up for seven days. Sheriff Joe Arpaio licks his chops in an upscale Chinese restaurant in Phoenix, dining with his deputies, as Mexican illegal immigrants are given instructions by the manager to keep a low profile in the kitchen.
2:00 PM
The new batch is looking good. Even the tweaker with the white chef hat is happy. He smokes what remains from the old batch. The Motel 6 smells like magic. The lights have been on for nearly a week. The manager lets us stay free if we give him a couple ounces at the end of each month. His wife smokes it; he slams it into his veins. They have burgundy pock marks on their faces, weigh about ninety pounds each.
"Motel 6" (photo by Flickr user Addison Berry)
4:00 PM
The chef tells me to unscrew the smoke detector, rip it down from the ceiling. We removed the battery months ago, but the green light drives him crazy. “Flashes in sync with thunder,” he says. His beard is crusty, my breasts are numb, the room spins in circles, and the laboratory becomes the breath of the Valley of the Sun. Seventy-seven restaurant applications and I’m cooking amphetamines in a wooden coffin a few dozen yards from Interstate 8. We’re going to sell it in Maricopa County, and then cook another batch to drive out to San Diego. Then we’ll disappear into Mexico, twenty thousand dollars in our pockets and a new nipple ring to celebrate the occasion of catering to the whims and tastes of fiends and whores.
"Welcome to the Dream House - Malibu Barbie's Meth Lab" (photo by Flickr user JoeInSouthernCA)
6:00 PM
Fumes seeping out beneath the door, the police storm our laboratory, smash the door down, knocking me on the head with the butt of a rifle. Unconscious on semen-stained mattress, they mess up the room as I bleed into our bed, the pillow so soft. They arrest the cook.
6:03 PM
Regaining consciousness, regretting everything: my vigorous actions in the pit of this fragile economy, decrepit recession led us to cook shards. They handcuff the chef; bandage my wound, gashed cranium dancing in the dust of cracked mirror. My reflection in the glass looks different, distant in the haze we’ve lived in for months. Culinary school extraordinaire, summa cum laude graduate who had ambitions to work in Vegas in a luxurious resort no more; now merely a meth manufacturer shacking up with an addict, a felon soon to be wearing pink socks and pink underwear and sandals in Tent City.
6:06 PM
Watching the nefarious ingredients frying in their beakers, a science teacher and a mad student we were, soon to become the special recipe of rattlesnakes, the sauce stirs as my stomach turns and the green beacon beneath the smoke alarm beckons brighter, batteries no longer required.
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Matthew Dexter lives and breathes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He is in no way, shape or form involved in any drug cartels—though some Mexicans still consider him the Lil Wayne of literature.
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