Big John, first at the rendezvous somewhere southeast of Los Angeles, sits patiently in the captain's chair of his motor home, parked on a promontory overlooking a panorama of backcountry hills green as spring in the afternoon sun. A full silver beard spreads over his chest, almost obscuring the picture of a Thompson submachine gun on his red T shirt. THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN FREEDOM MACHINE, reads the legend. A bird-skinning knife is holstered parallel to his belt. Big John is an original road warrior, a man whose history stretches back to the beginning of time as bikers measure it: 20 years riding the Harley express across the country delivering a variety of drugs -- first methamphetamines (called crank by the bikers and speed by city users), then cocaine, and now crank again. "When the good German meth was taken off the market by those guys in San Diego with the Mexican connection in 1981 or so, I decided I was too old to learn to cook ((manufacture synthetic drugs)) myself, so I just shifted over to coke."
He hitches around to look back at his companion, Jeanette, who sits on the bed doing something with stacks of tiny Ziploc bags. "Wasn't that '81, hon?" Taking a mumble for confirmation, Big John peers beyond the cat stretched out in the sunlight on the dashboard. "There are 150 narcs running around out there, and everybody is in a stampede to roll over. Everybody and his brother is distributing Product, and it's getting to be a dog-eat-dog world." His face assumes a mournful set: "I've been ripped off by my friends big time; they get down into the bag, on the pure stuff, and get paranoid, and right away they want to get you first." Too much crank can easily produce self- destructive paranoia.
Far below, a black Jeep starts up the dirt road leading to the hilltop. Three alchemists, led by the inestimable Bernard, have come for a meeting. "At least there's one cook that ain't wired to the max," Big John concedes. "He never touches the Product." It shows: most illegal drug chemists, awash in dollars but their brains stewed by fumes, seldom pay attention to the little touches that transform banal consumer goods into personal statements of good taste. Bernard has 14-karat-gold-plated wheels on his favorite Corvette, and he gave a designer team jacket to the fellow who jockeys his offshore-racing boat. But Bernard is not some Johnny-come-lately cook with a jailhouse recipe in his jeans. He is a second-generation outlaw who at 16 learned how to extract pure methamphetamine from common industrial chemical solutions in a laboratory hidden on an Indian reservation. He was tutored by two German chemists flown in by his father. Bernard can't pronounce methylmethamphetamine, but he knows how to make something very like it and how much to charge. "I've worked hard for everything I have," Bernard says, proudly citing the enduring American ethic.