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Part of crank's appeal to Paula, and apparently to most users, is that it helped her get things done. It made her feel capable, on top of things. She could party into the wee hours (often having sex with virtual strangers because, as she puts it, once you've stayed up all night with someone, you feel pretty close to them), go to work the next day, then come home and clean her room. "I even started depending on it to go to school," she says.
Then came what Paula claims was a three-month-long, nearly sleepless crank run that left her homeless, expelled from school and seeing ghouls behind every tree. Crankers tend to exaggerate, but her memories of the streak have that patented methamphetamine exactitude. "I knew I had to get nutrition, so every day I had a pudding snack, an applesauce and a little carton of milk," she says.
Her diet wasn't all so wholesome, though. "Also, I was smoking tons of pot just to calm my nerves."
For Jennifer, the conscience-stricken mother, the party's still not over. Another crank-warped week has passed; another Friday night has rolled around; and though she's thinner, paler and less coherent, she's feeling considerably richer owing to the arrival this morning of her monthly child-support check. Swaying nautically on her favorite barstool, she reports that she has made some changes in her life in the past few days. She's moved out of her parents' place, leaving her daughter behind, and has taken up residence in a rented house with two male roommates who share her taste for meth and, unlike her family, don't "make me feel guilty every time they look at me."
That's where the party continues when the bars close. The tiny house, across the tracks and across the freeway, is supernaturally tidy. In the spotless kitchen, at a spotless table next to a box filled with hundreds of empty beer cans all conscientiously rinsed and crushed (when crankers decide to clean house, they clean house), Jennifer and her roommates smoke and jabber while clock hands turn from 3 to 4 to 5. The oldest roommate--his fortyish, gaunt face so stiff and lifeless it looks taxidermied--veers from a fond recollection of a camping trip to a paranoid rant about "hidden cameras" and warnings to TIME's photographer and reporter that "we know how to protect ourselves in this house."
With daybreak nearing, disaster strikes. Jennifer discovers she has lost her purse, child-support check and all. A panic ensues. The house is searched, and the driveway. Someone hatches a plan to drive downtown and retrace Jennifer's steps, which won't be easy. "Where did you leave it?" her friends keep asking, but she just sighs and insists she can't remember.
Probably the same place she left her looks, her education, her jobs, her little angel. Somewhere out there in crank city, in the dark--a dark that, no matter how hard Jennifer tries to stop it, always turns to dawn.
--With reporting by Patrick Dawson on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation