When I met Larry, he was working as a roofer. He put the all-new roof on our house, a complete tear-off and everything. Sitting around with him, we started talking about this and that, and he had a story to tell, and it went a little something like this:

Larry the Roofer, father of eight kids ("I think I finally figured out what causes it!") used to be a speed cooker. He was good at it, and had a thriving operation going on. In the basement of his house he had a separate room, all walled off and securely locked up, in which he had his lab. He made a lot of high grade speed, and after a while the Vice and Narcotics Division of the Portland Police Bureau got interested in busting him, so here's what they did:

The Portland Police sent an undercover agent into action. She was a young, good-looking woman whom everyone called Peaches. She took care not to look like a cop. She wore regular tavern-patron clothes, a tank top and jeans, and started hanging out at this little tavern where Larry and a few of his friends were regulars. It only took her about a month of hanging out at the tavern, shooting pool and drinking beer and getting high with the guys in the parking lot, until she started making friends with Larry. She was real nice to him, went home with him, fucked him to death a couple of times, one thing led to another until pretty soon they were living together. "We were in love," says Larry, still shaking his head years later. She slept in his bed every night, fed his kids, took care of his house, did ALL KINDS OF DOPE with him, it was like living in a happy dream. Larry and Peaches got very close in the course of living together for a year.

Exactly on the one-year anniversary of the day she first moved in with him, Peaches personally slapped the handcuffs on him and saw him off to jail. She testified against him in court, got him convicted of manufacturing a controlled sunstance, saw him sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary. He did eight years, got out on probation for the last two years.

But that's not the end of it. Peaches thought about the whole thing and decided it stank. Larry was as honest (!) and decent (!) a man as any she'd met on the Portland Police force (yeah, that shouldn't have been too hard) and she decided she had done the wrong thing. Peaches quit the force, walked away from all that, went back to getting high all the time, and she's walking around the sidewalks of Old Town right now, talking to herself and looking at her feet.