LIVES SCARRED, STALLED BY ADDICTION

The drug’s legacy includes rotted teeth, collapsed veins and ravaged skin.

SAN BERNARDINO Flopped on a couch in his darkened San Bernardino secondhand
store, Richard Barnett describes three decades of smoking methamphetamine.
His rambling stories burst out in bits and pieces and don’t always make
sense.

“You come here to buy fixable things,” he said, surveying thousands of saws,
toys, dishes, photos, car parts, golf clubs, magazines, rocks and appliances
in the store. “That’s what I think I’ll call the shop — Fixable Things.”

As he speaks, one question lingers. Can the store’s name apply to his life?

Someday, maybe.

Barnett’s nose is like a blade. Skin is stretched painfully thin across an
angular face.

His teeth are gone, attacked and rotted by chemicals in the meth. The teeth
used to hurt so much, Barnett said, he pried them from his jaws with
ballpoint pens.

Except the ones that broke off out of his reach. He let a dentist pull
those. Barnett, 45, keeps them all in a little plastic box in the shop on
Victoria Avenue.

Rotten teeth are among the common health problems of meth users.

Manuel Salazar, 41, started using speed in Sacramento 11 years ago before he
settled in Kansas City, Kan., where he lives now.

“At 30 years old, I had nice teeth,” he said, black decay tracing the edges
of his once-pearly whites.

Tattoos hide scars in the crook of his elbow where veins collapsed from
years of “slamming” — slang for injecting methamphetamine.

Beneath a pants leg, black circles in Salazar’s skin pinpoint long-healed
infections from the syringe.

The drug’s pull is so strong that when he ran out of veins just about
everywhere else, Salazar started shooting up in his scrotum.

Until he felt a tremendous pain. “I shot and I missed,” he said. Doctors
removed the testicle he jabbed with the needle.

Neither Salazar nor Barnett wanted an addict’s life. Years ago, Barnett
hoped for the happiness and success that he saw others enjoy.

For now, the store is his dream, even though it is not open. Barnett’s
lifestyle has paralyzed those plans for four years.

Most mornings, he smokes methamphetamine if he has it. Then he tries to
straighten out the shop’s seemingly hopeless mess.

He just can’t seem to keep the cleanup on track.

Barnett said he pays rent on the shop with help from his mother and money
from Supplemental Security Income, a federal program for people who cannot
work because of physical or mental disabilities.

Behind the store, three dozen washers and dryers and several old cars litter
the yard. A rusted gas heater looks like junk, but it’s not, he said.

“I clean this up, spray-paint it nice and black . . . I get 40, 50 bucks for
that,” he said.

For Barnett, life without meth is inconceivable. He started using the drug
in about seventh grade, after he was stabbed by some boys in a fight, he
said.

There are other injuries. His shirt hides more rubbery white scars than it
seems possible for any one man to survive.

Barnett has been stabbed three or four times and shot twice. Two people once
shot him in the abdomen and back in an argument over a drug deal. All the
problems are just part of the path he has followed, Barnett said. He was
supposed to get married twice, but both romances ended before he reached the
altar.

He clings to the notion of a better future.

“I hope there would be something that could make me feel human again,”
Barnett said. Someday, maybe.

Raymond Smith can be reached by e-mail at rsmith@pe.com.