I’ll be honest with you. “Breaking Bad” completely ruined local meth raids for me.
A few weeks ago, when a pair of men were accused of whipping up tasty batches of the stuff on Lisbon Street, I had high hopes.
“Let’s not be so fast to condemn these fellows,” I said. “There’s a chance that what we have here is a man, driven by old emotional wounds and a fierce need to provide for his family, who has turned to the high-risk, high-reward world of the drug trade because health problems demand that he act fast.”
It was very deep and wordy. I envisioned a dynamic, multi-layered story about these fascinating men who used chemistry to build an empire. We’re talking science, societal pressures and a man’s savage love for his family as ingredients in one intoxicating stew. Is there any way this story won’t win a Pullet Surprise?
Then I learned that the two men pretty much burned their facial hair off and botched the batch the very first time they tried to cook. This wasn’t chemistry; it was a pair of guys taking shots in the dark and hoping for the best.
So much for Walter White and his many inner-conflicts. So much for Jesse Pinkman’s heartbreaks and dashed attempts at redemption.
What we had on Lisbon Street was a couple of guys looking to get high on the cheap, a storyline that didn’t exactly warrant the use of “Baby Blue” as a theme song. It warranted the Benny Hill music, or perhaps a sad tuba.
Which is the case more often than not when it comes to local crime drama. Your garden variety drug peddler didn’t get into the trade because of some complex existential angst, he got into it as a means of financing his own habits.
Killers kill over petty passions: stolen girlfriends, owed money, bad breakups.
Thieves thieve because they’re greedy. Robbers rob because it just seems easier than getting a job. These are not people who will inspire Vince Gilligan to whip up a script and sell it for a zillion dollars.
Of course, there are exceptions. I remember a string of bank robberies back in the day committed by a woman who was so emotionally scarred by a lifetime of acne, she became hellbent on financing a treatment.
We’ve seen a man kill his father over what he claimed was a pattern of sexual abuse that spanned generations.
We saw a serial rapist run amok in a frenzy of hatred toward women that would make Freud himself utter a gasp.
The Romeo Parent killing in 2013? There’s plenty for Gilligan to work with there. Betrayal, street justice and the old-as-crime-itself notion that nobody likes a rat, for starters. Throw in a little prescription drug abuse, a grisly killing and an ugly court drama, and you’ve got something worthy of AMC.
The two dudes with their chemistry set on Lisbon Street probably won’t get any calls from Hollywood, but we see our share of human drama. Our own version of Walter White might be teaching at a local high school as we speak and the Jesse Pinkman equivalent could be behind the wheel of that ugly RV bouncing up Sabattus Street. At least that’s what I’ll be pondering the next time I get sent to another reported meth lab.
And don’t even get me started on “The Walking Dead.” Every night at last call, I see the walkers lumbering up Pine Street: the march of the Lewiston zombies.
It’s chilling, yo.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer who has recently discovered a thing called Netflix. Email: mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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