Just one tiny taste

Meth hooked man on first try

By TERESA RESSEL
Daily Journal Staff Writer

Clyde Novella has led a troubled life because of the forbidden fruit he tasted in a weak moment.

The weak moment was when a friend suggested he try meth. Meth was easily attainable in the 1960s with a prescription for little yellow diet pills at any drug store.

The drug became his sanctuary, and his prison. He felt like Superman at times and like a modern-day vampire at others.

Novella has written a book harshly detailing the ups and downs of a five-year meth addiction in the 1960s. The story, which includes foul language, takes place in a mental hospital where he shares the inner battles, nightmares, hallucinations, overdoses, and the self-centeredness that comes with the obsession to get meth.

The book is labeled as a novel based on his addiction. Names, including his own, have been changed and a psychiatrist has been added to help the story flow.

Novella (the pen name used because he doesn’t want to identify anyone in the story) is from St. Louis and has been living in Terre Du Lac for a short time.

He and his wife spent the last 30 years working on this book called, “Just A Little Taste.” He wrote it and she’s edited down from 600 pages to 300. They’ve recently self-published it.

“I wrote it as a warning,” he said. “I got trapped into it by trying it once.”

He said using meth or speed was like Christmas morning and winning the lottery. But when the high wore off or the meth ran out ...

“You might as well be in your grave,” he said. “It was an unbearable depression. Not normal depression — slit-your-throat depression.”

He compared himself to a modern-day vampire, only wanting to get more meth to keep him alive. He also drank, and did LSD and marijuana.

Novella, through the character, Tim, a lovesick young man, describes how the meth use began.

He had grown up in a good family with two wonderful parents. He became a paratrooper to be like John Wayne, but quickly found out it was nothing like the movies. He ended up with a Dear John letter from his wife, who took off with their child.

It was a downward struggle from there.

He tells how he said no to meth before finally taking it just to appease his friend, who said it would make him forget his woman troubles.

“You think it is something you can try once and walk away from, but it isn’t,” he said.

He spent that next week with his friend, either too high or too paranoid to leave. He forgot he even had a job.

“After the first few days, Jed taught me to hit up myself,” the book reads. “Finally after two days of plying my new skill, I crashed.

“Two days passed before I woke up. I was on a real downer — weak, foggy-headed, and paranoid. I had never before let fear rule my actions. Now an ordinary noise — a knock on the door, a car’s motor, the telephone’s ring — sent me diving behind the couch or into a closet for hours. Then, when hints of my strength reappeared, I began another speed run.”

He became pale, and emaciated. One day, after three years of use, he looked in the mirror and saw a man who looked like he was wasting away from cancer.

“But that was OK because I had the cure,” he writes in the book about an upcoming trip to the drug store. “Straight folks spent millions searching for what I had written on the little note in my pocket. I had no doubt that I could inject speed into a terminally ill patient and watch him become well again. But right now I needed the treatment more than anyone suffering from any natural affliction.”

The meth he used is not the same drug that is being used today. “It was pure meth,” he said, adding he didn’t trust the kind that was “home-made.”

The best memories were of partying, and living on peanut butter, crackers, LSD and speed for three months.

During these years, he rarely saw his old friends and the woman he had fallen in love with.

He witnessed a friend overdose and die, and got arrested at a party.

His parents never kicked him out because they knew some day he would come back to his senses. He said without his parents, he would have died.

A woman, the love of his life, who is now his wife, was the reason he got clean but it was a battle to stay that way. After months of being clean, he admitted himself to a mental hospital where he was locked up for a couple days and then in a day clinic for six to eight weeks.

He said he felt all alone, trapped within his mind due to what he and the meth did to himself.

He said it was not easy to live as Clark Kent when he knew he could be Superman, or at least feel like Superman when high on meth.

In the author’s note at the end of the book, Novella wrote, “Even now, after all this time, when I get extremely bummed out, my mind flashes back to that first little taste of meth, and how it made me feel like I was on an elevator racing up into the atmosphere; free from the gravity of life’s problems.”

He explained what keeps him grounded is the knowledge that he was really standing on an escalator going down to a dark abyss only God could rescue him from.

The book, after all, is subtly about finding God.

“I figured I tried everything, why not try God,” he said. Another thing that helped keep his mind off of meth was exercise, until he became disabled due to a back injury.

*********Big Hopes and Faith**********

Novella has big hopes for his book because he believes God has big things in mind for it. He sent one copy to the Montana Meth Project to see if they are interested in using it.

The book will be available at the Bonne Terre Memorial Library and he hopes to have it at Desloge Wal-Mart.

His wife, who goes by “Elaine” in the book, said she never used meth but she knew him before and after meth. She felt like she had experienced it after reading what he wrote about it. The book does not preach, she added. It paints a picture with words.

Dr. Raymond Fabing, a long-time area licensed professional counselor, said he basically read the whole book without putting it down. Novella put his heart and soul in this book and has written it in a real down-to-Earth way, Fabing said. He added the people, old and young, who have read it have found that it speaks to them. He thinks it would be good for anyone to read because a lot of people have addictions.

He said it may have foul language but society has a lot of evil. People need to realize that people they know have gone through this or will go through it.

Novella, who describes himself as “a Bohemian but a Christian, too,” hopes the book will help him get on a radio show. He wants to be on a radio show for six weeks, just a couple hours a week. Then maybe he could get his own show.

He sees the book and a possible radio show as a way to reach people about Christ.

“I’m not looking for fame and fortune,” he said. “I’m looking for a stepping stone to tell people what I found out. I want to make Clyde Novella so famous that he can have a radio show.”

He does not believe meth addicts should be put in prison for years for “falling into a trap.” He believes prison is for violent people.

Novella is a Bible reader. He still has the well-worn Bible his mother gave him in 1973.

He also enjoys drawing political cartoons. He and his wife also spent a year working on an animated cartoon about Hippies.



Teresa Ressel is a reporter for the Daily Journal and can be reached at 573-431-2010, ext. 179 or at tressel@dailyjournalonline.com.

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