The Adderall Diaries (7 page)

“We’re all just writing about ourselves,” I say.

Nick tells me about a man he’s going to see in Turkey, a prisoner from Abu Ghraib, the man Lynndie England appeared to be pulling from his cell on a leash. He says when he talks to people about torture they often respond, “But they’re trying kill us.” “Who?” he says. “Who’s trying to kill us?”

I tell Nick about Sean and the Hans Reiser trial. It’s been almost two months since I first heard about Sean. I say there’s no body and the man that the victim left her husband for confessed to eight murders. I tell him all the ways I know Sean. Nick says it sounds complicated.

“Do you think Sean did it?” Nick asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Sean told my friend Josh that if he understood Sean’s relationship with Hans, Josh would weep piss and blood.”

“Who talks like that?”

I tell Nick I thought I would get to know Sean. Figure him out. But he disappeared on me and now I’m remembering all these things I thought I left behind.

The cafés are filled with struggling actors whispering to themselves. A belt of greenish smog lies like spilled sewage across the mountain range barreling the city. It’s different from San Francisco where the air is clean and the city is beautiful. Los Angeles is big and ugly. Uglier even than Oakland. Sometimes, in the early evening, Bearman, Nick, and I play basketball at a school yard on the edge of Hollywood, hoisting our shots with both hands toward the naked rims. There’s never anyone around to see our awkward athletic display.

“I’m writing for
Esquire,
” I tell the paparazzi at the jail where Paris Hilton is serving time. What else would I say? That I’m waiting for a murder trial to start, sleeping on someone’s couch, and starring in porn films in the San Fernando Valley?

I talk to the inmates as they leave the jail for treatment facilities. One woman is missing her front teeth, top and bottom. The other had four earrings ripped out during a gang fight in South Central. She says she was defending her sister.

The PR machine works overtime to flag the story that Paris is serving extra time because she’s a celebrity. It’s inaccurate but there’s nothing to do about it. Paris is given a special bed in the hospital unit. “You have to be dying to get one of those beds,” one of the inmates tells me. I pen an editorial pointing out that this is actually about prison crowding and a justice system that works differently for the rich. After a thousand words I’m done.

The night Paris is scheduled to get out I’m with a crowd of journalists flanking the walkway leading from the main entrance, kept back by yellow tape.

“I want pictures of a happy lady,” says Nick Ut. Thirty-five years ago he photographed a naked girl running in front of a black cloud, arms spread so as not to touch her sides, 80 percent of her body covered in napalm. In front of the girl, a boy with his mouth open in a black square screams. Behind her, soldiers walk casually, their helmets in place, guns across their shoulders. That picture won the Pulitzer Prize and helped end a war an ocean away. More recently Ut photographed Paris Hilton crying in the back-seat of a police car after being told she was to return to jail.

“You look at the pictures,” Nick says. “They’re very similar. Also different. Kim was poor and her family suffered a long time. Paris was in jail for three days.”

When Paris was first sentenced she said she hoped the media would focus more on the war. When the judge ordered her back, she screamed, “Mom, it’s not fair.” In a phone interview from jail she said, “It’s like being in a cage.”

There are hundreds of journalists, a dozen police, and tourists coming in. I meet Ashley Moore, who spent seven days here back in September. She couldn’t make bail so she sat in the jail for a week. After she was released the judge dropped the case. She has the Japanese symbol for beautiful on her arm, a rose tattooed on her foot. “That place,” she says pointing to the jail, “is no place to be.” But here she is, waiting to see Paris get out. She says she has nothing else to do on a Monday night.

As it gets closer to midnight the crowd swells. The TV reporters report live. Helicopters hover overhead. The parents pull up in a large black SUV. Their bodyguard is a big, bald man in a well-tailored suit. He seems to know the police. He looks like he could have been a football player once. The driver wears mirrored glasses and doesn’t smile. More tape is stretched to secure the crowd. The thrum of the helicopters is like a soundtrack.

“You’re so beautiful, Kathy,” a girl cries. The girl looks Spanish or Asian, or both. She’s wearing a tank top, her breasts pushed up.

“Thank you,” Kathy Hilton says. Kathy sits in the car, the window rolled down, bantering with the press. She soaks the cameras’ flashes in like lotion, plays with her hair.

Then the girl says it again, “You’re so beautiful, Kathy.”

Kathy smiles.

Then the girl says it again and Kathy looks ahead uncomfortably.

“Oh God, please let Paris go free!” a deranged man wails, stretching his arms and dropping to his knees.

Arc lights are set up. It’s midnight and everything shines. The reporters lean over the tape. The paparazzi wait with cameras strapped over their necks. All of it infused with the nervous energy of a bull waiting for a clown to unhinge the gate.

And then she is out. Paris Hilton in tight jeans and a light jacket thrown over a white shirt. She’s smiling, basking in the glow. She looks better without makeup. She gets to the car and is hugging her mother and then the door is open and she is inside and the tape and the barricades go down and the police cannot control the crowd. The car inches away. The paparazzi stand shins against the bumper, bent across the hood, taking pictures through the glass. Nick Ut stands in the wreckage of toppled tripods left by the young photographers, reviewing pictures he took. He’s a little man and this is not exactly his game. But Paris was smiling and happy, exactly as he had hoped.

At four in the morning my phone rings. I flip the bright screen while Bearman’s cats look up from the corner. It’s my friend Roger, calling from Chicago. Two men jumped him while he was trying to hail a cab. “Oh Steve,” he says. “They wouldn’t stop.” They kept beating him, even after they got his wallet and left him lying in the street almost unconscious. I stay on the phone with Roger for a long time. I talk to the doctor who put five stitches in Roger’s face and assures me everything is going to be OK. Later Roger says he just wishes he hadn’t been drunk at the time. He would have fought back.

Roger’s my oldest friend. I’ve known him since I was seven. Once, Justin’s father pulled up on the sidewalk in his taxi and I took off running. He poked a gun in Roger’s chest and asked where I had gone and Roger responded he didn’t know. Another time my father caught Roger climbing in through my bedroom window. He stood there with a hammer, considering whether or not to break Roger’s fingers. He told me later he was glad he hadn’t.

I spend an afternoon at the glassy ocean out at Venice Beach. There are concrete benches and tables on the beach, an outdoor gym, an ice-cream shop. People are roller-skating up and down the boardwalk. Old men walk in shorts with their shirts off, their bellies toasted by the sun. I think about the difference between being famous and disappearing. Los Angeles is a fantastic place to disappear. There are so many people trying to be recognized that all you have to do is stand still. In the hundreds of miles of sprawling suburbs a person could do nothing here and the time would pass and that would be that.

Hans Reiser’s trial won’t start for six more weeks, presuming it’s not continued, and Sean is still missing. I wonder who else Sean is hiding from, how far he is in over his head. I study the pictures I posed for inside Sean’s apartment. I have them in a file on my computer. There are large black tiles on the floor, a plaster angel on the wall in what looks like the entryway, a standing brass lamp and dark wood dresser. I’m tied into a body harness, wearing a blindfold and a spiked collar. A woman in a latex catsuit is posing to look as if she is digging her nails into my face. It was the summer of 1999, right around the time Hans and Nina were getting married on an Oakland hilltop. In the wedding video they dance behind a minotaur and Hans cannot keep his hands off Nina. He grasps for her like a greedy child, the way I grasped for Lissette. Sean was there dressed in drag, the maid of honor, witnessing for his friend. While I was chained up in his apartment was he already coveting his best friend’s wife?

Before I leave Los Angeles I meet a music producer. She asks what I’m working on and I say I am kind of writing a book about murder and kind of not doing anything. She says she tried to kill her stepfather once. She was sixteen and working in a pharmacy and she found a type of pill and figured out how many pills it would take to kill a person. She stole the pills, slipping a couple in her pockets every day, careful to cover her tracks. The night she decided she’d had enough she ground the pills and put them in her stepfather’s food.

“Nothing happened,” she says. “He was too fat. It went right through his system. He didn’t even notice.”

In the beginning of July, George Bush commutes Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence of thirty months for perjury. He doesn’t pardon Libby, who served as the vice president’s chief of staff, just changes the sentence so he doesn’t serve any time. He says the penalty was too severe but makes no move to change the mandatory sentencing for everyone else. Below the article is a story about Eva Daley, who drove her son and six of his friends to a gang fight in Long Beach where they stabbed a boy to death. It must have looked like a circus trick, all those children piling out of the car toward the playground.

When I get home from Los Angeles I see Miranda in the afternoon and we make a large pot of curried vegetables. I don’t see her again until a week later when her roommates are having a party and she asks to sleep over. She has to be up at four in the morning to go to work. She says she’s been busy. She says she’s having an existential crisis. She met a boy at a rock show and thinks maybe she’s in love. She’s wearing tennis shoes, a sweatshirt, and yellow running shorts. We walk down Cortland looking for ice cream but all the shops are closed.

Miranda is tired. The work she’s doing is secret, possibly illegal, and justified by the causes she represents. She doesn’t go to movies or watch television. She reads essays to support her desires, reinforces her beliefs with books like
Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
At night she closes herself around me while I lean over the side of the bed with the covers pushed back, sweating. Miranda’s legs pressed behind my legs feel like they’re a hundred degrees. I’m trying not to panic. I wake up startled in the middle of the night and she lays her hand over my face, spreading her fingers across my eyes.

“Go back to sleep,” she says. “You belong to me.”

In the morning her clothes are gone, along with her bag of books, her bicycle. I put on the mix CD she made while I cook eggs and make coffee.

I’m moving soon. Just a little more than a mile away into a one-bedroom apartment with a twenty-six-year-old kid who works for a guitar magazine. I tap my pen on the table and stare past the fire escape, contemplating the hill. I hear a series of explosions behind the building. It’s the Fourth of July.

“You’re twitching,” my psychiatrist says. “Above your eye.”

“I’ve always had a twitch,” I say.

When I was younger I could barely control it. I would roll my lips, blink quickly, nod my head in short, quick jerks. I was so tense I could only wear extra-large clothes that hung on me like sacks because I couldn’t stand the feeling of fabric pressing my shoulders. She says the Adderall could make it worse. She asks if I want to start taking medication for depression. She suggests Welbutrin or a serotonin agent.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think I want to be on any more pills.”

I tell her I took Paxil once but it just made things worse. My father, I suspect, also suffers from depression. A deep sadness always followed his rage. “I’m awful,” he would say after his fits. There might be broken plates across the kitchen floor and he would be standing in my doorway, the bags beneath his eyes heavy with grief. He would offer a gift, like a bowl of ice cream or a glass of Coke. “I feel terrible about it.” That was his way of talking about things. His apologies always came with an assurance that he was hurting too, that he could be trusted to take care of his own punishments. He needed to know I forgave him, as if he couldn’t go on otherwise. But I knew he would erupt again, exploding through the house like a thunderstorm, and I didn’t have any forgiveness in me.

When I got older we patched things up for a while but it didn’t work out. I haven’t spoken to my father in a long time. Our last real conversation was an argument over the phone in 2004. I was writing a book about the presidential election and I could see Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter nearby at the entrance to a veteran’s hospital. My novel
Happy Baby
was just out. As in all of my novels, the protagonist is a stand-in for me. He was raised in group homes and was heavily into S/M. It was my first time writing honestly about my sexual desires and my tendency to eroticize my childhood.

I received a note from a journalist who, after interviewing me, had been contacted by my father. My father told him I was a liar, a spoiled child from an upper-middle-class home looking for attention. He told him that I could have come home at any time, which wasn’t true; when I was arrested at age fourteen I didn’t know where he lived. My father disputed basic facts, saying I had gone to two high schools, not four. That I left home at fifteen, not thirteen. He didn’t shave my head, he gave me a haircut. He only handcuffed me to a pipe one time, he said, and look how many stories I wrote about it. It didn’t take long to realize this wasn’t the first journalist my father had contacted. He left a trail of denials across the internet like digital breadcrumbs. Everywhere I found a review of the book I would also find his comments.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. I was incredulous. There was the senator in front of me, his arm wrapped around a soldier whose leg had been amputated below the knee, and I was sitting in the parking lot and couldn’t even get out of the car.

“I know, son, I know,” my father said, as if he felt sorry for me.

My writer’s block began after that conversation. I had based my identity on a year spent sleeping on the streets and the four years that followed. It wasn’t much of a foundation. He was questioning my story, telling anyone who would listen that I had made up the whole thing, my entire life. I began to qualify everything. I wouldn’t say anything about myself without first saying there were people who remembered things differently. I wondered how much I had mythologized my own history, arranged my experiences to highlight my successes and excuse my failures. How far had I strayed from the truth?

When I stopped responding to my father he pushed further. Yes, he wrote, he had yelled quite a bit and maybe, since my room was off the kitchen, I had mistakenly thought he was yelling at me. Then the group homes became foster homes and finally I had never even been in a foster home, I wouldn’t know what one looked like, everything was the product of my imagination, a result perhaps of something that happened in the mental hospital in 1986. He was trying to obliterate me. He was stealing my past and I was trying to hold on but felt it slipping through my fingers. I started to disappear.

In the documents from Read Mental Hospital, a doctoral psychology student writes,
Stephen experiences interpersonal rela tionships as unsatisfying and leave him with feelings of loneliness and isolation. His family system is not experienced as a haven where warmth and nurturance are demonstrated. Paternal fig ures are seen as punitive and rejecting. Maternal figures are seen in more positive light but are unavailable resulting in feeling of abandonment
(sic). That was more than twenty years ago. I get the notes my father sends through reviews or comments almost every month telling me I need to apologize to my dead mother. I hear from female writers who my father has written to. “I liked your article. I think you know my son…” Growing up he would flirt with my friends’ mothers. He once offered to get an apartment for a girlfriend of mine. “A girl that pretty shouldn’t have to work.” I see the mean reviews he leaves of my books on Amazon. And I think, I don’t need antidepressants. I have real problems.

I’m sitting on a black chair with my feet up, staring at my psychiatrist scratching notes on the digital tablet on her lap. It costs me $75 a visit, more for the meds. Each visit is only fifteen minutes long. She has so much faith in her pills; she doesn’t know me at all. I wish we could go for a walk and I could try to explain some of it to her. I wish we could sit for three hours on top of Bernal Heights. I think she would have good advice. She’s wearing a long black dress, her hair piled in a bun on her head. She’s a nice lady. She’s getting ready to retire and the lines on her face are rivulets of empathy. I’m twitching. She’s telling me I should take antidepressants and I’m thinking of Tolstoy saying the only conclusion a reasonable person can come to is that life is meaningless. And then everything seems like a cliché.

I pay my doctor and head outside where I’m reminded of something else: the sun greeting Meursault in Camus’
The Stranger.
Meursault fails to show remorse at his mother’s funeral and then, at the beach, takes one step forward when he knows he should take one step back, and is blinded by the light flashing off the Arab’s blade.

I can’t find Sean but I find more than a dozen people who know him. Sean wanted to turn his dungeon studio into a church so that all the dominatrixes who worked there would be priestesses, safeguarded by laws protecting religious freedoms. “He’s like that,” someone says. “He’s always looking for an angle.”

Several people remember Sean claiming he murdered someone as long as ten years ago.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” I ask one person.

“I didn’t believe him,” that person says.

Everybody seems to have a different opinion of Sean. They often refer to his generosity and kindness. One person says if Sean claims to have killed eight people then it’s true. Sean’s not a liar. Others caution me to keep my distance.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“He’s hard to get rid of. Once he’s in your life he won’t want to go away. He sees it as a game.”

I also hear something more disturbing. Someone says Sean called a friend just weeks before Nina disappeared. The friend described Sean as extremely agitated, saying Sean couldn’t understand how Nina could leave him and why she was refusing to see him.

I go to Portland for a writers’ workshop at Reed College. Every day I read work by my ten students and we sit around a coffee table discussing their essays. One woman says she’s an abuse survivor, another writes about a car crash she survived but in which her boyfriend died. One writes about doing her MFA in New York and how one of the students stole a story idea from another student and published it in a book. A man from Iowa says the class is really just an excuse to visit his grandchildren. He’s seventy-four years old and once ran for Congress. One morning he asks if anyone read the local paper. “This young woman,” he says. “She was killed over in Iraq. Shot by a sniper. Now her two kids have no mother. And we’re sitting around talking about where to put a fucking period.”

As part of the conference I give a reading at an outdoor amphitheater with rows of white wood benches leading up to the Gray Campus Center. It’s a quiet evening with fifty students and faculty sitting patiently while I read an essay about Lissette carving “possession” in my side. She spelled it wrong, leaving out one
s.
The metaphor was too obvious. It was like Jim Morrison dying in the bathtub or Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. It meant exactly what you thought it meant.

In Los Angeles, Bearman had told me I needed to find a new story. I had written four novels based loosely on my life and multiple personal essays. “Listen,” he said. “Stick to Hans and Sean and keep yourself out of it.” My friend Kay encourages me to write something accessible, and to keep a journal for the rest. “Write something that people want to read,” she says. “Think of Dave Eggers. He wrote a book about himself and moved on to other things.” Twelve years ago, when I was hospitalized following my overdose, my friend Louie came to visit me. He said, “You better never write about this.” He was trying to distinguish between being a real human being and someone who only lives on the page. I didn’t even consider myself a writer then, though I wrote all the time.

I was in the hospital for eight days after my overdose. My body was covered in strange boils and for most of my time there I could barely move. I had a stroke, or a seizure. The doctors didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. My troubles were self-inflicted.

I checked out early, returning to the room I rented on the third floor of a large house near the university, walking with a limp. Suddenly I noticed how yellow the walls were, and how the roof rose at a sharp angle, cutting the space in half. I stopped eating. I lost twenty-five pounds. I couldn’t focus and I began to have panic attacks, which I hadn’t experienced since I was in the group homes.

Soon after leaving the hospital I began to fantasize about getting a gun and going to the lake and putting the gun in my mouth and toppling back into the water. I would kill myself just like Kurt Cobain had two years earlier. But it was winter, and I worried that the frozen lake would keep me alive and I would be rescued somehow. It was all I could think about. A month after I was out of the hospital I showed up back at the emergency room and told them what I was going to do. A resident gave me some Klonopin and sent me home. The next day I enrolled in a drug treatment program.

My friends think I’m a happy person. And in a way I am. But I’ve been sad a lot too. When I’m sad I don’t want anyone to know. I try to hide it, even from myself. I read books on depression. They all say to take your meds; it’s a matter of finding the right cocktail. But the authors also talk about recurrences, shifting dosages, sleeping ten hours a night, and losing all interest in sex. It’s only recently that I’m realizing I’ve been depressed all my life. I run from it like a fire. I could stand under a thousand spotlights, publish a million books, and it wouldn’t change a thing.