The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  In his memoir my father refers to the man as Jerk Number One and the two men that joined in as Jerk Number Two and Jerk Number Three. He wrote, “I set up a check list of procedures.

  “Unfortunately wearing the long coat over the sawed-off shotgun was impractical now, in the heart of Chicago’s warm July summer. Even the mornings were warm. I could still do it, but people would notice it and it would look peculiar. And the mornings were bright. Jerk Number One came out to his station wagon about 7:30 AM, the sun had already been up quite a while. I’d be visible like nobody’s business.

  “Still it had to be now, as I was leaving the country. Then the case would die a natural death.

  “I had a black vinyl hat to wear. I could put on a false beard and mustache, and eyeglasses with no glass in them. I was nervous but determined.

  “Jerk Number One was killed one morning while sitting in his car. Apparently someone got out of a car behind and across the street from his and put both barrels of a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun through the side window on the driver’s side.” He finished the section with this strange caveat: “If any state’s attorney or Chicago policeman is reading this, I am stating categorically that I had nothing to do with Jerk One’s death. I suppose he must have had other enemies besides myself.”

  Shortly after that my parents moved to England where I was born.

  I stayed home from work sick as I read through the entire manuscript. His denial was typical, with its hope to take credit and claim innocence at the same time. I didn’t doubt he killed that man. It fit everything I thought I knew about my father: driven by pride, anger, and violence. Especially pride. The most startling detail was not the murder, but the lack of remorse for the child who grew up without his father as a result of my father’s actions. The boy is never again mentioned in the text. I wanted to meet him. I imagined getting to know him, going to bars together and drinking Budweiser, and one day saying, “My father killed your father.” He would be around fifty now. I looked for information everywhere but I came up against a dead end. I combed through microfiche of Chicago newspapers from the time. I hired students to help me with research. I went to the neighborhood looking for long-term residents who might remember something. I contacted the Chicago Bar Association trying to find the attorney who had represented my father and they told me he was deceased.

  The University of Michigan did a study on murders committed in Chicago in the 1970s. There was no white man shot with a shotgun, sitting in his car.

  I’ve been holding on to that information for a long time. Wondering where it fit.

  BOOK 1

  Preliminary Motions

  CHAPTER 1

  May; Golden State; Suicidal Thoughts; A Year without Speed; Floyd Mayweather Comes Up Short; “Your Guy Just Confessed to Eight Murders”; Lissette; The Part about Josie

  It’s May 4, 2007, the morning after the Golden State Warriors won the first round of the NBA playoffs against a Dallas team that was supposed to be one of the best ever to play the game. I’m not thinking about murder confessions.

  I’m taking Adderall, a Schedule D amphetamine salt combo, emptying the time-release capsules into glasses of orange juice, trying to break down the casings surrounding the amphetamines to see if I can get all the speed at once. I swirl the juice, press against the beads with the back of a spoon. I take five milligrams at eight, five more at noon. My roommate is gone. He left his door open and his computer sitting on the floor and I shuttle back and forth between his room, where I pass hours playing cards online, and my room, where I stare out the window and struggle to write something and then give up and go back to his room and play some more cards. It’s a lonely, pointless existence, but that’s what happens.

  I head to a party at a small publishing house in the Mission. All the kids are there, eating cake and bean dip and drinking beer. It’s 5:00 and they’re off work. One girl wears bright red pants that come to her rib cage. She’s just back from Germany and says everybody in Europe is wearing these kinds of pants.

  I talk with Doug and Brent about the Warriors’ run, how they barely even made the play-offs.

  “I have the Chicago Bulls DVDs at home,” Doug says. “I watch the games of the nineties over and over again. It helps me relax. You know the best player on that team wasn’t Michael Jordan? It was Scottie Pippen. Scottie could dunk from the free-throw line at any time. He just elevated, and it was done.”

  I know what he’s talking about. I lived in Chicago all those years. I remember the play-offs against New York, Scottie Pippen flying into Patrick Ewing like a warhead destroying a mountain. Of course it was Jordan, and to a lesser extent Phil Jackson, who enabled Pippen to do what he did. He was never any good after he left the Bulls. He had his payoff, his championship rings, his millions, the rest no one will ever know.

  I feel ready to kill myself.

  After the party I stop at the café. There’s a girl from the writing program there, one of the new fellows. She’s young, with bright red cheeks and a mop of healthy brown hair. She says she had been somewhere and heard someone say my name. She says it bitterly.

  “I’m famous,” I say. “Which is why I have so much money. Women follow me everywhere.” But I’m joking. I don’t have any money. I’ve had writer’s block for almost two years.

  I go home and start drinking. By midnight it’s done. I’m asleep on the couch, beneath an eight-panel collage my ex-girlfriend Lissette made for me. She made it while she was still living with her husband in a little house on the other side of the Bay, before our relationship broke apart her marriage. Each panel is two feet high and eighteen inches wide and comprised mostly of fetish models cut from mainstream magazines: women in gas masks, men on operating tables stuck full of hypodermic needles. Glossy pictures glued on black cardboard, peeling at the edges. It’s the only decoration I have. The collage brought us back together for a while but in the end it was the unfinished work of a child, an accurate description of us both.

  I have two roommates who won’t be coming home. We live in a large, cheap apartment in the outer Mission with strange gray carpet and a view of the water reclamation plant on a hill nearby. So instead of going to my room, I fall asleep on the couch and then eventually go downstairs where I toss and dream until morning when I wake up feeling scratchy but fine and I take ten milligrams of Adderall and hope I can do this without doing it again.

  My psychiatrist lives just down the street from me. I can walk there. I see her once a month, or once every three months, and she prescribes my pills. The pills make me crazy, I know that, but I don’t see the alternative. It’s really just speed, no different from the original amphetamine salts Gordon Alles injected in June 1929, and almost identical to the Pervitin used by German paratroopers in World War II as they dropped behind enemy lines in a state the British newspapers described as “heavily drugged, fearless, and berserk.” It’s the same stuff injected in high doses in the Haight Ashbury that Allen Ginsberg was talking about in 1965 when he said, “Speed is anti-social, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind.”1

  Without the Adderall I have a hard time following through on a thought. My mind is like a man pacing between the kitchen and the living room, always planning something in one room then leaving as soon as he arrives in the other. Adderall is a compound of four amphetamine salts. The salts, with their diverse half lives, metabolize at different rates, so the amphetamine uptake is smoother and the come down lighter. And I wonder if I’m not still walking back and forth in my head, just faster, so fast it’s as if I’m not walking at all.

  My psychiatrist is tall and thin and her skin hangs loosely around her face. I like her quite a bit although I’ve never spent more than fifteen minutes with her. She works from her home and the door to a small waiting room is always open on the side of her house. There are magazines there, in particular ADD Magazine. The magazine is full of tips for organizing your life. There’s even an article suggesting that maybe too much organi
zation is not a good thing. Mostly though, it’s about children. How to deal with your attention deficit child and the child’s teacher, who might be skeptical.

  In the writing class I teach, a woman recently turned in an essay about her son who suffers from attention deficit. Her essay was written as a love letter and was completely absent of hate or envy or any of the things that make us human. It was missing everything we try to hide.

  “How are you feeling?” my psychiatrist asks.

  “Better,” I reply.

  I had stopped taking the pills for a year, maybe more. Three weeks ago I started taking them again. When I quit taking Adderall I was still dating Lissette. I would go to her house in Berkeley during the day while her husband was gone and wrap myself around her feet while she worked. Or I would visit her at the dungeon where she worked on the weekends as a professional dominatrix. I would sit in the dressing room with the women and we would watch television. Lissette was the most popular and she would be off with clients most of the day. She would leave them in the rooms to undress. When she returned they would be kneeling on the floor, their naked backs facing her. She might walk carefully toward them, sliding the toe of her boot across the carpet. Or she might stand away from them, letting their anticipation build, as she pulled a single-tail from the rack. She loved to be adored and the best clients made her feel happy and complete. The walls were thin and I could hear the paddles landing on a client’s back with a thud sometimes followed by a scream. When she was done she might come downstairs and sit on my lap for a while, and then we would go.

  I have a memory of Lissette in the dungeon, which was really just a four-bedroom basic Californian with a driveway and a yard in a quiet town north of Berkeley, near the highway. She’s standing on the back of a couch, grabbing a toy from the top of a row of lockers. She’s wearing panties with lace along the bottom and high heels, and we’re all staring at the back of her thighs, amazed.

  When I was taking Adderall all I thought about was Lissette and when I stopped taking the Adderall I started thinking about other things. Lissette noticed and we broke up. Then we got back together, then we broke up again. Over the course of last year, after I had stopped, I often felt suicidal. I had time, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was a writer but I had forgotten how to write so I sat with my computer. I sat in coffeeshops or I sat at home or I sat at the Writer’s Grotto, an old building near the ballpark where a group of authors share office space. I still had a bunch of pills left and occasionally I would take one, just to know that the writer’s block was real. Then I lost all the pills when my bag was stolen at a bar on Twenty-second Street six months ago, and that was the end of that.

  If you asked me what happened this past year I’m not sure I could tell you. I could say I moved into this apartment on the edge of the city where I can hear children and dogs in the morning and I despise it. I could say I was with and not with Lissette, getting together and breaking up every couple of months. At one point I called her the love of my life. I could say honestly I started to write a novel every day. I could say I went on tour for six weeks with the Sex Workers Art Show and that a compilation of previously written essays and stories about my predilection for—my addiction to—violent sex was released to silent reviews.

  I could say I watched the first three seasons of The Wire on DVD and on Sunday nights I went to a friend’s house nearby and ate dinner and watched HBO.

  I ran a reading series in the same bar where my bag was stolen. The series was part of a literary organization I founded to raise money for progressive candidates running for Congress in 2006.

  I edited an anthology of political erotica.

  I could say I did all these things and if it sounds like a lot I can assure you it isn’t. I’m not married and I have no children. I have friends but they don’t know where I am most of the time. I don’t work. I live on money I made before, money that is almost gone.

  Last year I made $10,000.

  I live in San Francisco. Rents are going up.

  I’m teaching a couple of classes to get by. I know I should get a job, but it’s hard to do that after a while.

  On May 5, 2007, Floyd Mayweather meets Oscar De La Hoya at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas. The fight has been hyped for five months. Floyd will make more than $20 million and De La Hoya will make more than $30 million. De La Hoya is heavier and Mayweather faster. Mayweather goes running late at night in Las Vegas, 3:00 AM sprints in the dark. The underlying drama is that Floyd’s father had been in jail for drug running. Floyd trained with his uncle instead.

  The boxers move quickly inside the ropes, sweat pouring down their backs like a glaze. Mayweather peppers the older De La Hoya, landing a shot in the tenth that snaps De La Hoya’s head back like a spring toy. De La Hoya, well past his prime, comes out hard in the final rounds, his shoulders turning as if on rotors, delivering a flurry of jabs into Mayweather’s ribs. Mayweather just barely wins the fight and tells anyone who will listen, “This proves I’m the greatest fighter of all time.” But it doesn’t. Floyd Mayweather was supposed to win big, and he squeaked by. Floyd’s father sits ringside, a guest of his son’s opponent. The father has long braids and cheeks so sharp it’s as if his face was engraved. After the fight the older Mayweather says he thinks De La Hoya should have won.

  I know everything there is to know about fathers who root against their sons.

  The morning after the fight I get a call from Josh, a staff writer at Wired magazine. He’s working on a profile of Hans Reiser, a brilliant computer programmer accused of killing his estranged wife.

  I helped Josh track down Hans’ former best friend, Sean Sturgeon. Sean and I have several girlfriends in common and I once did a bondage photo shoot in his apartment when he wasn’t home. I don’t remember ever meeting him but our paths have crossed so many times it almost doesn’t make sense. Josh is calling to say he found out something incredible about the case. “Your guy Sean just confessed to eight murders, maybe nine.”

  “Why maybe nine?”

  “He isn’t sure if one of the victims was dead.”

  Josh says Sean’s not under arrest and he’s refusing to tell the district attorney the names of the people he killed. Sean told Josh that he confessed to the DA because he’s a born-again Christian and thought the jury would want to know. It seemed the right thing to do. Or rather, he posed it as a question: “Don’t you think the jury would want to know?” But then he said Hans knew about his murders and he was confessing in order to beat Hans to the punch. Maybe he confessed for both reasons. Or maybe he confessed for reasons that had nothing to do with Reiser or the jury. He denied having anything to do with Hans’ wife’s disappearance. He told Josh, “Give me some sodium pentothal or any truth serum, put a little ecstasy in there and ask me if I killed Nina. I have never been a threat to her.”2

  Sean told the police and the district attorney that his victims had physically and sexually abused him and his sister in the East Bay commune where they were raised. He claimed he hadn’t killed anyone since 1996. The commune interests me. I know the places where adults come in contact with unsupervised children. Between fourteen and eighteen I was in five different state-funded childcare facilities, including three group homes, a mental hospital, and a temporary youth shelter that stuffed thirty children into each room. In those places you can never tell who to trust.

  When I’m done talking to Josh I feel like I’m waiting for something. The group homes were a long time ago. It’s still morning and I put a pot of water on the stove. I call Josh back and ask him for Sean’s phone number.

  If Sean committed eight murders it’s a huge story, I think. Here is a man willing to wait years to get revenge on the people who stole his childhood. I think of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, two of my favorite books, both set around spectacular murders and written by novelists. I know people who have known Sean for more than a decade. I have the inside track. And there’s something else about the case; Nina Reis
er’s body was never found.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t know if Sean will talk to me. If he did kill eight people, surely the police would have arrested him by now. And why isn’t he a suspect in the disappearance of Nina Reiser?

  After calling Sean and leaving a message I bicycle through the city, down Market Street toward the Castro, my right pant leg rolled up so as not to get caught in the chain. My bicycle, an old Peugot I picked up for $150 nine years ago, is my prize possession. I live a spare existence. I haven’t owned a car since I first got to this city.

  I cut right, past the Gay and Lesbian Center and the Three Dollar Bill Café. Something’s tugging on me. I had heard of Nina’s murder, but never the full story. I had heard about Sean and how Nina’s disappearance crushed him. He took to bed, paralyzed with grief. He was in love with his best friend’s wife. It was all just passing information. But eight murders? Revenge killings? Eight murders isn’t revenge. Eight murders is a serial killer.

  I go to the park to meet a girl I know. Someone who has taken a habit of coming to my readings. She’s engaged and lives with her fiancé between the Marina and Russian Hill. I’ve only seen her once before and she’d explained their relationship. It was simple. He was monogamous and believed in monogamy. She cheated on him and always would.