The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  She arrives wearing a black dress and sandals. Her skin is so pale all I can think of is milk. I don’t think of my complicity in her unfaithfulness. I don’t want to. I don’t love her; she’s just someone I know. I wait as she walks across the grass in her sandals. A man stops her and asks if she is willing to be in one of his paintings. She talks with him for a moment, her head turned his way, her body pointing toward me. He doesn’t have any paint. He wears dark, heavy clothes, his belongings bound in garbage bags around him.

  The sun is brilliant and the colorful houses are brightly lit along the hills. On some days the fog catches on their drainpipes like cotton, but today it’s easy to see why people want to live here. Easy to see San Francisco for the gentle paradise it is.

  We lie on the grass with my shirt pulled up. I forget all about De La Hoya’s fight and Sean Sturgeon’s confession. I ask her to pinch my nipple and she does but it isn’t enough. I ask her to do it harder and soon there is blood everywhere. There are people nearby but they don’t seem to notice. For most of it she keeps her hand over my mouth and I close my eyes and drift away. “It’s OK,” she says.

  That’s only half the day. There’s a barbecue, and then a reading, and then a party. There’s always a party. I dance with a girl. “How do you know Eric?” I ask between songs. “I don’t,” she says. “My boyfriend knows him.” I dance better after that. It’s still the weekend, after all. It’s still San Francisco. Everything is beautiful. Really. It seems perfect. The DJ looks like Napoleon Dynamite and spins pop from the eighties on vinyl. I’m thirty-five years old. The woman I’m dancing with has curly black hair and moves with steady grace, her silk dress rolling in waves down her arms. I feel loose and fine. I take $5 from another writer, who puts his money, inexplicably, on De La Hoya.

  “Always bet on youth,” I tell him.

  It’s one in the morning. I don’t imagine anything can ever go wrong.

  I’m leaning back at my desk staring at a poster for Cameron Tuttle’s Paisley Hanover when Sean finally returns my call. “You’re a hard guy to get a hold of,” I say.

  “I needed to do a little research on you first,” he replies. He sounds friendly and sure of himself. Like someone who knows he has something you want but hasn’t decided if he’ll give it to you.

  I get right to the point and ask for the names of the eight people he killed.

  “I’m not ready to talk about that yet,” he says. “Let’s just say there are fewer abusers on the street now than there were before.”

  He wants to know if I think he should get a literary agent.

  I say I think he should get a lawyer.

  “Why do I need a lawyer?” he asks. “I’m ready to plead guilty and spend my time in prison as a good Christian.”

  “They’re not going to put you in jail without knowing who you killed.”

  “Why do they have to know who I killed? Isn’t the confession enough?”

  I tell him he doesn’t need a literary agent.

  I’m talking with a man who has already told the police he killed eight people. I imagine they’re investigating, or they don’t believe him.

  “I’ve been asking around,” Sean says. “People have a lot to say about you.” I let that lie between us. Something about the way he says it makes me not want to know. And I don’t want to admit too many acquaintances in common. I don’t want to put anybody in danger, or at least anybody other than myself.

  It turns out he’s been speaking with Lissette. They know each other from the dungeon. He used to be the houseboy and when one of the girls wanted to practice with her whips she would practice on him. “I hear you’re emotionally dishonest,” Sean says. That’s what Lissette told him. It’s exactly the kind of accusation she would make. Her accusations are like koans. I think, You killed eight people and you’re accusing me of being emotionally dishonest?

  After talking for a few minutes Sean and I make plans to meet in Oakland then hang up. It’s the first I’ve heard of Lissette since our latest breakup. She knew about Sean’s confessions, but she was talking with him anyway, even as she was packing her apartment outside the financial district and moving to the fog belt on the edge of Golden Gate Park. She had left her husband and then she had left me. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Every relationship is. She would never have left if I fought harder to keep her. She was a jealous girlfriend, and when she told me all the ways I made her unhappy, I never really understood. I probably wasn’t trying hard enough. Or I wasn’t capable.

  Lissette used to cut me. She kept a knife by my bed, a present from a client. It had a grip handle. My breathing would slow down when the blade opened my skin. I would close my eyes and feel my body lift from the mattress. It was like being on a raft. One time I was blindfolded and my chest was bleeding and I tried to kiss her while pushing up against the knife, which she held to my jugular.

  “You have no sense of self-preservation,” she said, planting kisses on my cheeks.

  It wasn’t true. I had a fantastic sense of self-preservation but it had left me for a while.

  She woke me one night two months ago in her large studio in the busiest part of San Francisco and said she thought I should leave. I said I was sorry I couldn’t make it work. I had been sleeping naked on the inside of the spoon. She was so beautiful and she looked at me the way a mother looks at a child and I loved that. I put my clothes on and bicycled home across the city. The landscape of closing bars and well-lit taquerias seemed bright, surreal, and full of smoke.

  I didn’t tell Sean about that.

  I didn’t tell Sean I found a book of mine in the used bookstore near my house. I don’t know how they got it. I self-published it years ago and then took it out of print. It was like finding an old diary. It was full of stories written in my early twenties, most of them centering on my relationship with my fiancée, Josie. The plot was: a good girl from a good family falls in love with an artist and betrays him by treating him the same way he treats her. I recognized the boy in the stories, many of them written from the girl’s perspective. I thought he was very normal for his age, a little lost. He was a boy who saw the world through narrative; people and events all had arcs. Life tapered toward a conclusion. I can see now that there is a conclusion but no arc. There’s life and death and all the barely connected things that happen in between. The boy I read about was a boy who could have settled on something and turned out OK. What he needed was a goal. Instead he went traveling because he thought he was happier when he was alone.

  Yesterday there was a tornado in Kansas. People are angry because the equipment they need is in the Middle East. I see the news in a crowded bar where I’m watching the second round of the play-offs. Utah has called a time-out and for a minute the station rolls pictures of splintered houses and turned-over cars. The governor wants to call out the National Guard but the Guardsmen are serving tours overseas. Then a solemn reporter grips the microphone. The sound is turned off so I can’t hear what he’s saying, just read the capsule summaries below the screen.

  There’s a table set up with free hot dogs. A boy in his early twenties drinks near the window. His girlfriend comes in just before the half and kisses him on the cheek. She presses her side against him. It makes me think of Josie, the way she would sit next to me.

  It was the summer of 1995 when we first got together. She had just graduated college, was drinking heavily and preparing to travel in Europe. While she was away I sent long letters, up to forty pages, poste restant to whichever town she was heading to next. They weren’t love letters so much as diaries written by hand.

  Two years later we were living in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. By then I’d overdosed on heroin and Josie was overcoming a cocaine habit. We spent time on our front porch. The neighborhood was changing. Rents were going up, but it wasn’t there yet. It was a long way from there. There was so much concrete and if you looked east, the concrete rose from the ground and became the buildings downtown. We weren’t far from Harpo
Studios, where Oprah ran her empire. We were miles from the lake and the city was hot and the Village was all red brick and white cement. I don’t remember there being any parks in that neighborhood. Josie had a job at a recruiting firm downtown but I couldn’t seem to do it. I worked temp assignments but was always getting fired.

  “Why don’t you get me a job?” I asked.

  “I will,” she promised.

  Josie had convinced me to return to Chicago with her. I had been living in Los Angeles for six months working as an assistant on a TV show called Second Noah, about adolescents whose parents had died, or whose parents had abandoned them, and who’d been taken in by a family in Florida. It was supposed to be a modern version of The Brady Bunch but the producers had no understanding of what happens to children of that age without parents. When the show was canceled I got work as a driver and stole all of the presents out of Leonardo DiCaprio’s fan mail, which I was delivering from his agent to his publicist, and gave them as Christmas presents. One of the presents was sheer silk underwear, which I gave to Josie. But they were cut for men and drooped sadly around her thighs. On the drive back from LA, Josie and I almost got married at a twenty-four-hour chapel in Las Vegas, but didn’t. To make up for it I bought her an engagement ring from a quarter machine at a K-Mart outside Salt Lake City and we slept the night in the parking lot during a snowstorm. We were twenty-four.

  The apartment we ended up with in Chicago was long, with high ceilings. The landlord left threatening, incoherent notes. There was a man on the corner who sold elotes on a stick covered in butter and cheese. We were just two miles, maybe less, north of the United Center where Michael Jordan played.

  What I’m trying to say is that I loved Josie, but things didn’t work out.

  A year later Josie went off to law school in Washington, D.C. She offered to stay in Chicago with me and attend a lesser school but I said I didn’t want to be responsible for her bad decisions. Then I was accepted at the University of Virginia Law School; I’d taken the Law School Admission Test at Josie’s urging and scored well. I could start the next year and Josie and I would be within easy driving distance. We could hike the Blue Ridge Mountains. I broke up with her instead.

  “I just thought we would always be together,” she said. And I know part of me felt good about it, like I had won.

  For two years, more, before we stopped talking altogether, Josie wouldn’t take me back. She met someone else, fairly quickly. Because she was desirable. And I mean not just beautiful, but the kind of woman who smiles a lot, and likes to have a good time, and thinks for herself. She had confidence. She was fun to be around.

  Five years after Josie and I split I met her on a train. It was a coincidence. There were ten cars, so even on the same train the odds were stacked against us. I was spending a weekend in a city I didn’t live in anymore and I thought she had moved away. But there she was in a polyester sleeveless brown shirt, without makeup, reading a paperback. She was like everybody else on that train, coming home from work, except she had better posture. I sat next to her, reading over her shoulder, and she ignored me until I started to poke her. Then she turned and we started to laugh.

  “What in the world,” she said, shaking her head and smiling, closing the book on her lap.

  She looked lovely, but not as lovely as she would have looked if she had known she was going to see me. If she’d had her lipstick on and some blush, I don’t know what I would have done. As it was, she was working as a lawyer for the labor relations board and getting married to Tony, who was one of my best friends from college. We were no longer on speaking terms.

  I convinced her to get a drink with me and we went to a bar where the pipes were broken and water poured from the ceiling into buckets set across the floor.

  “This is wonderful,” I joked. “We’re having a drink inside our metaphor.”

  Eventually Tony came and by that time I was very drunk. He was still tall, muscular, and strikingly handsome. I considered hitting him but that was unlikely to turn out in my favor.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were dating her?” I asked Tony. “I’d have gotten over it eventually.”

  “It was you or Jo, and I picked Jo,” he said.

  After a little more talk Tony said they were considering a move to North Carolina.

  “Why would you do that?” I asked.

  “Property’s cheap,” Tony said. “And there’s less crime.”

  They lived in a condominium Tony’s parents owned in a run-down building at the end of Lake Shore Drive. The neighborhood hadn’t changed in years. There was no more crime now than before, but they were talking about something else.

  Earlier today I talked with a woman I know in Virginia. I locked the door to my office, turned on the camera in the computer, and took my clothes off for her. She told me to turn around and I did. Then I sat naked at the computer and typed. It was ridiculous. I also spent the day preparing for class. If I can keep teaching I’ll be fine. Not really, but I’ll have enough money to make it for a little while. The classes are ending in a couple of weeks and I have nothing new scheduled. If I agree to move to some small town that needs a professor I can get on the tenure path. I could buy a house and teach people how to write. I’d have to sleep with my students then. Away from the big city it would be my only option. But that’s not really open to me. It’s not really what I want to do. Which is what got me on this track to begin with, arranging interviews with murderers, hoping to make sense of somebody else’s crime. There’s a woman missing. Her husband says he didn’t kill her. There’s a man who says he’s killed eight people but won’t say who they are. There are so many unanswered questions. It’s been a long time since I knew what I wanted, since I had something to strive toward. I keep floating, head poking above the waves, waiting for a purpose to arrive like a boat in the middle of the ocean.

  I never did meet anyone like Josie again. Women like Josie don’t make it to their thirties without getting married. If you’re going to meet someone like that you’re going to meet her in your early twenties. And if you’re like me, that’s going to be a time when you’re making your living selling drugs out of your freezer, living in a squat a bullet away from Cabrini Green. You’ll have to represent something, like the other side of the tracks, but safe. Someone who, when the time comes, when the party’s over, she can turn around and guide to a place where life is a little more predictable. But when the party was over I didn’t want to turn around. I didn’t want to go to law school or get a real job or love only one person forever though in many ways she was the most loveable person I was ever going to meet. It didn’t matter. I had to test my dissatisfaction. She had gone east so I went west. I got a job in a ski resort, bartending on top of a mountain. I learned how to board, and disappeared in the snow.

  That was another time. I’ve been in San Francisco nine years. I’m suffering side effects from the Adderall. There are always side effects. Insomnia, loss of appetite, headaches, obsession, erratic decision-making. Inconsistency. I took my pill early in the day but I’m still awake and full of thoughts. So I lie in bed with my windows open, glad to be alone. It’s the middle of the week. I haven’t been sleeping and I’m missing appointments. My nails are bitten down and bleeding. All I can do is document it all and see where it leads me. I’m taking my meds and the world will be a different place for a while.

  I have a self-published book I wrote when I was with Josie, and another book of unpublished poems. I never show them to anyone. The poems are so full of anger. Anger at Josie for being better than me, for always having the upper hand. For loving her family and being loved by them in return. For being someone who got over things and not recognizing that I was a person who didn’t get over anything. But I read that book and those poems and I see something else. I see who I was then.

  This is who I am now.

  1. Michelle P. Kraus, Allen Ginsberg: An Annotated Bibliography, 1969–1977 (Scarecrow Press, 1980), 66.

  2. Jo
sh Davis, Wired, June 26, 2007.

  CHAPTER 2

  Late May; Tom Takes the Ball; Once Upon a Time in the Mental Hospital; Hans Reiser at Alameda County Courthouse; Sean Sturgeon in Oakland; In Bed with Miranda

  On a warm Sunday afternoon I meet some friends at a court above the Castro. We run three on three, protected from the wind by Buena Vista Hill. We play a soft game. No one wants to be injured. From the court we can see the next hill rising before Noe Valley and east to the long flat space of the Mission District before Portero Hill and the piers.

  “I can score on you at will,” Doug says, which is mostly true. I’m not a good player. For some reason I’ve always been drawn to basketball, even though I was more talented at other sports. Doug grabs my shirt and I threaten to start a blog about him, dougcheats.blogspot.com. My team wins every game.

  After, Tom asks if I would like a ride to my bicycle, which is down at the intersection. I say sure, just to put off being alone. I tell him about an email I came across while searching for an old girlfriend’s phone number. In the email she said she was angry. She said I only called her when my “needs” were acting up. That I didn’t think of her as a person.

  “We’re all like that at times,” Tom says. “You shouldn’t worry about it. I think you’re one of the most well-adjusted people I know. I mean, outside of your love life.”

  “Really?” I say. “You think that?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Considering the life you’ve led. Don’t you think so?”

  I shake my head and smile, then get up and walk him back to his car. I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all.

  When I was fourteen I slept on a couch in my old house. It was the house I grew up in, a yellow stucco corner home with a magnolia tree in the backyard. The house was mostly empty. My father was selling it. He had already moved to a new place in the suburbs somewhere. I had been on the streets for almost a year, sleeping in hallways and on rooftops. On particularly cold nights I had broken into boiler rooms. I knew it was dangerous to sleep in my old house.