The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  We walk for an hour. Sean’s friendly. I’m trying to decide if I like him, and I think I do. He mentions a man who was seeing an old girlfriend and how the man was giving him a hard time so Sean started surveiling him, keeping track of his habits, his whereabouts. This was only a few years ago. “I wouldn’t have hurt him,” Sean says. “I gave my guns to my pastor.” He says he just wanted to convince this man to leave him alone, but the way he says it suggests something larger. Like the real message he was trying to get across to this man, and maybe to me, was that there were forces larger than himself at work in this world. By engaging Sean this man was coming in contact with things bigger than he could comprehend.

  We talk about finding God.

  “I’ve also been looking for something to give my life meaning,” I say.

  Sean tells me about the commune but doesn’t give me names. He uses the word “hunting” to describe the periods he took off from work before 1996. He tells me about Julian Adams, a scoutmaster he claims was involved in a child molestation ring. “Look it up,” he says. Later I do. Julian Adams had been convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior and a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America is still pending. He died of natural causes in 2004.6 In our conversation Sean seemed to be hinting that he had something to do with Adams’ death, but that’s clearly false.

  “So this is all off the record?” Sean says after a while.

  We stop on a corner, facing each other.

  “No,” I say slowly. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then let’s go back,” he says, turning toward the station.

  I get a call and then a note from Sean. He writes, “I can see you’re a person attracted to the limelight.” He wants to sign a contract, something I had originally proposed. We should do a book together. Sean urges me to think big. He’s considering a prison ministry and thinks his story of finding Jesus could help free the souls of people like him behind bars. But he’s not yet in prison himself.

  In the morning I take my pill and sit down at my desk. I think of taking an extra one just to go further, but I don’t. I keep thinking about Sean and Hans. I keep getting Sean and Hans confused, perhaps because their names sound the same, or perhaps something else. I think about a young Sean, his pale arms poking from the blue sleeves of his dark blue scout uniform. I think about Nina Reiser and the two children she left behind, Cori and Lila, only four and six years old when their mother disappeared.7 They’re living with their grandmother in Russia now and it’s unclear if she’ll bring them back for the trial.

  Sean said wolves mate once for life. He said he was Nina’s wolf. When he pulled out of the Bart parking lot I saw a sticker of two wolves facing each other on his rear window. When I see my psychiatrist again I might ask her for sleeping pills. Something to help me so I don’t stay awake all night thinking about murderers, and where they hide their thoughts. Something to help me hide my own.

  I’m in bed with Miranda, a recent Stanford graduate. She’s a friend of some of my former students and I feel a little strange about that. She just turned twenty-four. She’s a burlesque dancer and a political activist. When she does her burlesque show she dresses like a maid and mops the floor with her hair and when she’s done she’s almost naked, shaking her shoulders with a sign taped across her chest: EXHIBITIONIST. In bed she wears boxer shorts and a tank top. She’s tall and dark with kinky hair dyed with streaks of gold, a pierced lip, ivy tattoos circling above her hips. She could easily be a model, but she doesn’t care. She believes in revolution.

  Miranda grew up in Haiti, in a large house on a hill outside Port-au-Prince. All she’ll tell me about her family is that her father works for a fruit company and doesn’t agree with her views.

  “What about your mom?” I ask.

  She opens her mouth like she’s going to say something awful, her tongue plastered against her bottom teeth, then shakes her head and pats me on the cheek. “You’d like my mother,” she says. “You have a lot in common.”

  I hang out with Miranda in bars on Polk Street, watching her perform with drag queens. I meet a boy at her show, younger than me with a mohawk and a pretty face. He says he’s also a writer, a poet. On the side he does boy burlesque. I think he’s pretty, but if I were into men I would want someone stronger who could take care of me.

  It’s Patti Smith night and the queens climb the stage in black wigs and torn jeans. They sing “Ain’t It Strange” and “Gloria,” snarling at the crowd and wondering whose sins Jesus died for. Miranda dances behind them in a short skirt, kicking her long brown legs high in the air while I watch from the crowd, holding her drink.

  Miranda’s room is bright yellow with album covers stuck to the wall. Lene Lovich, Kate Bush, The Slits. She lectures me on music. I tell her she’s a snob. We sleep on a small mattress. She insists I sleep naked and I insist she keep her clothes on. She wraps around my back, her arm over my chest.

  Her windows face the morning sun and the illegals stand on the corner just below the ledge waiting for someone with a van and a job to stop and put them to work. They stand there every day, in baseball caps, sweatshirts. Waiting. Miranda says they aren’t Mexicans; most of them are from Guatemala and El Salvador. I’ve been showing up at her place more and more often. I call from Valencia Street at the end of the day, just when I think she’s going to sleep.

  Hans’ trial won’t start for two more months. I was in court when they scheduled the hearing. It was my second time at the sturdy building in downtown Oakland. Hans wore yellow prison fatigues and stood in the prisoner’s pen, holding two boxes of papers. I noticed his poor posture and thinning hair. He seemed naive, carrying the giant boxes and not understanding that the trial was actually months away.

  “Tell me something nice,” I said to Miranda the night after the hearing. I was acting like a child and she wanted desperately to be an adult. “Tell me I’m pretty.”

  “You are,” she whispered. “You’re so pretty.”

  Our relationship is absurd, infantilizing. I’m eleven years older than her. She’s a vegan. She wears heels and keeps her sex toys on top of a beat-up dresser. She wants to dress me in women’s clothes and I tell her I don’t mind but I don’t really think we’ll get there. The sad thing is how our relationship mirrors all my other romances. Fragmented. Thin. Except that I’m getting worse. In my twenties I would have been too proud to beg a woman to hold me. I didn’t know enough to cry. I wouldn’t dream of pressing my nose against someone’s chest, saying, “I’m so sad. I don’t know what’s happening to me.” And I have less to give.

  We don’t have sex. She has a girlfriend. And a boyfriend. She has many lovers. She keeps pictures of them on her desk, tapes their poems near the bed. She’s so beautiful and smooth, like a statue cut from cherry. But for some reason I don’t want to see her naked. Maybe she’s too young, or something else. I’m just lying in bed with her, trying to fit into her stomach and not making it. She gets up to go to work at four in the morning, pulling on her boots while the city is still pitch. I rise with the sound of trucks stopping. On the surface everything seems fine.

  In a note Sean says, “You have an opportunity to be a better person than you have been in the past and people are watching to see if you make the right decisions this time.” He no longer wants to sign a contract. He says he isn’t threatening me, but he’s surprised I don’t recognize him from before. “Maybe that’s because you just view people and situations according to how they might or might not best serve your current interest.”

  He says he’s having health problems and that he was assaulted as a result of the article Josh wrote about him. Then he disconnects his phone and stops answering his mail. In his notes to me the week before he disappears he mentions something Hans said to him. “Society has rules. And if society will not punish those who break the rules then I will.”

  I’ve only just started writing again and I’m not sure I’ll be able to find the story without Sean. The trial seems a long way off. I can’t st
and another year of writer’s block, sitting at a desk, staring out the window, waiting for something resembling insight to arrive like a packet in the mail.

  3. It is not universally agreed upon that the ReiserFS is the first Linux journaling system but the majority of programmers believe it to be the first. A majority also agree that the reason ReiserFS never made it to the Linux kernel was because of Hans’ difficult personality. There are also programmers that claim Hans stole the basic code for the file system.

  4. Nearly two years after first speaking with Sean I find out Books In Print does not list these titles, although it does list Divorce for Dummies.

  5. The car actually belonged to his mother, but she rarely drove it.

  6. Alameda County Court File 98866.

  7. Though widely printed elsewhere I’ve decided to use fake names for the children.

  Chapter 3

  June; Minor Breakdowns and a Flight to Los Angeles; The Part about Justin; Dungeon in San Fernando; Nick Flynn on Torture; Paris Hilton; A Phone Call from My Oldest Friend; Everybody Has a Murder Story

  On June 5 Paris Hilton turns herself in at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood. Her incarceration is the biggest story of the year, almost comparable to that day in 1994 when O. J. Simpson walked into the condominium on South Bundy Drive, knocked his wife unconscious, pressed his knee into her back, lifted her head, and slit her throat. Paris eclipses everything. On June 7 the Los Angeles County Sheriff reassigns her to home confinement. The next day the judge sends her back to jail. Everywhere I go I see pictures of Paris Hilton or hear her name. People talk about her, even while saying they’re tired of talking about her. They talk about her then say we should really be talking about Iraq. But the war is off the front page, along with Phil Spector’s murder trial and Britney Spears’ comeback tour. There’s only Paris Hilton, her aquiline features and uniquely yellow hair, her small eyes staring at the rest of us.

  When Sean disappears I head to the airport and purchase a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. The first time I came to Los Angeles was June 1986. I was nearing the end of my homeless year. I hitchhiked with my best friend, Justin. Justin was a year older than I and he had been running away since he was twelve. I was supposed to be starting high school soon and Justin should have been going into his sophomore year. But we didn’t think about that. We thought about places to sleep, listening to music, and getting high.

  Everything about Justin was cool: his long black hair, cheap bandanas, the way he carried his cigarettes in his sleeve or in his back pocket when he didn’t have sleeves. He had an easy sense of style but he was also very handsome; he would have looked good no matter what he wore. Girls were always inviting him into their houses when their parents weren’t around. When he lived at home, his father beat him with a stick, and sometimes Justin would tap on my window at night, his entire body covered in welts.

  Our plan was to get to California and become beach bums, but we never made it to the beach. We got a ride across Arizona from a trucker. He had a wife back East and called her from the booths set aside for long-distance haulers at stops along the way. He hardly even looked at the road, smoothly shifting the giant gears as we drove west. He said he picked us up, even though it was against company policy, because we looked harmless.

  “I’ve been all over the country many times,” he said. “Been to Detroit and all points south. But where I’m dropping you kids is East LA. And there ain’t a thing in the world like East LA.”

  We arrived with no money, our clothes torn and caked in mud. It had taken less than a week but we hadn’t left with much. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of trucks in the stop near the interchange on the edge of downtown. Men stood in open trailers on piles of carpets, the air wavy with gasoline and radio bustle. They hoisted barbells next to their trucks and blew smoke from the windows. Nearby we found skid row where the homeless slept against the buildings or lined up for the soup kitchen. There was vomit all over the sidewalks. The women looked as though they would snap if you touched them. The buildings were boarded and abandoned or had sheets of metal pulled down their fronts. It was like a glimpse of our future. The homeless we knew in Chicago were like us, just kids with bad parents waiting for their situations to change. But near the Los Angeles Mission there were thousands of homeless people who were older and crazy and deathlike. They seemed to make up the entire city.

  We left Los Angeles, hitchhiking north with a German tourist to Las Vegas where we were arrested. A couple days later I was sent back on a Trailways bus. The whole trip took eight days. Justin was let out of the juvenile hall two weeks after I was and when he got to Chicago he was taken into custody on an outstanding warrant for home invasion. His parents refused to pick him up and he was made a ward of the court. Two months later the state took custody of me as well.

  Justin didn’t tell me what had happened until eight years later, at a party in the apartment where I was living with new friends I had met in college. My college friends didn’t like Justin; they thought he was a mooch. That night in Los Angeles eight years earlier, we had returned to the truck stop. A driver let us into his cab and we smoked hash with him. I remember how dark and shiny the driver’s skin was, red and yellow sores weeping on his cheek. Or maybe my memory has altered his appearance so I see him with the swollen face of a demon. He made some calls over the radio, checking to see if any drivers wanted to take in a couple of young hikers. Of course, no one responded, and he had other plans. While I slept behind the seats he molested Justin and in the morning he stole our things, which was really just some poetry and a couple of shirts.

  I was telling my favorite story, the one about hitchhiking to California with my best friend, and Justin interrupted me and said, “Steve, I was molested.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked. “Why didn’t you scream?”

  I meet a woman in Culver City. She’s short and curvy with thick, bleached hair and lives in a complex at the intersection of two six-lane roads. The cars speed past like on a highway. I don’t see how anybody could ever get across. Outside her apartment are lots filled with half-constructed buildings but nobody’s working on them. Los Angeles is a place where things take a long time to happen.

  It’s eleven in the morning and before anything she wants to take her dog for a walk. There are no pedestrians on the bright white sidewalks and her dog takes a crap on the unfinished driveway in front of her neighbor’s garage. She looks around, gripping a fistful of plastic bags.

  “I’m not picking that up,” she says.

  I drive with her and her boyfriend through the hills of the 405, past the Getty, into the Valley. Everything is hot and flat, the grass is brown and weeds sprout from the walk. We stop in a 7-Eleven next to a gas station and load up on Red Vines and bottled water before turning into a nondescript alley and parking behind a low, windowless building with a thick iron door.

  This used to be public storage. The entry is lit with low-wattage fluorescent bulbs. A woman sits at an old computer playing solitaire without acknowledging us. The house madam sits on a black couch near the entrance and we talk for a while before the four of us head into the second room where there’s an eight-foot chain web against one wall, a leather bed, and a short, padded spanking bench with knee rests.

  “This is a good place,” the madam says. “As long as there aren’t any customers. If a client comes he’ll have to walk right through here to get to any of the other rooms.”

  “Are you ready?” she asks, running her fingers inside my shirt and pinching my nipples with her long nails.

  “Yes,” I say. It’s too late to say anything else, and anyway, it feels good. I don’t really want to know what’s going to happen.

  The house madam leaves and I take my clothes off and the woman from Culver City fastens leather cuffs around my ankles, latching a spreader bar to them to keep my legs forced apart. She fastens nipple clamps with weights on the ends, pushes me over the bed, and slides inside m
e with her strap-on. I’m wearing a rubber mask and a blindfold so I can’t see her boyfriend moving behind us with the camera. She leans over me, one hand gripping my throat and the other pressing down my back. This is fine, I think. I’ll just stay like this. When the filming is over and I’m getting dressed, the boyfriend offers me a can of energy cola. “You were great,” he says. “We couldn’t ask for a better victim.”

  It’s not the first time I’ve been photographed nude, but it’s the first video. When I was twenty-one and working as a stripper in Chicago, I was asked to make a porn. I made a demo, which consisted of masturbating while the director shot pictures with a small Kodak. But then I decided I didn’t want to be in the film. I thought I might regret it. Now I know I wouldn’t have regretted it. It wouldn’t have meant anything.