The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  11. Stuart Alexander died in prison a year later.

  12. My mother’s type of MS is much less common today following the advent of drug treatments in the mid-nineties.

  13. Blood cannot be dated through DNA testing.

  CHAPTER 8

  December/January/February; Sluts, Media Whores, Murderers; Juno; Elizabeth Wurtzel; Proposition 21; Eurasian Goddess; Adolescent Forgiveness; Winter Holidays; Suicide Note or Press Release; Sylvia Plath; Simone Weil; Issues with Women

  From the fifth floor of the courthouse I can see the birds gilding the cold surface of Lake Merrit, hiding in the trees on the lawn at the water’s edge. The docks are empty, a steady stream of traffic moves like animation on the freeway nearby, the sun paints the west face of a white tenement on the farther shore.

  I never meant to write about a murder. It was just a chance comment when I was grasping for anything. “Your guy just confessed to eight murders.” I believed it. I wanted it to be true.

  In the opening months of the trial my depression lifts. I can see it, like a cloud cresting a mountain range, but I try to pretend it’s not there. I read an essay on William Styron by his daughter, now a novelist herself.14 He had already written Darkness Visible, about his first bout of depression that led to eventual hospitalization. It’s a profound work on the subject, eighty pages of straightforward prose, as specific and purposeful as a life vest. It became a number one best seller. Following the publication he toured as an advocate and spokesman for the afflicted, but he never wrote the sequel. His daughter tells of when his depression returned. The second time nothing worked. He was in and out of institutions for fifteen years, incoherent with pills and treatment. He stopped trying to write, as if the author of Sophie’s Choice was entirely separate from the man in bed on the second floor, refusing to move. He met his wife when he was still that young and brilliant writer. He told her to leave him, but she wouldn’t, even though he wasn’t a particularly good husband. She entered a new phase of life as his caretaker.

  The prosecution is still calling witnesses. Hans’ neighbor saw Hans two days after Nina disappeared. It was eleven at night and Hans had just brought his mother home. It was two hours after he was told Nina was missing. It was a sweltering night and the neighbor was on his deck barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt, watering the rose bushes. He saw Hans in jogging pants and a heavy jacket, dressed for winter, hosing down a section of his driveway for half an hour. What’s he doing? the neighbor thought. “He was exhibiting strange behavior, even for Hans.”

  We also hear from Arthur Gomez, who was in jail with Hans after he’d been arrested when a report came on that a body had been found in the Oakland woods. Hans rushed to the TV.

  “That’s when I knew he did it,” Gomez says.

  “And why did you decide to testify?” Du Bois asks.

  “I’ve done some bad things. But killing your wife, that’s evil.”

  “I see. And you would say it’s evil to kill your wife but not to smack her around?” he asks, referring to Gomez’s second felony conviction. Gomez cracks a smile.

  “She wasn’t my wife.”

  We also hear from the investigator who found Nina’s van parked near the highway three miles from Hans’ mother’s house, her groceries strewn about, an exploded melon in the backseat.

  In his office Du Bois has articles mentioning this trial framed on his walls, hung before the trial even started, before he knew if he had won or lost.

  I remember Sean telling me, “I can see you enjoy the limelight.” He was right. He kept insisting he was the opposite, that he had never looked for attention. But of course he had; he just didn’t know it. While he was talking to me he was talking to 20/20, 48 Hours, Wired. He thinks he knows why he was talking to these people. We all like to think we know why we do what we do. I hear the defense’s introduction of Sean as “a drug addict. A sadomasochist.” Sean said he wouldn’t talk to me until after the trial, but at that point he would help with my book. His eight phantom murders hover wraithlike and faceless in the courtroom. Sean won’t be testifying. Hora won’t call him, and the judge’s ruling that Du Bois can’t intimate Sean’s involvement in the crime renders it pointless for him to call Sean as a witness for the defense.

  According to Jung, a stranger can see in an instant something in you that you might spend years learning about yourself. Du Bois harps on the flaws of every witness. How awful we all are when we look at ourselves under a light, finally seeing our reflections. How little we know about ourselves. How much forgiveness it must take to love a person, to choose not to see their flaws, or to see those flaws and love the person anyway. If you never forgive you’ll always be alone.

  During breaks Du Bois tells us Nina wasn’t such a good mother, she was just cultivating an image. He accuses the prosecutor of bringing the case to trial because of the media coverage. But Paul Hora might be the only decent man in the courtroom. Simple and honest, he refers to himself as a Boy Scout, believes deeply in the law, and goes to sleep early at night. He’s one of the best prosecutors in the state. He won’t talk to the media. His only fault is a tendency to assume guilt in the accused. A small blemish compared to the rest of us: sluts, media whores, murderers.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel just turned forty. She’s in law school now. Gorgeous, Ivy League educated, a Generation X darling, she was twenty-four when Prozac Nation was released. By her second book she was supplementing antidepressants with Ritalin, chopping her pills and snorting them, which led to her third book, More, Now, Again, about her addiction to ADD medication. The book was panned by the critics. Prozac Nation offered hope for people with depression; they weren’t alone with their bottle of pills. More, Now, Again destroyed that premise. It turned out the pills didn’t work after all. Like Prozac Nation, it also ended on a hopeful note, but people no longer believed it. She had shattered her own myth. I wonder if she’s given up writing because it was destroying her, or decided that the return on investment doesn’t equal the time served. Perhaps the writing was just a symptom of some other insatiable desire. Maybe she’ll write an essay here and there but her life is now about other things.

  I wonder if I’ll have to quit Adderall soon. I keep upping my dosage with diminishing effects. I’m tense all the time. Sometimes I feel so angry I can’t recognize myself. I get headaches. The days fuse together and my memory fails me often. At a birthday party on the weekend, I describe Juno, which I had seen earlier, to a friend. I loved the movie. It felt familiar, perhaps because it was written by a former stripper, but more because of the average middle-class existence of the children portrayed in the film. They played records and ran track and called each other on hamburger shaped phones. The parents weren’t educated or rich but they were decent. It was a world I knew through a looking glass. The high school in the film existed within my high school, but I didn’t go there. “Who’d you see the movie with?” my friend asks. I stare at her for a minute, unsure if I’ll be able to recall. “You don’t remember?” And then I do, the memory spreading like an ink stain. I make some joke to cover up. We all forget things. I had just seen the movie three hours earlier.

  The online message boards are filled with Adderall and Ritalin junkies, popping up to ninety milligrams every day just to get back to where they were before they started. Like every drug it’s never as good as the first time. But the alternative seems so much worse. I don’t see how I can write anything without the speed. What would I do if I stopped writing? How would I make money? Who would know I was alive? I lie down at night and cover my eyes, eager for the morning pill. When the Adderall works I lose myself. The amphetamine gives me confidence. I forget that no one depends on me in any way. And then one morning I take the framed picture of a juvenile inmate and lay it on my desk. There’s the face of the boy in black and white superimposed on a maximum security cell with its door open to reveal the end of a bed. I’d put together a fundraiser for the child years ago. We packed hundreds of people into an art space and showe
d a film, then listened to activists and spoken word poets. He had been tried as an adult following the passage of Proposition 21, the Pete Wilson bill. Wilson was the governor of California, a man deformed by the force of his own ambition, and the misnamed Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act was supposed to propel him to the presidency. It didn’t. He broke the backs of the people he stepped on and then burned out and faded away. As far as I know the boy staring at me is still behind bars and will be for the rest of his life. I used to think that if I had worked harder, been more organized, I could have stopped Proposition 21. I was wrong. Proposition 21 passed with 60 percent of the vote. I place a pill above his face and crush it with the back of a credit card and snort it with a rolled-up check. I notice the difference immediately. It’s just like cocaine.

  I get a letter from a student in Michigan. He’s seventeen and friends with the son of a woman I met years ago in a restaurant near the interstate. Later I would send her money, when I had any. She walked in wearing a full-length fur coat, which I took from her before lighting her cigarette. She had fresh injections in her lips, breast implants, and Botox. She lived fifty miles from anything resembling a city, took uppers all day while selling video chats and phone calls and subscriptions to her Web site, which featured pictures of her fully clothed, shopping for books. She was European and Asian and looked like Jessica Rabbit if Jessica Rabbit starred in Venus in Furs. I didn’t think I had ever seen anybody so beautiful in my entire life. I wanted to be roped against her body, dragged behind her as she went about her day. She said she was a hypnotist and could read my mind. We drank beers from tall glasses shaped like boots before going to my hotel room where I lay on the floor and she walked across me in her heels. She kept taking pictures of herself, posing for her camera set on the dresser.

  “I don’t like giving people pleasure,” she said. Then she sat on the sofa and I kneeled in front of her and she slapped me several times. She held her cigarette near my face and I could feel its heat about to burn my eyelids. She laughed loudly. Then she pressed the cigarette into the back of both my hands. “Those are going to blister.”

  The blisters, just behind my thumb and index finger, were the size of pencil erasers. At the time I was finishing my novel Happy Baby. Flying home, rubbing the yellow nubs behind my knuckles, I wrote what had just happened into the opening of the book. I think of her every time I look at the scars.

  The boy who wrote to me includes a picture of himself hanging out with two friends in a park with their hoods pulled over their ears sharing a large bottle of Jack Daniels. He wants to know what I think of his writing. He’s in high school and writes on his Web page about his friend’s hot mom and his own drug use. I wonder if he knows what his friend’s hot mom does to strangers in hotel rooms. His prose is jittery and honest. He writes about drugs correctly, from the vantage point of a lover who doesn’t know he’s going to be let down.

  There was a time in my life when drugs made me deliriously happy. I remember an apartment near the school where one of Justin’s girlfriends lived. Six of us sat on the couch laughing for hours while Pat, in a loose blue polyester shirt, imitated Jesus Christ, spreading his arms for crucifixion, the cuffs hanging loosely from his wrists. “I forgive you,” he said. “Seriously. You’re forgiven.” Anne told us to be quiet, she was worried about the downstairs neighbors, but we could have cared less. We weren’t going anywhere.

  “Why aren’t you high?” I asked. “If you were high we wouldn’t be so loud.”

  I remember drinking vodka from clear plastic bottles the night I turned fourteen, in a basement I’d broken into with Justin and Javier. We drank until dawn and in the morning we were woken by the police and told to get out and not come back. They didn’t ask where we were going next. I remember smoking joints dipped in PCP, and I remember playing dice for T-shirts on the top floor of the group home, and I remember waking up one morning with a giant dagger tattooed on my shoulder. I remember climbing from the group home window and hanging from the fire escape, my feet resting on the rail for balance. If I put any weight on the rail the stair would lower and there would be nothing beneath me. It was winter and a fine layer of snow covered the city. I was two stories above the pavement, sneaking back and forth between rooms, awed as the hospital melted and everything burned bright all the way to the Robert Taylor Homes, the largest housing projects in the world.15 I remember crawling along the floor searching for a plastic bag the size of a Lemonhead rumored to have disappeared into the carpet. I remember a heavy metal concert on quaaludes and smoking crack from a pressure gauge and feeling for a moment like everything was possible. Drugs didn’t make us loveable, they made us capable of love, gave us the ability to forgive, which had eluded us previously. I remember holding a belt in my mouth and pushing the needle into my vein and sliding happily to the floor.

  Now I get prescriptions and use drugs for a different reason. I’m more ambitious and I have less control. When Du Bois described Sean as “a drug addict, a sadomasochist,” he could easily have been describing me.

  Court breaks for the winter holidays and I spend my time rereading my notes. I sit with the lights off looking into the airshaft, imagining Hans Reiser and his cruel disregard. On March 13, 2002, back when they were still friends, Hans sent Sean an email saying Nina would not be the only woman in his life. He said he needed at least five more children. He must have meant boys. He never mentions his daughter in any of his letters. The double standard didn’t bother him. He said Nina could take care of the children. He thought he was benevolent and entitled. Following the separation in 2004, Cori acted out in school. After weekends with Hans, Cori told his teachers he didn’t need to listen to them because they were women and women shouldn’t have any rights in this country. Hans’ own mother testified that her son was selfish. It doesn’t make him a murderer, though. Not until it’s all taken together, all of his actions in the month following the crime. On September 28, 2006, Hans was picked up and a warrant was served on his body. He was taken to the station for a DNA swab and photographed nude. He carried $9,000 in cash, his passport, and a three-page single-spaced typed note.

  “I’m a well known scientist,” he wrote. “You get to where you know someone’s methodology is wrong.” He addresses the schoolteachers he believed were conspiring against him. “I’ve been telling you about Nina and nobody listens. I would like to thank the school and teachers for teaching me about how the court works… I may be a danger to the world view of some but I am no danger to my children.”

  It was unclear the point of the letter or why it would be one of the few possessions in the small fanny pack around his waist. Later he would say it was a press release. To me it resembles a suicide note. But he didn’t go through with it. He was charged with murder twelve days later and has been held without bail ever since.

  On February 11, 1963, at 6:00 AM, Sylvia Plath went to the children’s room and left a plate of bread and butter and two glasses of milk. She wrote a note asking whoever found her to call her doctor, and left the doctor’s phone number. Then she turned on the gas and put her head in the oven. The au pair, a young girl from Australia, was supposed to start that day. She arrived at nine, right on time, but nobody came to the door. The neighbor should have been awake but his bedroom was just beneath Sylvia’s kitchen and the gas had seeped through the floor, knocking him out cold. The au pair went looking for a telephone to call the agency and make sure she had the right address. When the door finally opened at 11 AM, Sylvia’s body was still warm.

  In the months preceding her suicide Plath read the Ariel poems to A. Alvarez. He heard the despair but chose not to react to it. He critiqued the poems on their own terms, the way Sylvia wanted him to, recognizing the fatal brilliance. Even as she read aloud to him:

  I do not stir,

  The frost makes a flower,

  The dew makes a star,

  The dead bell,

  The dead bell,

  Somebody’s done for

&n
bsp; The last time Alvarez saw Sylvia, on Christmas Eve 1962, he wrote, “She seemed different. Her hair, which she usually wore in a tight, school-mistressy bun, was loose. It hung straight to her waist like a tent, giving her pale face and gaunt figure a curiously desolate rapt air, like a priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult. When she walked in front of me down the hall passage and up the stairs of her apartment her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal… When I left about eight o’clock to go to my dinner-party, I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgivable way. And I knew she knew. I never again saw her alive. ”16

  Plath’s last collection culminated in a new era in letters, the merger of the artist with her art. It was the beginning of the sixties, the Boomers were stepping from beneath Eisenhower’s prosperous shadow. Fifteen years after Plath’s death, Susan Sontag wrote of Goethe and his disdain for Kleist, who submitted his work, “on the bended knees of his heart.” Sontag cast a harsh light across her generation’s artistic expectations. “The morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays’ tales were mined—is just what we value today. ”17 That was thirty years ago. Today’s artists are healthier and no special prizes are given for suffering. It’s no wonder Wurtzel went to law school. The books of our time have little to do with destruction of the self. We expect our bards to survive, to figure things out. The literature of triumph over adversity spans every age, but where is the rest of it? We’re living in the most medicated era humanity has ever known. The artist is no longer expected to play chicken with her creation. Doctors monitor our intake. We live in the age of Goethe on Zoloft.