The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

“Why did you remove the hard drives from your computer?” Paul Hora asks.

  “I didn’t want the police to take them. I was the subject of a murder investigation.”

  “You said you removed the hard drives on the seventh. Why did you think she was murdered on September 7? She was missing. You just heard she was missing on the night of September 5. Didn’t you think she might have had an accident, that she could be in the hospital? Why would you think it was murder?”

  “You’ve convinced me,” Hans replies. “It must have been the eighth.”

  During closing arguments Hora walks the jury through the crime. He places a puzzle on an easel next to a picture of Nina. Every piece contains a clue: the missing hard drive, Nina’s last location, Hans’ active cover-up. Hora presents a clear narrative for the jury, from the importance of Nina leaving her children, to Hans’ motives, to his lies on the stand. Each time Hora removes a piece of the puzzle he places it over Nina, revealing Hans, until the only pieces left are the location of the body and the method of murder.

  Hora asks the jury, “If you were innocent, why wouldn’t you offer to help? Why would you refuse to talk to the police when your wife is missing, and immediately contact your lawyer?” Pointing at Hans, Hora continues, “He says he spilled milk in the car before his mother went to Burning Man. If you spill milk in the car you don’t throw away sections of the car. You don’t throw large portions of your car away when your wife is missing and you think you’re being investigated for a homicide. Then he [Hans] took it a step further, says ‘I’ve always wanted to build a futon in the back of the car.’ Why wait until your wife’s missing to build a futon in the back of your mom’s car?” Paul talks about the cell phones, how when Nina’s phone was recovered the battery was missing, just as Hans’ battery was missing from his phone when he was arrested.

  “Two hundred seventy thousand people drive across the Oakland Bay Bridge every day,” Hora says, displaying an image of the bridge on the screen. “If you stopped every single one of them, how long do you think you would have to wait to find one of them with the battery intentionally taken out of his phone? How many years would you have to wait to find one with the battery out of his phone and the front seat removed from his car?”

  Du Bois follows Hora. “This has been a tough case for me,” he says. “Because my client is a difficult person to communicate with, to relate to, to present as a witness. Nina is easy to like and likeable, a pleasure to look at, a pleasure to be around.” He talks about the evidence in the order it was presented, trying to punch tiny holes in each of the sixty witnesses’ testimonies. “Do you really think Officer Denson, a trained police officer with twenty-seven years’ experience, would tell Nina to buy a gun?” He doesn’t link the evidence into a story and perhaps that’s intentional. He wants to remove the file system, to make it impossible to structure the information. He talks a lot about the things that are unknown. What evidence was Hans hiding when he hosed down the driveway? What evidence was supposedly on the car seat Hans threw away? And why didn’t the prosecution call Sean Sturgeon? He projects a platypus onto the evidence screen. “The platypus is odd. Hans is odd. Odd in the way he speaks. Odd in the way he carries himself. Hans Reiser is the duck-billed platypus amongst normal people and gets the same consideration, under the law, as you and I.”

  “If the platypus doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” I whisper to the producer seated next to me.

  “You should use that in your book,” she says.

  In the morning I take ten milligrams of Adderall and then ten more of the extended release. I sit down in the coffee shop then go into the bathroom and snort a few more lines. I thought I had stopped snorting Adderall, but I keep coming back to it. In the 1950s when Dexadrine and Dexamyl and other amphetamine combinations were being mass consumed as diet pills, research started coming out about tolerance and the return of lost weight. When the National Academy of Sciences advised the FDA that amphetamine weight loss products were not very effective, the pharmaceutical companies suppressed the information for years.19 Now Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Ritchie are taking Adderall for weight loss like the fifties housewives, because it’s the same thing. The amphetamine hasn’t changed. Benzedrine, Dexedrine, methamphetamine. They’re all forms of beta-phenyl-isopropylamine: synthetic adrenaline.

  The closing arguments are over and I bicycle through the city. All the pot clubs are open at night, their unlocked doors throwing green light onto the streets. I pass the line of bike messengers waiting to get into the Zeitgeist for a cold beer. I bike Valencia, Guererro, Dolores. These streets are noisy, crowded. This is where I live, in the city that I arrived at accidentally. It’s good to have a home, to know I’m going to be here for a while. That I’ll stay where I am, sharing a one-bedroom apartment close to the park and the coffee shop I like, in the middle of everything, with my young roommate, for as long as I can.

  “Little kids need their mother,” Paul Hora said in his summation. “Little kids miss their mother. He [Hans] hid her body. Hiding the body is so much worse. The pain and suffering you cause those kids for life. They never get to have a funeral or visit a headstone.”

  Du Bois countered by saying the prosecution had not proven its case. He said the burden of evidence against the accused has been getting lighter in recent years. He talked about prisoners freed after serving decades for crimes they didn’t commit. He talked about George W. Bush and his case for war, Colin Powell going to the United Nations with stories of weapons of mass destruction. It was the most, perhaps only, compelling part of Du Bois’ case. But it wasn’t enough for me. I believed the father was guilty. I agreed with Hora, little kids need their mother.

  For the last two months I’ve been dating three women. They all have different partners and know about each other. I met them all at almost the same time and see each a couple times a week. There’s Caterina who lives with her boyfriend and works in Oakland. She has spikey blond hair, a mousy nose, and dresses like a boy. We grab lunch together and occasionally in the evening she comes over with her boyfriend and the three of us have dinner. Her boyfriend brings me flowers. Caterina and I don’t have sex or do S/M, we just kiss and talk. We sit near the fountain in downtown Oakland by the bubble tea stand, my legs over her legs, her hand on the back of my neck.

  And there’s Mary, who is young and soft with smooth, comforting curves. She works at the bakery on the corner and sleeps over when she has to be at work early. She likes it when I wear the camisole and panties Patty bought me and I sleep in front of her on the inside of the spoon.

  There’s also Raina, a nurse’s aide who does fetish modeling and porn films. Raina has lots of partners, dominant and submissive. She’s what people in the S/M community refer to as “lifestyle” and what that really means is that sadomasochism is at the center of her world. In her teens she was homeless and by her early twenties she was addicted to heroin. Now, in her late twenties, she’s mostly got herself together. She’s self-educated and reads a book every day. She’s a heavy player, like Sean used to be, and her legs are often covered in large bruises. I’m not a heavy player. I usually can’t take that much pain. But I like being marked and I’m emotional and very submissive around the right person. I get shy and I think about the worst things I’ve experienced and I let the chains and the belts lift those things off of me, at least for a little while. All my fears and failures dissipate. Like the fear of my father when he dragged me home one night in the winter of 1985. His large, dark car slid toward the curb and came to a halt. “Get in,” he said. We drove home in silence and walked into the house and his face tensed up and he smacked me so hard I fell against the wall. I had just turned fourteen and my father was big and muscular. But that’s not what matters. He wasn’t really that much bigger than me, he just seemed that way because he had been screaming at me all my life. What matters, the only thing that matters at all, is that I didn’t fight back. I froze, the way my father froze that day in 1970 when the man ran up to him in the park
and said, “Did you hit my kid?” That kid he was referring to was my age, but my father couldn’t protect me from the man hitting me. My father was that man and I was my father’s son and he handed his fear down to me. He gave me an opportunity to correct his failure and I passed on it. None of it would have mattered if I fought back, but I didn’t. If I had, both of our lives would have been different.

  When I’m tied up, it’s the woman’s responsibility to protect me. She becomes my mother and my father. She gets angry for reasons I can’t understand, but she doesn’t leave. I absorb her anger, which becomes forgiveness. She stands behind my bed, then leans over me, her belly pressing against my face. I’m inhaling her stomach while she digs her nails into my skin. We’re standing at the intersection of our desires. What she wants is to be needed and to take control and what I want is to need and give up control. She hogties me on my bedroom floor, lining clothespins along my chest and thighs. She turns me over and lies on top of me. There are times when the pain is so great and I close my eyes and see my father grimacing behind a curtain of snow and because I can’t fail, because now I am thirty-six years old and there is nothing I can do, the tears pour from my face. She is Lissette, she is Raina, she is Patty, she is so many others. She is my savior and addiction and she says, “I think you’re wonderful.” She says, “I think you’re amazing.” She takes in my failures and my shortcomings, and she loves me the way only a mother can love a child. The pain takes away everything else. It’s as if she’s dug a finger through my ribs and is scratching at my heart. The euphoria spreads into a smile so large that I am almost laughing too. And I say, “I love you.” I tell my mother I love her as she wraps her hand around my penis and shushes me and says all these things that my body is telling me, they’re all OK. They’re part of my beauty, part of who I am, even the fear. She says, “To me you are perfect. I wouldn’t want you any other way.”

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed around me,” Raina says. I’m lying with my head in her lap, my legs wrapped around her waist, naked as a baby. She’s stroking my hair. “I’ve seen everything. There’s nothing you could do that would freak me out. I already understand how fucked up you are.”

  Mary, Caterina, and Raina have all met each other. They come to readings I have in the city and send each other their regards. It sounds ridiculous and complex, and it probably is. But actually, I’m as relaxed and happy as I’ve been in a while. Summer is coming and the sky is blue almost every day. The jury will reach its verdict. The park near my house fills with people and I don’t feel lonely. Caterina tells me to try and enjoy it.

  “You’re surrounded by people who like you,” she says. But she lives with her boyfriend. They’ve been together six years. And before that she was married.

  “Right,” I say. “But I’d like some guarantees.”

  And even in the best of times I don’t always keep it together. Raina is in my bedroom. I’m blindfolded and dressed like a girl and bleeding a little from some of the things she’s been doing.

  “I’m going to wash my hands,” she says.

  “Don’t go,” I almost scream, wrapping my arms around her leg. The panic shoots through me, turning to a cold, familiar fear. I’ll never see her again. “I’m sorry,” I say. I say it over and over and over. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Raina says, almost singing. “I’m staying right here.”

  The jury goes into deliberations and we’re all sent home to wait for the call. I collect $5 from six journalists and start a pool to guess when the verdict will arrive. One day stretches into two, and then a long weekend. The jury asks for several pieces of evidence, but the court won’t relay their requests to the media. On Monday I go for a ride along the bay, bicycling slowly past the docks and under the bridge and the old boats out near Hunters Point that seem never to have moved in the ten years I’ve lived here. There are people living in this area and they’re angry because the city ignores them, the streets aren’t maintained, there’s too much crime. On the upcoming ballot there’s an initiative that will transform the entire neighborhood with luxury condos and wide streets and green parks, and all the angry residents that don’t already own property will have to go somewhere else.

  I’ve been contracting with 20/20 for almost six months. Part of the deal is that I’m supposed to do an on-camera interview when the trial is over. I thought they wanted to talk to me about Hans but what they’re really interested in is Sean. They want me to talk about sadomasochism while they cut away to fuzzy images of women wearing leather, handcuffs on bedsheets, whips. They want to make a link between sadomasochism and death. But if anything became clear in this trial it’s that kinky sex had nothing to do with it.

  The 20/20 producers called me as a group and put me on speaker phone. They told me the questions they were going to ask about Sean. They wanted me to explain the difference between a bottom, a top, and a switch. They wanted me to talk about Sean as a “heavy player” and the kind of things Sean might like. The facts are correct but the questions are wrong, too sensational and out of context. I’m writing about the same things in my own book but I don’t trust these people.

  “Why not just ask me about the trial?” I said. “I’ve been in court every day. I know this case better than anyone.”

  “Oh please,” the senior producer said. “You can’t really pretend you didn’t know we would ask you about this.”

  “I need to think about it,” I said.

  “Oh, Stephen,” she replied. “I’m so disappointed in you.”

  I turn off the Bay, along Sixteenth Street, toward the base of Portero Hill. We have an agreement. I’m so disappointed in you. They don’t even try to mask their manipulation. Then they call back. The jury has reached a verdict.

  “You’re too late,” a woman tells me on the first floor of the courthouse. It’s one of the producers from 20/20. She’s pregnant with twins and she’s waiting near the information desk, hoping to catch some jurors on their way out.

  I bolt up the stairs and emerge from the fifth-floor stairwell into a scrim of boom mikes and tripods. The vestibule is packed to the walls with local and national media outlets. In the short hallway to the restroom the video techs are replaying the verdict on the double monitor. The on-air talent are already relaying their stories back to the viewing audience, the cameramen wrangling long coils of electrical cord. I crouch beneath the water fountains, near the machine where the professionals re-dub beta tapes. There are agreements already in place between broadcasting companies for pool cameras. The producers are whispering, trying to keep secrets from each other. The union crews hustle to stay busy and earn a spot on the next job. I’m thankful for their monitors, two small screens sitting on top of the series of beams with wheels full of media decks, cassettes popping out like toaster waffles.

  It’s the first time Goodman has allowed cameras in his courtroom, one in the front row of the gallery, another from the witness stand, staring at all the participants. I ignore what’s going on around me and focus instead on the screen: inside Courtroom Nine every seat is taken and a large crowd stands back near the doors. The bailiffs make no move to clear people who were unable to find seats. Hans, Du Bois, and Hora sit at the long table in the center. Du Bois is sad, his cheeks seeming to slide from his jaw, eyes drawn and bewildered. He knows the jury is coming back too soon. Hans looks like he was yanked out of bed, the top button undone on his shirt, his thick red tie hanging loosely from his collar, begging to be tightened. He leans toward Du Bois, whispering in his ear as the jury files behind them, settling into two rows of seats out of view of the cameras facing the accused.

  Juror Number One is chosen as the foreman. I remember him listening closely during Cori’s testimony, nodding and encouraging the boy, smiling thoughtfully as the child squirmed uncomfortably on the stand. He gives the bailiff a note, which the bailiff then walks over to Judge Goodman. The judge opens the envelope, reads it, hands it back to the bai
liff. The bailiff returns the note to the foreman.

  “Does that represent your true and final verdict?” Goodman asks. Each juror says yes in their turn. Murder in the first degree, pre-meditated, with malice.

  “Bailiff, remove Mr. Reiser from the courtroom.” I shift from one leg to another while watching. There’s commotion behind me, heels clicking rapidly against the linoleum, but on the screen the court is stunned silent.

  “I’ve been the best father that I know how,” Hans says. He has more to say but he doesn’t get the chance. The bailiff taps him on the shoulder, grips his arm at the elbow and wrist, pulls him from the room. He will no longer be granted the courtesy of the accused.

  The holding cell door closes in front of Hans, his mouth still open. The judge thanks the jury for their service. The camera focuses on Paul Hora leaning back at the table, folding his hands together. Du Bois shuffles a folder into a briefcase.

  I watch the verdict again, but now from another angle, the view from the witness stand. Each juror answers affirmatively. This case has aged Du Bois. He’s a highly regarded defense attorney and I’ve come to like him immensely, even if I never believe a word he says. The camera drops to an empty trash bin beneath the table, a bag folded loosely around its rim, then rises again to his face. Then Hans. Hans looks stunned as the clerk reads, “We the jury find the defendant guilty of murder. On or about September 3, 2006, in the county of Alameda, Hans Reiser did and with malice murder Nina Reiser.”

  “I’ve been the best father that I know how.” The bailiff stands ready behind Hans, taps him on the shoulder, leads him forcefully from the room.

  “Can you rewind?” I say. “Play it again?”

  There are press conferences. Du Bois promises appeals; Hora says justice has been served. The jurors slip out a side door. Late in the afternoon the building is mostly empty. I look in on Courtroom Nine. Boxes of tapes, documents, and displays sit at the front of the room. The jury hardly requested any of it. Now it will have to be stored somewhere, the transcripts of phone calls Hans made to his mother and pleading voice mails left for Nina; the photographs of Nina and the children and her blood sprayed across the beam; swabs, DNA lab results; recordings, videos; maps charting Hans’ routes through the East Bay as he tried to evade the police; receipts for a water pump, for books about murder; testimony from social workers, doctors; financial records; everything that went into the story Paul Hora wrote for the jury having served its purpose.