At the time I was just out of college and didn’t know what to do. In college I was a history major. I started hanging out at a club called Berlin, flirting with the bartenders and the cocktail servers. I had nowhere to go but I liked to dance. One night the bartender asked me to be in a fashion show. I walked the runway in striped shorts with orange straps across my shoulders, moving as slowly as I could, basking in the glow of the runner lights. A crowd of club-goers gathered along the sides and stretched their arms toward my ankles. I passed through the mesh curtains into the dressing room and asked if I could go again.
“You are so vain,” the bartender said, patting my ass.
My stripper year was also my heroin year, when I headed with my friends to the West Side, through the remnants of the ’68 riots, to pick up bundles from men on lawn chairs in front of abandoned lots.
At the same time I was just starting film school, and getting along better with my father. I would hang out at his house and we would tell each other stories, things that had nothing to do with my childhood. We never discussed what led to me leaving home so young and the state taking custody. We had different interpretations of what happened and if we got anywhere near the subject it felt like our fragile reconciliation wouldn’t survive. My father would compliment me, tell me how much better my work was than the other film students. “They don’t understand narrative,” he said. “Most people don’t know how to tell a story.” He was proud of me, but not for working hard. Working hard was for suckers. He thought I had talents that other people didn’t, talents that we shared. I soaked up his compliments but didn’t trust him enough to share my feelings. I knew that if I admitted any vulnerability, someday he would use it against me. It was a feature of his rage. When he was angry he would grasp for whatever meant the most to you and destroy it. When I was with him I would tell him how well everything was going, how happy my life was, and when I left I replayed his compliments in my mind as if they were on a cassette and I was wearing invisible headphones.
One day I came over and my father was limping, his body twisting at right angles, his chest nearly parallel to the floor as he walked. Growling, he gripped the furniture, grasping the edges of the large white couches he’d bought with his new wife. “Motherfucker!” He turned to me, face red, eyes looking like they wanted to jump out of his skull. My big, strong, vain, and fearsome father with his beautiful body, always lifting weights so his chest and arms were thick, strutting naked through the house, past my mother and me, his cock flapping between his legs. But now he seemed broken. “My body is a burning building!” he shouted. “I have to get out!”
I felt a surge of emotion like I had never felt for my mother. My father left and I was alone in his big suburban house with the nice furniture. I cried for a long time, a deep, uncontrollable cry. Shortly after that his spine collapsed and he was placed in a halo and he moved to the first floor because he couldn’t climb the stairs to the bedroom where he’d installed skylights. His new wife was trying to leave him and I said to her, “Now is the time.” But she didn’t, and I wasn’t really that involved.
It was a period of my life that could have gone either way. Or maybe not. Maybe there’s only one way to go with a needle. I went to school. I took my clothes off at The Manhole. Men ran their fingers along my legs, working their tips inside my underwear, trying to get a thumb in my asshole. I pressed my back against them at the Bijou Sunday mornings, rubbed my cheek against their necks. It all made sense at the time, twenty-two years old, a year out of college, graduate school, the rapprochement with my father, the nights and weekends spent dancing on a box bathing in anonymous attention, the rigs full of heroin. But when I try to make sense of it now it’s like a soup. How could I be so many different people? My stripper year ended with an overdose in a rented room a couple of days before Thanksgiving, and when I got out of the hospital I spiraled into a period of unbearable depression. I was never the same after that.
Returning from the dungeon the woman’s boyfriend drives my rental while I lay my head in her lap. She wears tight jeans and I press against her legs and she runs her fingers absently around my ear. A truck passes with a placard stuck to the sideboard: We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you. It takes a while in rush hour through the 405. She says she’s hungry and wants to stop for Mexican food. I tell her I need to get back to Hollywood where I’ve been sleeping on my friend Bearman’s couch.
I have no idea why I’m in LA. It’s a city I’ve never liked. I’d been having the latest in a string of minor breakdowns. According to the book I’m reading these breakdowns are going to become more frequent, and more severe. But it doesn’t happen. I start to feel better almost right away.
I sleep in the living room, near an open window, in an old-style courtyard building in a part of Hollywood known as Little Armenia. There’s a fountain in the courtyard and a small hill where cats bathe in the sun. Beyond the gates old men set tables on the sidewalk and play backgammon until dusk. Bearman doesn’t question why I’m in Los Angeles. He always seems genuinely happy to see me. He lives with his fiancée and people come over all the time. Everybody has keys. Nobody calls, they just walk in and out. There’s no need to make plans. I take ten milligrams of Adderall with my coffee every day. At night, two milligrams of Lunesta gets me to sleep, but I wake up feeling groggy. The sleeping pills give me headaches. Or maybe it’s the combination. I remind myself to eat, but sometimes I forget. In the mornings I meet Nick Flynn, who is writing a book about torture, and we sit across from each other with our headphones on. We met years ago after I reviewed a book he wrote. Now he’s in LA with his girlfriend, who is starring in a new television series.
“It’s not really about torture,” he says. “It’s really about me, and what it’s like for me to wake up in a country that sanctions torture.”
“We’re all just writing about ourselves,” I say.
Nick tells me about a man he’s going to see in Turkey, a prisoner from Abu Ghraib, the man Lynndie England appeared to be pulling from his cell on a leash. He says when he talks to people about torture they often respond, “But they’re trying kill us.” “Who?” he says. “Who’s trying to kill us?”
I tell Nick about Sean and the Hans Reiser trial. It’s been almost two months since I first heard about Sean. I say there’s no body and the man that the victim left her husband for confessed to eight murders. I tell him all the ways I know Sean. Nick says it sounds complicated.
“Do you think Sean did it?” Nick asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Sean told my friend Josh that if he understood Sean’s relationship with Hans, Josh would weep piss and blood.”
“Who talks like that?”
I tell Nick I thought I would get to know Sean. Figure him out. But he disappeared on me and now I’m remembering all these things I thought I left behind.
The cafés are filled with struggling actors whispering to themselves. A belt of greenish smog lies like spilled sewage across the mountain range barreling the city. It’s different from San Francisco where the air is clean and the city is beautiful. Los Angeles is big and ugly. Uglier even than Oakland. Sometimes, in the early evening, Bearman, Nick, and I play basketball at a school yard on the edge of Hollywood, hoisting our shots with both hands toward the naked rims. There’s never anyone around to see our awkward athletic display.
“I’m writing for Esquire,” I tell the paparazzi at the jail where Paris Hilton is serving time. What else would I say? That I’m waiting for a murder trial to start, sleeping on someone’s couch, and starring in porn films in the San Fernando Valley?
I talk to the inmates as they leave the jail for treatment facilities. One woman is missing her front teeth, top and bottom. The other had four earrings ripped out during a gang fight in South Central. She says she was defending her sister.
The PR machine works overtime to flag the story that Paris is serving extra time because she’s a celebrity. It’s inaccurate but there’s nothing to do
about it. Paris is given a special bed in the hospital unit. “You have to be dying to get one of those beds,” one of the inmates tells me. I pen an editorial pointing out that this is actually about prison crowding and a justice system that works differently for the rich. After a thousand words I’m done.
The night Paris is scheduled to get out I’m with a crowd of journalists flanking the walkway leading from the main entrance, kept back by yellow tape.
“I want pictures of a happy lady,” says Nick Ut. Thirty-five years ago he photographed a naked girl running in front of a black cloud, arms spread so as not to touch her sides, 80 percent of her body covered in napalm. In front of the girl, a boy with his mouth open in a black square screams. Behind her, soldiers walk casually, their helmets in place, guns across their shoulders. That picture won the Pulitzer Prize and helped end a war an ocean away. More recently Ut photographed Paris Hilton crying in the back-seat of a police car after being told she was to return to jail.
“You look at the pictures,” Nick says. “They’re very similar. Also different. Kim was poor and her family suffered a long time. Paris was in jail for three days.”
When Paris was first sentenced she said she hoped the media would focus more on the war. When the judge ordered her back, she screamed, “Mom, it’s not fair.” In a phone interview from jail she said, “It’s like being in a cage.”
There are hundreds of journalists, a dozen police, and tourists coming in. I meet Ashley Moore, who spent seven days here back in September. She couldn’t make bail so she sat in the jail for a week. After she was released the judge dropped the case. She has the Japanese symbol for beautiful on her arm, a rose tattooed on her foot. “That place,” she says pointing to the jail, “is no place to be.” But here she is, waiting to see Paris get out. She says she has nothing else to do on a Monday night.
As it gets closer to midnight the crowd swells. The TV reporters report live. Helicopters hover overhead. The parents pull up in a large black SUV. Their bodyguard is a big, bald man in a well-tailored suit. He seems to know the police. He looks like he could have been a football player once. The driver wears mirrored glasses and doesn’t smile. More tape is stretched to secure the crowd. The thrum of the helicopters is like a soundtrack.
“You’re so beautiful, Kathy,” a girl cries. The girl looks Spanish or Asian, or both. She’s wearing a tank top, her breasts pushed up.
“Thank you,” Kathy Hilton says. Kathy sits in the car, the window rolled down, bantering with the press. She soaks the cameras’ flashes in like lotion, plays with her hair.
Then the girl says it again, “You’re so beautiful, Kathy.”
Kathy smiles.
Then the girl says it again and Kathy looks ahead uncomfortably.
“Oh God, please let Paris go free!” a deranged man wails, stretching his arms and dropping to his knees.
Arc lights are set up. It’s midnight and everything shines. The reporters lean over the tape. The paparazzi wait with cameras strapped over their necks. All of it infused with the nervous energy of a bull waiting for a clown to unhinge the gate.
And then she is out. Paris Hilton in tight jeans and a light jacket thrown over a white shirt. She’s smiling, basking in the glow. She looks better without makeup. She gets to the car and is hugging her mother and then the door is open and she is inside and the tape and the barricades go down and the police cannot control the crowd. The car inches away. The paparazzi stand shins against the bumper, bent across the hood, taking pictures through the glass. Nick Ut stands in the wreckage of toppled tripods left by the young photographers, reviewing pictures he took. He’s a little man and this is not exactly his game. But Paris was smiling and happy, exactly as he had hoped.
At four in the morning my phone rings. I flip the bright screen while Bearman’s cats look up from the corner. It’s my friend Roger, calling from Chicago. Two men jumped him while he was trying to hail a cab. “Oh Steve,” he says. “They wouldn’t stop.” They kept beating him, even after they got his wallet and left him lying in the street almost unconscious. I stay on the phone with Roger for a long time. I talk to the doctor who put five stitches in Roger’s face and assures me everything is going to be OK. Later Roger says he just wishes he hadn’t been drunk at the time. He would have fought back.
Roger’s my oldest friend. I’ve known him since I was seven. Once, Justin’s father pulled up on the sidewalk in his taxi and I took off running. He poked a gun in Roger’s chest and asked where I had gone and Roger responded he didn’t know. Another time my father caught Roger climbing in through my bedroom window. He stood there with a hammer, considering whether or not to break Roger’s fingers. He told me later he was glad he hadn’t.
I spend an afternoon at the glassy ocean out at Venice Beach. There are concrete benches and tables on the beach, an outdoor gym, an ice-cream shop. People are roller-skating up and down the boardwalk. Old men walk in shorts with their shirts off, their bellies toasted by the sun. I think about the difference between being famous and disappearing. Los Angeles is a fantastic place to disappear. There are so many people trying to be recognized that all you have to do is stand still. In the hundreds of miles of sprawling suburbs a person could do nothing here and the time would pass and that would be that.
Hans Reiser’s trial won’t start for six more weeks, presuming it’s not continued, and Sean is still missing. I wonder who else Sean is hiding from, how far he is in over his head. I study the pictures I posed for inside Sean’s apartment. I have them in a file on my computer. There are large black tiles on the floor, a plaster angel on the wall in what looks like the entryway, a standing brass lamp and dark wood dresser. I’m tied into a body harness, wearing a blindfold and a spiked collar. A woman in a latex catsuit is posing to look as if she is digging her nails into my face. It was the summer of 1999, right around the time Hans and Nina were getting married on an Oakland hilltop. In the wedding video they dance behind a minotaur and Hans cannot keep his hands off Nina. He grasps for her like a greedy child, the way I grasped for Lissette. Sean was there dressed in drag, the maid of honor, witnessing for his friend. While I was chained up in his apartment was he already coveting his best friend’s wife?
Before I leave Los Angeles I meet a music producer. She asks what I’m working on and I say I am kind of writing a book about murder and kind of not doing anything. She says she tried to kill her stepfather once. She was sixteen and working in a pharmacy and she found a type of pill and figured out how many pills it would take to kill a person. She stole the pills, slipping a couple in her pockets every day, careful to cover her tracks. The night she decided she’d had enough she ground the pills and put them in her stepfather’s food.
“Nothing happened,” she says. “He was too fat. It went right through his system. He didn’t even notice.”
Chapter 4
July; Scooter and Eva; Miranda Leaves; The Stranger; Clues, Rumors, and Observations; What’s in Portland; Kay’s Advice; Norman Mailer; The Situation and the Story; Sean Sturgeon Returns with a Message
In the beginning of July, George Bush commutes Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence of thirty months for perjury. He doesn’t pardon Libby, who served as the vice president’s chief of staff, just changes the sentence so he doesn’t serve any time. He says the penalty was too severe but makes no move to change the mandatory sentencing for everyone else. Below the article is a story about Eva Daley, who drove her son and six of his friends to a gang fight in Long Beach where they stabbed a boy to death. It must have looked like a circus trick, all those children piling out of the car toward the playground.
When I get home from Los Angeles I see Miranda in the afternoon and we make a large pot of curried vegetables. I don’t see her again until a week later when her roommates are having a party and she asks to sleep over. She has to be up at four in the morning to go to work. She says she’s been busy. She says she’s having an existential crisis. She met a boy at a rock show and thinks maybe she’s in lo
ve. She’s wearing tennis shoes, a sweatshirt, and yellow running shorts. We walk down Cortland looking for ice cream but all the shops are closed.
Miranda is tired. The work she’s doing is secret, possibly illegal, and justified by the causes she represents. She doesn’t go to movies or watch television. She reads essays to support her desires, reinforces her beliefs with books like Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? At night she closes herself around me while I lean over the side of the bed with the covers pushed back, sweating. Miranda’s legs pressed behind my legs feel like they’re a hundred degrees. I’m trying not to panic. I wake up startled in the middle of the night and she lays her hand over my face, spreading her fingers across my eyes.
“Go back to sleep,” she says. “You belong to me.”
In the morning her clothes are gone, along with her bag of books, her bicycle. I put on the mix CD she made while I cook eggs and make coffee.
I’m moving soon. Just a little more than a mile away into a one-bedroom apartment with a twenty-six-year-old kid who works for a guitar magazine. I tap my pen on the table and stare past the fire escape, contemplating the hill. I hear a series of explosions behind the building. It’s the Fourth of July.
“You’re twitching,” my psychiatrist says. “Above your eye.”
“I’ve always had a twitch,” I say.
When I was younger I could barely control it. I would roll my lips, blink quickly, nod my head in short, quick jerks. I was so tense I could only wear extra-large clothes that hung on me like sacks because I couldn’t stand the feeling of fabric pressing my shoulders. She says the Adderall could make it worse. She asks if I want to start taking medication for depression. She suggests Welbutrin or a serotonin agent.
The Adderall Diaries Page 6