The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think I want to be on any more pills.”

  I tell her I took Paxil once but it just made things worse. My father, I suspect, also suffers from depression. A deep sadness always followed his rage. “I’m awful,” he would say after his fits. There might be broken plates across the kitchen floor and he would be standing in my doorway, the bags beneath his eyes heavy with grief. He would offer a gift, like a bowl of ice cream or a glass of Coke. “I feel terrible about it.” That was his way of talking about things. His apologies always came with an assurance that he was hurting too, that he could be trusted to take care of his own punishments. He needed to know I forgave him, as if he couldn’t go on otherwise. But I knew he would erupt again, exploding through the house like a thunderstorm, and I didn’t have any forgiveness in me.

  When I got older we patched things up for a while but it didn’t work out. I haven’t spoken to my father in a long time. Our last real conversation was an argument over the phone in 2004. I was writing a book about the presidential election and I could see Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter nearby at the entrance to a veteran’s hospital. My novel Happy Baby was just out. As in all of my novels, the protagonist is a stand-in for me. He was raised in group homes and was heavily into S/M. It was my first time writing honestly about my sexual desires and my tendency to eroticize my childhood.

  I received a note from a journalist who, after interviewing me, had been contacted by my father. My father told him I was a liar, a spoiled child from an upper-middle-class home looking for attention. He told him that I could have come home at any time, which wasn’t true; when I was arrested at age fourteen I didn’t know where he lived. My father disputed basic facts, saying I had gone to two high schools, not four. That I left home at fifteen, not thirteen. He didn’t shave my head, he gave me a haircut. He only handcuffed me to a pipe one time, he said, and look how many stories I wrote about it. It didn’t take long to realize this wasn’t the first journalist my father had contacted. He left a trail of denials across the internet like digital breadcrumbs. Everywhere I found a review of the book I would also find his comments.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. I was incredulous. There was the senator in front of me, his arm wrapped around a soldier whose leg had been amputated below the knee, and I was sitting in the parking lot and couldn’t even get out of the car.

  “I know, son, I know,” my father said, as if he felt sorry for me.

  My writer’s block began after that conversation. I had based my identity on a year spent sleeping on the streets and the four years that followed. It wasn’t much of a foundation. He was questioning my story, telling anyone who would listen that I had made up the whole thing, my entire life. I began to qualify everything. I wouldn’t say anything about myself without first saying there were people who remembered things differently. I wondered how much I had mythologized my own history, arranged my experiences to highlight my successes and excuse my failures. How far had I strayed from the truth?

  When I stopped responding to my father he pushed further. Yes, he wrote, he had yelled quite a bit and maybe, since my room was off the kitchen, I had mistakenly thought he was yelling at me. Then the group homes became foster homes and finally I had never even been in a foster home, I wouldn’t know what one looked like, everything was the product of my imagination, a result perhaps of something that happened in the mental hospital in 1986. He was trying to obliterate me. He was stealing my past and I was trying to hold on but felt it slipping through my fingers. I started to disappear.

  In the documents from Read Mental Hospital, a doctoral psychology student writes, Stephen experiences interpersonal rela tionships as unsatisfying and leave him with feelings of loneliness and isolation. His family system is not experienced as a haven where warmth and nurturance are demonstrated. Paternal fig ures are seen as punitive and rejecting. Maternal figures are seen in more positive light but are unavailable resulting in feeling of abandonment (sic). That was more than twenty years ago. I get the notes my father sends through reviews or comments almost every month telling me I need to apologize to my dead mother. I hear from female writers who my father has written to. “I liked your article. I think you know my son…” Growing up he would flirt with my friends’ mothers. He once offered to get an apartment for a girlfriend of mine. “A girl that pretty shouldn’t have to work.” I see the mean reviews he leaves of my books on Amazon. And I think, I don’t need antidepressants. I have real problems.

  I’m sitting on a black chair with my feet up, staring at my psychiatrist scratching notes on the digital tablet on her lap. It costs me $75 a visit, more for the meds. Each visit is only fifteen minutes long. She has so much faith in her pills; she doesn’t know me at all. I wish we could go for a walk and I could try to explain some of it to her. I wish we could sit for three hours on top of Bernal Heights. I think she would have good advice. She’s wearing a long black dress, her hair piled in a bun on her head. She’s a nice lady. She’s getting ready to retire and the lines on her face are rivulets of empathy. I’m twitching. She’s telling me I should take antidepressants and I’m thinking of Tolstoy saying the only conclusion a reasonable person can come to is that life is meaningless. And then everything seems like a cliché.

  I pay my doctor and head outside where I’m reminded of something else: the sun greeting Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger. Meursault fails to show remorse at his mother’s funeral and then, at the beach, takes one step forward when he knows he should take one step back, and is blinded by the light flashing off the Arab’s blade.

  I can’t find Sean but I find more than a dozen people who know him. Sean wanted to turn his dungeon studio into a church so that all the dominatrixes who worked there would be priestesses, safeguarded by laws protecting religious freedoms. “He’s like that,” someone says. “He’s always looking for an angle.”

  Several people remember Sean claiming he murdered someone as long as ten years ago.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I ask one person.

  “I didn’t believe him,” that person says.

  Everybody seems to have a different opinion of Sean. They often refer to his generosity and kindness. One person says if Sean claims to have killed eight people then it’s true. Sean’s not a liar. Others caution me to keep my distance.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “He’s hard to get rid of. Once he’s in your life he won’t want to go away. He sees it as a game.”

  I also hear something more disturbing. Someone says Sean called a friend just weeks before Nina disappeared. The friend described Sean as extremely agitated, saying Sean couldn’t understand how Nina could leave him and why she was refusing to see him.

  I go to Portland for a writers’ workshop at Reed College. Every day I read work by my ten students and we sit around a coffee table discussing their essays. One woman says she’s an abuse survivor, another writes about a car crash she survived but in which her boyfriend died. One writes about doing her MFA in New York and how one of the students stole a story idea from another student and published it in a book. A man from Iowa says the class is really just an excuse to visit his grandchildren. He’s seventy-four years old and once ran for Congress. One morning he asks if anyone read the local paper. “This young woman,” he says. “She was killed over in Iraq. Shot by a sniper. Now her two kids have no mother. And we’re sitting around talking about where to put a fucking period.”

  As part of the conference I give a reading at an outdoor amphitheater with rows of white wood benches leading up to the Gray Campus Center. It’s a quiet evening with fifty students and faculty sitting patiently while I read an essay about Lissette carving “possession” in my side. She spelled it wrong, leaving out one s. The metaphor was too obvious. It was like Jim Morrison dying in the bathtub or Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. It meant exactly what you thought it meant.

  In Los Angeles, Bearman had told me I needed to find a new story.
I had written four novels based loosely on my life and multiple personal essays. “Listen,” he said. “Stick to Hans and Sean and keep yourself out of it.” My friend Kay encourages me to write something accessible, and to keep a journal for the rest. “Write something that people want to read,” she says. “Think of Dave Eggers. He wrote a book about himself and moved on to other things.” Twelve years ago, when I was hospitalized following my overdose, my friend Louie came to visit me. He said, “You better never write about this.” He was trying to distinguish between being a real human being and someone who only lives on the page. I didn’t even consider myself a writer then, though I wrote all the time.

  I was in the hospital for eight days after my overdose. My body was covered in strange boils and for most of my time there I could barely move. I had a stroke, or a seizure. The doctors didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. My troubles were self-inflicted.

  I checked out early, returning to the room I rented on the third floor of a large house near the university, walking with a limp. Suddenly I noticed how yellow the walls were, and how the roof rose at a sharp angle, cutting the space in half. I stopped eating. I lost twenty-five pounds. I couldn’t focus and I began to have panic attacks, which I hadn’t experienced since I was in the group homes.

  Soon after leaving the hospital I began to fantasize about getting a gun and going to the lake and putting the gun in my mouth and toppling back into the water. I would kill myself just like Kurt Cobain had two years earlier. But it was winter, and I worried that the frozen lake would keep me alive and I would be rescued somehow. It was all I could think about. A month after I was out of the hospital I showed up back at the emergency room and told them what I was going to do. A resident gave me some Klonopin and sent me home. The next day I enrolled in a drug treatment program.

  My friends think I’m a happy person. And in a way I am. But I’ve been sad a lot too. When I’m sad I don’t want anyone to know. I try to hide it, even from myself. I read books on depression. They all say to take your meds; it’s a matter of finding the right cocktail. But the authors also talk about recurrences, shifting dosages, sleeping ten hours a night, and losing all interest in sex. It’s only recently that I’m realizing I’ve been depressed all my life. I run from it like a fire. I could stand under a thousand spotlights, publish a million books, and it wouldn’t change a thing.

  At the end of the Portland conference I stand outside the main hall with one of the students. She’s a lawyer, educated at Yale. She used her vacation to come here. I want to go inside, talk to some of the people I met. But the student is so beautiful. She says the faculty are like celebrities.

  “Why are you talking to me?” she asks. “I’m too boring for you. I’m not going to carve ‘possession’ over your ribs.”

  I imagine her knife sliding inside me, cutting along my stomach, peeling back my skin. She leans against the wall, playing with her hair.

  “Maybe I’m trying to get to the other side of that,” I tell her.

  Her shirt is unbuttoned. Her skin is dark and smooth. “You like exotic women,” she says. “And you’re attracted to things you can’t have.” She leans toward me, like a dare. I press my hand on her waist and kiss her, lingering against her lips. She says she has a boyfriend. Someone her mother would like. I am not someone her mother would like. She’s been trying to please her mother her entire life.

  When I get back from Portland, Miranda informs me she doesn’t want to see me for a while. Her life is in turmoil. It has nothing to do with me. We just sleep together. We were just acting as placeholders for each other. Anyway, I had my chance.

  I think about Norman Mailer rewriting The Deer Park in a Benzedrine haze, popping Seconal to find some sleep at night and waking in a stupor. Benzedrine and Adderall are essentially the same thing. Mailer was the biggest literary star of his time, but The Deer Park was not a great book. Later he would remember, “I would pick up the board, wait for the first sentence—like all working addicts I had come to an old man’s fine sense of inner timing—and then slowly, but picking up speed, the actions of the drugs hovering into collaboration like two ships passing in view of one another, I would work for an hour, not well but not badly either. Then my mind would wear out, and new work was done for the day. I would sit around, watch more television and try to rest my dulled mind, but by evening a riot of bad nerves was on me again, and at two in the morning I’d be having the manly debate of whether to try to sleep with two double capsules, or settle again for my need of three. ”8 He describes my life perfectly, except when he wrote this he had already made something of himself. Much later he would write his true crime masterpiece, The Executioner’s Song, which gives me hope. He wrote his best book years after his TV and pills and marijuana, his thirties behind him. When asked what five novels he would bring with him to a desert island, he said his own.

  I think about calling my father. I have so many questions. What was the man’s name? Did he really kill him? Did he sleep with my mother’s sister or was he joking? Does he still have pictures of himself from after the men beat him up? Can I see them? What were the names of the books he gave me to read? Why did he want to be a writer in the first place? Who was Al Capone’s lawyer? How do you bore holes in a shotgun? I just want the facts.

  Sitting on top of Dolores Park hill with a friend, I mention I’m working on a new book. She asks what it’s about.

  “I’m writing about murder,” I tell her. I have no more classes scheduled, no income coming in. The memoirist Vivian Gornick would say the murder is just the situation; the story is something else.

  It’s golden hour, the sun is down and everything is evenly lit. The park is filled with couples making out.

  And then Sean returns.

  It’s been months since I last heard from him. We meet at a diner in the Castro. He sits in front of a wall of bright posters of the Jersey Boys, Bob Marley, MenInGear.com. We’re at a long table. It’s ten at night. Men pass the windows in Day-Glo tank tops and tight pants.

  What Sean most wants to tell me is that my friend Josh may be in danger. He says he heard friends of Hans didn’t like the article. “These are bad people,” he says. “Just try to think: who would still be friends with Hans?” (Who would still be friends with a murderer?) He says I should tell Josh to look out.

  I shrug my shoulders and order a bowl of chili. He didn’t like the article and he wants me to scare someone on his behalf. He’s manipulative but clumsy. He mentions the article again.

  “Nobody ever likes what’s written about them,” I snap. I name a couple of books he could read on the subject. I mention Janet Malcolm, who referred to being written about as having a sort of narcissist’s holiday but who also said that when the holiday was over and the article or book has been published, the subject had the experience of flunking a test she didn’t know she was taking.9

  Sean’s upset because in the article Josh called him evasive.

  “You are evasive,” I say. “I’ve interviewed politicians. You are the most evasive person I’ve ever met.”

  “That’s because I don’t even know you,” he says. I don’t say that he contacted me this time. That I had given up on trying to meet with him when he disappeared and turned off his phone. That I don’t trust him because he answers questions with questions, tells stories with analogies rather than facts, converses in detail about everything except what interests me. He says he grew up in a commune but I don’t know the commune’s name. For all I know it wasn’t a commune at all. Maybe it was just a normal house where a lot of people stopped by. All I know about him is that on Sundays he goes to church and that he loved a woman and that woman is gone.

  “I don’t mean it as an insult,” I say. But maybe I do. Maybe what I really want to say is, Why are you doing this? Why are you wasting my time? Why are you leading me into this rabbit hole?

  “I’m going to help you with your book,” he says. “But I can’t talk to you about it until after the trial.”

>   “By that time I don’t know what I’ll be writing about,” I say. “Anyway, you wouldn’t like how it turned out. You wouldn’t like how I portrayed you.”

  I ask Sean how he is doing and he looks at me like I’m crazy. He was attacked a second time, he says. He lives in a condo in the East Bay and someone broke into the garage. He heard feet scampering and then someone hit him in the back of the head with a pipe and he passed out.

  “I didn’t see them.” He says there were things pertaining to Nina missing from his car, and other things. I say it could be unrelated. He says he’ll be curious to see what evidence suddenly appears at the trial. Why would he have evidence related to Nina in his car? He wants to know what I’ve been doing. I tell him about standing outside the jail when Paris Hilton was released, the seminar in Portland. I tell him about making the gossip pages in the San Francisco Chronicle by throwing a beer on a sixty-six year-old man at a literary event.10

  “I couldn’t live the kind of life you lead,” he says. He likes quiet, says the police requested that he turn in his guns. I thought he gave his guns to his pastor. “I’ve never shot anyone,” he says. “I’ve been shot at once. They should have taken my knives.”

  The restaurant is crowded, noisy, and overlit. Sean’s hinting that at least some of the people he killed were killed with knives, which would make for one hell of a mess. The boys are filtering into the diner from the gay bars. “I was supporting Nina even though she was with another man,” Sean says. He’s drinking a mimosa. He says Nina was about to take the first round of the medical boards. “If she passed she would be able to get a better job.” He starts crying, the tears rolling gently down his nose.

  I don’t feel the sympathy I’m supposed to feel. I feel empty. I wonder if the Adderall is making me cold, or if it’s just the lack of sleep. It makes me think of my own mother and how I didn’t cry when she died. Instead I went with some friends down to the canal and we drank a bottle of vodka. I was thirteen. “Drink to forget,” Nicko said. I didn’t cry for years.