The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  I fold my hands and watch Sean’s face. I asked him once about the people left behind, the children, the lovers. He said that wasn’t his concern. I could see from his expression that he had never even considered it. If he did kill those people, he hadn’t given a thought to the collateral damage. He didn’t care. The murderer crying because he has lost the woman he loves to a killer. Is he crying for himself or for Nina or the two children? How could he feel remorse but not guilt? What does “loss” mean? How do we convince ourselves of loss? Nina had already left him. He was still giving her money though she hadn’t seen him in four months. It’s not that his pain isn’t real, just unknowable. It belongs to him, exists in the complex forge of his heart. The words and the tears are the product of this engine but they don’t communicate anything. I’m blind to what’s inside.

  At the same time I’m talking to Sean, an old friend of mine is placing a loaded gun in his mouth. Six weeks ago Mike fell and cracked his skull while visiting a doctor for strep throat. Since then he’d been having panic attacks, ringing in his ears, and depression. He may have been there that night at the canal after my mother died. He usually was. Once he was just another stoned kid, like the rest of us, like Tom, who died a couple of years ago on his drug dealer’s floor, flopping like a fish while his dealer searched the internet for a way to revive him. Or Rich Herrera, who last year followed a three-day coke binge with a handful of sleeping pills, stopping his heart. Mike had been doing well. He had a wife and a child. He was a police officer, a profession that seems to attract juvenile criminals, at least in the Chicago area. Mike pulls the trigger, blows out the back of his head.

  I get the phone call about Mike from Roger two days later while in the terminal at SFO waiting for a plane to New York. I’m supposed to give a reading at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan. I’m sitting by the window, looking at a flight boarding for Indonesia, a sky blue Korean Air jet taxiing the runway. Then the tarmacs and the bay followed by the hills. I tell Roger I have to go, my flight’s boarding, though it isn’t actually boarding for another hour. There’ve been a lot of these calls in the past few years. I’m missing everybody’s funeral.

  But I don’t know about Mike yet, the taste of gun like a mouthful of coins, his wife, five months pregnant with a second child, stopping in front of the door with no idea what awaits her inside.

  I’m sitting across from a man who may be a murderer, but I can’t tell. “I need to leave the life of violence behind me,” Sean says as the waitress takes his empty bowl and refills my water. “I just can’t handle all the things I’m doing. There’s no winners in this. Everybody loses.”

  8.  Norman Mailer,Advertisements for Myself (Putnam, 1959), 244.

  9. Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Vintage, 1990).

  10. Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 2007.

  CHAPTER 5

  Late July/Early August; Goldberg’s Funeral; A Prostitute on Victoria Avenue; Ted Light Shoots a Homeless Man with a Crossbow; Risk and Reward; The Coast of Chicago; Arriving in San Francisco; A Real Job with Benefits

  In a funeral home on the Northwest Side of Chicago, Mike lies in an open casket, five days dead, his bloated face covered in thick makeup. He looks like a large doll. I stand at the back of the room near the heavy drapes. Mike’s daughter is there on the couch with her chin on her tiny fists watching a small DVD player. A detail of Columbia, Missouri’s police department is in attendance in their dress blues. One of the officers who worked with Mike tells me that rookies would sometimes ask Mike to identify the drugs they’d found, and we laugh. Mike never had any problem identifying drugs. “He was a good guy,” the officer says. Just like that.

  After the wake there’s the funeral. It’s raining. A rabbi speaks while a lady in a smart suit holds an umbrella above him. We take turns shoveling dirt onto the casket. “That costs $150,” Javier says, pointing to a square of white flowers on top of a grave. He used to work in the cemetery. “Plus maintenance.” Mike’s mother is here. His home situation wasn’t as bad as most of ours. Both his parents were alive, though separated. Mike’s father invites everyone over to his house for food but we go to a bar instead.

  We don’t talk a lot about Mike, who was a nice guy and didn’t get in much trouble. We talk about Tim Strutz and his Camaro fishtailing through the alleys near Devon. I mention that I was volunteering in a homeless shelter my senior year in high school when Tim came in on the other side of the line. Someone mentions Tomlee taking the police on a high-speed chase and then, surrounded in a parking lot, refusing to get out of the car and the police punching him repeatedly in the head while he sat in the driver’s seat. Ant was out of the car and standing with his arms folded across his chest while Tomlee got his beating. “Are you scared?” the cop asked him.

  “No,” Ant said. “I’m just cold.”

  We talk about the house burglary ring Aaron started in 1986. Aaron wasn’t at Mike’s funeral today. He once told me he started robbing houses because he wanted to be like me. I had just returned from hitchhiking to California and he said he wanted to have stories to tell too. He spent years in jail. Last time I saw him he was shooting up in his apartment. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m a junky.” It didn’t bother him. He stuck the needle right in his leg. He sold me my last bundle of heroin, ten poorly mixed bags including a hotshot full of pure juice that nearly killed me.

  “Where is that guy, anyway?” Roger asks.

  Ant orders sandwiches and pitchers of beer. We talk about the kids that came in from the suburbs. They’d brought a keg down to the canal and didn’t want to share. They didn’t know they were in our space, that we had dug the fire pit and made the stairs and slept many nights there while the rats ducked in and out of the muck. There were more of them than us and the largest stood in front of Ron Fessedon and said, “It’s time for you guys to leave.” Ron got a queer look on his face then pulled a branch from the tree and punched him in the temple with it and he fell face-first in the dirt, his girlfriend screaming, “You killed him!” Everybody scattered.

  Eddie mentions Billy showing up drunk and losing his job at UPS. Roger remembers Mitch taking off his shirt at Eddie’s wedding, Pat throwing a bottle through the window of Devon Bank. Javier talks about coming home to his first apartment and seeing a trail of blood in the hallway and hoping it didn’t lead to his door, but of course it did. His roommate was covered in bandages, sitting in a straight-backed chair. He’d been fighting with his girlfriend and glass was everywhere.

  When we get together these are always the stories we tell. Stories of theft and violence. We tell the same stories over and over again and I always learn something new. This time I learn that the decision to rob Paul’s parents’ house was made in my father’s car, which Tim McKitrick had stolen that morning. My father used to attach a set of magnetic keys to the underside of the bumper. I don’t remember telling anybody about them, but I probably did.

  “There were an unusual number of sociopaths in our group,” Roger observes. “Including your father.”

  It’s true, I think. We’re proud of our stories. They make us sound tougher than we were. Actually we were weak and rarely stood up for one another. We had no group identity and no sense of loyalty. We weren’t into anything except bad heavy metal music, and a lot of us weren’t even into that, we were just faking it. We rooted against each other and maintained no rituals other than getting high. I was also a thief. Crawling into my parents’ room late at night, dragging my father’s pants along the floor then rummaging through his pockets, trying to decide how much money I could take without him noticing. He always had bail money, up to a $1,000 in cash, and I would take $200 or $300 at a time. The year before my mother died I must have stolen $2,000. I remember my heart beating so hard and fast I was worried it would shake the furniture. And I remember the bright bathroom lights at four in the morning, the blood drained from my face, leaning against the sink trying to control my breathing as I waited for t
he lump in my throat to subside. I remember dragging the pants back into their room. And the staggering quantities of drugs I would buy with that money.

  A lot of my friends are living at home again with their parents, getting into their late thirties, still trying to figure it out. It’s too late for most of us. A few are doing well. Alex owns his own computer support business. Roger is completing a PhD in psychology. Ant is a contractor, happily married with a gorgeous child, selling rebuilt classic cars on the side. Dave, Rob, and Pat play in bands. There are no CEOs, no VPs of marketing. Justin’s back home more than twenty years after the state took custody of him, sleeping in the same room where his father beat him with a stick. Javier is nearing forty, intermittently homeless.

  “There weren’t many women in our group when we were younger,” Javier points out.

  “Can you blame them?” I reply.

  The drinking continues until late when Velchry, stumbling drunk, can’t find his car. We end up at the RedLine Tap watching the neighborhood bluegrass band, and then I leave and walk down the cobblestone street next to the Morse Station. The last train clatters past overhead. Mike is dead. It doesn’t make any sense, compared with some of the people still alive. Velchry has a child he rarely sees. So does Eddie. Dave and Nadia split custody. Justin has a child with his ex-wife. Bob moved back into the city while his wife is in the suburbs with their two children. We’ve bred children into broken homes. The next generation of ourselves. I pass the No Exit Cafe, where I used to play chess with the off-duty cabdrivers. I was a good player. After I convinced the group home to send me to the normal high school my junior year, I joined the chess team and came in sixth in the city. The principal made an announcement over the intercom.

  A woman calls to me from the end of the street. “Hey,” she says. “Can you help me out?” It’s two in the morning. She wears a thin synthetic shirt, the straps hanging loosely, lines of sweat running down her arms. She reminds me of a prostitute on Victoria Avenue, not far away. She was the first woman who treated me the way I wanted. She wanted more money than I had…

  A man in a white T-shirt wants to talk to me about something. He’s holding the corner with two other men. He has a scraggly halo of a beard. “I’m talking to you,” he says. “Hey, man. I’m talking to you.” The lights are on in front of JB’s, the delivery drivers double-parked to the end of the block. It’s the best pizza in America but if you stop for a slice late at night you don’t know what’s going to happen. The tiny strip mall with the hair salon and Magic Video is closed for the night. I want to tell the hustlers and hookers and crackheads that I grew up here and went to public schools. If I hadn’t left they would recognize me, and instead of asking me for something or motioning to me with their fingers or calling out, “What you want? What you need?” they would just nod. If I had never left, then I could walk safely past the white shirts between the bar and my friend’s house with the futon in the living room four blocks away, and these people would be there to guarantee my safe passage. And occasionally I would give them a beer from a six-pack I was taking home and occasionally they would ask if I would like a drink and we would share a bottle across from the bus stop and talk about where the neighborhood is going, the new grocery store on Howard, the shuttered post office. But I left and not everybody recognizes me now.

  I stay near the lake in what’s known as East Rogers Park. It’s an area that’s almost equally black, white, and Hispanic. When the lost boys started arriving from the Sudan, they landed in East Rogers Park. Towards Ridge, where the Kurds emigrated when Saddam Hussein came to power in the eighties, the store signs are written in Arabic. Then West Rogers Park, the strip along Devon known as Little India, where traffic drags to a halt, the street crowded with spice vendors and sari shops. Then the small Orthodox enclave on the other side of California, formerly the entry point for Russian Jews during Operation Exodus, most of whom have moved to suburbs. There’s also a small community of religious Koreans and a new wave of East Europeans fresh from the Balkan wars. Rogers Park has always been this way. It has to be among the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. Between the Kurds and the Indians is the state park and the Jiffy Lube on Western Avenue, the longest street in the city. Four blocks west of that is CSC, the special school for group home kids and children with behavior disorders that I attended when I was fifteen.

  The school was four floors with steel doors and buzzer locks on the outside. The teachers were kind and there were only six of us in each class but it seemed that every day in that school someone was being restrained. We were just across the street from Mather, the normal high school, a single-story compound with an aluminum-wrapped flat roof, over fifteen hundred students, and its own park. That wasn’t a good school either; only 60 percent of the students graduated. I wanted to go there. The Mather students slouched past our windows in the morning with no idea they were passing us by.

  Near the school was Green Briar Park where we played basketball. It was also the hangout for a gang called the Popes, as well as for a local drug dealer named Ted Light. Ted was two years older than I was, with a smooth, fat face. He wore polo shirts and looked like he was from somewhere else. I didn’t know anyone who dressed like him. Once, when we were picking up drugs at his house and he had left the room, Nicko lifted Ted’s bedding to show the rubber sheet underneath. Ted was a bed wetter.

  Ted owned a crossbow and he used it to shoot small animals climbing telephone poles in his alley. One day Ted and a twenty-seven-year-old car thief named Dwight Lambert drove toward the lake, then south, past the fancy buildings in Lincoln Park. They took the ramp near the river onto Lower Wacker Drive where the trucks came in the morning full of furniture and clothing bound for Chicago’s department stores. Ted spotted a homeless man in a loading dock, sleeping on his left side on top of a cardboard box. Dwight idled the car while Ted pulled on a pair of leather gloves, slid a serrated razor-tipped arrow into the bow, aimed from the window, and shot the man in the heart. The man flipped onto his back, mouth wide, gasping for air as his heart seized and his body released his ghost. The two men waited, like children at an aquarium, watching him die before Ted took off his gloves, stored the crossbow, and drove away.

  “You know the killer instinct?” Ted asked Eddie a couple of days later. They were smoking Ted’s pot as he explained how the man flopped onto his back after the arrow plunged into his chest. “Everyone wants to know what it’s like to take another man’s life.”

  Four years later, after being found guilty of murdering Gaylord Tolbert, Ted told Cook County judge Earl Strayhorn, “I’m not an evil person. My face may not show it, but my heart is filled with sorrow.” Then he was led to the holding cell where he met Javier.

  “How’d it go?” Javier asked.

  “They gave me sixty years,” Ted replied.

  There were more than fifty men in that cell and Ted sat on the floor like an affectless Buddha.

  “He didn’t seem to care. Maybe he was relieved,” Javier said.

  Javier would do six months waiting for his own trial for criminal property damage. His girlfriend had turned him in for grave robbing. Ironic, since he would one day maintain the cemetery grounds. None of us were able to come up with the $5,000 necessary to bail him out. We didn’t even try.

  At a bar watching a friend’s band two days after Mike’s funeral I ask Eddie about the $1,000 reward for information that led to Ted Light’s arrest. Eddie shakes his head and mentions being exploited in my writing before. People often feel exploited when they find themselves in my work. It doesn’t matter if I call it fiction; I know as well as they do that’s not an excuse. I don’t bother trying to defend myself. It’s not defensible, it’s just what I do. I spend years crafting a two-hundred-page story, all the time my life sits next to me like a jar of paint.

  I want to tell Eddie that writing a novel is an act of love, but it’s much more complicated than that. We’re standing outside of a rock club. It’s midsummer and Mike is dead. Eddie
’s trying to rebuild his life. He’s lost his license and the mother of his child has taken out a restraining order against him. He says maybe he should get a cut from my writing.

  “How about I buy you a beer?” I say.

  “That’ll work,” he replies, though I know it won’t.

  We spent our entire childhood together. In third grade I punched him in the face. I once created a fake company to get him honorably discharged from the airforce. He almost failed high school in his fifth year and I got up an hour early every day to get him out of bed and drag him to classes. I would give anything to care about somebody that way again. Later he told me that high school was a mistake. He didn’t need a diploma. He should have just gone to work. He’s the only guy I know who regrets graduating high school.

  Before I leave Chicago I grab lunch with Roger. We talk about the times we’ve pulled apart, inevitable when you’ve known someone nearly thirty years. But we’re closer now than ever. He’s the first person I would call in a crisis.

  I was seven and playing soccer with my father when we met. My mother said he was an alley kid. A year after I met Roger my mother felt dizzy and went to see a doctor. She was bedridden almost immediately. My father built a ramp up the front stairs for her wheelchair, but she didn’t like to go outside sickly and shaking. When I say my mother had multiple sclerosis, people don’t know what I mean. They think it’s something that comes and goes and stays with you into old age. But that’s not what happened. She lost control of her bladder and peed in a bucket next to the couch. I would empty the bucket into the toilet. She shook so hard she could barely lift her head and sat all day watching a small black and white television. I remember wondering why she didn’t have a larger TV. She liked Oprah, and the soap operas, and she liked a sitcom called Benson about a butler who became the lieutenant governor. She liked the show so much she named our cat, a fat tabby with white paws, Benson.