The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

  My left wrist is riddled like a one-way map. I was a homeless teenager the last time I pressed a straight razor deep into my arm and yanked it out, the flesh blooming from the gash like a red and white rose before I fell to my knees, unsure if I wanted to finish the job or just find a warm place to spend the night. Alvarez was convinced Sylvia did not actually want to die. For one thing, she adored her children. For another, there was the note asking whoever found her to call the doctor and providing the number. Everything was set up for her rescue, but everything went wrong and she died. It’s unlikely that if Alvarez was more supportive he could have saved Plath, but we’ll never know. She wanted her poetry to be understood on its own terms, even as she ate through herself. Alvarez’s description of their last meeting is shockingly cruel, especially given his own history with suicide, which he wrote in a brief epilogue: “The youth who swallowed the sleeping pills and the man who survived are so utterly different that someone or something must have died.” It’s also accurate. The death smell released by the chronically depressed is powerful and repellent. The natural inclination is to recoil. To function one has to hide one’s intent. Even when we write about it we keep it to ourselves.

  Geoff Dyer came through his depression by following a fascination with D. H. Lawrence. “One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence. ”18 Dyer’s conclusions are only a beginning. To follow an interest out of the darkness is a trick, a small Band-Aid for a larger problem. What happens, I wonder, when the study is complete, the book published? How do we remind ourselves to start again?

  Norman Mailer wrote, “The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.” Hans’ letter was not a cry for help, it was an angry wail. In the final act he would force the world to see that he was right. He wasn’t, but he couldn’t help himself; he wanted others to believe. By September 28, 2006, Hans Reiser had given up. He was haunted and trapped. Then, for some reason, Hans decided to fight, to “not back down” as he told Nina in one of many threatening emails he sent her. In court, he frequently smiles as his enemies are exposed on the stand. He laughs at all of the prosecutor’s jokes. He sees Paul Hora as a worthy adversary. The trial gives his life meaning; no matter what happens, the world will hear the wrongs perpetrated against him.

  This book begins with a suicidal urge. If I was going to kill myself anyway, I could write whatever I wanted. And that’s what I started to do. And then I met Sean and I became curious about things and my curiosity kept me going. But my curiosity about Sean Sturgeon and Hans Reiser will end. I’ve been playing emotional Russian roulette. Life requires more than a series of projects to keep us busy. I want to finish this story, which is structured around the depths of my own psychic pain. But I don’t want to stick my head in the oven with no guarantees. Hans waits in his cell, thinking through his defense like a puzzle, which once solved will set him free. I’m thinking through my own.

  Patty lives above Pacific Heights and from her bedroom you can barely see the lights on top of the Golden Gate Bridge. I haven’t called her since her birthday four months ago. When we were dating she wouldn’t let me wear clothes in her apartment or sit on the furniture, so when I arrive I take my clothes off in the entryway beneath the portrait of her deceased husband.

  She used to buy me things, decorations for my bedroom, women’s panties and a camisol she wanted me to wear when I slept with her. We would go to restaurants and she would order for me. I wouldn’t even look at the menu. And if I wanted a beer, or something else, I would ask permission first.

  Patty ties me to the bed facedown and stuffs her panties in my mouth. She beats me first with a thick paddle and then a cane. I try to clear my mind and let the pain wrap around me, separate the individual welts. I like this feeling, this helplessness. I like knowing there’s nothing I can do.

  There’s still at least a month left in the trial. Hans has been raising his hand in court, interrupting the proceedings. The judge reprimanded him in front of the jury. I’ve been making extra money filing reports for 20/20. I call several times a day to tell them who the witnesses are, if any new information is presented. A producer at 20/20 told me 48 Hours might do a book about the trial and get Sean to sign an exclusive agreement. She was making it up, hoping I would sabotage the competition. It was all just ugly. The trial has gone three months already. How much is enough time to decide whether or not a person should spend the rest of their life in jail? During breaks I sit in the bathroom and crush a small amount of Adderall on top of the toilet-paper dispenser, snorting it quietly while the bailiffs and lawyers wash their hands.

  “Do you remember when I told you never to write about me and you agreed?” Patty asks. I shake my head. I turn to look but she’s moved behind me and I can’t see her, just the edge of a yellow dresser and the curtain drawn across the window. I hear her rummaging through some drawers. I know she doesn’t like being written about but I can’t remember that specific conversation. Did I really say I would never write about her? I remember when we were first together and she cut me with a scalpel. It was the first time I had ever been cut by someone, three quick slices along my left rib whose scars I can still see clearly. I begged her to stop and later begged her to cut me again. Other times she stuck me full of needles, making heart patterns on my chest. I had no idea my capacity for pain before meeting her. Over time, when we were dating other people, we would occasionally sleep together. She would scratch messages in my side with her fingernails or with pins along my legs for the next woman to see. I remember Miranda running her fingertips over the dried blood at the top of my thighs, not commenting on the large red letters spelling out MY DIRTY WHORE.

  Patty and I didn’t use safe words. We didn’t play “safe, sane, and consensually.” She told me to call her “daddy,” and threatened to shave my head. Sometimes she hit me when she was angry, when we were just walking down the street. Then she started taking pills for her anger and she became someone else.

  “I don’t know why I allow you to keep hurting me,” Patty says, sitting next to me on the bed. I wait, moving just enough that my shoulder is against her leg. She gets up and hits me again, much harder, then again. I stretch my fingers forward as she lays into me. It doesn’t feel good anymore. I’m thinking about Lissette and my father and someone who said that a writer will always sell you out. I’m saturated with self-loathing. Why is she doing this? I want her to stop but instead she goes back to the paddle, the thick wood landing heavily on my back. I don’t scream or make any noise.

  When Patty is done she unties me but I don’t move. I lie like I’m dead, like a fish deposited on the sand. She lies on top of me. I feel like I am all out of tears, though I haven’t cried at all. My insides are dry. She walks me to the door and I get dressed. She watches me with something like a concerned smile. It’s well past midnight and I can hear rain pattering. I don’t have anything to say. We hug and kiss. Her lips, thick and healthy, are the best thing about her.

  “You’re getting skinny. You need to eat.” I don’t respond. She presses a finger against my ribs. “Don’t ever call me,” she says, “or try to contact me again.”

  “What are your issues with women?”

  I’m talking to an editor from a large publishing house. She’s offering to buy this book but I don’t think I can accept.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’d like to be in a relationship.”

  “That’s not the impression I get.”

  I know what she’s saying. The only answer I can imagine is that my desires override each other. My desire for a stable, loving relationship is canceled out by the urge to be hurt and humiliated. But even without these desires I would have to develop the same
skills everybody else does: to trust, to commit, to enrich someone else’s life. I would have to become consistent.

  The editor reminds me of a nurse who treated me the time I was found sleeping in a hallway with my wrist sliced open. “Why would you do that?” she asked. I didn’t bother to reply. I was fourteen. She was blond and pretty, her hair cut in a practical bob. I stared at her jaw and watched her throat move as she talked and taped my wound shut. I wanted to ask if she would take me home, to point out her hypocrisy. But I didn’t so I never knew whether she might have said yes. That was my first morning as a ward of the court.

  My trials went for years as the state battled my father for custody. Family First was the official policy of the Department of Children and Family Services, and caseworkers would meet with me in small rooms asking if I wouldn’t rather be with my dad. I was intransigent. Before the hearings my father whispered to me outside the courtroom, “You killed your mother,” something he still says in the notes he sends me. He wanted to provoke an outburst so the judge, the social workers, would see me out of control. But that didn’t happen. I usually turn my rage inward. He was fighting on principle; he didn’t like anybody pushing him around. There was no chance of me going home with him, I would have gone back to the streets instead. And I don’t think he wanted me home. He had never reported me missing. Eventually my father stopped showing up for the hearings but before that I asked him for his new address and he said I would find out where he lived in due time. And I did.

  An older friend drove me from Chicago’s South Side into Evanston. We went up and down the streets looking for my dad’s Town Car. His other car was a 1971 sky blue Cougar convertible with a white leather interior, a 351 Quickstart engine, and the original hubcaps featuring a large cat curling around a red, white, and blue number one.

  We found the Lincoln parked on a residential street in front of a three-story house with big windows blasting light onto a porch with a broad wood swing and a full green lawn. The house was gigantic. Somewhere inside was my older sister, my stepmother, my new sister only a year old. Later my father and I would make up and I would go in their kitchen and make sandwiches, even do my laundry, but I would never spend the night in that house.

  I was fifteen years old. We were two blocks off the lake. If we listened we might have heard the surf bubbling onto the sand. The beaches were semi-private; residents were given tokens for admission, everybody else had to pay a fee. I sat with my friend for moments, or minutes, pretending it was no big deal that I had just found my father’s house. Unsure of my own feelings, even to this day. Unsure if I had killed my mother. It seems impossible. I wasn’t even there when she died. I didn’t see her that morning, I just got up and went to school. And that day, summer just over, my father waited in the convertible with the top down, parked in front of the entrance in the early afternoon as we streamed from the building. The sky was as clear and blue as it’s ever been. I climbed in the passenger seat without saying anything. He was crying for himself, hoping I might help him with his pain. But I was indifferent to it and didn’t love him yet. I hadn’t known my mother was dying. Nobody had said anything about that. Her death was simple; no arrests were made. She just didn’t wake up. Her skin was bleached from years spent out of the sun, and the blood sifted through her and settled on her side in one large, colorful bruise. Or so I was told.

  Eighteen months later and my father had a new wife, a new child, and a new house. The house was nicer, the wife was healthier, the neighborhood was better. Did I want to go inside? I remember it perfectly, the vibrancy of the memory the only testimony to the meaning of the discovery. I knew where my father lived again and I knew where I lived twenty miles away in a group home with eight other boys. That particular group home was a very hard place and I never wanted to go back there. It was spring. It was night. Our pockets were filled with coins from robbing parking meters. I stepped outside and ran a key along the back door of my father’s dark blue car. Then we drove away.

  You tell me, I think, still holding the phone with the editor from the large publishing house, feeling the pressure of the nurse’s thumb on my palm as she pulls the tape and my skin comes together, making for a cleaner scar. What is my problem with women? Tell me and I’ll believe you.

  14. New Yorker, December 10, 2007.

  15. The Robert Taylor Homes were eventually eclipsed by projects in Brazil and elsewhere.

  16. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (Random House, 1972), 33.

  17. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (Macmillan, 2001), 55.

  18.  Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (North Point Press, 1999), 231.

  CHAPTER 9

  March/April; Nina’s Last Day; The Part about Susan Grabowski; Things that Can Be Known; Cateyes; Hans Reiser Lies on the Stand; What’s Missing on the Missing Hard Drives: The Verdict; In the Woods with the Children at Night

  On September 3, 2006, Anthony Zografos stopped by on his way out of town. He was Nina’s last boyfriend. They’d been together since she left Sean in 2005. He was going camping for the night with his ex-wife and children in Big Basin near Santa Cruz. Unlike Hans and Nina, Anthony and his ex were still cordial, for the sake of the kids, but Anthony’s wife wasn’t very fond of Nina. She had hopes she would get back together with Anthony and was jealous of the depth of the affection he had for Nina but had never had for her. He waited several minutes on the doorstep. It was unplanned, this last stop, just another opportunity to see her face. Nina came straight from the shower, her black hair shiny and wet.

  An hour later she took the children to the Berkeley Bowl for lunch and sent Anthony a text while they were eating: I’m sorry I missed your calls my love. It’s great that you stopped to say goodbye.

  When the children finished eating Nina piloted the cart past the bright tables stacked with colorful hills of fruit and vegetables, bulk bins chock-full of nuts and granola, piles of individually wrapped cheeses. The Berkeley Bowl is teeming with locally grown produce and meats from nearby ranches. The store represents not just the wealth of the area but the wealth of the northern California countryside, and there must have been a time when Nina went through this store and thought, There is nothing like this in Russia.

  She bought $150 worth of groceries, enough for a week. The groceries would sit in the back of her minivan and rot. The minivan would be discovered on a secluded street just off the highway. Inspectors would find her purse in the van, along with all of her possessions except her keys. Someone will have removed the battery from her phone. A security camera captured the children playing near the register while Nina first asked for a take-home container, then lifted Cori into the basket, Lila riding below the cart. In her parting shot Nina enters the frame wearing flip-flops and a purple sundress. We see the side of her, her naked arm pushing the handle, then she’s gone.

  It’s six and a half miles, an eighteen-minute drive, from the Berkeley Bowl to Hans’ mother’s house, where he’d been living since the separation. It’s a large house high up in the hills by an enormous regional park. There are steep cliffs and miles of woods, but you wouldn’t want to leave the trails, the whole place is filled with poison oak.

  At 2:04 PM Nina made her final phone call to tell Hans she’d be there soon. Actually, it was supposed to be her weekend with the kids but Hans insisted it was his. “What should I do?” she had asked Anthony. She didn’t want to pay more lawyer fees. He told her to split the weekend and avoid the fight. When Hans said he would not back down he meant it. Anyway, it was Labor Day weekend, there was no school on Monday. Hans’ mother would be in Nevada until Tuesday.

  Sometime before 2:30 Nina arrived at the house. She was almost half an hour late. Hans made macaroni and cheese for Nina and Lila and spaghetti for Cori. Nina told him they’d just eaten but Hans insisted. Hans didn’t want her to go. They ate, then Hans sent the children downstairs. There was or wasn’t yelling. The children gave conflicting statements at different times to d
ifferent people.

  “I’m going to marry Anthony,” Nina said. “And I think you should be looking for someone else as well.”

  Hans didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about custody of the children and Nina’s recent deposition taken by his new divorce lawyer, his sixth counting himself, in two years.

  “You’re not going to keep getting child support,” Hans told her. “Because you did so poorly on your deposition. Actually, you should pay back some of the alimony I already gave you.”

  Nina listened patiently. She was used to Hans refusing responsibility, blaming his actions on the inconsiderateness of others. In his mind he never started it; he only responded. Hans tried to convince her to give up legal custody of the children, which she refused. He said Cori was bored at school and wanted to live with him. Nina said he was creating an unnecessary conflict for the child when he asked Cori to choose sides. Hans said he wanted Cori to see his dentist, which Nina said was fine. He thought if he kept talking he would wear her down. It always worked with his mother. If he just kept insisting his mother always gave up. But Nina didn’t give up. She wouldn’t let Hans have legal custody of the children. He warned her she would be convicted of embezzlement, of fraud. They were going to subpoena Sean’s financial documents and the truth would come out that Nina and Sean were stealing from him. She nodded calmly, unconcerned.