The Adderall Diaries (15 page)

“I’m a well known scientist,”
he wrote.
“You get to where you know someone’s methodology is wrong.”
He addresses the schoolteachers he believed were conspiring against him.
“I’ve been telling you about Nina and nobody listens. I would like to thank the school and teachers for teaching me about how the court works… I may be a danger to the world view of some but I am no danger to my children.”

It was unclear the point of the letter or why it would be one of the few possessions in the small fanny pack around his waist. Later he would say it was a press release. To me it resembles a suicide note. But he didn’t go through with it. He was charged with murder twelve days later and has been held without bail ever since.

On February 11, 1963, at 6:00 AM, Sylvia Plath went to the children’s room and left a plate of bread and butter and two glasses of milk. She wrote a note asking whoever found her to call her doctor, and left the doctor’s phone number. Then she turned on the gas and put her head in the oven. The au pair, a young girl from Australia, was supposed to start that day. She arrived at nine, right on time, but nobody came to the door. The neighbor should have been awake but his bedroom was just beneath Sylvia’s kitchen and the gas had seeped through the floor, knocking him out cold. The au pair went looking for a telephone to call the agency and make sure she had the right address. When the door finally opened at 11 AM, Sylvia’s body was still warm.

In the months preceding her suicide Plath read the
Ariel
poems to A. Alvarez. He heard the despair but chose not to react to it. He critiqued the poems on their own terms, the way Sylvia wanted him to, recognizing the fatal brilliance. Even as she read aloud to him:

The last time Alvarez saw Sylvia, on Christmas Eve 1962, he wrote,
“She seemed different. Her hair, which she usually wore in a tight, school-mistressy bun, was loose. It hung straight to her waist like a tent, giving her pale face and gaunt figure a curiously desolate rapt air, like a priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult. When she walked in front of me down the hall passage and up the stairs of her apartment her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal… When I left about eight o’clock to go to my dinner-party, I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgivable way. And I knew she knew. I never again saw her alive. ”
¹⁶

Plath’s last collection culminated in a new era in letters, the merger of the artist with her art. It was the beginning of the sixties, the Boomers were stepping from beneath Eisenhower’s prosperous shadow. Fifteen years after Plath’s death, Susan Sontag wrote of Goethe and his disdain for Kleist, who submitted his work,
“on the bended knees of his heart.”
Sontag cast a harsh light across her generation’s artistic expectations.
“The morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays’ tales were mined—is just what we value today. ”
¹⁷
That was thirty years ago. Today’s artists are healthier and no special prizes are given for suffering. It’s no wonder Wurtzel went to law school. The books of our time have little to do with destruction of the self. We expect our bards to survive, to figure things out. The literature of triumph over adversity spans every age, but where is the rest of it? We’re living in the most medicated era humanity has ever known. The artist is no longer expected to play chicken with her creation. Doctors monitor our intake. We live in the age of Goethe on Zoloft.

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.