The Adderall Diaries (16 page)

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.

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 different 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.

Finally, after an hour, Nina said, “Hans, I have to go.”

It was almost 4 PM. Nina called the children upstairs. Cori wrapped his arms around her waist, squeezing as hard as he could. He didn’t kiss her because he had cavities and was afraid they might be contagious. Then Nina walked outside, or she didn’t. The children watched her, or they went back downstairs. She walked up the stairs along the side of the house to the street, which was level with the top floor, the rest of the house built along a hill three stories below the road. Hans watched her walk away and felt a strange mix of desire and sadness. The sun on the back of Nina’s legs, her ankles lifting from her sandals. He thought she looked magnificent. Hans thinks the only people who win in a divorce are the lawyers. He had wanted to tell her, when they were sitting on the couch, that they could wipe the slate clean. But she was so smug, so calm. Perhaps things would have been different if she had shown a little fear.

Here is where time fractures. Every unknown minute hanging like a string of question marks. Between 3:30 PM and 6:00 PM Nina said her last words, whatever they were. Maybe they weren’t words at all, just a surprised gurgle and a look of terror. Maybe she made a threat, struggled, tried to bite. Perhaps she worked her fingers between someone’s forearm and her neck, or wrapped her hands around someone’s wrist, the blood vessels surrounding her eyes exploding like fireworks as she stared into the face of her killer. Perhaps the children were downstairs playing on the computers with the sound turned up when Nina was dragged back inside, the arm across her throat locking out the scream, her blood spraying against the beam in the center of the living room. Maybe she stepped into the van parked at the top of the driveway in front of Hans’ mother’s house, pushed her hair back, took the battery out of her phone, rested her purse on the floor in front of the passenger seat, slid the key into the ignition…

The day before Hans Reiser finally takes the stand to explain his side of the story, Susan Grabowski is found dead from a heroin overdose. We used to meet at the canal when I was a runaway, and later when I was in the homes. She was one of the only girls around. She was blond and pretty but with bad skin. She wore blue jeans and rock shirts, hooded sweaters beneath denim jackets. The same things we all wore. She lived on the western edge of the city and went to the technical high school but caught buses into Rogers Park. I’d seen her only a couple of times in recent years when she showed up at readings I did in Chicago. She was chubbier, and suffering from back problems, but otherwise seemed the same. The back problems came from an injury she’d suffered on the job. The heroin took away the pain and the settlement paid for the addiction.

My friends want to know if I’m coming for Susan’s wake. After all, I was there for Mike’s funeral. I weigh the pros and cons. There’s a storm coming through the Midwest, and flights are delayed. It would have to be a quick trip, less than twenty-four hours, so as not to miss any of Hans’ testimony. It would cost money, that’s the thing. I’m putting a price tag on Susan’s life. Is she worth more or less than $400 and six hours in a plane? I tell them I’m not coming. It’s expensive to fly to Chicago, and Susan and I weren’t close anymore.

I’m tired of my old friends dying. I don’t know anyone in San Francisco who has lost four close childhood friends to drugs and suicide in the past six years. I keep wondering what it proves. It didn’t seem consequential at the time. We were just getting high and keeping each other company before moving on to other things. I remember showing up for a fight at the grammar school and gazing across a sea of blue jackets and torn jeans. There must have been forty of us, not a single child with both parents living in the same home, and whoever we were supposed to fight got a glimpse of our numbers and turned away. It was an average, middle-class neighborhood. Why did we end up at the bottom of it? Why did we have to find each other? We were supposed to turn out OK and we didn’t. There are no coincidences once you’re dealing with percentages.

Hans’ father hangs out in the vestibule the days before his son takes the stand. He was absent most of Hans’ childhood, only coming back into Hans’ life in the past ten years. He joined his son in Russia, where he says he was robbed by “a superbly conditioned crack addict.” Called to testify by the defense, he says he warned his son in the weeks after Nina disappeared that the people following him were “KGB or S/M techno-geeks, probably the latter.” During recess Hans’ father does one-armed push-ups in the courtroom. He has an awkward, wanting smile. He might as well be saying,
I’m sorry but it’s not my fault. Obviously, I’m paranoid and crazy. Don’t blame me.

If Hans Reiser, a strange kid with an absent father, had grown up in West Rogers Park, there is no doubt he would have been one of us. Now our numbers are thinning. We’re marginalized. Until the last shot makes its final lap through our arteries, nobody knows for sure what’s true. When we die our argument dies with us. The argument we never articulated well enough, that we were failed by our parents, and the schools, and the state. The cause of death is the missing safety net.

Nietzsche said there are no facts, only interpretations. Nina Reiser was five feet five inches tall and weighed 114 pounds. She was the mother of Cori and Lila. She met Hans through a bride service in St. Petersburg, Russia. These are facts. There are things that can be known.

I know I entered the mental hospital August 31, 1986, and was released three months later into the McCormick House, where I shared a room with Cateyes, a member of an all-black gang called the Vice Lords. These are facts. He tattooed a dagger on my left shoulder, which I later covered up with a larger, more colorful tattoo. He called himself Cateyes because of his large green eyes that pinched slightly at the corners toward his ears. But he wore thick glasses and his eyesight was getting worse. No one paid attention or cared enough to try and figure out why his sight was deteriorating. He wasn’t in touch with any family except his brother, also a gang member, also living in a state-run home.

Cateyes slept with the radio playing beneath his pillow. “I dare you to turn it off,” he said. It didn’t matter; I was too afraid to sleep. Sometimes I slept in the bathroom with the door locked.

I shook when Cateyes made a fist and jerked his shoulders sharply. “It’s OK,” Big John told me. “There’s nothing wrong with being scared.” But there was everything wrong with being scared. I lost coordination in my arms and legs. I couldn’t defend myself. I was food waiting to be eaten.

Cateyes was four years older than I was and the worst kind of inconsistent friend. Sometimes I sat with him in the homework room tutoring him in math or history as he studied for his GED. They called me Einstein in that home because I would figure out how much Night Train or Mad Dog it would take to equal a pint of vodka or a six-pack of beer. Away from the home, if there was trouble, Cateyes would protect me. Hours later, back at McCormick House, he would stand over me as I sat paralyzed on the edge of the mattress while he smacked his palm, showing off his power over me, and called out to one of the other kids, “Hey, Jerry. Come here. Check this out.”

It was the time of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and there was construction all over the South Side where we lived. There were bunting ribbons in front of buildings and blue and white signs with the mayor’s name. Washington actually lived in the same neighborhood, just closer to the lake. Farrakhan’s mosque was also nearby. So was Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. Jackson hosted cultural conversations at Operation PUSH headquarters. Farrakhan’s house was on Woodlawn and quiet men, wearing mirrored sunglasses and suits with bow ties, stood watch in front on the grass. But we didn’t pay attention to any of that. Every week in McCormick House we piled into the van and the staff took us to the bowling alley at the Circle Campus. We would bowl, or they would give us $2 to play quarter video games. Coming home we would stop for Polish sausages and strawberry sodas at Maxwell and Halsted. House music was rising from the ground in 1986. It was a new kind of music with pounding bass, drum machines, samples, and repetitive phrases. It was music stolen from other music and changed, like a hot-wired car on blocks at the chop shop getting new rims and a paint job. The sound was raw and melodic and could keep you dancing for hours. It was a movement flowering in the Chicago ghetto, championed by Frankie Knuckles and Trax Records. We didn’t know we were at the center of a national storm, that our music was spreading like an oil spill toward Detroit. We listened to the beats as we drove to and from Circle Campus. One day the van began to drive away and Cateyes wasn’t inside. We were dancing to the new tunes, everybody pounding on the seats. Our favorite staff member, Kev, a former gang member himself, was driving and saying, “Do it now. Do it.” And there was Cateyes running to catch up. He was so fast, running down the middle of the street, cutting between cars. Kev kept driving. “Look at him run.”