The Adderall Diaries (5 page)

But it happened anyway and I’m still alive.

In pre-trial motions Hans waives his right to a speedy trial. His lawyer has another murder to litigate. There’s no date for seating a jury. I think about this trial, and where it’s going to go. Will it grind Hans to dust or will he emerge to complete his next file system? A computer can’t run without a file system. It wouldn’t be able to find anything. The hard drive would be like a library with a billion unshelved books and no card catalog. The county clerk, tapping a polished nail on the partition, her untucked shirt hanging loosely over her skirt, leans over to talk with the court reporter. And it occurs to me that at some point in my life I should have been one of them, a probation officer or a caseworker, if just for a while. It was the logical thing for a group home kid to do.

There’s a small line of cabs waiting at the MacArthur Bart Station. The drivers sit on their hoods or lean back in their seats reading newspapers. A pushcart vendor sells Cokes and pretzels, high school students wait around the bus stop. Oakland lacks all of the charm of San Francisco. The breeze is warmer, the colors are dull, the roads are flat and poorly maintained, the school system is a wreck. It’s a muscular city, dangerous in parts, a different kind of California.

I look around for Sean but don’t see him. In a note he sent following our phone call he claimed we had met before at the Berkeley pier but I have no memory of that. I remember a birthday party and a barbecue and a fight I had with Lissette. But I don’t remember Sean.

I’ve seen pictures of Sean but they weren’t distinctive. They weren’t the kind of pictures that give you a real sense of what the person looks like. And then I see a man standing by the rail at the car park and I see why he wouldn’t stand out. He’s pale and a little short, slightly fat, wearing jeans and a loose black top. He’s unshaven and tired looking. On his neck is a faded blue ink cross, his face is lightly pocked, his red hair is going gray. He keeps his hands in his jeans and slouches forward. Like the city he lives in, he’s drained of color, except for his eyes, which are a deep blue like a protected lake.

“I used to be quite handsome,” he says. “Now I can’t stay awake for more than a few hours.” He says he’s had surgery on his shoulder, another operation for kidney stones. Workers’ comp kept him waiting a long time. He’s been strung out on Vicodin for years.

We talk about Nina. “I took care of her,” Sean says. “Even when she wouldn’t see me.”

I ask him questions and he won’t give me the specifics. Or he will, but not the ones I want. He was born into the middle of an American story. It was the sixties, then the seventies. The Summer of Love had devolved into violent protests and a country split by an unnecessary war an ocean away. Flower children and peaceniks gave way to Charlie Manson, Altamont, bank robberies, guards shot dead at point-blank range, Richard Nixon, and bombs. It was a generation that failed to stop a war and, in Sean’s case, failed to protect its children. He says he was molested and tortured over a period of thirteen years.

He lived in a commune near Berkeley, the epicenter of the movement. There were lots of communes then, filled with people protesting the war in Vietnam. Men were coming home from that war and dropping out. And some of those men were getting involved in the anti-war movement, and some of those men had bad memories from the Mekong Delta. And some of those men moved into Sean’s house.

“So, are you writing about children who have been abused?” Sean asks.

“No,” I say. “I’m writing about a person who’s taken justice into his own hands and killed eight people.”

“Why would I talk to you about that?” he asks.

We walk past an auto shop and a Walgreen’s. The weather has gotten cold again. The sidewalks are battered and cracked. He tells me about these men, the men who came into the commune. Some, he says, had been trained at the School of the Americas. “Do you know about that place?”

“I do,” I say. The academy, set up by the U.S. government to train South American soldiers, has been associated with the death squads in El Salvador and Chile and the Nicaraguan Contras. It was one of those sad American mistakes, a bad idea gone worse. But America does good, too. The CIA is involved in everything. We’re not always on the wrong side. Usually we’re on both sides, which means we’re probably right at least 50 percent of the time. He talks about torture, what we see on the news, foreign soldiers detained, humiliated, drowned. Hundreds of pictures we’ve grown used to seeing. A man standing on a crate holding two electrical wires, unsure if he’s about to be electrocuted. “That’s nothing,” Sean says. “That’s not torture.”

Sean says he’s not into BDSM anymore and that he never did BDSM with Nina. He used to be what people refer to as a “heavy player,” which is how we know so many people in common. I’ve heard of him digging a knife in his own arm, carving RAGE, or standing naked in the middle of a room while several women strike at him with leather straps, his blood pooling at his feet. But that was before he became a Christian. Now he goes to church every week, volunteers at the soup kitchen on weekends.

“Why should I talk to you?” he asks. “If someone was shooting at me right now, they might hit you. I don’t want any more violence.” I try to understand what he’s saying. Who are these people who would shoot at us if he talked to me, and how would they find us? I imagine diving for cover as a car streaks past, faces hidden behind scarves, guns poking from the windows, the vehicle exhaling a gusher of exhaust thick as a mudslide. He thinks people might come after him, friends perhaps of the people he killed. It’s as if the only reason he hasn’t named his victims is to protect people like me and other innocent pedestrians. It’s a bizarre rationalization, and the challenge is to figure out if he’s afraid of going to jail or if he is lying. And why. He says he’s never killed anyone who didn’t abuse him. Then he adds, “Or came after me with a gun. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” I try to get him to go further with this. What omelet? But he won’t say anything more about it.

Sean says he never sought attention. This is clearly important to him, a matter of honor. He is ready to go to jail but unwilling to name the people he killed. He isn’t sure why he should talk to me and I’m not sure either and I know this could go on for a long time.

But I’m stuck. I want information. An author looking for a story can be like a junky looking for a fix. But it’s worse than that because an author without a story isn’t even an author. I was ten or eleven when I started writing poems, which I brought to my friend’s house to read to his mother. By the time I was twelve my bedroom was covered with poetry I’d taped to the walls. When my father ripped the poetry down, I kept writing, but hid it somewhere else. It was as if I had to express every thought that came into my head. The poems became longer, turning into stories during college. At some point my nervous brain stopped pumping out information so quickly, and I started publishing what I wrote. My reasons for writing changed. I was no longer trying to express every thought, I was writing to understand myself. I rewrote my stories hundreds of times and became dependent on working through problems on the page. In my late twenties I was simultaneously awarded a fellowship for emerging writers and sold two novels I had submitted blindly to a small publisher. At that point I finally thought of myself as a writer. Other writers often called me prolific, which made me vaguely uncomfortable. It sounded more like an accusation than a compliment. Without paying attention I had become what I wrote and I worried what would happen if I became unable to write. And then one day it happened. And it happened the next day, and the day after that. And it lasted for almost two years with the exception of a vignette here or there. I’d gone silent. But now here was Sean.

We walk for an hour. Sean’s friendly. I’m trying to decide if I like him, and I think I do. He mentions a man who was seeing an old girlfriend and how the man was giving him a hard time so Sean started surveiling him, keeping track of his habits, his whereabouts. This was only a few years ago. “I wouldn’t have hurt him,” Sean says. “I gave my guns to my pastor.” He says he just wanted to convince this man to leave him alone, but the way he says it suggests something larger. Like the real message he was trying to get across to this man, and maybe to me, was that there were forces larger than himself at work in this world. By engaging Sean this man was coming in contact with things bigger than he could comprehend.

We talk about finding God.

“I’ve also been looking for something to give my life meaning,” I say.

Sean tells me about the commune but doesn’t give me names. He uses the word “hunting” to describe the periods he took off from work before 1996. He tells me about Julian Adams, a scoutmaster he claims was involved in a child molestation ring. “Look it up,” he says. Later I do. Julian Adams had been convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior and a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America is still pending. He died of natural causes in 2004.
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In our conversation Sean seemed to be hinting that he had something to do with Adams’ death, but that’s clearly false.

“So this is all off the record?” Sean says after a while.

We stop on a corner, facing each other.

“No,” I say slowly. “I don’t think so.”

“Then let’s go back,” he says, turning toward the station.

I get a call and then a note from Sean. He writes, “I can see you’re a person attracted to the limelight.” He wants to sign a contract, something I had originally proposed. We should do a book together. Sean urges me to think big. He’s considering a prison ministry and thinks his story of finding Jesus could help free the souls of people like him behind bars. But he’s not yet in prison himself.

In the morning I take my pill and sit down at my desk. I think of taking an extra one just to go further, but I don’t. I keep thinking about Sean and Hans. I keep getting Sean and Hans confused, perhaps because their names sound the same, or perhaps something else. I think about a young Sean, his pale arms poking from the blue sleeves of his dark blue scout uniform. I think about Nina Reiser and the two children she left behind, Cori and Lila, only four and six years old when their mother disappeared.
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They’re living with their grandmother in Russia now and it’s unclear if she’ll bring them back for the trial.

Sean said wolves mate once for life. He said he was Nina’s wolf. When he pulled out of the Bart parking lot I saw a sticker of two wolves facing each other on his rear window. When I see my psychiatrist again I might ask her for sleeping pills. Something to help me so I don’t stay awake all night thinking about murderers, and where they hide their thoughts. Something to help me hide my own.

I’m in bed with Miranda, a recent Stanford graduate. She’s a friend of some of my former students and I feel a little strange about that. She just turned twenty-four. She’s a burlesque dancer and a political activist. When she does her burlesque show she dresses like a maid and mops the floor with her hair and when she’s done she’s almost naked, shaking her shoulders with a sign taped across her chest: EXHIBITIONIST. In bed she wears boxer shorts and a tank top. She’s tall and dark with kinky hair dyed with streaks of gold, a pierced lip, ivy tattoos circling above her hips. She could easily be a model, but she doesn’t care. She believes in revolution.

Miranda grew up in Haiti, in a large house on a hill outside Port-au-Prince. All she’ll tell me about her family is that her father works for a fruit company and doesn’t agree with her views.

“What about your mom?” I ask.

She opens her mouth like she’s going to say something awful, her tongue plastered against her bottom teeth, then shakes her head and pats me on the cheek. “You’d like my mother,” she says. “You have a lot in common.”

I hang out with Miranda in bars on Polk Street, watching her perform with drag queens. I meet a boy at her show, younger than me with a mohawk and a pretty face. He says he’s also a writer, a poet. On the side he does boy burlesque. I think he’s pretty, but if I were into men I would want someone stronger who could take care of me.

It’s Patti Smith night and the queens climb the stage in black wigs and torn jeans. They sing “Ain’t It Strange” and “Gloria,” snarling at the crowd and wondering whose sins Jesus died for. Miranda dances behind them in a short skirt, kicking her long brown legs high in the air while I watch from the crowd, holding her drink.

Miranda’s room is bright yellow with album covers stuck to the wall. Lene Lovich, Kate Bush, The Slits. She lectures me on music. I tell her she’s a snob. We sleep on a small mattress. She insists I sleep naked and I insist she keep her clothes on. She wraps around my back, her arm over my chest.

Her windows face the morning sun and the illegals stand on the corner just below the ledge waiting for someone with a van and a job to stop and put them to work. They stand there every day, in baseball caps, sweatshirts. Waiting. Miranda says they aren’t Mexicans; most of them are from Guatemala and El Salvador. I’ve been showing up at her place more and more often. I call from Valencia Street at the end of the day, just when I think she’s going to sleep.

Hans’ trial won’t start for two more months. I was in court when they scheduled the hearing. It was my second time at the sturdy building in downtown Oakland. Hans wore yellow prison fatigues and stood in the prisoner’s pen, holding two boxes of papers. I noticed his poor posture and thinning hair. He seemed naive, carrying the giant boxes and not understanding that the trial was actually months away.

“Tell me something nice,” I said to Miranda the night after the hearing. I was acting like a child and she wanted desperately to be an adult. “Tell me I’m pretty.”

“You are,” she whispered. “You’re so pretty.”

Our relationship is absurd, infantilizing. I’m eleven years older than her. She’s a vegan. She wears heels and keeps her sex toys on top of a beat-up dresser. She wants to dress me in women’s clothes and I tell her I don’t mind but I don’t really think we’ll get there. The sad thing is how our relationship mirrors all my other romances. Fragmented. Thin. Except that I’m getting worse. In my twenties I would have been too proud to beg a woman to hold me. I didn’t know enough to cry. I wouldn’t dream of pressing my nose against someone’s chest, saying, “I’m so sad. I don’t know what’s happening to me.” And I have less to give.