The Adderall Diaries (6 page)

We don’t have sex. She has a girlfriend. And a boyfriend. She has many lovers. She keeps pictures of them on her desk, tapes their poems near the bed. She’s so beautiful and smooth, like a statue cut from cherry. But for some reason I don’t want to see her naked. Maybe she’s too young, or something else. I’m just lying in bed with her, trying to fit into her stomach and not making it. She gets up to go to work at four in the morning, pulling on her boots while the city is still pitch. I rise with the sound of trucks stopping. On the surface everything seems fine.

In a note Sean says, “You have an opportunity to be a better person than you have been in the past and people are watching to see if you make the right decisions this time.” He no longer wants to sign a contract. He says he isn’t threatening me, but he’s surprised I don’t recognize him from before. “Maybe that’s because you just view people and situations according to how they might or might not best serve your current interest.”

He says he’s having health problems and that he was assaulted as a result of the article Josh wrote about him. Then he disconnects his phone and stops answering his mail. In his notes to me the week before he disappears he mentions something Hans said to him. “Society has rules. And if society will not punish those who break the rules then I will.”

I’ve only just started writing again and I’m not sure I’ll be able to find the story without Sean. The trial seems a long way off. I can’t stand another year of writer’s block, sitting at a desk, staring out the window, waiting for something resembling insight to arrive like a packet in the mail.

On June 5 Paris Hilton turns herself in at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood. Her incarceration is the biggest story of the year, almost comparable to that day in 1994 when O. J. Simpson walked into the condominium on South Bundy Drive, knocked his wife unconscious, pressed his knee into her back, lifted her head, and slit her throat. Paris eclipses everything. On June 7 the Los Angeles County Sheriff reassigns her to home confinement. The next day the judge sends her back to jail. Everywhere I go I see pictures of Paris Hilton or hear her name. People talk about her, even while saying they’re tired of talking about her. They talk about her then say we should really be talking about Iraq. But the war is off the front page, along with Phil Spector’s murder trial and Britney Spears’ comeback tour. There’s only Paris Hilton, her aquiline features and uniquely yellow hair, her small eyes staring at the rest of us.

When Sean disappears I head to the airport and purchase a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. The first time I came to Los Angeles was June 1986. I was nearing the end of my homeless year. I hitchhiked with my best friend, Justin. Justin was a year older than I and he had been running away since he was twelve. I was supposed to be starting high school soon and Justin should have been going into his sophomore year. But we didn’t think about that. We thought about places to sleep, listening to music, and getting high.

Everything about Justin was cool: his long black hair, cheap bandanas, the way he carried his cigarettes in his sleeve or in his back pocket when he didn’t have sleeves. He had an easy sense of style but he was also very handsome; he would have looked good no matter what he wore. Girls were always inviting him into their houses when their parents weren’t around. When he lived at home, his father beat him with a stick, and sometimes Justin would tap on my window at night, his entire body covered in welts.

Our plan was to get to California and become beach bums, but we never made it to the beach. We got a ride across Arizona from a trucker. He had a wife back East and called her from the booths set aside for long-distance haulers at stops along the way. He hardly even looked at the road, smoothly shifting the giant gears as we drove west. He said he picked us up, even though it was against company policy, because we looked harmless.

“I’ve been all over the country many times,” he said. “Been to Detroit and all points south. But where I’m dropping you kids is East LA. And there ain’t a thing in the world like East LA.”

We arrived with no money, our clothes torn and caked in mud. It had taken less than a week but we hadn’t left with much. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of trucks in the stop near the interchange on the edge of downtown. Men stood in open trailers on piles of carpets, the air wavy with gasoline and radio bustle. They hoisted barbells next to their trucks and blew smoke from the windows. Nearby we found skid row where the homeless slept against the buildings or lined up for the soup kitchen. There was vomit all over the sidewalks. The women looked as though they would snap if you touched them. The buildings were boarded and abandoned or had sheets of metal pulled down their fronts. It was like a glimpse of our future. The homeless we knew in Chicago were like us, just kids with bad parents waiting for their situations to change. But near the Los Angeles Mission there were thousands of homeless people who were older and crazy and deathlike. They seemed to make up the entire city.

We left Los Angeles, hitchhiking north with a German tourist to Las Vegas where we were arrested. A couple days later I was sent back on a Trailways bus. The whole trip took eight days. Justin was let out of the juvenile hall two weeks after I was and when he got to Chicago he was taken into custody on an outstanding warrant for home invasion. His parents refused to pick him up and he was made a ward of the court. Two months later the state took custody of me as well.

Justin didn’t tell me what had happened until eight years later, at a party in the apartment where I was living with new friends I had met in college. My college friends didn’t like Justin; they thought he was a mooch. That night in Los Angeles eight years earlier, we had returned to the truck stop. A driver let us into his cab and we smoked hash with him. I remember how dark and shiny the driver’s skin was, red and yellow sores weeping on his cheek. Or maybe my memory has altered his appearance so I see him with the swollen face of a demon. He made some calls over the radio, checking to see if any drivers wanted to take in a couple of young hikers. Of course, no one responded, and he had other plans. While I slept behind the seats he molested Justin and in the morning he stole our things, which was really just some poetry and a couple of shirts.

I was telling my favorite story, the one about hitchhiking to California with my best friend, and Justin interrupted me and said, “Steve, I was molested.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked. “Why didn’t you scream?”

I meet a woman in Culver City. She’s short and curvy with thick, bleached hair and lives in a complex at the intersection of two six-lane roads. The cars speed past like on a highway. I don’t see how anybody could ever get across. Outside her apartment are lots filled with half-constructed buildings but nobody’s working on them. Los Angeles is a place where things take a long time to happen.

It’s eleven in the morning and before anything she wants to take her dog for a walk. There are no pedestrians on the bright white sidewalks and her dog takes a crap on the unfinished driveway in front of her neighbor’s garage. She looks around, gripping a fistful of plastic bags.

“I’m not picking that up,” she says.

I drive with her and her boyfriend through the hills of the 405, past the Getty, into the Valley. Everything is hot and flat, the grass is brown and weeds sprout from the walk. We stop in a 7-Eleven next to a gas station and load up on Red Vines and bottled water before turning into a nondescript alley and parking behind a low, windowless building with a thick iron door.

This used to be public storage. The entry is lit with low-wattage fluorescent bulbs. A woman sits at an old computer playing solitaire without acknowledging us. The house madam sits on a black couch near the entrance and we talk for a while before the four of us head into the second room where there’s an eight-foot chain web against one wall, a leather bed, and a short, padded spanking bench with knee rests.

“This is a good place,” the madam says. “As long as there aren’t any customers. If a client comes he’ll have to walk right through here to get to any of the other rooms.”

“Are you ready?” she asks, running her fingers inside my shirt and pinching my nipples with her long nails.

“Yes,” I say. It’s too late to say anything else, and anyway, it feels good. I don’t really want to know what’s going to happen.

The house madam leaves and I take my clothes off and the woman from Culver City fastens leather cuffs around my ankles, latching a spreader bar to them to keep my legs forced apart. She fastens nipple clamps with weights on the ends, pushes me over the bed, and slides inside me with her strap-on. I’m wearing a rubber mask and a blindfold so I can’t see her boyfriend moving behind us with the camera. She leans over me, one hand gripping my throat and the other pressing down my back. This is fine, I think. I’ll just stay like this. When the filming is over and I’m getting dressed, the boyfriend offers me a can of energy cola. “You were great,” he says. “We couldn’t ask for a better victim.”

It’s not the first time I’ve been photographed nude, but it’s the first video. When I was twenty-one and working as a stripper in Chicago, I was asked to make a porn. I made a demo, which consisted of masturbating while the director shot pictures with a small Kodak. But then I decided I didn’t want to be in the film. I thought I might regret it. Now I know I wouldn’t have regretted it. It wouldn’t have meant anything.

At the time I was just out of college and didn’t know what to do. In college I was a history major. I started hanging out at a club called Berlin, flirting with the bartenders and the cocktail servers. I had nowhere to go but I liked to dance. One night the bartender asked me to be in a fashion show. I walked the runway in striped shorts with orange straps across my shoulders, moving as slowly as I could, basking in the glow of the runner lights. A crowd of club-goers gathered along the sides and stretched their arms toward my ankles. I passed through the mesh curtains into the dressing room and asked if I could go again.

“You are so vain,” the bartender said, patting my ass.

My stripper year was also my heroin year, when I headed with my friends to the West Side, through the remnants of the ’68 riots, to pick up bundles from men on lawn chairs in front of abandoned lots.

At the same time I was just starting film school, and getting along better with my father. I would hang out at his house and we would tell each other stories, things that had nothing to do with my childhood. We never discussed what led to me leaving home so young and the state taking custody. We had different interpretations of what happened and if we got anywhere near the subject it felt like our fragile reconciliation wouldn’t survive. My father would compliment me, tell me how much better my work was than the other film students. “They don’t understand narrative,” he said. “Most people don’t know how to tell a story.” He was proud of me, but not for working hard. Working hard was for suckers. He thought I had talents that other people didn’t, talents that we shared. I soaked up his compliments but didn’t trust him enough to share my feelings. I knew that if I admitted any vulnerability, someday he would use it against me. It was a feature of his rage. When he was angry he would grasp for whatever meant the most to you and destroy it. When I was with him I would tell him how well everything was going, how happy my life was, and when I left I replayed his compliments in my mind as if they were on a cassette and I was wearing invisible headphones.

One day I came over and my father was limping, his body twisting at right angles, his chest nearly parallel to the floor as he walked. Growling, he gripped the furniture, grasping the edges of the large white couches he’d bought with his new wife. “Motherfucker!” He turned to me, face red, eyes looking like they wanted to jump out of his skull. My big, strong, vain, and fearsome father with his beautiful body, always lifting weights so his chest and arms were thick, strutting naked through the house, past my mother and me, his cock flapping between his legs. But now he seemed broken. “My body is a burning building!” he shouted. “I have to get out!”

I felt a surge of emotion like I had never felt for my mother. My father left and I was alone in his big suburban house with the nice furniture. I cried for a long time, a deep, uncontrollable cry. Shortly after that his spine collapsed and he was placed in a halo and he moved to the first floor because he couldn’t climb the stairs to the bedroom where he’d installed skylights. His new wife was trying to leave him and I said to her, “Now is the time.” But she didn’t, and I wasn’t really that involved.

It was a period of my life that could have gone either way. Or maybe not. Maybe there’s only one way to go with a needle. I went to school. I took my clothes off at The Manhole. Men ran their fingers along my legs, working their tips inside my underwear, trying to get a thumb in my asshole. I pressed my back against them at the Bijou Sunday mornings, rubbed my cheek against their necks. It all made sense at the time, twenty-two years old, a year out of college, graduate school, the rapprochement with my father, the nights and weekends spent dancing on a box bathing in anonymous attention, the rigs full of heroin. But when I try to make sense of it now it’s like a soup. How could I be so many different people? My stripper year ended with an overdose in a rented room a couple of days before Thanksgiving, and when I got out of the hospital I spiraled into a period of unbearable depression. I was never the same after that.

Returning from the dungeon the woman’s boyfriend drives my rental while I lay my head in her lap. She wears tight jeans and I press against her legs and she runs her fingers absently around my ear. A truck passes with a placard stuck to the sideboard:
We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you.
It takes a while in rush hour through the 405. She says she’s hungry and wants to stop for Mexican food. I tell her I need to get back to Hollywood where I’ve been sleeping on my friend Bearman’s couch.

I have no idea why I’m in LA. It’s a city I’ve never liked. I’d been having the latest in a string of minor breakdowns. According to the book I’m reading these breakdowns are going to become more frequent, and more severe. But it doesn’t happen. I start to feel better almost right away.

I sleep in the living room, near an open window, in an old-style courtyard building in a part of Hollywood known as Little Armenia. There’s a fountain in the courtyard and a small hill where cats bathe in the sun. Beyond the gates old men set tables on the sidewalk and play backgammon until dusk. Bearman doesn’t question why I’m in Los Angeles. He always seems genuinely happy to see me. He lives with his fiancée and people come over all the time. Everybody has keys. Nobody calls, they just walk in and out. There’s no need to make plans. I take ten milligrams of Adderall with my coffee every day. At night, two milligrams of Lunesta gets me to sleep, but I wake up feeling groggy. The sleeping pills give me headaches. Or maybe it’s the combination. I remind myself to eat, but sometimes I forget. In the mornings I meet Nick Flynn, who is writing a book about torture, and we sit across from each other with our headphones on. We met years ago after I reviewed a book he wrote. Now he’s in LA with his girlfriend, who is starring in a new television series.

“It’s not really about torture,” he says. “It’s really about me, and what it’s like for me to wake up in a country that sanctions torture.”