Excerpt from The Adderall Diaries

From Chapter Four

When I get back from Portland, Miranda informs me she doesn’t want to see me for a while. Her life is in turmoil. It has nothing to do with me. We just sleep together. We were just acting as placeholders for each other. Anyway, I had my chance.

I think about Norman Mailer rewriting The Deer Park in a Benzedrine haze, popping Seconal to find some sleep at night and waking in a stupor. Benzedrine and Adderall are essentially the same thing. Mailer was the biggest literary star of his time, but The Deer Park was not a great book. Later he would remember, “I would pick up the board, wait for the first sentence—like all working addicts I had come to an old man’s fine sense of inner timing—and then slowly, but picking up speed, the actions of the drugs hovering into collaboration like two ships passing in view of one another, I would work for an hour, not well but not badly either. Then my mind would wear out, and new work was done for the day. I would sit around, watch more television and try to rest my dulled mind, but by evening a riot of bad nerves was on me again, and at two in the morning I’d be having the manly debate of whether to try to sleep with two double capsules, or settle or again for my need of three.”* He describes my life perfectly, except when he wrote this he had already made something of himself. Much later he would write his true crime masterpiece, The Executioner’s Song, which gives me hope. He wrote his best book years after his TV and pills and marijuana, his thirties behind him. When asked what five novels he would bring with him to a desert island, he said his own.

I think about calling my father. I have so many questions. What was the man’s name? Did he really kill him? Did he sleep with my mother’s sister or was he joking? Does he still have pictures of himself from after the men beat him up? Can I see them? What were the names of the books he gave me to read? Why did he want to be a writer in the first place? Who was Al Capone’s lawyer? How do you bore holes in a shotgun? I just want the facts.

Sitting on top of Dolores Park hill with a friend, I mention I’m working on a new book. She asks what it’s about.

“I’m writing about murder,” I tell her. I have no more classes scheduled, no income coming in. The memoirist Vivian Gornick would say the murder is just the situation; the story is something else.

It’s golden hour, the sun is down and everything is evenly lit. The park is filled with couples making out.

And then Sean returns.

It’s been months since I last heard from him. We meet at a diner in the Castro. He sits in front of a wall of bright posters of the Jersey Boys, Bob Marley, MenInGear.com. We’re at a long table. It’s ten at night. Men pass the windows in Day-Glo tank tops and tight pants.

What Sean most wants to tell me is that my friend Josh may be in danger. He says he heard friends of Hans didn’t like the article. “There are bad people,” he says. “Just try to think: who would still be friends with Hans?” (Who would still be friends with a murderer?) He says I should tell Josh to look out.

I shrug my shoulders and order a bowl of chili. He didn’t like the article and he wants to scare someone on his behalf. He’s manipulative but clumsy. He mentions the article again.

“Nobody ever likes what’s written about them,” I snap. I name a couple of books he could read on the subject. I mention Janet Malcolm, who referred to being written about as having a sort of narcissist’s holiday but who also said that when the holiday was over and the article or book has been published, the subject had the experience of flunking a test she didn’t know she was taking.**

Sean’s upset because in the article Josh called him evasive.

“You are evasive,” I say. “I’ve interviewed politicians. You are the most evasive person I’ve ever met.”

“That’s because I don’t even know you,” he says. I don’t say that he contacted me this time. That I had given up on trying to meet with him when he disappeared and turned off his phone. That I don’t trust him because he answers questions with questions, tells stories with analogies rather than facts, converses in detail about everything except what interests me. He says he grew up in a commune but I don’t know the commune’s name. For all I know it wasn’t a commune at all. Maybe it was just a normal house where a lot of people stopped by. All I know about his is that on Sundays he goes to church and that he loved a woman and that woman is gone.

“I don’t mean it as an insult,” I say. But maybe I do. Maybe what I really want to say is, Why are you doing this? Why are you wasting my time? Why are you leading me into this rabbit hole?

“I’m going to help you with your book,” he says. “But I can’t talk to you about it until after the trial.”

From The Adderall Diaries. © 2009 by Stephen Elliott. All rights reserved.