The Adderall Diaries (9 page)

I want to tell Eddie that writing a novel is an act of love, but it’s much more complicated than that. We’re standing outside of a rock club. It’s midsummer and Mike is dead. Eddie’s trying to rebuild his life. He’s lost his license and the mother of his child has taken out a restraining order against him. He says maybe he should get a cut from my writing.

“How about I buy you a beer?” I say.

“That’ll work,” he replies, though I know it won’t.

We spent our entire childhood together. In third grade I punched him in the face. I once created a fake company to get him honorably discharged from the airforce. He almost failed high school in his fifth year and I got up an hour early every day to get him out of bed and drag him to classes. I would give anything to care about somebody that way again. Later he told me that high school was a mistake. He didn’t need a diploma. He should have just gone to work. He’s the only guy I know who regrets graduating high school.

Before I leave Chicago I grab lunch with Roger. We talk about the times we’ve pulled apart, inevitable when you’ve known someone nearly thirty years. But we’re closer now than ever. He’s the first person I would call in a crisis.

I was seven and playing soccer with my father when we met. My mother said he was an alley kid. A year after I met Roger my mother felt dizzy and went to see a doctor. She was bedridden almost immediately. My father built a ramp up the front stairs for her wheelchair, but she didn’t like to go outside sickly and shaking. When I say my mother had multiple sclerosis, people don’t know what I mean. They think it’s something that comes and goes and stays with you into old age. But that’s not what happened. She lost control of her bladder and peed in a bucket next to the couch. I would empty the bucket into the toilet. She shook so hard she could barely lift her head and sat all day watching a small black and white television. I remember wondering why she didn’t have a larger TV. She liked Oprah, and the soap operas, and she liked a sitcom called
Benson
about a butler who became the lieutenant governor. She liked the show so much she named our cat, a fat tabby with white paws, Benson.

I was eight when she got sick and thirteen when she died and I can’t fully reconstruct what happened between us. I remember telling her I loved her and I remember trying to get affection by saying, “You don’t love me anymore.” I remember the quilt that covered her those five years. But there’s some deep hole in my memory of my mother. There are all these details, but not as many as there should be. I can remember saying things, but not feeling anything. She lay on the couch virtually paralyzed watching that tiny television. I have pictures of my mother, before she was sick and after. I can see how her face became hollow and ghostly, her high cheeks sinking against her jawbones, the redness in her eyes and her lips contrasting sharply with her pallor. I remember her tears, which were cold, running down her cheeks and onto mine as I kissed her and made up another excuse to leave the house.

Roger tells me I’ve always been good at reinventing myself. I tell him I’m thinking about going on antidepressants. He says he’s been on antidepressants for ten years and they’ve made all the difference. I tell Roger about the Adderall, how I’m ashamed to tell anybody about the pills I’m taking and I don’t want to add another one into the mix. I tell him about the murders, the similarities between Sean, my father, and me. I realize this is the first I’ve mentioned Sean since my plane landed.

“Sean won’t talk to me until after Hans’ trial.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go to the trial. See if Hans is guilty. Maybe Sean had nothing to do with it. Maybe he’s just some fringe character making up crimes he didn’t commit.”

“But why would anybody confess to eight murders he didn’t commit?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But if he killed eight people, or believes he killed eight people, he’s crazy either way.”
But what if he’s lying and he knows it? What if he’s just a prankster trying to trick some one into writing a book about him?

Roger has a scar under his eye from stitches he got after he was mugged not too long ago. I tell him it looks good. He wants to know when I’m coming back and I say I don’t have any plans.

Back in those group homes I learned that people come and go. I learned that relationships aren’t permanent or guaranteed and I will never be safe. And yet I have all these old friends and we’re still in touch years later. Guys who used to ditch high school and motion to me during recess, shaking bags of weed. Guys from the basketball courts, park benches, school steps, rooftops, group homes, and canals of my childhood. I just wish we’d found a way to come up with Javier’s bail money. I wish we hadn’t robbed each other’s houses. I wish we hadn’t turned on each other so often. I wish we had rooted for each other. I wish we hadn’t let each other down so many times.

I tell Roger I love him very much. “Come out to San Francisco,” I say. “It’s the most beautiful city in the world.”

When I left Chicago in late 1997 I wasn’t thinking about San Francisco; I wasn’t thinking about anywhere. I wondered where I would end up but felt just a vague, rootless anxiety because I had no idea.

I spent a season in a ski resort high in the Rocky Mountains near the Loveland Pass where you can glide through trees lit by moonlight on a giant thirty-minute ski run in soft, untouched powder. A dozen of us hit the pass on those winter nights. We pushed back from the ridge, hurtling toward the valley, the sky blurry with stars. I would lean back on my board, waving the tip above the surface, snow buzzing my ankles like fairies. It felt like riding a cloud. We sailed through clusters of trees, jumping small creek beds. In the mountains nobody ever asked what you did for a living or where you were from. At the base, flushed and cold, we’d strap our gear over our shoulders and hike back to the top.

When winter was over and the snow was melting I came down from the mountain. I drove into southern Utah where they film the Nike commercials. I lay on a bench for twelve hours outside the Moab post office trying to decide where to go. I had left my fiancée and the weight of that was finally on me. I was in a part of Utah famed for its sandstone arches and deep gorges, kayakers paddling the rapids that swept up along the pink and brown canyon walls. I kept all my possessions inside my hatchback: snowboard, bicycle, photographs, and several boxes of papers. I considered staying in the Lazy Turtle hostel with a hippie who made her living beading necklaces. Instead I continued on the Nevada 50, the “loneliest road in America,” a barren two-lane street across the longest stretch of the state, gas stations and a brothel every fifty miles, listening to Radiohead’s
OK Computer
until Reno rose ahead of me in a neon rage.

In San Francisco I slept in my car above the Castro, the seat reclined as far as it would go. I went to the bars and asked men to buy me drinks. I would listen to their problems, acting like a young hustler, the real JT Leroy, except I’d been plucked off the streets years ago. I was better looking than when I was a homeless fourteen-year-old. My skin was clearer, and I was more prepared to strike a deal. But I didn’t have much to sell.

One man took me home. He lived on a small street in Twin Peaks. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said. I slept in his spare bedroom, where he kept a wooden cross with eyebolts and leather shackles drilled into the wall.

“If you come home drunk I’m going to chain you to that and fuck you,” he said.

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t,” I replied.

I was twenty-six and I hadn’t committed to any city. I had been crisscrossing the country like a dog chasing his tail and I was in California again. I hadn’t spent a year in the same house or apartment since I was thirteen. I thought I was just passing through.

It was a time when people were coming to San Francisco for a reason. Innovators and Ivy Leaguers clogging the entry ramps to the digital age, pulling the levers of the roaring stock market housed in cool server banks throughout the Bay Area. A gold rush was under way. The 101, the primary artery between the city and Silicon Valley, was littered with billboards flashing by like pages of a flipbook advertising Web sites to nowhere. There were private parties every night in the small dark bars in North Beach and South of Market. They were easy to get into and inside everything was free. People talked about “vaporware” and “loss leaders” and “CRM” and the importance of losing money. They carried the next big thing on a disc at the bottom of their backpack. It was more random than a dartboard thrown at a map, but it’s where I ended up. Kids my age were billionaires overnight.

I got a job summarizing free catalogs for a database called Catalogs2Go. There was another temp whose only job was to find more free catalogs to order that I could then describe. They came every day, hundreds of them: catalogs for gardening, lawn furniture, fabric distributors, handmade popsicle-stick houses. They sat above and beneath my feet, filling the shelves and window ledge. I tried to paraphrase five an hour, but that became four, and then three. Then I stopped altogether and sat watching the city through the window, all the people sifting between downtown buildings.

After a month I walked into the vice president’s office and told him I hadn’t done anything in weeks and he didn’t know that because he had no system of accountability. I told him I could finish his Web site in ten days. They’d been working on it for almost a year.

“We don’t want to hire you,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to hire me,” I said.

He gave me an office and a phone. I asked people I met at poetry readings to write summaries at $5 a description. The catalogs disappeared and the office became clean and the vice president asked if I would join the company and offered me $50,000 and I let out a low whistle and that was that.

Catalogs2Go was the perfect symbol of the time, a Web site dedicated to giving away something that was already free, but it was just a whim of the vice president, it had nothing to do with the company, and the technical support cost $20,000 a month. There was talk of shutting the Web site down. I thought that if they shut it down I would lose my job, and I didn’t want to lose my job. It was the first real job I had ever had. In fact, I wasn’t going to lose my job. Nobody lost their job then. We were still a year away from the point where everybody lost their jobs all at once and billion dollar companies became penny stocks and office buildings became empty glass houses next to highways, with nothing of value left except the copper wiring.

I met someone who optimized Web sites for search engines and asked him to help me. He registered Catalogs2Go so it came up first whenever someone went looking for “free stuff.” Soon the site was getting two thousand unique users a day and in 1999 you didn’t shut down a Web site with that much traffic. The company had a second round of funding and was hiring everyone available, but the e-commerce platform the company was based on didn’t work, or didn’t work well enough, and we were losing money on every client. I suggested we sell “search engine optimization.” I decided we should charge $3,000 a month.

This is the period of my life that makes the least sense. I had my own apartment. I was making more money than I could possibly spend. I was engaged with my work though I recognized its basic absurdity. I was happy, probably as happy as I have ever been. When I tell people my story I talk about group homes, writing, sexual awakening. I talk about rooftops and drugs and relationships. I mention getting clean and graduating high school in two years and going to college only to finish university and fall right back in. I talk about the semester I took off to work as a barker for a live sex show in Amsterdam, and the affair I had with Miriam, the Surinamese cabaret dancer whose husband was in jail for committing some violent crime. But I rarely talk about the fourteen months I spent working for a living in the place where I made most of the friends I’m closest with today, the people I hired. I rarely talk about it even though it’s the moment when modern events finally intersected directly with my life and I became part of the world.

I couldn’t get permission from my superiors to sell my product, but they weren’t saying no. Within six months my little department was billing something like a million dollars. I was given a bonus. I had five full-time employees and my own temps. We hired the search engine expert. He had business cards printed with the job title “Jedi” and sent company-wide emails on the virtues of gambling and getting high and was quickly fired, but it didn’t matter. I would promise rankings and then I would tell someone else to figure out how to get them. I was quoted as a search engine expert in the
New York Times.
I didn’t even know how it was done. In retrospect I guess it was a consulting model, but everyone wanted to believe we had created some magic software. Because once you admitted that it was just a college grad scratching his head and resubmitting a Web site with different taglines, then you had nothing to sell. The other companies had their own college grads making coffee and working for options.

Late in 1999 and early in 2000, companies were going public very quickly and that was the only point. When I started at the company there were maybe fifteen employees; eight months later there were two hundred. The company, and the industry, was sinking under its own weight. The board brought in a new leadership team and when they arrived they saw that the only thing turning a profit was me and my little crew in the back.