The Adderall Diaries (4 page)

“What in the world,” she said, shaking her head and smiling, closing the book on her lap.

She looked lovely, but not as lovely as she would have looked if she had known she was going to see me. If she’d had her lipstick on and some blush, I don’t know what I would have done. As it was, she was working as a lawyer for the labor relations board and getting married to Tony, who was one of my best friends from college. We were no longer on speaking terms.

I convinced her to get a drink with me and we went to a bar where the pipes were broken and water poured from the ceiling into buckets set across the floor.

“This is wonderful,” I joked. “We’re having a drink inside our metaphor.”

Eventually Tony came and by that time I was very drunk. He was still tall, muscular, and strikingly handsome. I considered hitting him but that was unlikely to turn out in my favor.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were dating her?” I asked Tony. “I’d have gotten over it eventually.”

“It was you or Jo, and I picked Jo,” he said.

After a little more talk Tony said they were considering a move to North Carolina.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“Property’s cheap,” Tony said. “And there’s less crime.”

They lived in a condominium Tony’s parents owned in a run-down building at the end of Lake Shore Drive. The neighborhood hadn’t changed in years. There was no more crime now than before, but they were talking about something else.

Earlier today I talked with a woman I know in Virginia. I locked the door to my office, turned on the camera in the computer, and took my clothes off for her. She told me to turn around and I did. Then I sat naked at the computer and typed. It was ridiculous. I also spent the day preparing for class. If I can keep teaching I’ll be fine. Not really, but I’ll have enough money to make it for a little while. The classes are ending in a couple of weeks and I have nothing new scheduled. If I agree to move to some small town that needs a professor I can get on the tenure path. I could buy a house and teach people how to write. I’d have to sleep with my students then. Away from the big city it would be my only option. But that’s not really open to me. It’s not really what I want to do. Which is what got me on this track to begin with, arranging interviews with murderers, hoping to make sense of somebody else’s crime. There’s a woman missing. Her husband says he didn’t kill her. There’s a man who says he’s killed eight people but won’t say who they are. There are so many unanswered questions. It’s been a long time since I knew what I wanted, since I had something to strive toward. I keep floating, head poking above the waves, waiting for a purpose to arrive like a boat in the middle of the ocean.

I never did meet anyone like Josie again. Women like Josie don’t make it to their thirties without getting married. If you’re going to meet someone like that you’re going to meet her in your early twenties. And if you’re like me, that’s going to be a time when you’re making your living selling drugs out of your freezer, living in a squat a bullet away from Cabrini Green. You’ll have to represent something, like the other side of the tracks, but safe. Someone who, when the time comes, when the party’s over, she can turn around and guide to a place where life is a little more predictable. But when the party was over I didn’t want to turn around. I didn’t want to go to law school or get a real job or love only one person forever though in many ways she was the most loveable person I was ever going to meet. It didn’t matter. I had to test my dissatisfaction. She had gone east so I went west. I got a job in a ski resort, bartending on top of a mountain. I learned how to board, and disappeared in the snow.

That was another time. I’ve been in San Francisco nine years. I’m suffering side effects from the Adderall. There are always side effects. Insomnia, loss of appetite, headaches, obsession, erratic decision-making. Inconsistency. I took my pill early in the day but I’m still awake and full of thoughts. So I lie in bed with my windows open, glad to be alone. It’s the middle of the week. I haven’t been sleeping and I’m missing appointments. My nails are bitten down and bleeding. All I can do is document it all and see where it leads me. I’m taking my meds and the world will be a different place for a while.

I have a self-published book I wrote when I was with Josie, and another book of unpublished poems. I never show them to anyone. The poems are so full of anger. Anger at Josie for being better than me, for always having the upper hand. For loving her family and being loved by them in return. For being someone who got over things and not recognizing that I was a person who didn’t get over anything. But I read that book and those poems and I see something else. I see who I was then.

This is who I am now.

On a warm Sunday afternoon I meet some friends at a court above the Castro. We run three on three, protected from the wind by Buena Vista Hill. We play a soft game. No one wants to be injured. From the court we can see the next hill rising before Noe Valley and east to the long flat space of the Mission District before Portero Hill and the piers.

“I can score on you at will,” Doug says, which is mostly true. I’m not a good player. For some reason I’ve always been drawn to basketball, even though I was more talented at other sports. Doug grabs my shirt and I threaten to start a blog about him, dougcheats.blogspot.com. My team wins every game.

After, Tom asks if I would like a ride to my bicycle, which is down at the intersection. I say sure, just to put off being alone. I tell him about an email I came across while searching for an old girlfriend’s phone number. In the email she said she was angry. She said I only called her when my “needs” were acting up. That I didn’t think of her as a person.

“We’re all like that at times,” Tom says. “You shouldn’t worry about it. I think you’re one of the most well-adjusted people I know. I mean, outside of your love life.”

“Really?” I say. “You think that?”

“Sure,” he says. “Considering the life you’ve led. Don’t you think so?”

I shake my head and smile, then get up and walk him back to his car. I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all.

When I was fourteen I slept on a couch in my old house. It was the house I grew up in, a yellow stucco corner home with a magnolia tree in the backyard. The house was mostly empty. My father was selling it. He had already moved to a new place in the suburbs somewhere. I had been on the streets for almost a year, sleeping in hallways and on rooftops. On particularly cold nights I had broken into boiler rooms. I knew it was dangerous to sleep in my old house.

I dreamed of footsteps, then screams, then something hitting my face. I woke trying to hide from my father’s fists. He pulled me by my hair into the kitchen where he had a set of clippers waiting. He forced me to kneel at the cabinets while he shaved my head. It was the second time he had shaved my head. There wasn’t any reason for it, except perhaps control through humiliation. He didn’t know what else to do. I had put a cigarette out on the windowsill.

He gave me $5 when he was done, then went to the local pharmacy and told them not to sell me any razors. It was early in the morning and we sat outside the pharmacy and he placed his hand on my shoulder and said something conciliatory.

“I hate you so much,” I said.

When the police found me that night sleeping beneath the mailboxes in the entryway to an apartment building, I had a giant gash in my wrist. I had gone to a different pharmacy for razor blades. It was my sixth suicide attempt that year.

“Where do your parents live?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. All I knew was the location of the empty house. That was the night I fell into the Illinois juvenile system. The officers stared at me lying there, the room lit by the flashing red and blue lights filtering through the windows, like in some twisted disco.

The hospital they took me to was on the northwest side surrounded by a field of weeds and crabgrass and a tall fence, a place for abandoned children called Henry Horner Children’s Adolescent Center. It’s been closed down for years but it was the kind of place you’d never end up in if you had someone advocating for you. There were no towels, no soap, no doors on the washroom stalls. The inmates punched the air and spread shit in long brown streaks across the walls.

The year on the streets had drained me. I’d followed a man into a hotel room and sat at a plastic table snorting lines of coke while a john with a black mustache and blond wig wearing a nurse’s dress sucked off two or three homeless men at a time. I’d hitchhiked to California with my best friend and spent three days in the Las Vegas detention center. I slept with strangers, ate out of garbage bins, panhandled for change. I got in cars every time a driver opened a door. I’d become too adept at moving around. It was good for me to stay in one place for three months with locked exits and a bed.

The hospital was filthy but there was heat, televisions bolted near the ceiling in the day room, a pool table. The children were doped up on Thorazine and Haldol and walked around like zombies. The point of the pills was to keep the children manageable but I was so subdued when admitted they didn’t bother. I made friends with Jay, who had burned down a church, and Malcolm, who had unsuccessfully tried to kill his stepfather. I hung out with French Fry, who was tall and good looking with thick black hair, but three fourths of his body was covered in mottled red scars from lighting himself on fire. We played cards throughout the day and smuggled in pot, which we hid inside the foam roof panels. At lunch we smacked butter patties onto the ceiling and they turned rancid so they stopped giving us butter. When Malcolm was placed in restraints I slid a magazine below the door so he would have something to read. I was reprimanded and locked in timeout, a small room with a thin mat and a window on the hallway for staff to look in.

When a bag of thirty ice-cream cups was discovered in one of the freezers the janitor asked who it belonged to. “That’s Carol’s,” I said, referring to a nurse who had problems with her weight. I was put in timeout again.

One night, staff was lecturing us on our bad attitudes and one of them said, “You act like you’re in hell.” And French Fry stood screaming. “You want to see hell, motherfucker? I’ve seen hell!”

Shortly after my phone call with Sean Sturgeon I head to Alameda County Courthouse. I take a rush-hour train to Oakland surrounded by all the other morning people with places to be.

It’s the beginning of Hans Reiser’s trial and I’ve been gathering information on the case, unsure whether Hans will be at the periphery or center of my true crime book. Hans met Nina in 1998 when he visited a bridal office in St. Petersburg, Russia. His company was doing well and he had hired several Russian programmers to help with the next generation of the file system he’d been working on. He paged through the women’s profiles, paying $20 for each one he wanted to be introduced to. The women would come in to a conference room for fifteen minutes and if he liked them they made other plans. Nina Sharanova didn’t want to come to the office so her profile was marked “phone first.” She was the last woman Hans contacted and they arranged to meet near the Church of the Spilled Blood where Alexander II had been slain in 1880, one link in a chain of events leading to the October Revolution of 1917.

Hans met more than fifty women through the service but Nina was different. She had a quality he couldn’t fully understand, a sincerity of affection he’d never experienced with the exception of his mother. But she wasn’t his mother and her affection wasn’t only for him. She was magnetic, beautiful, easygoing. When she walked into a room people turned to look at her. It’s easy to see, even in the photographs. The high, fine cheekbones, the easy smile. She never looks like she’s posing for a picture. A woman like Nina had never paid attention to Hans before.

At their first meeting Hans read Nina a poem and told her he was a famous computer programmer. Maybe she thought he was like Bill Gates. As it happens, in the world of open source computer programmers and techno geeks, Hans Reiser is a minor celebrity. His file system, ReiserFS, was the first journaling file system for Linux. The journal is the computer’s own imperfect story. It’s like the black box in an airplane cockpit, but it’s also the flight plan, a record of what the computer did as well as where it intended to go. Storing data on a disk, like committing an event to memory, is almost never a one-step process. If the computer gets interrupted between steps, the file system becomes inconsistent, the computer crashes, and certain data is lost forever. The journal allows a computer to recover from this catastrophe by resolving inconsistencies, reconciling what can be known with what can’t, providing the narrative bridge between where the computer has been and what the machine has become. If ReiserFS became a standard feature of the open source operating system Linux, distributors would pay Hans’ company for support and Hans would be worth millions. The only stumbling block was Hans’ personality. In a community known for eccentric personalities, he had a reputation for being selfish and aggressive and particularly difficult to work with.
³

A year after they met, Nina was in America, pregnant with their first child. Hans was frequently away in Russia supervising his team of programmers, and Sean was hanging around keeping Nina company. According to Sean he warned Hans he needed to be more involved in his marriage and sent Hans two books,
The Dummies Guide to Better Communication Between Couples
and
The Dummies Guide to Divorce.
He told Hans he was going to need one of those books.
⁴

In 2001 Sean and Nina had their first affair. In California Nina helped Hans with his company, but Hans’ father told him she was embezzling money. She was a doctor and wanted to pass the American medical boards but Hans wanted her to stay home and take care of the kids. He said he didn’t have any use for a smart wife. He told her that in America it was just as respectable to be a good mother as it was to be a doctor. Nina wanted to be both. She filed for divorce in the summer of 2004, leaving Hans for his best friend. The divorce was contentious, with Hans adopting his father’s claims and accusing Sean and Nina of embezzling money.

If I’m going to write a true crime book I’m going to have to figure out what happened between Hans and Nina and Sean. Like Hans, Sean had a motive for killing Nina; she left him as well. In 2005 Nina met Anthony Zografos, an attractive older man with a husky Mediterranean accent and large, sad eyes. She continued to accept money from Sean but refused to see him. Sean left $1,900 in cash in Nina’s mailbox two days before she disappeared. According to Anthony, Nina thought Sean was a psychopath.

On September 3, 2006, Nina dropped the children with Hans for the weekend and was never seen or heard from again. Hans’ father suggested she was probably hiding in Russia. Two weeks later the police found a copy of
Homicide
by David Simon in Hans’ car.
⁵
Simon, who also created the TV show
The Wire,
says there are two types of murder cases, the dunkers and the whodunits. The dunkers are slam-dunks, involving, say, a man covered in blood standing over a body saying, “Yeah, I killed him. He hit me first.” The dunkers are easy. The whodunits take time. You have to interview people, gather evidence. And even when you do everything right there’s all that space between the arrest and the trial, so much opportunity, so easy for the killer to get away. Simon says a suspect should never talk to the police. He also says that a murder is rarely solved without a body. Without a body you have to first prove the person is dead.

When I arrive at the court I meet Henry Lee from the
San Francisco Chronicle.
He’s alone on a bench in the hallway trying to get reception for a tiny battery-powered transistor television. Henry’s a veteran crime reporter and his byline accompanies many of the major cases in the Bay Area. I ask what he thinks of Sean’s confession and how he thinks it will impact the case. He can’t write about Sean’s confession because of a gag order. Henry says the confession is “fantastical.” He says, “People confess to murders they didn’t commit all the time.”

It’s just preliminary hearings. A judge has to be assigned, a jury selected. The prosecution and the defense have to argue over what evidence will be admissible.

I watch the public attorneys in their wrinkled suits. They look just like the men and women I saw periodically in my youth introducing themselves as my guardian
ad litem.
Or filling out the forms admitting me into the mental hospital. Or picking me up from the group home I lived in deep on the South Side, driving me along Lake Shore Drive, past the giant steel mountains of downtown, and leaving me at the next group home on the North Side. They were there when my friend and protector was removed and placed in drug rehab. They were there for twice-yearly progress meetings on the West Side where I was left with an ashtray and a stack of magazines while they decided what would happen to me next. They were there when my father was found guilty of abuse and neglect, and all the other times. They always looked like they hadn’t showered or shaved or brushed their hair. Their shirts were misbuttoned, often untucked. But they always had buttons on their shirts. They always had collars. And they drove small, messy cars.

These are the people in the court, along with the bailiffs, the judge with a face like a teddy bear, the prisoners off to one side of the room, another box for medium and maximum security prisoners, and the friends and families sitting in various shades of sweat-suit cotton on the dark wood seats. It’s crowded but orderly. People know each other. There’s a lot of smiling and nodding and shuffling of papers, while decisions are handed down, permanently altering people’s lives. When I was young, my father warned me about getting caught in the gears of the system. The system, he said, would not let go once you were inside. The machine would grind you to dust.