The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott Read Free Book Online Page 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