The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott

works for a guitar magazine. I tap my pen on the table and stare past the fire escape, contemplating the hill. I hear a series of explosions behind the building. It’s the Fourth of July.
    “You’re twitching,” my psychiatrist says. “Above your eye.”
    “I’ve always had a twitch,” I say.
    When I was younger I could barely control it. I would roll my lips, blink quickly, nod my head in short, quick jerks. I was so tense I could only wear extra-large clothes that hung on me like sacks because I couldn’t stand the feeling of fabric pressing my shoulders. She says the Adderall could make it worse. She asks if I want to start taking medication for depression. She suggests Welbutrin or a serotonin agent.
    “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think I want to be on any more pills.”
    I tell her I took Paxil once but it just made things worse. My father, I suspect, also suffers from depression. A deep sadness always followed his rage. “I’m awful,” he would say after his fits. There might be broken plates across the kitchen floor and he would be standing in my doorway, the bags beneath his eyes heavy with grief. He would offer a gift, like a bowl of ice cream or a glass of Coke. “I feel terrible about it.” That was his way of talking about things. His apologies always came with an assurance that he was hurting too, that he could be trusted to take care of his own punishments. He needed to know I forgave him, as if he couldn’t go on otherwise. But I knew he would erupt again, exploding through the house like a thunderstorm, and I didn’t have any forgiveness in me.
    When I got older we patched things up for a while but it didn’t work out. I haven’t spoken to my father in a long time. Our last real conversation was an argument over the phone in 2004. I was writing a book about the presidential election and I could see Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter nearby at the entrance to a veteran’s hospital. My novel
Happy Baby
was just out. As in all of my novels, the protagonist is a stand-in for me. He was raised in group homes and was heavily into S/M. It was my first time writing honestly about my sexual desires and my tendency to eroticize my childhood.
    I received a note from a journalist who, after interviewing me, had been contacted by my father. My father told him I was a liar, a spoiled child from an upper-middle-class home looking for attention. He told him that I could have come home at any time, which wasn’t true; when I was arrested at age fourteen I didn’t know where he lived. My father disputed basic facts, saying I had gone to two high schools, not four. That I left home at fifteen, not thirteen. He didn’t shave my head, he gave me a haircut. He only handcuffed me to a pipe one time, he said, and look how many stories I wrote about it. It didn’t take long to realize this wasn’t the first journalist my father had contacted. He left a trail of denials across the internet like digital breadcrumbs. Everywhere I found a review of the book I would also find his comments.
    “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. I was incredulous. There was the senator in front of me, his arm wrapped around a soldier whose leg had been amputated below the knee, and I was sitting in the parking lot and couldn’t even get out of the car.
    “I know, son, I know,” my father said, as if he felt sorry for me.
    My writer’s block began after that conversation. I had based my identity on a year spent sleeping on the streets and the four years that followed. It wasn’t much of a foundation. He was questioning my story, telling anyone who would listen that I had made up the whole thing, my entire life. I began to qualify everything. I wouldn’t say anything about myself without first saying there were people who remembered things differently. I wondered how much I had mythologized my own history, arranged my experiences to highlight my successes and excuse my failures. How far had I strayed from the