Free The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott

really about me, and what it’s like for me to wake up in a country that sanctions torture.”
    “We’re all just writing about ourselves,” I say.
    Nick tells me about a man he’s going to see in Turkey, a prisoner from Abu Ghraib, the man Lynndie England appeared to be pulling from his cell on a leash. He says when he talks to people about torture they often respond, “But they’re trying kill us.” “Who?” he says. “Who’s trying to kill us?”
    I tell Nick about Sean and the Hans Reiser trial. It’s been almost two months since I first heard about Sean. I say there’s no body and the man that the victim left her husband for confessed to eight murders. I tell him all the ways I know Sean. Nick says it sounds complicated.
    “Do you think Sean did it?” Nick asks.
    “I don’t know,” I say. “Sean told my friend Josh that if he understood Sean’s relationship with Hans, Josh would weep piss and blood.”
    “Who talks like that?”
    I tell Nick I thought I would get to know Sean. Figure him out. But he disappeared on me and now I’m remembering all these things I thought I left behind.
    The cafés are filled with struggling actors whispering to themselves. A belt of greenish smog lies like spilled sewage across the mountain range barreling the city. It’s different from San Francisco where the air is clean and the city is beautiful. Los Angeles is big and ugly. Uglier even than Oakland. Sometimes, in the early evening, Bearman, Nick, and I play basketball at a school yard on the edge of Hollywood, hoisting our shots with both hands toward the naked rims. There’s never anyone around to see our awkward athletic display.
    “I’m writing for
Esquire,
” I tell the paparazzi at the jail where Paris Hilton is serving time. What else would I say? That I’m waiting for a murder trial to start, sleeping on someone’s couch, and starring in porn films in the San Fernando Valley?
    I talk to the inmates as they leave the jail for treatment facilities. One woman is missing her front teeth, top and bottom. The other had four earrings ripped out during a gang fight in South Central. She says she was defending her sister.
    The PR machine works overtime to flag the story that Paris is serving extra time because she’s a celebrity. It’s inaccurate but there’s nothing to do about it. Paris is given a special bed in the hospital unit. “You have to be dying to get one of those beds,” one of the inmates tells me. I pen an editorial pointing out that this is actually about prison crowding and a justice system that works differently for the rich. After a thousand words I’m done.
    The night Paris is scheduled to get out I’m with a crowd of journalists flanking the walkway leading from the main entrance, kept back by yellow tape.
    “I want pictures of a happy lady,” says Nick Ut. Thirty-five years ago he photographed a naked girl running in front of a black cloud, arms spread so as not to touch her sides, 80 percent of her body covered in napalm. In front of the girl, a boy with his mouth open in a black square screams. Behind her, soldiers walk casually, their helmets in place, guns across their shoulders. That picture won the Pulitzer Prize and helped end a war an ocean away. More recently Ut photographed Paris Hilton crying in the back-seat of a police car after being told she was to return to jail.

    “You look at the pictures,” Nick says. “They’re very similar. Also different. Kim was poor and her family suffered a long time. Paris was in jail for three days.”
    When Paris was first sentenced she said she hoped the media would focus more on the war. When the judge ordered her back, she screamed, “Mom, it’s not fair.” In a phone interview from jail she said, “It’s like being in a cage.”
    There are hundreds of journalists, a dozen police, and tourists coming in. I meet Ashley Moore, who spent seven days here back in September. She couldn’t make bail so she sat in the jail for a