Free The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott Page A

week. After she was released the judge dropped the case. She has the Japanese symbol for beautiful on her arm, a rose tattooed on her foot. “That place,” she says pointing to the jail, “is no place to be.” But here she is, waiting to see Paris get out. She says she has nothing else to do on a Monday night.
    As it gets closer to midnight the crowd swells. The TV reporters report live. Helicopters hover overhead. The parents pull up in a large black SUV. Their bodyguard is a big, bald man in a well-tailored suit. He seems to know the police. He looks like he could have been a football player once. The driver wears mirrored glasses and doesn’t smile. More tape is stretched to secure the crowd. The thrum of the helicopters is like a soundtrack.
    “You’re so beautiful, Kathy,” a girl cries. The girl looks Spanish or Asian, or both. She’s wearing a tank top, her breasts pushed up.
    “Thank you,” Kathy Hilton says. Kathy sits in the car, the window rolled down, bantering with the press. She soaks the cameras’ flashes in like lotion, plays with her hair.
    Then the girl says it again, “You’re so beautiful, Kathy.”
    Kathy smiles.
    Then the girl says it again and Kathy looks ahead uncomfortably.
    “Oh God, please let Paris go free!” a deranged man wails, stretching his arms and dropping to his knees.
    Arc lights are set up. It’s midnight and everything shines. The reporters lean over the tape. The paparazzi wait with cameras strapped over their necks. All of it infused with the nervous energy of a bull waiting for a clown to unhinge the gate.
    And then she is out. Paris Hilton in tight jeans and a light jacket thrown over a white shirt. She’s smiling, basking in the glow. She looks better without makeup. She gets to the car and is hugging her mother and then the door is open and she is inside and the tape and the barricades go down and the police cannot control the crowd. The car inches away. The paparazzi stand shins against the bumper, bent across the hood, taking pictures through the glass. Nick Ut stands in the wreckage of toppled tripods left by the young photographers, reviewing pictures he took. He’s a little man and this is not exactly his game. But Paris was smiling and happy, exactly as he had hoped.
    At four in the morning my phone rings. I flip the bright screen while Bearman’s cats look up from the corner. It’s my friend Roger, calling from Chicago. Two men jumped him while he was trying to hail a cab. “Oh Steve,” he says. “They wouldn’t stop.” They kept beating him, even after they got his wallet and left him lying in the street almost unconscious. I stay on the phone with Roger for a long time. I talk to the doctor who put five stitches in Roger’s face and assures me everything is going to be OK. Later Roger says he just wishes he hadn’t been drunk at the time. He would have fought back.
    Roger’s my oldest friend. I’ve known him since I was seven. Once, Justin’s father pulled up on the sidewalk in his taxi and I took off running. He poked a gun in Roger’s chest and asked where I had gone and Roger responded he didn’t know. Another time my father caught Roger climbing in through my bedroom window. He stood there with a hammer, considering whether or not to break Roger’s fingers. He told me later he was glad he hadn’t.
    I spend an afternoon at the glassy ocean out at Venice Beach. There are concrete benches and tables on the beach, an outdoor gym, an ice-cream shop. People are roller-skating up and down the boardwalk. Old men walk in shorts with their shirts off, their bellies toasted by the sun. I think about the difference between being famous and disappearing. Los Angeles is a fantastic place to disappear. There are so many people trying to be recognized that all you have to do is stand still. In the hundreds of miles of sprawling suburbs a person could do nothing here and the time would pass and that would be that.
    Hans Reiser’s trial won’t start