In my last installment, I wrote about an exceptionally accomplished ADD doctor who plied his trade in Silicon Valley. I call him the Colonel of Silicon Valley — he bore a striking resemblance to the KFC icon — and I may have been his last patient. When I first saw him (in the Spring of 2009), he had already retired, and was only taking calls by special appointment. I got one of those appointments, and it changed my life. But not until I struggled through the hellish experience of following the Colonel’s first orders. The good doctor was not just my Colonel. In a most profound way, he was also my Virgil.

Again, this was 1999, and my stop at the doctor’s office was part of a transition to an entirely new career. I had just closed the final chapter on my second career — the theatre — and I was readying myself for what I was hoping would be a more lucrative — if not happier — life. As I said before, the small-professional theatre business is not really a business at all; it’s more like charity (though there are some amazing exceptions). Practically everyone I was meeting back then was getting work as part of the vast, sprawling marketing machinery that drove the first Internet boom. Some folks I met clearly had talent. Others clearly didn’t. I realized that it couldn’t be that hard to land a decent job, even if I didn’t have any direct relevant experience. But something also told me that a check-up was in order. I had noticed over the years that it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to muster the energy required to get through a normal workday. I was managing my life, but at great physical cost. At some point, a theory emerged: I had ADD. Over the course of several visits to the Colonel, that theory was confirmed.

This is where I left off in the story, and it was just before I acted on the Doctor/Colonel’s instructions to try two medications: one for ADD (Adderall) and one for what the Colonel called “mild depression” (Zoloft). Leaving the cozy comforts of the doctor’s office — with all its benign-yet-medieval contraptions — I realized that the prescription was an A through Z (or alpha through omega) of medical comforts. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Why? For one thing, I wasn’t a drug person. Like many people of my generation, I had sampled recreational drugs — but less as a lifestyle choice, and more as a rite of passage to growing up. With the exception of alcohol, my body has never taken well to drugs. I suffered so much of my childhood with an unbelievably long hay-fever season — beginning early Spring, ending late Fall — because I hated the loopy feeling induced by antihistamines, and later, when the new class of hay-fever drugs came along, the jumpy mania of pseudoephedrine, or Sudafed. The problem I had with drugs was as much physical as it was psychological. With drugs, I really didn’t feel like myself. Yes, it’s hard being me – there are easier jobs, I am sure — but I prefer it to the alternatives.

But with the Colonel’s clear-eyed optimism, I was ready to make a small change in my life. And he provided encouragement.

“Giovanno … ”

“The thing is, the experience … for my patient … was unusual. Bright lights, everywhere, was out of the ordinary for this guy.”

I couldn’t tell if that was a warning or a promise. But for several days, I thought about this guy, an early visitor to the Colonel’s bunker, imagining him as a pale, withdrawn, techno-geek — perhaps like the folks in the Valley I would soon call my associates — who couldn’t quite get with the recreational drugs when they were fashionable , but who got electric with the new class of pseudo-speed drugs, like Aderrall. The Colonel was quick to explain when he ran down the list of ADD treatments.

“It’s a bit like speed,” he said of Adderall.

I immediately recalled my childhood bout with hay-fever drugs, the one that started with anti-histamines and ended with pseudo-ephredrine. Clue: any drug with the suffix “drine” is speed.

“Why would you want speed for ADD?”

The Colonel smiled. “It helps you focus.”

Well, that sounded good … almost. It was not like I had trouble focusing. In fact, I may have had the opposite problem, of hyper-focusing on specific tasks, making it cumbersome to focus on others. And I was especially intrigued about the “bright lights” comment. It was an odd but perhaps appropriate appeal to someone who was simultaneously diagnosed with ADD and depression.”

“OK,” said I, not convinced, but excited.

***

Over time, I evaluated the drugs on the basis of three experiences.

On my first night with Adderall, my wife and I dined quietly, table for two, windowside at an upper Haight restaurant that was kind of a haunt for us. Wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but I may have selected the location — and the table — to test the Colonel’s “bright lights” theory. My wife may have understood this, too.

“So?,” said she looking past me, across the table, through the window, the corner of Haight and Masonic.

I quickly thought — at one time, this was the recreational drug capital of the world. But my experiment wasn’t recreation.

“Well, truth is, things do look brighter. But I can’t tell if I am really experiencing this, or if I am simply talking myself into it.”

We kept talking. I felt good that she understood. The drug was taking effect, for sure, but the nature of the effect wasn’t clear. Also didn’t help that I had also taken my first dose of Zoloft, the anti-depressant the Colonel described, which presumably came with no bright-lights effects, but which was obstinately designed to make you more cheerful or accepting with whatever situation you were faced — a breakup, a job termination, sitting windowside at a Haight/Ashbury restaurant, tripping on the traffic lights and storefront neon. We kept talking, and drinking, until the moment I felt the Colonel’s insight came true.

“I see them.”

“The bright lights.”

It was like — as the Colonel had attempted to describe — standing before a retail electronics storefront and watching a hundred TV screens simultaneously projecting loudly, colorfully, brightly. But I wasn’t standing before a retail storefront. I was in my neighborhood restaurant, and instead of talking heads bobbing busily inside their screens, I was being assaulted by living heads, people babbling at their dinner tables. It was a novel experience — never had anything like that before. But it was not entirely unfamiliar. As the natural light — the sun — started to do down the city, a limousine pulled up alongside the curb by my window. Couldn’t believe my eyes, but out stepped Mayor Willie Brown, escorted by two — two! — beautifully dressed ladies. He was wearing a fedora. I turned to my wife, confirming what I saw, as the mayor turned the corner, angling toward the front entrance. He would we be dining with us, along with the other bobbing heads. And it was then I understood what was familiar.

In an ancient edition of The National Lampoon — a favorite of mine as a child in the 60s — a writer parodied what it was like to take a trip on LSD — a drug that is wildly visual — at a time when our most prevalent visual icons were commercial. He reported what it was like spending a crazy night with the Pillsbury Doughboy, Mr. Peanut and his entourage. I thought, “I’m spending the evening with Willie Brown,” loving the moment, but knowing something was not quite right.

***

The second experience came soon after. After several days of “bright lights,” I began to slip further and further in the wee hours of the morning, reading, watching TV, browsing the Web (we said that back then). I couldn’t get to sleep.

I set up an appointment with the Colonel.

“Hmm… that’s odd, ” said he. “I prescribed a pediatric dose.”

“Well, perhaps we should cut off the Zoloft, and see how the Adderall takes alone.”

That sounded right. I was enjoying the lights too much to cut them off, despite the late nights and somnambulant days.

***

Which brings me to the third experience.

Shortly after I started with the medication, I took my first job in Silicon Valley. It was at a then-very-hot PR agency, where I was one of ten men in the company of 50 women. It was, to put it mildly, a big culture shock. But with the help of the Big A, I found myself fitting in. But something was not right.

One day, in the midst of some serious Big A boost, I saw myself float above my body as I approached a tall, blonde, politically conservative colleague. Someone I deeply respected, but someone with whom I had almost nothing in common. It might be normal for many people to walk up to a relative stranger and make small talk. But for me — I am squarely on the “I” side of the first quadrant of Myers-Briggs — it’s an unnatural act. And although it was a completely acceptable, socially-positive, team-building gesture, I couldn’t help but judge it as fake. I went back to the Colonel.

“Hmmm.” At least one “m” longer in his prefatory pause.

“Both drugs?

I reminded him that I had cut off the Zoloft. He wore a worried look as he searched for a suggestion. The sun was setting, and the room had a somber glow.

“Guess you can stop. But I suggest you don’t.”

I may have returned a few times after that, but gradually I weaned myself from both the medication and the therapy. For better or worse, I decided it would be better to continue in the Valley as myself , without the aid of anything that the Colonel prescribed. Except of course for the weird memories, the non-medical advice, and the crazy-but-beautiful technology in his office; like the small contraption with the trigger and the colored bulbs — the one that got me so excited about my never-to-happen career as a fighter pilot. I’d spent so much of my life taking a stand against small medical dependencies. Didn’t see how technology might distract and seduce me with other lights.

Before my life in marketing, I toiled as a ghostwriter, then slaved as a theatre producer. At the end of my second career, I was, for the first time in my life, deeply interested in learning how to make money. As one of my colleagues used to say, the theatre business isn’t a business at all. It’s more like a charity. Especially if you are on the production side; the last two years for me were perhaps the most enjoyable, but they were also — as people in my current life like to say — the most cash-flow negative. I had fun, learned a lot, but it was time to get out. It was time to make a living.

But it was not an easy transition. My situation wasn’t nearly as bad as many actor friends of mine who swore they had no other marketable skills. To become a producer — even in the small-professional theatre world, the slice of the theatre market that I found myself in — requires that you master many skills, some of which are highly marketable. Like PR. To get people to come to my 99-seat theatre in Berkeley required that I learn how to speak to the press. For the press in theatre, to a degree unknown in many other markets, can make or break a show almost instantly. I got good, really fast. But after several successes, I learned something about myself that I really didn’t like. I didn’t just get good at PR; I was good at PR. And so when I began pondering what to do with the rest of my life, I reflected on that epiphany I had mid-career in theatre. And I recall meeting with a very unpleasant PR pro in the middle of my theatre company’s most successful production. He had no idea what I did for the production — the role of producer is mysterious to almost all outsiders — but he was impressed with the reception from the media. I remember — no I rue — the day — he sat with me at a bar after a sensational turnout. It was like he was talking a young-un, someone he was trying to recruit to his agency. “Hey, you could actually become a PR guy,” said he brightly.

This was the late 90’s, when many people my age and younger were making more money than they ever imagined, stoking the machinery of the dotcom boom. I met a lot of people working on the softer side of business — design, marketing, communications — and I thought, why not give it a go? How much does one really need to know to become and marketing or PR “professional.” My arrogance was not entirely misguided. But I rushed into this world without ever really understanding the questions or the implications of my decision. Questions like, “what, in fact, do I know about PR,” “could I ever be happy doing this work,” “let’s say I learn that I am good at it — will I ever be able to leave?” I had no illusions about getting shackled by golden handcuffs. I was thinking, after so many years of self-induced poverty, almost any amount of money would handcuff me.

But there was something else. I was largely unaware of it, but it was apparent to my wife, who got to see the masterful producer for what he was really was at home — someone who struggled to keep up with the simplist details of adult life. Emphasis on struggled, because I almost always got things done, but at an unusually high cost. There was seldom a day when I’d come home and didn’t complain that I was tired. Things got done either too late in the day, or things got done because my wife was kind enough to do them for me (an unconscious coping strategy for me, and of course unfair to my wife). With the help of some people who knew better, we developed a theory: perhaps I had Adult ADD. I wasn’t quite buying it — this was a time when practically everyone in the Bay Area was self-diagnosing and reaching the same conclusion — but it was interesting, and the symptoms, if not the label, felt right. I was about to look for work in Silicon Valley. I owed it to myself to find out what was up. Taking a job in the Valley — a place that was at least partly responsible for the distractions that makes life so hard for people with ADD — had to be a terrible idea if I in fact I had ADD. Right? Cut me some slack — I didn’t really know the place.

The Colonel

Turns out that Silicon Valley is swarming with ADD types. Emphasis on types because ADD is not really a condition, but a spectrum of conditions. If you are thirty-something or younger, chances are you knew the kids on this spectrum by name. They were ADHD — if they were smart hyperactive screw-ups– or just ADD, if they very smart screw-ups of a more subtle yet equally tragic variety. If you are over 40-something or older, chances are you grew up knowing the same kids, but not by name. You probably just knew they were different.

The doctor I visited in the summer of 1999 — in a non-descript medical-professional strip mall in Belmont, California (which sits on the northernmost tip of the Valley) — was of the older generation. He struggled through elementary school, middle school, high school, and medical school, never understanding why he had to work so much harder than everyone else around him. He didn’t work harder on the things that most people found difficult — he was great at math, sciences, and other things that require a facility for abstraction. It was the little things — or littler things — that made life so difficult for him. Like showing up to class on time. Like remembering people’s names. Like putting on his shoes — from the same pair — in the morning. He became a famous ADD doctor — highly recommended by someone close to me and my wife — and a legend in Silicon Valley, though few of his patients will reveal his name. Not because it would expose the patients as ADD people, but because revealing would be rude. The doctor was a gentleman, the furthest thing from rude. He spoke in a hard-to-exactly-place Southern accent, appeared to wear the same suit every time you visited, sported a well-groomed beard, clean, snow-white, cut with a flair. On the right day, he looked just like Colonel Sanders. I will respect the doctor’s anonymity — kinda — and call him the Colonel. I owe him that respect. I may have been his last patient.

When we first met, the Colonel was in retirement. He had diagnosed, advised, and treated many people in the Valley — of course, never disclosing their names — but if you do know the place, you might take some guesses on the kinds of people who sat with him in Belmont. He was a doctor for technology executives, and he came with some technology of his own. The Colonel put me through trials and tests on a number of ancient ADD-detecting instruments. Cannot remember them all, but these were the standouts:

–A series of multiple-choice exams designed to detect ADD-like sentiment and behavior. There were many odd questions — designed deliberately to be odd I am sure.

–A strange exercise where I sat next to the Colonel and he asked me to close my eyes. He then took my hand and guided it in an elliptical orbit asking me what I saw in the room if I had the vantage point of a tiny person sitting on my index finger.

And, of course, there were many, many conversations. The Colonel was a psychiatrist, and despite his attachment to the ancient tests — a throwback to a time when machines did as much of the analysis as humans — he was still an adherent to “the talking cure.” He gave me my diagnosis on the fifth week.

“Giovanno.” He never got my name right. “You could have been a fighter pilot.”

That felt good. I had aced the lights-and-trigger test. But I suspected it was too late for a military career.

“There’s good news and bad news,” he cleared his throat, then looked at me steadily (perhaps readying to reveal his recipe of 11 herbs and spices). My heart lept.

“First the bad news. You have ADD … and I think you are depressed. I am going to prescribe two kinds of medication.”

I was not surprised. I suspected something was wrong a few weeks back when he shook his head reviewing my answers to the multiple-choice exams. He had sighed a few times.

“But the good news. You think in pictures.”

He beamed now. I got the feeling that this really meant something to the Colonel. I got the feeling he was speaking about himself.

“This is good. There are a few things you can do that most people can’t do.” Then more soberly: “Problem is that there are many things that you can’t do as easily as others can.”

The Colonel showed me a diagram of the brain and explained. People with ADD, it turns out, have a big shortage of something that forces them to work harder. But whether as a result of overcompensation, or through divine justice, people with ADD tend to be better at things like synthesis, abstraction, and “thinking in pictures.”

I walked away from the Colonel’s office with two prescriptions and a few difficult-to-evaluate ideas about what to do next. But I did decide to move forward with a career in Silicon Valley, knowing that there might be issues. And I did take the Colonel’s advice and got the two prescriptions filled (more about that later). But what I didn’t see at that time — the summer of 1999, almost exactly ten years ago — was that the Valley would soon provide me with a complex of tools that would both screw me up further and enable me to manage my life more effectively. But it took me a while to say no to drugs and say yes to technology. As I said, I really didn’t know the place.

The story begins in a doctor’s office — an accomplished ADD expert in Belmont, California — who diagnosed me in 1999 and sent me off to my first job in marketing with a poignant warning. If you have ADD, a life in marketing in Silicon Valley can be a curse or a blessing; you’re actually in the job of creating the conditions and tools — the weapons of mass distraction — that make life so difficult for so many people. For me, the marketing life has been both a curse and a blessing. But for this column, I’ve chosen to highlight the former. It makes for a better story, and it is a bit closer to the truth.