Less Than Zero

  “She’s going to do this movie in Hawaii. What do you do?”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  “Don’t ask me about my mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?” I say again.

  She finds the vest. “Here.”

  “Why not?”

  “What do you do?” she asks, holding out the vest.

  “What do you do?”

  “What do you do?” she asks, her voice shaking. “Don’t ask me, please. Okay, Clay?”

  “Why not?”

  She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.

  “Because … I don’t know,” she sighs.

  I look at her and don’t feel anything and walk out with my vest.

  Rip and I are sitting in A.R.E. Records on Wilshire. Some executive in charge of promotion is scoring some coke from Rip. The guy who’s executive in charge of promotion is twenty-two and has platinum-blond hair and is wearing all white. Rip wants to know what he can get him.

  “Need some coke,” the guy says.

  “Great,” Rip says, and reaches into the pocket of his Parachute jacket.

  “It’s a nice day out,” the guy says.

  “Yeah, it’s great,” Rip says.

  “Great,” I say.

  Rip asks the guy if he can get him a backstage pass to The Fleshtones concert.

  “Sure.” He hands Rip two small envelopes.

  Rip says that he’ll talk to him later, sometime soon, and hands him an envelope.

  “Great,” the guy says.

  Rip and I get up and Rip asks him, “Have you seen Julian?”

  The guy is sitting behind a large desk and he picks up the phone and tells Rip to wait a minute. The guy doesn’t say anything into the phone. Rip leans on the desk and picks up a demo of some new British group that’s on the large glass desk. The guy gets off the phone and Rip hands the demo to me. I study it and put it back on the desk. The guy grins and tells Rip that the two of them should have lunch.

  “What about Julian?” Rip asks.

  “I don’t know,” the executive in charge of promotion says.

  “Thanks a lot.” Rip winks.

  “Great, you bet, babe,” the guy says, leaning back in the chair, his eyes slowly turning up.

  Trent calls me up while Blair and Daniel are over at my house and invites us to a party in Malibu; he mentions something about X dropping by. Blair and Daniel say that it sounds like a good idea and though I really don’t want to go to a party or see Trent all that badly, the day is clear and a ride to Malibu seems like a nice idea. Daniel wants to go anyway to see what houses were destroyed in the rainstorms. Driving down Pacific Coast Highway, I’m really careful not to speed and Blair and Daniel talk about the new U2 album and when the new song by The Go-Go’s comes on they ask me to turn it up and sing along with it, half joking, half serious. It gets cooler as we drive nearer the ocean and the sky turns purplish, gray, and we pass an ambulance and two police cars parked by the side of the road as we head toward the darkness of Malibu and Daniel cranes his neck to get a look and I slow down a little. Blair says she suspects that they’re searching for a wreck, an accident, and the three of us are silent for a moment.

  X is not at the party in Malibu. Neither are too many other people. Trent answers the door wearing a pair of briefs and he tells us that he and a friend are using this guy’s place while he’s in Aspen. Apparently, Trent comes here a lot and so do a lot of his friends, who are mostly blond-haired pretty male models like Trent, and he starts to tell us to help ourselves to a drink and some food and he walks back to the jacuzzi and lies down, stretches out under the darkening sky. There are mostly young boys in the house and they seem to be in every room and they all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices, and then I start to wonder if I look exactly like them. I try to forget about it and get a drink and look around the living room. Two boys are playing Ms. Pac Man. Another boy lying in an overstuffed couch smoking a joint and watching MTV. One of the boys playing Ms. Pac Man moans and hits the machine, hard.

  There are two dogs running along the empty beach. One of the blond boys call out to them, “Hanoi, Saigon, come here,” and the dogs, both Dobermans, come leaping gracefully onto the deck. The boy pets them and Trent smiles and starts to complain about the service at Spago. The boy who hit the Ms. Pac Man machine walks over and looks down at Trent.

  “I need the keys to the Ferrari. I’m going to get some booze. Know where the credit cards are?”

  “Just charge it,” Trent says wearily. “And get lots of tonic, okay, Chuck?”

  “Keys?”

  “Car.”

  “Sure thing.”

  The sun starts to break through the clouds and the boy with the dogs sits next to Trent and begins to talk to us. It seems that the boy is also a model and is trying to break into the movie business, like Trent. But the only thing his agent’s gotten him is a Carl’s Jr. commercial.

  “Hey, Trent, it’s on, dude,” a boy calls from inside the house. Trent taps me on the shoulder and winks and tells me that I have to see something; he motions for Blair and Daniel to come also. We walk into the house and down a hall and into what I guess is the master bedroom and there are about ten boys in the room, along with the four of us and the two dogs, who followed us into the house. Everyone in the room is looking up at a large television screen. I look up to the screen.

  There’s a young girl, nude, maybe fifteen, on a bed, her arms tied together above her head and her legs spread apart, each foot tied to a bedpost. She’s lying on what looks like newspaper. The film’s in black and white and scratchy and it’s kind of hard to tell what she’s lying on, but it looks like newspaper. The camera cuts quickly to a young, thin, nude, scared-looking boy, sixteen, maybe seventeen, being pushed into the room by this fat black guy, who’s also naked and who’s got this huge hardon. The boy stares at the camera for an uncomfortably long time, this panicked expression on his face. The black man ties the boy up on the floor, and I wonder why there’s a chainsaw in the corner of the room, in the background, and then has sex with him and then he has sex with the girl and then walks off the screen. When he comes back he’s carrying a box. It looks like a toolbox and I’m confused for a minute and Blair walks out of the room. And he takes out an ice pick and what looks like a wire hanger and a package of nails and then a thin, large knife and he comes toward the girl and Daniel smiles and nudges me in the ribs. I leave quickly as the black man tries to push a nail into the girl’s neck.

  I sit in the sun and light a cigarette and try to calm down. But someone’s turned the volume up and so I sit on the deck and I can hear the waves and the sea gulls crying out and I can hear the hum of the telephone wires and I can feel the sun shining down on me and I listen to the sound of the trees shuffling in the warm wind and the screams of a young girl coming from the television in the master bedroom. Trent walks back outside, twenty, thirty minutes later, after the screams and yelling of the girl and the boy stop, and I notice that he has a hardon. He adjusts himself and sits next to me.

  “Guy paid fifteen thousand for it.”

  The two boys who were playing Ms. Pac Man walk out onto the deck, holding drinks, and one tells Trent that he doesn’t think it’s real, even though the chainsaw scene was intense.

  “I bet it’s real,” Trent says, somewhat defensively.

  I sit back in the chair and watch Blair walk along the shore.

  “Yeah, I think it’s real too,” the other boy says, easing himself into the jacuzzi. “It’s gotta be.”

  “Yeah?” Trent asks, a little hopefully.

  “I mean, like, how can you fake a castration? They cut the balls off that guy real slowly. You can’t fake that,” the boy says.

  Trent nods his head and thinks about it for a while and Daniel comes out, smiling, red-faced, and I sit back in the sun.

  Wes
t, one of my grandfather’s personal secretaries, came down that afternoon. He was hunched over, wearing a string tie and a jacket with one of my grandfather’s hotels’ insignia on the back of it, passing out Beechnut licorice gum. He talked about the heat and the plane ride on the Lear. He came with Wilson, another of my grandfather’s aides, and he was wearing a red baseball cap, and he carried around clippings of how the weather in Nevada had been for the past two months. The men sat around and talked about baseball and drank beer and my grandmother sat there, her blouse hanging limply from her frail body, blue-and-yellow kerchief tied tightly around her neck.

  Trent and I are standing around Westwood and he’s telling me about how the guy came back from Aspen and kicked everyone out of the house in Malibu, so Trent’s going to live with someone in the Valley for a couple of days, then he’s going to go up to New York to do some shooting. And when I ask him what kind of shooting, he just shrugs and says, “Shooting, dude, shooting.” He says that he really wants to go back to Malibu, that he misses the beach. He then asks me if I want to do some coke. I tell him that I do but not right now. Trent takes hold of my arm roughly and says, “Why not?”

  “Come on, Trent,” I tell him. “My nose hurts.”

  “It’s all right. This’ll make it feel better. We can go upstairs at Hamburger Hamlet.”

  I look at Trent.

  Trent looks at me.

  It only takes five minutes and when we come back down onto the street, I don’t feel too much better. Trent says that he does and wants to go to the arcade across the street. He also tells me that Sylvan, from France, O.D.’d on Friday. I tell him that I don’t know who Sylvan was. He shrugs. “Ever mainline?” he asks.

  “Have I ever mainlined?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “Oh boy,” he says ominously.

  When we get to his car, some friend’s Ferrari, my nose is bleeding.

  “I’ll have to get you some Decadron or Celestone. They help swelling in blocked nasal passages,” he says.

  “Where do you get that?” I ask, my fingers and a piece of Kleenex, covered with snot, blood. “Where do you get that shit?”

  There’s a long pause and he starts the car up and says, “Are you serious?”

  My grandmother had gotten very ill that afternoon. She started to cough up blood. She had already begun to grow bald and had been losing weight as a result of pancreatic cancer. Later that night, as my grandmother lay in her bed, the others continued their conversations, talking about Mexico and bullfights and bad movies. My grandfather cut his finger opening a beer. They ordered food from an Italian restaurant in town and a boy with a patch on his jeans that read “Aerosmith Live” delivered the food. My grandmother came down. She was feeling a little better. She didn’t eat anything, though. I sat by her and my grandfather did a magic trick with two silver dollars.

  “Did you see that, Grandma?” I asked. Too shy to look into her faded eyes.

  “Yes. I saw it,” she said, and tried to smile.

  I’m about to fall asleep, but Alana comes by unannounced and the maid lets her in and she knocks on my door and I wait a long time before I open it. She has been crying and she comes in and sits on my bed and mentions something about an abortion and starts to laugh. I don’t know what to say, how to deal with it, so I tell her I’m sorry. She gets up and walks over to the window.

  “Sorry?” she asks. “What for?” She lights a cigarette but can’t smoke it and puts it out.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, Clay …” She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she’s going to start to cry. I’m standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like “I think we’ve all lost some sort of feeling.”

  “Was it Julian’s?” I ask, tensing up.

  “Julian’s? No. It wasn’t,” she says. “You don’t know him.”

  She falls asleep and I walk downstairs, outside, and sit by the jacuzzi, looking into the lighted water, the steam coming up from it, warming me.

  I get up from the pool just before dawn and walk back up to my room. Alana’s standing by the window smoking a cigarette and looking out over the Valley. She tells me that she bled a lot last night and that she feels weak. We go out to breakfast in Encino and she keeps her sunglasses on and drinks a lot of orange juice. When we get back to my house, she gets out of the car and says, “Thank you.”

  “What for?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says after a while.

  She gets into her car and drives off.

  When I flush the toilet in my bathroom, it becomes stopped up with Kleenex, and blood clouds the water and I put down the lid, because there’s nothing else for me to do.

  I stop by Daniel’s house later that day. He’s sitting in his room playing Atari on his television set. He doesn’t look too good, tan to the point of sunburn, younger than I remember him in New Hampshire, and when I say something to him, he’ll repeat part of it and then nod. I ask him if he got the letter from Camden asking what courses he’ll be taking next term and he pulls out the Pitfall cassette and puts in one called Megamania. He keeps rubbing his mouth and when I realize that he’s not going to answer me, I ask him what he’s been doing.

  “Been doing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hanging out.”

  “Hanging out where?”

  “Where? Around. Pass me that joint over there on the nightstand.”

  I hand him the joint and then a book of matches from The Ginger Man. He lights it and then resumes playing “Megamania.” He hands me the joint and I relight it. Yellow things are falling toward Daniel’s man. Daniel starts to tell me about a girl he knows. He doesn’t tell me her name.

  “She’s pretty and sixteen and she lives around here and on some days she goes to the Westward Ho on Westwood Boulevard and she meets her dealer there. This seventeen-year-old guy from Uni. And this guy spends all day shooting her full of smack again and again .…” Daniel misses ducking one of the falling yellow things and it hits his man, which dissolves from the screen. He sighs, goes on. “And then he feeds her some acid and takes her off to a party in the hills or in the Colony and then … and then …” Daniel stops.

  “And then what?” I ask, handing him back the joint.

  “And then she gets gangbanged by the entire party.”

  “Oh.”

  “What do you think?”

  “That’s … too bad.”

  “Good idea for a screenplay?”

  Pause. “Screenplay.”

  “Yeah. Screenplay.”

  “I’m not too sure.”

  He stops playing “Megamania” and puts in a new cassette, “Donkey Kong.” “I don’t think I’m going back to school,” he says. “To New Hampshire.”

  After a while I ask him why.

  “I don’t know.” He stops, lights the joint again. “It doesn’t seem like I’ve ever been there.” He shrugs, sucks in on the joint. “It seems like I’ve been here forever.” He hands it to me. I shake my head, no.

  “So you’re not going back?”

  “I’m going to write this screenplay, see?”

  “But what do your parents think?”

  “My parents? They don’t care. Do yours?”

  “They must think something.”

  “They’ve gone to Barbados for the month and then they’re going to oh … shit … I don’t know … Versailles? I don’t know. They don’t care,” he says again.

  I tell him, “I think you should come back.”

  “I really don’t see the point,” Daniel says, not taking his eyes off the screen and I begin to wonder what the point was, if we ever knew. Daniel gets up finally and turns the television off and then looks out the window. ?
??Weird wind today. It’s pretty strong.”

  “What about Vanden?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “Vanden. Come on Daniel. Vanden.”

  “She might not be coming back,” he says, sitting back down.

  “But she might.”

  “Who’s Vanden?”

  I walk over to the window and tell him that I’m leaving in five days. There are magazines lying out by the pool and the wind moves them, sends them flying across the concrete near the pool. A magazine falls in. Daniel doesn’t say anything. Before I leave I look at him lighting another joint, at the scar on his thumb and finger and feel better for some reason.

  I’m in a phone booth in Beverly Hills.

  “Hello?” my psychiatrist answers.

  “Hi. This is Clay.”

  “Yes, oh hi, Clay. Where are you?”

  “In a phone booth in Beverly Hills.”

  “Are you coming in today?”

  “No.”

  Pause.

  “I see. Um, why not?”

  “I don’t think that you’re helping me all that much.”

  Another pause. “Is that really why?”

  “What?”

  “Listen, why don’t you—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Where are you in Beverly Hills?”

  “I won’t be seeing you anymore, I think.”

  “I think I’m going to call your mother.”

  “Go ahead. I really don’t care. But I’m not coming back, okay?”

  “Well, Clay. I don’t know what to say and I know it’s been difficult. Hey, man, we all have—”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  On the morning of the last day, West woke up early. He was dressed in the same jacket and the same string tie, and Wilson was wearing the same red baseball cap. West offered me another piece of Bazooka bubble gum and told me that a piece of gum will make you hum and I took two pieces. He asked me if everybody was ready and I said I didn’t know. The director’s wife stopped by to tell us that they were flying to Las Vegas for the weekend. My grandmother was taking Percodan. We started out for the airport in the Cadillac. In early afternoon the moment finally came to board the plane and leave the desert. Nothing was said in the empty airport lounge until my grandfather turned and looked at my grandmother and said, “Okay, partner, let’s go.” My grandmother died two months later in a large high bed in an empty hospital room on the outskirts of the desert.