When we get to Rip’s apartment on Wilshire, he leads us into the bedroom. There’s a naked girl, really young and pretty, lying on the mattress. Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are tied above her head. Her cunt is all rashed and looks dry and I can see that it’s been shaved. She keeps moaning and murmuring words and moving her head from side to side, her eyes half-closed. Someone’s put a lot of makeup on her, clumsily, and she keeps licking her lips, her tongue drags slowly, repeatedly, across them. Spin kneels by the bed and picks up a syringe and whispers something into her ear. The girl doesn’t open her eyes. Spin digs the syringe into her arm. I just stare. Trent says “Wow.” Rip says something.
“She’s twelve.”
“And she is tight, man,” Spin laughs.
“Who is she?” I ask.
“Her name is Shandra and she goes to Corvalis” is all Rip says.
Ross is playing Centipede in the living room and the sound of the video game carries to where we’re standing. Spin puts a tape on and then takes off his shirt and then his jeans. He has a hardon and he pushes it at the girl’s lips and then looks over at us. “You can watch if you want.”
I leave the room.
Rip follows me.
“Why?” is all I ask Rip.
“What?”
“Why, Rip?”
Rip looks confused. “Why that? You mean in there?”
I try to nod.
“Why not? What the hell?”
“Oh God, Rip, come on, she’s eleven.”
“Twelve,” Rip corrects.
“Yeah, twelve,” I say, thinking about it for a moment.
“Hey, don’t look at me like I’m some sort of scumbag or something. I’m not.”
“It’s …” my voice trails off.
“It’s what?” Rip wants to know.
“It’s … I don’t think it’s right.”
“What’s right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.”
I lean up against the wall. I can hear Spin moaning in the bedroom and then the sound of a hand slapping maybe a face.
“But you don’t need anything. You have everything,” I tell him.
Rip looks at me. “No. I don’t.”
“What?”
“No, I don’t.”
There’s a pause and then I ask, “Oh, shit, Rip, what don’t you have?”
“I don’t have anything to lose.”
Rip turns away and walks back into the bedroom. I look in and Trent’s already unbuttoning his shirt, staring at Spin, who’s straddling the girl’s head. “Come on, Trent,” I say. “Let’s get outta here.”
He looks over at me and then at Spin and the girl and says, “I think I’m gonna stay.”
I just stand there. Spin turns his head while he’s thrusting into the girl’s head and says, “Shut the door if you’re gonna stay. Okay?”
“You should stay,” Trent says.
I close the door and walk away and through the living room, where Ross is still playing Centipede.
“I got the high score,” he says. He notices that I’m leaving and asks, “Hey, where are you going?”
I don’t say anything.
“I bet you’re gonna check out that body again, right?”
I close the door behind me.
A few miles from Rancho Mirage, there was a house that belonged to a friend of one of my cousin’s. He was blond and good-looking and was going to go to Stanford in the fall and he came from a good family from San Francisco. He would come down to Palm Springs on weekends and have these parties in the house on the desert. Kids from L.A. and San Francisco and Sacramento would come down for the weekend and stay for the party. One night, near the end of summer, there was a party that somehow got out of hand. A young girl from San Diego who had been at the party had been found the next morning, her wrists and ankles tied together. She had been raped repeatedly. She also had been strangled and her throat had been slit and her breasts had been cut off and someone had stuck candles where they used to be. Her body had been found at the Sun Air Drive-In hanging upside down from the swing set that lay near the corner of the parking lot. And the friend of my cousin’s disappeared. Some say he went to Mexico and some say he went to Canada or London. Most people say he went to Mexico, though. The mother was put in an institution and the house lay empty for two years. Then one night it burned down and a lot of people say that the guy came back from Mexico, or London, or Canada, and burned it down.
I drive up the canyon road where the house used to be, still wearing the same clothes I had on earlier that afternoon, in Finn’s office, in the hotel room of the Saint Marquis, behind Flip, in the alley, and I park the car and sit there, smoking, looking for a shadow or figure lurking behind the rocks. I cock my head and listen for a murmur or a whisper. Some people say you can see the boy walking through the canyons at night, peering out over the desert, wandering through the ruins of the house. Some also say that the police caught him and put him away. In Camarillo, hundreds of miles from Palo Alto and Stanford.
I remember this story clearly as I drive away from the ruins of the house and I begin to drive even farther out into the desert. The night’s warm and the weather reminds me of nights in Palm Springs when my mother and father would have friends over and play bridge and I would take my father’s car and put the top down and drive through the desert listening to The Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, the hot wind blowing through my hair.
And I remember the mornings when I would be the first one up and I would watch the steam rise off the heated pool on the cold desert at dawn, my mother sitting in the sun all day when it was so quiet and still that I could see the shadows caused by the sun move and shift across the bottom of the still pool and my mother’s dark, tan back.
The week before I leave, one of my sister’s cats disappears. It’s a small brown kitten and my sister says that last night she could hear squealings and a yelp. There are pieces of matted fur and dried blood near the side door. A lot of cats in the neighborhood have had to be kept inside because, if they’re allowed out at night, there’s a chance that the coyotes will eat them. On some nights when the moon’s full and the sky’s clear, I look outside and I can see shapes moving through the streets, through the canyons. I used to mistake them for large, misshaped dogs. It was only later I realized they were coyotes. On some nights, late, I’ve been driving across Mulholland and have had to swerve and stop suddenly and in the glare of the headlights I’ve seen coyotes running slowly through the fog with red rags in their mouths and it’s only when I come home that I realize that the red rag is a cat. It’s something one must live with if you live in the hills.
Written on the bathroom wall at Pages, below where it says “Julian gives great head. And is dead.”: “Fuck you Mom and Dad. You suck cunt. You suck cock. You both can die because that’s what you did to me. You left me to die. You both are so fucking hopeless. Your daughter is an Iranian and your son is a faggot. You both can rot in fucking shitting asshole hell. Burn, you fucking dumbshits. Burn, fuckers. Burn.”
The week before I leave, I listen to a song by an L.A. composer about the city. I would listen to the song over and over, ignoring the rest of the album. It wasn’t that I liked the song so much; it was more that it confused me and I would try to decipher it. For instance, I wanted to know why the bum in the song was on his knees. Someone told me that the bum was so grateful to be in the city instead of somewhere else. I told this person that I thought he missed the point and the person told me, in a tone I found slightly conspiratorial, “No, dude … I don’t think so.”
I sat in my room a lot, the week before I left, watching a television show that was on in the afternoons and that played videos while a DJ from a local rock station introduced the clips. There would be about a hundred teenagers dancing in front of a huge screen on which the videos were played; the images dwarfing the teenagers—and I would recognize people whom I had seen
at clubs, dancing on the show, smiling for the cameras, and then turning and looking up to the lighted, monolithic screen that was flashing the images at them. Some of them would mouth the words to the song that was being played. But I’d concentrate on the teenagers who didn’t mouth the words; the teenagers who had forgotten them; the teenagers who maybe never knew them.
Rip and I were driving on Mulholland one day before I left and Rip was chewing on a plastic eyeball and wearing a Billy Idol T-shirt and kept flashing the eyeball between his lips. I kept trying to smile and Rip mentioned something about going to Palm Springs one night before I left and I nodded, giving in to the heat. On one of Mulholland’s most treacherous turns, Rip slowed the car down and parked it on the edge of the road and got out and motioned for me to do so too. I followed him to where he stood. He pointed out the number of wrecked cars at the bottom of the hill. Some were rusted and burnt, some new and crushed, their bright colors almost obscene in the glittering sunshine. I tried to count the cars; there must have been twenty or thirty cars down there. Rip told me about friends of his who died on that curve; people who misunderstood the road. People who made a mistake late in the night and who sailed off into nothingness. Rip told me that, on some quiet nights, late, you can hear the screeching of tires and then a long silence; a whoosh and then, barely audible, an impact. And sometimes, if one listens very carefully, there are screams in the night that don’t last too long. Rip said he doubted that they’ll ever get the cars out of there, that they’ll probably wait until it gets full of cars and use it as an example and then bury it. And standing there on the hill, overlooking the smog-soaked, baking Valley and feeling the hot winds returning and the dust swirling at my feet and the sun, gigantic, a ball of fire, rising over it, I believed him. And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end.
“Where are we going?” I asked
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just driving.”
“But this road doesn’t go anywhere,” I told him.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“What does?” I asked, after a little while.
“Just that we’re on it, dude,” he said.
Before I left, a woman had her throat slit and was thrown from a moving car in Venice; a series of fires raged out of control in Chatsworth, the work of an arsonist; a man in Encino killed his wife and two children. Four teenagers, none of whom I knew, died in a car accident on Pacific Coast Highway. Muriel was readmitted to Cedars-Sinai. A guy, nicknamed Conan, killed himself at a fraternity party at U.C.L.A. And I met Alana accidentally in The Beverly Center.
“I haven’t seen you around,” I told her.
“Yeah, well, I haven’t been around too much.”
“I met someone who knows you.”
“Who?”
“Evan Dickson. Do you know him?”
“I’m going-out with him.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s what he told me.”
“But he’s fucking this guy named Derf, who goes to Buckley.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh,” she said.
“So what?”
“It’s just so typical.”
“Yes,” I told her. “It is.”
“Did you have a good time while you were here?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad.”
And I see Finn at the Hughes Market on Doheny on Tuesday afternoon. It’s hot and I’ve been lying out by the pool all day. I get in my car and take my sisters to the market. They haven’t gone to school today and they’re wearing shorts and T-shirts and sunglasses and I’m wearing an old Polo bathing suit and a T-shirt. Finn is with Jared and he notices me in the frozen foods section. He’s wearing sandals and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and he glances at me once and then looks down and then looks back up. I turn away quickly and walk to the vegetables. He follows me. I pick up a six-pack of iced tea and then a carton of cigarettes. I look back at him and our eyes meet and he grins and I turn away. He follows me to the checkstand.
“Hey, Clay.” He winks.
“Hi,” I say, smiling, walking away.
“Catch ya later,” he says, cocking his fingers as if they were a gun.
The last week. I’m in Parachute with Trent. Trent tries on clothes. I lean against a wall, reading an old issue of Interview. Some pretty blond-haired boy, I think it’s Evan, is trying on clothes. He doesn’t go into a booth to try them on. He tries them on in the middle of the store in front of a full-length mirror. He looks at himself as he stands there with only his jockey shorts and argyle socks on. The boy’s broken from his trance when his boyfriend, also blond and pretty, comes up behind him and squeezes his neck. Then he tries something else on. Trent tells me that he saw the boy with Julian parked in Julian’s black Porsche outside of Beverly Hills High, talking to a kid who looked about fourteen. Trent tells me that even though Julian was wearing sunglasses, he could still see the purple bruises around his eyes.
While reading the paper at twilight by the pool, I see a story about how a local man tried to bury himself alive in his backyard because it was “so hot, too hot.” I read the article a second time and then put the paper down and watch my sisters. They’re still wearing their bikinis and sunglasses and they lie beneath the darkening sky and play a game in which they pretend to be dead. They ask me to judge which one of them can look dead the longest; the one who wins gets to push the other one into the pool. I watch them and listen to the tape that’s playing on the Walkman I’m wearing. The Go-Go’s are singing “I wanna be worlds away/I know things will be okay when I get worlds away.” Whoever made the tape then let the record skip and I close my eyes and hear them start to sing “Vacation” and when I open my eyes, my sisters are floating face down in the pool, wondering who can look drowned the longest.
I go to the movies with Trent. The theater we go to in Westwood is almost empty except for a few scattered people, most of them sitting alone. I see an old friend from high school sitting with some pretty blond girl near the front, on the aisle, but I don’t say anything and I’m kind of relieved when the lights go down that Trent hasn’t recognized him. Later, in the video arcade, Trent plays a game called Burger Time in which there are all these video hot dogs and eggs that chase around a short, bearded chef and Trent wants to teach me how to play, but I don’t want to. I just keep staring at the maniacal, wiggling hot dogs and for some reason it’s just too much to take and I walk away, looking for something else to play. But all the games seem to deal with beetles and bees and moths and snakes and mosquitoes and frogs drowning and mad spiders eating large purple video flies and the music that goes along with the games makes me feel dizzy and gives me a headache and the images are hard to shake off, even after I leave the arcade.
On the way home, Trent tells me, “Well, you really acted like a dick today.” On Beverly Glen I’m behind a red Jaguar with a license plate that reads DECLINE and I have to pull over.
“What’s wrong, Clay?” Trent asks me, this edge in his voice.
“Nothing,” I manage to say.
“What in the fuck is wrong with you?”
I tell him I have a headache and drive him home and tell him I’ll call him from New Hampshire.
For some reason I remember standing in a phone booth at a 76 Station in Palm Desert at nine-thirty on a Sunday night, late last August, waiting for a phone call from Blair, who was leaving for New York the next morning for three weeks to join her father on location. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and an old baggy argyle sweater and tennis shoes with no socks and my hair was unbrushed and I was smoking a cigarette. And from where I was standing, I could see a bus stop with four or five people sitting or standing under the fluorescent streetlights, waiting. There was a teenage boy, maybe fifteen, sixteen, who I thought was hitchhiking and I was feeling on edge and I wanted to tell the boy something, but the bus came and the boy got on. I was waiting in a phone booth with no door and the Day-Glo light was insistent a
nd giving me a headache. A parade of ants marched across an empty yogurt cup that I put my cigarette out into. It was strange that night. There were three phone booths at this particular gas station on that Sunday night last August and each booth was being used. There was a young surfer in the booth next to mine in OP shorts and a yellow T-shirt with “MAUI” etched across it and I was pretty sure that he was waiting for the bus. I didn’t think the surfer was talking to anyone; that he was pretending to be talking and that there was no one listening on the other end and all I could keep thinking about was is it better to pretend to talk than not talk at all and I kept remembering this night at Disneyland with Blair. The surfer kept looking over at me and I kept turning away, waiting for the phone to ring. A car pulled up with a license plate that read “GABSTOY” and a girl with a black Joan Jett haircut, probably Gabs, and her boyfriend, who was wearing a black Clash T-shirt, got out of the car, motor still running, and I could hear the strains of an old Squeeze song. I finished another cigarette and lit one more. Some of the ants were drowning in the yogurt. The bus came by. People got on. Nobody got off. And I kept thinking about that night at Disneyland and thinking about New Hampshire and about Blair and me breaking up.
A warm wind whipped through the empty gas station and the surfer, who I thought was a hustler, hung up the phone and I heard no dime drop and pretended not to notice. He got on a bus that passed by. GABSTOY left. The phone rang. It was Blair. And I told her not to go. She asked me where I was. I told her that I was in a phone booth in Palm Desert. She asked “Why?” I asked “Why not?” I told her not to go to New York. She said that it was a little too late to be bringing this up. I told her to come to Palm Springs with me. She told me that I hurt her; that I promised I was going to stay in L.A.; that I promised I would never go back East. I told her that I was sorry and that things will be all right and she said that she had heard that already from me and that if we really like each other, what difference will four months make. I asked her if she remembered that night at Disneyland and she asked, “What night at Disneyland?” and we hung up.