Less Than Zero

  I’m nodding and looking over at Chris, who gets off the phone and yells, “Shit.”

  “What is wrong?” asks Atiff.

  “I had my guitar stolen and I had some Desoxyn hidden in it and I was supposed to give it to someone.”

  “What do you do?” I ask Chris.

  “Hang around U.C.L.A.”

  “Enrolled in classes?”

  “I think.”

  “He also writes music,” says Trent, standing in the doorway, only wearing jeans, hair wet, toweling it dry. “Play them some of your stuff.”

  “Sure,” Chris says, shrugging.

  Chris goes to the stereo and puts a tape in it. From where I’m standing I can see the jacuzzi, steaming, blue, lit, and past that a weight set and two bicycles. I sit down on the couch and look through some of the magazines spread across the table; a couple of GQ’s, and a few Rolling Stones and an issue of Playboy and the issue of People with the picture of Blair and her father in it and a copy of Stereo Review and Surfer. Flip through a Playboy then start to space out and stare at the framed poster for the “Hotel California” album; at the hypnotizing blue lettering; at the shadow of the palms.

  Trent mentions that someone named Larry didn’t get into film school. The music comes out over the speakers and I try to listen to it, but Trent’s still talking about Larry and Rip is cracking up hysterically in Trent’s room. “I mean his father’s got a fucking series that’s in the fucking top ten. He’s got his own steadicam and U.S.C. still doesn’t let him in? Things are fucked up.”

  “They didn’t let him in because he’s a heroin addict,” Rip calls out.

  “What bullshit,” Trent says.

  “You didn’t know that?” Rip laughs.

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “He practically eats it raw,” Rip says, turning the volume on the television down. “He used to be normal.”

  “Oh shit, Rip,” I call out. “What does normal mean to you?”

  “No, I mean really normal.”

  “Shit, I never knew that about Larry,” Atiff says.

  “You’re so full of shit,” Trent calls out to the bedroom.

  “Oh, Trent, suck my dick,” Rip yells.

  “Take it out,” Trent calls out, laughing, walking back to the bedroom. “Hey, who made the reservations at Morton’s?”

  Déjà vu passes through me and I open a GQ, faces from my sisters’ walls come back to me. The music is loud and the songs sound like they’re being sung by a little girl and the drum machine is too noisy, and insistent. The little girl voices sing out, “I don’t know where to go/I don’t know what to do/I don’t know where to go/I don’t know what to do/Tell me. Tell me …”

  “Did you make the reservations?” Trent calls again.

  “You have any meth?” Chris calls back to Trent.

  “No,” Trent calls back. “Who made the reservations?”

  “Yes, I made them,” Rip shouts. “Now shut up.”

  “Do any of you guys have any meth?” Chris asks.

  “Meth?” Atiff asks.

  “Look, we don’t have any meth,” I tell him.

  The music stops.

  “You gotta hear this next song,” Trent says, pulling on a shirt.

  Chris ignores him and picks up the phone in the kitchen. He dials and then asks whoever’s on the other end if they have any meth. Chris pauses and hangs up, looking dejected.

  “Some guy propositioned me today,” Rip is saying, walking into the living room. “He just came up to me in Flip and offered me six hundred dollars to go to Laguna with him for the weekend.”

  “I’m sure you’re not the only guy he approached,” Trent says, coming out into the living room and opening the door that leads out to the jacuzzi. He bends down and feels the water. “Chris, do you have any cigarettes?”

  “Yeah, in my room, on the bed stand,” Chris says, dialing another number.

  I stare back at the poster and wonder if I should do the coke I have in my pocket now, before we go to Morton’s, or when we get there. Trent comes out of Chris’s room and wants to know who’s lying on the floor of Chris’s room, sleeping.

  “Oh, that’s Alan, I think. He’s been there for like two days.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” Trent says. “Just great.”

  “Just leave him alone. He has mono or something.”

  “Let’s just go,” Trent says.

  Rip goes to the bathroom first and Atiff and I stand up.

  Chris hangs up the phone.

  “Are you going to be here when I get back?” Trent asks him.

  “No. Gotta go over to the Colony. Look for some meth.”

  My dreams start out calmly. I’ll be younger and walking home from school and the day will be overcast, clouds gray and white and some of them purple. Then it’ll start to rain and I’ll begin to run. After running through all this falling water for what seems to be a really long time, I’ll suddenly trip into mud and fall flat on the ground and because the earth’s so wet, I start to sink, and the mud fills my mouth and I start to swallow it and then it goes up through my nose and finally into my eyes, and I don’t wake up until I’m completely underground.

  It begins to rain in L. A. I read about the houses falling, slipping down the hills in the middle of the night and I stay up all night, usually wired on coke, until early morning to make sure nothing happens to our house. Then I go out into the damp, humid morning and get the paper, read the film section and try to ignore the rain.

  Nothing much happens during the days it rains. One of my sisters buys a fish and puts it in the jacuzzi and the heat and chlorine kill it. I get these strange phone calls. Someone calls, usually late at night, and on my number, and when I answer the phone, the person on the other end doesn’t say anything for three minutes. I keep count. Then I’ll hear a sigh and the person hangs up. The street lights on Sunset get short-circuited, so a yellow light will be flashing at an intersection and then a green one will blink on for a couple of seconds, followed by the yellow and then the red and green lights will start to shine at the same time.

  I get a message that Trent stopped by. He was wearing a really expensive suit, my sisters said, and driving someone else’s Mercedes. “Friend of mine’s,” Trent told them. He also told them to tell me that Scott O.D.’d. I don’t know who Scott is. It keeps raining. And that night, after I get three of the weird silent phone calls, I break a glass by throwing it against the wall. No one comes in to see what the sound was. Then I lie on the bed, awake, take twenty milligrams of Valium to come off the coke, but it doesn’t get me to sleep. I turn MTV off and the radio on, but KNAC won’t come in so I turn the radio off and stare out across the Valley and look at the canvas of neon and fluorescent lights lying beneath the purple night sky and I stand there, nude, by the window, watching the clouds pass and then I lie on my bed and try to remember how many days I’ve been home and then I get up and pace the room and light another cigarette and then the phone will ring. This is how the nights are when it rains.

  I’m sitting in Spago with Trent and Blair and Trent says he’s positive that there were people doing cocaine at the bar and I tell him why don’t you go join them and he tells me to shut up. Since we did half a gram before leaving Trent’s apartment, none of us are too hungry, and we only order appetizers and one pizza and keep drinking grapefruit juice and vodka. Blair keeps smelling her wrist and humming along with the new Human League single that’s playing over the stereo system. Blair asks the waiter, after he brings us our fourth round of greyhounds, if he was at the Edge the other night. He smiles and shakes his head.

  “So tell me,” Blair asks Trent. “Is Walker really an alcoholic?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Walker is,” Trent says.

  “I knew it. But Walker’s great though. Walker’s nice.”

  Trent laughs and agrees, then looks at me.

  I’m totally startled for a moment and I look at both of them and say, “Walker is nice.” I don’t
know who Walker is.

  “Yeah, I like Walker,” Trent says.

  “Yeah, Walker’s nice.” Blair nods.

  “Hey, did I tell you,” Trent begins. “I’m going to the Springs tomorrow. I have to go down and watch some dumb-ass Mexican gardener plant cactus in the backyard. Is that the most typical thing you have ever heard of? So typical. Mom asked me and I said, ‘No way, dude,’ and she said, ‘You never do anything for me,’ and I mean, she was right, and so I said, ‘Okay,’ because I felt sorry for her, you know? Besides, I heard that Sandy has some great coke and he’ll be there.”

  Blair smiles. “You’re such a nice boy.”

  It’s getting to be toward midnight and someone pays the check and I tell Trent, after Blair’s left for the restroom, that I didn’t have the slightest idea who Walker is. Trent looks at me and says, “You don’t make any sense, you know that?”

  “I make sense.”

  “No, dude. You’re ridiculous.”

  “Why don’t I make sense?”

  “Because you just don’t.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You’re a fool, Clay,” Trent laughs.

  “No, I’m not,” I tell him, laughing back.

  “Yeah, I think you are. In fact, I’m totally sure of it,” he says.

  “Are you?”

  Trent finishes his drink, sucks on an ice cube and asks, “So, who are you fucking?”

  “No one. Who I fuck is not your business or Blair’s, okay?”

  “Yeah, right,” he snorts.

  “What is this?” I ask Trent.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Who are you fucking?” I ask him.

  “Oh, come on, Clay, please.”

  “No, who are you fucking, Trent?” I ask again.

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what? What is there to get?” I ask. “If this has anything to do with Blair, you’re really screwed. She should know better. Does she think we’re still going-out? Is that what she told you? Well, we’re not, okay? Got it?” The coke’s wearing off and I’m about to get up and go to the men’s room.

  “Have you told her?” he finally asks.

  “No,” I say, still looking at him, then out the window.

  “Tacky. Really tacky,” he says slowly.

  “What’s tacky?” Blair asks, sitting down.

  “Roberto,” Trent says, averting his eyes from mine.

  I don’t want to leave Trent and Blair alone, so I sit there, very still.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think he’s friendly.”

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “He’s just different,” Blair says.

  “Why do you like him?” Trent asks, finishing another ice cube, glaring at me.

  “Because,” Blair says, standing up.

  “Because you don’t spend that much time with him.” Trent gets up also and Blair laughs and says, “Could be,” and she’s in a better mood and I start to wonder if she did any coke in the bathroom. Probably. Then I wonder if it makes any difference.

  While waiting for the car to arrive, Blair and Trent smile at each other in this way that really irritates me and then she looks up at the sky, which is cloudy, and it begins to rain lightly. We get into Blair’s car and she puts in a tape that she made the other night and Bananarama starts to sing and Trent asks her where the Beach-Mix tape is and Blair tells him that she burned it because she heard it too many times. For some reason I believe this and unroll the window and we drive to After Hours.

  The girl I’m sitting next to at After Hours is sixteen and tan and tells me that it’s tragic that KROQ has a playlist. Blair’s sitting across from me and next to Trent, who’s doing his Richard Blade impersonation for two young blond girls. Rip comes over, after talking to the gay porno star who’s sitting at the bar with his girl friend, and he whispers something in Blair’s ear and the two of them get up and leave. The girl, who’s sitting next to me, is drunk and has her hand on my thigh and is now asking if The Whiskey burned down and I tell her yeah, sure, and Blair and Rip come back and sit down and they both seem insanely alert; Blair’s head moves back and forth quickly, staring at the dancers in the club; and Rip’s eyes dart from side to side, looking for the girl he came with. Blair picks up a crayon and starts to write something on the table. Rip spots the girl. Tall blond boy comes over to our table and one of the girls sitting next to Trent jumps up and says, “Teddy! I thought you were in a coma!” and Teddy explains that no, he wasn’t in a coma, but that he did get his driver’s license revoked for drunk driving on Pacific Coast Highway and Blair keeps drawing on the table and Teddy sits down. I think I see Julian here, leaving, and I get up from the table and go to the bar and then outside and it’s raining hard and I can hear Duran Duran from inside and a girl I don’t know passes by and says, “Hi” and I nod and then go to the restroom and lock the door and stare at myself in the mirror. People knock on the door and I lean against it, don’t do any of the coke, and cry for around five minutes and then I leave and walk back into the club and it’s dark and crowded and nobody can see that my face is all swollen and my eyes are red and I sit down next to the drunken blond girl and she and Blair are talking about S.A.T. scores. Then Griffin comes in with this really beautiful blond girl and he flashes me a smile and the two of them go to the bar to talk to the gay porno star and his girlfriend. And somewhere along the line, Blair leaves with Rip or maybe with Trent, or maybe Rip leaves with Trent or maybe Rip leaves with the two blond girls sitting next to Trent or maybe Blair leaves with the two blond girls, and I end up dancing with this girl and she leans over to me and whispers that maybe we should go to her place. And we cross the crowded dance floor and she goes to the restroom and I wait at a table for her. Someone’s written “Help Me” over and over in red crayon on the table in a childish scrawl and there are little curlicues on the e’s in me, and phone numbers written around the twenty “Help Me” ’s and a lot of unreadable writing around the telephone numbers and the two red words stick out even more. The girl comes back and we walk out of After Hours, past the girl who said “hi” to me, crying in the doorway, and the gay porno star smoking a joint in the alley; past the four Mexican guys teasing the kids who go in and out of the club, and past the security officer and the parking attendant who keeps telling the Mexican boys that they’d better leave. And one of them calls out to me, “Hey, punk faggot,” and the girl and I get into her car and drive off into the hills and we go to her room and I take off my clothes and lie on her bed and she goes into the bathroom and I wait a couple of minutes and then she finally comes out, a towel wrapped around her, and sits on the bed and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she says stop it and, after I let go, she tells me to lean against the headboard and I do and then she takes off the towel and she’s naked and she reaches into the drawer by her bed and brings out a tube of Bain De Soleil and she hands it to me and then she reaches into the drawer and brings out a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses and she tells me to put them on and I do. And she takes the tube of suntan lotion from me and squeezes some onto her fingers and then touches herself and motions for me to do the same, and I do. After a while I stop and reach over to her and she stops me and says no, and then places my hand back on myself and her hand begins again and after this goes on for a while I tell her that I’m going to come and she tells me to hold on a minute and that she’s almost there and she begins to move her hand faster, spreading her legs wider, leaning back against the pillows, and I take the sunglasses off and she tells me to put them back on and I put them back on and it stings when I come and then I guess she comes too. Bowie’s on the stereo and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and turns on MTV. I lie there, naked, sunglasses still on, and she hands me a box of Kleenex. I wipe myself off and then look through a Vogue that’s lying by the side of the bed. She puts a robe on and stares at me. I can hear thunder in the distance and it
begins to rain harder. She lights a cigarette and I start to dress. And then I call a cab and finally take the Wayfarers off and she tells me to be quiet walking down the stairs so I won’t wake her parents. The cab takes me back to Trent’s apartment, and it’s pouring rain outside, and when I get into my car, there’s a note on the passenger seat that says, “Have a good time?” and I’m pretty sure it’s Blair’s handwriting and I drive back home.

  I’m sitting in my psychiatrist’s office the next day, coming off from coke, sneezing blood. My psychiatrist’s wearing a red V-neck sweater with nothing on underneath and a pair of cut-off jeans. I start to cry really hard. He looks at me and fingers the gold necklace that hangs from his tan neck. I stop crying for a minute and he looks at me some more and then writes something down on his pad. He asks me something. I tell him I don’t know what’s wrong; that maybe it has something to do with my parents but not really or maybe my friends or that I drive sometimes and get lost; maybe it’s the drugs.

  “At least you realize these things. But that’s not what I’m talking about, that’s not really what I’m asking you, not really.”

  He gets up and walks across the room and straightens a framed cover of a Rolling Stone with Elvis Costello on the cover and the words “Elvis Costello Repents” in large white letters. I wait for him to ask me the question.

  “Like him? Did you see him at the Amphitheater? Yeah? He’s in Europe now, I guess. At least that’s what I heard on MTV. Like the last album?”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “What about me?” I scream, choking.

  “Come on, Clay,” the psychiatrist says. “Don’t be so … mundane.”

  It was my grandfather’s birthday and we had been in Palm Springs for close to two months; for too long. The sun was hot and the air was thick during those weeks. It was lunchtime and we were all sitting out beneath the overhang in front of the pool at the old house. I could remember that my grandmother had bought me a bag of rock candy that day and I had been chewing them constantly, nervously. The housekeeper brought out cold cuts and beer and Hawaiian Punch and potato chips on a large wooden platter, and set it down on the table my aunt and my grandmother and grandfather and mother and father and I were sitting at. My mother and aunt picked at the turkey sandwiches. My grandfather was wearing a jockstrap and a straw hat and drank Michelob beer. My aunt was fanning herself with a People magazine. My grandmother hadn’t been feeling well and she nibbled at her sandwich lightly and sipped cold herb tea. My mother wasn’t listening to any of the conversation. She was watching my sisters and cousins play in the pool, her eyes fixated on the cool aqua water.