Less Than Zero (13 page)

“Did it? I thought I saw it at the Avco over the summer.”

“But I saw a screening of it over at MGM.”

“It didn’t even open at the Avco,” someone says.

“I think you’re talking about Marco Ferraro,” Blair says.

“Yeah, that’s it,” the costume designer says. “Marco Ferraro.”

“I thought he O.D.’d,” Jared says.

“Yeah, Beastman!, that was pretty good,” the film student says to me. “See it?”

I nod, looking over at Blair. I didn’t like Beastman! and I ask the film student, “Didn’t it bother you the way they just kept dropping characters out of the film for no reason at all?”

The film student pauses and says, “Kind of, but that happens in real life .…”

I stare ahead, at Blair.

“I mean, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” She won’t look at me.

“Marco Ferraro?” Blair’s father asks. “Is he a dago?”

“He’s gorgeous,” Kim sighs.

“Total babe,” Alana nods.

“Really?” the director asks, grinning, leaning toward Kim. “Who else do you think is … gorgeous?”

“Yeah, girls,” Blair’s father says. “Maybe you can give us some input.”

“Just remember,” Jared says. “No great actors. Just some guy whose ass looks as good as his face.”

The costume designer nods and says, “Absolutely.”

“Daddy, you know I’ve been asking you to put Adam Ant or Sting in the movie,” Blair says.

“I know, I know, honey. Clyde and I have been talking it over and if you really want it that bad, I think something can be arranged. What do you think about Adam Ant or Sting in Star Raiders?” he asks Alana and Kim.

“I’d see it,” Kim says.

“I’d see it twice,” Alana says.

“I’d get it on videocassette,” Kim acids.

“I agree with Blair,” Blair’s father says. “I think we should seriously look into Adam Ant or String.”

“That’s Sting, daddy.”

“Yeah, Sting.”

Clyde smiles and looks at Kim. “Yeah, let’s get Sting. Whaddya think about that, honey?”

Kim blushes and says, “That would be great.”

“We’ll call him and Adam for readings next week.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Blair says.

“Anything you want, baby.”

“You better check his bod out first, Clyde,” says Jared, looking concerned.

“Oh, we will, we will,” Clyde says, still smiling at Kim. “Wanna be there when we do it?”

Blair finally looks at me with this pained look in her eyes and I look over at Kim, almost ashamed, then angry.

Kim blushes once more and says, “Maybe.”

J
ulian hasn’t called me since I gave him the money and so I decide to call him the next day. But I don’t have his number and so I call Rip, but Rip’s gone, some young kid tells me so I call Trent’s apartment and Chris answers and tells me that Trent’s still in Palm Springs and then asks if I know anyone who has any meth. I finally call Blair and she gives me Julian’s number and when I’m about to tell her that I’m sorry about the night at After Hours, she says she’s got to go and hangs up. I call the number and a girl with a really familiar voice answers.

“He’s either in Malibu or Palm Springs.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look, can I have the number at either of those places?”

“All I know is that he’s staying at the house in Rancho Mirage or at the house in the Colony.” She stops and seems unsure. “That’s all I know.” There’s a long pause. “Who is this? Finn?”

“Finn? No. I just need the number.”

There’s another pause and then a sigh. “Okay, listen. I don’t know where he is. Oh, shit … I can’t tell you this. Who is this?”

“Clay.”

There’s a longer pause.

“Listen,” I say. “Don’t tell him I called. I’ll just get in touch with him later.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” I start to hang up.

“Finn?” she asks.

I hang up.

T
hat night I go to a party at Kim’s house and end up meeting someone, Evan, who tells me that he’s a close friend of Julian’s. And the next day we go to McDonald’s after he gets out of school. It’s around three in the afternoon, and Evan sits across from me.

“So, is Julian in Palm Springs?” I ask him.

“Palm Springs is great,” Evan says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Do you know if he’s there?”

“I love it. It’s the most fuckin’ beautiful place in the world. Maybe you and I can go up there sometime,” he says.

“Yeah, sometime.” What does that mean?

“Yeah. It’s great. So’s Aspen. Aspen’s hot.”

“Is Julian there?”

“Julian?”

“Yeah, I heard he might be down there.”

“Why would Julian be at Aspen?”

I tell him I have to go to the restroom. Evan says sure. I go to the phone instead and call Trent, who got back from Palm Springs and ask him if he saw Julian there. He tells me no and that the coke he got from Sandy sucks and that he has too much of it and he can’t sell it. I tell Trent that I can’t find Julian and that I’m strung out and tired. He asks me where I am.

“In a McDonald’s in Sherman Oaks,” I tell him.

“That’s why,” Trent says.

I don’t understand and hang up.

R
ip says you can always find someone at Pages at one or two in the morning in Encino. Rip and I drive there one night because Du-par’s is crowded with teenage boys coming from toga parties and old waitresses wearing therapeutic shoes and lilacs pinned to their uniforms who keep telling people to be quiet. So Rip and I go to Pages and Billy and Rod are there and so are Simon and Amos and LeDeu and Sophie and Kristy and David. Sophie sits with us and brings over LeDeu and David. Sophie tells us about the Vice Squad concert at The Palace and says that her brother slipped her a bad lude before the show and so she slept through it. LeDeu and David are in a band called Western Survival and they both seem calm and cautious. Rip asks Sophie where someone named Boris is and she tells him that he’s at the house in Newport. LeDeu has this huge mass of black hair, really stiff and sticking out in all directions, and he tells me that whenever he goes to Du-par’s, people always move away from him. That’s why he and David always come to Pages. Sophie falls asleep on my shoulder and soon my arm falls asleep, but I don’t move it since her head’s on it. David’s wearing sunglasses and a Fear T-shirt and tells me that he saw me at Kim’s New Year’s Eve party.
I nod and tell him I remember even though he wasn’t there.

We talk about new music and the state of L.A. bands and the rain and Rip makes faces at an old Mexican couple sitting across from us; he leers at them and slides the black fedora he’s wearing over his face and grins. I excuse myself and go to the bathroom. Two jokes written on the bathroom wall at Pages: How do you get a nun pregnant? Fuck her. What’s the difference between a J.A.P. and a bowl of spaghetti? Spaghetti moves when you eat it. And below the jokes: “Julian gives great head. And is dead.”

A
lmost everybody had gone home that last week in the desert. Only my grandfather and grandmother, mother and father and myself were left. All the maids had gone, as had the gardener and the poolman. My sisters went to San Francisco with my aunt and her children. Everybody was very tired of Palm Springs. We had been there off and on for nine weeks and nowhere else except Rancho Mirage for the past three. Nothing much happened during the last week. One day, a couple of days before we left, my grandmother went into town with my mother and bought a blue purse. My parents took her to a party at a director’s house that night. I stayed in the big house with my grandfather, who had gotten drunk and had fallen asleep earlier that evening. The artificial waterfall in the spacious pool had been turned off, and with the exception of the jacuzzi, the pool
itself was in the process of being drained. Someone had found a rattlesnake floating on top of what was left of the water at the bottom, and my parents warned me to stay in the house and not go out into the desert
.

That night it was very warm and while my grandfather slept I ate steak and ribs that had been flown down two days earlier from one of the hotels my grandfather owned in Nevada. I watched a rerun of “The Twilight Zone” that night and took a walk. No one was out. The palm trees were trembling and the streetlights were very bright and if you looked past the house and into the desert, all there was was blackness. No cars passed and I thought I saw a rattlesnake slither into the garage. The darkness, the wind, the rustling from the hedges, the empty cigarette box lying on the driveway all had an eerie effect on me and I ran inside and turned all the lights on and got into bed and fell asleep, listening to the strange desert wind moan outside my window
.

I
t’s late on a Saturday night and we’re all over at Kim’s house. There’s nothing much to do here, except drink gin and tonics and vodka with lots of lime juice and watch old movies on the Betamax. I keep staring at this portrait of Kim’s mother which hangs over the bar in the high-ceilinged living room. There’s nothing much happening tonight except that Blair has heard about the New Garage downtown between 6th and 7th or 7th and 8th and so
Dimitri and Kim and Alana and Blair and I decide to drive downtown.

The New Garage is actually a club that’s in a four-story parking lot; the first and second and third floors are deserted and there are still a couple of cars parked there from the day before. The fourth story is where the club is. The music’s loud and there are a lot of people dancing and the entire floor smells like beer and sweat and gasoline. The new Icicle Works single comes on and a couple of The Go-Go’s are there and so is one of The Blasters and Kim says that she spotted John Doe and Exene standing by the DJ. Alana starts to talk to a couple of English boys she knows who work at Fred Segal. Kim talks to me. She tells me that she doesn’t think that Blair likes me much anymore. I shrug and look out an open window. From where I’m standing, I look out the window and out into the night, at the tops of buildings in the business district, dark, with an occasional lighted room somewhere near the top. There’s a huge cathedral with a large, almost monolithic lighted cross standing on the roof and pointing toward the moon; a moon which seems rounder and more grotesquely yellow than I remember. I look at Kim for a moment and don’t say anything. I spot Blair on the dance floor with some pretty young boy, maybe sixteen, seventeen, and they both look really happy. Kim says that it’s too bad, though I don’t think she means it. Dimitri, drunk and mumbling incoherently, shambles over to the two of us, and I think he’s going to say something to Kim, but instead he sticks his hand through the window, getting the skin stuck on the glass, and as
he tries to pull his hand away, it becomes all cut up, mutilated, and blood begins to spurt out unevenly, splashing thickly onto the glass. After taking him to some emergency room at some hospital, we go to a coffee shop on Wilshire and sit there until about four and then we go home.

T
here’s another religious program on before I’m supposed to go out with Blair. The man who’s talking has gray hair, pink-tinted sunglasses and very wide lapels on his jacket and he’s holding a microphone. A neon-lit Christ stands forlornly in the background. “You feel confused. You feel frustrated,” he tells me. “You don’t know what’s going on. That’s why you feel hopeless, helpless. That’s why you feel there is no way out of the situation. But Jesus will come. He will come through the eye of that television screen. Jesus will put a roadblock in your life so that you can turn around and He’s gonna do it for you now. Heavenly Father, You will set the captive free. They, who are in bondage, teach them. Celebrate the Lord. Let this be a night of Deliverance. Tell Jesus, ‘Forgive me of my sins,’ and then you may feel the joy that is unspeakable. May your cup overflow. In Jesus’ name, Amen … Hallelujah!”

I wait for something to happen. I sit there for close to an hour. Nothing does. I get up, do the rest of the coke that’s in my closet and stop at the Polo Lounge for a drink before picking up Blair, who I called earlier and
mentioned that I had two tickets to a concert at the Amphitheater and she didn’t say anything except “I’ll go” and I told her I’d pick her up at seven and she hung up. I tell myself, while I sit alone at the bar that I was going to call one of the numbers that flashed on the bottom of the screen. But I realized that I didn’t know what to say. And I remember seven of the words that the man spoke. Let this be a night of Deliverance.

I remember these words for some reason as Blair and I are sitting at Spago after having just seen the concert and it’s late and we’re sitting by ourselves in the patio and Blair sighs and asks for a cigarette. We drink Champagne Kirs, but Blair has too many and when she orders her sixth, I tell her that maybe she’s had enough and she looks at me and says, “I am hot and thirsty and I will order what I fucking want.”

I
’m sitting with Blair in an Italian ice cream parlor in Westwood. Blair and I eat some Italian ice cream and talk. Blair mentions that
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
is on cable this week.

“The original?” I ask, wondering why she’s talking about that movie. I start making paranoid connections.

“No.”

“The remake?” I ask cautiously.

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” I look back at my ice cream, which I’m not eating much of.

“Did you feel the earthquake?” she asks.

“What?”

“Did you feel the earthquake this morning?”

“An earthquake?”

“Yes.”

“This morning?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Pause. “I thought maybe you had.”

In the parking lot I turn to her and say, “Listen, I’m sorry, really,” even though I’m not too sure if I am.

“Don’t,” she says. “It’s okay.”

At a red light on Sunset, I lean over and kiss her and she puts the car into second and speeds up. On the radio is a song I have already heard five times today but hum along to anyway. Blair lights a cigarette. We pass a poor woman with dirty, wild hair and a Bullock’s bag sitting by her side full of yellowed newspapers. She’s squatting on a sidewalk by the freeway, her face tilted toward the sky; eyes half-slits, because of the glare of the sun. Blair locks the doors and then we’re driving along a side street up in the hills. No cars pass by. Blair turns the radio up. She doesn’t see the coyote. It’s big and brownish gray and the car hits it hard as it runs out into the middle of the street and Blair screams and tries to drive on, the cigarette falling from her lips. But the coyote is stuck under the wheels and it’s squealing and the car is having difficulty moving. Blair stops the car and puts it in reverse and turns the engine off. I don’t want to get out of the car, but Blair’s crying hysterically, her head in her lap, and I get out of the car and walk slowly over to the coyote.
It’s lying on its side, trying to wag its tail. Its eyes are wide and frightened looking and I watch it start to die beneath the sun, blood running out of its mouth. All of its legs are smashed and its body keeps convulsing and I begin to notice the pool of blood that’s forming at the head. Blair calls out to me, and I ignore her and watch the coyote. I stand there for ten minutes. No cars pass. The coyote shudders and arches its body up three, four times and then its eyes go white. Flies start to converge, skimming over the blood and the drying film of the eyes. I walk back to the car and Blair drives off and when we get to her house she turns on the TV and I think she takes some Valium or some Thorazine and the two of us go to bed while “Another World” starts.