Less Than Zero (18 page)

Trent and I follow Rip and Spin to Rip’s car and Rip tells us to meet them in back of Flip. Trent and I drive down Melrose and Flip is all lit up and closed and we all make a left and then park behind the building in the deserted lot in back. Ross gets out of his VW Rabbit and motions for Rip and Spin and me and Trent to follow him to the alley behind the empty store.

“I hope nobody told the police,” Ross mutters.

“Who else knows about this?” Rip asks.

“Some friends of mine. They found him this afternoon.”

Two girls come out of the darkness of the alley, giggling and holding onto each other. One says, “Jesus, Ross, who is that guy?”

“I don’t know, Alicia.”

“What happened to him?”

“O.D.’d, I guess.”

“Have you called the police?”

“What for?”

One of the girls says, “We gotta bring Marcia. She’ll freak out.”

“Have you girls seen Mimi?” Ross asks.

“She was over here with Derf and they left. We’re gonna see X over at The Roxy.”

“We were just there.”

“Oh, how are they?”

“Okay. They didn’t sing ‘Adult Books’ though.”

“They didn’t?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, they never do.”

“I know.”

“Bummer.”

The girls leave, talking about Billy Zoom, and Rip and Spin and Trent and I follow Ross deeper into the alley.

He’s lying against the back wall, propped up. The face is bloated and pale and the eyes are shut, mouth open and the face belongs to some young, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old boy, dried blood, crusted, above the upper lip.

“Jesus,” Rip says.

Spin’s eyes are wide.

Trent just stands there and says something like “Wild.”

Rip jabs the boy in the stomach with his foot.

“Sure he’s dead?”

“See him moving?” Ross giggles.

“Christ, man. Where did you find this?” Spin asks.

“Word gets around.”

I cannot take my eyes off the dead boy. There are moths flying above his head, twirling around the light bulb that hangs over him, illuminating the scene. Spin kneels down and looks into the boy’s face and studies it earnestly. Trent starts to laugh and lights up a joint. Ross is leaning against a wall, smoking, and he offers me a cigarette. I shake my head and light my own, but my hand’s shaking badly and I drop it.

“Look at that, no socks,” Trent mutters.

We stand there for a while longer. A wind comes through the alley. Sounds of traffic can be heard coming from Melrose.

“Wait a minute,” Spin says. “I think I know this guy.”

“Bullshit,” Rip laughs.

“Man, you are so sick,” Trent says, handing me the joint.

I take a drag and hand it back to Trent and wonder about what would happen if the boy’s eyes were to open.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ross says.

“Wait.” Rip motions for him to stay and then sticks a cigarette in the boy’s mouth. We stand there for five more minutes. Then Spin stands up and shakes his head, scratches at Gumby, and says, “Man, I need a cigarette.”

Rip gets up and holds onto my arm and says to me and Trent, “Listen, you two, you’ve gotta come over to my place.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I’ve got something at my place that will blow your mind.”

Trent giggles expectantly and we all leave the alley.

W
hen 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.

T
he 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.

W
ritten 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.”

T
he 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.

R
ip 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.

B
efore 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.”