Less Than Zero (12 page)

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.”

I
t 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
.

“I think we’ve been here too long,” my aunt said
.

“That is an understatement,” my father said, shifting in his chair
.

“I want to leave,” my aunt said in a very far-off voice, eyes distant, her fingers clenched around the magazine
.

“Well,” my grandfather spoke up. “We’d better get out of here before too soon. I’m turning as red as a tamale. Right, Clay?” He winked at me and opened his fifth beer
.

“I’m going to make flight reservations today,” my aunt said
.

One of my cousins was looking through a copy of the L.A. Times and mentioned something about a plane crash in San Diego. Everybody murmured, and plans for leaving were forgotten
.

“How awful,” my aunt said
.

“I think I would rather die in a plane crash than any other way,” my father said after some time
.

“I think it would be dreadful.”

“But it would be nothing. You get bombed on the plane, take a Librium, and the plane takes off and crashes and you never know what hit you.” My father crossed his legs
.

It was silent at the table. The only sounds came from my sisters and cousins splashing in the water
.

“What do you think?” my aunt asked my mother
.

“I try not to think about things like that,” my mother said
.

“What about you, Mom?” my father asked my grandmother
.

My grandmother, who hadn’t said anything all day, wiped her mouth and said very quietly, “I wouldn’t want to die in any way.”

I
drive over to Trent’s house, but Trent, I remember, is in Palm Springs, so I drive to Rip’s place and some blond kid answers the door only wearing a bathing suit, the sunlamp in the living room burning. “Rip is gone,” the blond kid says. I leave, and as I’m pulling onto Wilshire, Rip pulls in front of me in his Mercedes, and leans out the window and says, “Spin and I are going to City Cafe. Meet us there.” I nod, follow Rip down Melrose, the license plate that reads “CLIMAXX” shimmering.

City Cafe is closed and there’s an old man in ragged clothing and an old black hat on, talking to himself, standing in front and when we pull up, he scowls at us. Rip unrolls his window and I drive up alongside him.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask him.

“Spin wants to go to Hard Rock.”

“I’ll follow you,” I tell him.

It starts to rain.

We get to Hard Rock Cafe and once we’re seated, Spin tells me that he got some great stuff this afternoon. There’s a man sitting at the table next to ours whose eyes are closed very tightly. The girl he’s sitting with doesn’t seem to mind and picks at a salad. When the man finally opens his eyes, I’m relieved for some reason. Spin’s still talking and when I try to change the subject and ask where Julian might be, Spin tells me that he once got ripped off on
what was otherwise real good blow from Julian. Rip tells me that Julian has too many hang-ups.

“For one, he is constantly strung out.”

Spin looks at me and nods. “Strung out.”

“I mean he sells great coke and smack, but he shouldn’t sell it to junior high kids. That’s real low.”

“Yeah,” I say, taking this in. “Low.”

“Some people say that that thirteen-year-old kid who O.D.’d at Beverly bought the smack from Julian.”

I turn to Rip after a while. “What have you been doing?”

“Not too much. Took some animal tranquilizers last night with Warren and went to see The Grimsoles,” he says. “They were cool. Throwing rats out into the audience. Warren took one out to the car.” Rip looks down, giggles. “And killed it. Big rat too. Took him twenty, thirty minutes to kill the fucker.”

“I just got back from Vegas,” Spin says. “Derf and I drove down. Just hung out at my father’s hotel by the pool in our jocks. It was cool … I guess.”

“What have you been doing, dude?” Rip asks.

“Oh, not too much,” I say.

“Yeah, there’s not a whole lot to do anymore,” he says.

Spin agrees, nods.

After dinner we share a joint in the car as we drive out to Malibu to buy a couple of grams of coke from some guy named Dead. I’m sitting in the small back seat of Rip’s car and I thought that Rip had said, “We’re going to meet someone called Ed.” But when Spin said, “How do you know Dead is gonna be around?” and Rip said,

“Because Dead is always around,” I realized what the name was.

It seems that there’s a party at Dead’s house and some of the people there, mostly young boys, look at the three of us strangely, probably because Rip and Spin and I aren’t wearing bathing suits. We walk up to Dead, who’s in his midforties, wearing a pair of briefs, lying in a huge pile of pillows, two tan young boys sitting by his side watching HBO, and Dead hands Rip a large envelope. There’s a blond pretty girl in a bikini sitting behind Dead and she’s petting the head of the boy who’s on Dead’s left.

“You gotta be more careful, boys,” Dead lisps.

“Why’s that, Dead?” Rip asks.

“There are narcs crawling all over the Colony.”

“No. Really?” Spin asks.

“Yeah. Kid of mine was shot in the leg by a narc.”

“No way. Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus.”

“The guy was seventeen, for Christ’s sake. Shot in the fucking leg. Maybe you know him.”

“Who was it?” Rip asks. “Christian?”

“No. Randall. Goes to Oakwood. Huh?”

Spin shakes his head and “Hungry Like the Wolf” bursts out of the speakers that are attached to the ceiling, above Dead’s balding, sweaty head.

“You gotta be more careful.”

“Yeah. You gotta be more careful,” Spin says, licking his lips at the girl whose fingers are still running through
the blond boy’s hair. Blond boy winks at me, pouts his lips.

In the car, Spin tastes the coke and says that it’s cut with too much novocaine. Rip says that at this point he doesn’t care and that he just wants to do some. Rip turns the radio up and keeps screaming happily “What’s gonna happen to all of us?” And Spin keeps screaming back, “All of who, dude? All of who?” We do some of the coke and then go to an arcade in Westwood and play video games for close to two hours and end up spending something like twenty bucks apiece and we stop playing only because we run out of quarters. Rip only has one-hundred-dollar bills on him and the arcade won’t give him change. So Rip stuffs the bills back into his pocket and yells fuck off to the guy working at the change booth and the three of us go back to his car and finish the rest of the coke.

B
lair’s father is having this party for a young Australian actor whose new film is opening in L.A. next week. Blair’s dad is trying to get the actor to star in the new film he’s producing, some thirty-million-dollar science fiction adventure film called Star Raiders. But the Australian actor’s price is too high. I go to the party to try to talk to Blair, but I haven’t seen her yet, only a lot of actors and Blair’s friends from film school at U.S.C. Jared’s there and he keeps trying to pick up on the Australian actor. Jared keeps asking him if he’s seen “The Twilight Zone” with Agnes Moorehead, and the Australian
actor keeps shaking his head and saying, “No, mate.” Jared mentions other episodes of the show and the Australian actor, who’s sweating profusely and drinking his fourth rum and coke, keeps telling Jared that he hasn’t seen any of “The Twilight Zone” episodes he’s talking about. Finally, the actor walks away from Jared, and Jared’s joined by his new boyfriend, not the waiter from Morton’s but a costume designer who worked on Blair’s father’s last film, and who might, or might not, work on the costumes for Star Raiders. The Australian actor walks over to his wife, who ignores him. Kim tells me that the two of them got into a fight this afternoon and that she left their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in a rage and went to an expensive hair salon on Rodeo and had all her hair chopped off. Her hair’s red and cut close to the scalp and when she turns her head to a different angle, I can catch patches of white beneath the spiked hair.

Talk of the damage the storms caused at Malibu is brought up and someone mentions that the entire house next to theirs collapsed. “Just like that. One minute it was there. The next—whoosh … Just like that.” Blair’s mother nods her head as she listens to the director who’s telling her this and her lips are trembling and she keeps glancing over at Jared. I’m about to go over and ask her where Blair is, but some people, a couple of actors and actresses and a director and some studio executives enter, and Blair’s mother walks over to them. They’ve just come from the Golden Globe Awards. One of the actresses sweeps into the room and hugs the costume designer and whispers to him loudly, “Marty just lost, get him a whiskey
neat, fast, and get me a vodka collins before I collapse, will you, darling?”

The costume designer snaps his fingers at the black, gray-haired bartender and says, “Did you hear that?” The bartender rises out of his stupor a little too quickly, a little too unconvincingly and makes the actress her drinks. People begin to ask her who won what at the Golden Globes. But the actress and most of the actors and producers and studio executives have forgotten. The director, Marty, remembers and he recites each name carefully and if someone asks who they were up against, the director will look straight ahead and tell them, in alphabetical order.

I start to talk to one of the boys who goes to film school at U.S.C. He’s very tan and has the beginnings of a blond beard and wears glasses and ripped Tretorn tennis shoes and he keeps talking about the “aesthetic indifference” in American movies. The two of us are sitting alone in the den and soon Alana and Kim and Blair walk in. They sit down. Blair doesn’t look at me. Kim touches the boy from film school’s leg and says, “I called you last night, where were you?” And he says, “Jeff and I smoked a couple of bowls and then went to a screening of the new Friday the 13th movie.” I look over at Blair, try to make eye contact, get her attention. But she won’t look over at me.

Jared and Blair’s father and the director of Star Raiders and the costume designer walk in and sit down and the talk soon turns to the Australian actor and Blair’s father asks the director, who’s wearing a Polo sweatsuit and dark glasses, why the actor is in town.

“I think he’s here to see if he got nominated for an Oscar. The nominations come out soon, you know.”

“For that piece of shit?” Blair’s father barks.

He calms down and looks over at Blair, who sits by the fireplace, near where the Christmas tree used to be, and she looks depressed. Her father motions for her. “Come here, baby, sit on daddy’s lap.” And Blair stares at him incredulously for a moment and then looks down, smiles and walks out of the room. No one says anything. After a while the director clears his throat and says that if they can’t get that “fuckin’ Aussie” to be in Star Raiders, then who’s going to star in it? Some names go around.

“What about that delicious boy who was in Beastman!? You know who I’m talking about, Clyde.” The costume designer looks over at the director, who’s scratching his chin, deep in thought.

Blair walks back in with a drink and looks over at me and I look away and pretend to be interested in the conversation.

The costume designer slaps his knee and says, “Marco! Marco!” He yelps the name again. “Marco … uh, Marco … Ferr … Ferra … oh shit, I have completely forgotten.”

“Marco King?”

“No, no, no.”

“Marco Katz?”

Exasperated, the costume designer shakes his head and says, “Did anyone see
Beastman!
?”

“When did
Beastman!
come out?” Blair’s father asks.