The Informers

by Bret Easton Ellis

  Turning on the bathwater full blast, willing the sound of rushing water hitting the mammoth porcelain tub to drown out the noise of two roadies dragging the girl and boy out of the bed, out of the room, taking their turn, I lean toward the tub, making sure only cold water pours out of the faucet. I move toward the door, press my ear against it to hear if anybody's still in the room, and pretty sure no one is, I open it, peer out, and nobody's in the room. From a small refrigerator I take out a plastic ice bucket and then move toward the ice machine that was placed at my request in the middle of the suite and get some ice. Then, on my way back to the bathroom, I kneel by the bed and open a drawer and take out a bag of Librium and then I'm back in the bathroom and locking the door and pouring the bucket of ice into the tub, making sure there's enough water at the bottom of the bucket so that I can wash the Librium down my throat, and I step into the tub, lie down, only my head above water, unsettled by the fact that maybe the freezing water and the Librium aren't really such a great combo.

  In the dream I'm sitting in the restaurant on top of the hotel near a wall of windows and staring out over the blanket of neon lights that pass for a city. I'm drinking a Kamikaze and sitting across from me is the young Oriental girl from Hustler but her smooth brown face is covered with geisha makeup and the geisha makeup and the tight, fluorescent-pink dress and the expression creasing her flat, soft features and the gaze in the blank dark eyes are predatory, making me uneasy, and suddenly the entire blanket of lights flickers, fades, sirens are wailing and people I never noticed are running out of the restaurant, screams, shouts from the black city below, and huge arcs of flame, orange and yellow highlighted against a black sky, shoot up from points on the ground and I'm still staring at the geisha girl, the arcs of flame reflected in her black eyes, and she's mumbling something to me and there's no fear in those large and slanted wet eyes because she's smiling warmly now, saying the same word again and again and again but the sirens and screams and various explosions drown the word out and when I'm shouting, panicked, asking her what she's saying, she just smiles, blinking, and takes out a paper fan and her mouth keeps moving, forming the same word, and I'm leaning toward her to hear the word but a huge claw bursts through the window, showering us with glass, and it grabs me and the claw is warm, pulsing with anger and covered with a slime that drenches the suit I'm wearing and the claw pulls me out the window and I twist toward the girl, who says the word again, this time clearly.

  "Godzilla . . . Godzilla, you idiot . . . I said Godzilla . . .”

  Screaming silently, I'm lifted toward its mouth, eighty, ninety stories up, looking through what's left of the smashed wall of glass, a cold black wind whipping furiously around me, and the Oriental girl with the pink dress on is now standing on the table, smiling and waving her fan at me, crying out "Sayonara" but it doesn't mean goodbye.

  Sometime later, after I climb nude and sobbing from the bathtub, after Roger calls on one of the extensions and tells me that my father has called seven times in the last two hours (something about an emergency), after I tell Roger to tell my father that I'm asleep or out or anything or in another country, after I smash three champagne bottles against one of the walls in the suite, I'm finally able to sit in a chair I've moved over to a window and look out over Tokyo. I'm holding a guitar, trying to write a song, because for the past week a number of chord progressions have been repeating themselves in my head but I'm having a hard time sorting them out and then I'm playing old songs I wrote when I was playing with the band and then I stare at broken glass on the floor that surrounds the bed, thinking: that's a cool album cover. Then I'm picking up a half-empty package of M&M's and washing them down with some vodka and then since it makes me sick I have to head for the bathroom but I trip over the telephone cord and my hand slams into a thick piece of champagne-bottle glass and for a long time I'm staring at my palm, at a thin rivulet of blood racing down my wrist. Unable to shake the glass out, I pull it out and the hole in my hand looks soft and safe and I take the jagged stained piece of glass that still has part of a Dom Perignon label on it and seal the wound by placing it back into it where it looks complete, but the glass falls out and streaming blood covers the guitar I'm beginning to strum and the bloodied guitar will make a pretty good record cover too and I'm able to light a cigarette, blood soaking it only a little. More Librium and I'm asleep but the bed shakes and the earth moving is part of my dream, another monster approaching.

  The phone starts ringing at what I can only guess is noon.

  "Yeah?" I ask, eyes closed.

  "It's me," Roger says.

  "I'm sleeping, Lucifer."

  "Come on, get up. You're having lunch with someone today."

  "Who?"

  "Someone," Roger says, irritated. "Come on, let's play."

  "I need, like, something," I mumble, opening my eyes, the sheets, the guitar next to the sheets, covered with brown dried blood, some of it in patches so thick it moves me to open my mouth, then swallow. "I need something, man."

  "What?" Roger's saying. "Your Mr. Potato Head broke? What?"

  "No, a doctor, man."

  "Why?" Roger sighs.

  "Cut my hand."

  "Really?" Roger sounds bored.

  "It was bleeding, um, pretty bad."

  "Oh, I'm sure it was. How did you do this?" Roger asks. "In other words: did you have help?"

  "I did it shaving—who the fuck cares? Just . . . get a doctor."

  After a while, Roger asks, "If it's not bleeding anymore, does it matter?"

  "But there was a lot of . . . blood, man."

  "But does it even hurt?" Roger asks. "Can you even feel it?"

  A long pause, then, "No, um, not really." I wait a minute before saying, "Sort of."

  "I'll get you a doctor. Jesus."

  "And a maid. A vacuum. I need a ... vacuum, man."

  "You are a vacuum, Bryan," Roger says. I can hear giggling in the background, which Roger silences by hissing, then he tells me, "Your father keeps calling." I can hear Roger lighting a cigarette. "For what it's worth."

  "My fingers, um, Roger, won't move."

  "Did you hear me or, like, what's the bloody story?"

  "What did he want? Is that what you want me to ask?" I sigh. "How did he know where I am?"

  "I don't know. Some emergency. Your mom's in the hospital? I'm not sure. Who knows?"

  I try to sit up, then with my left hand light a cigarette. When it becomes apparent to Roger that I'm not going to say anything else, Roger says, "I'll give you three hours to get cleaned up. Do you need longer? I hope to holy Christ not, okay?"

  "Yeah.”

  "And wear something with long sleeves," Roger warns.

  "What?" I ask, confused.

  "Long sleeves, man. Wear long sleeves. Something poofy."

  I look down at my arms. "Why?"

  "Multiple choice: (a) you look nice in long sleeves; (b) you have holes in your arms; (c) you have holes in your arms; (d) you have holes in your arms."

  A long pause that I finally break up by saying, "C?"

  "Good," Roger says, then hangs up.

  A producer from Warner Brothers who is in Tokyo to meet with Japanese representatives from Sony is thirty and balding and has a face like a death mask and is wearing a kimono with tennis shoes, pacing languidly around his suite, smoking a joint, and it's all really fab and to die over and Roger is flipping through Billboard, sitting on a giant unmade bed, and the producer has been on the phone forever and whenever he is put on hold he points at Roger and says, basically, "That minipony is really nifty," and Roger, pleased that the producer has noticed the small tuft of hair, nods, turns around, shows the thing off.

  "Like Adam Ant?" the producer asks.

  "You bet." Roger, who should be mortified, turns back to Billboard.

  "Help yourself to sake."

  Roger leads me by the hand out to the balcony, where two Oriental girls, maybe fifteen, fourteen, sit at a table piled with plates of sushi and what lo
oks like waffles.

  "Wow," I say. "Waffles."

  "Please don't feel like you're saying too much," Roger says.

  "Why don't you just ignore me?" I plead.

  "On second thought," Roger says, making a terrible face, "why don't you just sit this one out?"

  One of the Oriental girls is wearing pink satin underwear and no top and she's the one I was with last night and the other girl, wearing a POLICE T-shirt, has a Walkman on and glazed eyes. The producer moves over to the balcony doors and is now talking to Manuel about having some deli but no pickles and it's really fab. He clicks off, snaps his fingers as he sits down with a pained expression, motioning for the girl with pink satin underwear to cover herself. The girl, who has a heart of ice, stands up, walks slowly back into the room, turns the television on and falls to the floor with a thump.

  The producer sits next to the Oriental girl with the Walkman, sighs, takes a hit off the joint. He offers it to Roger, who shakes his head, then to me. Roger shakes his head for me too.

  "Sake?" the producer asks. "It's chilled."

  "Great," Roger says.

  "Bryan?" the producer asks.

  Roger shakes his head again.

  "Anybody feel the earthquake?" the producer asks, pouring the sake straight from the bottle into champagne glasses.

  "Yeah, I did," Roger says, lighting a cigarette. "Really terrifying," and then, after glancing over at me, "Well, not so scary."

  "Don't trust these fucking Japs," the producer says. "I hope it got some of them."

  "Who does, man?" Roger sighs, nodding tiredly in agreement.

  "They're building an artificial ocean," the producer says.

  "Several, in fact."

  I adjust my sunglasses, look at my hands. Roger readjusts my sunglasses. This moves the producer to get down to business.

  He begins gravely. "An idea for a movie. It's actually an idea that has been halfway realized. It is, as we speak, sitting in a vault being guarded by some of the most dangerous men at Warners." Pause. "You're sensing it's a really hot property." Pause. "The reason we came to you, Bryan, is because there are people who remember how intense that movie turned out about the life of the band." His voice gets high and trails off and he studies my face for a reaction, a tough job.

  "I mean, holy Jesus, the four of you guys—Sam, Matt and . . ." The producer stops, snaps his fingers, looks at Roger for help.

  "Ed," Roger says. "His name was Ed." Pause. "Actually, at the time the band formed it was Tabasco." Pause. "We changed it."

  "Ed, gosh," the producer says, pausing awkwardly with such a false reverence that it almost moves me to tears. "What is known as a 'real tragedy.' A real shame. Real upsetting too, I bet, no?"

  Roger sighs, nods. "They were already broken up by then."

  The producer takes a huge toke off the joint and while inhaling manages to say the following: "You guys were probably one of the pioneering forces in rock during the last decade and it's a shame you broke up—can I interest you in some waffles?"

  Roger delicately sips sake, says, "It is a shame," and then looks at me. "Right?"

  I sigh. "Sí, señor."

  "Since the flick turned out to be so cool and profitable without exploiting anyone, we thought that, um, with your"—the producer glances at Roger for help, falters—"presence, you'd be interested and thrilled to actually star in a movie."

  "We receive so many scripts," Roger sighs, adding, "Bryan turned down Amadeus, so he's got rather high standards."

  "The movie," the producer continues, "is basically the rock-star-in-outer-space thing. An alien creature, this E.T., sabotages the—"

  I clutch Roger's arm.

  "E.T. An extraterrestrial," Roger says softly.

  I let go. The producer continues.

  "The E..T. sabotages the dude's limo after a gig at the Forum and after a rather large and fiery chase takes him to this planet where the rock star is held captive. I mean, yadda whatever and there's a princess, who is basically a love interest." The producer pauses, looks at Roger hopefully. "We're thinking Pat Benatar. We're thinking a Go-Go."

  Roger laughs. "Oh, that's bloody great."

  "The only way the guy can get released is to record songs and perform a concert for the planet's emperor, who is basically a, um, tomato." The producer grimaces, shuddering, then looks worriedly at Roger.

  Roger is squeezing the bridge of his nose and saying, "So it's madcap, right?"

  "It's not tacky and you have a copy," the producer tells Roger. "And everyone is getting excited by the thing in the vault."

  Roger smiles, nods, looks over at the Oriental girl and sticks his tongue out, winking. He tells the producer, "I'm not bored."

  I actually remember the movie that was made about the band and the movie had gotten it pretty much right except the filmmakers forgot to add the endless paternity suits, the time I broke Kenny's arm, clear liquid in a syringe, Matt crying for hours, the eyes of fans and "vitamins," the look on Nina's face when she demanded a new Porsche, Sam's reaction when I told him Roger wanted me to do a solo record—information the filmmakers seemed to not want to deal with. The filmmakers seemed to have edited out the time I came home and found Nina sitting in the bedroom in the house on the beach, a pair of scissors in her hand, and they cut out the shot of a punctured, leaking water bed. The editor seemed to have misplaced the scene where Nina tried to drown herself one night at a party in Malibu and they cut the sequence that followed where her stomach was pumped and also the next shot, where she leaned into the frame next to my face and said, "I hate you," and she turned her face, pale and swollen, her hair still wet and plastered to her cheeks, away from me. The movie had been made before Ed jumped from the roof of the Clift Hotel in San Francisco so the filmmakers had an excuse for that scene not being in the movie but there seemed to be no excuse for the rest to have been omitted and for the movie's being made up of bones, an X ray, a set of dull facts, that became wildly popular.

  A green lantern hanging from a rafter that shields the balcony pulls me back into the conversation: percentage points, script approval, gross against net profits, terms that, even now, I still find strangely unfamiliar, and I'm staring into Roger's flute of sake and the Oriental girl, inside, is writhing, kicking at the floor, moving in circles, sobbing, and the producer stands up, still talking to Roger, closes the door and smiles when I say, "I'm grateful."

  I call Matt. It takes the operator a swift seven minutes to connect me to the number. Matt's fourth wife, Ursula, answers, sighing when I tell her who it is. I wait five minutes for her to come back and I'm imagining Matt standing next to Ursula in the kitchen of a house in Woodland Hills, head bowed down. Instead Ursula says, "He's here," and Matt's voice comes over the line.

  "Bryan?"

  "Yeah, man, it's me."

  Matt whistles. "Whoa." Long pause. "Where are you?"

  "Japan. Tokyo, I think."

  "Has it been . . . two, three years?"

  "No, man, it hasn't been . . . that long," I say. "I don't know."

  "Well, man, I heard you were, um, touring."

  "World Tour '84, man."

  "I heard something about that. . . .” His voice trails off.

  Tense, awkward silence broken only by "yeah"s and "um"s.

  "I saw the video," he says.

  "The one with Rebecca De Mornay?"

  "Er, no, the one with the monkey."

  "Oh . . . yeah."

  "I heard the album," Matt finally says.

  "Did . . . you like it, man?" I ask.

  "Are you kidding, man?" he says.

  "Is that . . . good, man?" I ask.

  "Great backup. Really tight."

  Another long silence.

  "It's, um, valid, man, valid," Matt says. Pause. "The one about the car, man?" Pause. "I saw John Travolta buy a copy at Tower."

  Long pause.

  "I'm, um, really gratified by your response, man," I say. "Okay?"

  Long pause.

&nb
sp; "Are you, um, doing anything, like, now?" I ask.

  "I've fooled around with some stuff," Matt says. "Might be ready to go into the studio in a couple of months."

  "Ter-rif-ic," I say.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Have you . . . talked to Sam?" I ask.

  "Just about . . . well, maybe it was a month ago? One of the lawyers? Ran into him somewhere. By accident."

  "Sam is . . . okay?"

  Not sounding too sure, Matt says, "He's great."

  "And . . . his lawyers?"

  He answers by asking, "How's Roger?"

  "Roger is . . . Roger."

  "Out of rehab?"

  "A long time ago.

  "Yeah, I know what you mean." Matt sighs. "I know what you mean, man."

  "Well, man." I breathe in, tense up—"I wonder if maybe you'd like to, oh I don't know, if maybe you would like to get together and write some songs when I get finished with this tour, maybe record some stuff . . . man?"

  Matt coughs, then after not too long says, "Oh man I don't know y'know the old days are over man and I really don't think so."

  "Well, fuck, it's not like—" I stop in midsentence.

  "You gotta move on."

  "I . . . I am, you know, but." I start to kick my foot against a wall and my fingernails have somehow dug themselves so hard into the bandaged wound that it becomes spotted with red.

  "It's over, y'know, man?" Matt is saying.

  "Am I, like, lying, man?"

  I'm not saying anything, just blowing on my palm.

  "I was watching some of those old movies that Nina and Dawn took in Monterey," Matt is saying.

  I'm trying not to listen, thinking Dawn?

  "And the weirdest thing but also the grooviest thing is that Ed looked really good. He looked great, in fact. Tan and in good shape and I don't know what happened." Pause. "I don't know what the fuck happened, man."

  "Who cares, man?"

  "Yeah." Matt sighs. "You've got a point."

  "Because I don't care, man."

  "I guess I don't care either, man."

  I hang up, pass out.

  On the way to the arena, sitting in the back of the limo, watching television, sumo wrestling, what could be an old Bruce Lee movie, the same commercial about a blue lemonade seven times, throwing ice cubes I've sucked on at the small square screen, I roll the glass partition down and tell the chauffeur I need a lot of cigarettes and the chauffeur reaches into the glove compartment, tosses back a pack of Marlboros, and cocaine I'd taken earlier isn't doing much of anything, which I expected, and dismayingly it just seems to intensify the pain in my hand and I keep swallowing but residue keeps tickling the back of my throat in an insistent, annoying kind of way and I keep drinking Scotch which almost takes away the taste.