“That’s why,” Trent says.
I don’t understand and hang up.
Rip 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.”
Almost 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.
It’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.
There’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.
And at Kim’s party that night, while everyone plays Quarters and gets drunk, Blair and I sit on a couch in the living room and listen to an old XTC album and Blair tells me that maybe we should go out to the guest house and we get up and leave the living room and walk by the lighted pool and once inside the guest house we kiss roughly and I’ve never wanted her more and she grabs my back and pushes me against her so hard that I lose my balance and we both fall, slowly, to our knees and her hands push up beneath my shirt and I can feel her hand, smooth and cool on my chest and I kiss, lick, her neck and then her hair, which smells like jasmine, and I rub against her and we push each other’s jeans down and touch each other and I rub my hand through her underwear and when I enter her too quickly, she breathes in sharply and I try to be very still.
I’m sitting in Trumps with my father. He’s bought a new Ferrari and has started wearing a cowboy hat. He doesn’t wear the cowboy hat into Trumps, which relieves me, sort of. He wants me to see his astrologer and advises me to buy the Leo Astroscope for the upcoming year.
“I will.”
“Those planetary vibes work on your body in weird ways,” he’s saying.
“I know.”
The window we’re sitting next to is open and I lift a glass of champagne to my mouth and close my eyes and let my hair get slightly ruffled by the hot winds and then I turn my head and look up toward the hills. A businessman stops by. I had asked my mother to come, but she said that she was busy. She was lying out by the pool reading Glamour magazine when I asked her to come.
“Just for drinks,” I said.
“I don’t want to go to Trumps ‘just for drinks.’”
I sighed, said nothing.
“I don’t want to go anywhere.”
One of my sisters, who was lying next to her, shrugged and put on her sunglasses.
“Anyway, I’m having ON put on the cable,” she said, harassed, as I left the pool.
The businessman leaves. My father doesn’t say much. I try to make conversation. I tell him about the coyote that Blair ran over. He tells me that it’s too bad. He keeps looking out the window, eyeing the fire-hydrant-red Ferrari. My father asks me if I’m looking forward to going back to New Hampshire and I look at him and tell him yes.
I awoke to the sound of voices outside. The director whose party my parents had taken my grandmother to the night before was outside at the table, under the umbrella, eating brunch. The director’s wife was sitting by his side. My grandmother looked well under the shade of the umbrella. The director began to talk about the death of a stuntman on one of his films. He talked about how he missed a step. Of how he fell headfirst onto the pavement below.
“He was a wonderful boy. He was only eighteen.”
My father opened another beer.
My grandfather looked down, sadly. “What was his name?” he asked.
“What?” The director glanced up.
“What was his name? What was the kid’s name?”
There was a long silence and I could only feel the desert breeze and the sound of the jacuzzi heating and the pool draining and Frank Sinatra singing “Summer Wind” and I prayed that the director remembered the name. For some reason it seemed very important to me. I wanted very badly for the director to say the name. The director opened his mouth and said, “I forgot.”
From lunch with my father I drive to Daniel’s house. The maid answers the door and leads me out to the backyard, where Daniel’s mother, who I met at Parents Day at Camden in New Hampshire, is playing tennis in her bikini, her body greased with tanning oil. She stops playing tennis with the ball machine and she walks over to me and talks about Japan and Aspen and then about a strange dream she had the other night where Daniel was kidnapped. She sits down on a chaise longue by the pool and the maid brings her an iced tea and Daniel’s mother takes the lemon out of it and sucks on it while staring at a young blond boy raking leaves out of the pool and then she tells me she has a migraine and that she hasn’t seen Daniel in days. I walk inside and up the stairs and past the poster of Daniel’s father’s new film and into Daniel’s room to wait for him. When it becomes apparent that Daniel won’t be coming home, I get into my car and drive over to Kim’s house to pick up my vest.
The first thing I hear when I enter the house is screaming. The maid doesn’t seem to mind and she walks back into the kitchen after opening the door for me. The house is still not furnished yet and as I walk out to the pool, I pass the Nazi pots. It’s Muriel who’s screaming. I walk out to where she’s lying with Kim and Dimitri by the pool and she stops. Dimitri’s wearing black Speedos and a sombrero and is holding an electric guitar, trying to play “L.A. Woman,” but he can’t play the guitar too well because his hand was recently rebandaged after he sliced it open at the New Garage and everytime his hand comes down on the guitar, his face flinches. Muriel screams again. Kim’s smoking a joint and she finally notices me and gets up and tells me that she thought her mother was in England but she recently read in Variety that she’s actually in Hawaii scouting locations with the director of her next film.
“You should call before you come over,” Kim tells me, handing Dimitri the joint.
“I’ve tried, but no one answers,” I lie, realizing that probably no one would have answered the phone even if I had called.
Muriel screams and Kim looks over at her, distracted and says, “Well, maybe you’ve been calling the numbers that I’ve disconnected.”
“Maybe,” I tell her. “I’m sorry. I just came for my vest.”
“Well, I just … it’s okay this once, but I don’t like people coming over. Someone is telling people where I live. I don’t like it.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I mean, I used to like people coming over, but now I just can’t stand it. I can’t tak
e it.”
“When are you going back to school?” I ask her as we walk back to her room.
“I don’t know.” She gets defensive. “Has it even started yet?”
We walk into her room. There’s only a big mattress on the floor and a huge, expensive stereo that takes up an entire wall and a poster of Peter Gabriel and a pile of clothes in the corner. There are also the pictures that were taken at her New Year’s Eve party tacked up over the mattress. I see one of Muriel shooting up, wearing my vest, me watching. Another of me standing in the living room only wearing a T-shirt and my jeans, trying to open a bottle of champagne, looking totally out of it. Another of Blair lighting a cigarette. One of Spit, wasted, beneath the flag. From outside, Muriel screams and Dimitri keeps trying to play the guitar.
“What have you been doing?” I ask.
“What have you been doing?” she asks back.
I don’t say anything.
She looks up, bewildered. “Come on, Clay, tell me.” She looks through the pile of clothes. “You must do something.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“What do you do?” she asks.
“Things, I guess.” I sit on the mattress.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Things,” My voice breaks and for a moment I think about the coyote and I think that I’m going to cry, but it passes and I just want to get my vest and get put of here.
“For instance?”
“What’s your mom doing?”
“Narrating a documentary about teenage spastics. What do you do, Clay?”
Someone’s written the alphabet, maybe Spit or Jeff or Dimitri, on her wall. I try to concentrate on that, but I notice that most of the letters aren’t in order and so I ask, “What else is your mom doing?”
Less Than Zero Page 11
