by John Niven
‘Come,’ Lucius said.
Dr Ali entered. ‘Good evening, Lucius,’ he said. Always formal. The doctor was Iranian, in his sixties, with a thick beard and moustache. He’d got out in ’79, when the Shah got in.
‘Hi!’ Lucius said.
‘Would you like your milk now?’
‘Not yet. I want another bit of candy first!’ Lucius was beaming, excited as a ten-year-old.
‘Hmmm.’ The doctor hesitated. As a physician Dr Ali knew the risks involved. ‘Candy’ was the code they used for what was basically a high-end pharmaceutical speedball: part morphine, part methamphetamine. Lucius had already had two shots of this today. ‘Milk’ was more serious and was what Lucius used at bedtime every night: propofol. A drug used in procedural sedation. So, yes, Dr Ali definitely had his reservations about alternately shooting Lucius up with speed and then general anaesthetic. But more than this it was the tedium that it would entail: it was already after eleven o’clock. A shot of candy at this time would mean Du Pre would be up for several hours – taking his pleasures in what the staff called the ‘romper room’ – before Ali had to return to administer the milk sometime around 3 a.m. Infuriatingly, the good doctor had a twenty-two-year-old honey waiting for him at home. A gorgeous, but decidedly simple, Du Pre fan he’d been introduced to at a club in Hollywood last week. (Another undoubted perk of the job.)
‘Hmmm?’ Lucius said. ‘Uh, what’s with the hmmm?’ Lucius didn’t sound like an excited ten-year-old any more. He sounded like Joel Silver with a hangover.
‘Not a thing,’ Ali said, suddenly beaming. Lucius Du Pre was his client after all. (And it helped, Ali found, if you thought in terms of clients rather than patients.) His only client. One who paid him a retainer of a million dollars a year. Who leased him a Porsche and provided a home, and access to beautiful girls and the countless other perks that come with being physician on call to one of the most famous men in the world. ‘Let’s proceed, shall we?’ Lucius had already rolled up his sleeve.
A moment or two with the cotton swab, the two tiny brown bottles, the tourniquet and the syringe, Ali saying, as he always did, ‘Tiny sharp scratch now’, and then – ohhh-hhhhhhhhhhh. Jesus. Sweet Jesus. Come kiss my face.
Lucius vaguely dismissed Ali and then wandered off through his large rooms. Smiling. Touching things. Lamps, books, tapestries. Everything felt nice. White, Lucius thought. They will walk in white. By my side. For they are worthy.
By the time he reached the small bedroom he didn’t even bother to hide it. Just walked straight in with it hanging out, already half hard, massaging it. Jerry gasped, there on the bed in his Disney pyjamas, his lips stained with ice cream, bathed in the blue light of the cartoon film.
‘I hope you’ve saved some room,’ Lucius said, giggling.
THREE
‘I hate him!’ Connor Murphy screamed, lashing out a kick at the back of the driver’s seat of his father’s Mercedes.
‘HEY!’ his dad yelled. Glen sniffed hard, pulling a tangy rope of cocaine back down his throat, concentrating on the twists and turns of Sunset as it snaked through Brentwood. It was late. He’d had to do something to cope with the nearly two-hour round trip out to Malibu and back to Echo Park. ‘Mind the fucking seat!’ He pulled his thick mane of grey-blond hair out of his face, hiked the sleeve of his biker’s jacket up over the Celtic cross tattoo on his forearm. In his early forties now, Glen still dressed like a rock star. Or Kiefer Sutherland circa The Lost Boys.
‘He’s a fucking asshole!’ Connor continued. ‘This Jerry kid. It’s all “Jerry this” and “Jerry that” now.’ The pain was still fresh for Connor. Being led out of the bedroom like that, with all the others. Realising that Jerry wasn’t with them, that Jay had taken Jerry off to one side as they filed down the hallway. That Jerry had received the Golden Ticket that, until very recently, had been Connor’s own invite to the Chocolate Factory.
‘Easy, sweetheart,’ Connor’s mother Bridget said, turning round to look at her son in the back seat, trying to smile, finding it difficult through a combination of Botox and the same rough cocaine she’d snorted with Glen before they left the house. Turning forty this year, Bridget was displaying a good deal more cleavage than might be thought necessary for a night-time drive across the city. But old habits died hard. Fifteen, twenty years ago, had Bridget been making a midnight run across LA it would have been for entirely different reasons than picking her child up.
Bridget and Glen found themselves in a difficult position. They were trying to sympathise with their son’s hurt, with the fact that he had been slighted by someone he loved. But, and even as emotionally insulated with cocaine as they were, it was impossible for the couple not to understand that their integrity was compromised here by the fact that for months they had been allowing their teenage son to be routinely buggered by a fifty-year-old paedophile. Still, the end was in sight. Bridget reached back and patted her son’s leg. ‘It’s nearly over, Connor. We’ve got him. We’ve got him now.’
‘Damn right we’ve got him,’ Glen said.
The Murphys’ story followed a curve familiar to anyone within Lucius Du Pre’s inner circle. They were a poor family, Bridget and Glen having both followed the archetypal LA trajectory: she had got off the bus from Toledo back in 1996 at the age of nineteen. She tried to become an actress, succeeded in becoming a hooker, then took to waitressing when her looks began to go. He too tried to become an actor, failed at becoming an agent, then turned to dealing cocaine. Somewhere along the way Bridget got pregnant and Connor was born shortly after George W. stood on the deck of that aircraft carrier and said, ‘Mission accomplished.’ Connor was a beautiful boy. Everyone said so. So they got him an agent. Just like his parents before him, Connor failed to get a single part, until four years ago, when, just shy of his tenth birthday, he was cast as an extra in the video for Lucius Du Pre’s Christmas single ‘Love All the Children’. (Yes, a title that caused untold hilarity for those in the know. Not so much hiding-in-plain-sight as frantically-masturbating-in-plain-sight.)
Connor and his parents met Lucius on the set. Lucius was very taken with Connor. They were invited to occasional gatherings at Narnia. After a while, once he was twelve, Connor started getting the invitations on his own. After about a year of this, Bridget found a pair of her son’s bloodstained underpants stuffed under his bed. Go straight to the police? This was their initial thought. But Glen had a friend. A lawyer friend, Art. And Art had a slightly different take, a way to exact a far greater revenge. Like the true LA players they were, Glen and Bridget began to ask – What’s the angle? Where does my leverage lie? They bided their time and enjoyed the fruits of the Du Pre patronage for a while. Their credit card debts paid off in full. The Mercedes they were sitting in. Lavish gifts at Christmas and birthdays. And, gradually, they came up with a plan. Glen invested the last few hundred dollars available on one of their Visa cards in some technology, at a place over in the valley. The camera fitted inside a baseball cap. You couldn’t even see it.
‘Yeah,’ Glen Murphy said, accelerating as the lights changed, crossing out of Beverly Hills and into West Hollywood now, remembering the look on Lance Schitzbaul’s face in their meeting the day before yesterday, his jaw dropping, the way the arrogant, high-handed old Jewish fuck was finally lost for words, ‘we got him over a fucking barrel.’
After a moment he realised this might have been an unfortunate turn of phrase given his son’s recent experiences.
FOUR
So you go from the air-conditioned chill of the car, to the air-conditioned chill of the jet, to (via a brief walkthrough of the LAX VIP arrivals) the air-conditioned chill of another car, the car taking me from the airport to the Unigram building in West Hollywood. I don’t bother going to my apartment, having slept a good five or six hours on the flight and showered and changed on the plane. As we get snared in traffic on La Cienega, I turn on the TV in the back of the limo and there it is on CNN – the camera showing a blank stretch of spa
ce in cold, wet Washington. The empty bleachers, the preparations. ‘And we’re now moments away,’ the CNN chick says, ‘from something many people thought was impossible, something that would never come to pass …’
The inauguration of the Donald.
It’s a blinder, isn’t it? A twenty-four-carat belter. I mean, a year or so back, most people wouldn’t have dared imagine he would … that he could. ‘What if he gets the nomination?’ I asked my liberal Californian friends, after he’d bowled down the escalator and called all the fucking beaners rapists and muggers and whatnot. ‘Oh, Steven,’ they laughed. ‘You don’t understand American politics. He’ll never get the Republican nomination because the GOP establishment/the moon’s in Uranus/fucking whatever.’
Well, as you know, after a few months of the Donald literally Sieg Heiling to arenas packed with salivating rednecks, he got the nomination. ‘What if he wins the fucker?’ I asked. ‘Oh, Steven,’ they laughed, all the queer fools you’re forced to hang out with in the entertainment industry, ‘you don’t understand. The numbers don’t work for him. Given the Hispanic vote/the electoral college/the number of Latino shirtlifters in fucking Miami he can’t possibly blah blah blah …’
You know what? These cunts aren’t laughing now.
The GOP establishment? The electoral college picture? The voting block of People of Colour? Turned out no one gave a fuck about all that bollocks. They just wanted to hear all the words. It reminded me of back in the day, when you’d sign the most appalling dance record imaginable. There’d always be a moment where you’d think – ‘Hang on. This is too much. Even the fucking cheap seats aren’t going to be having this.’ And then there you’d be – larging it at number one for a couple of months. This is why the liberals are all going so crazy. The Vengabus is coming? Mate, the Vengabus is going to be number one for the next eight years and you’re all Belle and Sebastian fans.
‘Yeah!’ I shout delightedly at the TV. ‘Suck it up, bitches! MAGA!’
‘How’s that, Mr Stelfox?’ Mike, my usual LA driver, says, turning half around.
‘The inauguration,’ I say, gesturing at the TV. ‘Your new president.’ Mike is black, in his thirties, shaved head, athletic-looking, and I realise we might be about to have a disagreement here. Which I wouldn’t totally mind. Something to get the blood pumping, the faculties sharpened before I go in to meet Trellick.
‘Yes, sir,’ Mike says. He’s smiling and shaking his head slowly, revealing his glittering mouth of crocodile teeth. ‘Hell of a day. Between you and me, and it ain’t a popular view out here …’ he gestures out of the window, at the burger joints, car parks, palm fronds, tanning salons and bumper-to-bumper traffic of southern California, ‘I voted for the man.’
‘Fantastic,’ I say. And then add, genuinely curious ‘Why?’
‘Ah, you know …’ he thinks, punctuating this process with a blast on the horn when the car in front of us fails to notice the lights have changed, ‘… we been pushed around enough.’
Brilliant. Mike must make, what? Fifty grand a year max? It’s like … you’re at Treblinka, or Sobibor, or Belsen, in ’43 or ’44, and you’re there huddled by the smokestacks in your striped pyjamas, weighing forty kilos, watching your kids floating up into the sky in ash form, and instead of voting for more soup or, say, something mental like an actual end to concentration camps, you’re voting to increase the production of Zyklon B like you’ve got shares in the stuff. You’re voting for more guards and a faster turnaround time in the fucking showers. You want to know what happened? Two vectors in history intersected: ‘everyone reckons they’re a player’ met ‘overwhelming fear of sand negroes’ and – bosh – here we are. It’s too fucking good.
‘Amen,’ I say, raising my glass of Evian to the mad darkie.
And then, on-screen, it’s happening. The great man is coming out, walking along with Obama. Obama is trying to smile, put a brave face on it, but he knows it’s over. His liberal dream gone, wiped on the arses of the millions of patriots who voted for the huge black shape lumbering along beside him. I turn the sound up as Trump begins his address. It’s all business as usual until he gets to a line that makes me sit bolt upright in my seat.
‘This American carnage,’ he thunders, ‘stops right here and stops right now.’
American carnage. I fucking like the sound of this.
The elevator takes me up. Samantha, Trellick’s PA (packed into an insanely tight woollen wrap dress), meets me in reception and walks me through the main offices (heads turning at the desks of the juniors. I am, I’ll thank you to remember, something of a legend in this business) with the usual enquiries about my flight and how long I’m in town for. I pass young guys in T-shirts, boilers, beasts and doables, gold and platinum discs and water coolers. It is all very familiar from the offices I spent my youth in, with one major change – there is almost total silence apart from the tapping of keyboards. No phones ringing, no screamed conversations. No blaring music. Everyone is locked in the private atmosphere of their own desk. And then we’re approaching the double doors to the office at the very end, Samantha opens them and …
‘Oi oi,’ James Trellick is saying as he comes across his office to greet me. As everyone who lives out here does after a while, Trellick has a certain California health glow about him – tanned, complexion fresh and healthy from hours of hiking and the gym and parties where you nurse one drink for an hour and a half. Trellick turned fifty last year, but he’d easily pass for ten years younger. He’s wearing a crisp white shirt and jeans. No tie. However, beneath all of this, he looks tired, like he hasn’t slept much in the last couple of days. The eyes are red and I can almost feel the stress radiating from him as he hurries Sam out of the office, saying, ‘We’re not to be disturbed. Oh – and can you tell Lance and Brandon we’ll meet them in the boardroom in –’ he looks at his watch, a Piguet, a fiftieth birthday gift from yours truly – ‘fifteen minutes?’
‘Of course,’ Sam says. ‘Steven, can I get you anything?’
‘Just coffee,’ I say, ‘Bl—’
‘Black. I remember.’
She closes the doors behind her. Trellick and I walk over to his desk. His office is vast, with huge windows giving onto a terrace that looks towards the Hollywood Hills. ‘Right,’ I say as soon as the doors close. ‘Out with it.’
‘Just a sec. Wait till Sam brings the coffee.’
‘I’m assuming this is properly mental if you couldn’t even go into it on the phone?’
‘Off. The. Fucking. Scale,’ Trellick says, slumping down behind his desk. I pick up one of the framed photos on it. Trellick’s wife Pandora and his two sons, James Jr and Alex, now aged eleven and nine. He had another one too, recently – a year or two ago. That’s right, even Trellick did it. Did the decent thing. Straightened up and flew right. Can you imagine it?
‘How’s Pan and the boys?’ I ask.
‘All good.’
‘You behaving yourself?’
‘Mmmm …’ he says, grinning, meaning that there will be stories worth hearing at lunch later. A soft knock at the door, and a girl’s head pops round. ‘James,’ she says, ‘sorry to disturb you. Have you got a second?’
‘Christ, literally a second, Chrissy,’ Trellick says, beckoning her in. ‘Steven, Chrissy Price, one of our A&R people, Chrissy, Steven Stel—’
‘Hi,’ I say, extending a hand as she comes over.
‘Oh, I know who you are,’ she says, cutting Trellick off. ‘Really pleased to meet you. Sorry for interrupting.’There’s a slight Texan twang in her accent, her reddish hair cut in a longish bob that covers much of her face, a freckled face that is undeniably sensational. She’s also been given one of those jackpot body deals: tiny, slender waist with a huge rack and cheeks, her jeans straining to keep the arse in check, the vintage tee (Black Flag) similarly not quite up to the job of keeping the jugs tethered. ‘I just thought you should know that it looks like Capitol have upped their offer on NDC to half a mil.’
> ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Trellick says.
‘We’re still in the frame, but I think we’re going to have to go there, or near there, if we want to stay in the frame.’
‘Do we want to?’ Trellick says.
‘I think we do,’ she says. ‘Their new track is blowing up.’
I’ve been reading about this. I’ve heard a couple of tracks. NDC means Norwegian Dance Crew: a bunch of no-mark rave chancers from Oslo who couldn’t have got arrested in Britain twenty years ago but who have now become – since America suddenly decided it ‘got’ rave a few years ago, or ‘EDM’ as the half-witted colonial spunkers insist on calling it – the hottest unsigned dance act in the business. ‘What do you reckon?’ Trellick says to me, leaning back in his chair, smiling, relishing this trip down memory lane, when this was how I used to earn a living.
What do I reckon? I reckon these Nordic bastards couldn’t write an actual song if you had their immediate families tied up in front of them with knives at their throats. I reckon their ‘live’ set consists of them jumping up and down in matching boiler suits while they play a CD labelled GENERIC RAVE IDIOCY. I reckon they probably have as much longevity as the kind of plastic toy the fucking gyppos give you at the fair when you shoot down five ducks in a row. But I also reckon that this is exactly the kind of thing that the millions of sunburned redneck fuck-faced inbred Yank ravers who pack the clubs at Vegas week after week to lose their minds to DJ Rectal Cancer or MC I’ve Actually Shat Myself are after. I also reckon stranger things have happened. I also reckon that this Chrissy boiler smiling at me now, begging for my approval, is completely fucking doable and would likely suck your cock like she was trapped underwater and the only source of oxygen was your fucking urethra. So …
