Bret Ellis - Less than zero

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.