Bret Ellis - Less than zero

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... Halleluiah!"

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 ear.

"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 be 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 beating 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."