Bret Ellis - Less than zero

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 take 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 out 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?"

"She's going to do this movie in Hawaii. What do you do?"

"Have you spoken to her?"

"Don't ask me about my mother."

"Why not?"

"Don't say that."

"Why not?" I say again.

She finds the vest. "Here."

"Why not?"

"What do you do?" she asks, holding out the vest.

"What do you do?"

"What do you do?" she asks, her voice shaking. "Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?"

"Why not?"

She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.

"Because... I don't know," she sighs.

I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.

Rip and I are sitting in I.R.S. Records on La Brea. Some executive in charge of promotion is scoring some coke from Rip. The guy who's executive in charge of promotion is twenty-two and has platinum-blond hair and is wearing all white. Rip wants to know what he can get him.

"Need some coke," the guy says.

"Great," Rip says, and reaches into the pocket of his Parachute jacket.

"It's a nice day out," the guy says.

"Yeah, it's great," Rip says.

"Great," I say.

Rip asks the guy if he can get him a backstage pass to The Fleshtones concert.

"Sure." He hands Rip two small envelopes.

Rip says that he'll talk to him later, sometime soon, and hands him an envelope.

"Great," the guy says.

Rip and I get up and Rip asks him, "Have you seen Julian?"

The guy is sitting behind a large desk and he picks up the phone and tells Rip to wait a minute. The guy doesn't say anything into the phone. Rip leans on the desk and picks up a demo of some new British group that's on the large glass desk. The guy gets off the phone and Rip hands the demo to me. I study it and put it back on the desk. The guy grins and tells Rip that the two of them should have lunch.

"What about Julian?" Rip asks.

"I don't know," the executive in charge of promotion says.

"Thanks a lot." Rip winks.

"Great, you bet, babe," the guy says, leaning back in the chair, his eyes slowly turning up.

Trent calls me up while Blair and Daniel are over at my house and invites us to a party in Malibu; he mentions something about X dropping by. Blair and Daniel say that it sounds like a good idea and though I really don't want to go to a party or see Trent all that badly, the day is clear and a ride to Malibu seems like a nice idea. Daniel wants to go anyway to see what houses were destroyed in the rainstorms. Driving down Pacific Coast Highway, I'm really careful not to speed and Blair and Daniel talk about the new U2 album and when the new song by The Go-Go's comes on they ask me to turn it up and sing along with it, half joking, half serious. It gets cooler as we drive nearer the ocean and the sky turns purplish, gray, and we pass an ambulance and two police cars parked by the side of the road as we head toward the darkness of Malibu and Daniel cranes his neck to get a look and I slow down a little. Blair says she suspects that they're searching for a wreck, an accident, and the three of us are silent for a moment.

X is not at the party in Malibu. Neither are too many other people. Trent answers the door wearing a pair of briefs and he tells us that he and a friend are using this guy's place while he's in Aspen. Apparently, Trent comes here a lot and so do a lot of his friends, who are mostly blond-haired pretty male models like Trent, and he starts to tell us to help ourselves to a drink and some food and he walks back to the jacuzzi and lies down, stretches out under the darkening sky. There are mostly young boys in the house and they seem to be in every room and they all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices, and then I start to wonder if I look exactly like them. I try to forget about it and get a drink and look around the living room. Two boys are playing Ms. Pac Man. Another boy lying in an overstuffed couch smoking a joint and watching MTV. One of the boys playing Ms. Pac Man moans and hits the machine, hard.