Bret Ellis - Less than zero

There are two dogs running along the empty beach. One of the blond boys call out to them, "Hanoi, Saigon, come here," and the dogs, both Dobermans, come leaping gracefully onto the deck. The boy pets them and Trent smiles and starts to complain about the service at Spago. The boy who hit the Ms. Pac Man machine walks over and looks down at Trent.

"I need the keys to the Ferrari. I'm going to get some booze. Know where the credit cards are?"

"Just charge it," Trent says wearily. "And get lots of tonic, okay, Chuck?"

"Keys?"

"Car."

"Sure thing."

The sun starts to break through the clouds and the boy with the dogs sits next to Trent and begins to talk to us. It seems that the boy is also a model and is trying to break into the movie business, like Trent. But the only thing his agent's gotten him is a Carl's Jr. commercial.

"Hey, Trent, it's on, dude," a boy calls from inside the house. Trent taps me on the shoulder and winks and tells me that I have to see something; he motions for Blair and Daniel to come also. We walk into the house and down a hall and into what I guess is the master bedroom and there are about ten boys in the room, along with the four of us and the two dogs, who followed us into the house. Everyone in the room is looking up at a large television screen. I look up to the screen.

There's a young girl, nude, maybe fifteen, on a bed, her arms tied together above her head and her legs spread apart, each foot tied to a bedpost. She's lying on what looks like newspaper. The film's in black and white and scratchy and it's kind of hard to tell what she's lying on, but it looks like newspaper. The camera cuts quickly to a young, thin, nude, scared-looking boy, sixteen, maybe seventeen, being pushed into the room by this fat black guy, who's also naked and who's got this huge hardon. The boy stares at the camera for an uncomfortably long time, this panicked expression on his face. The black man ties the boy up on the floor, and I wonder why there's a chainsaw in the corner of the room, in the background, and then has sex with him and then he has sex with the girl and then walks off the screen. When he comes back he's carrying a box. It looks like a toolbox and I'm confused for a minute and Blair walks out of the room. And he takes out an ice pick and what looks like a wire hanger and a package of nails and then a thin, large knife and he comes toward the girl and Daniel smiles and nudges me in the ribs. I leave quickly as the black man tries to push a nail into the girl's neck.

I sit in the sun and light a cigarette and try to calm down. But someone's turned the volume up and so I sit on the deck and I can hear the waves and the sea gulls crying out and I can hear the hum of the telephone wires and I can feel the sun shining down on me and I listen to the sound of the trees shuffling in the warm wind and the screams of a young girl coming from the television in the master bedroom. Trent walks back outside, twenty, thirty minutes later, after the screams and yelling of the girl and the boy stop, and I notice that he has a hardon. He adjusts himself and sits next to me.

"Guy paid fifteen thousand for it."

The two boys who were playing Ms. Pac Man walk out onto the deck, holding drinks, and one tells Trent that he doesn't think it's real, even though the chainsaw scene was intense.

"I bet it's real," Trent says, somewhat defensively.

I sit back in the chair and watch Blair walk along the shore.

"Yeah, I think it's real too," the other boy says, easing himself into the jacuzzi. "It's gotta be."

"Yeah?" Trent asks, a little hopefully.

"I mean, like, how can you fake a castration? They cut the balls off that guy real slowly. You can't fake that," the boy says.

Trent nods his head and thinks about it for a while and Daniel comes out, smiling, red-faced, and I sit back in the sun.

W est, one of my grandfather's personal secretaries, came down that afternoon. He was hunched over, wearing a string tie and a jacket with one of my grandfather's hotels' insignia on the back of it, passing out Beechnut licorice gum. He talked about the heat and the plane ride on the Lear. He came with Wilson, another of my grandfather's aides, and he was wearing a red baseball cap, and he carried around clippings of how the weather in Nevada had been for the past two months. The men sat around and talked about baseball and drank beer and my grandmother sat there, her blouse hanging limply from her frail body, blue-and-yellow kerchief tied tightly around her neck.

Trent and I are standing around Westwood and he's telling me about how the guy came back from Aspen and kicked everyone out of the house in Malibu, so Trent's going to live with someone in the Valley for a couple of days, then he's going to go up to New York to do some shooting. And when I ask him what kind of shooting, he just shrugs and says, "Shooting, dude, shooting." He says that he really wants to go back to Malibu, that he misses the beach. He then asks me if I want to do some coke. I tell him that I do but not right now. Trent takes hold of my arm roughly and says, "Why not?"

"Come on, Trent," I tell him. "My nose hurts."

"It's all right. This'll make it feel better. We can go upstairs at Hamburger Hamlet."

I look at Trent.

Trent looks at me.

It only takes five minutes and when we come back down onto the street, I don't feel too much better. Trent says that he does and wants to go to the arcade across the street. He also tells me that Sylvan, from France, O.D.'d on Friday. I tell him that I don't know who Sylvan was. He shrugs. "Ever mainline?" he asks.

"Have I ever mainlined?"

"Yeah."

"No."

"Oh boy," he says ominously.

When we get to his car, some friend's Ferrari, my nose is bleeding.

"I'll have to get you some Decadron or Celestone. They help swelling in blocked nasal passages," he says.

"Where do you get that?" I ask, my fingers and a piece of Kleenex, covered with snot, blood. "Where do you get that shit?"

There's a long pause and he starts the car up and says, "Are you serious?"

M y grandmother had gotten very ill that afternoon. She started to cough up blood. She had already begun to grow bald and had been losing weight as a result of pancreatic cancer. Later that night, as my grandmother lay in her bed, the others continued their conversations, talking about Mexico and bullfights and bad movies. My grandfather cut his finger opening a beer. They ordered food from an Italian restaurant in town and a boy with a patch on his jeans that read "Aerosmith Live" delivered the food. My grandmother came down. She was feeling a little better. She didn't eat anything, though. I sat by her and my grandfather did a magic trick with two silver dollars.

"Did you see that, Grandma?" I asked. Too shy to look into her faded eyes.

"Yes. I saw it," she said, and tried to smile.

I'm about to fall asleep but Alana comes by unannounced and the maid lets her in and she knocks on my door and I wait a long time before I open it. She has been crying and she comes in and sits on my bed and mentions something about an abortion and starts to laugh. I don't know what to say, how to deal with it, so I tell her I'm sorry. She gets up and walks over to the window.

"Sorry?" she asks. "What for?" She lights a cigarette but can't smoke it and puts it out.

"I don't know."

"Well, Clay..." She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she's going to start to cry. I'm standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like "I think we've all lost some sort of feeling."