Bret Ellis - Less than zero

"Was it Julian's?" I ask, tensing up.

"Julian's? No. It wasn't," she says. "You don't know him."

She falls asleep and I walk downstairs, outside, and sit by the jacuzzi, looking into the lighted water, the steam coming up from it, warming me.

I get up from the pool just before dawn and walk back up to my room. Alana's standing by the window smoking a cigarette and looking out over the Valley. She tells me that she bled a lot last night and that she feels weak. We go out to breakfast in Encino and she keeps her sunglasses on and drinks a lot of orange juice. When we get back to my house, she gets out of the car and says, "Thank you."

"What for?" I ask.

"I don't know," she says after a while.

She gets into her car and drives off.

When I flush the toilet in my bathroom, it becomes stopped up with Kleenex, and blood clouds the water and I put down the lid, because there's nothing else for me to do.

I stop by Daniel's house later that day. He's sitting in his room playing Atari on his television set. He doesn't look too good, tan to the point of sunburn, younger than I remember him in New Hampshire, and when I say something to him, he'll repeat part of it and then nod. I ask him if he got the letter from Camden asking what courses he'll be taking next term and he pulls out the Pitfall cassette and puts in one called Megamania. He keeps rubbing his mouth and when I realize that he's not going to answer me, I ask him what he's been doing.

"Been doing?"

"Yeah."

"Hanging out."

"Hanging out where?"

"Where? Around. Pass me that joint over there on the nightstand."

I hand him the joint and then a book of matches from The Ginger Man. He lights it and then resumes playing "Megamania." He hands me the joint and I relight it. Yellow things are falling toward Daniel's man. Daniel starts to tell me about a girl he knows. He doesn't tell me her name.

"She's pretty and sixteen and she lives around here and on some days she goes to the Westward Ho on Westwood Boulevard and she meets her dealer there. This seventeen-year-old guy from Uni. And this guy spends all day shooting her full of smack again and again...." Daniel misses ducking one of the falling yellow things and it hits his man, which dissolves from the screen. He sighs, goes on. "And then he feeds her some acid and takes her off to a party in the hills or in the Colony and then... and then..." Daniel stops.

"And then what?" I ask, handing him back the joint.

"And then she gets gangbanged by the entire party."

"Oh."

"What do you think?"

"That's... too bad."

"Good idea for a screenplay?"

Pause. "Screenplay."

"Yeah. Screenplay."

"I'm not too sure."

He stops playing "Megamania" and puts in a new cassette, "Donkey Kong." "I don't think I'm going back to school," he says. "To New Hampshire."

After a while I ask him why.

"I don't know." He stops, lights the joint again. "It doesn't seem like I've ever been there." He shrugs, sucks in on the joint. "It seems like I've been here forever." He hands it to me. I shake my head, no.

"So you're not going back?"

"I'm going to write this screenplay, see?"

"But what do your parents think?"

"My parents? They don't care. Do yours?"

"They must think something."

"They've gone to Barbados for the month and then they're going to oh... shit... I don't know... Versailles? I don't know. They don't care," he says again.

I tell him, "I think you should come back."

"I really don't see the point," Daniel says, not taking his eyes off the screen and I begin to wonder what the point was, if we ever knew. Daniel gets up finally and turns the television off and then looks out the window. "Weird wind today. It's pretty strong."

"What about Vanden?" I ask.

"Who?"

"Vanden. Come on Daniel. Vanden."

"She might not be coming back," he says, sitting back down.

"But she might."

"Who's Vanden?"

I walk over to the window and tell him that I'm leaving in five days. There are magazines lying out by the pool and the wind moves them, sends them flying across the concrete near the pool. A magazine falls in. Daniel doesn't say anything. Before I leave I look at him lighting another joint, at the scar on his thumb and finger and feel better for some reason.

I'm in a phone booth in Beverly Hills.

"Hello?" my psychiatrist answers.

"Hi. This is Clay."

"Yes, oh hi, Clay. Where are you?"

"In a phone booth in Beverly Hills."

"Are you coming in today?"

"No."

Pause.

"1 see. Um, why not?"

"1 don't think that you're helping me all that much."

Another pause. "Is that really why?"

"What?"

"Listen, why don't you—"

"Forget it."

"Where are you in Beverly Hills?"

"I won't be seeing you anymore, I think."

"I think I'm going to call your mother."

"Go ahead. I really don't care. But I'm not coming back, okay?"

"Well, Clay. I don't know what to say and I know it's been difficult. Hey, man, we all have—"

"Go fuck yourself."

O n the morning of the last day, West woke up early. He was dressed in the same jacket and the same string tie, and Wilson was wearing the same red baseball cap. West offered me another piece of Bazooka bubble gum and told me that a piece of gum will make you bum and I took two pieces. He asked me if everybody was ready and I said I didn't know. The director's wife stopped by to tell us that they were flying to Las Vegas for the weekend. My grandmother was taking Percodan. We started out for the airport in the Cadillac. In early afternoon the moment finally came to board the plane and leave the desert. Nothing was said in the empty airport lounge until my grandfather turned and looked at my grandmother and said, "Okay, partner, let's go." My grandmother died two months later in a large high bed in an empty hospital room on the outskirts of the desert.

Since that summer, I have remembered my grandmother in a number of ways. I remember playing cards with her and sitting on her lap in airplanes, and the way she slowly turned away from my grandfather at one of my grandfather's parties at one of his hotels when he tried to kiss her. And I remember her staying at the Bel Air Hotel and giving me pink and green mints, and at La Scala, late at night, sipping red wine, and humming "On the Sunny Side of the Street" to herself.

I find myself standing at the gates of my elementary school. I don't remember the grass and flowers, bougainvillea I think, being there when I attended; and the asphalt that was near the administration building has been replaced by trees and the dead trees that used to hang limply over the fence near the security booth are not dead anymore; the entire parking lot has been repaved smoothly with new, black asphalt. I also don't remember a big yellow sign that reads: "Warning. Keep Out. Guard Dogs On Duty" which hangs from the entrance gate, which is visible from my car, parked in the street outside the school. Since classes are over for the day, I decide to walk through the school.

I walk to the gate and then stop for a moment before entering, almost turning back. But I don't. I step past the gate, thinking that this is the first afternoon in a long time that I've come back and walked through the school. I watch three children climb across a jungle gym placed near the entrance gates and I spot two teachers I had in first or second grade, but I don't say anything to them. Instead, I look through the window of a classroom, where a little girl is painting a picture of the city. From where I stand, I can hear the Glee Club practicing in the room next to where the little girl paints, singing songs I forgot existed, like "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Little White Duck."

I used to pass the school often. Everytime I drove my sisters to their school, I would always make sure to drive past and I would catch sight of small children getting onto yellow buses with black trim and teachers laughing to each other in the parking lot before classes. I don't think that anyone else who went to the school drives by or gets out and looks around, since I've never seen anyone I remember. One day I saw a boy I had gone to the school with, maybe first grade, standing by the fence, alone, fingers gripping the steel wire and staring off into the distance and I told myself that the guy must live close by or something and that was why he was standing alone, like me.