Bret Ellis - Less than zero

Rip and I were driving on Mulholland one day before I left and Rip was chewing on a plastic eyeball and wearing a Billy Idol T-shirt and kept flashing the eyeball between his lips. I kept trying to smile and Rip mentioned something about going to Palm Springs one night before I left and I nodded, giving in to the heat. On one of Mulholland's most treacherous turns, Rip slowed the car down and parked it on the edge of the road and got out and motioned for me to do so too. I followed him to where he stood. He pointed out the number of wrecked cars at the bottom of the hill. Some were rusted and burnt, some new and crushed, their bright colors almost obscene in the glittering sunshine. I tried to count the cars; there must have been twenty or thirty cars down there. Rip told me about friends of his who died on that curve; people who misunderstood the road. People who made a mistake late in the night and who sailed off into nothingness. Rip told me that, on some quiet nights, late, you can hear the screeching of tires and then a long silence; a whoosh and then, barely audible, an impact. And sometimes, if one listens very carefully, there are screams in the night that don't last too long. Rip said he doubted that they'll ever get the cars out of there, that they'll probably wait until it gets full of cars and use it as an example and then bury it. And standing there on the hill, overlooking the smog-soaked, baking Valley and feeling the hot winds returning and the dust swirling at my feet and the sun, gigantic, a ball of fire, rising over it, I believed him. And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end.

"Where are we going?" I asked

"I don't know," he said. "Just driving."

"But this road doesn't go anywhere," I told him.

"That doesn't matter."

"What does?" I asked, after a little while.

"Just that we're on it, dude," he said.

Before I left, a woman had her throat slit and was thrown from a moving car in Venice; a series of fires raged out of control in Chatsworth, the work of an arsonist; a man in Encino killed his wife and two children. Four teenagers, none of whom I knew, died in a car accident on Pacific Coast Highway. Muriel was readmitted to Cedars-Sinai. A guy, nicknamed Conan, killed himself at a fraternity party at U.C.L.A. And I met Alana accidentally in The Beverly Center.

"I haven't seen you around," I told her.

"Yeah, well, I haven't been around too much."

"I met someone who knows you."

"Who?"

"Evan Dickson. Do you know him?"

"I'm going-out with him."

"Yeah, I know. That's what he told me."

"But he's fucking this guy named Derf, who goes to Buckley."

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh," she said.

"So what?"

"It's just so typical."

"Yes," I told her. "It is."

"Did you have a good time while you were here?"

"No."

"That's too bad."

And I see Finn at the Hughes Market on Doheny on Tuesday afternoon. It's hot and I've been lying out by the pool all day. I get in my car and take my sisters to the market. They haven't gone to school today and they're wearing shorts and T-shirts and sunglasses and I'm wearing an old Polo bathing suit and a T-shirt. Finn is with Jared and he notices me in the frozen foods section. He's wearing sandals and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and he glances at me once and then looks down and then looks back up. I turn away quickly and walk to the vegetables. He follows me. I pick up a six-pack of iced tea and then a carton of cigarettes. I look back at him and our eyes meet and he grins and I turn away. He follows me to the checkstand.

"Hey, Clay." He winks.

"Hi," I say, smiling, walking away.

"Catch ya later," he says, cocking his fingers as if they were a gun.

The last week. I'm in Parachute with Trent. Trent tries on clothes. I lean against a wall, reading an old issue of Interview. Some pretty blond-haired boy, I think it's Evan, is trying on clothes. He doesn't go into a booth to try them on. He tries them on in the middle of the store in front of a full-length mirror. He looks at himself as he stands there with only his jockey shorts and argyle socks on. The boy's broken from his trance when his boyfriend, also blond and pretty, comes up behind him and squeezes his neck. Then he tries something else on. Trent tells me that he saw the boy with Julian parked in Julian's black Porsche outside of Beverly Hills High, talking to a kid who looked about fourteen. Trent tells me that even though Julian was wearing sunglasses, he could still see the purple bruises around his eyes.

While reading the paper at twilight by the pool, I see a story about how a local man tried to bury himself alive in his backyard because it was "so hot, too hot." I read the article a second time and then put the paper down and watch my sisters. They're still wearing their bikinis and sunglasses and they lie beneath the darkening sky and play a game in which they pretend to be dead. They ask me to judge which one of them can look dead the longest; the one who wins gets to push the other one into the pool. I watch them and listen to the tape that's playing on the Walkman I'm wearing. The Go-Go's are singing "I wanna be worlds away/I know things will be okay when I get worlds away." Whoever made the tape then let the record skip and I close my eyes and hear them start to sing "Vacation" and when I open my eyes, my sisters are floating face down in the pool, wondering who can look drowned the longest.

I go to the movies with Trent. The theater we go to in Westwood is almost empty except for a few scattered people, most of them sitting alone. I see an old friend from high school sitting with some pretty blond girl near the front, on the aisle, but I don't say anything and I'm kind of relieved when the lights go down that Trent hasn't recognized him. Later, in the video arcade, Trent plays a game called Burger Time in which there are all these video hot dogs and eggs that chase around a short, bearded chef and Trent wants to teach me how to play, but I don't want to. I just keep staring at the maniacal, wiggling hot dogs and for some reason it's just too much to take and I walk away, looking for something else to play. But all the games seem to deal with beetles and bees and moths and snakes and mosquitoes and frogs drowning and mad spiders eating large purple video flies and the music that goes along with the games makes me feel dizzy and gives me a headache and the images are hard to shake off, even after I leave the arcade.

On the way home, Trent tells me, "Well, you really acted like a dick today." On Beverly Glen I'm behind a red Jaguar with a license plate that reads DECLINE and I have to pull over.

"What's wrong, Clay?" Trent asks me, this edge in his voice.

"Nothing," I manage to say.

"What in the fuck is wrong with you?"

I tell him I have a headache and drive him home and tell him I'll call him from New Hampshire.

F or some reason I remember standing in a phone booth at a 76 Station in Palm Desert at nine-thirty on a Sunday night, late last August, waiting for a phone call from Blair, who was leaving for New York the next morning for three weeks to join her father on location. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and an old baggy argyle sweater and tennis shoes with no socks and my hair was unbrushed and I was smoking a cigarette. And from where I was standing, I could see a bus stop with four or five people sitting or standing under the fluorescent streetlights, waiting. There was a teenage boy, maybe fifteen, sixteen, who I thought was hitchhiking and I was feeling on edge and I wanted to tell the boy something, but the bus came and the boy got on. I was waiting in a phone booth with no door and the Day-Glo light was insistent and giving me a headache. A parade of ants marched across an empty yogurt cup that I put my cigarette out into. It was strange that night. There were three phone booths at this particular gas station on that Sunday night last August and each booth was being used. There was a young surfer in the booth next to mine in OP shorts and a yellow T-shirt with "MAUI" etched across it and I was pretty sure that he was waiting for the bus. I didn't think the surfer was talking to anyone; that he was pretending to be talking and that there was no one listening on the other end and all I could keep thinking about was is it better to pretend to talk than not talk at all and I kept remembering this night at Disneyland with Blair. The surfer kept looking over at me and I kept turning away, waiting for the phone to ring. A car pulled up with a license plate that read "GABSTOY" and a girl with a black Joan Jett haircut, probably Gabs, and her boyfriend, who was wearing a black Clash T-shirt, got out of the car, motor still running, and I could hear the strains of an old Squeeze song. I finished another cigarette and lit one more. Some of the ants were drowning in the yogurt. The bus came by. People got on. Nobody got off. And I kept thinking about that night at Disneyland and thinking about New Hampshire and about Blair and me breaking up.