Less Than Zero

City Cafe is closed and there’s an old man in ragged clothing and an old black hat on, talking to himself, standing in front and when we pull up, he scowls at us. Rip unrolls his window and I drive up alongside him.



“Where do you want to go?” I ask him.



“Spin wants to go to Hard Rock.”



“I’ll follow you,” I tell him.



It starts to rain.



We get to Hard Rock Cafe and once we’re seated, Spin tells me that he got some great stuff this afternoon. There’s a man sitting at the table next to ours whose eyes are closed very tightly. The girl he’s sitting with doesn’t seem to mind and picks at a salad. When the man finally opens his eyes, I’m relieved for some reason. Spin’s still talking and when I try to change the subject and ask where Julian might be, Spin tells me that he once got ripped off on what was otherwise real good blow from Julian. Rip tells me that Julian has too many hang-ups.



“For one, he is constantly strung out.”



Spin looks at me and nods. “Strung out.”



“I mean he sells great coke and smack, but he shouldn’t sell it to junior high kids. That’s real low.”



“Yeah,” I say, taking this in. “Low.”



“Some people say that that thirteen-year-old kid who O.D.’d at Beverly bought the smack from Julian.”



I turn to Rip after a while. “What have you been doing?”



“Not too much. Took some animal tranquilizers last night with Warren and went to see The Grimsoles,” he says. “They were cool. Throwing rats out into the audience. Warren took one out to the car.” Rip looks down, giggles. “And killed it. Big rat too. Took him twenty, thirty minutes to kill the f**ker.”



“I just got back from Vegas,” Spin says. “Derf and I drove down. Just hung out at my father’s hotel by the pool in our jocks. It was cool … I guess.”



“What have you been doing, dude?” Rip asks.



“Oh, not too much,” I say.



“Yeah, there’s not a whole lot to do anymore,” he says.



Spin agrees, nods.



After dinner we share a joint in the car as we drive out to Malibu to buy a couple of grams of coke from some guy named Dead. I’m sitting in the small back seat of Rip’s car and I thought that Rip had said, “We’re going to meet someone called Ed.” But when Spin said, “How do you know Dead is gonna be around?” and Rip said,



“Because Dead is always around,” I realized what the name was.



It seems that there’s a party at Dead’s house and some of the people there, mostly young boys, look at the three of us strangely, probably because Rip and Spin and I aren’t wearing bathing suits. We walk up to Dead, who’s in his midforties, wearing a pair of briefs, lying in a huge pile of pillows, two tan young boys sitting by his side watching HBO, and Dead hands Rip a large envelope. There’s a blond pretty girl in a bikini sitting behind Dead and she’s petting the head of the boy who’s on Dead’s left.



“You gotta be more careful, boys,” Dead lisps.



“Why’s that, Dead?” Rip asks.



“There are narcs crawling all over the Colony.”



“No. Really?” Spin asks.



“Yeah. Kid of mine was shot in the leg by a narc.”



“No way. Really?”



“Yeah.”



“Jesus.”



“The guy was seventeen, for Christ’s sake. Shot in the f**king leg. Maybe you know him.”



“Who was it?” Rip asks. “Christian?”



“No. Randall. Goes to Oakwood. Huh?”



Spin shakes his head and “Hungry Like the Wolf” bursts out of the speakers that are attached to the ceiling, above Dead’s balding, sweaty head.



“You gotta be more careful.”



“Yeah. You gotta be more careful,” Spin says, licking his lips at the girl whose fingers are still running through the blond boy’s hair. Blond boy winks at me, pouts his lips.



In the car, Spin tastes the coke and says that it’s cut with too much novocaine. Rip says that at this point he doesn’t care and that he just wants to do some. Rip turns the radio up and keeps screaming happily “What’s gonna happen to all of us?” And Spin keeps screaming back, “All of who, dude? All of who?” We do some of the coke and then go to an arcade in Westwood and play video games for close to two hours and end up spending something like twenty bucks apiece and we stop playing only because we run out of quarters. Rip only has one-hundred-dollar bills on him and the arcade won’t give him change. So Rip stuffs the bills back into his pocket and yells f**k off to the guy working at the change booth and the three of us go back to his car and finish the rest of the coke.