Less Than Zero

“Finn? No. I just need the number.”



There’s another pause and then a sigh. “Okay, listen. I don’t know where he is. Oh, shit … I can’t tell you this. Who is this?”



“Clay.”



There’s a longer pause.



“Listen,” I say. “Don’t tell him I called. I’ll just get in touch with him later.”



“You sure?”



“Yeah.” I start to hang up.



“Finn?” she asks.



I hang up.



That night I go to a party at Kim’s house and end up meeting someone, Evan, who tells me that he’s a close friend of Julian’s. And the next day we go to McDonald’s after he gets out of school. It’s around three in the afternoon, and Evan sits across from me.



“So, is Julian in Palm Springs?” I ask him.



“Palm Springs is great,” Evan says.



“Yeah,” I say. “Do you know if he’s there?”



“I love it. It’s the most f**kin’ beautiful place in the world. Maybe you and I can go up there sometime,” he says.



“Yeah, sometime.” What does that mean?



“Yeah. It’s great. So’s Aspen. Aspen’s hot.”



“Is Julian there?”



“Julian?”



“Yeah, I heard he might be down there.”



“Why would Julian be at Aspen?”



I tell him I have to go to the restroom. Evan says sure. I go to the phone instead and call Trent, who got back from Palm Springs and ask him if he saw Julian there. He tells me no and that the coke he got from Sandy sucks and that he has too much of it and he can’t sell it. I tell Trent that I can’t find Julian and that I’m strung out and tired. He asks me where I am.



“In a McDonald’s in Sherman Oaks,” I tell him.



“That’s why,” Trent says.



I don’t understand and hang up.



Rip says you can always find someone at Pages at one or two in the morning in Encino. Rip and I drive there one night because Du-par’s is crowded with teenage boys coming from toga parties and old waitresses wearing therapeutic shoes and lilacs pinned to their uniforms who keep telling people to be quiet. So Rip and I go to Pages and Billy and Rod are there and so are Simon and Amos and LeDeu and Sophie and Kristy and David. Sophie sits with us and brings over LeDeu and David. Sophie tells us about the Vice Squad concert at The Palace and says that her brother slipped her a bad lude before the show and so she slept through it. LeDeu and David are in a band called Western Survival and they both seem calm and cautious. Rip asks Sophie where someone named Boris is and she tells him that he’s at the house in Newport. LeDeu has this huge mass of black hair, really stiff and sticking out in all directions, and he tells me that whenever he goes to Du-par’s, people always move away from him. That’s why he and David always come to Pages. Sophie falls asleep on my shoulder and soon my arm falls asleep, but I don’t move it since her head’s on it. David’s wearing sunglasses and a Fear T-shirt and tells me that he saw me at Kim’s New Year’s Eve party. I nod and tell him I remember even though he wasn’t there.



We talk about new music and the state of L.A. bands and the rain and Rip makes faces at an old Mexican couple sitting across from us; he leers at them and slides the black fedora he’s wearing over his face and grins. I excuse myself and go to the bathroom. Two jokes written on the bathroom wall at Pages: How do you get a nun pregnant? Fuck her. What’s the difference between a J.A.P. and a bowl of spaghetti? Spaghetti moves when you eat it. And below the jokes: “Julian gives great head. And is dead.”



Almost everybody had gone home that last week in the desert. Only my grandfather and grandmother, mother and father and myself were left. All the maids had gone, as had the gardener and the poolman. My sisters went to San Francisco with my aunt and her children. Everybody was very tired of Palm Springs. We had been there off and on for nine weeks and nowhere else except Rancho Mirage for the past three. Nothing much happened during the last week. One day, a couple of days before we left, my grandmother went into town with my mother and bought a blue purse. My parents took her to a party at a director’s house that night. I stayed in the big house with my grandfather, who had gotten drunk and had fallen asleep earlier that evening. The artificial waterfall in the spacious pool had been turned off, and with the exception of the jacuzzi, the pool itself was in the process of being drained. Someone had found a rattlesnake floating on top of what was left of the water at the bottom, and my parents warned me to stay in the house and not go out into the desert.