Less Than Zero
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.
“I see. Um, why not?”
“I 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 f**k yourself.”
On 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 hum 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.