Less than zero

"Did you bring it?" I ask.

"Cool down..." Rip says, looking at the menu. "It's getting hot. Real hot. Like last summer."

"Yeah."

An old woman, holding an umbrella, falls to her knees on the other side of the street.

"Remember last summer?" he's asking me.

"Not really."

There are people standing over the old woman and an ambulance comes, but most of the people in La Scala don't seem to notice.

"Yeah, sure you do."

Last summer. Things I remember about last summer. Hanging out at clubs: The Wire, Nowhere Club, Land's End, the Edge. An Albino in Canter's around three in the morning. Huge green skull leering at drivers from a billboard on Sunset, hooded, holding a pyx, bony fingers beckoning. Saw a transvestite wearing a halter top in line at some movie. Saw a lot of transvestites that summer. Dinner at Morton's with Blair when she told me not to go to New Hampshire. I saw a midget get into a Corvette. Went to a Go-Go's concert with Julian. Party at Kim's on a hot Sunday afternoon. B-52s on the stereo. Gazpacho, chili from Chasen's, hamburgers, banana daiquiri's, Double Rainbow ice cream. Two English boys lounging by the pool who tell me about how much they like working at Fred Segal. All the English boys I met that summer worked at Fred Segal. Thin French boy, who Blair slept with, smoking a joint, feet in the jacuzzi. Big black Rotweiller bites at the water and swims laps. Rip carries a plastic eyeball in his mouth. I keep staring past the palm trees, watching the skies.

Someone is supposed to be playing at The Palace tonight, but Blair's drunk and Kim spots Lene hanging out in front and the two of them groan and Blair turns the car around. Someone named Angel was supposed to go with us tonight, but earlier today she got caught in the drain of her jacuzzi and almost drowned. Kim says that The Garage reopened somewhere on La Brea and Blair drives to La Brea and then down La Brea and then up and then down once more and she can't find it. Blair laughs and says, "This is ridiculous," and pushes in some Spandau Ballet tape and turns the volume up.

"Let's just go to the fucking Edge," Kim yells.

Blair begins to laugh and then says, "Oh, all right."

"What do you think, Clay? Should we go to the Edge?" Kim asks.

I'm sitting in the back seat drunk and I shrug, and when we get to the Edge, I drink two more drinks.

The DJ at the Edge tonight isn't wearing a shirt and his nipples are pierced and he wears a leather cowboy hat and between songs he keeps mumbling "Hip-Hip-Hooray." Kim tells me that the DJ obviously cannot decide whether he's butch or New Wave. Blair introduces me to one of her friends, Christie, who's on this new TV show on ABC. Christie is with Lindsay, who's tall and looks a lot like Matt Dillon. Lindsay and I walk upstairs to the restroom and do some coke in one of the stalls. Above the sink, on the mirror, someone's written in big black letters "Gloom Rules."

After we leave the restroom, Lindsay and I sit at the bar upstairs and he tells me that there's not too much going on anywhere in the city. I nod, watch the large strobe light blink off and on, flashing across the big dance floor. Lindsay lights my cigarette and begins to talk, but the music's loud and I can't hear a lot of what he's saying. Some surfer bumps into me and then smiles and asks for a light. Lindsay gives the boy a light and smiles back. Lindsay then begins to talk about how he hasn't met anyone for the past four months who's over nineteen. "Blows your mind away, huh?" he screams, over the sound of the music.

Lindsay gets up and says that he spots his dealer and has to go talk to her. I sit at the bar alone and light another cigarette, order another drink. There's a fat girl also sitting alone at the near empty bar, trying to talk to the bartender, who, like the DJ, is also shirtless and dancing by himself, behind the bar, to the music that's pouring out of the club's sound system. The fat girl has a lot of makeup on and she's sipping a Tab with a straw and wearing purple Calvin Klein jeans and matching cowboy boots. The bartender isn't listening to her and I have this image of her, sitting alone in a room somewhere in the city, waiting for a phone to ring. The fat girl orders another Tab. From downstairs the music stops and the DJ announces that there'll be a miniskirt beach party at The Florentine Gardens in two weeks.

"It's really... lively tonight," the fat girl tells the bartender.

"Where?" the bartender asks.

The girl looks down, embarrassed for a moment, and pays for her drink and I can barely hear her mumble, "Somewhere," and she gets up and buttons the top button on her jeans and leaves the bar and sometime, later that night, I realize I'm going to be home for two more weeks.

The psychiatrist I see tells me that he has a new idea for a screenplay. Instead of listening, I sling a leg over the arm of the huge black leather chair in the posh office and light another cigarette, a clove. This guy goes on and on and after every couple of sentences he runs his fingers through his beard and looks at me. I have my sunglasses on and he isn't too sure if I'm looking at him. I am. The psychiatrist talks some more and soon it really doesn't matter what he says. He pauses and asks me if I would like to help him write it. I tell him that I'm not interested. The psychiatrist says something like, "You know, Clay, that you and I have been talking about how you should become more active and not so passive and I think it would be a good idea if you would help me write this. At least a treatment."

I mumble something, blow some of the clove smoke toward him and look out the window.

I park my car in front of Trent's new apartment, a few blocks from U.C.L.A. in Westwood, the apartment he lives in when he has classes. Rip answers the door since he's now Trent's dealer, since Trent hasn't been able to find Julian.

"Guess who's here?" Rip asks me.

"Who?"

"Guess."

"Who?"

"Guess."

"Tell me, Rip."

"He's young, he's rich, he's available, he's Iranian." Rip pushes me into the living room. "Here's Atiff."

Atiff, who I haven't seen since graduation, is sitting on the couch wearing Gucci loafers and an expensive Italian suit. He's a freshman at U.S.C. and drives a black 380 SL.

"Ah, Clay, how are you, my friend?" Atiff gets up from the couch and shakes my hand.

"Okay. How about you?"

"Oh, very good, very good. I just got back from Rome."

Rip walks out of the living room and into Trent's room and turns MTV on and the sound up.

"Where's Trent?" I ask, wondering where the bar is.

"In the shower," Atiff says. "You look great. How was New Hampshire?"

"It was okay," I say, and smile at Trent's roommate, Chris, who's sitting at the table in the kitchen, on the phone. He smiles back and gets up and starts pacing nervously around the kitchen. Atiff is talking about clubs in Venice and how he lost a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage in Florence. He lights a thin Italian cigarette. "I got back two nights ago because I was told classes start soon. I am not sure when they do, but I hear that it is rather soon. " He pauses. "Did you go to Sandra's party at Spago last night? No? It wasn't very good."

I'm nodding and looking over at Chris, who gets off the phone and yells, "Shit."

"What is wrong?" asks Atiff.

"I had my guitar stolen and I had some Desoxyn hidden in it and I was supposed to give it to someone."

"What do you do?" I ask Chris.

"Hang around U.C.L.A."

"Enrolled in classes?"

"I think."

"He also writes music," says Trent, standing in the doorway, only wearing jeans, hair wet, toweling it dry. "Play them some of your stuff."

"Sure," Chris says, shrugging.

Chris goes to the stereo and puts a tape in it. From where I'm standing I can see the jacuzzi, steaming, blue, lit, and past that a weight set and two bicycles. I sit down on the couch and look through some of the magazines spread across the table; a couple of GQ's, and a few Rolling Stones and an issue of Playboy and the issue of People with the picture of Blair and her father in it and a copy of Stereo Review and Surfer. Flip through a Playboy then start to space out and stare at the framed poster for the "Hotel California" album; at the hypnotizing blue lettering; at the shadow of the palms.

Trent mentions that someone named Larry didn't get into film school. The music comes out over the speakers and I try to listen to it, but Trent's still talking about Larry and Rip is cracking up hysterically in Trent's room. "I mean his father's got a fucking series that's in the fucking top ten. He's got his own steadicam and U.S.C. still doesn't let him in? Things are fucked up."

"They didn't let him in because he's a heroin addict," Rip calls out.

"What bullshit," Trent says.

"You didn't know that?" Rip laughs.

"What in the hell are you talking about?"

"He practically eats it raw," Rip says, turning the volume on the television down. "He used to be normal."

"Oh shit, Rip," I call out. "What does normal mean to you?"

"No, I mean really normal."

"Shit, I never knew that about Larry," Atiff says.

"You're so full of shit," Trent calls out to the bedroom. "Oh, Trent, suck my dick," Rip yells.

"Take it out," Trent calls out, laughing, walking back to the bedroom. "Hey, who made the reservations at Morton's?"

Déjà vu passes through me and I open a GQ, faces from my sisters' walls come back to me. The music is loud and the songs sound like they're being sung by a little girl and the drum machine is too noisy, and insistent. The little girl voices sing out, "I don't know where to go/I don't know what to do/I don't know where to go/I don't know what to do/Tell me. Tell me..."

"Did you make the reservations?" Trent calls again.

"You have any meth?" Chris calls back to Trent.

"No," Trent calls back. "Who made the reservations?"

"Yes, I made them," Rip shouts. "Now shut up."

"Do any of you guys have any meth?" Chris asks.

"Meth?" Atiff asks.

"Look, we don't have any meth," I tell him.

The music stops.

"You gotta hear this next song," Trent says, pulling on a shirt.

Chris ignores him and picks up the phone in the kitchen. He dials and then asks whoever's on the other end if they have any meth. Chris pauses and hangs up, looking dejected.

"Some guy propositioned me today," Rip is saying, walking into the living room. "He just came up to me in Flip and offered me six hundred dollars to go to Laguna with him for the weekend."

"I'm sure you're not the only guy he approached," Trent says, coming out into the living room and opening the door that leads out to the jacuzzi. He bends down and feels the water. "Chris, do you have any cigarettes?"

"Yeah, in my room, on the bed stand," Chris says, dialing another number.

I stare back at the poster and wonder if I should do the coke I have in my pocket now, before we go to Morton's, or when we get there. Trent comes out of Chris's room and wants to know who's lying on the floor of Chris's room, sleeping.

"Oh, that's Alan, I think. He's been there for like two days."

"Oh, that's great," Trent says. "Just great."

"Just leave him alone. He has mono or something."

"Let's just go," Trent says.

Rip goes to the bathroom first and Atiff and I stand up.

Chris hangs up the phone.

"Are you going to be here when I get back?" Trent asks him.

"No. Gotta go over to the Colony. Look for some meth."

My dreams start out calmly. I'll be younger and walking home from school and the day will be overcast, clouds gray and white and some of them purple. Then it'll start to rain and I'll begin to run. After running through all this falling water for what seems to be a really long time, I'll suddenly trip into mud and fall flat on the ground and because the earth's so wet, I start to sink, and the mud fills my mouth and I start to swallow it and then it goes up through my nose and finally into my eyes, and I don't wake up until I'm completely underground.

It begins to rain in L.A. I read about the houses falling, slipping down the hills in the middle of the night and I stay up all night, usually wired on coke, until early morning to make sure nothing happens to our house. Then I go out into the damp, humid morning and get the paper, read the film section and try to ignore the rain.

Nothing much happens during the days it rains. One of my sisters buys a fish and puts it in the jacuzzi and the heat and chlorine kill it. I get these strange phone calls. Someone calls, usually late at night, and on my number, and when I answer the phone, the person on the other end doesn't say anything for three minutes. I keep count. Then I'll hear a sigh and the person hangs up. The street lights on Sunset get short-circuited, so a yellow light will be flashing at an intersection and then a green one will blink on for a couple of seconds, followed by the yellow and then the red and green lights will start to shine at the same time.

I get a message that Trent stopped by. He was wearing a really expensive suit, my sisters said, and driving someone else's Mercedes. "Friend of mine's," Trent told them. He also told them to tell me that Scott O.D.'d. I don't know who Scott is. It keeps raining. And that night, after I get three of the weird silent phone calls, I break a glass by throwing it against the wall. No one comes in to see what the sound was. Then I lie on the bed, awake, take twenty milligrams of Valium to come off the coke, but it doesn't get me to sleep. I turn MTV off and the radio on, but KNAC won't come in so I turn the radio off and stare out across the Valley and look at the canvas of neon and fluorescent lights lying beneath the purple night sky and I stand there, nude, by the window, watching the clouds pass and then I lie on my bed and try to remember how many days I've been home and then I get up and pace the room and light another cigarette and then the phone will ring. This is how the nights are when it rains.

I'm sitting in Spago with Trent and Blair and Trent says he's positive that there were people doing cocaine at the bar and I tell him why don't you go join them and he tells me to shut up. Since we did half a gram before leaving Trent's apartment, none of us are too hungry, and we only order appetizers and one pizza and keep drinking grapefruit juice and vodka. Blair keeps smelling her wrist and humming along with the new Human League single that's playing over the stereo system. Blair asks the waiter, after he brings us our fourth round of greyhounds, if he was at the Edge the other night. He smiles and shakes his head.

"So tell me," Blair asks Trent. "Is Walker really an alcoholic?"

"Yeah, yeah. Walker is," Trent says.

"I knew it. But Walker's great though. Walker's nice."

Trent laughs and agrees, then looks at me.

I'm totally startled for a moment and I look at both of them and say, "Walker is nice." I don't know who Walker is.

"Yeah, I like Walker," Trent says.

"Yeah, Walker's nice." Blair nods.

"Hey, did I tell you," Trent begins. "I'm going to the Springs tomorrow. I have to go down and watch some dumb-ass Mexican gardener plant cactus in the backyard. Is that the most typical thing you have ever heard of? So typical. Mom asked me and I said, 'No way, dude,' and she said, 'You never do anything for me,' and I mean, she was right, and so I said, 'Okay,' because I felt sorry for her, you know? Besides, I heard that Sandy has some great coke and he'll be there."

Blair smiles. "You're such a nice boy."

It's getting to be toward midnight and someone pays the check and I tell Trent, after Blair's left for the restroom, that I didn't have the slightest idea who Walker is. Trent looks at me and says, "You don't make any sense, you know that?"

"I make sense."

"No, dude. You're ridiculous."

"Why don't I make sense?"

"Because you just don't."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Maybe it doesn't."

"Jesus."

"You're a fool, Clay," Trent laughs.

"No, I'm not," I tell him, laughing back.

"Yeah, I think you are. In fact, I'm totally sure of it," he says.

"Are you?"

Trent finishes his drink, sucks on an ice cube and asks, "So, who are you fucking?"

"No one. Who I fuck is not your business or Blair's, okay?"

"Yeah, right," he snorts.

"What is this?" I ask Trent.

He doesn't say anything.

"Who are you fucking?" I ask him.

"Oh, come on, Clay, please."

"No, who are you fucking, Trent?" I ask again.

"You don't get it, do you?"

"Get what? What is there to get?" I ask. "If this has anything to do with Blair, you're really screwed. She should know better. Does she think we're still going-out? Is that what she told you? Well, we're not, okay? Got it?" The coke's wearing off and I'm about to get up and go to the men's room.

"Have you told her?" he finally asks.

"No," I say, still looking at him, then out the window.

"Tacky. Really tacky," he says slowly.

"What's tacky?" Blair asks, sitting down.

"Roberto," Trent says, averting his eyes from mine.

I don't want to leave Trent and Blair alone, so I sit there, very still.

"Oh, I don't know. I think he's friendly."

"No, he isn't."

"He's just different," Blair says.

"Why do you like him?" Trent asks, finishing another ice cube, glaring at me.

"Because," Blair says, standing up.

"Because you don't spend that much time with him." Trent gets up also and Blair laughs and says, "Could be," and she's in a better mood and I start to wonder if she did any coke in the bathroom. Probably. Then I wonder if it makes any difference.

While waiting for the car to arrive, Blair and Trent smile at each other in this way that really irritates me and then she looks up at the sky, which is cloudy, and it begins to rain lightly. We get into Blair's car and she puts in a tape that she made the other night and Bananarama starts to sing and Trent asks her where the Beach-Mix tape is and Blair tells him that she burned it because she heard it too many times. For some reason I believe this and unroll the window and we drive to After Hours.

The girl I'm sitting next to at After Hours is sixteen and tan and tells me that it's tragic that KROQ has a playlist. Blair's sitting across from me and next to Trent, who's doing his Richard Blade impersonation for two young blond girls. Rip comes over, after talking to the gay porno star who's sitting at the bar with his girl friend, and he whispers something in Blair's ear and the two of them get up and leave. The girl, who's sitting next to me, is drunk and has her hand on my thigh and is now asking if The Whiskey burned down and I tell her yeah, sure, and Blair and Rip come back and sit down and they both seem insanely alert; Blair's head moves back and forth quickly, staring at the dancers in the club; and Rip's eyes dart from side to side, looking for the girl he came with. Blair picks up a crayon and starts to write something on the table. Rip spots the girl. Tall blond boy comes over to our table and one of the girls sitting next to Trent jumps up and says, "Teddy! I thought you were in a coma!" and Teddy explains that no, he wasn't in a coma, but that he did get his driver's license revoked for drunk driving on Pacific Coast Highway and Blair keeps drawing on the table and Teddy sits down. I think I see Julian here, leaving, and I get up from the table and go to the bar and then outside and it's raining hard and I can hear Duran Duran from inside and a girl I don't know passes by and says, "Hi" and I nod and then go to the restroom and lock the door and stare at myself in the mirror. People knock on the door and I lean against it, don't do any of the coke, and cry for around five minutes and then I leave and walk back into the club and it's dark and crowded and nobody can see that my face is all swollen and my eyes are red and I sit down next to the drunken blond girl and she and Blair are talking about S.A.T. scores. Then Griffin comes in with this really beautiful blond girl and he flashes me a smile and the two of them go to the bar to talk to the gay porno star and his girlfriend. And somewhere along the line, Blair leaves with Rip or maybe with Trent, or maybe Rip leaves with Trent or maybe Rip leaves with the two blond girls sitting next to Trent or maybe Blair leaves with the two blond girls, and I end up dancing with this girl and she leans over to me and whispers that maybe we should go to her place. And we cross the crowded dance floor and she goes to the restroom and I wait at a table for her. Someone's written "Help Me" over and over in red crayon on the table in a childish scrawl and there are little curlicues on the e's in me, and phone numbers written around the twenty "Help Me" 's and a lot of unreadable writing around the telephone numbers and the two red words stick out even more. The girl comes back and we walk out of After Hours, past the girl who said "hi" to me, crying in the doorway, and the gay porno star smoking a joint in the alley; past the four Mexican guys teasing the kids who go in and out of the club, and past the security officer and the parking attendant who keeps telling the Mexican boys that they'd better leave. And one of them calls out to me, "Hey, punk faggot," and the girl and I get into her car and drive off into the hills and we go to her room and I take off my clothes and lie on her bed and she goes into the bathroom and I wait a couple of minutes and then she finally comes out, a towel wrapped around her, and sits on the bed and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she says stop it and, after I let go, she tells me to lean against the headboard and I do and then she takes off the towel and she's naked and she reaches into the drawer by her bed and brings out a tube of Bain De Soleil and she hands it to me and then she reaches into the drawer and brings out a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses and she tells me to put them on and I do. And she takes the tube of suntan lotion from me and squeezes some onto her fingers and then touches herself and motions for me to do the same, and I do. After a while I stop and reach over to her and she stops me and says no, and then places my hand back on myself and her hand begins again and after this goes on for a while I tell her that I'm going to come and she tells me to hold on a minute and that she's almost there and she begins to move her hand faster, spreading her legs wider, leaning back against the pillows, and I take the sunglasses off and she tells me to put them back on and I put them back on and it stings when I come and then I guess she comes too. Bowie's on the stereo and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and turns on MTV. I lie there, naked, sunglasses still on, and she hands me a box of Kleenex. I wipe myself off and then look through a Vogue that's lying by the side of the bed. She puts a robe on and stares at me. I can hear thunder in the distance and it begins to rain harder. She lights a cigarette and I start to dress. And then I call a cab and finally take the Wayfarers off and she tells me to be quiet walking down the stairs so I won't wake her parents. The cab takes me back to Trent's apartment, and it's pouring rain outside, and when I get into my car, there's a note on the passenger seat that says, "Have a good time?" and I'm pretty sure it's Blair's handwriting and I drive back home.

I'm sitting in my psychiatrist's office the next day, coming off from coke, sneezing blood. My psychiatrist's wearing a red V-neck sweater with nothing on underneath and a pair of cut-off jeans. I start to cry really hard. He looks at me and fingers the gold necklace that hangs from his tan neck. I stop crying for a minute and he looks at me some more and then writes something down on his pad. He asks me something. I tell him I don't know what's wrong; that maybe it has something to do with my parents but not really or maybe my friends or that I drive sometimes and get lost; maybe it's the drugs.

"At least you realize these things. But that's not what I'm talking about, that's not really what I'm asking you, not really."

He gets up and walks across the room and straightens a framed cover of a Rolling Stone with Elvis Costello on the cover and the words "Elvis Costello Repents" in large white letters. I wait for him to ask me the question.

"Like him? Did you see him at the Amphitheater? Yeah? He's in Europe now, I guess. At least that's what I heard on MTV. Like the last album?"

"What about me?"

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"You'll be fine."

"I don't know," I say. "I don't think so."

"Let's talk about something else."

"What about me?" I scream, choking.

"Come on, Clay," the psychiatrist says. "Don't be so... mundane."

It was my grandfather's birthday and we had been in Palm Springs for close to two months; for too long. The sun was hot and the air was thick during those weeks. It was lunchtime and we were all sitting out beneath the overhang in front of the pool at the old house. I could remember that my grandmother had bought me a bag of rock candy that day and I had been chewing them constantly, nervously. The housekeeper brought out cold cuts and beer and Hawaiian Punch and potato chips on a large wooden platter, and set it down on the table my aunt and my grandmother and grandfather and mother and father and I were sitting at. My mother and aunt picked at the turkey sandwiches. My grandfather was wearing a jockstrap and a straw hat and drank Michelob beer. My aunt was fanning herself with a People magazine. My grandmother hadn't been feeling well and she nibbled at her sandwich lightly and sipped cold herb tea. My mother wasn't listening to any of the conversation. She was watching my sisters and cousins play in the pool, her eyes fixated on the cool aqua water.

"I think we've been here too long," my aunt said.

"That is an understatement," my father said, shifting in his chair.

"I want to leave," my aunt said in a very far-off voice, eyes distant, her fingers clenched around the magazine.

"Well," my grandfather spoke up. "We'd better get out of here before too soon. I'm turning as red as a tamale. Right, Clay?" He winked at me and opened his fifth beer.

"I'm going to make flight reservations today," my aunt said.

One of my cousins was looking through a copy of the L.A. Times and mentioned something about a plane crash in San Diego. Everybody murmured, and plans for leaving were forgotten.

"How awful," my aunt said.

"I think I would rather die in a plane crash than any other way," my father said after some time.

"I think it would be dreadful."

"But it would be nothing. You get bombed on the plane, take a Librium, and the plane takes off and crashes and you never know what hit you." My father crossed his legs.

It was silent at the table. The only sounds came from my sisters and cousins splashing in the water.

"What do you think?" my aunt asked my mother.

"I try not to think about things like that," my mother said.

"What about you, Mom?" my father asked my grandmother.

My grandmother, who hadn't said anything all day, wiped her mouth and said very quietly, "I wouldn't want to die in any way."

I drive over to Trent's house, but Trent, I remember, is in Palm Springs, so I drive to Rip's place and some blond kid answers the door only wearing a bathing suit, the sunlamp in the living room burning. "Rip is gone," the blond kid says. I leave, and as I'm pulling onto Wilshire, Rip pulls in front of me in his Mercedes, and leans out the window and says, "Spin and I are going to City Cafe. Meet us there." I nod, follow Rip down Melrose, the license plate that reads "CLIMAXX" shimmering.

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 fucker."

"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 fucking 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 fuck 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.

Blair's father is having this party for a young Australian actor whose new film is opening in L.A. next week. Blair's dad is trying to get the actor to star in the new film he's producing, some thirty-million-dollar science fiction adventure film called Star Raiders. But the Australian actor's price is too high. I go to the party to try to talk to Blair, but I haven't seen her yet, only a lot of actors and Blair's friends from film school at U.S.C. Jared's there and he keeps trying to pick up on the Australian actor. Jared keeps asking him if he's seen "The Twilight Zone" with Agnes Moorehead, and the Australian actor keeps shaking his head and saying, "No, mate." Jared mentions other episodes of the show and the Australian actor, who's sweating profusely and drinking his fourth rum and coke, keeps telling Jared that he hasn't seen any of "The Twilight Zone" episodes he's talking about. Finally, the actor walks away from Jared, and Jared's joined by his new boyfriend, not the waiter from Morton's but a costume designer who worked on Blair's father's last film, and who might, or might not, work on the costumes for Star Raiders. The Australian actor walks over to his wife, who ignores him. Kim tells me that the two of them got into a fight this afternoon and that she left their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in a rage and went to an expensive hair salon on Rodeo and had all her hair chopped off. Her hair's red and cut close to the scalp and when she turns her head to a different angle, I can catch patches of white beneath the spiked hair.

Talk of the damage the storms caused at Malibu is brought up and someone mentions that the entire house next to theirs collapsed. "Just like that. One minute it was there. The next — whoosh... Just like that." Blair's mother nods her head as she listens to the director who's telling her this and her lips are trembling and she keeps glancing over at Jared. I'm about to go over and ask her where Blair is, but some people, a couple of actors and actresses and a director and some studio executives enter, and Blair's mother walks over to them. They've just come from the Golden Globe Awards. One of the actresses sweeps into the room and hugs the costume designer and whispers to him loudly, "Marty just lost, get him a whiskey neat, fast, and get me a vodka collins before I collapse, will you, darling?"

The costume designer snaps his fingers at the black, gray-haired bartender and says, "Did you hear that?" The bartender rises out of his stupor a little too quickly, a little too unconvincingly and makes the actress her drinks. People begin to ask her who won what at the Golden Globes. But the actress and most of the actors and producers and studio executives have forgotten. The director, Marty, remembers and he recites each name carefully and if someone asks who they were up against, the director will look straight ahead and tell them, in alphabetical order.

I start to talk to one of the boys who goes to film school at U.S.C. He's very tan and has the beginnings of a blond beard and wears glasses and ripped Tretorn tennis shoes and he keeps talking about the "aesthetic indifference" in American movies. The two of us are sitting alone in the den and soon Alana and Kim and Blair walk in. They sit down. Blair doesn't look at me. Kim touches the boy from film school's leg and says, "I called you last night, where were you?" And he says, "Jeff and I smoked a couple of bowls and then went to a screening of the new Friday the 13th movie." I look over at Blair, try to make eye contact, get her attention. But she won't look over at me.

Jared and Blair's father and the director of Star Raiders and the costume designer walk in and sit down and the talk soon turns to the Australian actor and Blair's father asks the director, who's wearing a Polo sweatsuit and dark glasses, why the actor is in town.

"I think he's here to see if he got nominated for an Oscar. The nominations come out soon, you know."

"For that piece of shit?" Blair's father barks.

He calms down and looks over at Blair, who sits by the fireplace, near where the Christmas tree used to be, and she looks depressed. Her father motions for her. "Come here, baby, sit on daddy's lap." And Blair stares at him incredulously for a moment and then looks down, smiles and walks out of the room. No one says anything. After a while the director clears his throat and says that if they can't get that "fuckin' Aussie" to be in Star Raiders, then who's going to star in it? Some names go around.

"What about that delicious boy who was in Beastman!? You know who I'm talking about, Clyde." The costume designer looks over at the director, who's scratching his chin, deep in thought.

Blair walks back in with a drink and looks over at me and I look away and pretend to be interested in the conversation.

The costume designer slaps his knee and says, "Marco! Marco!" He yelps the name again. "Marco... uh, Marco... Ferr... Ferra... oh shit, I have completely forgotten. "

"Marco King?"

"No, no, no."

"Marco Katz?"

Exasperated, the costume designer shakes his head and says, "Did anyone see Beastman!?"

"When did Beastman! come out?" Blair's father asks.

"Beastman! came out last fall, I think."

"Did it? I thought I saw it at the Avco over the summer."

"But I saw a screening of it over at MGM."

"It didn't even open at the Avco," someone says.

"I think you're talking about Marco Ferraro," Blair says.

"Yeah, that's it," the costume designer says. "Marco Ferraro."

"I thought he O.D.'d," Jared says.

"Yeah, Beastman!, that was pretty good," the film student says to me. "See it?"

I nod, looking over at Blair. I didn't like Beastman! and I ask the film student, "Didn't it bother you the way they just kept dropping characters out of the film for no reason at all?"

The film student pauses and says, "Kind of, but that happens in real life...."

I stare ahead, at Blair.

"I mean, doesn't it?"

"I guess." She won't look at me.

"Marco Ferraro?" Blair's father asks. "Is he a dago?"

"He's gorgeous," Kim sighs.

"Total babe," Alana nods.

"Really?" the director asks, grinning, leaning toward Kim. "Who else do you think is... gorgeous?"

"Yeah, girls," Blair's father says. "Maybe you can give us some input."

"Just remember," Jared says. "No great actors. Just some guy whose ass looks as good as his face."

The costume designer nods and says, "Absolutely."

"Daddy, you know I've been asking you to put Adam Ant or Sting in the movie," Blair says.

"I know, I know, honey. Clyde and I have been talking it over and if you really want it that bad, I think something can be arranged. What do you think about Adam Ant or Sting in Star Raiders?" he asks Alana and Kim.

"I'd see it," Kim says.

"I'd see it twice," Alana says.

"I'd get it on videocassette," Kim adds.

"I agree with Blair," Blair's father says. "I think we should seriously look into Adam Ant or String."

"That's Sting, daddy."

"Yeah, Sting."

Clyde smiles and looks at Kim. "Yeah, let's get Sting. Whaddya think about that, honey?"

Kim blushes and says, "That would be great."

"We'll call him and Adam for readings next week."

"Thank you, Daddy," Blair says.

"Anything you want, baby."

"You better check his bod out first, Clyde," says Jared, looking concerned.

"Oh, we will, we will," Clyde says, still smiling at Kim. "Wanna be there when we do it?"

Blair finally looks at me with this pained look in her eyes and I look over at Kim, almost ashamed, then angry.

Kim blushes once more and says, "Maybe."

Julian hasn't called me since I gave him the money and so I decide to call him the next day. But I don't have his number and so I call Rip, but Rip's gone, some young kid tells me so I call Trent's apartment and Chris answers and tells me that Trent's still in Palm Springs and then asks if I know anyone who has any meth. I finally call Blair and she gives me Julian's number and when I'm about to tell her that I'm sorry about the night at After Hours, she says she's got to go and hangs up. I call the number and a girl with a really familiar voice answers.

"He's either in Malibu or Palm Springs."

"Doing what?"

"I don't know."

"Look, can I have the number at either of those places?"

"All I know is that he's staying at the house in Rancho Mirage or at the house in the Colony." She stops and seems unsure. "That's all I know." There's a long pause. "Who is this? Finn?"

"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 fuckin' 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.

That night it was very warm and while my grandfather slept I ate steak and ribs that had been flown down two days earlier from one of the hotels my grandfather owned in Nevada. I watched a rerun of "The Twilight Zone" that night and took a walk. No one was out. The palm trees were trembling and the streetlights were very bright and if you looked past the house and into the desert, all there was was blackness. No cars passed and I thought I saw a rattlesnake slither into the garage. The darkness, the wind, the rustling from the hedges, the empty cigarette box lying on the driveway all had an eerie effect on me and I ran inside and turned all the lights on and got into bed and fell asleep, listening to the strange desert wind moan outside my window.

It's late on a Saturday night and we're all over at Kim's house. There's nothing much to do here, except drink gin and tonics and vodka with lots of lime juice and watch old movies on the Betamax. I keep staring at this portrait of Kim's mother which hangs over the bar in the high-ceilinged living room. There's nothing much happening tonight except that Blair has heard about the New Garage downtown between 6th and 7th or 7th and 8th and so Dimitri and Kim and Alana and Blair and I decide to drive downtown.

The New Garage is actually a club that's in a four-story parking lot; the first and second and third floors are deserted and there are still a couple of cars parked there from the day before. The fourth story is where the club is. The music's loud and there are a lot of people dancing and the entire floor smells like beer and sweat and gasoline. The new Icicle Works single comes on and a couple of The Go-Go's are there and so is one of The Blasters and Kim says that she spotted John Doe and Exene standing by the DJ. Alana starts to talk to a couple of English boys she knows who work at Fred Segal. Kim talks to me. She tells me that she doesn't think that Blair likes me much anymore. I shrug and look out an open window. From where I'm standing, I look out the window and out into the night, at the tops of buildings in the business district, dark, with an occasional lighted room somewhere near the top. There's a huge cathedral with a large, almost monolithic lighted cross standing on the roof and pointing toward the moon; a moon which seems rounder and more grotesquely yellow than I remember. I look at Kim for a moment and don't say anything. I spot Blair on the dance floor with some pretty young boy, maybe sixteen, seventeen, and they both look really happy. Kim says that it's too bad, though I don't think she means it. Dimitri, drunk and mumbling incoherently, shambles over to the two of us, and I think he's going to say something to Kim, but instead he sticks his hand through the window, getting the skin stuck on the glass, and as he tries to pull his hand away, it becomes all cut up, mutilated, and blood begins to spurt out unevenly, splashing thickly onto the glass. After taking him to some emergency room at some hospital, we go to a coffee shop on Wilshire and sit there until about four and then we go home.

There's another religious program on before I'm supposed to go out with Blair. The man who's talking has gray hair, pink-tinted sunglasses and very wide lapels on his jacket and he's holding a microphone. A neon-lit Christ stands forlornly in the background. "You feel confused. You feel frustrated," he tells me. "You don't know what's going on. That's why you feel hopeless, helpless. That's why you feel there is no way out of the situation. But Jesus will come. He will come through the eye of that television screen. Jesus will put a roadblock in your life so that you can turn around and He's gonna do it for you now. Heavenly Father, You will set the captive free. They, who are in bondage, teach them. Celebrate the Lord. Let this be a night of Deliverance. Tell Jesus, 'Forgive me of my sins,' and then you may feel the joy that is unspeakable. May your cup overflow. In Jesus' name, Amen... Halleluiah!"

I wait for something to happen. I sit there for close to an hour. Nothing does. I get up, do the rest of the coke that's in my closet and stop at the Polo Lounge for a drink before picking up Blair, who I called earlier and mentioned that I had two tickets to a concert at the Amphitheater and she didn't say anything except "I'll go" and I told her I'd pick her up at seven and she hung up. I tell myself, while I sit alone at the bar that I was going to call one of the numbers that flashed on the bottom of the screen. But I realized that I didn't know what to say. And I remember seven of the words that the man spoke. Let this be a night of Deliverance.

I remember these words for some reason as Blair and I are sitting at Spago after having just seen the concert and it's late and we're sitting by ourselves in the patio and Blair sighs and asks for a cigarette. We drink Champagne Kirs, but Blair has too many and when she orders her sixth, I tell her that maybe she's had enough and she looks at me and says, "I am hot and thirsty and I will order what I fucking want."

I'm sitting with Blair in an Italian ice cream parlor in Westwood. Blair and I eat some Italian ice cream and talk. Blair mentions that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is on cable this week.

"The original?" I ask, wondering why she's talking about that movie. I start making paranoid connections.

"No."

"The remake;" I ask cautiously.

"Yeah."

"Oh." I look back at my ice cream, which I'm not eating much of.

"Did you feel the earthquake?" she asks. "What?"

"Did you feel the earthquake this morning?"

"An earthquake?"

"Yes."

"This morning?"

"Yeah."

"No, I didn't."

Pause. "I thought maybe you had."

In the parking lot I turn to her and say, "Listen, I'm sorry, really," even though I'm not too sure if I am.

"Don't," she says. "It's okay."

At a red light on Sunset, I lean over and kiss her and she puts the car into second and speeds up. On the radio is a song I have already heard five times today but hum along to anyway. Blair lights a cigarette. We pass a poor woman with dirty, wild hair and a Bullock's bag sitting by her side full of yellowed newspapers. She's squatting on a sidewalk by the freeway, her face tilted toward the sky; eyes half-slits, because of the glare of the sun. Blair locks the doors and then we're driving along a side street up in the hills. No cars pass by. Blair turns the radio up. She doesn't see the coyote. It's big and brownish gray and the car hits it hard as it runs out into the middle of the street and Blair screams and tries to drive on, the cigarette falling from her lips. But the coyote is stuck under the wheels and it's squealing and the car is having difficulty moving. Blair stops the car and puts it in reverse and turns the engine off. I don't want to get out of the car, but Blair's crying hysterically, her head in her lap, and I get out of the car and walk slowly over to the coyote. It's lying on its side, trying to wag its tail. Its eyes are wide and frightened looking and I watch it start to die beneath the sun, blood running out of its mouth. All of its legs are smashed and its body keeps convulsing and I begin to notice the pool of blood that's forming at the head. Blair calls out to me, and I ignore her and watch the coyote. I stand there for ten minutes. No cars pass. The coyote shudders and arches its body up three, four times and then its eyes go white. Flies start to converge, skimming over the blood and the drying film of the eyes. I walk back to the car and Blair drives off and when we get to her house she turns on the TV and I think she takes some Valium or some Thorazine and the two of us go to bed while "Another World" starts.

And at Kim's party that night, while everyone plays Quarters and gets drunk, Blair and I sit on a couch in the living room and listen to an old XTC album and Blair tells me that maybe we should go out to the guest house and we get up and leave the living room and walk by the lighted pool and once inside the guest house we kiss roughly and I've never wanted her more and she grabs my back and pushes me against her so hard that I lose my balance and we both fall, slowly, to our knees and her hands push up beneath my shirt and I can feel her hand, smooth and cool on my chest and I kiss, lick, her neck and then her hair, which smells like jasmine, and I rub against her and we push each other's jeans down and touch each other and I rub my hand through her underwear and when I enter her too quickly, she breathes in sharply and I try to be very still.

I'm sitting in Trumps with my father. He's bought a new Ferrari and has started wearing a cowboy hat. He doesn't wear the cowboy hat into Trumps, which relieves me, sort of. He wants me to see his astrologer and advises me to buy the Leo Astroscope for the upcoming ear.

"I will."

"Those planetary vibes work on your body in weird ways," he's saying.

"I know."

The window we're sitting next to is open and I lift a glass of champagne to my mouth and close my eyes and let my hair get slightly ruffled by the hot winds and then I turn my head and look up toward the hills. A businessman stops by. I had asked my mother to come, but she said that she was busy. She was lying out by the pool reading Glamour magazine when I asked her to come.

"Just for drinks," I said.

"I don't want to go to Trumps 'just for drinks.' "

I sighed, said nothing.

"I don't want to go anywhere."

One of my sisters, who was lying next to her, shrugged and put on her sunglasses.

"Anyway, I'm having ON put on the cable," she said, harassed, as I left the pool.

The businessman leaves. My father doesn't say much. I try to make conversation. I tell him about the coyote that Blair ran over. He tells me that it's too bad. He keeps looking out the window, eyeing the fire-hydrant-red Ferrari. My father asks me if I'm looking forward to going back to New Hampshire and I look at him and tell him yes.

I awoke to the sound of voices outside. The director whose party my parents had taken my grandmother to the night before was outside at the table, under the umbrella, eating brunch. The director's wife was sitting by his side. My grandmother looked well under the shade of the umbrella. The director began to talk about the death of a stuntman on one of his films. He talked about how be missed a step. Of how he fell headfirst onto the pavement below.

"He was a wonderful boy. He was only eighteen."

My father opened another beer.

My grandfather looked down, sadly. "What was his name?" he asked.

"What?" The director glanced up.

"What was his name? What was the kid's name?"

There was a long silence and I could only feel the desert breeze and the sound of the jacuzzi beating and the pool draining and Frank Sinatra singing "Summer Wind" and I prayed that the director remembered the name. For some reason it seemed very important to me. I wanted very badly for the director to say the name. The director opened his mouth and said, "I forgot."

From lunch with my father I drive to Daniel's house. The maid answers the door and leads me out to the backyard, where Daniel's mother, who I met at Parents Day at Camden in New Hampshire, is playing tennis in her bikini, her body greased with tanning oil. She stops playing tennis with the ball machine and she walks over to me and talks about Japan and Aspen and then about a strange dream she had the other night where Daniel was kidnapped. She sits down on a chaise longue by the pool and the maid brings her an iced tea and Daniel's mother takes the lemon out of it and sucks on it while staring at a young blond boy raking leaves out of the pool and then she tells me she has a migraine and that she hasn't seen Daniel in days. I walk inside and up the stairs and past the poster of Daniel's father's new film and into Daniel's room to wait for him. When it becomes apparent that Daniel won't be coming home, I get into my car and drive over to Kim's house to pick up my vest.

The first thing I hear when I enter the house is screaming. The maid doesn't seem to mind and she walks back into the kitchen after opening the door for me. The house is still not furnished yet and as I walk out to the pool, I pass the Nazi pots. It's Muriel who's screaming. I walk out to where she's lying with Kim and Dimitri by the pool and she stops. Dimitri's wearing black Speedos and a sombrero and is holding an electric guitar, trying to play "L.A. Woman," but he can't play the guitar too well because his hand was recently rebandaged after he sliced it open at the New Garage and everytime his hand comes down on the guitar, his face flinches. Muriel screams again. Kim's smoking a joint and she finally notices me and gets up and tells me that she thought her mother was in England but she recently read in Variety that she's actually in Hawaii scouting locations with the director of her next film.

"You should call before you come over," Kim tells me, handing Dimitri the joint.

"I've tried, but no one answers," I lie, realizing that probably no one would have answered the phone even if I had called.

Muriel screams and Kim looks over at her, distracted and says, "Well, maybe you've been calling the numbers that I've disconnected."

"Maybe," I tell her. "I'm sorry. I just came for my vest."

"Well, I just... it's okay this once, but I don't like people coming over. Someone is telling people where I live. I don't like it."

"I'm sorry about that."

"I mean, I used to like people coming over, but now I just can't stand it. I can't take it."

"When are you going back to school?" I ask her as we walk back to her room.

"I don't know." She gets defensive. "Has it even started yet?"

We walk into her room. There's only a big mattress on the floor and a huge, expensive stereo that takes up an entire wall and a poster of Peter Gabriel and a pile of clothes in the corner. There are also the pictures that were taken at her New Year's Eve party tacked up over the mattress. I see one of Muriel shooting up, wearing my vest, me watching. Another of me standing in the living room only wearing a T-shirt and my jeans, trying to open a bottle of champagne, looking totally out of it. Another of Blair lighting a cigarette. One of Spit, wasted, beneath the flag. From outside, Muriel screams and Dimitri keeps trying to play the guitar.

"What have you been doing?" I ask.

"What have you been doing?" she asks back.

I don't say anything.

She looks up, bewildered. "Come on, Clay, tell me." She looks through the pile of clothes. "You must do something."

"Oh, I don't know."

"What do you do?" she asks.

"Things, I guess." I sit on the mattress.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Things." My voice breaks and for a moment I think about the coyote and I think that I'm going to cry, but it passes and I just want to get my vest and get out of here.

"For instance?"

"What's your mom doing?"

"Narrating a documentary about teenage spastics. What do you do, Clay?"

Someone's written the alphabet, maybe Spit or Jeff or Dimitri, on her wall. I try to concentrate on that, but I notice that most of the letters aren't in order and so I ask, "What else is your mom doing?"

"She's going to do this movie in Hawaii. What do you do?"

"Have you spoken to her?"

"Don't ask me about my mother."

"Why not?"

"Don't say that."

"Why not?" I say again.

She finds the vest. "Here."

"Why not?"

"What do you do?" she asks, holding out the vest.

"What do you do?"

"What do you do?" she asks, her voice shaking. "Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?"

"Why not?"

She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.

"Because... I don't know," she sighs.

I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.

Rip and I are sitting in I.R.S. Records on La Brea. Some executive in charge of promotion is scoring some coke from Rip. The guy who's executive in charge of promotion is twenty-two and has platinum-blond hair and is wearing all white. Rip wants to know what he can get him.

"Need some coke," the guy says.

"Great," Rip says, and reaches into the pocket of his Parachute jacket.

"It's a nice day out," the guy says.

"Yeah, it's great," Rip says.

"Great," I say.

Rip asks the guy if he can get him a backstage pass to The Fleshtones concert.

"Sure." He hands Rip two small envelopes.

Rip says that he'll talk to him later, sometime soon, and hands him an envelope.

"Great," the guy says.

Rip and I get up and Rip asks him, "Have you seen Julian?"

The guy is sitting behind a large desk and he picks up the phone and tells Rip to wait a minute. The guy doesn't say anything into the phone. Rip leans on the desk and picks up a demo of some new British group that's on the large glass desk. The guy gets off the phone and Rip hands the demo to me. I study it and put it back on the desk. The guy grins and tells Rip that the two of them should have lunch.

"What about Julian?" Rip asks.

"I don't know," the executive in charge of promotion says.

"Thanks a lot." Rip winks.

"Great, you bet, babe," the guy says, leaning back in the chair, his eyes slowly turning up.

Trent calls me up while Blair and Daniel are over at my house and invites us to a party in Malibu; he mentions something about X dropping by. Blair and Daniel say that it sounds like a good idea and though I really don't want to go to a party or see Trent all that badly, the day is clear and a ride to Malibu seems like a nice idea. Daniel wants to go anyway to see what houses were destroyed in the rainstorms. Driving down Pacific Coast Highway, I'm really careful not to speed and Blair and Daniel talk about the new U2 album and when the new song by The Go-Go's comes on they ask me to turn it up and sing along with it, half joking, half serious. It gets cooler as we drive nearer the ocean and the sky turns purplish, gray, and we pass an ambulance and two police cars parked by the side of the road as we head toward the darkness of Malibu and Daniel cranes his neck to get a look and I slow down a little. Blair says she suspects that they're searching for a wreck, an accident, and the three of us are silent for a moment.

X is not at the party in Malibu. Neither are too many other people. Trent answers the door wearing a pair of briefs and he tells us that he and a friend are using this guy's place while he's in Aspen. Apparently, Trent comes here a lot and so do a lot of his friends, who are mostly blond-haired pretty male models like Trent, and he starts to tell us to help ourselves to a drink and some food and he walks back to the jacuzzi and lies down, stretches out under the darkening sky. There are mostly young boys in the house and they seem to be in every room and they all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices, and then I start to wonder if I look exactly like them. I try to forget about it and get a drink and look around the living room. Two boys are playing Ms. Pac Man. Another boy lying in an overstuffed couch smoking a joint and watching MTV. One of the boys playing Ms. Pac Man moans and hits the machine, hard.

There are two dogs running along the empty beach. One of the blond boys call out to them, "Hanoi, Saigon, come here," and the dogs, both Dobermans, come leaping gracefully onto the deck. The boy pets them and Trent smiles and starts to complain about the service at Spago. The boy who hit the Ms. Pac Man machine walks over and looks down at Trent.

"I need the keys to the Ferrari. I'm going to get some booze. Know where the credit cards are?"

"Just charge it," Trent says wearily. "And get lots of tonic, okay, Chuck?"

"Keys?"

"Car."

"Sure thing."

The sun starts to break through the clouds and the boy with the dogs sits next to Trent and begins to talk to us. It seems that the boy is also a model and is trying to break into the movie business, like Trent. But the only thing his agent's gotten him is a Carl's Jr. commercial.

"Hey, Trent, it's on, dude," a boy calls from inside the house. Trent taps me on the shoulder and winks and tells me that I have to see something; he motions for Blair and Daniel to come also. We walk into the house and down a hall and into what I guess is the master bedroom and there are about ten boys in the room, along with the four of us and the two dogs, who followed us into the house. Everyone in the room is looking up at a large television screen. I look up to the screen.

There's a young girl, nude, maybe fifteen, on a bed, her arms tied together above her head and her legs spread apart, each foot tied to a bedpost. She's lying on what looks like newspaper. The film's in black and white and scratchy and it's kind of hard to tell what she's lying on, but it looks like newspaper. The camera cuts quickly to a young, thin, nude, scared-looking boy, sixteen, maybe seventeen, being pushed into the room by this fat black guy, who's also naked and who's got this huge hardon. The boy stares at the camera for an uncomfortably long time, this panicked expression on his face. The black man ties the boy up on the floor, and I wonder why there's a chainsaw in the corner of the room, in the background, and then has sex with him and then he has sex with the girl and then walks off the screen. When he comes back he's carrying a box. It looks like a toolbox and I'm confused for a minute and Blair walks out of the room. And he takes out an ice pick and what looks like a wire hanger and a package of nails and then a thin, large knife and he comes toward the girl and Daniel smiles and nudges me in the ribs. I leave quickly as the black man tries to push a nail into the girl's neck.

I sit in the sun and light a cigarette and try to calm down. But someone's turned the volume up and so I sit on the deck and I can hear the waves and the sea gulls crying out and I can hear the hum of the telephone wires and I can feel the sun shining down on me and I listen to the sound of the trees shuffling in the warm wind and the screams of a young girl coming from the television in the master bedroom. Trent walks back outside, twenty, thirty minutes later, after the screams and yelling of the girl and the boy stop, and I notice that he has a hardon. He adjusts himself and sits next to me.

"Guy paid fifteen thousand for it."

The two boys who were playing Ms. Pac Man walk out onto the deck, holding drinks, and one tells Trent that he doesn't think it's real, even though the chainsaw scene was intense.

"I bet it's real," Trent says, somewhat defensively.

I sit back in the chair and watch Blair walk along the shore.

"Yeah, I think it's real too," the other boy says, easing himself into the jacuzzi. "It's gotta be."

"Yeah?" Trent asks, a little hopefully.

"I mean, like, how can you fake a castration? They cut the balls off that guy real slowly. You can't fake that," the boy says.

Trent nods his head and thinks about it for a while and Daniel comes out, smiling, red-faced, and I sit back in the sun.

West, one of my grandfather's personal secretaries, came down that afternoon. He was hunched over, wearing a string tie and a jacket with one of my grandfather's hotels' insignia on the back of it, passing out Beechnut licorice gum. He talked about the heat and the plane ride on the Lear. He came with Wilson, another of my grandfather's aides, and he was wearing a red baseball cap, and he carried around clippings of how the weather in Nevada had been for the past two months. The men sat around and talked about baseball and drank beer and my grandmother sat there, her blouse hanging limply from her frail body, blue-and-yellow kerchief tied tightly around her neck.

Trent and I are standing around Westwood and he's telling me about how the guy came back from Aspen and kicked everyone out of the house in Malibu, so Trent's going to live with someone in the Valley for a couple of days, then he's going to go up to New York to do some shooting. And when I ask him what kind of shooting, he just shrugs and says, "Shooting, dude, shooting." He says that he really wants to go back to Malibu, that he misses the beach. He then asks me if I want to do some coke. I tell him that I do but not right now. Trent takes hold of my arm roughly and says, "Why not?"

"Come on, Trent," I tell him. "My nose hurts."

"It's all right. This'll make it feel better. We can go upstairs at Hamburger Hamlet."

I look at Trent.

Trent looks at me.

It only takes five minutes and when we come back down onto the street, I don't feel too much better. Trent says that he does and wants to go to the arcade across the street. He also tells me that Sylvan, from France, O.D.'d on Friday. I tell him that I don't know who Sylvan was. He shrugs. "Ever mainline?" he asks.

"Have I ever mainlined?"

"Yeah."

"No."

"Oh boy," he says ominously.

When we get to his car, some friend's Ferrari, my nose is bleeding.

"I'll have to get you some Decadron or Celestone. They help swelling in blocked nasal passages," he says.

"Where do you get that?" I ask, my fingers and a piece of Kleenex, covered with snot, blood. "Where do you get that shit?"

There's a long pause and he starts the car up and says, "Are you serious?"

My grandmother had gotten very ill that afternoon. She started to cough up blood. She had already begun to grow bald and had been losing weight as a result of pancreatic cancer. Later that night, as my grandmother lay in her bed, the others continued their conversations, talking about Mexico and bullfights and bad movies. My grandfather cut his finger opening a beer. They ordered food from an Italian restaurant in town and a boy with a patch on his jeans that read "Aerosmith Live" delivered the food. My grandmother came down. She was feeling a little better. She didn't eat anything, though. I sat by her and my grandfather did a magic trick with two silver dollars.

"Did you see that, Grandma?" I asked. Too shy to look into her faded eyes.

"Yes. I saw it," she said, and tried to smile.

I'm about to fall asleep but Alana comes by unannounced and the maid lets her in and she knocks on my door and I wait a long time before I open it. She has been crying and she comes in and sits on my bed and mentions something about an abortion and starts to laugh. I don't know what to say, how to deal with it, so I tell her I'm sorry. She gets up and walks over to the window.

"Sorry?" she asks. "What for?" She lights a cigarette but can't smoke it and puts it out.

"I don't know."

"Well, Clay..." She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she's going to start to cry. I'm standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like "I think we've all lost some sort of feeling."

"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."

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 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.

I light a cigarette and sit down on a bench and notice two pay phones and remember when there used to be no pay phones. Some mothers pick their children up from school and the children catch sight of them and run across the yard and into their arms and the sight of the children running across the asphalt makes me feel peaceful; it makes me not want to get up off the bench. But I find myself walking into an old bungalow and I'm positive that this was where my third-grade classroom was located. The bungalow is in the process of being torn down. Next to the abandoned bungalow lies the old cafeteria, and it's empty and also in the process of being torn down. The paint on both buildings is faded everywhere and peeling off in huge patches of pale green.

I go to another bungalow and the door's open and I walk in. The day's homework is written on the blackboard and I read it carefully and then walk to the lockers but can't find mine. I can't remember which one it was. I go into the boy's bathroom and squeeze a soap dispenser. I pick up a yellowed magazine in the auditorium and strike a few notes on a piano. I had played the piano, the same piano, at a Christmas recital in second grade and I strike a few more chords from the song I played and they ring out through the empty auditorium and echo. I panic for some reason and leave the room. Two boys are playing handball outside. A game I forgot existed. I walk away from the school without looking back and get into my car and drive away.

I meet Julian that same day in an old rundown arcade on Westwood Boulevard. He's playing Space Invaders and I come up and stand next to him. Julian looks tired and talks slowly and I ask him where he's been and he says around and I ask him for the money and tell him that I'm leaving soon. Julian says that there are some problems, but if I come with him to this guy's place, he can give me the money.

"Who is this guy?" I ask him.

"This guy is..." Julian waits and blows away an entire row of Space Invaders. "This guy is some guy I know. He'll give you your money." Julian loses a warrior, mutters something.

"Why don't you get it from him? And then bring it to me?" I tell him.

Julian looks up from the game and stares at me.

"Wait a minute," he says, and leaves the arcade. When he comes back, he tells me that if I want the money, I have to come with him, now.

"I really don't want to."

"See ya later, Clay," Julian says.

"Wait..."

"What's wrong? You wanna come or not? You want your money or not?"

"Why do we have to do it this way?"

"Because," is all Julian says.

"Is there any other way we can work this out?"

Pause.

"Julian?"

"Do you want your money or not?"

"Julian."

"Do you want your money or not, Clay?"

"Yeah."

"Then come on, let's go."

We leave the arcade.

Finn's apartment is on Wilshire Boulevard, not too far away from Rip's penthouse. Julian says he's known Finn for six, maybe seven months, but from the look on Julian's face I get the feeling that he's been going to Finn's apartment a lot longer than that, for too long. The parking attendant knows his car and lets him park it in the Loading Zone Only section. Julian waves at the doorman sitting on a couch. To get to Finn's place, we take the elevator and Julian presses P for Penthouse. The elevator's empty and Julian starts to sing some old Beach Boys song, really loudly, and I lean against the wall of the elevator and take a deep breath as it comes to a stop. I can make out my reflection, blond hair cut too short, a deep tan, sunglasses still on.

We walk through the darkness of the hall to get to Finn's door and Julian rings the bell. The door's opened by a boy, maybe fifteen, with bleached-blond hair and the tan, tough looks of most of the surfers at Venice or Malibu. The boy who's only wearing gray shorts, and who I recognize as the boy who was leaving Rip's apartment the day Rip was supposed to meet me at Cafe Casino, and he stares at us malevolently as we walk in. I wonder if this is Finn or if Finn is sleeping with this surfer and the thought makes me tense and my stomach falls a little. Julian knows where Finn's "office" is, where Finn does his business. I start to get suspicious for some reason and nervous. Julian comes to a white door and opens it and the two of us walk into a totally spare, totally white room, complete with floor-to-ceiling windows and mirrors on the ceiling and this feeling of vertigo washes over me and I almost have to catch my balance. I notice that I can see my father's penthouse in Century City from this room and I get paranoid and start to wonder if my father can see me.

"Hey, hey, hey. It's my best boy." Finn's sitting behind a large desk and is maybe twenty-five, thirty, blond, tan, unremarkable looking. The desk is empty except for a phone and an envelope with Finn's name on it and two small silver vials. The only other thing sitting on the desk is this glass paperweight with a small fish trapped in it, its eyes staring out helplessly, almost as if it was begging to be freed, and I start to wonder, If the fish is already dead, does it even matter?

"Who's this?" Finn asks, smiling at me.

"He's a friend of mine. Name is Clay. Clay, this is Finn." Julian shrugs, distracted.

Finn checks me out and smiles again and then turns to Julian.

"How did everything go last night?" Finn asks, still smiling.

Julian pauses and then says, "Okay, fine," and looks down.

"Fine? That's all? Jason called me today and said that you were fantastic. Really tops."

"He did?"

"Yeah. Really. He really digs you."

I begin to feel weak, walk around the room, search my pocket for a cigarette.

Another pause and then Julian coughs.

"Well, kid, if you're not too busy today, you've got an appointment at four at the Saint Marquis with some business guy from outta town. And then tonight at Eddie's party, okay?"

Finn stares at Julian and then looks at me.

"You know what?" He starts tapping his fingers on the desk. "You bringing your friend here might be a good thing. Guy at the Saint Marquis wants two guys. One just to watch, of course, but Jan is out at the Colony and might not be back...."

I look at Finn and then over at Julian.

"No, Finn. He's a friend," Julian says. "I owe him money. That's why I brought him by."

"Listen, I can wait," I say, realizing somehow that it's too late and adrenaline starts to rush through me.

"Why don't you two guys go?" Finn says, looking me over. "Julian, take your friend."

"No, Finn. Don't drag anybody else into this."

"Listen, Julian," Finn says, not smiling anymore, enunciating each word clearly. "I said, I think that you and your friend should go to the Saint Marquis at four, all right?" Finn turns to me. "You want your money, right?"

I shake my head, no.

"You don't?" he asks incredulously.

"Yes. I mean, yes, I... I do," I say. "Sure."

Finn turns to Julian and then back at me. "You feel all right?"

"Yeah," I tell him. "Just have the shakes."

"Wanna lude?"

"No thanks." I look back at the fish.

Finn turns to Julian. "So, how are your parents, Julian?"

"I don't know." Julian's still looking down.

"Yeah, okay... well," Finn begins. "Okay, why don't you two go to the hotel and then meet me at The Land's End and then we'll go to Eddie's party and give you your money and your friend his money. Okay, babes? How about that? How does that sound?"

"Where do I meet you?" Julian asks.

"At The Land's End. Upstairs," Finn says. "What is this? Is something wrong?"

"No," Julian says. "When?"

"Nine-thirty?"

"Fine."

I look over at Julian and the image of sports club after school in fifth grade comes back to me.

"Are you okay, Julie?" Finn looks back at Julian.

"Yeah, I'm just nervous." Julian's voice trails off. He's about to say something, mouth opens. I can hear a plane passing by, overhead. Then an ambulance.

"What is it, babe? Hey, you can tell me." Finn seems understanding and walks over to Julian and puts his arm around him.

I think Julian's crying.

"Will you excuse us, please?" Finn asks me politely.

I walk out of the room and close the door behind me, but I can still hear the voices.

"I think that tonight will be my last... my last night. Okay, Finn? I don't think I can do this anymore. I'm just so sick of feeling so... sad all the time and I can't... Can't I do something else for you? Just till I pay you back?" Julian's voice is all shaky and then it cracks.

"Hey, hey, hey, baby," Finn croons. "Baby, it's okay."

I could leave the penthouse now. Even though Julian drove, I could leave the penthouse. I could call someone to pick me up.

"No, Finn, no, it's not."

"Here..."

"Ho, Finn. No way. I don't want that. I'm through with that."

"Of course, you are."

There's a really long silence and I can only hear a couple of matches being lit and this slapping sound, and after a while, Finn finally speaks up. "Now, you know that you're my best boy and you know that I care for you. Just like my own kid. Just like my own son..." There's a pause and then Finn says, "You look thin."

The surfer brushes past me and enters the room and tells Finn that someone named Manuel is on the phone. The surfer leaves. Julian gets up from Finn's desk, buttoning his sleeve, and says goodbye to Finn.

"Hey, keep up the Nautilus. Keep up the bod." Finn winks.

"Sure."

"See ya later tonight, right, Clay?"

I want to say no, but I have the feeling somehow that I will be seeing him later tonight and I nod and say, "Yeah" and try to sound convincing, like I mean it.

"You're terrific, you kids. Just fab," Finn tells us.

I follow Julian across the hallway and as I cross the living room to get to the door, I see the surfer lying in the living room on the floor, his right hand down his pants, eating a bowl of Captain Crunch. He's alternating between reading the back of the cereal box and watching "The Twilight Zone" on the huge TV screen in the middle of the living room and Rod Serling's staring at us and tells us that we have just entered The Twilight Zone and though I don't want to believe it, it's just so surreal that I know it's true and I stare at the boy on the living room rug for one last time and then slowly turn away and follow Julian out the door and into the darkness of Finn's hall. And in the elevator on the way down to Julian's car, I say, "Why didn't you tell me the money was for this?" and Julian, his eyes all glassy, sad grin on his face, says, "Who cares? Do you? Do you really care?" and I don't say anything and realize that I really don't care and suddenly feel foolish, stupid. I also realize that I'll go with Julian to the Saint Marquis. That I want to see if things like this can actually happen. And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst.

The Saint Marquis. Four o'clock. Sunset Boulevard. The sun is huge and burning, an orange monster, as Julian pulls into the parking lot and for some reason he's passed the hotel twice and I keep asking him why and he keeps asking me if I really want to go through with this and I keep telling him that I do. As soon as I step out of the car, I look at the pool and wonder if anybody has drowned in the pool. The Saint Marquis is a hollow hotel; it has a swimming pool in a courtyard surrounded by rooms. There's a fat man in a lounge chair, his body shining, suntan oil slathered onto it. He stares at the two of us as we walk toward the room Finn told Julian to go to. The man's staying in room 001. Julian walks up to the door and knocks. The curtains are closed and a face, a shadow, peers out. The door's opened by a man, forty, forty-five, wearing slacks and a shirt and a tie, who asks, "Yes... what may I do for you?"

"You're Mr. Erickson, right?"

"Yes... Oh, you must be..." His voice trails off as he looks Julian and me over.

"Is something wrong?" Julian asks.

"No, not at all. Why don't you two come in?"

"Thanks," Julian says.

I follow Julian into the room and become unnerved. I hate hotel rooms. My great-grandfather died in one. At the Stardust in Las Vegas. He had been dead two days before anybody found him.

"Would you boys like a drink?" the man asks.

I have a feeling that these men always ask this and though I want one, badly, I look at Julian, who shakes his head and says, "No, thank you, sir." And I also say, "No, thank you, sir."

"Why don't you two boys make yourself comfortable and sit down."

"Can I take my jacket off?" Julian asks.

"Yes. By all means, son."

The man begins to make himself a drink.

"Are you in L.A. for long?" Julian asks.

"No, no, just a week, for business." The man sips his drink.

"What do you do?"

"I'm into real estate, son."

I look over at Julian and wonder if this man knows my father. I look down and realize that I don't have anything to say, but I try to think of something; the need to hear my own voice begins to get more intense and I keep wondering if my father knows this guy. I try to shake the thought from my head, the idea of this guy maybe coming up to my father at Ma Maison or Trumps, but it stays there, stuck.

Julian speaks up. "Where are you from?"

"Indiana."

"Oh, really? Where in Indiana?"

"Muncie."

"Oh. Muncie, Indiana."

"That's right."

There's a pause and the man shifts his eyes from Julian to me and then back to Julian. He sips his drink.

"Well, which of you young men would like to get up?" The man from Indiana is gripping his glass too tightly and he sets his drink on the bar. Julian stands up.

The man nods, and asks, "Why don't you take off your tie?"

Julian does.

The man shifts his gaze from Julian over to me, to make sure that I'm watching.

"And your shoes and socks."

Julian does this also and then looks down.

"And... uh, the rest."

Julian slips out of his shirt and pants and the man peels back the window shade and looks out onto Sunset Boulevard and then back at Julian.

"Do you like living in L.A.?"

"Yeah. I love L.A.," Julian says, folding his pants.

The man looks over at me and then says, "Oh no, this won't do. Why don't you sit over there, near the window. That's better." The man sits me down in an easy chair and positions me nearer the bed and then, satisfied, walks up to Julian and places his hand on Julian's bare shoulder. His hand drops down to Julian's jockey shorts and Julian closes his eyes.

"You're a very nice young man."

An image of Julian in fifth grade, kicking a soccer ball across a green field.

"Yes, you're a very beautiful boy," the man from Indiana says, "and here, that's all that matters."

Julian opens his eyes and stares into mine and I turn away and notice a fly buzzing lazily over to the wall next to the bed. I wonder what the man and Julian are going to do. I tell myself I could leave. I could simply say to the man from Muncie and Julian that I want to leave. But, again, the words don't, can't, come out and I sit there and the need to see the worst washes over me, quickly, eagerly.

The man walks over to the bathroom and tells us both that he'll be out in a minute. He closes the bathroom door. I get up from the chair and walk over to the bar to look for something to drink. I notice the man's wallet which he left on the bar and I look through it. I'm so nervous I don't care, don't even know why I'm doing it. There are a lot of business cards in it but I don't look at any, not wanting to see my father's. There are some credit cards and the usual amount of cash someone from out of town might carry when coming into the city. There are also pictures of a very tired, pretty woman, the man's wife probably, and two pictures of his children, all boys, straight-limbed, and with short blond hair and striped shirts, looking full of confidence. The pictures depress me and I put the wallet back down on the bar and wonder if the man took the pictures. I look over at Julian, who's sitting on the edge of the bed, head down. I sit down and then lean over and turn the stereo on.

The man comes out of the bathroom and tells me, "No. No music. I want you to hear it all. Everything." He switches the stereo off. I ask the man if I can use the bathroom. Julian takes off his underwear. The man smiles for some reason and says yes and I walk into the bathroom and lock the door and turn on both faucets in the sink and flush the toilet repeatedly as I try to throw up, but I don't. I wipe my mouth and then come back into the room. The sun's shifting, shadows stretching across the walls, and Julian's trying to smile. The man's smiling back, the shadows stretching across his face.

I light a cigarette.

The man rolls Julian over.

Wonder if he's for sale.

I don't close my eyes.

You can disappear here without knowing it.

Julian and I walk out into the parking lot. We've been in the hotel room since four o'clock and it's now nine. I have been sitting in the chair for five hours. As we get into Julian's car, I ask him where we're going.

"To The Land's End to get your money. You want your money, don't you?" he asks. "Don't you, Clay?"

I look at Julian's face and remember mornings sitting in his Porsche, double-parked, smoking thinly rolled joints, listening to the new Squeeze album before classes started at nine, and even though the image comes back to me, it doesn't disturb me anymore. Julian's face looks older to me now.

It's around ten and The Land's End is crowded. The club lies on Hollywood Boulevard and Julian parks in back, in an alley, and I walk with him up to the entrance and Julian pushes his way through the line and kids jeer, but Julian ignores them. From the back door you walk into the club like you're walking into a cellar and it's dark and like a cave with all these partitions separating the club into small areas where groups huddle in the darkness. As we walk in, the manager, who looks like a fifty-year-old surfer, is hassling with a group of teenagers who are trying to get in and who are obviously underage. And as the manager winks at Julian and lets us both through, one of the girls in line stares at me and smiles, her wet lips, covered with this pink garish lipstick, part and she bares her upper teeth like she was some sort of dog or wolf, growling, about to attack, and she knows Julian and she says something rude that I can't hear and Julian gives her the finger.

Before I can make out any faces, my eyes have to wait a minute to get used to the darkness. The club's crowded tonight and some of the kids waiting out in back won't be able to get in. "Tainted Love" is playing, loudly, over the stereo system and the dance floor is packed with people, most of them young, most of them bored, trying to look turned on. There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy's car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes, all of them or at least most of them staring at one blond-haired boy standing in the back with sunglasses on. Julian recognizes the guy and tells me that he works for Finn also.

We pass through the crowd and walk into the back, leaving the thumping music and the smoke-filled room behind us. In the back and up the stairs is where Lee, the newly appointed part time DJ, hangs out. Finn's sitting on a couch talking to him and it seems that it's Lee's first night and Lee, blond and tan, seems nervous. Finn introduces Julian and me to Lee and then asks Julian how everything went and Julian mutters fine and tells Finn that he wants the money. Finn tells him that he'll give it to him, to both of us, at Eddie's party; that he wants Julian to do a little favor for him; after the little favor, Finn says that he'll be more than happy to give us our money.

Though Lee's eighteen, he looks a lot younger than Julian or I and this scares me. Lee's office looks over Hollywood Boulevard and, as Julian sighs and turns away from Finn, who starts to talk to Lee, I walk to the window and stare at the cars. An ambulance passes by. Then a police siren. Lee looks very preppy, is what Finn says, and then something like, "They like that. That preppy look." It seems that Lee's ready and so is Finn and Lee says that he's a little nervous and Finn laughs and says, "There's nothing to worry about. You don't have to do that much. Not with these guys. Just typical studio execs, that's all." Finn smiles and straightens Lee's tie. "And if you have to do anything... well, hey, you make the money, babes." And Julian says, "Bullshit" a little too loudly and Finn says, "Watch it" and I don't know what I'm doing here and I look over at Lee, who's smiling dumbly, and do and don't see Julian in the same innocent smile.

Julian follows Finn and Lee in Finn's Rolls-Royce and Julian tells them at a stoplight that he has to drop me off at my car so that I can follow them to Eddie's place. Julian drops me back at my car at the arcade in Westwood and then I follow the two cars up into the hills.

The house I follow Finn and Lee and Julian to is in Bel Air and it's a huge stone house with a sprawling front lawn and Spanish fountains and gargoyles looming up above the roof. The house is on Bellagio and I wonder what Bellagio means as I pull into the wide, circular driveway and a valet attendant opens the door and as I get out of the car I can see Finn wrapping his arms around Julian and Lee and they walk through the open front door before me. I follow them into the house and there are mostly men inside, but there are some women too and everyone seems to recognize Finn. Some people even recognize Julian. There's a strobe light on in the living room and for a moment the slight edginess I feel turns into a sort of wild dizziness and my knees almost buckle and it seems that everyone's talking, eyes constantly searching; beat of the music matching the movements and the stares.

"Hey, Finn, my main man, how've you been?"

"Hey, Bobby. Great. How's business?"

"Fab. And who's this?"

"This is my best boy. Julian. And this is Lee."

"Hey," Bobby says.

"Hi," Lee says, and smiles, looks down.

"Say hello." Finn nudges Julian.

"Hello."

"Wanna dance?"

Finn nudges Julian again.

"No, not now. Could you excuse me?" Julian breaks away from Finn and Lee and Finn calls after him and I follow Julian through the crowd, but I lose him and so I light a cigarette and wander over to the bathroom, but it's locked. The Clash are singing "Somebody Got Murdered" and I lean against the wall and break out into a cold sweat and there's a young guy who I sort of recognize sitting in a chair staring at me from across the room and I stare back, confused, wondering if he knows me, but I realize it's pointless. That the guy is stoned and doesn't see me, doesn't see anything.

The bathroom door opens and a man and a woman come out together, laughing, and they pass me and I go in and shut the door and open a small vial and notice that I don't have too much coke left, but I do what's left of it and I take a drink from the faucet and look at myself in the mirror, run my hand over my hair, and then across my cheek, decide I need to shave. Suddenly Julian bursts in, along with Finn. Finn smashes him against the wall and locks the bathroom door.

"What in the hell are you doing?"

"Nothing," Julian yells. "Nothing. Just leave me alone. I'm going home. Give Clay his money."

"You're acting like a real asshole and I want it stopped. I have some very important clients out there tonight and you are not going to fuck it up."

"Leave me the fuck alone," Julian says. "Don't touch me."

I lean up against the wall and look down at the floor.

Finn looks at me and then at Julian and sneers. "Jesus, Julian, you are really pathetic, man. What are you gonna do? You don't have any choice. Do you understand that? You can't leave. You can't walk out now. Are you gonna run to Mommy or Daddy, huh?"

"Stop it."

"Your expensive shrink?"

"Stop it, Finn."

"Who? Do you have any friends left? What the fuck are you gonna do? Just leave?"

"Stop it," Julian screams.

"You come to me a year ago with a huge debt to some dealers and I give you a job and show you off and take you around and I give you all these clothes and all the fuckin' coke you could snort, and what do you do in return?"

"I know. Shut up," Julian screams, choking, covering his head with his hands.

"You act like an arrogant, selfish, ungrateful—"

"Fuck off, you—"

"—little prick."

"—asshole pimp."

"Don't you appreciate what I've done for you?" Finn pushes Julian harder against the door. "Huh? Don't you?"

"Stop it, you asshole pimp."

"Don't you? Answer me. Don't you?"

"Done for me? You've turned me into a whore." Julian's face is all red and his eyes are wet and I'm freaking out, just trying to stare at the floor whenever Julian or Finn looks over at me.

"No. I haven't done that, man," Finn says quietly.

"What?"

"I didn't turn you into a whore. You did it yourself."

The music's pumping through the walls and I can actually feel it vibrate against my back, almost through me, and Julian's still looking down and he tries to move or turn away but Finn holds his shoulders back and Julian starts to laugh-cry softly and he tells Finn that he's sorry.

"I can't do it anymore.... Please, Finn ..."

"Sorry, babe, I just can't let you go that easily."

Julian slowly falls to the floor in a sitting position.

Finn has taken out a syringe and a spoon and a book of matches from Le Dome.

"What are you doing?" Julian sniffs.

"My best boy has got to cool down tonight."

"Finn... But I'm leaving." Julian starts to laugh. "I really am. I've paid my fucking debt. No more. This is it."

But Finn isn't listening and he squats down and grabs Julian's arm and pushes back the jacket sleeve and the shirt and he takes off his own belt and ties it around the arm and slaps at his arm to find a vein and gets one after a while and while he's heating up something in the deep, silver spoon all Julian keeps saying is "Finn. Don't." Finn jabs the needle into Julian's arm and jiggles it.

"What are you gonna do? You have nowhere to go. You going to tell everyone? That you whored yourself to pay off a drug debt? Man, you are more naive than I thought. But come on, baby, you'll feel better."

Disappear Here.

The syringe fills with blood.

You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.

Wonder if he's for sale.

People are afraid to merge. To merge.

Finn finally leads Julian out of the bathroom and I follow them and Finn begins to lead Julian up the stairs and, as the two of them make their way up the long staircase, I can see that there's a door open just a crack at the top of the stairs and the music stops for a minute and I can hear low moans coming from the room, and as Finn leads Julian into the room, a scream suddenly bursts out, and Julian disappears with Finn and the door slams shut. I turn away and leave the house.

After I leave the party, I head for The Roxy, where X is playing. It's almost midnight and The Roxy is crowded and I find Trent standing near the entrance and he asks me where I've been and I don't say anything and then he hands me a drink. It's hot in the club and I hold the drink up to my forehead, my face. Trent mentions that Rip's here and I walk with Trent over to where Rip is, and Trent tells me that they're going to be singing "Sex and Dying in High Society" any minute now and I say "That's great." Rip's wearing black 501's and a white X T-shirt and Spin's wearing a T-shirt that reads: "Gumby. Pokey. The Blockheads" and black 501's also. Rip comes up to me and the first thing he says is, "There are too many fucking Mexicans here, dude."

Spin snorts and says, "Let's kill 'em all."

Trent must think that this is a pretty good idea because he laughs and nods.

Rip glances at me and says, "Jesus, dude. You look real bad. What's wrong? Want some coke?"

I manage to actually shake my head and finish Trent's drink.

A dark boy with a thin mustache and an "Under The Big Black Sun" T-shirt bumps into me and Rip grabs his shoulders and pushes him back into the dancing crowd and shouts "Fuckin' Spic!"

Spin's talking to somebody named Ross, and Spin turns to Rip after Rip's turned away from the stage.

"Listen, Ross has found something in the alley behind Flip."

"What?" Rip shouts, interested.

"A body."

"You kidding me?"

Ross shakes his head nervously, smiling.

"This, I've got to see." Rip grins. "Come on, Clay."

"No," I say. "I don't think so I want to see the show."

"Come on. I want to show you something at my place anyway."

Trent and I follow Rip and Spin to Rip's car and Rip tells us to meet them in back of Flip. Trent and I drive down Melrose and Flip is all lit up and closed and we all make a left and then park behind the building in the deserted lot in back. Ross gets out of his VW Rabbit and motions for Rip and Spin and me and Trent to follow him to the alley behind the empty store.

"I hope nobody told the police," Ross mutters.

"Who else knows about this?" Rip asks.

"Some friends of mine. They found him this afternoon."

Two girls come out of the darkness of the alleys giggling and holding onto each other. One says, "Jesus, Ross, who is that guy?"

"I don't know, Alicia."

"What happened to him?"

"O.D.'d, I guess."

"Have you called the police?"

"What for?"

One of the girls says, "We gotta bring Marcia. She'll freak out."

"Have you girls seen Mimi?" Ross asks.

"She was over here with Derf and they left. We're gonna see X over at The Roxy."

"We were just there."

"Oh, how are they?"

"Okay. They didn't sing 'Adult Books' though."

"They didn't?"

"Nope."

"Oh, they never do."

"I know."

"Bummer."

The girls leave, talking about Billy Zoom, and Rip and Spin and Trent and I follow Ross deeper into the alley.

He's lying against the back wall, propped up. The face is bloated and pale and the eyes are shut, mouth open and the face belongs to some young, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old boy, dried blood, crusted, above the upper lip.

"Jesus," Rip says.

Spin's eyes are wide.

Trent just stands there and says something like "Wild."

Rip jabs the boy in the stomach with his foot.

"Sure he's dead?"

"See him moving?" Ross giggles.

"Christ, man. Where did you find this?" Spin asks.

"Word gets around."

I cannot take my eyes off the dead boy. There are moths flying above his head, twirling around the light bulb that hangs over him, illuminating the scene. Spin kneels down and looks into the boy's face and studies it earnestly. Trent starts to laugh and lights up a joint. Ross is leaning against a wall, smoking, and he offers me a cigarette. I shake my head and light my own, but my hand's shaking badly and I drop it.

"Look at that, no socks," Trent mutters.

We stand there for a while longer. A wind comes through the alley. Sounds of traffic can be heard coming from Melrose.

"Wait a minute," Spin says. "I think I know this guy."

"Bullshit," Rip laughs.

"Man, you are so sick," Trent says, handing me the joint.

I take a drag and hand it back to Trent and wonder about what would happen if the boy's eyes were to open.

"Let's get out of here," Ross says.

"Wait." Rip motions for him to stay and then sticks a cigarette in the boy's mouth. We stand there for five more minutes. Then Spin stands up and shakes his head, scratches at Gumby, and says, "Man, I need a cigarette."

Rip gets up and holds onto my arm and says to me and Trent, "Listen, you two, you've gotta come over to my place."

"Why?" I ask.

"I've got something at my place that will blow your mind."

Trent giggles expectantly and we all leave the alley.

When we get to Rip's apartment on Wilshire, he leads us into the bedroom. There's a naked girl, really young and pretty, lying on the mattress. Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are tied above her head. Her cunt is all rashed and looks dry and I can see that it's been shaved. She keeps moaning and murmuring words and moving her head from side to side, her eyes half-closed. Someone's put a lot of makeup on her, clumsily, and she keeps licking her lips, her tongue drags slowly, repeatedly, across them. Spin kneels by the bed and picks up a syringe and whispers something into her ear. The girl doesn't open her eyes. Spin digs the syringe into her arm. I just stare. Trent says "Wow." Rip says something.

"She's twelve."

"And she is tight, man," Spin laughs.

"Who is she?" I ask.

"Her name is Shandra and she goes to Corvalis" is all Rip says.

Ross is playing Centipede in the living room and the sound of the video game carries to where we're standing. Spin puts a tape on and then takes off his shirt and then his jeans. He has a hardon and he pushes it at the girl's lips and then looks over at us. "You can watch if you want."

I leave the room.

Rip follows me.

"Why?" is all I ask Rip.

"What?"

"Why, Rip?"

Rip looks confused. "Why that? You mean in there?"

I try to nod.

"Why not? What the hell?"

"Oh God, Rip, come on, she's eleven."

"Twelve," Rip corrects.

"Yeah, twelve," I say, thinking about it for a moment.

"Hey, don't look at me like I'm some sort of scumbag or something. I'm not."

"It's..." my voice trails off.

"It's what?" Rip wants to know.

"It's... I don't think it's right."

"What's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it."

I lean up against the wall. I can hear Spin moaning in the bedroom and then the sound of a hand slapping maybe a face.

"But you don't need anything. You have everything," I tell him.

Rip looks at me. "No. I don't."

"What?"

"No, I don't."

There's a pause and then I ask, "Oh, shit, Rip, what don't you have?"

"I don't have anything to lose."

Rip turns away and walks back into the bedroom. I look in and Trent's already unbuttoning his shirt, staring at Spin, who's straddling the girl's head. "Come on, Trent," I say. "Let's get outta here."

He looks over at me and then at Spin and the girl and says, "I think I'm gonna stay."

I just stand there. Spin turns his head while he's thrusting into the girl's head and says, "Shut the door if you're gonna stay. Okay?"

"You should stay," Trent says.

I close the door and walk away and through the living room, where Ross is still playing Centipede.

"I got the high score," he says. He notices that I'm leaving and asks, "Hey, where are you going?"

I don't say anything.

"I bet you're gonna check out that body again, right?"

I close the door behind me.

A few miles from Rancho Mirage, there was a house that belonged to a friend of one of my cousin's. He was blond and good-looking and was going to go to Stanford in the fall and he came from a good family from San Francisco. He would come down to Palm Springs on weekends and have these parties in the house on the desert. Kids from L.A. and San Francisco and Sacramento would come down for the weekend and stay for the party. One night, near the end of summer, there was a party that somehow got out of hand. A young girl from San Diego who had been at the party had been found the next morning, her wrists and ankles tied together. She had been raped repeatedly. She also had been strangled and her throat had been slit and her breasts had been cut off and someone had stuck candles where they used to be. Her body had been found at the Sun Air Drive-In hanging upside down from the swing set that lay near the corner of the parking lot. And the friend of my cousin's disappeared. Some say he went to Mexico and some say he went to Canada or London. Most people say he went to Mexico, though. The mother was put in an institution and the house lay empty for two years. Then one night it burned down and a lot of people say that the guy came back from Mexico, or London, or Canada, and burned it down.

I drive up the canyon road where the house used to be, still wearing the same clothes I had on earlier that afternoon, in Finn's office, in the hotel room of the Saint Marquis, behind Flip, in the alley, and I park the car and sit there, smoking, looking for a shadow or figure lurking behind the rocks. I cock my head and listen for a murmur or a whisper. Some people say you can see the boy walking through the canyons at night, peering out over the desert, wandering through the ruins of the house. Some also say that the police caught him and put him away. In Camarillo, hundreds of miles from Palo Alto and Stanford.

I remember this story clearly as I drive away from the ruins of the house and I begin to drive even farther out into the desert. The night's warm and the weather reminds me of nights in Palm Springs when my mother and father would have friends over and play bridge and I would take my father's car and put the top down and drive through the desert listening to The Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, the hot wind blowing through my hair.

And I remember the mornings when I would be the first one up and I would watch the steam rise off the heated pool on the cold desert at dawn, my mother sitting in the sun all day when it was so quiet and still that I could see the shadows caused by the sun move and shift across the bottom of the still pool and my mother's dark, tan back.

The week before I leave, one of my sister's cats disappears. It's a small brown kitten and my sister says that last night she could hear squealings and a yelp. There are pieces of matted fur and dried blood near the side door. A lot of cats in the neighborhood have had to be kept inside because, if they're allowed out at night, there's a chance that the coyotes will eat them. On some nights when the moon's full and the sky's clear, I look outside and I can see shapes moving through the streets, through the canyons. I used to mistake them for large, misshaped dogs. It was only later I realized they were coyotes. On some nights, late, I've been driving across Mulholland and have had to swerve and stop suddenly and in the glare of the headlights I've seen coyotes running slowly through the fog with red rags in their mouths and it's only when I come home that I realize that the red rag is a cat. It's something one must live with if you live in the hills.

Written on the bathroom wall at Pages, below where it says "Julian gives great head. And is dead.": "Fuck you Mom and Dad. You suck cunt. You suck cock. You both can die because that's what you did to me. You left me to die. You both are so fucking hopeless. Your daughter is an Iranian and your son is a faggot. You both can rot in fucking shitting asshole hell. Burn, you fucking dumbshits. Burn, fuckers. Burn."

The week before I leave, I listen to a song by an L.A. composer about the city. I would listen to the song over and over, ignoring the rest of the album. It wasn't that I liked the song so much; it was more that it confused me and I would try to decipher it. For instance, I wanted to know why the bum in the song was on his knees. Someone told me that the bum was so grateful to be in the city instead of somewhere else. I told this person that I thought he missed the point and the person told me, in a tone I found slightly conspiratorial, "No, dude... I don't think so."

I sat in my room a lot, the week before I left, watching a television show that was on in the afternoons and that played videos while a DJ from a local rock station introduced the clips. There would be about a hundred teenagers dancing in front of a huge screen on which the videos were played; the images dwarfing the teenagers — and I would recognize people whom I had seen at clubs, dancing on the show, smiling for the cameras, and then turning and looking up to the lighted, monolithic screen that was flashing the images at them. Some of them would mouth the words to the song that was being played. But I'd concentrate on the teenagers who didn't mouth the words; the teenagers who had forgotten them; the teenagers who maybe never knew them.

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.

For 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.

A warm wind whipped through the empty gas station and the surfer, who I thought was a hustler, hung up the phone and I heard no dime drop and pretended not to notice. He got on a bus that passed by. GABSTOY left. The phone rang. It was Blair. And I told her not to go. She asked me where I was. I told her that I was in a phone booth in Palm Desert. She asked "Why?" I asked "Why not?" I told her not to go to New York. She said that it was a little too late to be bringing this up. I told her to come to Palm Springs with me. She told me that I hurt her; that I promised I was going to stay in L.A.; that I promised I would never go back East. I told her that I was sorry and that things will be all right and she said that she had heard that already from me and that if we really like each other, what difference will four months make. I asked her if she remembered that night at Disneyland and she asked, "What night at Disneyland?" and we hung up.

And so I drove back to L.A. and went to a movie and sat by myself and then drove around until one or so and sat in a restaurant on Sunset and drank coffee and finished my cigarettes and stayed until they closed. And I drove home and Blair called me. I told her that I'll miss her and that maybe when I get back, things will work out. She said maybe, and then that she did remember that night at Disneyland. I left for New Hampshire the next week and didn't talk to her for four months.

Before I leave I meet Blair for lunch. She's sitting on the terrace of The Old World on Sunset waiting for me. She's wearing sunglasses and sipping a glass of white wine she probably got with her fake I.D. Maybe the waiter didn't even ask her, I think to myself as I walk in through the front door. I tell the hostess that I'm with the girl sitting on the terrace. She's sitting alone and she turns her head toward the breeze and that one moment suggests to me a move on her part of some sort of confidence, or some sort of courage and I'm envious. She doesn't see me as I come up behind her and kiss her on the cheek. She smiles and turns around and lowers her sunglasses and she smells like wine and lipstick and perfume and I sit down and leaf through the menu. I put the menu down and watch the cars pass by, starting to think that maybe this is a mistake.

"I'm surprised you came," she says.

"Why? I told you I was going to come."

"Yes, you did," she murmurs. "Where have you been?"

"I had an early lunch with my father."

"That must have been nice." I wonder if she's being sarcastic.

"Yeah," I say, unsure. I light a cigarette.

"What else have you been doing?"

"Why?"

"Come on, don't get so pissed off. I only want to talk."

"So talk." I squint as smoke from the cigarette floats into my eyes.

"Listen." She sips her wine. "Tell me about your weekend."

I sigh, actually surprised that I don't remember too much of what happened. "I don't remember. Nothing."

"Oh."

I pick up the menu again and then put it down without opening it.

"So, you're actually going back to school," she says.

"I guess so. There's nothing here."

"Did you expect to find something?"

"I don't know. I've been here a long time."

Like I've been here forever.

I quietly kick my foot against the terrace railing and ignore her. It is a mistake. Suddenly she looks at me and takes off her Wayfarers.

"Clay, did you ever love me?"

I'm studying a billboard and say that I didn't hear what she said.

"I asked if you ever loved me?"

On the terrace the sun bursts into my eyes and for one blinding moment I see myself clearly. I remember the first time we made love, in the house in Palm Springs, her body tan and wet, lying against cool, white sheets.

"Don't do this, Blair," I tell her.

"Just tell me."

I don't say anything.

"Is it such a hard question to answer?"

I look at her straight on.

"Yes or no?"

"Why?"

"Damnit, Clay," she sighs.

"Yeah, sure, I guess."

"Don't lie to me."

"What in the fuck do you want to hear?"

"Just tell me," she says, her voice rising.

"No," I almost shout. "I never did." I almost start to laugh.

She draws in a breath and says, "Thank you. That's all I wanted to know." She sips her wine.

"Did you ever love me?" I ask her back, though by now I can't even care.

She pauses. "I thought about it and yeah, I did once. I mean I really did. Everything was all right for a while. You were kind." She looks down and then goes on. "But it was like you weren't there. Oh shit, this isn't going to make any sense." She stops.

I look at her, waiting for her to go on, looking up at the billboard. Disappear Here.

"I don't know if any other person I've been with has been really there, either... but at least they tried."

I finger the menu; put my cigarette out.

"You never did. Other people made an effort and you just... It was just beyond you." She takes another sip of her wine. "You were never there. I felt sorry for you for a little while, but then I found it hard to. You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it."

I watch the cars pass by on Sunset.

"It's hard to feel sorry for someone who doesn't care."

"Yeah?" I ask.

"What do you care about? What makes you happy?"

"Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing," I tell her.

"Did you ever care about me, Clay?"

I don't say anything, look back at the menu.

"Did you ever care about me?" she asks again.

"I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care."

"I cared about you for a little while."

I don't say anything.

She takes off her sunglasses and finally says, "I'll see you later, Clay." She gets up.

"Where are you going?" I suddenly don't want to leave Blair here. I almost want to take her back with me.

"Have to meet someone for lunch."

"But what about us?"

"What about us?" She stands there for a moment, waiting. I keep staring at the billboard until it begins to blur and when my vision becomes clearer I watch as Blair's car glides out of the parking lot and becomes lost in the haze of traffic on Sunset. The waiter comes over and asks, "Is everything okay, sir?"

I look up and put on my sunglasses and try to smile. "Yeah. "

Blair calls me the night before I leave.

"Don't go," she says.

"I'll only be gone a couple of months."

"That's a long time."

"There's always summer."

"That's a long time."

"I'll be back. It's not that long."

"Shit, Clay."

"You've got to believe me."

"I don't."

"You have to."

"You're lying."

"No, I'm not."

And before I left, I read an article in Los Angeles Magazine about a street called Sierra Bonita in Hollywood. A street I'd driven along many times. The article said that there were people who drove on the street and saw ghosts; apparitions of the Wild West. I read that Indians dressed in nothing but loincloths and on horseback were spotted, and that one man had a tomahawk, which disappeared seconds later, thrown through his open window. One elderly couple said that an Indian appeared in their living room on Sierra Bonita, moaning incantations. A man had crashed into a palm tree because he had seen a covered wagon in his path and it forced him to swerve.

When I left there was nothing much in my room except a couple of books, the television, stereo, the mattress, the Elvis Costello poster, eyes still staring out the window; the shoebox with the pictures of Blair in the closet. There was also a poster of California that I had pinned up onto my wall. One of the pins had fallen out and the poster was old and torn down the middle and was tilted and hanging unevenly from the wall.

I drove out to Topanga Canyon that night and parked near an old deserted carnival that still stood, alone in a valley, empty, quiet. From where I was I could hear the wind moving through the canyons. The ferris wheel pitched slightly. A coyote howled. Tents flapped in the warm wind. It was time to go back. I had been home a long time.

There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called "Los Angeles" and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.