Glamorama (17 page)

“Oh great,” I groan. “Who is this little shit? I mean, spare me, baby.”

“Victor, Chloe and I are friends. I assume you know this,” she says, staring straight at me. “At least you’re supposed to know this.”

“Why am I supposed to know this?” I smile.

“Because she’s your girlfriend?” she asks, her mouth hanging open.

“That’s an excuse?”

“No, Victor. A reason.
You’re
making it an excuse.”

“You’re losing me, baby. This is getting kinda trippy.”

“Well, steady yourself.”

“Hey, what about a cappuccino?”

“Don’t you know who your girlfriend’s acquaintances are? Don’t you talk to her?” Lauren is losing it. “What’s with you—oh god, why am I asking? I know, I
know
. I’ve gotta go.”

“Wait, wait—I want to get these.” I gesture toward the basket of CDs I’m holding. “Come with me and I’ll walk you out. I’ve got band practice but I can squeeze in a latte.”

She hesitates, then moves with me toward the registers. Once there, my AmEx card doesn’t go through. I moan “Spare me” but Lauren
actually smiles—a smile that causes a major déjà vu—and puts it on her card when she pays for her CDs and she doesn’t even say anything about paying her back.

It’s so cold in Tower that everything—the air, the sounds revolving around us, the racks of CDs—feels white, snowed in. People pass by, moving on to the next register, and the high-set fluorescent lighting that renders everyone flat and pale and washed out doesn’t affect Lauren’s skin, which looks like ivory that’s tan, and her presence—just the mere gesture of her signing the receipt—touches me in a way I can’t shrug off, and the music rising above us—“Wonderwall”—makes me feel doped and far away from my life. Lust is something I really haven’t come across in a long time and I follow it now in Tower Records and it’s getting hard to shake off the thought that Lauren Hynde is part of my future. Outside, I put my hand on the small of her back, guiding her through the sidewalk crowd to the curb on Broadway. She turns around and looks at me for a long time and I let her.

“Victor,” she starts, responding to my vibe. “Look—I just want to make something clear. I’m seeing someone.”

“Who?”

“That doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m involved.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me who it is?” I ask. “And if it’s that twerp Baxter Priestly I’ll actually give you a thousand bucks.”

“I don’t think you have a thousand bucks.”

“I have a big change bowl at home.”

“It was”—she stops, stuck—“interesting to see you.”

“Come on, let’s go get a café au lait at Dean & Deluca. Sounds hip, huh?”

“What about the band?” she asks.

“Those losers can wait.”

“I can’t.”

She starts to move away. I reach out, touch her arm gently. “Wait—are you going to the Todd Oldham show? It’s at six. I’m in it.”

“Oh god, come off it, Victor.” She keeps walking.

I dart in and out of people’s way to keep up with her.

“What? What is it?” I’m asking.

“I’m not really part of that scene.”

“What scene, baby?”

“The one where all anyone is interested in is who’s fucking who, who has the biggest dick, the biggest tits, who’s more famous than whoever.”

Confused, I keep following. “And you’re, um, not like into this?” I ask, watching her wave down a taxi. “You’ve got like a problem?”

“I’ve gotta go, Victor.”

“Hey, can I get your phone number?”

Before she slams the door, without turning toward me, I hear Lauren say, “Chloe has it.”

19

Chloe and I went to L.A. last September for reasons we never really figured out, though in retrospect I think it had something to do with trying to save our relationship and Chloe was supposed to be a presenter at the MTV Awards, which I remember nothing of except Oscar talk, Frida Kahlo talk, Mr. Jenkins talk, how big is Dweezil Zappa’s dick talk, Sharon Stone wearing pajamas, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., coming on to Chloe, only two green Jujyfruits in the box I held while spacing out during the ceremony, and it was all really just Cindy Cindy Cindy and in every photo printed of me—in W, in US, in
Rolling Stone—I
am holding the same half-empty bottle of Evian.

We stayed at the Chateau Marmont in a giant suite with a balcony twice its size overlooking West L.A. When Chloe didn’t want to talk she’d rush to the bathroom, turn on the hair dryer full blast and point it toward my calm, bewildered face. Her nickname for me during those weeks out there was “my little zombie.” I tried out for and didn’t get the part of a drug addict’s friend in a medical-drama pilot that ultimately was never produced but it didn’t really matter since I was so out of it I even had to reread things Paula Abdul said in interviews. Chloe was always “dying of thirst,” there were always tickets for some lame-o screening, our conversations were always garbled, the streets were always—inexplicably—covered with confetti, we were always at barbecues at Herb Ritts’, which were always attended by either Madonna or
Josh Brolin or Amy Locane or Veronica Webb or Stephen Dorff or Ed Limato or Richard Gere or Lela Rochon or Ace of Base, where turkey-burgers were always served, which we always washed down with pink-grapefruit iced tea, and bonfires were always lit throughout the city along with the giant cones of klieg lights announcing premieres.

When we went to an AIDS fund-raiser thrown by Lily Tartikoff at Barneys, cameras flashed and Chloe’s dry hand clutched my limp hand and she squeezed it only once—a warning—when a reporter from E! television asked me what I was doing there and I said, “I needed an excuse to wear my new Versace tuxedo.” I could barely make it up the series of steep staircases to the top floor but once I was there Christian Slater gave me a high five and we hung out with Dennis Leary, Helen Hunt, Billy Zane, Joely Fisher, Claudia Schiffer, Matthew Fox. Someone pointed someone else out to me and whispered “The piercing didn’t take” before melting back into the crowd. People talked about cutting off their hair and burning their fingernails.

Most people were mellow and healthy, tan and buff and drifting around. Others were so hysterical—sometimes covered with lumps and bruises—that I couldn’t understand what they were saying to me, so I tried to stay close to Chloe to totally make sure she didn’t fall back into any destructive habits and she wore Capri pants and Kamali makeup, canceled aromatherapy appointments that I was unaware she had made, her diet dominated by grape- and lemongrass- and root-beer-flavored granitas. Chloe didn’t return phone calls from Evan Dando, Robert Towne, Don Simpson, Victor Drai, Frank Mancuso, Jr., Shane Black. She was bawling constantly and bought a print by Frank Gehry for something like thirty grand and an Ed Ruscha fog painting for considerably more. Chloe bought Lucien Gau shogun table lamps and a lot of iron baskets and had it all shipped back to Manhattan. Rejecting people was the hot pastime. We had a lot of sex. Everyone talked about the year 2018. One day we pretended to be ghosts.

Dani Jansen wanted to take us to mysterious places and I was asked by four separate people what my favorite land animal was and since I didn’t know what these were I couldn’t even fake an answer. Hanging out with two of the Beastie Boys at a house in Silver Lake, we met a lot of crew-cut blondes and Tamra Davis and Greg Kinnear and David
Fincher and Perry Farrell. “Yum—ice” was a constant refrain while we drank lukewarm Bacardi-and-Cokes and bitched about taxes. In the backyard a pool that had been drained was filled with rubble and the chaise longues had empty syringes scattered all over them. The only question I asked during dinner was “Why don’t you just grow your own?” From where I stood I watched someone take ten minutes to cut a slice of cheese. There was a topiary in the shape of Elton John in the backyard, next to the rubble-strewn pool. We were eating Vicodin and listening to Nico-era Velvet Underground tapes.

“The petty ugliness of our problems seems so ridiculous in the face of all this natural beauty,” I said.

“Baby, that’s an Elton John topiary behind you,” Chloe said.

Back at the Chateau, CDs were scattered all over the suite and empty Federal Express packages littered the floor. The word “miscellany” seemed to sum up everything we felt about each other or so Chloe said. We had fights at Chaya Brasserie, three in the Beverly Center, one later in Le Colonial at a dinner for Nick Cage, another at House of Blues. We kept telling each other it didn’t matter, that we didn’t care, fuck it, which was actually pretty easy to do. During one of our fights Chloe called me a “peon” who had about as much ambition as a “parking lot attendant.” She wasn’t right, she wasn’t wrong. If we were stuck in the suite at the Chateau after a fight there was really no place left to go, either the kitchen or the balcony, where two parrots, named Blinky and Scrubby the Gibbering Idiot, hung out. She lay in bed in her underwear, light from the TV flooding the darkened suite, the Cocteau Twins droning from the stereo, and during these lulls I would wander out by the pool and chew gum and drink Fruitopia while reading an old issue of
Film Threat
or the book
Final Exit
, rereading a chapter titled “Self-Deliverance via the Plastic Bag.” We were in a nonzone.

Ten or eleven producers were found dead in various Bel Air mansions. I autographed the back of a Jones matchbook in my “nearly indecipherable scrawl” for some young thing. I mused about publishing my journal entries in
Details
. There was a sale at Maxfields but we had no patience. We ate tamales in empty skyscrapers and ordered bizarre handrolls in sushi bars done up in industrial-chic decor, in restaurants with names like Muse, Fusion, Buffalo Club, with people like Jack Nicholson, Ann Magnuson, Los Lobos, Sean MacPherson, a
fourteen-year-old male model named Dragonfly who Jimmy Rip really dug. We spent too much time at the Four Seasons bar and not enough at the beach. A friend of Chloe’s gave birth to a dead baby. I left ICM. People told us that they either were vampires or knew someone who was a vampire. Drinks with Depeche Mode. So many people we vaguely knew died or disappeared the weeks we were there—car accidents, AIDS, murders, overdoses, run over by a truck, fell into vats of acid or maybe were pushed—that the amount for funeral wreaths on Chloe’s Visa was almost five thousand dollars. I looked really great.

18