Less Than Zero (8 page)

A
t Kim’s new house, in the hills overlooking Sunset, the gates are open but there don’t seem to be too many cars around. After Blair and I walk up to the door and
ring the doorbell, it takes a long time for anybody to open it. Kim finally does, wearing tight faded jeans, high black leather boots, white T-shirt, smoking a joint. She takes a hit off it before hugging both of us and saying “Happy New Year,” then leads us into a high-ceilinged entrance room and tells us she just moved in three days ago and that “Mom’s in England with Milo” and that they haven’t had time to furnish it yet. But the floors are carpeted, she tells us, and says that it’s a good thing and I don’t ask her why she thinks it’s a good thing. She tells us that the house is pretty old, that the guy who owned it before was a Nazi. On the patios, there are these huge pots holding small trees with swastikas painted on them. “They’re called Nazi pots,” Kim says.

We follow her downstairs to where there are only about twelve or thirteen people. Kim tells us that Fear’s supposed to play tonight. She introduces Blair and me to Spit, who’s a friend of the drummer’s, and Spit has really pale skin, paler than Muriel’s, and short greasy hair and a skull earring and dark circles under his eyes, but Spit’s mad and after saying hi, tells Kim that she has to do something about Muriel.

“Why?” Kim asks, inhaling on the joint.

“Because the bitch said I looked dead,” Spit says, eyes wide.

“Oh, Spit,” Kim says.

“She says that I smell like a dead animal.”

“Come on, Spit, forget it,” Kim says.

“You know I don’t keep dead animals in my room anymore.” He looks over at Muriel, who’s at the end of the long bar, laughing, holding a glass of punch.

“Oh, she’s wonderful, Spit,” Kim says. “She’s just been taking sixty milligrams of lithium a day. She’s just tired.” Kim turns to Blair and me. “Her mother just bought her a fifty-five-thousand-dollar Porsche.” Then she looks back at Spit. “Can you believe it?”

Spit says he can’t and that he’s going to try to forget about it and decide what albums to play and Kim tells him, “Go ahead,” and then before he goes over to the stereo, “Listen, Spit, don’t get Muriel down. Just keep quiet. She just left Cedars-Sinai and once she gets drunk, she’s fine. She’s just a little strung out.”

Spit ignores this and holds up an old Oingo Boingo record.

“Can I play this or not?”

“Why don’t you save that for later?”

“Listen, Kim-ber-ly, I’m getting bored,” he says, teeth gritted.

Kim pulls a joint out of her back pocket and hands it to him.

“Just cool it, Spit.”

Spit says thanks and then sits down on the couch next to the fireplace, with the huge replica of the American flag draped over it, and stares at the joint a long time before he lights it.

“Well, you two look fabulous,” Kim says.

“So do you,” Blair tells her. I nod. I’m tired and a little stoned and didn’t really want to come, but Blair actually came over to my house earlier and we went swimming and then to bed and Kim called up.

“Is Alana coming?” Blair asks.

“No, can’t make it.” Kim shakes her head, taking another hit off the joint. “Going to the Springs.”

“What about Julian?” Blair asks.

“Nope. Too busy fucking Beverly Hills lawyers for money,” Kim sighs, then laughs.

I’m about to ask her what she meant by that when suddenly someone calls out her name and Kim says, “Oh, shit, the liquor guy just arrived” and walks off and I look out past the big lighted pool, out over Hollywood; blanket of lights under a neon purple sky and Blair asks me if I’m okay and I say sure.

Some young guy, eighteen or nineteen, brings in a large cardboard box and sets it on the bar and Kim signs something and tips him and he says, “Happy New Year, dudes” and leaves. Kim takes a bottle of champagne out of the box, opens it expertly and calls out, “Everybody take a bottle. It’s Perrier-Jouet. It’s chilled.”

“You convinced me, you rat.” Muriel runs over and hugs Kim and Kim gives her a bottle.

“Is Spit pissed at me or something? All I said was that he looked dead,” Muriel says, opening her bottle. “Hiya, Blair, hi, Clay.”

“He’s just on edge,” Kim says. “Wind’s weird or something.”

“He’s such a moron. He tells me that, ‘Well, I used to do well in school before they kicked me out.’ Huh? What in the fuck does that mean?” Muriel asks. “Besides, the idiot uses a blowtorch to freebase.”

Kim shrugs and takes another swallow.

“Muriel, you look wonderful,” Blair says.

“Oh, Blair, you look gorgeous, as usual,” Muriel says,
taking a swallow. “And oh my God, Clay, you must give me that vest.”

I look down while opening my bottle. The vest is just a gray-and-white argyle, one of the triangles dark red.

“It looks as if you got stabbed or something. Please let me wear it,” Muriel pleads, touching the vest.

I smile and look at her and then realize that she’s totally serious and I’m too tired to say no so I pull it off and hand it to her and she puts it on, laughing. “I’ll give it back, I’ll give it back, don’t worry.”

There’s this really irritating photographer in the room and he keeps taking pictures of everybody. He’ll walk up to someone and point the camera in their face and then take two or three pictures and he comes up to me and the flash blinds me for a second and I take another swallow from the champagne bottle. Kim starts to light candles all over the room and Spit puts on an X album and someone starts to pin balloons up to one of the bare walls and the balloons, only half blown up, just hang there, limply. The door that leads out to the pool and veranda is open and also has a couple of balloons pinned on it and we walk outside, over to the pool.

“What’s your mom doing?” Blair asks. “Is she going out with Tom anymore?”

“Where did you hear that? The Inquirer?” Kim laughs.

“No. I saw a picture of them in the Hollywood Reporter.”

“She’s in England with Milo, I told you,” Kim says as we get closer to the lighted water. “At least that’s what I read in Variety.”

“How about you?” Blair asks, starting to smile. “Who are you seeing?”

“
Moi?
” Kim laughs and then mentions some famous young actor I think we went to school with; can’t remember.

“Yeah, I heard about that. Just wanted you to verify.”

“It’s true.”

“He wasn’t at your Christmas party,” Blair says.

“He wasn’t?” Kim looks worried. “Are you sure?”

“He wasn’t,” Blair says. “Did you see him, Clay?”

“No, I didn’t see him,” I tell her, not remembering.

“That’s weird,” Kim says. “Must have been on location.”

“How is he?”

“He’s nice, he’s really nice.”

“What about Dimitri?”

“Oh, so what,” Kim says.

“Does he know?” Blair asks.

“Probably. I’m not sure.”

“Do you think he’s upset?”

“Listen, Jeff is a fling. I like Dimitri.”

Dimitri’s sitting on a chair by the pool playing a guitar and is really tan and has short blond hair and he just sits in the chaise longue playing these strange, eerie chords and then starts to play this one riff over and over again and Kim just looks at him and doesn’t say anything. The phone rings from inside and Muriel calls out, waving her hands, “It’s for you, Kim.”

Kim walks back inside and I’m about to ask Blair if she wants to go but Spit, still smoking the joint, comes over with some surfer to Dimitri and says, “Heston has some great acid,” and the surfer with Spit looks at Blair and winks and then she pats my ass and lights a cigarette.
“Where’s Kim?” Spit asks when he doesn’t get an answer from Dimitri, who just stares into the pool, strumming the guitar. He then looks over at the four of us standing around him and for a minute it looks like he’s going to say something. But he doesn’t, just sighs and looks back at the water.

This young actress comes in with some well-known producer, who I met once at one of Blair’s father’s parties, and they check out the scene and walk over to Kim, who’s just gotten off the phone, and she tells them that her mother’s in England with Milo and the producer says that last he heard she was in Hawaii and then they mention that maybe Thomas Noguchi might be stopping by and then the actress and the producer leave and Kim walks over to where Blair and I’ve stood and she tells us that it was Jeff on the phone.

“What did he say?” Blair asks.

“He’s an asshole. He’s down in Malibu with some surfer, some guy, and they’re holed up in his house.”

“What did he want?”

“To wish me a Happy New Year.” Kim looks upset.

“Well, that’s nice,” Blair says hopefully.

“He said, ‘Have a Happy New Year, cunt,’” she says, and lights a cigarette, the champagne bottle she holds by her side almost empty. She’s about to cry or say something else when Spit comes over and says that Muriel locked herself in Kim’s room and so Kim and Spit and Blair and I walk inside, upstairs, down a hallway and over to Kim’s door and Kim tries to open it but it’s locked.

“Muriel,” she calls out, knocking. No one answers.

Spit pounds on the door, then kicks it.

“Don’t fuck the door up, Spit,” Kim says, and then yells out, “Muriel, come out.”

I look over at Blair and she looks worried. “Do you think she’s all right?”

“I don’t know,” Kim says.

“What’s she on?” Spit wants to know.

“Muriel?” Kim calls out again.

Spit lights another joint, leans against the wall. The photographer comes by and takes pictures of us. The door opens slowly and Muriel stands there and looks like she’s been crying. She lets Spit, Kim, Blair and the photographer and me into the room and then she closes the door and locks it.

“Are you all right?” Kim asks.

“I’m fine,” she says, wiping her face.

The room’s dark except for a couple of candles in the corner and Muriel sits down in the corner next to one of the candles, next to a spoon and a syringe and a little folded piece of paper with brownish powder on it and a piece of cotton. There’s already some stuff in the spoon and Muriel wads the piece of cotton up as small as possible and puts it in the spoon and sticks the needle into the cotton and then draws it into the syringe. Then she pulls up her sleeve, reaches for a belt in the darkness, finds it and wraps it around her upper arm. I spot the needle tracks, look over at Blair, who’s just staring at the arm.

“What’s going on here?” Kim asks. “Muriel, what are you doing?”

Muriel doesn’t say anything, just slaps her arm to find a vein and I look at my vest and it freaks me out to see
that it does look like someone got stabbed, or something.

Muriel holds the syringe and Kim whispers, “Don’t do it,” but her lips are trembling and she looks excited and I can make out the beginnings of a smile and I get the feeling that she doesn’t mean it and as the needle sticks into Muriel’s arm, Blair gets up and says, “I’m leaving,” and walks out of the room. Muriel closes her eyes and the syringe slowly fills with blood.

Spit says, “Oh, man, this is wild.”

The photographer takes a picture.

My hands shake as I light a cigarette.

Muriel begins to cry and Kim strokes her head, but Muriel keeps crying and drooling all over, looking like she’s laughing really and her lipstick’s smeared all over her lips and nose and her mascara’s running down her cheeks.

At midnight Spit tries to light some firecrackers but only a couple go off. Kim hugs Dimitri, who doesn’t seem to notice or care, and he drops his guitar by his side and stares off into the pool and eleven or twelve of us stand out by the pool and someone turns the music down so that we can hear the sounds of the city celebrating, but there’s not a whole lot to hear and I keep looking into the living room, where Muriel’s lying on a couch, smoking a cigarette, sunglasses on, watching MTV. All we can hear are windows breaking up in the hills and dogs beginning to howl and a balloon bursts and Spit drops a champagne bottle and the American flag that’s hanging like a curtain over the fireplace moves in the hot breeze and Kim gets up and lights another joint. Blair whispers “Happy New Year” to me and then takes her
shoes off and sticks her feet into the warm, lighted water. Fear never shows up and the party ends early.

A
nd at home that night, sometime early that morning, I’m sitting in my room watching religious programs on cable TV because I’m tired of watching videos and there are these two guys, priests, preachers maybe, on the screen, forty, maybe forty-five, wearing business suits and ties, pink-tinted sunglasses, talking about Led Zeppelin records, saying that, if they’re played backwards, they “possess alarming passages about the devil.” One of the guys stands up and breaks the record, snaps it in half, and says, “And believe me, as God-fearing Christians, we will not allow this!” The man then begins to talk about how he’s worried that it’ll harm the young people. “And the young are the future of this country,” he screams, and then breaks another record.

“J
ulian wants to see you,” Rip says over the phone.

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he say what for?” I ask.

“No. He didn’t have your number and he wanted it and so I gave it to him.”

“He didn’t have my number?”

“That’s what he said.”

“I don’t think he’s called me.”

“Said he needed to talk to you. Listen, I don’t like to relay phone messages, dude, so be grateful.”

“Thanks.”

“He said he’ll be at the Chinese Theater today at three-thirty. You could meet him there, I guess.”

“What’s he doing there?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

I
decide to meet Julian. I drive over to the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and stare at the footprints for a little while. Except for a young couple, not from L.A., taking pictures of the footprints and this suspicious-looking Oriental guy standing by the ticket booth, there’s no one around. The tan blond usher standing by the door says to me, “Hey, I know you. Two Decembers ago at a party in Santa Monica, right?”

“I don’t think so,” I tell him.

“Yeah. Kicker’s party. Remember?”

I tell him I don’t remember and then ask him if the concession stand’s open. The usher says yeah and lets me in and I buy a Coke.