Less Than Zero (7 page)

C
hristmas in Palm Springs. It was always hot. Even if it was raining, it was still hot. One Christmas, last Christmas, after it was all over, after the old house was left, it got hotter than a lot of people could remember. No one wanted to believe that it could get as hot as it had become; it was simply impossible. But the temperature readings at the Security National Bank in Rancho Mirage would read 111 and 112 and 113 and all I could do was stare at the numbers, refusing to believe that it could get that hot, that hellish. But then I’d look across the desert and a hot wind would whip into my face and the sun would glare down so hard that my sunglasses couldn’t keep the shine away and I’d have to squint to see that the metal grids in the crosswalk
signs were twisting, writhing, actually melting in the heat, and I knew that I had to believe it.

The nights during Christmas weren’t any better. It would still be light at seven and the sky would stay orange until eight and the hot winds would come through the canyons and filter out over the desert. When it got really dark the nights would be black and hot and on some nights these weird white clouds would drift slowly through the sky and disappear by dawn. It would also be quiet. It was strange to drive down no at one or two in the morning. There wouldn’t be any cars out, and if I stopped by the side of the road and turned the radio off and rolled down the windows, I couldn’t hear anything. Only my own breath, which was all raspy and dry and came in uneven gasps. But I wouldn’t do this for long, because I’d catch a glimpse of my eyes in the rearview mirror, sockets red, scared, and I’d get really frightened for some reason and drive home quickly.

Early evenings were about the only time I’d go outside. I’d spend this time by the pool, eating banana popsicles and reading the
Herald Examiner,
when there was some shade in the backyard, and the pool would be totally still except for an occasional ripple caused by big yellow and black bees with huge wings and black dragonflies, crashing into the pool, driven mad by the insane heat.

Last Christmas in Palm Springs, I’d be lying in bed, naked, and even with the air conditioner on, the cool air blowing over me and a bowl of ice, some of it wrapped in a towel, next to the bed, I couldn’t become cool. Visions of driving through town and feeling the hot winds on my shoulder and watching the heat
rise up out of the desert would make me feel warm and I’d force myself up and walk downstairs out onto the deck by the lighted pool in the middle of the night and I’d try to smoke a joint but I could barely breathe. I’d smoke it anyway, just to get to sleep. I could only stay outside for so long. There’d be these strange sounds and lights next door, and I’d go back upstairs to my room and lock the door and finally fall asleep
.

When I woke up in the afternoon, I’d come downstairs and my grandfather would tell me that he heard strange things at night and when I asked him what strange things, be said that he couldn’t put his finger on it and so he’d shrug and finally say that it must have been his imagination, probably nothing. The dog would bark all night and when I’d wake up to tell it to be quiet, it would look freaked out, its eyes wide, panting, shaking, but I’d never go outside to see why the dog was barking and I’d lock myself back in my room and put the towel, damp, cool, over my eyes. The next day, out by the pool, there was an empty package of cigarettes. Lucky Strikes. No one smokes cigarettes in the family. The next day my father had new locks put on all the doors and the gates in back, while my mother and sisters took the Christmas tree down, while I slept
.

A
couple hours later, Blair calls. She tells me there’s a picture of her father and her at a premiere in the new People. She also says that she’s drunk and in the house alone and that her family is down the street at someone’s screening room, watching a rough cut of her father’s new
film. She also tells me that she’s nude and in bed and that she misses me. I start to walk around the room, nervous, while I listen to her. Then I stare at myself in the mirror in my closet. I spot this small shoebox in the corner of the closet and look through it while I’m on the phone with Blair. There are all these photographs in the box: a picture of Blair and me at Prom; one of us at Disneyland on Grad Nite; a couple of us at the beach in Monterey; and couple of others from a party in Palm Springs; a picture of Blair in Westwood I had taken one day when the two of us had left school early, with Blair’s initials on the back of the photo. I also find this picture of myself, wearing jeans and no shirt and no shoes, lying on the floor, with sunglasses on, my hair wet, and I think about who took it and can’t remember. I smooth it out and try to look at myself. I think about it some more and then put it away. There are other photographs in the box but I can’t deal with looking at them, at old snapshots of Blair and me and so I put the shoebox back in the closet.

Light a cigarette and turn on MTV and turn off the sound. An hour passes, Blair keeps talking, tells me that she still likes me and that we should get together again and that just because we haven’t seen each other for four months is no reason to break up. I tell her we have been together, I mention last night. She says you know what I mean and I start to dread sitting in the room, listening to her talk. I look over at the clock. It’s almost three. I tell her I can’t remember what our relationship was like and I try to steer the conversation away to other topics, about movies or concerts or what she’s been doing all
day, or what I’ve been doing tonight. When I get off the phone with her, it’s almost dawn, Christmas Day.

I
t’s Christmas morning and I’m high on coke, and one of my sisters has given me this pretty expensive leather-bound datebook, the pages are big and white and the dates elegantly printed on top of them, in gold and silver lettering. I thank her and kiss her and all that and she smiles and pours herself another glass of champagne. I tried to keep a datebook one summer, but it didn’t work out. I’d get confused and write down things just to write them down and I came to this realization that I didn’t do enough things to keep a datebook. I know that I won’t use this one and I’ll probably take it back to New Hampshire with me and it’ll just lie on my desk for three or four months, unused, blank. My mother watches us, sitting on the edge of the couch in the living room, sipping champagne. My sisters open their gifts casually, indifferent. My father looks neat and hard and is writing out checks for my sisters and me and I wonder why he couldn’t have written them out before, but I forget about it and look out the window; at the hot wind blowing through the yard. The water in the pool ripples.

I
t’s a really sunny, warm Friday after Christmas and I decide I need to work on my tan so I go with a bunch of people, Blair and Alana and Kim and Rip and Griffin, to the beach club. I get to the club before anyone else does and while the attendant parks my car, I sit on a bench and wait for them, staring out at the expanse of sand that meets the water, where the land ends. Disappear here. I stare out at the ocean until Griffin drives up in his Porsche. Griffin knows the parking attendant and they talk for a couple of minutes. Rip drives up soon after in his new Mercedes and also seems to know the attendant and when I introduce Rip to Griffin they laugh and tell me that they know each other and I wonder if they’ve slept together and I get really dizzy and have to sit down on the bench. Alana and Kim and Blair drive up in someone’s convertible Cadillac.

“We just had lunch at the country club,” Blair says, turning the radio down. “Kim got lost.”

“I did not,” Kim says.

“So she didn’t believe I remembered where it was and we had to stop at this gas station to ask for directions and Kim asks this guy who works there for his phone number.”

“He was gorgeous,” Kim exclaims.

“So what? He pumps gas,” Blair shrieks, getting out of the car, looking great in a one-piece. “Are you ready for this? His name is Moose.”

“I don’t care what his name is. He is totally gorgeous,” Kim says again.

On the beach, Griffin has smuggled rum and Coke in and we’re drinking what’s left of it. Rip practically takes his bathing suit off so his tan line’ll be exposed. I don’t put enough tanning oil on my legs or chest. Alana has brought a portable tape-deck and keeps playing the same INXS song, over and over; talk of the new Psychedelic Furs album goes around; Blair tells everyone that Muriel just got out of Cedars-Sinai; Alana mentions that she called Julian up to ask him if he wanted to come but there wasn’t anyone home. Everyone eventually stops talking and concentrates on what sun is left. Some Blondie song comes on and Blair and Kim ask Alana to turn it up. Griffin and I get up to go to the locker room. Deborah Harry is asking, “Where is my wave?”

“What’s wrong?” Griffin asks, staring at himself in the mirror once we’re in the men’s room.

“I’m just tense,” I tell him, splashing water on my face.

“Things’ll be okay,” Griffin says.

And there, back on the beach, in the sun, staring out into the Pacific, it seems really possible to believe Griffin. But I get sunburned and when I stop at Gelson’s for some cigarettes and a bottle of Perrier, I find a lizard in the front seat. The checkout clerk is talking about murder statistics and he looks at me for some reason and asks if I’m feeling okay. I don’t say anything, just walk quickly out of the market. When I get home, I take a shower, turn on the stereo and that night I can’t get to sleep; the sunburn’s uncomfortable, and MTV’s giving me a headache
and I take some Nembutal Griffin slipped me in the parking lot at the beach club.

I
get up late the next morning to the blare of Duran Duran coming from my mother’s room. The door’s open and my sisters are lying on the large bed, wearing bathing suits, leafing through old issues of GQ, watching some porno film on the Betamax with the sound turned off. I sit down on the bed, also in my bathing suit, and they tell me that Mom went out to lunch and that the maid went shopping and I watch about ten minutes of the movie, wondering whose it is—my mom’s? sisters’? Christmas present from a friend? the person with the Ferrari? mine? One of my sisters says that she hates it when they show the guy coming and I walk downstairs, out to the pool, do my laps.

W
hen I was fifteen and first learned how to drive, in Palm Springs, I’d take my father’s car while my parents were asleep and my sisters and I would drive around the desert, in the middle of the night, Fleetwood Mac or Eagles on, loud, top down, hot winds blowing, making the palm trees bend, silent. And one night my sisters and I took the car out and it was a night where there wasn’t any moon and the wind was strong, and someone
had just dropped me off from a party that hadn’t been too fun. The McDonald’s we were going to stop at was closed due to some power outage caused by the winds and I was tired and my sisters were fighting and I was on the way back home when I saw what I thought was a bonfire from about a mile down the highway, but as I drove closer I saw that it wasn’t a bonfire but a Toyota parked at this strange, crooked angle, its hood open, flames pouring out of the engine. The front windshield was smashed open and a Mexican woman was sitting on the curb, on the side of the highway, crying. There were two or three kids, Mexican also, standing behind her, staring at the fire, gaping at the rising flames, and I was wondering why there were no other cars out to stop or help. My sisters stopped fighting and told me to stop the car so that they could watch. I had an urge to stop, but I didn’t. I slowed down, and then drove quickly away and pushed back in the tape my sisters had taken out when they first saw the flames, and turned it up, loud, and drove through every red light until I got back to our house
.

I don’t know why the fire bothered me, but it did, and I had these visions of a child, not yet dead, lying across the flames, burning. Maybe some kid, thrown through the windshield and who’d fallen onto the engine, and I asked my sisters if they thought they saw a kid burning, melting, on the engine and they said no, did you?, neato, and I checked the papers the next day to make sure there hadn’t been one. And later that same night I sat out by the pool, thinking about it until I finally fell asleep, but not before the power went out due to the wind and the pool went black
.

And I remember that at that time I started collecting all these newspaper clippings; one about some twelve-year-old kid who accidentally shot his brother in Chino; another about a guy in Indio who nailed his kid to a wall, or a door, I can’t remember, and then shot him, point-blank in the face, and one about a fire at a home for the elderly that killed twenty and one about a housewife who while driving her children home from school flew off this eighty-foot embankment near San Diego, instantly killing herself and the three kids and one about a man who calmly and purposefully ran over his ex-wife somewhere near Reno, paralyzing her below the neck. I collected a lot of clippings during that time because, I guess, there were a lot to be collected
.

I
t’s a Saturday night and on some Saturday nights when there’s not a party to go to and no concerts around town and everyone’s seen all the movies, most people stay at home and invite friends over and talk on the phone. Sometimes someone will drop by and talk and have a drink and then get back into his car and drive over to somebody else’s house. On some Saturday nights there’ll be three or four people who drive from one house to another. Who drive from about ten on Saturday night until just before dawn the next morning. Trent stops by and tells me about how “a couple of hysterical J.A.P.’s” in Bel Air have seen what they called some kind of monster, talk of a werewolf. One of their friends has supposedly disappeared. There’s a search party in Bel Air
tonight and they’ve found nothing except—and now Trent grins—the body of a mutilated dog. The “J.A.P.’s,” who Trent says are “really out of their heads,” went to spend the night at a friend’s house in Encino. Trent says that the J.A.P.’s probably drank too much Tab, had some kind of allergic reaction. Maybe, I say, but the story makes me uneasy. After Trent leaves I try to call Julian, but there’s no answer and I wonder where he could be and after I hang the phone up, I’m pretty sure I can hear someone screaming in the house next to us, down the canyon, and I close my window. I can also hear the dog barking out in back and KROQ is playing old Doors songs and War of the Worlds is on channel thirteen and I switch it to some religious program where this preacher is yelling “Let God use you. God wants to use you. Lie back and let him use you, use you.” “Lie back,” he keeps chanting. “Use you, use you.” I’m drinking gin and melted ice in bed and imagine that I can hear someone breaking in. But Daniel says, over the phone, that it’s probably my sisters getting something to drink. It’s hard to believe Daniel tonight; on the news I hear there were four people beaten to death in the hills last night and I stay up most of the night, looking out the window, staring into the backyard, looking for werewolves.