Bret Easton Ellis

Imperial Bedrooms

hessensitive

I started with champagne tonight so the lucidity hasn't worn off and the dead zone isn't bleeding forward yet and I'm in someone's Aston Martin and he's bragging about a whore he keeps in his Abbot Kinney condo just east of the Venice canals and another one in a suite at the Huntley. I murmur the hotel's ad line ("Sea and be seen").

The orange face contemplates something and as it leans into me it says, "You're so much further out there than I thought, dude."

There's nothing to do but wait for the party and since I have nowhere else to go I stick around Culver City, skipping the afternoon auditions, the fear returning as I walk to a liquor store to buy aspirin, the alcoholic dreaminess of everything, the ghosts swarming everywhere whispering 'You need to be careful who you let into your life,' and I'm pacing the courtyard while I return a couple of calls- leaving messages for the agent, the manager, the movie about the monkeys, Dr. Woolf- and smoking cigarettes by the swimming pool and watching the decorating crew string up lights along the length of a curving beige wall that borders one end of the pool and then I'm introduced to the actor who got the main role of Grant, Kevin Spacey's son, in The Listeners and the boy is unusually handsome even with the beard he has because of the pirate movie he's shooting and screens have been set up and headshots of various young actors are flashing on them and then from somewhere complaints are made and the screens are repositioned and I meet another girl who won another modelling competition and the afternoon becomes grayer, the sky shrouded with clouds, and someone asks me, "What's the matter, dude?"

"Well, I knew Blair had loaned him a lot of money- well, seventy grand, but for him that's a lot of money."

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