“Yeah.”
“Well, it had moments, but I sort of knew I pulled that thing out of my ass. Even made plenty of references to the dog’s ass in it. That’s what they call literary allusion. I think that’s what they call it, anyway. But I figured I could get away with it. And I did. Look,” he says, holding up a paper coffee cup, “free coffee.”
I hand over my copy and Bret Easton Ellis signs it, To Luke, Go Fuck Yourself You Know-Nothing Cunt! Best, B.E.E. and adds a little smiley face after it.
I shake Bret Easton Ellis’s hand, thank him and make my way to the café to find Abigail where she’s sitting at a table near the window that looks out onto Nordstrom’s storefront and a parking lot that looks a lot like my face. She’s reading an instructional book about dealing with friends and family that suffer from mental conditions such as sloth, greed, gluttony, lust, wrath, envy, and capitalism. I think there’s a carpenter in it and a bunch of men that fuck their daughters up the ass. I think I read it once, but I’m not sure if that was before or after the stigmata.
My mouth fills with locusts but they’re quick and exit before anyone notices.
Abigail looks up and her neon blue eyes, bordered by a dark blue eyeliner, shock me and turn me dumb. I reach out and touch her face, move a strand of red hair behind her ear, and tell her that I love her. She pushes my hand away, laughs nervously, looks around, and tells me to stop, says that I’m speaking nonsense. I ask her to come out with me to the parking lot that looks like my face. To fuck me on it. To make love to me surrounded by cold glistening metal vehicles that when put together on cold black asphalt look just like my face, but she says no and that she doesn’t think the parking lot looks very much like my face anyway and I disagree and feel like she just took something away from me.
“I’m sorry I murdered you,” I say.
She looks up at me.
“I’m sorry I gutted you like a fish. You’re not a fish. I know you’re not,” and then I remove the hook in her mouth and she smiles, says thank you, and calls me crazy.
“And I’m sorry I killed your boyfriend—that I slit open his throat like a strung-up pig and liked it when he squealed like one even though I know he’d never fry up good and go well with eggs and hash browns.”
“That reminds me,” Abigail says, searching through her dark red velvet purse as I stand over her at her small table in the café at Borders. “I need to call Eric.”
“Um, why?”
“His mother died,” she says, then laughs.
I can think only about Abigail naked, wet, and screaming until her face melts off, falls into her lap and gets pushed away like a smoldering soup that’s left her mid-section warped and violent like a modernist painting. I want to put my face into it and let it get warped and violent like a modernist painting.
Instead, I have no patience, so I walk away to find self-help books that can tell me how to kill someone better and pleasure oneself afterward, and from there on out be pleasured and fulfilled by life.
While walking through the fluorescent-lit space filled with yuppies, cripples, deaf and dumb people, illiterates, the homeless, and large bi-pedal crickets raping the checkout clerks, I recall that I used to work here. That it was my first real job I had in the city. That I used to organize these shelves with poetry and Oprah’s books and books on ass cancer and that when asked by a customer where he could find a book about helping a friend with colon cancer that I directed him to the correct section while nearly crying from holding back a fit of laughter, having gone mad from answering such questions day in and day out while stationed at the info desk, and how holding back that fit of laughter tore muscles in my abdomen and chest and had me out of work for over a week without pay.
I remember lying in bed, hardly able to move, watching Gilligan’s Island and Sally Jessie Rafael scalp another Native American while feeding myself only on the pigeons that flew through my window who tried to entertain me with stories of the talking bugs that were their friends. Then I would remove their heads and end their crazy talk, suck down their blood so I could rehydrate, pluck their wings, remove their fleas, spit out the gristle, and chew for hours on their fat to get me through the recuperation.
Just so I could get back as quickly as possible to shelving books about Oprah and ass cancer at Borders.
While in a daze and about to throw up I bump into Bret Easton Ellis who’s going through his own books on the shelves in the fiction section with a pen, signing them with winking smiley faces and crossing out words within each book such as “that” and “were” and replacing them with “cunt” and “cockface” while laughing and scratching his Big Bird beak with self-congratulations.
“You have lots of money,” I say.
He looks up from scribbling in a paperback copy of Less Than Zero, and says, “Um, yeah?”
“You should get on Rogaine or something,” I say, then grab his copy of Less Than Zero away from him and then take his pen, too, and begin replacing words like “disappear” with “kill someone” and others like “Ray-Bans” with “dead baby seals.”
I hand it back to him and pick up a book about Mount Everest that starts with the accomplishments of all that conquered it and ends with a high resolution photo collage of those that died on it, frozen in their places, their grey faces glowing amidst their neon snow gear. Just left there because going there to get them and bring them back would be too dangerous and costly. Though how someone can get there to take pictures of a frozen face clutched in pain and why they can’t be brought back is never answered.
Next I know, me and Bret Easton Ellis are at the Olive Garden in the mall and he’s telling me not to order anything but booze while bossing around the wait staff to bring us more and more free breadsticks and the breadsticks are easily the best thing I’ve ever eaten.
Bret Easton Ellis drinks mojito after mojito even though it’s technically winter, and I sip a vodka martini while he slowly bleeds out our waitress over the table and pays off the hostess to look the other way, calls it research, says he’s doing a study for a script treatment, that his actions are necessary to make more books that can be made into bad movies that will make him more money than the books and everyone smiles and asks for his autograph, and so I take their napkins and copies of The Rules of Attraction and sign them with, I wrote this fucking book, bitch, don’t you ever ask Bret Easton Ellis to sign a book he didn’t even write ever again, and then finish it off with a heart that looks like the Smashing Pumpkins’ heart but with my initials in it.
After ditching out on the bill at the Olive Garden I remember that I also worked there, that I spilled beer on customers, dropped trays of food all over the dining room, and learned how to make a shitty wine sound exotic while working on getting blowjobs during my shifts from out-of-town women twenty years my senior. Then I remember that after three weeks of it—and deciding blowjobs from old women didn’t suffice—that I took my notepad and apron back to the manager’s office after a shift and tied him up, the ropes cutting into his fat wrists, ankles, and neck, bruises breaking out there along with blood clusters as I cut up the apron and notepad and the fourteen dollars in tips I made that day and fed it to him, forcing it down his throat with the cheap blush wine they made me peddle with an Italian accent. Then I told him that I quit.
“What happened to the redhead?” Bret Easton Ellis asks as we stand in front of Mrs. Fields where Robin Williams orders a chocolate chip cookie five-feet in diameter that reads, Happy Anniversary, I’ve Never Been So Depressed, and everyone that sees it laughs and he cries and tells them how he gave out PlayStations for Halloween. His furry body becomes coated in tears. His skin cries. Then he turns away from the counter, says, “Oh, hello, Bret,” and scurries on by. I try to stop him to tell him that I thought Toys was a brilliant movie, despite what stuck-up pricks say, but he’d already rolled into a furry little ball and bounced down the escalator.
“What redhead?” I ask, chomping into a doughy peanut butter cookie.
“The one you were with at my reading,” Bret Easton Ellis says before biting into a chocolate chocolate-chip cookie.
“Oh, she’s telling her dead boyfriend that his mother’s dead,” I say and throw the last half of my cookie at a kid in a Hot Dog on a Stick uniform. “Or, maybe she’s trying to get back with him. The language people use today—I don’t understand most of it.”
“Me either,” Bret Easton Ellis says. “That’s why I can’t write good books anymore.”
For a moment I think that maybe I also worked at Mrs. Field’s but then realize I’ve never had a job that good.
“I’ll call her,” I tell Bret Easton Ellis and he looks pleased.
Abigail says that even though I murdered her and her boyfriend, she’d be pleased to join me and Bret Easton Ellis at the Mrs. Field’s, especially if she could bring Eric, which I said was out of the question but she shows up with Eric anyway and he seems overly excited about the cookies and tells me before saying hello that he’ll probably get a dozen for his mom.
“I’m Bret Easton Ellis,” Bret Easton Ellis says, shaking Eric’s hand. Then he takes Abigail’s hand and kisses it, then he takes back Eric’s hand and kisses it, then he puts his Wayfarers on and pretends to be cool and takes a seat by himself at a table overlooking the first floor of the mall.
“I like him,” Abigail says.
Eric goes up to the counter and orders a dozen mud-flavored cookies for his mom.
“Why’d you bring him?” I ask Abigail.
“Who, Eric?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s my boyfriend. You know that, Luke. You’re lucky he’s not the jealous type or we’d never get to hang out.”
“Are you serious?” I ask as Bret Easton Ellis lowers his Wayfarers down the bridge of his nose, stares at us, winks, and smiles.
Somewhere in the distance Robin Williams either laughs or cries like a sad or happy coyote.
Frustrated, I look back at Eric, then to Bret Easton Ellis, then back at Abigail, and all I want to do is kiss her wet, red mouth, rip her face from her skull and wear it around for a year.
“Luke, you knew this wasn’t a date, right?” Abigail asks, all seriousness and composure.
“Everyone that climbs Mount Everest climbs over the bodies of those that died before them, bodies just left there because the climb is so hard that taking the dead home with them is not an option,” I say.
“That’s beautiful, Luke. See, that’s why I like hanging out with you. You can be so difficult sometimes, but sometimes you say the most beautiful things.”
“You’re crazy, I say,” I say for effect.
She laughs and blushes.
Eric, holding a box of cookies wrapped in a pink bow, joins us and takes Abigail’s hand.
“Hey, Luke,” he says, having a hard time looking me in the eyes.
I walk over to Bret Easton Ellis and sit across from him, don’t say anything for a very long time, think I see Cameron below throwing her child into a deep well, then realize it’s just some dark haired woman I don’t know throwing a child into a deep well.
Bret Easton Ellis pulls a flask from his suit jacket pocket, takes off his Ray-Bans, and drinks from it, then leans forward with sudden fervor and says, “You. You want advice.”
“I do?”
“You want to know, why.”
“Why what?”
“You want to feel confident. To know what it’s like to know what you’re doing in this labyrinth. To know how to follow it without hurting anyone or getting lost. To feel like if you ran into David Bowie or a troll you’d know exactly what to say. And if you happened to be chasing a redhead through there with a face full of cancer, you’d like to know how to catch her and cure it. You want to know what it feels like to know that you know what you want and that what you want is to help others, to be there for them, to stop the bleeding after you’ve cut them.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Bret Easton Ellis says and takes another pull from his flask, puts it away, sighs, and puts the sunglasses back on.
“I’m not Clay,” I say.
“I know. I know,” Bret Easton Ellis says. “I just….” He stares off, goes distant. He tears up behind the Wayfarers, I imagine.
“It’s not like this,” Bret Easton Ellis continues. “In the desert. It’s full of less. Full of less of this. And, Blair—I mean, whatever your name is—I don’t know what I’m saying half the time. I just want to drag you back to my room, tie you up, and waterboard you while I read every word Ronald Reagan ever wrote down out loud until you understand what that man really said and what that man really wanted, because, you fucking kids—you goddamned kids, I don’t think any of you get it. You just don’t get it! What Ronald Reagan wanted was for me to rape you! He was a good man.”
“I can’t remember anything about him,” I say. “I think my grandmother voted for him. If women could vote back then. I can’t remember.”
Bret Easton Ellis looks frustrated and frazzled so I leave him, walk over to Abigail and Luke who stare into each other’s eyes like mentally handicapped children incapable of speech.
“Oh. Hi, Luke,” Eric says, not looking up at me. He’s got something in his hands and he’s holding Abigail’s left hand.
“Hi, Luke,” Abigail says, not looking away from Eric.
The soundtrack from Labyrinth starts playing overhead, but then I realize it’s just Bret Easton Ellis behind us singing to himself the hit song from the movie, “As the World Falls Down.”
“We just got engaged, Luke!” Eric says, finally looking up at me, his eyes glossy, lost, and dumb.
“He just proposed,” Abigail says, her eyes wet. Then she shows me a ring with an impossibly small diamond embedded in what looks like a small rabbit’s still-beating heart. Blood runs down her wrist, stops at the elbow, and drips onto the table.
“In front of Mrs. Field’s?” I ask.
They don’t say anything, just grab each other across the table and start making out in a mess of two faces seeming to have a hard time finding the other’s mouth.
I look back at Bret Easton Ellis. He’s looking away from us still singing the song from Labyrinth.
Next thing I know, we’re all on MUNI heading north on 19th Avenue because Bret Easton Ellis says he wants to take the lucky couple to Golden Gate Park and toast to their nuptials with the finest champagne.
I tell Bret Easton Ellis there’s no champagne in Golden Gate Park. That, in fact, there’s nothing at all to do at Golden Gate Park. That this isn’t New York and he should snap out of it.
He just looks at me, smiles through the Wayfarers, shows me the bleached blue-white smile of Hollywood success.
“Don’t you have a car?” I ask Bret Easton Ellis as the bus hits pothole after pothole after homeless person, making the trip bumpy and arduous.
“Um,” he says, shoulders slumped, staring out the window. “I think I left it in Lunar Park.”
“That’s not a place,” I say. “That’s your crappy book.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly, staring at his reflection in the window.
In the seats behind us either Eric is fingering Abigail or Abigail is fingering Eric so I keep my eyes forward until we reach Lincoln Way and deboard.
“Get down from there!” Eric yells, laughing, holding a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1966 that Bret Easton Ellis had delivered via helicopter. The helicopter landed in an ocean of light and wind at the polo field and took off before the cops could be alerted. They left us with a half dozen bottles and took off north, scaring the bison at the bison field in the park maintained by vegetarians that raise bison in order to sacrifice them to their vegetarian god.
“I’m going to jump!” Bret Easton Ellis says, standing on the roof of what must be an equipment shed for the park rangers. No higher than twelve feet. “I’ll fucking do it, you fucking snot-nosed know-nothing shits!” He takes a drink from his bottle of Dom Pérignon 1966, tries to pull his p
ants down to moon us, and falls.
“Oh, shit!” Eric yells.
Abigail makes small animal sounds.
I stand back with my bottle of Dom Pérignon 1966 and make sure the last two bottles remain guarded.
In the barely lit darkness, Eric helps Bret Easton Ellis get his pants up. “There ya go, man,” Eric says, getting him to his feet, Bret Easton Ellis’s arms now around both Eric and Abigail as they help walk him to the side of this manmade lake where yuppies play with their remote-controlled yachts before making the mayor go down on them on their full-sized yachts out in the bay.
All three of them sit quietly on the bench, staring at the moon’s reflection on the manmade lake until Bret Easton Ellis looks back at me and asks, half-heartedly, “Hey, whatsyourname, is there any more champagne left? I broke mine in the fall. I mean, my bottle. I broke my bottle.”
“Um, yeah. No problem. There’s one left, I think,” I say as I swallow what’s left of mine, grab one of the last bottles for Bret Easton Ellis and pop the other one open for myself, aiming the cork at Eric’s head but missing miserably because of the darkness.
“So,” Bret Easton Ellis says, “you two are getting married. That’s fucking wonderful.” Sitting between them, he clinks their bottles. “I can’t say—I can’t begin to tell you how much respect and envy I have for the sanctity of marriage. If only I could ever….”
“That’s really nice, Bret,” Abigail says. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, red—”
“Oh? Do you like my hair? It’s—”
“Uh, yeah, sure, red. As I was saying…. Marriage is beautiful. And I have nothing but the highest level of respect and romantic awe when two people get together and decide to make a three-year commitment to each other. It’s truly beautiful,” he says, purposefully spilling half his bottle over the couple’s heads before running off to the edge of the lake, laughing like a drugged hyena, and dropping his pants to moon us. Then, straightening himself up, pants still around the ankles, he takes the champagne bottle in hand and drinks while pissing into the lake.
Enjoy Me Page 4