The Informers

by Bret Easton Ellis

  I'm waiting alone at the stoplight on Beverly and Doheny, turning the radio up even louder. A black boy runs out of the parking lot of the Hughes supermarket on the corner of Beverly and past my car. Two store clerks and a security guard follow him. The boy throws something in the street and runs away into the darkness of West Hollywood, followed by the three men. I sit in the Porsche, very still, while the light turns green, a tumbleweed blows by. I get out of the car, cautiously, and walk into the intersection and look around to see what the black boy dropped. There are no cars coming from any of the four streets that intersect here and no noise either, except for the humming of fluorescent streetlights and the Plimsouls coming from the radio and I pick up what the black boy dropped. It's a package of filet mignon, and staring at it beneath the overhead glare of a neon light, I can see that some of the juice seeping from the Styrofoam is running down the length of my hand to my wrist, staining the cuff of a white Commes des Garçons shirt I'm wearing. I put the piece of meat back down, carefully, wipe my hand on the back of my jeans, then get into my car. I turn the volume on the radio down and the light turns green again and I come to another yellow, now red, light and I turn the radio off and put a tape in and drive back to the apartment on Wilshire.

  10

  THE SECRETS OF SUMMER

  I'm trying to pick up this ok-looking blond Valley bitch at Powertools and she's sort of into it but not drinking enough, only pretending to be drunk, but she goes for me, like they all do, and says she's twenty.

  "Uh-huh," I tell her. "Right. You look really young," even though I know she can't be more than sixteen, maybe even fifteen if junior is working the doors tonight and which is pretty exciting if you consider the prospects. "I like them young," I tell her. "Not too young. Ten? Eleven? No way. But fifteen?" I'm saying. "Hey, yeah, that's cool. It may be jailbait, but so what?"

  She just stares at me blankly like she didn't hear a word, then checks her lips in a compact and stares at me some more, asks me what a wok is, what the word "invisible" means.

  I'm getting totally psyched to get this bitch back to my place in Encino and I even get a medium hard-on waiting for her while she's in the ladies' room telling her friends she's leaving with the best-looking guy here while I'm at the bar drinking red-wine spritzers with my medium hard-on.

  "What are these little fellas called?" I ask the bartender, a cool-looking dude my age, wondering, gesturing toward the drink.

  "Red-wine spritzers," he says.

  "I don't want to get too drunk, though," I tell him while he pours a group of frat guys another round. "No way. Not tonight."

  I turn and look out at everyone dancing on the dance floor and I think I banged the DJ about a million years ago but I'm not too sure and she's playing some god-awful nigger rap song and I'm getting hungry and want to split and then here the girl comes, all ready to go.

  "It's the anthracite Porsche," I tell the valet and she's impressed. "This is gonna be great," I'm saying. "I'm totally jazzed," I tell her but trying not to seem too eager.

  She plays some Bowie tape while we drive toward the Valley. I tell her an Ethiopian joke.

  "What's an Ethiopian with sesame seeds on his head?"

  "What's an Ethiopian?" she asks.

  "A Quarter Pounder," I say. "That really cracks me up."

  We get to Encino. I open the garage door with the garage opener.

  "Wow," she says. "You've got a big house," and then, "You'll take me home afterwards, later?"

  "Yeah. Sure," I say, opening a bottle of fumé blanc. "Some chicks are stupid but I like that in a fuck."

  We go into the bedroom and she's wondering where all the furniture is. "Where's the furniture?" she whines.

  "I ate it. just shut up, pop in a coil and lay down," I mutter, pointing her toward the bathroom, and then, "I'll give you some coke afterwards," even though I don't say what afterwards means, don't even hint.

  "What do you mean? A coil?"

  "Yeah. You don't want to get pregnant, do you? End up giving birth to something awful. A monster? Some kind of beast? You want that?" I ask. "Jesus, even your abortionist would freak out."

  She looks at the bed and then at me and then tries to open the door to the other room.

  "No way." I stop her. "Not that room." I shove her toward the bathroom door. She looks at me, still pretending to be drunk, then goes in, closes the door. I actually hear her fart.

  I turn the lights off, with a Bic, light candles I bought at the Pottery Barn last night. I take off my clothes, touching myself, already stiff, stretch out on the bed, waiting, starving now.

  "Come on come on come on."

  The toilet flushes, she uses the bidet and then she comes out, shoes in hand, and seems shocked to find me lying on the bed with this giant hard-on but she plays it cool. She doesn't want to do this and she knows she's way out of her league and she knows it's too late and this turns me on even more and I have to giggle and she takes her clothes off, asking "Where's the coke? Where's the coke?" and I say "After, after" and pull her toward me. She doesn't really want to fuck so she tries to give me head instead and I let her for a little while even though I cannot feel a thing, so then I start fucking her reallv hard, looking into her face when I'm coming and, like always, she freaks out when she sees my eyes, shiny black, and she sees the horrible teeth, the ruptured mouth (what Dirk thinks looks like "the anus of an octopus"), and I'm screaming on top of her, the mattress below us sopping wet with her blood and she starts screaming too and then I hit her hard, punching her in the face until she passes out and I carry her outside to the pool and by the light coming from underwater and the moon, high in Encino tonight, bleed her.

  I meet Miranda at the Ivy on Robertson for a late supper and she's looking, in her own words, "absoloutly fabulous." Miranda is "forty," with jet-black hair pulled back tight, a jagged white streak running through it on the side, a pale-tan complexion and high, gorgeous cheekbones, teeth the color of lightning, and she's wearing an original hand-beaded velvet dress by Lagerfeld from Bergdorf Goodman she bought when she was in New York last week to bid on a water bottle at Sotheby's that eventually went for a million dollars and to check out a private fund-raising party for George Bush, which, according to Miranda, was "just smashing."

  "Even though you're older than me by, like, twenty years, you always seem incredibly youthful," I tell her. "You are definitely one of my favorite people to hang out with in L.A."

  Tonight we're on the patio and it's hot and we're talking quietly about how Donald is used rather promiscuously in a layout on linen suits in the August issue of GQ and how if you look very carefully at the model next to him you can see four tiny purple dots on his tan neck that the airbrusher missed.

  "Donald is absoloutly wicked," Miranda says.

  I agree and ask, "What's the definition of superfluous? Ethiopian after-dinner mints."

  Miranda laughs and tells me that I'm wicked too and I sit back, sipping my limeade and Stoli, very pleased.

  "Oh look, there's Walter," Miranda says, sitting up a little. "Walter, Walter," she calls out, waving.

  I despise Walter-fiftyish, faggot-clone, agent at ICM whose main claim to fame in some circles is that he bled every person in the Brat Pack except Emilio Estevez, who told me one night at On the Rox that he wasn't into "Dracula and shit like that." Walter saunters over to our table, wearing a completely tacky Versace tuxedo, and he drones on about the screening at Paramount tonight and how this film will do $110 million domestic and that he played fucky with one of the film's stars even though the film is a piece of shit and he flirts shamelessly with me and I'm not impressed. He slinks off—"What a slime, what a homo," I mutter—and then it's only me and Miranda.

  "So tell me what you've been reading, darling," she asks, after the N.Y. steaks, blood rare and extra au jus on the side, arrive and we both dig in. "By the way, this is"—she cocks her head, chewing—"delish," and then, "Oh, but what a headache."

  "Tolstoy," I lie. "I never
read. Boring. You?"

  "I absoloutly love that Jackie Collins. Marvelous trash," she says, chewing, a dark line of juice dripping down her pale chin as she pops two Advil, washing them down with the cup of au jus. She wipes her chin and smiles, blinking rapidly.

  "How's Marsha?" I ask, sipping a red-wine spritzer.

  "She's still in Malibu with. . ." and now Miranda lowers her voice, mentions one of the Beach Boys.

  "No way, dude," I exclaim, laughing.

  "Would I lie to you, baby?" Miranda says, rolling her eyes up, licking her lips, polishing that steak off.

  "Marsha for the longest time was only into animals, right?" I ask. "Cows? Horses, birds, dogs, pets, you name it, right?"

  "Who do you think controlled the coyote population last summer," Miranda says.

  "Yeah, I heard about that," I murmur.

  "Baby, she would go to Calabasas, out to the stables, and bleed a fucking horse in thirty minutes flat," Miranda says. "I mean, holy shit, baby, things were getting ridiculous for a while."

  "I personally cannot stand horses' blood," I'm saying. "It's way too thin, too sweet. Other than that, I can deal with just about anything, but only when I'm feeling gloomy."

  "The only animal I cannot abide is a cat," Miranda says, chewing. "That's because so many of them have leukemia and lots of other poo-poo diseases."

  "Dirty, filthy creatures." I shudder.

  We order two more drinks and split another steak before the kitchen closes and then Miranda confides to me that she almost got herself into a gang bang the other night over at Tuesday's place with all these frat boys from USC.

  "I'm, like, completely taken aback by this," I say. "Miranda, you can be so lousy." I drink the rest of the spritzer, which is a little too bubbly tonight.

  "Darling, believe me, it was some kind of accident. A party. Lots of young gorgeous men." She winks, fingering a tall glass of Moët. "I'm sure you can guess how that turned out."

  "You're just, like, wicked," I tell her, chuckling. "How did you extract yourself from the . . . situation?"

  "What do you think I did?" she says teasingly, gulping down the rest of the champagne. "I sucked the living shit right out of them." She looks around the mostly empty patio, waves over to Walter as he steps into his limo with a girl who looks about six, and Miranda savs, softly, "Semen and blood is a delightful combo, and do you know what?"

  "I'm captivated."

  "Those ridiculous USC boys loved it." She laughs, throwing her head back. "Lined up again and I of course was only too happy to please them again and they all passed out." She laughs harder and I'm laughing too and then she stops, looking up at a helicopter crossing the sky, a searchlight sending down a cone of white. "The one I liked lapsed into a coma." She looks sadly out onto Robertson at a small tumbleweed the valets are playing soccer with. "His neck fell apart."

  "Don't be sad," I say. "It's been a delightful evening."

  "Let's catch a midnight flick in Westwood," she suggests, eyes brightening at her own suggestion.

  We go to the movies after dinner but we first buy two large raw steaks at a Westward Ho and eat them in the front row and I flirt with a couple of sorority girls, one of whom asks me where I got my vest, meat hanging from my mouth, and Miranda even bought napkins.

  "I adore you," I tell her, once the previews start. "Because you've got the right idea."

  I'm at another club, Rampage (but pronounce it French), and I find a pseudo-hot-looking Valley bitch and she seems really slow and stupid like she's completely stoned or drunk or something but she's got great tits and a pretty hot body, not too heavy, maybe a little too skinny, and basically her emptiness thrills me.

  "I usually hate skinny chicks," I'm telling her. "But you look great."

  "Skinny chicks suck?" she asks.

  "Hey—that's pretty funny," I tell her.

  "Is it?" she asks, slack, washed out.

  "I'm into you anyway.

  We take my car and drive over to the Valley, into Encino.

  I tell her a joke.

  "What do you call an Ethiopian wearing a turban?"

  "Is this a joke?"

  "Q-Tip," I say. "That really cracks me up. Even you must admit it's riotous."

  The girl is too stoned to respond to the joke but she manages to ask, "Does Michael Jackson live around here?"

  "Yep," I say. "He's a buddy."

  "I'm really impressed," she says ungratefully.

  "I only went to one party after the Victory tour and it was really shitty," I tell her. "I hate hanging out with niggers anyway."

  "That's not exactly the nicest thing you could say."

  "Mellow out," I groan.

  In my room she's into it and we're fucking wildly and when she starts to come I begin to lick and chew at the skin on her neck, panting, slavering, finding the jugular vein with my tongue, and I start bleeding her and she's laughing and moaning and coming even harder and blood is spurting into my mouth, splashing the roof, and then something weird starts to happen and I get really tired and nauseous and I have to roll off her and that's when I realize that this girl is not drunk or stoned but that she's on some, as she puts it now, "way-out fucking drugs."

  "Ecstasy? LSD? Is it smack?" I'm gagging. She lies there silently.

  "Oh Christ no," I say, feeling it. "It's . . . heroin," I croak. "Oh shit. Now I'm majorly tripping."

  I roll off the bed onto the floor, naked, my head killing me, this poison cramping my stomach up, and I crawl toward the bathroom, and all the time this fucking drugged-out bitch who has snapped out of her stupor is now crawling along with me, squealing "Let's play let's play let's play you're a cowboy and I'm a squaw, got it?" and I growl at her, trying to scare her, showing her my teeth, the fangs, my horrible transformed mouth, my eyes black, lidless. But she doesn't freak out, just laughs, completely high. I finally make it to the toilet and on my back vomit up her blood in geysers and then pass out with the door closed, on the floor. I wake the next night, groggy, her blood dried all over my face and neck and chest. I wash it off in a long, hot shower with a loofah and then I walk into the bedroom. On the bed, written on a matchbook from California Pizza Kitchen, is her name and phone number and below that, "Had a wild time." I go to the other room, swallow some Valium, open up my coffin and take a little nap.

  I wake up later, restless, still kind of weak, grateful for the new customized coffin I had this guy out in Burbank build for me: FM radio, tape cassette, digital alarm clock, Perry Ellis sheets, phone, small color TV with built-in VCR and cable (MTV, HBO). Elvira is the hottest-looking woman on TV and she hosts this horror-movie show on Sunday nights which is my favorite show on TV and I would like to meet Elvira one day and maybe one day I will.

  I get up, take my vitamins, work out with weights while playing Madonna on CD, take a shower, study my hair, blond and thick, and I'm thinking about calling Attila, my hairdresser, and making an appointment for tomorrow night and then I call and leave a message. The maid has come and cleaned, which she is supposed to do, and I have specified to her that if she ever tries to open the coffin I will take her two little children and turn them into a human tostada with extra lettuce and saisa and eat them, muchas gracias. I get dressed: Levi's, penny loafers, no socks, a white T-shirt from Maxfield's, an Armani vest.

  I drive over to the Sun 'n' Fun twenty-four-hour tanning parlor on Woodman and get ten minutes of rays, then head over to Hollywood to maybe visit Dirk, who is mostly into pretty boys, hustlers down on Santa Monica, in bars, at gyms. He likes chain saws, which are okay if you have your place soundproofed like Dirk does. I pass an alley, four parking lots, a 7-Eleven, numerous police cars.

  It's a warm night and I pop open the sunroof, play the radio loud. Stop off at Tower Records and buy a couple of tapes, then it's to the twenty-four-hour Hughes on Beverly and Doheny and pick up a lot of steak in case I don't feel like going out next week because raw meat is okay even though the juice is thin and not salty enough. The fat chick at checkout
flirts with me while I write a check for seven hundred and forty dollars—the only thing I bought is filet mignon. Stop off at a couple of clubs, places where I have a free pass or know the doormen, check out the scene, then drive around some more. Think about the girl I picked up at Powertools, the way I drove her to a bus stop on Ventura Boulevard, dropped her off, hoping she doesn't remember. I drive by a sporting goods store and think about what happened to Roderick and shudder, get queasy. But I take a Valium and soon I'm feeling pretty good, passing by the billboard on Sunset that says DISAPPEAR HERE and I wink over at two blond girls, both wearing Walkmen, in a convertible 450SL at a stoplight we're at and I smile back at them and they giggle and I start following them down Sunset, think about stopping for maybe some sushi with them, and I'm about to tell them to pull over when I suddenly see that Thrifty drugstore sign coming up, the huge neon-blue lowercase t flashing off and on, floating above buildings and billboards, the moon hanging low behind, above it, and I'm getting closer to it, getting weak, and I make this totally illegal U-turn, and still feeling sort of sick but better the farther I get from it, my rearview mirror turned down, I head over to Dirk's place.

  Dirk lives in a huge old-style Spanish-looking place that was built a long time ago up in the hills and I let myself in through the back door, and walking through the kitchen, I can hear the TV blaring up above. There are two hacksaws in a sink filled with pink water and suds and I smile to myself, hungry. Whenever I hear about some young guy on the news who was found near the beach, maybe part of his body, an arm or a leg or a torso, sucked clean in a bag near a freeway underpass, I have to whisper to myself, "Dirk." Take two Coronas out of the fridge and run upstairs to his room, open the door and it's dark. Dirk's sitting on the couch, wearing a PHIL COLLINS T-shirt and jeans, a sombrero on his head and Tony Lamas, watching Bad Boys on the VCR, rolling a joint, and he looks full, a bloody towel in the corner.