by Dale Peck
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 says, 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.”
“Ec
stasy? 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 salsa and eat them, muchas gracias. I get dressed: Levi’s, penny loafers, no socks, a white T-shirt from Maxfields, 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 45osl 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.
“Hey, Dirk,” I say.
“Hey, dude.” He turns around.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. You?”
“Just thought I’d stop by, see how it’s hanging.” I hand him one of the Coronas. He twists the top off. I sit down next to him, pop mine open, throw my cap over at the bloody towel, below a poster of the Go-Go’s and a new stereo. A mound of damp bones stains the felt on a pool table, beneath it a bundle of wet Jockey shorts spotted violet and black and red.
“Thanks, guy.” Dirk takes a swallow. “Hey”—he grins—“what’s brown and full of cobwebs?”
“Ethiopian’s asshole,” I say.
“Right on.” We slap high five.
On the patio, a bag filled with flesh, heavy with blood, hangs from a wooden beam and moths flutter around it, and when it drips they scatter, then regroup. Beneath that someone has strung white Christmas lights around a large thorny tumbleweed. A blond bat flaps its wings, repositions itself in the rafters above the bag of flesh and the moths.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“That’s Andre.”
“Hey Andre.” I wave.
The bat squeaks a reply.
“Andre’s got a hangover,” Dirk yawns.
“Bummer.”
“It takes a long time to pull someone’s skull out of their mouth,” Dirk’s saying.
“Uh-huh.” I nod. “Can I have a seltzer?”
“Can you?”
“Nice toucan,” I say, noticing a comatose bird in a cage that hangs near the French doors that lead out to a veranda. “What’s its name?”
“Bok Choy,” Dirk says. “Hey, if you’re gonna get a seltzer, make me a mimosa, will you?”
“Jesus,” I whisper. “The things that toucan has seen.”
“The toucan doesn’t have a clue,” Dirk says.
Body bags lie out by the Jacuzzi, lit candles surround the steaming water, a reminder of relatives who will not be as anguished as they should be, a test they will not pass.
I go back downstairs, get a seltzer, make Dirk a mimosa, then we hang out, watch the movie, drink some more beer, look through worn copies of GQ, Vanity Fair, True Life Atrocities, smoke some pot, and that’s around the time I can smell the blood, coming from the next room, so fresh it’s pulsing.
“I think I have the munchies,” I say. “I think I may go berserk.”
Dirk rewinds the movie and we start watching it again. But I can’t concentrate. Sean Penn keeps getting beat up and I get hungrier but don’t say anything and then the movie’s over and he turns the channel to HBO, where Bad Boys is on, so we start watching it again and we smoke some more pot and finally I have to stand up and walk around the room.
“Marsha’s with one of the Beach Boys,” Dirk says. “Walter called me.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I had dinner with Miranda at the Ivy the other night. Can you dig it?”
“Gnarly. I can dig it.” He shrugs. “I haven’t talked to Marsha since”—he stops, thinks about something, says, hesitantly—“since Roderick.” He switches the channel, then back again.
No one mentions Roderick a whole lot anymore. Last year, Marsha and Dirk were supposed to have dinner with Roderick at Chinois and when they stopped by his place in Brentwood, they found, at the bottom of Roderick’s empty swimming pool, a wooden stake (which was really a Wilson 5 baseball bat crudely whittled down) driven into the concrete near the drain, which had been all scratched up (Roderick prided himself on long, manicured claws), and gray-black sand and dust and chunks of ash were scattered in piles in one corner. Marsha and Dirk had taken the stake, which was slathered with Lawry’s garlic powder, and burned it in Roderick’s empty house, and no one has seen Roderick since.
“I’m sorry, man,” Dirk says. “It scares the shit out of me.”
“Aw, come on, dude, let’s not talk about that,” I say. “Come on.”
“Righty-o, Professor.” Dirk does his Felix the Cat impersonation, slaps his Wayfarers on and smiles.
I’m walking around the room now, in the dark, shouts coming from the TV, moving toward the door, the smell rich and very thick, and I take another deep breath and it’s sweet too and definitely male. I’m hoping I’ll be offered some but I don’t want to act like a leech and I lean up against the wall and Dirk is talking about stealing pints from Cedars and I’m moving toward the door, stepping over the towel drenched with blood, trying casually to open it.