American Psycho

by Bret Easton Ellis

  Small World (Chrysalis; 1988) is the most ambitious, artistically satisfying record yet produced by Huey Lewis and the News. The Angry Young Man has definitely been replaced by a smoothly professional musician and even though Huey has only really mastered one instrument (the harmonica), its majestic Dylanesque sounds give Small World a grandeur few artists have reached. It’s an obvious transition and their first album that tries to make thematic sense—in fact Huey takes on one of the biggest subjects of all: the importance of global communication. It’s no wonder four out of the album’s ten songs have the word “world” in their titles and that for the first time there’s not only one but three instrumentals.

  The CD gets off to a rousing start with the Lewis/Hayes-penned “Small World (Part One),” which, along with its message of harmony, has a blistering solo by Hayes at its center. In “Old Antone’s” one can catch the zydeco influences that the band has picked up on touring around the country, and it gives it a Cajun flavor that is utterly unique. Bruce Hornsby plays the accordion wonderfully and the lyrics give you a sense of a true Bayou spirit. Again, on the hit single “Perfect World,” the Tower of Power horns are used to extraordinary effect. It’s also the best cut on the album (written by Alex Call, who isn’t in the band) and it ties up all the album’s themes—about accepting the imperfections of this world but still learning to “keep on dreamin’ of livin’ in a perfect world.” Though the song is fast-paced pop it’s still moving in terms of its intentions and the band plays splendidly on it. Oddly this is followed by two instrumentals: the eerie African-influenced reggae dance track “Bobo Tempo” and the second part of “Small World.” But just because these tunes are wordless doesn’t mean the global message of communication is lost, and they don’t seem like filler or padding because of the implications of their thematic reprise; the band gets to show off its improvisational skills as well.

  Side two opens smashingly with “Walking with the Kid,” the first Huey song to acknowledge the responsibilities of fatherhood. His voice sounds mature and even though we, as listeners, don’t find out until the last line that “the kid” (who we assume is a buddy) is actually his son, the maturity in Huey’s voice tips us off and it’s hard to believe that the man who once sang “Heart and Soul” and “Some of My Lies Are True” is singing this. The album’s big ballad, “World to Me,” is a dreamy pearl of a song, and though it’s about sticking together in a relationship, it also makes allusions to China and Alaska and Tennessee, carrying on the album’s “Small World” theme—and the band sounds really good on it. “Better Be True” is also a bit of a ballad, but it’s not a dreamy pearl and its lyrics aren’t really about sticking together in a relationship nor does it make allusions to China or Alaska and the band sounds really good on it.

  “Give Me the Keys (And I’ll Drive You Crazy)” is a good-times blues rocker about (what else?) driving around, incorporating the album’s theme in a much more playful way than previous songs on the album did, and though lyrically it might seem impoverished, it’s still a sign that the new “serious” Lewis—that Huey the artist—hasn’t totally lost his frisky sense of humor. The album ends with “Slammin’,” which has no words and it’s just a lot of horns that quite frankly, if you turn it up really loud, can give you a fucking big headache and maybe even make you feel a little sick, though it might sound different on an album or on a cassette though I wouldn’t know anything about that. Anyway it set off something wicked in me that lasted for days. And you cannot dance to it very well.

  It took something like a hundred people to put Small World together (counting all the extra musicians, drum technicians, accountants, lawyers—who are all thanked), but this actually adds to the CD’s theme of community and it doesn’t clutter the record—it makes it a more joyous experience. With this CD and the four previous ones behind it, Huey Lewis and the News prove that if this really is a small world, then these guys are the best American band of the 1980s on this or any other continent—and it has with it Huey Lewis, a vocalist, musician and writer who just can’t be topped.

  In Bed with Courtney

  I’m in Courtney’s bed. Luis is in Atlanta. Courtney shivers, presses against me, relaxes. I roll off her onto my back, landing on something hard and covered with fur. I reach under myself to find a stuffed black cat with blue jewels for eyes that I think I spotted at F.A.O. Schwarz when I was doing some early Christmas shopping. I’m at a loss as to what to say, so I stammer, “Tiffany lamps … are making a comeback.” I can barely see her face in the darkness but hear the sigh, painful and low, the sound of a prescription bottle snapping open, her body shifting in the bed. I drop the cat on the floor, get up, take a shower. On The Patty Winters Show this morning the topic was Beautiful Teenage Lesbians, which I found so erotic I had to stay home, miss a meeting, jerk off twice. Aimless, I spent an inordinate amount of the day at Sotheby’s, bored and confused. Last night, dinner with Jeanette at Deck Chairs, she seemed tired and ordered little. We split a pizza that cost ninety dollars. After toweling my hair dry I put on a Ralph Lauren robe and walk back into the bedroom, start to dress. Courtney is smoking a cigarette, watching Late Night with David Letterman, the sound turned down low.

  “Will you call me before Thanksgiving?” she asks.

  “Maybe.” I button up the front of my shirt, wondering why I even came here in the first place.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, speaking slowly.

  My response is predictably cool. “Dinner at the River Café. Afterwards Au Bar, maybe.”

  “That’s nice,” she murmurs.

  “You and … Luis?” I ask.

  “We were supposed to have dinner at Tad and Maura’s,” she sighs. “But I don’t think we’re going to anymore.”

  “Why not?” I slip on my vest, black cashmere from Polo, thinking: I am really interested.

  “Oh you know how Luis is about the Japanese,” she starts, her eyes already glazed over.

  When she fails to continue I ask, annoyed, “You’re making sense. Go on.”

  “Luis refused to play Trivial Pursuit at Tad and Maura’s last Sunday because they have an Akita.” She takes a drag off her cigarette.

  “So, like …” I pause. “What happened?”

  “We played at my place.”

  “I never knew you smoked,” I say.

  She smiles sadly but in a dumb way. “You never noticed.”

  “Okay, I admit I’m embarrassed, but just a little.” I move over to the Marlian mirror that hangs above a Sottsass teakwood desk to make sure the knot in my Armani paisley tie isn’t crooked.

  “Listen, Patrick,” she says, with effort. “Can we talk?”

  “You look marvelous.” I sigh, turning my head, offering an airkiss. “There’s nothing to say. You’re going to marry Luis. Next week, no less.”

  “Isn’t that special?” she asks sarcastically, but not in a frustrated way.

  “Read my lips,” I say, turning back to the mirror. “You look marvelous.”

  “Patrick?”

  “Yes, Courtney?”

  “If I don’t see you before Thanksgiving …” She stops, confused. “Have a nice one?”

  I look at her for a moment before replying, tonelessly, “You too.”

  She picks up the stuffed black cat, strokes its head. I step out the door into the hallway, heading down it toward the kitchen.

  “Patrick?” she calls softly from her bedroom.

  I stop but don’t turn around. “Yes?”

  “Nothing.”

  Smith & Wollensky

  I’m with Craig McDermott in Harry’s on Hanover. He’s smoking a cigar, drinking a Stoli Cristall martini, asking me what the rules are for wearing a pocket square. I’m drinking the same thing, answering him. We’re waiting for Harold Carnes, who just got back from London on Tuesday, and he’s half an hour late. I’m nervous, impatient, and when I tell McDermott that we should have invited Todd or at least Hamlin, who was sure to have cocaine, he shrugs and says
that maybe we’ll be able to find Carnes at Delmonico’s. But we don’t find Carnes at Delmonico’s so we head uptown to Smith & Wollensky for an eight o’clock reservation that one of us made. McDermott is wearing a six-button double-breasted wool suit by Cerruti 1881, a tattersall cotton shirt by Louis, Boston, a silk tie by Dunhill. I’m wearing a six-button double-breasted wool suit by Ermenegildo Zegna, a striped cotton shirt by Luciano Barbera, a silk tie by Armani, suede wing-tips by Ralph Lauren, socks by E. G. Smith. Men Who’ve Been Raped by Women was the topic on The Patty Winters Show this morning. Sitting in a booth at Smith and Wollensky, which is strangely empty, I’m on Valium, drinking a good glass of red wine, wondering absently about that cousin of mine at St. Alban’s in Washington who recently raped a girl, biting her earlobes off, getting a sick thrill not ordering the hash browns, how my brother and I once rode horses together, played tennis—this is burning from my memory but McDermott eclipses these thoughts when he notices I haven’t ordered the hash browns after dinner has arrived.

  “What is this? You can’t eat at Smith and Wollensky without ordering the hash browns,” he complains.

  I avoid his eyes and touch the cigar I’m saving in my jacket pocket.

  “Jesus, Bateman, you’re a raving maniac. Been at P & P too long,” he mutters. “No fucking hash browns.”

  I don’t say anything. How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow. Frank Sinatra is somewhere, singing “Witchcraft.” I’m staring at the walls, listening to the words, suddenly thirsty, but our waiter is taking orders from a very large table of exclusively Japanese businessmen, and someone who I think is either George MacGowan or Taylor Preston, in the booth behind this one, wearing something by Polo, is eyeing me suspiciously and McDermott is still staring at my steak with this stunned look on his face and one of the Japanese businessmen is holding an abacus, another one is trying to pronounce the word “teriyaki,” another is mouthing, then singing, the words to the song, and the table laughs, an odd, not completely foreign sound, as he lifts up a pair of chopsticks, shaking his head confidently, imitating Sinatra. His mouth opens, what comes out of it is: “that sry comehitle stale … that clazy witchclaft …”

  Something on Television

  While getting dressed to meet Jeanette for a new British musical that opened on Broadway last week and then dinner at Progress, the new Malcolm Forbes restaurant on the Upper East Side, I watch a tape of this morning’s Patty Winters Show, which is split into two parts. The first section is a feature on the lead singer of the rock band Guns n’ Roses, Axl Rose, whom Patty quoted as telling an interviewer, “When I get stressed I get violent and take it out on myself. I’ve pulled razor blades on myself but then realized that having a scar is more detrimental than not having a stereo.… I’d rather kick my stereo in than go punch somebody in the face. When I get mad or upset or emotional, sometimes I’ll walk over and play my piano.” Part two consists of Patty reading letters that Ted Bundy, the mass murderer, had written to his fiancée during one of his many trials. “‘Dear Carole,’” she reads, while an unfairly bloated head shot of Bundy, just weeks away from execution, flashes across the screen, “‘please do not sit in the same row in court with Janet. When I look over toward you there she sits contemplating me with her mad eyes like a deranged seagull studying a clam … I can feel her spreading hot sauce on me already.…’”

  I wait for something to happen. I sit in my bedroom for close to an hour. Nothing does. I get up, do the rest of the coke—a minuscule amount—that’s in my closet left over from a late Saturday at M.K. or Au Bar, stop at Orso for a drink before meeting Jeanette, who I called earlier, mentioning that I had two tickets to this particular musical and she didn’t say anything except “I’ll go” and I told her to meet me in front of the theater at ten to eight and she hung up. I tell myself while I’m sitting alone at the bar in Orso that I was going to call one of the numbers that flashed on the bottom of the screen, but then I realize that I didn’t know what to say and I remember ten of the words Patty read: “I can feel her spreading hot sauce on me already.”

  I remember these words again for some reason while Jeanette and I are sitting in Progress after the musical and it’s late, the restaurant is crowded. We order something called eagle carpaccio, mesquite-grilled mahi-mahi, endive with chèvre and chocolate-covered almonds, this weird kind of gazpacho with raw chicken in it, dry beer. Right now there really is nothing edible on my plate, what there is tastes like plaster. Jeanette is wearing a wool smoking jacket, a silk chiffon shawl with one sleeve, wool tuxedo pants, all Armani, antique gold and diamond earrings, stockings from Givenchy, grosgrain flats. She keeps sighing and threatens to light a cigarette even though we’re seated in the nonsmoking section of the restaurant. Jeanette’s behavior deeply unsettles me, causes black thoughts to form and expand in my head. She’s been drinking champagne kirs but has already had too many and when she orders her sixth I suggest that maybe she’s had enough. She looks at me and says, “I am cold and thirsty and I will order what I fucking want.”

  I say, “Then have an Evian or San Pellegrino for Christ sakes.”

  Sandstone

  My mother and I are sitting in her private room at Sandstone, where she is now a permanent resident. Heavily sedated, she has her sunglasses on and keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they’re shaking. She tries to smile when she asks what I want for Christmas. I’m not surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head and look at her. I’m wearing a two-button wool gabardine suit with notched lapels by Gian Marco Venturi, cap-toed leather laceups by Armani, tie by Polo, socks I’m not sure where from. It’s nearing the middle of April.

  “Nothing,” I say, smiling reassuringly.

  There’s a pause. I break it by asking, “What do you want?”

  She says nothing for a long time and I look back at my hands, at dried blood, probably from a girl named Suki, beneath the thumbnail. My mother licks her lips tiredly and says, “I don’t know. I just want to have a nice Christmas.”

  I don’t say anything. I’ve spent the last hour studying my hair in the mirror I’ve insisted the hospital keep in my mother’s room.

  “You look unhappy,” she says suddenly.

  “I’m not,” I tell her with a brief sigh.

  “You look unhappy,” she says, more quietly this time. She touches her hair, stark blinding white, again.

  “Well, you do too,” I say slowly, hoping that she won’t say anything else.

  She doesn’t say anything else. I’m sitting in a chair by the window, and through the bars the lawn outside darkens, a cloud passes over the sun, soon the lawn turns green again. She sits on her bed in a nightgown from Bergdorf’s and slippers by Norma Kamali that I bought her for Christmas last year.

  “How was the party?” she asks.

  “Okay,” I say, guessing.

  “How many people were there?”

  “Forty. Five hundred.” I shrug. “I’m not sure.”

  She licks her lips again, touches her hair once more. “What time did you leave?”

  “I don’t remember,” I answer after a long time.

  “One? Two?” she asks.

  “It must have been one,” I say, almost cutting her off.

  “Oh.” She pauses again, straightens her sunglasses, black Ray-Bans I bought her from Bloomingdale’s that cost two hundred dollars.

  “It wasn’t very good,” I say uselessly, looking at her.

  “Why?” she asks, curious.

  “It just wasn’t,” I say, looking back at my hand, the specks of blood under the nail on my thumb, the photograph of my father, when he was a much younger man, on my mother’s bedside table, next to a photograph of Sean and me when we were both teenagers, wearing tuxedos, neither one of us smiling. In the photograph of my father he’s wearin
g a six-button double-breasted black sport coat, a white spread-collar cotton shirt, a tie, pocket square, shoes, all by Brooks Brothers. He’s standing next to one of the topiary animals a long time ago at his father’s estate in Connecticut and there’s something the matter with his eyes.

  The Best City for Business

  And on a rainy Tuesday morning, after working out at Xclusive, I stop by Paul Owen’s apartment on the Upper East Side. One hundred and sixty-one days have passed since I spent the night in it with the two escort girls. There has been no word of bodies discovered in any of the city’s four newspapers or on the local news; no hints of even a rumor floating around. I’ve gone so far as to ask people—dates, business acquaintances—over dinners, in the halls of Pierce & Pierce, if anyone has heard about two mutilated prostitutes found in Paul Owen’s apartment. But like in some movie, no one has heard anything, has any idea of what I’m talking about. There are other things to worry over: the shocking amount of laxative and speed that the cocaine in Manhattan is now being cut with, Asia in the 1990s, the virtual impossibility of landing an eight o’clock reservation at PR, the new Tony McManus restaurant on Liberty Island, crack. So what I’m assuming is that, essentially, like, no bodies have been found. For all I know, Kimball has moved to London too.