Less Than Zero (Page 13)

“Do you want something, man?” he asks. “I mean, I like you and if you need anything, just come see me, okay?”

“Thanks. I don’t need anything, not really.” I stop and feel kind of sad. “Jesus, Julian, how have you been? We’ve got to get together or something. I haven’t seen you in a long time.” I stop. “I’ve missed you.”

Julian stops playing with his keys and looks away from me. “I’ve been all right. How was … oh shit, where were you, Vermont?”

“No, New Hampshire.”

“Oh yeah. How was it?”

“Okay. Heard you dropped out of U.S.C.”

“Oh yeah. Couldn’t deal with it. It’s so totally bogus. Maybe next year, you know?”

“Yeah …” I say. “Have you talked to Trent?”

“Oh man, if I want to see him, I’ll see him.”

There’s another pause, this time longer.

“What have you been doing?” I finally ask.

“What?”

“Where have you been? What’ve you been doing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been around. Went to that Tom Petty concert at the … Forum. He sang that song, oh, you know, that song we always used to listen to .…” Julian closes his eyes and tries to remember the song. “Oh, shit, you know .…” He begins to hum and then sing the words. “Straight into darkness, we went straight into darkness, out over that line, yeah straight into darkness, straight into night.…”

The two girls look over at us. I look at the Perrier bottle, a little embarrassed, and say, “Yeah, I remember.”

“Love that song,” he says.

“Yeah, so did I,” I say. “What else you been up to?”

“No good,” he laughs. “Oh, I don’t know. Just been hanging out.”

“You called me and left a message, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“What did you want?”

“Oh forget it, nothing too important.”

“Come on, what is it?”

“I said forget it, Clay.”

He takes off his sunglasses and squints and his eyes look blank, and the only thing I can think of to say is, “How was the concert?”

“What?” He starts to bite his nails.

“The concert. How was it?”

He’s staring off somewhere else. The two girls get up and leave.

“It was a bummer, man. A real f**kin’ bummer,” he finally says, and then walks away. “Later.”

“Yeah, later,” I say, and look back at the Porsche and get the feeling that there’s someone else in it.

Rip never shows up at Cafe Casino and he calls me up, later, around three and tells me to come over to the apartment on Wilshire. Spin, his roommate, is sunbathing nude on the balcony and Devo’s on the stereo. I walk into Rip’s bedroom and he’s still in bed, nude, and there’s a mirror on the nightstand, next to the bed, and he’s cutting a line of coke. And he tells me to come in, sit down, check the view out. I walk over to the window and he gestures at the mirror and asks if I want any coke and I tell him I don’t think so, not now.

A very young guy, probably sixteen, maybe fifteen, really tan, comes out of the bathroom and he’s zipping up his jeans and buckling his belt. He sits on the side of the bed and puts on his boots, which seem too big for him. This kid has really short, spiked blond hair and a Fear T-shirt on and a black leather bracelet strapped to one of his wrists. Rip doesn’t say anything to him and I pretend that the kid isn’t there. He stands up and stares at Rip and then leaves.

From where I’m sitting, I watch as Spin gets up and walks into the kitchen, still nude, and starts to squeeze grapefruits into a large glass container. He calls to Rip, from the kitchen, “Did you make reservations wth Cliff at Morton’s?”

“Yeah, babes,” Rip calls back, before doing the coke.

I’m beginning to wonder why Rip has called me over, why he couldn’t meet me someplace else. There’s an old, expensively framed poster of The Beach Boys hanging over Rip’s bed and I stare at it trying to remember which one died, while Rip does three more lines. Rip throws his head back and shakes it and sniffs loudly. He then looks at me and wants to know what I was doing at the Cafe Casino in Westwood when he clearly remembers telling me to meet him at the Cafe Casino in Beverly Hills. I tell him that I’m pretty sure he said to meet at the Cafe Casino in Westwood.

Rip says, “No, not quite,” and then, “Anyway it doesn’t matter.”