Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [159]
I actually had the cab drop me off on Third Avenue, half a block from the condo, and I floated into Kiehl’s to buy Mike a particular type of shampoo I remembered he kept in my apartment. Over the store’s speakers Elton John was singing “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” and the song followed me back out onto Third Avenue. It had been a song my father had liked, and one night while we were driving through Westwood during the summer of 1976 when I was twelve he had even asked me who sang it, and when I told him he turned the volume up, and the fact that he liked the song made me grateful. Outside Kiehl’s I ran into a college classmate who had moved to Manhattan the same year I had and had just gone through his second divorce. (This wife had left him for someone on the Mets, and I vaguely remembered reading about it.) He was tan and had gray in his hair—which I immediately noticed, and I was suddenly ashamed of the coloring I’d had done to mine the day before in the Avon Center in Trump Tower. He had read about the disappearance of my son (actually taking hold of my hand as he told me how deeply sorry he was, a man I barely knew) and commented wryly about my breakup with Jayne (“Marriage is about love, and divorce is about money”), and when I answered certain questions he observed that I was speaking too slowly. I made vain gestures with my hands, trying to explain things. He had been through rehab recently, and as we compared notes I could tell—as he hurriedly walked away—that he knew I was high. His last words were “Well, maybe next time?” I walked across the street to a deli on the corner, where I bought a Post since I was now reading my (and Robby’s) horoscope daily (follow the tea leaves, avoid tragedy, ignore pentagrams, guess the hint, reconcile the future, the possible blazing, sleeper awake). And as I shuffled slowly back to the condo, I stopped in the middle of the block and turned around. Someone had been singing softly behind me, but no one was there. The song was so familiar that I shuddered. It wasn’t until I lay down in my empty space that I realized it was “The Sunny Side of the Street.”
And then I floated into a very soft place, surrounded by all the framed photos of Robby I had clipped from newspapers and magazines concerning his disappearance. This grim shrine to his biography sat in an orderly row on a shelf above my bed (“Your dark throne,” Mike called the sloping shelf, shivering). The heroin flowing through me, I thought about the last time I saw my father alive. He was drunk and overweight in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, and curling into myself on the bed I thought: What if I had done something that day? I had just sat passively in a booth at Maple Drive as the midday light filled the half-empty dining room, pondering a decision. The decision was: should you disarm him? That was the word I remember: disarm. Should you tell him something that might not be the truth but would get the desired reaction? And what was I going to convince him of, even though it was a lie? Did it matter? Whatever it was, it would constitute a new beginning. The immediate line: You’re my father and I love you. I remember staring at the white tablecloth as I contemplated saying this. Could I actually do it? I didn’t believe it, and it wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be. For one moment, as my father ordered another vodka (it was two in the afternoon; this was his fourth) and started ranting about my mother and the slump in California real estate and