The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [44]
“The one with Rebecca De Mornay?”
“Er, no, the one with the monkey.”
“Oh … yeah.”
“I heard the album,” Matt finally says.
“Did … you like it, man?” I ask.
“Are you kidding, man?” he says.
“Is that … good, man?” I ask.
“Great backup. Really tight.”
Another long silence.
“It’s, um, valid, man, valid,” Matt says. Pause. “The one about the car, man?” Pause. “I saw John Travolta buy a copy at Tower.” Long pause.
“I’m, um, really gratified by your response, man,” I say.
“Okay?”
Long pause.
“Are you, um, doing anything, like, now?” I ask.
“I’ve fooled around with some stuff,” Matt says. “Might be ready to go into the studio in a couple of months.”
“Ter-rif-ic,” I say.
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you … talked to Sam?” I ask.
“Just about … well, maybe it was a month ago? One of the lawyers? Ran into him somewhere. By accident.”
“Sam is … okay?”
Not sounding too sure, Matt says, “He’s great.”
“And … his lawyers?”
He answers by asking, “How’s Roger?”
“Roger is … Roger.”
“Out of rehab?”
“A long time ago.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Matt sighs. “I know what you mean, man.”
“Well, man.” I breathe in, tense up. “I wonder if maybe you’d like to, oh I don’t know, if maybe you would like to get together and write some songs when I get finished with this tour, maybe record some stuff … man?”
Matt coughs, then after not too long says, “Oh man I don’t know y’know the old days are over man and I really don’t think so.”
“Well, fuck, it’s not like—” I stop in midsentence.
“You gotta move on.”
“I … I am, you know, but.” I start to kick my foot against a wall and my fingernails have somehow dug themselves so hard into the bandaged wound that it becomes spotted with red.
“It’s over, y’know, man?” Matt is saying.
“Am I, like, lying, man?”
I’m not saying anything, just blowing on my palm.
“I was watching some of those old movies that Nina and Dawn took in Monterey,” Matt is saying.
I’m trying not to listen, thinking Dawn?
“And the weirdest thing but also the grooviest thing is that Ed looked really good. He looked great, in fact. Tan and in good shape and I don’t know what happened.” Pause. “I don’t know what the fuck happened, man.”
“Who cares, man?”
“Yeah.” Matt sighs. “You’ve got a point.”
“Because I don’t care, man.”
“I guess I don’t care either, man.”
I hang up, pass out.
• • •
On the way to the arena, sitting in the back of the limo, watching television, sumo wrestling, what could be and old Bruce Lee movie, the same commercial about a blue lemonade seven times, throwing ice cubes I’ve sucked on at the small square screen, I roll the glass partition down and tell the chauffeur I need a lot of cigarettes and the chauffeur reaches into the glove compartment, tosses back a pack of Marlboros, and cocaine I’d taken earlier isn’t doing much of anything, which I expected, and dismayingly it just seems to intensify the pain in my hand and I keep swallowing but residue keeps tickling the back of my throat in an insistent, annoying kind of way and I keep drinking Scotch which almost takes away the taste.
The stage reeks of sweat and it’s a hundred degrees onstage and we have been playing for about fifty minutes and all I want to do is sing the last song, which the band, when I mention this in between breaks, thinks is a pretty bad idea. All the songs are from the last three solo albums but from the front row I can hear Orientals crying out in thick, r-less accents the names of big hits I played with the band and this band launches into the biggest hit off the second solo LP and I can’t really tell if the audience is enthused even when they applaud loudly and behind me a four-hundred-foot tapestry—BRYAN METRO WORLD TOUR 1984—billows in back of us and I’m moving slowly across the large expanse of stage, trying to peer out into the audience but bright blinding spotlights turn the arena into this moving mass of gray darkness and as I begin to sing the second verse of the song I forget the lyrics. I sing “Another night passes by and still you wonder what happened” and then I freeze. A guitarist suddenly jerks his