The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [45]
Roger rides with me in the limo back to the hotel.
“Terrific show, Bryan.” Roger sighs. “Your concentration and showmanship really cannot be improved upon. I would be lying if I said they could. I’m all out of superlatives.”
“My hands are … fucked up.”
“Just the hands?” he says, not even really sarcastically, no edge in his voice, a muffled complaint maybe, an observation not worth making. “We’ll just tell the promoters you had an uneven synth mix,” Roger says. “We’ll just tell people that your mother died.”
We pass a crowded street diagonal to the hotel and everyone is trying to peer into the tinted windows as the limo rolls toward the Hilton.
“Jesus,” I’m mumbling to myself. “All these fucking gooks. Just look at them, Roger. Just look at all these fucking gooks, Roger.”
“All those fucking gooks bought your last album,” Roger says, then adds, under his breath, “You brain-dead asshole.”
I’m sighing, putting my sunglasses on. “I’d like to get out of this limo and tell these gooks what I think of them.”
“That’s not gonna happen, baby.”
“Why … not?”
“Because you aren’t presentable for direct contact with the public.”
“Think of all the words that rhyme with my name, Roger,” I say.
“Are there a lot?” Roger asks.
Roger and I are standing in an elevator.
“Get me a maid or something, okay?” I ask him. “My room is like a total wreck, man.”
“Clean it yourself.”
“No. Unh-uh.”
“I’ll move you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’ve got the whole floor, you cadaver. Take your pick.”
“Why can’t you just get me a maid?”
“Because housekeeping at the Tokyo Hilton seems to think that you raped two of their maids. Is this true, Bryan?”
“Define, um, rape, Roger.”
“I’ll have room service send up a dictionary.” Roger makes a terrible face.
“I’m going to move.”
Roger sighs, looks at me and says, “You’re getting the feeling that you’re not going to move, right? You’re realizing that you were going to consider it but now you’re coming to the conclusion that it would not be worth the effort, that you don’t have the strength or something, right?” Roger turns away, the elevator gradually slowing, reaching his floor. Roger turns a key so that the elevator is locked into going to my floor and not anywhere else, like I even want it to.
• • •
The elevator stops at the floor that Roger has put a lock on and I step into an empty, dim-lit corridor and start walking toward my door, breaking the hush by screaming loudly, twice, three, four times, and I fumble for the key that will open the door and I turn the handle and it’s open anyway and inside is a young girl sitting on my bed, dried blood everywhere, leafing through Hustler. She looks up from the magazine. I close the door, lock it, stare at her.
“Was that you screaming?” the girl asks in a small, tired voice.
“Guess,” I say and then, “Have you made friends with the ice machine yet?”
The girl is pretty, blond, dark tan, large wide blue eyes, Californian, a T-shirt with my name on it, faded tight cutoff jeans. Her lips are red, shiny, and she puts the magazine down as I slowly move toward her, almost tripping over a used dildo that Roger calls The Enabler. She stares back, nervously, but the way she gets up of the bed, walking slowly backward, seems too calculated and when she finally hits the wall and stands there breathing hard and I reach her, I have to put my