The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [49]
“Don’t dwell on the past, dude.”
“Do you know how much we still have to pay that bitch off every fucking month?”
“Leave me alone,” I whisper.
“She was in a wheelchair for a year.”
“I have something to tell you.”
“So don’t give me that oh-man-I-know-it shit. You don’t know,” Roger says. “You don’t know shit.”
“I have something to tell you.”
“What? You’re announcing your retirement?” Roger hisses. “Let me guess—you’re going to sell out big-time?”
“I hate Japan,” I say.
“You hate everywhere,” Roger groans. “You loathsome fuck.”
“Japan’s so … different,” I say, finally.
“That’s a joke. You say every place is different.” Roger sighs. “Focus, focus, focus, for Christ sakes, focus.”
I stare back into the mirror, hear screaming coming from the arena.
“Adjust my dreams for me, Roger,” I whisper. “Adjust my dreams for me.”
On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on an Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon.
8
LETTERS FROM L.A.
Sept 4 1983
Dear Sean,
Guess you didn’t expect to hear from me. Talk about getting away from it all! Here I am—all away across the country in California, sitting on my bed, drinking diet Coke and listening to Bowie. Pretty weird, isn’t it? I’ve been in L.A. a week and I still can’t quite believe it. All this summer I knew that I’d be coming out here but somehow the idea wasn’t quite real. It’s just as well that I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it because nothing would have prepared me. L.A. is something else.
I got into LAX last Tuesday afternoon, half-crazy from lack of sleep and wondering what the hell I was doing here. It was like walking into another world. 100 degrees out and all these beautiful blond tan people (specimens!) staring into outer space, walking around me and toward their cars. I felt so pale—kind of like what it would feel being the only blond girl in Egypt or something. And I got this awful feeling that all of them were looking at me: no tan, not blond, not beautiful, let’s ignore her! All I did those first few days was chain-smoke Export A’s and look at the pavement and wish I was back at Camden. I’m not sure how one fits in here. Get a tan? Dye my hair blond? I know it sounds paranoid but I really feel this hostility toward me. I’m getting used to it but still.
My grandparents were overjoyed when they saw me. They aren’t very emotional people but I’ve always been their favorite granddaughter and they were positively bubbling over with excitement. On the way back to their house my grandfather, who looked so tan and healthy it was positively eerie, patted my hand and said, “from now on we’re going to take care of you—you won’t lack for anything,” and he didn’t seem to be joking.
This last week I spent doing mostly touristy stuff and going to parties and trying to catch up on my sleep. We spent a day at Disneyland, which was a real trip. I’ve seen pictures of the place but let me tell you, Sean, seeing this place in reality was altogether something else. My grandfather’s assistant took something like twenty roles of pictures: me standing with Mickey Mouse (feeling utterly foolish), me in front of the Matterhorn, me staring pensively at Space Mountain, some pervert dressed up as Pluto coming on to me (disgusting), me with the Haunted Mansion