The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [71]
It’s a warm night and I pop open the sunroof, play the radio loud. Stop off at Tower Records and buy a couple of tapes, then it’s to the twenty-four-hour Hughes on Beverly and Doheny and pick up a lot of steak in case I don’t feel like going out next week because raw meat is okay even though the juice is thin and not salty enough. The fat chick at checkout flirts with me while I write a check for seven hundred and forty dollars—the only thing I bought is filet mignon. Stop off at a couple of clubs, places where I have a free pass or know the doormen, check out the scene, then drive around some more. Think about the girl I picked up at Powertools, the way I drove her to a bus stop on Ventura Boulevard, dropped her off, hoping she doesn’t remember. I drive by a sporting goods store and think about what happened to Roderick and shudder, get queasy. But I take a Valium and soon I’m feeling pretty good, passing by the billboard on Sunset that says DISAPPEAR HERE and I wink over at two blond girls, both wearing Walkmen, in a convertible 45OSL at a stoplight we’re at and I smile back at them and they giggle and I start following them down Sunset, think about stopping for maybe some sushi with them, and I’m about to tell them to pull over when I suddenly see that Thrifty drugstore sign coming up, the huge neon-blue lowercase t flashing off and on, floating above buildings and billboards, the moon hanging low behind, above it, and I’m getting closer to it, getting weak, and I make this totally illegal U-turn, and still feeling sort of sick but better the farther I get from it, my rearview mirror turned down, I head over to Dirk’s place.
Dirk lives in a huge old-style Spanish-looking place that was built a long time ago up in the hills and I let myself in through the back door, and walking through the kitchen, I can hear the TV blaring up above. There are two hacksaws in a sink filled with pink water and suds and I smile to myself, hungry. Whenever I hear about some young guy on the news who was found near the beach, maybe part of his body, an arm or a leg or a torso, sucked clean in a bag near a freeway underpass, I have to whisper to myself, “Dirk.” Take two Coronas out of the fridge and run upstairs to his room, open the door and it’s dark. Dirk’s sitting on the couch, wearing a PHIL COLLINS T-shirt and jeans, a sombrero on his head and Tony Lamas, watching Bad Boys on the VCR, rolling a joint, and he looks full, a bloody towel in the corner.
“Hey, Dirk,” I say.
“Hey, dude.” He turns around.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. You?”
“Just thought I’d stop by, see how it’s hanging.” I hand him one of the Coronas. He twists the top off. I sit down next to him, pop mine open, throw my cap over at the bloody towel, below a poster of the Go-Go’s and a new stereo. A mound of damp bones stains the felt on a pool table, beneath it a bundle of wet Jockey shorts spotted violet and black and red.
“Thanks, guy.” Dirk takes a swallow. “Hey”—he grins—“what’s brown and full of cobwebs?”
“Ethiopian’s asshole,” I say.
“Right on.” We slap high five.
On the patio, a bag filled with flesh, heavy with blood, hangs from a wooden beam and moths flutter around it, and when it drips they scatter, then regroup. Beneath that someone has strung white Christmas lights around a large thorny tumbleweed. A blond bat flaps its wings, repositions itself in the rafters above the bag of flesh and the moths.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“That’s Andre.”
“Hey Andre.” I wave.
The bat squeaks a reply.
“Andre’s got a hangover,” Dirk yawns.
“Bummer.”
“It takes a long time to pull someone’s skull out of their mouth,” Dirk’s saying.
“Uh-huh.” I nod. “Can I have a seltzer?”
“Can you?”
“Nice toucan,” I say, noticing a comatose bird in a cage that hangs near the french doors that lead out to a veranda. “What’s its name?”
“Bok Choy,” Dirk says. “Hey, if you’re gonna get a seltzer, make me a mimosa, will you?”
“Jesus,” I whisper. “The things that toucan has seen.”
“The toucan doesn’t have a clue,” Dirk says.
Body bags lie out by the Jacuzzi, lit candles surround