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Authors: Bret Easton Ellis
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stereo and that night I can’t get to sleep; the sunburn’s uncomfortable, and MTV’s giving me a headacheand I take some Nembutal Griffin slipped me in the parking lot at the beach club.
I get up late the next morning to the blare of Duran Duran coming from my mother’s room. The door’s open and my sisters are lying on the large bed, wearing bathing suits, leafing through old issues of GQ, watching some porno film on the Betamax with the sound turned off. I sit down on the bed, also in my bathing suit, and they tell me that Mom went out to lunch and that the maid went shopping and I watch about ten minutes of the movie, wondering whose it is—my mom’s? sisters’? Christmas present from a friend? the person with the Ferrari? mine? One of my sisters says that she hates it when they show the guy coming and I walk downstairs, out to the pool, do my laps.
W hen I was fifteen and first learned how to drive, in Palm Springs, I’d take my father’s car while my parents were asleep and my sisters and I would drive around the desert, in the middle of the night, Fleetwood Mac or Eagles on, loud, top down, hot winds blowing, making the palm trees bend, silent. And one night my sisters and I took the car out and it was a night where there wasn’t any moon and the wind was strong, and someone had just dropped me off from a party that hadn’t been too fun. The McDonald’s we were going to stop at was closed due to some power outage caused by the winds and I was tired and my sisters were fighting and I was on the way back home when I saw what I thought was a bonfire from about a mile down the highway, but as I drove closer I saw that it wasn’t a bonfire but a Toyota parked at this strange, crooked angle, its hood open, flames pouring out of the engine. The front windshield was smashed open and a Mexican woman was sitting on the curb, on the side of the highway, crying. There were two or three kids, Mexican also, standing behind her, staring at the fire, gaping at the rising flames, and I was wondering why there were no other cars out to stop or help. My sisters stopped fighting and told me to stop the car so that they could watch. I had an urge to stop, but I didn’t. I slowed down, and then drove quickly away and pushed back in the tape my sisters had taken out when they first saw the flames, and turned it up, loud, and drove through every red light until I got back to our house .
I don’t know why the fire bothered me, but it did, and I had these visions of a child, not yet dead, lying across the flames, burning. Maybe some kid, thrown through the windshield and who’d fallen onto the engine, and I asked my sisters if they thought they saw a kid burning, melting, on the engine and they said no, did you?, neato, and I checked the papers the next day to make sure there hadn’t been one. And later that same night I sat out by the pool, thinking about it until I finally fell asleep, but not before the power went out due to the wind and the pool went black .
And I remember that at that time I started collecting all these newspaper clippings; one about some twelve-year-old kid who accidentally shot his brother in Chino; another about a guy in Indio who nailed his kid to a wall, or a door, I can’t remember, and then shot him, point-blank in the face, and one about a fire at a home for the elderly that killed twenty and one about a housewife who while driving her children home from school flew off this eighty-foot embankment near San Diego, instantly killing herself and the three kids and one about a man who calmly and purposefully ran over his ex-wife somewhere near Reno, paralyzing her below the neck. I collected a lot of clippings during that time because, I guess, there were a lot to be collected .
I t’s a Saturday night and on some Saturday nights when there’s not a party to go to and no concerts around town and everyone’s seen all the movies, most people stay at home and invite friends over and talk on the
I get up late the next morning to the blare of Duran Duran coming from my mother’s room. The door’s open and my sisters are lying on the large bed, wearing bathing suits, leafing through old issues of GQ, watching some porno film on the Betamax with the sound turned off. I sit down on the bed, also in my bathing suit, and they tell me that Mom went out to lunch and that the maid went shopping and I watch about ten minutes of the movie, wondering whose it is—my mom’s? sisters’? Christmas present from a friend? the person with the Ferrari? mine? One of my sisters says that she hates it when they show the guy coming and I walk downstairs, out to the pool, do my laps.
W hen I was fifteen and first learned how to drive, in Palm Springs, I’d take my father’s car while my parents were asleep and my sisters and I would drive around the desert, in the middle of the night, Fleetwood Mac or Eagles on, loud, top down, hot winds blowing, making the palm trees bend, silent. And one night my sisters and I took the car out and it was a night where there wasn’t any moon and the wind was strong, and someone had just dropped me off from a party that hadn’t been too fun. The McDonald’s we were going to stop at was closed due to some power outage caused by the winds and I was tired and my sisters were fighting and I was on the way back home when I saw what I thought was a bonfire from about a mile down the highway, but as I drove closer I saw that it wasn’t a bonfire but a Toyota parked at this strange, crooked angle, its hood open, flames pouring out of the engine. The front windshield was smashed open and a Mexican woman was sitting on the curb, on the side of the highway, crying. There were two or three kids, Mexican also, standing behind her, staring at the fire, gaping at the rising flames, and I was wondering why there were no other cars out to stop or help. My sisters stopped fighting and told me to stop the car so that they could watch. I had an urge to stop, but I didn’t. I slowed down, and then drove quickly away and pushed back in the tape my sisters had taken out when they first saw the flames, and turned it up, loud, and drove through every red light until I got back to our house .
I don’t know why the fire bothered me, but it did, and I had these visions of a child, not yet dead, lying across the flames, burning. Maybe some kid, thrown through the windshield and who’d fallen onto the engine, and I asked my sisters if they thought they saw a kid burning, melting, on the engine and they said no, did you?, neato, and I checked the papers the next day to make sure there hadn’t been one. And later that same night I sat out by the pool, thinking about it until I finally fell asleep, but not before the power went out due to the wind and the pool went black .
And I remember that at that time I started collecting all these newspaper clippings; one about some twelve-year-old kid who accidentally shot his brother in Chino; another about a guy in Indio who nailed his kid to a wall, or a door, I can’t remember, and then shot him, point-blank in the face, and one about a fire at a home for the elderly that killed twenty and one about a housewife who while driving her children home from school flew off this eighty-foot embankment near San Diego, instantly killing herself and the three kids and one about a man who calmly and purposefully ran over his ex-wife somewhere near Reno, paralyzing her below the neck. I collected a lot of clippings during that time because, I guess, there were a lot to be collected .
I t’s a Saturday night and on some Saturday nights when there’s not a party to go to and no concerts around town and everyone’s seen all the movies, most people stay at home and invite friends over and talk on the
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