Read Online Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis - Free Book Online Page B

phone. Sometimes someone will drop by and talk and have a drink and then get back into his car and drive over to somebody else’s house. On some Saturday nights there’ll be three or four people who drive from one house to another. Who drive from about ten on Saturday night until just before dawn the next morning. Trent stops by and tells me about how “a couple of hysterical J.A.P.’s” in Bel Air have seen what they called some kind of monster, talk of a werewolf. One of their friends has supposedly disappeared. There’s a search party in Bel Airtonight and they’ve found nothing except—and now Trent grins—the body of a mutilated dog. The “J.A.P.’s,” who Trent says are “really out of their heads,” went to spend the night at a friend’s house in Encino. Trent says that the J.A.P.’s probably drank too much Tab, had some kind of allergic reaction. Maybe, I say, but the story makes me uneasy. After Trent leaves I try to call Julian, but there’s no answer and I wonder where he could be and after I hang the phone up, I’m pretty sure I can hear someone screaming in the house next to us, down the canyon, and I close my window. I can also hear the dog barking out in back and KROQ is playing old Doors songs and War of the Worlds is on channel thirteen and I switch it to some religious program where this preacher is yelling “Let God use you. God wants to use you. Lie back and let him use you, use you.” “Lie back,” he keeps chanting. “Use you, use you.” I’m drinking gin and melted ice in bed and imagine that I can hear someone breaking in. But Daniel says, over the phone, that it’s probably my sisters getting something to drink. It’s hard to believe Daniel tonight; on the news I hear there were four people beaten to death in the hills last night and I stay up most of the night, looking out the window, staring into the backyard, looking for werewolves.

A t Kim’s new house, in the hills overlooking Sunset, the gates are open but there don’t seem to be too many cars around. After Blair and I walk up to the door andring the doorbell, it takes a long time for anybody to open it. Kim finally does, wearing tight faded jeans, high black leather boots, white T-shirt, smoking a joint. She takes a hit off it before hugging both of us and saying “Happy New Year,” then leads us into a high-ceilinged entrance room and tells us she just moved in three days ago and that “Mom’s in England with Milo” and that they haven’t had time to furnish it yet. But the floors are carpeted, she tells us, and says that it’s a good thing and I don’t ask her why she thinks it’s a good thing. She tells us that the house is pretty old, that the guy who owned it before was a Nazi. On the patios, there are these huge pots holding small trees with swastikas painted on them. “They’re called Nazi pots,” Kim says.
    We follow her downstairs to where there are only about twelve or thirteen people. Kim tells us that Fear’s supposed to play tonight. She introduces Blair and me to Spit, who’s a friend of the drummer’s, and Spit has really pale skin, paler than Muriel’s, and short greasy hair and a skull earring and dark circles under his eyes, but Spit’s mad and after saying hi, tells Kim that she has to do something about Muriel.
    “Why?” Kim asks, inhaling on the joint.
    “Because the bitch said I looked dead,” Spit says, eyes wide.
    “Oh, Spit,” Kim says.
    “She says that I smell like a dead animal.”
    “Come on, Spit, forget it,” Kim says.
    “You know I don’t keep dead animals in my room anymore.” He looks over at Muriel, who’s at the end of the long bar, laughing, holding a glass of punch.
    “Oh, she’s wonderful, Spit,” Kim says. “She’s just been taking sixty milligrams of lithium a day. She’s just tired.” Kim turns to Blair and me. “Her mother just bought her a fifty-five-thousand-dollar Porsche.” Then she looks back at Spit. “Can you believe