Bret Easton Ellis - Imperial Bedrooms (Less Than Zero Sequel)

FOR R.T.

Contents

T hey had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names werent changed and there was nothing in it that hadnt happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away. Other examples: my girlfriend had in fact run over a coyote in the canyons below Mulholland, and a Christmas Eve dinner at Chasens with my family that I had casually complained about to the author was faithfully rendered. And a twelve-year-old girl really had been gang-rapedI was in that room in West Hollywood with the writer, who in the book noted just a vague reluctance on my part and failed to accurately describe how I had actually felt that nightthe desire, the shock, how afraid I was of the writer, a blond and isolated boy whom the girl I was dating had halfway fallen in love with. But the writer would never fully return her love because he was too lost in his own passivity to make the connection she needed from him, and so she had turned to me, but by then it was too late, and because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. Thats how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. Thats how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. Thats how I became the boy who wouldnt save a friend. Thats how I became the boy who couldnt love the girl.

T he scenes from the novel that hurt the most chronicled my relationship with Blair, especially in a scene near the novels end when I broke it off with her on a restaurant patio overlooking Sunset Boulevard and where a billboard that read DISAPPEAR HERE kept distracting me (the author added that I was wearing sunglasses when I told Blair that I never loved her). I hadnt mentioned that painful afternoon to the author but it appeared verbatim in the book and thats when I stopped talking to Blair and couldnt listen to the Elvis Costello songs we knew by heart (You Little Fool, Man Out of Time, Watch Your Step) and yes, she had given me a scarf at a Christmas party, and yes, she had danced over to me mouthing Culture Clubs Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? and yes, she had called me a fox, and yes, she found out I had slept with a girl I picked up on a rainy night at the Whisky, and yes, the author had informed her of that. He wasnt, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close to any of usexcept of course to Blair, and really not even to her. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didnt seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that hed shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.

B ut there was no point in being angry with him. When the book was published in the spring of 1985, the author had already left Los Angeles. In 1982 he attended the same small college in New Hampshire that Id tried to disappear into, and where we had little or no contact. (Theres a chapter in his second novel, which takes place at Camden, where he parodies Clayjust another gesture, another cruel reminder of how he felt about me. Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newmans I Love L.A.) Because of his presence I stayed at Camden only one year and then transferred to Brown in 1983 though in the second novel Im still in New Hampshire during the fall term of 1985. I told myself it shouldnt bother me, but the success of the first book hovered within my sight lines for an uncomfortably long time. This partly had to do with my wanting to become a writer as well, and that I had wanted to write that first novel the author had written after I finished reading itit was my life and he had hijacked it. But I quickly had to accept that I didnt have the talent or the drive. I didnt have the patience. I just wanted to be able to do it. I made a few lame, slashing attempts and realized after graduating from Brown in 1986 that it was never going to happen.

T he only person who expressed any embarrassment or disdain about the novel was Julian WellsBlair was still in love with the author and didnt care, nor did much of the supporting castbut Julian did so in a gleefully arrogant manner that verged on excitement, even though the author had exposed not only Julians heroin addiction but also the fact that he was basically a hustler in debt to a drug dealer (Finn Delaney) and pimped out to men visiting from Manhattan or Chicago or San Francisco in the hotels that lined Sunset from Beverly Hills to Silver Lake. Julian, wasted and self-pitying, had told the author everything, and there was something about the book being widely read and costarring Julian that seemed to give Julian some kind of focus that bordered on hope and I think he was secretly pleased with it because Julian had no shamehe only pretended that he did. And Julian was even more excited when the movie version opened in the fall of 1987, just two years after the novel was published.

I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its theatrical release, in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent Burroughs and Julian, who wasnt clean yet and kept biting his nails, squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation. (I saw Blair walk in with Alana and Kim and trailing Rip Millar. I ignored her.) The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everythingall the pain I felt, the betrayalI couldnt help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldnt disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. (It was also a bummer: very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didnt recoup its cost when released that November.) In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasnt blond, I wasnt tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movies moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyones drug use and trying to save Julian. (Ill sell my car, I warn the actor playing Julians dealer. Whatever it takes.) This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blairs character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our groupjittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. Be good to her, Julian tells Clay. She really deserves it. The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.