“What have you been doing?” I ask.
“What have you been doing?” she asks back.
I don’t say anything.
She looks up, bewildered. “Come on, Clay, tell me.” She looks through the pile of clothes. “You must do something.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“What do you do?” she asks.
“Things, I guess.” I sit on the mattress.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Things,” My voice breaks and for a moment I think about the coyote and I think that I’m going to cry, but it passes and I just want to get my vest and get put of here.
“For instance?”
“What’s your mom doing?”
“Narrating a documentary about teenage spastics. What do you do, Clay?”
Someone’s written the alphabet, maybe Spit or Jeff or Dimitri, on her wall. I try to concentrate on that, but I notice that most of the letters aren’t in order and so I ask, “What else is your mom doing?”
“She’s going to do this movie in Hawaii. What do you do?”
“Have you spoken to her?”
“Don’t ask me about my mother.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?” I say again.
She finds the vest. “Here.”
“Why not?”
“What do you do?” she asks, holding out the vest.
“What do you do?”
“What do you do?” she asks, her voice shaking. “Don’t ask me, please. Okay, Clay?”
“Why not?”
She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.
“Because … I don’t know,” she sighs.
I look at her and don’t feel anything and walk out with my vest.
Rip and I are sitting in A.R.E. Records on Wilshire. Some executive in charge of promotion is scoring some coke from Rip. The guy who’s executive in charge of promotion is twenty-two and has platinum-blond hair and is wearing all white. Rip wants to know what he can get him.
“Need some coke,” the guy says.
“Great,” Rip says, and reaches into the pocket of his Parachute jacket.
“It’s a nice day out,” the guy says.
“Yeah, it’s great,” Rip says.
“Great,” I say.
Rip asks the guy if he can get him a backstage pass to The Fleshtones concert.
“Sure.” He hands Rip two small envelopes.
Rip says that he’ll talk to him later, sometime soon, and hands him an envelope.
“Great,” the guy says.
Rip and I get up and Rip asks him, “Have you seen Julian?”
The guy is sitting behind a large desk and he picks up the phone and tells Rip to wait a minute. The guy doesn’t say anything into the phone. Rip leans on the desk and picks up a demo of some new British group that’s on the large glass desk. The guy gets off the phone and Rip hands the demo to me. I study it and put it back on the desk. The guy grins and tells Rip that the two of them should have lunch.
“What about Julian?” Rip asks.
“I don’t know,” the executive in charge of promotion says.
“Thanks a lot.” Rip winks.
“Great, you bet, babe,” the guy says, leaning back in the chair, his eyes slowly turning up.
Trent calls me up while Blair and Daniel are over at my house and invites us to a party in Malibu; he mentions something about X dropping by. Blair and Daniel say that it sounds like a good idea and though I really don’t want to go to a party or see Trent all that badly, the day is clear and a ride to Malibu seems like a nice idea. Daniel wants to go anyway to see what houses were destroyed in the rainstorms. Driving down Pacific Coast Highway, I’m really careful not to speed and Blair and Daniel talk about the new U2 album and when the new song by The Go-Go’s comes on they ask me to turn it up and sing along with it, half joking, half serious. It gets cooler as we drive nearer the ocean and the sky turns purplish, gray, and we pass an ambulance and two police cars parked by the side of the road as we head toward the darkness of Malibu and Daniel cranes his neck to get a look and I slow down a little. Blair says she suspects that they’re searching for a wreck, an accident, and the three of us are silent for a moment.
X is not at the party in Malibu. Neither are too many other people. Trent answers the door wearing a pair of briefs and he tells us that he and a friend are using this guy’s place while he’s in Aspen. Apparently, Trent comes here a lot and so do a lot of his friends, who are mostly blond-haired pretty male models like Trent, and he starts to tell us to help ourselves to a drink and some food and he walks back to the jacuzzi and lies down, stretches out under the darkening sky. There are mostly young boys in the house and they seem to be in every room and they all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices, and then I start to wonder if I look exactly like them. I try to forget about it and get a drink and look around the living room. Two boys are playing Ms. Pac Man. Another boy lying in an overstuffed couch smoking a joint and watching MTV. One of the boys playing Ms. Pac Man moans and hits the machine, hard.