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  “Victor,” she starts, responding to my vibe. “Look—I just want to make something clear. I’m seeing someone.”

  “Who?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m involved.”

  “Well, why don’t you tell me who it is?” I ask. “And if it’s that twerp Baxter Priestly I’ll actually give you a thousand bucks.”

  “I don’t think you have a thousand bucks.”

  “I have a big change bowl at home.”

  “It was”—she stops, stuck—“interesting to see you.”

  “Come on, let’s go get a café au lait at Dean & Deluca. Sounds hip, huh?”

  “What about the band?” she asks.

  “Those losers can wait.”

  “I can’t.”

  She starts to move away. I reach out, touch her arm gently. “Wait—are you going to the Todd Oldham show? It’s at six. I’m in it.”

  “Oh god, come off it, Victor.” She keeps walking.

  I dart in and out of people’s way to keep up with her.

  “What? What is it?” I’m asking.

  “I’m not really part of that scene.”

  “What scene, baby?”

  “The one where all anyone is interested in is who’s fucking who, who has the biggest dick, the biggest tits, who’s more famous than whoever.”

  Confused, I keep following. “And you’re, um, not like into this?” I ask, watching her wave down a taxi. “You’ve got like a problem?”

  “I’ve gotta go, Victor.”

  “Hey, can I get your phone number?”

  Before she slams the door, without turning toward me, I hear Lauren say, “Chloe has it.”

  19

  Chloe and I went to L.A. last September for reasons we never really figured out, though in retrospect I think it had something to do with trying to save our relationship and Chloe was supposed to be a presenter at the MTV Awards, which I remember nothing of except Oscar talk, Frida Kahlo talk, Mr. Jenkins talk, how big is Dweezil Zappa’s dick talk, Sharon Stone wearing pajamas, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., coming on to Chloe, only two green Jujyfruits in the box I held while spacing out during the ceremony, and it was all really just Cindy Cindy Cindy and in every photo printed of me—in W, in US, in Rolling Stone—I am holding the same half-empty bottle of Evian.

  We stayed at the Chateau Marmont in a giant suite with a balcony twice its size overlooking West L.A. When Chloe didn’t want to talk she’d rush to the bathroom, turn on the hair dryer full blast and point it toward my calm, bewildered face. Her nickname for me during those weeks out there was “my little zombie.” I tried out for and didn’t get the part of a drug addict’s friend in a medical-drama pilot that ultimately was never produced but it didn’t really matter since I was so out of it I even had to reread things Paula Abdul said in interviews. Chloe was always “dying of thirst,” there were always tickets for some lame-o screening, our conversations were always garbled, the streets were always—inexplicably—covered with confetti, we were always at barbecues at Herb Ritts’, which were always attended by either Madonna or Josh Brolin or Amy Locane or Veronica Webb or Stephen Dorff or Ed Limato or Richard Gere or Lela Rochon or Ace of Base, where turkey-burgers were always served, which we always washed down with pink-grapefruit iced tea, and bonfires were always lit throughout the city along with the giant cones of klieg lights announcing premieres.

  When we went to an AIDS fund-raiser thrown by Lily Tartikoff at Barneys, cameras flashed and Chloe’s dry hand clutched my limp hand and she squeezed it only once—a warning—when a reporter from E! television asked me what I was doing there and I said, “I needed an excuse to wear my new Versace tuxedo.” I could barely make it up the series of steep staircases to the top floor but once I was there Christian Slater gave me a high five and we hung out with Dennis Leary, Helen Hunt, Billy Zane, Joely Fisher, Claudia Schiffer, Matthew Fox. Someone pointed someone else out to me and whispered “The piercing didn’t take” before melting back into the crowd. People talked about cutting off their hair and burning their fingernails.

  Most people were mellow and healthy, tan and buff and drifting around. Others were so hysterical—sometimes covered with lumps and bruises—that I couldn’t understand what they were saying to me, so I tried to stay close to Chloe to totally make sure she didn’t fall back into any destructive habits and she wore Capri pants and Kamali makeup, canceled aromatherapy appointments that I was unaware she had made, her diet dominated by grape- and lemongrass- and root-beer-flavored granitas. Chloe didn’t return phone calls from Evan Dando, Robert Towne, Don Simpson, Victor Drai, Frank Mancuso, Jr., Shane Black. She was bawling constantly and bought a print by Frank Gehry for something like thirty grand and an Ed Ruscha fog painting for considerably more. Chloe bought Lucien Gau shogun table lamps and a lot of iron baskets and had it all shipped back to Manhattan. Rejecting people was the hot pastime. We had a lot of sex. Everyone talked about the year 2018. One day we pretended to be ghosts.

  Dani Jansen wanted to take us to mysterious places and I was asked by four separate people what my favorite land animal was and since I didn’t know what these were I couldn’t even fake an answer. Hanging out with two of the Beastie Boys at a house in Silver Lake, we met a lot of crew-cut blondes and Tamra Davis and Greg Kinnear and David Fincher and Perry Farrell. “Yum—ice” was a constant refrain while we drank lukewarm Bacardi-and-Cokes and bitched about taxes. In the backyard a pool that had been drained was filled with rubble and the chaise longues had empty syringes scattered all over them. The only question I asked during dinner was “Why don’t you just grow your own?” From where I stood I watched someone take ten minutes to cut a slice of cheese. There was a topiary in the shape of Elton John in the backyard, next to the rubble-strewn pool. We were eating Vicodin and listening to Nico-era Velvet Underground tapes.

  “The petty ugliness of our problems seems so ridiculous in the face of all this natural beauty,” I said.

  “Baby, that’s an Elton John topiary behind you,” Chloe said.

  Back at the Chateau, CDs were scattered all over the suite and empty Federal Express packages littered the floor. The word “miscellany” seemed to sum up everything we felt about each other or so Chloe said. We had fights at Chaya Brasserie, three in the Beverly Center, one later in Le Colonial at a dinner for Nick Cage, another at House of Blues. We kept telling each other it didn’t matter, that we didn’t care, fuck it, which was actually pretty easy to do. During one of our fights Chloe called me a “peon” who had about as much ambition as a “parking lot attendant.” She wasn’t right, she wasn’t wrong. If we were stuck in the suite at the Chateau after a fight there was really no place left to go, either the kitchen or the balcony, where two parrots, named Blinky and Scrubby the Gibbering Idiot, hung out. She lay in bed in her underwear, light from the TV flooding the darkened suite, the Cocteau Twins droning from the stereo, and during these lulls I would wander out by the pool and chew gum and drink Fruitopia while reading an old issue of Film Threat or the book Final Exit, rereading a chapter titled “Self-Deliverance via the Plastic Bag.” We were in a nonzone.

  Ten or eleven producers were found dead in various Bel Air mansions. I autographed the back of a Jones matchbook in my “nearly indecipherable scrawl” for some young thing. I mused about publishing my journal entries in Details. There was a sale at Maxfields but we had no patience. We ate tamales in empty skyscrapers and ordered bizarre handrolls in sushi bars done up in industrial-chic decor, in restaurants with names like Muse, Fusion, Buffalo Club, with people like Jack Nicholson, Ann Magnuson, Los Lobos, Sean MacPherson, a fourteen-year-old male model named Dragonfly who Jimmy Rip really dug. We spent too much time at the Four Seasons bar and not enough at the beach. A friend of Chloe’s gave birth to a dead baby. I left ICM. People told us that they either were vampires or knew someone who was a vampire. Drinks with Depeche Mode. So many people we vaguely knew died or disappeared the weeks we were there—car accidents, AIDS, murders, overdoses, run ove
r by a truck, fell into vats of acid or maybe were pushed—that the amount for funeral wreaths on Chloe’s Visa was almost five thousand dollars. I looked really great.

  18

  At Conrad’s loft on Bond Street it’s 1:30 which is really the only time to practice since everyone else in the building is at work or at Time Café acting like an idiot without trying over lunch, and from where I slouch in the doorway leading into the loft I can see all the members of the Impersonators lying around in various positions, each next to his own amp: Aztec’s wearing a Hang-10 T-shirt, scratching at a Kenny Scharf tattoo on his bicep, Fender in lap; Conrad, our lead singer, has a kind of damp appeal and dated Jenny McCarthy and has wilted hair the color of lemonade and dresses in rumpled linens; Fergy’s wrapped in an elongated cardigan and playing with a Magic 8 Ball, sunglasses lowered; and Fitzgerald was in a gothic rock band, OD’d, was resuscitated, OD’d again, was resuscitated again, campaigned mindlessly for Clinton, modeled for Versace, dated Jennifer Capriati, and he’s wearing pajamas and sleeping in a giant hot-pink-and-yucca-striped beanbag chair. And they’re all existing in this freezing, screwy-looking loft where DAT tapes and CDs are scattered everywhere, MTV’s on, Presidents of the United States merging into a Mentos commercial merging into an ad for the new Jackie Chan movie, empty Zen Palate take-out boxes are strewn all over the place, white roses dying in an empty Stoli bottle, a giant sad rag-doll photo by Mike Kelly dominates one wall, the collected works of Philip K. Dick fill an entire row in the room’s only bookcase, Lava lamps, cans of Play-Doh.

  I take a deep breath, enter the room casually, brush some confetti off my jacket.

  Except Fitz, they all look up, and Aztec immediately starts strumming something from Tommy on his Fender.

  “He seems to be completely unreceptive,” Aztec sings-talks. “The tests I gave him show no sense at all.”

  “His eyes react to light—the dials detect it,” Conrad chimes in. “He hears but cannot answer to your call.”

  “Shut up,” I yawn, grabbing an ice beer out of the fridge.

  “His eyes can see, his ears can hear, his lips speak,” Aztec continues.

  “All the time the needles flick and rock,” Conrad admits.

  “No machine can give the kind of stimulation,” Fergy points out, “needed to remove his inner block.”

  “What is happening in his head?” the three of them sing out.

  “Ooh I wish I knew,” Fitzgerald calls from the beanbag chair for one lucid moment. “I wish I kneeeeew.” He immediately rolls over into a fetal position.

  “You’re late,” Conrad snaps.

  “I’m late? It takes you guys an hour just to tune up,” I yawn, flopping onto a pile of Indian pillows. “I’m not late,” I yawn again, sipping the ice beer, notice them all glaring at me. “What? I had to cancel a hair appointment at Oribe to make it here.” I toss a copy of Spin that’s lying next to an antique hookah pipe at Fitz, who doesn’t even flinch when it hits him.

  “‘Magic Touch,’” Aztec shouts out.

  I answer without trying. “Plimsouls, Everywhere at Once, 3:19, Geffen.”

  “‘Walking Down Madison,’” he tosses out.

  “Kirsty MacColl, Electric Landlady, 6:34, Virgin.”

  “‘Real World.’”

  “Jesus Jones, Liquidizer, 3:03, SBK.”

  “‘Jazz Police.’”

  “Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man, 3:51, CBS.”

  “‘You Get What You Deserve.’”

  “Big Star, Radio City, 3:05, Stax.” I yawn. “Oh, this is too easy.”

  “‘Ode to Boy.’”

  “Yaz, You and Me Both, 3:35, Sire.”

  “‘Top of the Pops.’” Aztec’s losing interest.

  “The Smithereens, Blow Up, 4:32, Capitol.”

  “If only you gave the band that much attention, Victor,” Conrad says in Conrad’s hey-I’m-hostile-here mode.

  “Who came in here last week with a list of songs we should cover?” I retort.

  “I’m not gonna sing an acid-house version of ‘We Built This City,’ Victor,” Conrad fumes.

  “You’re throwing money out the window, dude.” I shrug.

  “Covers are nowhere, Victor,” Fergy pipes in. “There’s no money in covers.”

  “That’s what Chloe always tells me,” I say. “And if I don’t believe her, how am I gonna believe you?”

  “What’s the point, Victor?” someone sighs.

  “You, babe”—I’m pointing at Aztec—“have the ability to take a song that people have heard a million times and play it in a way that no one has ever heard it played before.”

  “And you’re too fucking lazy to write your own material,” Conrad says, pointing back, full of indie-rock venom.

  “I personally think a cocktail-mix version of ‘Shiny Happy People’ is hopping—”

  “REM is classic rock, Victor,” Conrad says patiently. “We do not do classic-rock covers.”

  “Oh god, I want to kill myself,” Fergy moans.

  “Hey—but the good news, everyone, is that Courtney Love’s over thirty,” I say happily.

  “Okay. I feel better.”

  “What kind of royalties is Courtney getting from Nirvana sales?” Aztec asks Fergy.

  “Was there a prenup?” Fergy wonders.

  Shrugs all around.

  “So,” Fergy concludes, “since Kurt’s demise maybe nothing.”

  “Hey, come on—Kurt Cobain didn’t die,” I say. “His music lives on in all of us.”

  “We really need to focus on new material, guys,” Conrad says.

  “Well, can we at least write one song without a shitty reggae beat that starts off with the line ‘I was a trippin in da crack house late last night’?” I ask. “Or ‘Dere’s a rat in da kitchen—what I gonna do?’”

  Aztec pops open a Zima and restrums his Fender contemplatively.

  “When’s the last time you guys made a demo?” I ask, noticing Chloe on the cover of the new Manhattan File next to the latest Wired and the copy of YouthQuake with me on the front, totally defaced with purple ink.

  “Last week, Victor,” I hear Conrad say through gritted teeth.

  “That’s a million years ago,” I murmur, flipping around for the article about her. It’s all blah blah blah—the last year of doing runway shows, the Lancôme contract, her diet, movie roles, denying the rumors about heroin addiction, Chloe talking about wanting to have kids (“A big playpen, the whole thing,” she’s quoted), a photo of us at the VH1 Fashion and Music Awards, with me staring vacantly into the camera, a photo of Chloe at the Doppelganger party celebrating the Fifty Most Fabulous People in the World, Baxter Priestly trailing behind her—and I’m trying to remember what my relationship with Lauren Hynde was like back at Camden or if there even was one, as if, right now, in the loft on Bond Street, it matters.

  “Victor,” Conrad’s saying, hands on hips, “a lot of bands are in the music biz for the totally wrong reasons: to make money, to get laid—”

  “Whoa, wait a minute, Conrad.” I hold my hands out, sitting up. “These are the wrong reasons? Really? Let me just get this straight.”

  “All you do here, Victor, is drink beer and reread magazines that you or your girlfriend happen to be in this month,” Conrad says, looming over me.

  “And you’re all so lost in the past, man,” I say wearily. “Captain Beef-heart records? Yogurt? What the fuck is like going on here, huh?” I exclaim. “And Jesus, Aztec—cut your toenails! Where are your fucking morals? What do you even do besides going to fucking poetry readings at Fez? Why don’t you go to a fucking gym or something?”

  “I get enough exercise,” Aztec says dubiously.

  “Rolling a joint isn’t exercise, guy,” I say. “And shave off that goddamn facial hair. You look like a fucking billy goat.”

  “I think it’s time you calm down, Victor,” Aztec says, “and take your place with the glitterati.”

  “I’m just offering you an escape from that whole s
tale hippie vibe.”

  Fergy looks over at me and shivers vaguely.

  “You’re jeopardizing our friendship, dude,” I say, though it emerges from my mouth without a lot of concern.

  “You’re never here long enough, Victor, to jeopardize anything!” Conrad shouts.

  “Oh spare me,” I mutter, getting up to leave.

  “Just go, Victor,” Conrad sighs. “No one wants you here. Go open your big tacky club.”

  I grab my portfolio and bag of CDs and head toward the door.

  “You all feel this way?” I’m asking, standing over Fitz, who wipes his nose on the ice-hockey jersey he’s using as a pillow, eyes closed, sleeping serenely, dreaming about cartons of methadone. “I bet Fitz wants me to stay. Don’t you, Fitz?” I ask, leaning down, trying to shake him awake. “Hey Fitz, wake up.”

  “Don’t even try, Victor,” Fergy yawns.

  “What’s wrong with the Synthman?” I ask. “Besides spending his teen years in Goa.”

  “He went on a Jägermeister binge last night,” Conrad sighs. “He’s on ibogaine now.”

  “And so?” I ask, still prodding Fitz.

  “And for breakfast Ecstasy cut with too much heroin.”

  “Too much?”

  “Too much heroin.”

  “Instead of like …”

  “The right amount of heroin, Victor.”

  “Christ,” I mutter.

  “Oh boy, Victor.” Conrad smirks. “Farm living’s the life for you.”

  “I’d rather be a farmer than hang out with people who drink their own blood, you fucking hippie vampires.”

  “Fitz is also suffering from binocular dysphoria and carpal tunnel syndrome.”

  “Shine on, you crazy diamond.” I rummage in my coat pocket and start handing out free drink tickets. “Well, I guess I’m here to tell you I’m quitting the band and these are only good between 11:46 and 12:01 tonight.”

  “So that’s it?” Conrad asks. “You’re just quitting?”