White Read online

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  During the spring of 1987 I had dinner with a group of guys, one who was the older brother of a Bennington classmate of mine and all of them working on Wall Street making what seemed like a lot of money for recent business school grads in their mid- to late twenties. During my initial research I’d grown frustrated by their evasions about what exactly they did for the companies where they worked—information I felt was necessary, and finally understood really wasn’t. I was surprised by the desire instead to show off their crazily materialistic lifestyles: the Armani suits, the hip, outrageously priced restaurants they could get reservations at, the cool Hamptons summer rentals and, especially, their expensive haircuts and tanning regimens and gym memberships and grooming routines. I began to realize that the standard hallmarks of gay male culture had been appropriated by straight male culture with the emergence of the heterosexual male dandy, something that had begun with the popularity of GQ magazine and American Gigolo at the dawn of the ’80s. The competition between these guys was overwhelming: the one-upmanship and bragging bordered at times on the threatening, and during this particular meal (the last one, it turned out) I suddenly decided—apropos of nothing in particular—that Patrick Bateman would be a serial killer. Or would imagine himself to be. (I never knew if it was one or the other, which in turn made the novel compelling to write. Is the answer more interesting than the mystery itself? I never thought so.) I have no idea why I made this connection during that dinner, but it changed my conception of the book, and late in the spring of 1987—or was it early summer?—I began re-threading the outline. And once this decision was reached the book started to mirror the surreal quality of my life during that period. A haze had descended over me after moving to New York and the only clarity came when I was alone, working on the novel.

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  I floated through 1987 in the midst of a dreamlike narrative that was decidedly mine yet also felt completely disconnected, as if it belonged to someone else. Who was this well-known young American writer cruising through Manhattan with a best seller at the age of twenty-three, who was both too young and too savvy (growing up in LA I learned that you become adept at dealing with the media by not caring about the media), who was part of the newly minted literary Brat Pack, photographed at clubs and parties, enjoying a bachelor’s existence, every door seemingly wide open to him? It was supposed to be an ’80s win-win, a kind of fantasy, though my anxiety and doubt about nearly everything kept blooming out of control. I skimmed articles about Bret Easton Ellis. I saw his picture in newspapers and magazines. I read that he’d been seen at certain art openings and nightclubs with certain young movie stars of the moment (Robert Downey Jr., Judd Nelson, Nic Cage) and at certain trendy restaurants (with literary Brat Pack cohort Jay McInerney) and sometimes I might have been there (paparazzi pics proved I was) and other times I couldn’t be sure: my author’s photo might have been printed next to a story about a gallery opening or a Midtown movie premiere, but that didn’t mean I was there. Sometimes just an RSVP was proof of my presence at an event whether I’d attended it or not. I often saw my name embedded in lists that confirmed I’d been somewhere when I knew, in fact, I hadn’t. In a sense there were now two Brets—the private and the public—and 1987 was the year I realized they coexisted, which was how unusual my life as a twenty-three-year-old celebrity seemed to me. After Less Than Zero, I attended that small college in Vermont for one more year and then moved back to the house in Sherman Oaks with my mom and two sisters for another year after I’d graduated, so I hadn’t been on a public stage until moving to New York. It’s not even that I cared all that much about having a double, it was just a New Sensation, as INXS put it in their ubiquitous single that played out as a key track over the party life of the city in 1987.

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  In the early fall of that year I published a second novel that received okay reviews and had so-so sales, at least compared to that first best seller, yet there was a massive amount of hype and press as well as a huge book party in a hip new club on the Lower East Side. I spent the duration of it in the owner’s office, suffering from an intense anxiety attack; I’d thrown up in the cab taking me to the party, due to nerves and a hangover after reinforcement drinks at Jams. That November the Less Than Zero movie was released to mediocre reviews and a middling box office, but there were celebrity-packed screenings and parties while the Bangles’ “Hazy Shade of Winter,” the first single from the film’s soundtrack, boomed from MTV and radios everywhere as it charted at #2 on Billboard. And I felt disconnected, as if this was all happening to someone else—a feeling of profound separation and alienation had taken over, yet I smiled and pretended everything was simple and nice and that everyone liked me even though this was decidedly untrue. One Bret bought into the lie of it all; the other Bret was intensely aware that it was only that, a lie. I was probably too young to fully enjoy and accept what was going on, which in turn made me frustrated and angry. What was this society that had allowed me to flourish? Why didn’t I trust it? Why did I want to escape it? Where else was there to go?

  My life was distinctly unlike the lives of my friends, who’d graduated with me in June 1986 and now had jobs that required them to go to an office (1987 was a time when you could graduate from college, find a job and pay a reasonable rent somewhere in Manhattan, something unimaginable given the moated gated community it is now, filled with what seems like only rich people and tourists). I kept strict writing hours in the condo on Thirteenth Street, where I tried to adhere to a routine that mirrored that of my friends who worked nine to five—though sometimes instead of having lunch I would walk to a theater and watch a movie. Then I’d resume writing before meeting up for a cocktail party, dinner somewhere and a nightclub, probably Nell’s; that’s how our evenings usually rolled. And depending on what night it was and how much work needed to be completed the following day, maybe a little cocaine was involved, though of course it was never “a little cocaine” and before we knew it dawn was rising over the East River and friends had to head to work without having slept—another tiny line, another shot of vodka, one more cigarette. But we could do this at twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five because we had the requisite youthful stamina, so it never seemed like a big deal. Instead of exhausting, it seemed romantic.

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  I distinctly remember having lunch at the Odeon on a Monday afternoon in October 1987, after a lost weekend, with a friend who’d also barely slept for two days, both of us not only hungover but still clearly wasted. Why I was having lunch at the Odeon with my friend, who was also twenty-three, and why we were both wearing suits when only half awake from our runaway weekends, is now—thirty years later—completely beyond me, something from not a distant era but a distant century. Yet it seemed then that everyone wore suits; I rarely went anywhere without wearing one, and neither did most of the men I knew, and while at that lunch—we were probably drinking champagne, and I was probably on Klonopin—I remember telling my friend about the last time I’d been at the Odeon, a few weeks earlier, when I found myself sharing cocaine with Jean-Michel Basquiat (we were both wearing suits) downstairs in the men’s restroom during a drunken dinner after a photo shoot for Interview magazine. Basquiat asked why there were so few black people in my first two novels and I said something about the casual racism of the white society I was depicting and we lit up cigarettes as we walked back, high, to the respective groups at our tables—just a typical encounter for me in the fall of 1987.

  Sometime during our lunch my friend commented that people appeared to be getting up mid-meal and leaving their tables en masse. I hadn’t noticed because my back was to the room, but when I looked over my shoulder I saw that young men in suits were hurriedly paying checks and dashing out onto West Broadway. We asked our waiter what was happening and he said it “seemed” the stock market was crashing. I very clearly remem
ber him using that word—one of the few things I remember clearly at all from that period—on what was, in fact, Black Monday. My friend and I had nothing to do with the market and so we finished lunch, exhausted to the point of amusement, at one of the last tables occupied in the restaurant. And despite the shock of Black Monday, the market’s collapse hardly affected the mind-set of young Manhattan during the few years that were left of the 1980s. If anything the decadence ramped up, as if to defy what Wall Street had told us, and perhaps this defiance was not an atypical response to that era.

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  My focus was the novel, which had become my only source of clarity during that period. I wrote the entire manuscript in the rented condo on Thirteenth Street, which had a futon mattress on the floor and some patio furniture scattered around, along with an elaborate stereo system that had an insanely expensive turntable, and a makeshift writing desk—not chicly minimalist, just empty; a place “decorated” by someone who couldn’t be bothered, somebody easily distracted by everything else. The book was reliable and I wasn’t, not necessarily. Away from the novel my life was a haze, and I can’t say now with any certainty if I really was at a U2 concert at the Meadowlands with a couple of Wall Street guys in the spring of 1987, or at the premiere of Dirty Dancing that August, or maybe at the premiere of Who’s That Girl earlier that summer, hanging out with Griffin Dunne. I remember Madonna’s slightly ominous title track to that film wafting out of radios all summer long (“Light up my life, so blind I can’t see / light up my life, no one can help me now”) and I remember sitting in a packed theater at the opening-day matinee of Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, and later that year being at the same theater for Fatal Attraction. But was I backstage before a Def Leppard concert talking to lead singer Joe Elliott while he ate a vegan meal, or was that just part of the dream? By the end of the year, was Jay McInerney really dating a once-unknown model who’d become famous because of a knife attack that left her beautiful face glamorously slashed, and did I really accompany them on their first public appearance—was it at another movie premiere, maybe Moonstruck? Was the paparazzi mob so insistent on getting a picture of the new celebrity couple that my own companion was elbowed violently aside when we left the screening, and did she burst into tears, and was a massive bruise already beginning to form above her rib cage at the after party?

  Did I actually visit the set of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sometime in April or May and even smoke a cigarette with Charlie Sheen between takes? I remember seeing the finished movie that December at a screening back in Los Angeles when I was home for Christmas and thinking that the seduction of Sheen’s Bud Fox by Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko was the most powerful part of the movie. Because that seduction was happening to all of us then, sort of, and it was still playing out by the time the movie was released. But the second act offered redemption, which marred everything that made the first part of the movie feel so of the moment. The second half was the lie that never came true, that never played itself out on the real Wall Street, with the real Bud Foxes and the real Gordon Gekkos—because there never was any redemption. In some ways, I saw American Psycho as the surreal corrective, the logical outcome of where Bud Fox was heading in 1988 and 1989, even as I also realized that I was writing about a nightmare version of myself.

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  Once I’d adjusted to life in Manhattan I became more focused not just on the novel but also on juggling my own reality apart from the novel—or maybe I just got used to things. It could be my life calmed down and fell into a restful rhythm after the stressful excitement of that initial year of 1987 or maybe it was simply that the Klonopin I’d been prescribed by a bored shrink on the Upper East Side was helping. Possibly inhabiting Patrick Bateman had clarified things for me; as the novel grew darker post–Black Monday, I began to feel a release. Just as there had been two Brets, there were two Patrick Batemans: there was the handsome and socially awkward boy next door whose name no one could remember because he seemed like everybody else—having conformed like everybody else—and there was the nocturnal Bateman who roamed the streets looking for prey, asserting his monstrousness, his individuality. At the end of the ’80s I saw this as an appropriate response to a society obsessed with the surface of things and inclined to ignore anything that even hinted at the darkness lurking below. The novel seemed an accurate summation of the Reagan era, with the Iran-Contra affair being obliquely referenced in the last chapter, and the violence unleashed inside was connected to my frustration, and at least hinted at something real and tangible in this superficial age of surfaces. Because blood and viscera were real, death was real, rape and murder were real—though in the world of American Psycho maybe they weren’t any more real than the fakery of the society being depicted. That was the book’s bleak thesis.

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  If I remembered little of 1987 in New York, then all I now remember about 1988 and 1989 is working on the book. I know that Basquiat died less than a year after our conversation in the men’s room at the Odeon; I know that I met someone I ended up living with for seven years, a Wall Street lawyer a few years older than I was, closeted and from the South, who sometimes reminded me of Patrick Bateman and sometimes didn’t; I know that I eventually made a half-hearted attempt at decorating the apartment on Thirteenth Street after purchasing it; I know that I finished American Psycho in December 1989, almost three years to the date after I began it; I know that it was finally released in March 1991 after the initial publisher canceled it. And I now know that many people from that period assumed after it was published that my career as a writer was over. I now know that I was never happier than I was in the summer of 1991.

  p o s t - s e x

  As a Gen Xer, finding my father’s Playboy stash in the bottom cabinet of his nightstand in the house on Valley Vista in the early 1970s was my first gateway into the world of nudity and sexual imagery. Despite what would become my preferences, the nudity in Playboy was intensely fascinating because I had nothing else to compare it to; a few illustrations in the copy of The Joy of Sex my parents kept in their closet could be powerfully erotic but they were only drawings, and the photographs in Playboy were tactile and alive with the color of flesh. And there were sometimes nude men in the Playboy layouts (merely decorative and never the main attraction) as well as in the stills from their annual Sex in Cinema roundup. Playboy was my introduction to the idea of the male gaze (and, later, Penthouse and Oui), while I lay on the green shag carpet next to the king-size waterbed in the groovy San Fernando Valley of the mid-1970s. In a pre-AIDS society where sexuality was discussed casually and without any anxiety or menace, the body was free of all signifiers except pleasure. There was no fear or dread in sexual imagery yet—no irony. It was, I’ve realized increasingly as I’ve gotten older, an innocent time, even though we decidedly felt it wasn’t as we lived through it.

  This was an era in which magazines were the only way to find sustained images of nudity. Though there was nudity in American movies in the 1970s, you had to have cable and then time the movie in order to catch the nudity or soft-core sex scene you’d originally seen in a theater and wanted to watch again when you were, um, alone. (This happened many times with the sex scene in Looking for Mr. Goodbar with Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, which I watched over and over on the Z Channel.) We were still years away from the advent of DVR, and VHS cassettes weren’t ubiquitous yet, and porn was still exclusively shown in theaters, and so we could see images of naked people only by getting our hands on a magazine. For many of us boys (and girls) this portal into the world of nudity was usually our father’s Playboy, or maybe later our mother’s Playgirl (though this was decidedly more rare), at least until we were old enough to buy magazines that were usually far more explicit than anything Playboy had initially offered.

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  In this age of the nude selfie, of porn spam and the freedom to
find every kind of sex act available on your phone within seconds, it’s hard to remember when nudity was still taboo, private, secret, between covers, and you had to pay for it. Or that pictures with posed models were actually exciting—images that raised the temperature and got things going in a way they simply don’t anymore for most of us, and these photos were our introduction to a deeper world of pornography and actual sex. As I got older, Playboy stopped becoming the go-to for masturbatory fantasies, and I began buying more explicit stuff at newsstands even though at fourteen or fifteen I was nowhere near the legal age. Maybe I looked older, or perhaps the vendors didn’t care; sometimes I’d wear a leather jacket and sunglasses to make myself look more adult, but I was never asked for ID in the LA of the late 1970s. Hustler was a favorite of mine because men were included in many of Suze Randall’s elaborate pictorials, and it was also popular with everyone else because Hustler, unlike Playboy then, showed pink. There was also a moment when Hustler, and Penthouse, in its Forum letters section, flirted with—and endorsed—male bisexuality, at least until AIDS slammed that door shut.