Lunar Park (3 page)

And when I returned to New York, I was told by Jayne that she was pregnant and that she intended to keep the child and that I was the father. I begged her to have an abortion. (“Change it! Fix it! Do something!” I screamed. “I can’t be doing this! I’ll be dead in two years! Don’t look at me like I’m crazy!”) Children had voices, they wanted to explain themselves, they wanted to tell you where everything was—and I could easily do without witnessing these special skills. I had already seen what I wanted and it did not involve children. Like all single men the first priority was my career. I had a fantasy bachelor’s life and wanted to keep it. I raged at Jayne, confronted her with entrapment, insisted it wasn’t mine. But she said she expected as much from me and had the child prematurely the following March at Cedars-Sinai, in L.A., where she was now living. I saw the child once during its first year—Jayne brought him over to the condo on 13th Street in a pathetic attempt at bonding when she was in town for the premiere of the movie she had made with Keanu Reeves the previous summer. She had named him Robert—Robby. Again I raged at her and insisted the child wasn’t mine. She asked, “Then who the hell do you think the father is?” I immediately made a connection and pounced on it. “Keanu Reeves!” I shouted. (Keanu had been a friend of mine when he was initially cast in
Less Than Zero,
but he was replaced by Andrew McCarthy when the studio producing the movie—Twentieth Century–Fox—scored a hit in the spring of 1987 with
Mannequin,
a low-budget sleeper which starred McCarthy, and was produced, ironically, by the father of the girl the character Blair—the heroine of
Less Than Zero
—was based on; my world was that small.) I threatened to sue Jayne if she asked for child support. Since I refused to participate in any testing, she hired a lawyer. I hired a lawyer. Her lawyer argued that “the child bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Ellis,” while my lawyer countered, reluctantly, at my urging, with “said child bears a striking resemblance to a certain Mr. Keanu Reeves!” (the exclamation point being my idea; blowing my relationship with Keanu because of this, not my idea). Tests I was legally obliged to undergo proved that I was the father, but I claimed that Jayne had misrepresented the facts when she said she was using contraception. “Ms. Dennis and Mr. Ellis were in a non-exclusive relationship,” my lawyer argued. “Regardless of Mr. Ellis being the father, it is her choice to be a single mother.” I learned in cases such as these that ejaculation was the legal point of no return. But one morning, after a particularly acrimonious phone call between my lawyer and Jayne’s, Marty hung up the phone, stunned, and looked at me. Jayne had given up. She no longer expected any child support and promptly dropped her lawsuit. It was at that moment in my lawyer’s office at One World Trade Center that I realized she had named the child after my father, but when I confronted her about it later that day, after we had tentatively forgiven each other, she swore it had never occurred to her. (Which I still do not believe, and which I am certain is the reason that the following events in
Lunar Park
happened—it was the catalyst.) What else? Her parents hated me. Even after it was proven that I was the father, Jayne’s last name remained on the birth certificate. I started wearing Hawaiian shirts and smoking cigars. Jayne had another child five years later—a girl named Sarah—and again the relationship with the father did not work out. (I knew the guy vaguely—a famous music executive in L.A.; he was a nice guy.) In the end, Jayne seemed practical and maternal and stable. We amiably kept in touch. She was still in love with me. I moved on.

Jayne always demanded Robby’s name not be connected with mine in any of the press I did and of course I agreed, but in August of 1994, when
Vanity Fair
assigned a profile to run when Knopf published
The Informers,
that collection of short stories I had written when still at Camden, the reporter suggested who Robby’s father might be and in his first draft—which ICM suspiciously got a peek at—cited a “reliable source” as saying that Bret Easton Ellis was in fact Robby’s dad. I relayed this information to Jayne, who called my agent, Binky Urban, and the head of Knopf, Sonny Mehta, to demand that this “fact” be excised, and Graydon Carter—the editor of
Vanity Fair
and also a friend—agreed to cut it, much to the chagrin of the reporter who had “endured” a week with me in Richmond, Virginia, where I supposedly was hiding out at a friend’s house. Actually, I was secretly attending the Canyon Ranch that had recently opened there to get in shape for the brief book tour I’d promised to do for Knopf to support
The Informers.
That information never made it into the article, either.

Very few people (close friends included) knew anything about this, my secret son, and—except for Jay McInerney and my editor, Gary Fisketjon, both of whom Robby met when Jayne and I attended the wedding of a mutual friend in Nashville—no one I was acquainted with had ever seen him, including my mother and my sisters. At that wedding in Nashville, Jayne informed me that Robby had been asking where his father was, why his dad wasn’t living with them, why he never came to visit. Supposedly there were an increasing number of tearful outbursts and long silences; there was confusion and the demand of proof; there were anxieties, irrational fears, attachment disorders, tantrums at school. He wouldn’t let people touch him. Yet at the wedding in Nashville he had instinctively reached for my hand—I was still a stranger, his mother’s friend, nobody—to show me a lizard he thought he had seen behind a hedge outside the hotel where a large number of the wedding guests were staying. This was something I pretended didn’t bother me, and I tried to refrain from mentioning him at the thousands of cocktail parties I attended during the following years. But at that moment in the evening when someone brought out the cocaine (which had admittedly become nightly by that point), fragments of this hidden life would tumble teasingly from my mouth. Though when I noticed the saddened, shocked expressions of people who sensed the yearning behind the mask, I would quickly shut up and offer my new mantra—“I’m kidding, I’m just kidding”—and then I would reintroduce whatever new girl I was dating to people she had known for years. The girl would look up from a mirror piled high with cocaine and stare at me wonderingly, shudder and then lean back down, causing another line to disappear through a tightly rolled twenty-dollar bill. The wedding—after Robby took my hand for the first time—was the beginning. This was the moment when the son suddenly became real to the father. It was also the first year I spent close to $100,000 on drugs. Money that—what?—could have gone to Robby, I suppose. But Jayne was commanding $4 to $5 million per picture, and I was high all the time, so it stopped bothering me.

But a lot of people thought I was gay so they would soon forget that Bret Easton Ellis had mentioned—raving, coked-up, sucking back another Stoli—that he had fathered a child. The gay thing being the outcome of a drunken British interview I was doing to promote the BBC documentary about my life thus far at thirty-three, its title taken from
American Psycho
’s last line:
This Is Not an Exit: The Bret Easton Ellis Story
(the fame, the excess, the falloff, the dysfunction, the heartbreak, the DUI, the shoplifting incident, the arrest in Washington Square Park, the comeback, walking tiredly through a gym in slow motion while Radiohead’s “Creep” blasted over the soundtrack). Noting casually that I appeared “rather effete” in many of the clips, and instead of asking if I was on drugs, the reporter wondered if I was a homosexual. And I said, “Yeah, you bet I am—sure!” adding what I thought to be a jaunty and overtly sarcastic remark about coming out of the closet: “Thank God!” I shouted. “Someone has
finally
outed me!” I had told countless interviewers about sexually experimenting with men—and went into explicit detail about the collegiate threesomes I had at Camden in a
Rolling Stone
profile—but this time it struck a nerve. Paul Bogaards, my publicist at Knopf, actually called me a “potty-mouthed butt pirate” after reading the piece in the
Independent,
while relishing the storm of controversy this admission caused, not to mention the increased sales of my backlist. The creator of Patrick Bateman, author of
American Psycho,
the most misogynistic novel ever written, was actually—gasp!—a homosexual?!? And the gay thing sort of stuck. After that interview appeared I was even named one of the
Advocate
’s 100 Most Interesting Gay People of the year, which drove my legitimately gay friends nuts and prompted confused, tearful phone calls from Jayne. But I was just being “rambunctious.” I was just being a “prankster.” I was just being “Bret.” Over the years photos of me in a Jacuzzi at the Playboy Mansion (I was a regular when I was in L.A.) kept appearing in that magazine’s “Hanging with Hef” page, so there was “consternation” about my sexuality. The
National Enquirer
said I was dating Julianna Margulies or Christy Turlington or Marina Rust. They said I was dating Candace Bushnell, Rupert Everett, Donna Tartt, Sherry Stringfield. Supposedly I was dating George Michael. I was even dating both Diane Von Furstenberg
and
Barry Diller. I wasn’t straight, I wasn’t gay, I wasn’t bi, I didn’t know what I was. But it was all my fault, and I enjoyed the fact that people were actually interested in who I was sleeping with. Did it matter? I was a mystery, an enigma, and that was what mattered—that’s what sold books, that’s what made me even more famous. Propaganda designated to enhance the already very chic image of author as handsome young playboy.

O
n heroin I thought everything I did was innocent and full of love and I had a yearning to bond with humanity and I was relaxed and serene and focused and I was frank and I was caring and I signed so many autographs and made so many new friends (who dwindled away, who didn’t make it). At the time I discovered dope I also started the decade-long process (the nineties) of outlining, writing and promoting a 500-page novel called
Glamorama,
about an international terrorist ring using the fashion world as a cover. And the book promised—predictably—to make me a multi-millionaire again and even more famous. But I had to do a world tour. This is what I promised when I signed the contracts; this was what was required of me to become the multimillionaire again; this was what ICM insisted on so they could collect the commissions from the multimillionaire. But I was heavily into smack and the sixteen-month-long tour was considered by the publishing house to be a potentially “precarious” situation, since I was, according to Sonny Mehta, “kind of high all the time.” But they relented. They needed me to do the tour to help recoup the massive advance they’d laid out. (I told them to send Jay McInerney in my place—no one could tell the difference, I argued, plus I was positive Jay would actually do it. Nobody at Knopf thought this was even vaguely feasible.) Besides, I wanted to be that multimillionaire again, so I promised them I was clean—and for a little while I was. An internist they sent me to was convinced I would need a new liver by the time I was forty if I wasn’t careful, which helped. But not enough.

To make sure I stayed drug-free during the first leg of the
Glamorama
tour, Knopf hired a Jamaican bodyguard to keep an eye on me. Sometimes he was easy to elude; other times he was not. Like many esteemed (albeit sloppy) drug users, I usually had cocaine powder all over my jackets when I came out of bathroom stalls, dusting my lapels, dotting itself in chunks on the trousers of my new Cerruti suits so at times it was noticeable that I wasn’t entirely clean yet, which eventually led to daily searches by Terence, who would find the packets of meth and coke and dope lodged in my Armani overcoats, which he then sent out for dry cleaning. And then there were the more serious side effects of doing drugs on a long, exhausting tour: the seizure in Raleigh and the life-threatening coma in St. Louis. Before long Terence just didn’t care anymore (“Mon, if you wanna do de dope, do de dope,” Terence tiredly told me as he fingered a dreadlock. “Terence don wanna know. Terence? He tired, mon.”) and soon I was doing bumps every ten minutes during interviews in a hotel bar in Cincinnati while guzzling double cosmopolitans at two in the afternoon. I was smuggling propane torches and large quantities of crack onto Delta flights. I overdosed in a bathtub in Seattle (I had technically died for three minutes in the Sorrento). And that was when the real worry began settling in. If the increasing number of handlers in each city couldn’t find me by lunch they were instructed by my publishers to get the house detective of whatever hotel I was staying at to unlock the door—and if the chain was up or I’d wedged a chair under the handle, they were instructed to “kick the fucker in”—to make sure I was still alive, and of course I was always still alive (literally, if not figuratively) but so wasted that PR reps would have to piggyback me from limousine to radio station to bookstore, where I would commence with my reading while sitting slumped in a chair, mumbling into a microphone, while a bookstore clerk nervously stood close by, ready to snap her fingers in front of my face if I zoned out (and sometimes during the signings they held my hand, guiding me to a recognizable signature when all I wanted to sign was an X). And if drugs were unavailable I became less committed to the cause. For example, since a dealer I knew in Denver had been—unbeknownst to me, before my arrival—stabbed to death in the head with a screwdriver I had to cancel an appearance at the Tattered Cover due to lack of dope. (I escaped the Brown Palace and was found on the front lawn of another dealer’s condo, moaning, my shoes and wallet stolen, my pants around my ankles.) Without drugs I couldn’t take showers because I was afraid of what might come out of the showerhead. Occasionally a book signing groupie who’d hinted she had drugs was dragged back to my hotel room and would attempt to revive me with dope and oral sex (which required a lot of patience on the groupie’s part). “It only takes a week to come off heroin,” one of these girls said hopefully while trying to gnaw her own arm off after she realized I had done all six bags of her smack. Without drugs I became convinced that a bookstore owner in Baltimore was in fact a mountain lion. If that was happening how could I endure the six-hour flight to Portland sober? My solution? Find more drugs. And so I kept scoring dope and continued to nod off during interviews in hotel bars. I passed out on planes, lying sprawled and unconscious in first class before being wheelchaired through airports with an airline attendant by my side to keep me from sliding out. “Food poisoning,” the press was told by Paul Bogaards, now the head of publicity at Knopf. “He was poisoned by . . . um . . . y’know, food.”