Lunar Park (4 page)

And the tour roared on.

I woke up in Milan. I woke up in Singapore. I woke up in Moscow. I woke up in Helsinki. I woke up in Cologne. I woke up in various cities along the eastern seaboard. I woke up cradling a bottle of tequila in a white limo with bullhorns attached to its front fender as it raced across Texas. “Why did Bret miss the reading?” Paul Bogaards was constantly asked by the press. After a pause Paul would answer with his now customary vagueness. “Um, fatigue . . .” A new tack: “Why did Bret postpone this whole leg of the tour?” Another long pause before “Um, allergies.” Then a longer pause before the confused journalist tentatively mentioned, “But it’s January, Mr. Bogaards.” Finally, after another drawn-out pause on Bogaards’s part, in a small voice: “Fatigue . . .” This was followed by yet another very long pause and then in barely a whisper: “Food poisoning.” But people were making so much money (there was enough pornography and dismemberment to appease my fan base so the book was on just about every best seller list despite reviews that usually ended with the word “Yuck”) that schedules were inevitably readjusted, because if they weren’t my publisher would suffer huge financial losses. Everything about my career was now measured in economics, and giant bouquets of flowers had to be sent to my hotel suites in order to soothe my “insecurity rages.” Every hotel on the
Glamorama
world tour was required to provide “ten votive candles, a box of chewable vitamin-C tablets, an assortment of Ricola throat lozenges, fresh gingerroot, three large bags of Cool Ranch Doritos, a chilled bottle of Cristal, and an unlisted outgoing-only phone line,” and at all readings the lights above the podium had to be “orange-tinted” because this would bring out the darkness of my salon-induced tan. If these contractual demands weren’t met the fine would be split between Knopf and myself. No one said being a Bret Easton Ellis fan was easy.

An actual “drug cop” was hired for the second U.S. tour; somehow during all of this the paperback had been published (I had been on the road that long). Terence had slipped out of the picture months ago and a fresh-faced young woman—“motivational helper” or “celebrity babysitter” or “sober companion,” or whatever—was now on hand to basically make sure I didn’t snort heroin before the readings. But of course she was hired to protect my publisher, not me. They didn’t really care about the underlying reasons of my addiction (but then neither did I) and were only interested in the amount of book sales the tour was generating. I thought I was “fragile yet functioning,” but according to memos the drug cop e-mailed to Knopf’s publicity department from the road, I was most decidedly
not
functioning.

E-mail memo #6: “15 miles southwest of Detroit writer was found hiding in back of stalled van on the median of a divided highway, picking at nonexistent scabs.”

E-mail memo #9: “Somehow writer has been teargassed at anti-globalization demonstration in Chicago.”

E-mail memo #13: “Berkeley; angry drug dealer was found choking writer due to ‘lack of payment’ in alley behind Barnes & Noble.”

E-mail memo #18: “Cleveland; writer slept until three p.m., missing all morning and lunch interviews; was then found ‘pigging out on junk food’ until compelled to ‘throw up.’ Also witnessed standing in front of hotel mirror sobbing ‘I’m getting so old.’ ”

E-mail memo #27: “Santa Fe; writer allegedly encouraged a Doberman pinscher to perform cunnilingus on unconscious groupie and when said animal failed to show interest in said groupie writer punched said animal in head and was severely bitten.”

E-mail memo #34: “Miami Book Fair; writer locked himself in bookstore bathroom repeatedly yelling at concerned employees to ‘Go away!’ When writer emerged an hour later he started to ‘freak out’ again. ‘I have a snake on me!’ writer screamed. ‘It’s biting me! It’s IN MY MOUTH!’ Writer was dragged to a waiting squad car while holding on to bewildered young yeshiva student attending the reading—whom writer continuously fondled and groped—until ambulance arrived. His eyes rolling back into his head, writer’s last words—shouted—before being driven off were quote ‘I am keeping the Jew-boy’ unquote.”

Paul Bogaards would respond with his own e-mails, such as: “I don’t care if you have to stick a broom up writer’s ass to get him upright and onstage—Just Do It.” I felt as if I had been hijacked. The tour seemed so long and monstrously unfair. I kept fainting from the endless pressure of it all. Wellbutrin helped me cope, along with my refusal to admit anything was wrong. My handler was now calling the tour “a legitimately traumatic experience.” When I countered with “It’s an escapade!” she snapped back, “You need to hit rock bottom.” But it’s a difficult thing to hit rock bottom when you are making close to $3 million a year.

The reviews of my readings did not vary: “Rambling, unfocused and self-obsessed, Ellis buried the night under the weight of so much gibberish that all his appearance offered was the experience of seeing a celebrity author unravel” was not an atypical critical response. Because of the Internet, word raced through cyberspace of my “bedraggled” and “unintentionally humorous” signings, and this made people buy books. It put asses in all those folding chairs at the readings the publisher had set up, which ended up being massive affairs because I was radiating the numb, burned-out cool so popular during that particular moment in the culture. But the desire to erase myself was too great—it was winning at a game in which there were no winners. I had become so malnourished that in the middle of a reading in Philadelphia (where I had thrown the book aside and started ranting about my father) a front tooth came loose.

I was exhausted by the nonstop barrage of press (and my duplicity and the truths I hid) and after the premiere of the movie version of
American Psycho
—which is what the sixteen-month
Glamorama
world tour was heading for, what it was culminating toward—I realized that if I wanted to live again (i.e., not die) I had to flee New York. I was that burned out. A weeklong coke and heroin binge began in the limo during the drive to the premiere at the Sony Theater on Broadway and 68th and continued into the long night of parties that started at the Cerruti store on Madison (they had supplied the movie’s fashions), moved downtown to Pop, then danced itself to Spa and then dragged itself into my condo on 13th Street, where the cast members and their various agents and PR reps and DJs and other notable members of young Hollywood boogied until the building’s superintendent arrived the following morning and demanded I kick everyone out due to the intolerable noise level, even though, high and reeking of vodka and base, I tried bribing him with a roll of hundreds. After all that, I lay alone in bed for the next seven days, watching porn DVDs with the sound off and snorting maybe forty bags of heroin, a blue plastic bucket that I vomited into continually by my side, and telling myself that the lack of respect from the critical community was what hurt so much and why I had to drug myself away from the pain. I just lay back and kept waiting for the tawdry end of the incendiary career.

T
he following week there was a useless stint at the Exodus Clinic in Marina del Ray (where I was diagnosed with something called “acquired situational narcissism”). It didn’t help. Only the speedballs and cocaine and the blotters of acid stamped with Bart Simpson and Pikachu meant anything to me, were the only things that made me
feel
something. Cocaine was destroying the lining of my nose and I honestly thought a good solution was to switch solely to basing, but the two quarts of vodka I was drinking daily made even that goal seem hazy and unattainable. I also realized I had written only one thing in the last two years: a horrible short story involving space aliens, a fast food restaurant and a talking bisexual scarecrow, even though I had promised ICM the first draft of my memoir. Since, according to Binky, we were turning down authorized biography requests at least twice a month, more than a dozen publishers had made inquiries about the memoir. I had talked brazenly about it during the
Glamorama
tour, where it was most prominently detailed in the (incoherent)
Rolling Stone
interview I did in the 1998 year-end double issue. I had even given it a title without having written a single usable sentence:
Where I Went I Would Not Go Back.
It was to deal primarily with the transforming events of my childhood and adolescence, ending with my junior year at Camden, a month before
Less Than Zero
was published. But even when I simply
thought
about the memoir it wouldn’t go anywhere (I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of nonfiction as I could in any of my novels) and so I gave up. (There is, however, an unauthorized biography Bloomsbury is publishing next year by a writer named Jaime Clarke that I will vehemently protest the publication of—its title:
Ellis Island
.) And the drugs continued.

There was also the money problem—I didn’t have any. I had blown it all. On what? Drugs. Parties that cost $50,000. Drugs. Girls who wanted to be taken to Italy, Paris, London, St. Barts. Drugs. A Prada wardrobe. A new Porsche. Drugs. Rehab treatment that wasn’t covered by health insurance. The movie money from polishing jobs that had, at one point, showered down on me started drying up when the drug rumors became too detailed to ignore and after I sent back several screenplays with none of the requested changes made and just my random notes scrawled in the margins: “Not so good” and “I think this rather excellent” and “Let’s beef it up” and the ubiquitous “I hated my father.” The spark that had once animated me had majorly fizzled out. What was I doing hanging out with gangbangers and diamond smugglers? What was I doing buying kilos? My apartment reeked of marijuana and freebase. One afternoon I woke up and realized I didn’t know how anything worked anymore. Which button turned the espresso machine on? Who was paying my mortgage? Where did the stars come from? After a while you learn that everything stops.

It was time to minimize damage. It was time to renew contacts. It was time to expect more from myself.

I had lost the hustle, the nerve, the
shit
it took to keep myself standing in the spotlight. My desire to be part of the Scene shrank—I was exhausted by it all. My life—my
name
—had been rendered a repetitive, unfunny punch line and I was sick of eating it. Celebrity was a life lived in code—it was a place where you constantly had to decipher what people wanted from you, and where the terrain was slippery and a world where ultimately you always made the wrong choice. What made everything less and less bearable was that I had to keep quiet about this because I knew no one else who could sympathize (maybe Jay McInerney, but he was still so lost inside it all that he never would have understood) and once I grasped that I was totally alone, I realized, only then, that I was in serious trouble. My wistful attitude about fame and drugs—the delight I took in feeling sorry for myself—had turned into a hard sadness, and the future no longer looked even remotely plausible. Just one thing seemed to be racing toward me: a blackness, a grave, the end. And so during that terrible year there were the inevitable 12-step programs, the six different treatment centers, the endless second chances, the fourth intervention, the unavoidable backsliding, the multiple relapses, the failed recoveries, the sudden escape to Las Vegas, the tumble into the abyss and, finally, the flameout.

I ultimately called Jayne. She listened. She made an offer. She held out a hand. I was so shocked that I broke into tears. What I was being given—I understood immediately—was extremely rare: a second chance with someone. I was briefly reluctant at first, but there was one factor overriding everything: no one else wanted me.

A
nd because of this I instantly rebounded. I got clean in May, signed a huge contract for a new novel with a reluctant Knopf and an insistent ICM in June and then moved into Jayne’s newly built mansion in July. We married later that month in a private ceremony at City Hall with only Marta, her assistant, as a witness. But Jayne Dennis was a well-known actress and “somehow” the news leaked. Immediately the
National Enquirer
ran an article on Jayne’s “spectacularly bad luck in love” and listed all of her ill-fated relationships (when had she dated Matthew McConaughey? Billy Bob Thornton? Russell Crowe? Who in the hell was Q-Tip?) before asking its readers, “Why is Jayne Dennis with a man who let her down so cruelly?” Comparisons were made to Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson, to Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger. A clinical psychologist hypothesized that famous women were no different from nonfamous women when it came to bad choices in relationships. “You can be beautiful and successful and still be attracted to a loser,” the clinical psychologist was quoted as saying, adding that “beautiful women are often geek magnets.” The article went on about my “crude insensitivity” and “refusal to disavow the comments made about Keanu Reeves’s role” in all of this. One anonymous source offered, “The novelty of dating a skunk must be arousing—she must really crave a challenge.” A “close friend” of Jayne’s was quoted as saying, “Marrying Bret Easton Ellis was one of the leading dumb choices of the new century.”

Damage control. We sat for a
Talk
magazine profile (titled “Cad or Catch?”) in which Jayne defended me and I repented. The article detailed the years I’d spent mired in drugs and alcohol, though I said I was now reformed. “Vicious false things have been said about Bret,” Jayne offered. When prodded by Jayne I “indignantly” added, “Yeah, I’m bitter about them as well.” Jayne went on to lament: “This business can be so hard on relationships that I’ve lost a lot of self-confidence” and “I think nice guys—whatever that means—were so intimidated by me that the men I dated weren’t usually very caring.” The writer noted the “sidelong glance” Jayne gave me. The writer noted my “grim countenance” and did not seem to believe me when I said, “I always try to be in the moment when I’m with my kids—I’m really devoting my life to fatherhood.” (The journalist failed to notice how darkly amused I was by everything at this point in my newly sober life: a crestfallen expression, the smear of blood on a hand, the heart that had stopped beating, the cruelty of children.) This writer had his own pop-psychology take on matters: “Famous women are known for sabotaging themselves because they don’t feel they deserve what they have” and “It takes character to resist a cad, and celebrities definitely do not have stronger than average character.” The writer also asked me questions along the lines of “Some reviewers have doubts about your sincerity—how do you respond?” and “Why did you pass out at the Golden Globe Awards last year?” But Jayne kept coming through with sound bites like “Bret is my source of strength,” to which an unnamed friend responded, “That’s a joke. Let’s face it, the reason Jayne married Bret Ellis is all about low self-esteem. She deserves better than a professional frat boy, okay? Ellis is a complete hoser.” Another unnamed friend was quoted as saying, “Bret wouldn’t even escort her to prenatal care appointments! We’re talking about a guy who smoked Thai sticks in taxicabs.” Jayne admitted that being attracted to “bad boys” had been an addiction and that their “unpredictability” gave her a rush. “Hey, I’m an interesting date,” I’m somehow quoted as saying. Another anonymous source: “I think she’s with Bret because Jayne’s a fixer-upper—she has convinced herself that a good guy’s in there.” Another nameless source disagreed and put it more succinctly: “He’s. A. Dick.” My own conclusion was “Jayne makes my life complete—I’m a grateful guy.” The article ended—shockingly, I thought—with: “Good luck, Jayne.”