Drive

Bret Easton Ellis is back. In this excerpt from his first novel in over a decade, the author returns to his beloved Los Angeles, where privileged teenagers ...

He walked over to it and picked the pipe up, grinning, and I was still grinning too about the mystery of the aquarium, and yet it seemed to be just another example of Matt’s inability to figure things out—there was nothing proactive about him, he drifted along carelessly, he hung up posters left in his mailbox— and as he filled the bowl with a small pinch of weed that he picked out of an open baggie I realized that I was going to be disappearing soon and that he would care about my absence as much as he seemed to care about the cat, the empty aquarium, the world at large. Instead I simply started the car and quickly drove away, the flashlight trained on me as I turned out of the driveway, glancing in the rearview mirror as Buckley and the beam of light retreated behind me until I was at the end of the block, where I turned off Stansbury and back onto Valley Vista. And I wondered what it was focusing on: the benches beside the koi pond, the statue of the school’s mascot, the Buckley Griffin—a mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, a gold life-sized edifice rising up on a stand beside the koi pond—the small waterfall that quietly cascaded into it, the date palms draping over the space. Matt went over to the stereo, bent down and lifted a needle, and the Specials started singing “Ghost Town” again—This town is coming like a ghost town—and I left the guesthouse without saying goodbye. I wanted to make a final impression on Matt and I wanted him to come hard and I kept stopping him from having an orgasm, pushing his hand away from the cock he was stroking, until I was ready, but I wanted him to come first, and then he was clenching up, his legs and ass lifted and spread, panting fuck fuck fuck and while rocking on his back exploded across his stomach and chest, streaking them white—and then I pulled out and came quietly, staring at him as he looked up at me, shaking, his face a confused grimace, breathing hard, grasping the wrist of the hand that was stroking myself to orgasm. When I arrived Matt was almost always stoned and usually damp from swimming and either concentrating on rolling a small pile of joints or staring at a movie on the Z Channel he’d watched a few times that week and was still trying to figure out or maybe he was holding a textbook that might as well have been written in Mandarin given the perplexed expression on his face, and sometimes Alex the cat would be lying on his lap staring at me blankly whenever I appeared. And in that first week he invited me to the house on Haskell—his parents were away, we could go swimming, get high—he was so amiable and friendly that it bordered on stoner parody and I wasn’t thinking about anything else except sex when I listened to him because I instinctively knew—not that Matt seemed gay at all—there was the possibility for something sexual to happen; it might not have existed in the invitation itself but there was a suggestion about the invite that was going to let me initiate this somehow and the path to Matt’s house became familiar that summer. “The Trawler” was a dumb name—it came nowhere near defining the totality of the killer’s madness—but a memo had been leaked to the press, and in one line that hadn’t been redacted “The Trawler” was clearly referenced and became the name of this nascent serial killer in the few articles that appeared: it hit the right ominous note. We were all distant from each other even though the public façade, the Boomer narrative, suggested otherwise: the Christmas card with the posed family photo emblazoned on it, the sleepovers I had where my mother acted like a concerned chaperone checking in on us as we watched the Z Channel, the days at the beach club with Thom and Jeff and Kyle that my father oversaw and where he acted as if he was our best friend—all of it seemed fake, performative, unreal. When the first murder happened, and the home invasions and the assaults picked up in mid-December after the long lull of a three-month hiatus, many people who survived the next wave of invasions commented that the attacker hadn’t cried at all; it was almost as if he had gained confidence, a strength, and perhaps by committing his first murder had become emboldened. The public didn't know this yet but Julie Selwyn would be the third victim of a serial killer who came to be known as the Trawler— this was a nickname that two investigators in the Hollywood division of the LAPD jokingly came up with in private. The matching mutilations that the victims suffered were not fully revealed to the press and it was almost a year after the last girl was found at the end of 1981 until most of these details were ultimately known—in a pre-digital world secrets were more easily kept; in fact, secrets were the norm in a pre-digital world.