Less Than Zero

In the next section, Clay attends Kim’s party along with Trent, a bisexual male model. There they see Julian, a high school friend and drug dealer who Clay says looks thinner than normal, but otherwise the same, with short, blonde hair.

The two make eye contact, but Julian walks away. Blair gives Clay a scarf for Christmas. Clay also sees Rip, his drug dealer, at Kim’s party. Clay buys cocaine from Rip, with whom he snorts lines and explains that he has taken classes in art, writing, and music. When asked, Clay admits that he doesn’t know if he wants to go back to school.

There is no furniture at the party, as Kim’s parents have just moved. Clay also talks to a guy named Griffin, who is a student at USC. After doing more cocaine together and chatting a bit, Griffin asks if Clay wants to go to his house, as his parents are in Rome for Christmas. Clay passively agrees. He wakes up the next morning before dawn and begins to dress in Griffin’s living room—presumably following a sexual encounter—while Griffin’s housecleaner looks on and takes little notice. Clay leaves Griffin’s house at dawn, but not before snorting more coke from his glove box. He realizes he left the scarf given to him by Blair at Griffin’s house. He sees a billboard that reads, “Disappear here,” which bothers him for reasons he can’t explain.

Clay sleeps for a few more hours at his home before getting up at 11:00 to meet his father for lunch. He sees a Ferrari that he doesn’t recognize in his driveway, and everyone else is still sleeping, so Clay swims laps in the pool before leaving for his lunch date.

At lunch, Clay’s father tells him that he looks thin and asks if he wants to go to Palm Springs for Christmas. This prompts a flashback to a previous visit that Clay made to Palm Springs. He skipped school one day to drive to an abandoned family home that his aunt was too sentimental to sell. The visit caused memories to flood him, so Clay decides not to visit again.

After lunch, Clay visits Muriel, who is hospitalized for anorexia, in the hospital. She is watching MTV and is surrounded by Glamour and Vogue magazines. On Clay’s drive home, someone in the vehicle next to him asks if he is an actor, a question which he ignores as he drives away.

Clay waits for his friend and dealer, Rip, at Cafe Casino in Westwood, although he ends up instead seeing Julian, who pulls up in a black Porsche and apologizes for not greeting him at the party. He explains that he has been in a bad state and has dropped out of USC, which he found to be “so totally bogus” (41). Julian asks if he wants any drugs, and Clay says no.

Clay visits Rip at his apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, where Rip keeps company with several other nearly nude young men whom Clay doesn’t know. Clay asks him why he never showed up, and Rip responds that he said to meet him at the Cafe Casino in Beverly Hills, not in Westwood. Clay doubts that Rip ever arrived there, either. Trent is also at Rip’s apartment, trying to reach another prospective drug dealer by phone, since he cannot reach Julian.

At his apartment, Trent invites Clay to a party that night at the Roxy, but Clay explains that his friend Daniel is having a party. Trent uses an anti-gay slur against Daniel, and Clay insists that he isn’t gay. Trent’s mom calls from downstairs, where he and Clay also find the house cleaner from El Salvador watching MTV. Trent explains that his mom will likely fire her soon but has not yet done so because she feels guilty that the woman’s family was killed. Trent’s mom leaves for a fashion show in Century City while Clay hears the maid vomiting in the bathroom.

Clay takes Blair to Daniel’s house for a party, but the two don’t stay long before going back to Blair’s house. After having sex at her home, Blair tells Clay to have a Merry Christmas if she doesn’t see him.

Clay has a flashback to a time when Blair went to stay in Monterrey, where they idled the week away drinking bourbon, swimming, watching movies, and making love. At the end of that week, Blair claimed that they should have gone to Palm Springs instead of Monterrey.

Back in the present, Clay stops to buy pornographic magazines at a newsstand. When he arrives home, the winds continue to whip fiercely outside. Clay falls asleep staring at an Elvis Costello poster that reads, “Trust,” and then casually mentions that it’s Christmas Eve.

Daniel calls Clay later on Christmas Eve and explains that he got a letter from a girl named Vanden, with whom they go to school in New Hampshire. The letter says that she is pregnant with what may be his child and that she may not go back to school. When Daniel asks Clay whether he should call her, he apathetically suggests that he should, but Daniel ultimately decides against it.

Clay has Christmas dinner with his family at a restaurant called Chasen’s, where his parents exchange only a few words. Clay is distracted by memories, including Blair’s comment about people being afraid to merge on freeways and a billboard he saw with the words, “Disappear here.” After a brief stop at the bar, they drop Clay’s father off at his penthouse before going home to Clay’s house on Mulholland Drive.

Clay’s memory returns to the previous Christmas in Palm Springs, when it was 112 degrees. He spent the holiday with his grandfather, who woke up to hear strange voices at night. They found Lucky Strikes, which no one in the family smoked, by the pool, so Clay’s dad had the locks changed. Despite the oppressive heat, Clay smokes a joint to fall asleep.

On the Friday following Christmas, Clay goes with his friends Rip, Griffin, Alana, and Kim to the beach. The girls say that they invited Julian, but he could not come. They listen to Blondie and The Psychedelic Furs on a portable tape deck and drink rum and coke.

In a flashback, Clay remembers driving around the desert in Palm Springs with his sisters and seeing a car burning. He imagined that he saw a child burning, too, but the papers the next day confirmed that there was no child. Clay became rather obsessed with images of dead children and cut out newspaper clippings of horrific acts such as parents killing their children and men killing their wives.

On the following Saturday, as is common for them when there is no party, people visit one another’s homes and drink. Trent visits Clay and uses an antisemitic phrase when telling him about a woman who claims she saw a werewolf. Clay wonders if it’s true and looks out his window in search of a werewolf for the rest of the night while drinking gin.