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I’m collaborating on a screenplay with this guy I met at the studio named Tad. I can’t really talk too much about it but it’s about these camp counselers and a big snake and it’s really scary. (Maybe I’ll send you a copy.) Tad’s really an artist (he paints these fantastic murals in Venice) but he wants to write screenplays. No one has seen Carlos for weeks. Last I heard, he was in Vegas, though someone else told me that they found both of his arms in a bag off La Brea. He was going to write the screenplay with me. I’ve shown part of it to my grandmother. She liked it. She said it was commercial.

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Anne

9

ANOTHER GRAY AREA

I’m kind of looking at Christie dancing next to the widescreen television set. Fun Boy 3’s on MTV, singing “Our Lips Are Sealed,” and Christie’s dancing rhythmically, spaced out, hands running over her bikini, her eyes closed. I’m bored but won’t admit it and Randy is lying on the floor, immobile, looking up at Christie, and Christie almost steps on him, both wasted. I’m sitting in the beige chair next to the beige couch that Martin is lying on. Martin is wearing a pair of Dolphin shorts, Wayfarers, browsing through the new issue of GQ. The video ends and Christie falls to the floor giggling, mumbling that she is very high. Randy lights another joint and inhales deeply and coughs and hands it to Christie. I look back at Martin. Martin keeps staring at a particular picture in the magazine. Now the Police are on MTV in black and white and Sting’s huge blond head stares straight out at the four of us and starts singing. I look away from the screen and over at Christie. Randy hands me the Joint and I take a toke and close my eyes but I’m so stoned right now that the hit doesn’t do anything, just moves me to the pseudorealization that I am located somewhere beyond communication. “God, Sting is gorgeous,” Christie moans or maybe it’s Randy. Christie takes another hit off the joint, rolls over onto her stomach and looks up at Martin. But Martin only nods, adjusts his sunglasses. Christie keeps looking up at him. Martin has not said a word during the past twelve videos. I have kept count. Christie is my girlfriend, a model who I think is from England.

I stand up, sit down, stand up again, pull on my shorts and walk out to the balcony and stand there with my hands on a railing, staring at Century City. The sun is setting and the sky is orange and purple and it seems to be getting hotter. Take a deep breath, trying to remember when Christie and Randy came over, when Martin let them in, when they turned on MTV, when they ate the first pineapple, when they lit the second joint, the third, the fourth. But now, inside, the video has changed and a boy gets sucked into a giant cloud shaped like a television, the colors of a rainbow. Christie is on top of Martin on the couch. Martin still has his sunglasses on. The issue of GQ he was holding is now on the beige floor. I walk past them, step over Randy and walk into the kitchen and pull a bottle of apricot-and-blueberry juice out of the refrigerator and walk back to the patio. I finish the juice and watch the sky get dark some more and when I turn back, I see that Martin and Christie are probably in Martin’s room, probably nude on beige sheets with the stereo on, Jackson Browne singing, softly. I walk over to Randy and look down on him.

“Want to go and get something to eat?” I ask.

Randy doesn’t say anything.

“Want to go and get something to eat?”

Randy starts to laugh, eyes still closed.

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“Want to go and get something to eat?” I ask again.

He grabs the GQ and, still laughing, puts it over his face.

“Want to go and get something to eat?” I ask.

On the cover is John Travolta and it almost looks like John Travolta is lying on the floor, giggling, wasted, wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans. I turn away and look at the TV screen: a toy airplane with a rock star inside it trying to control the panels in mock desperation and he’s singing to a girl not looking at him, doing her nails. I walk out of the apartment and drive onto Wilshire and then to some café in Beverly Hills called Café Beverly Hills where I order a salad and an iced tea.

I wake up out of some kind of stupor at eleven-twenty and when I walk into the kitchen looking for an orange or some matches for my bong I find a note written on Beverly Hills Hotel stationery that tells me to meet someone for lunch at a house up in the hills above Sunset where someone is directing a video for a band called the English Prices. Someone has left an address and directions and after about an hour of lying on the balcony, dreaming beneath the sun in my jockey shorts, listening to the sound of videos flashing by in a soothing, endless hum, I decide to meet someone for lunch. Before I leave, Spin calls and tells me that ever since Lance left for Venezuela he’s had a hard time finding good coke and that there are lots of frightened people in town and that he might drop out of USC if he can’t find the right Mercedes in the fall and that the service at Spago is getting worse. pqdm.com