When we went to an AIDS fund-raiser thrown by Lily Tartikoff at Barneys, cameras flashed and Chloe's dry hand clutched my limp hand and she squeezed it only once-a warning-when a reporter from E! television asked me what I was doing there and I said, "I needed an excuse to wear my new Versace tuxedo." I could barely make it up the series of steep staircases to the top floor but once I was there Christian Slater gave me a high five and we hung out with Dennis Leary, Helen Hunt, Billy Zane, Joely Fisher, Claudia Schiffer, Matthew Fox. Someone pointed someone else out to me and whispered "The piercing didn't take" before melting back into the crowd. People talked about cutting off their hair and burning their fingernails.
Most people were mellow and healthy, tan and buff and drifting around. Others were so hysterical-sometimes covered with lumps and bruises-that I couldn't understand what they were saying to me, so I tried to stay close to Chloe to totally make sure she didn't fall back into any destructive habits and she wore Capri pants and Kamali makeup, canceled aromatherapy appointments that I was unaware she had made, her diet dominated by grape- and lemongrass- and root-beer-flavored granitas. Chloe didn't return phone calls from Evan Dando, Robert Towne, Don Simpson, Victor Drai, Frank Mancuso, Jr., Shane Black. She was bawling constantly and bought a print by Frank Gehry for something like thirty grand and an Ed Ruscha fog painting for considerably more. Chloe bought Lucien Gau shogun table lamps and a lot of iron baskets and had it all shipped back to Manhattan. Rejecting people was the hot pastime. We had a lot of sex. Everyone talked about the year 2018. One day we pretended to be ghosts.
Dani Jansen wanted to take us to mysterious places and I was asked by four separate people what my favorite land animal was and since I didn't know what these were I couldn't even fake an answer. Hanging out with two of the Beastie Boys at a house in Silver Lake, we met a lot of crew-cut blondes and Tamra Davis and Greg Kinnear and David Fincher and Perry Farrell. "Yum-ice" was a constant refrain while we drank lukewarm Bacardi-and-Cokes and bitched about taxes. In the backyard a pool that had been drained was filled with rubble and the chaise longues had empty syringes scattered all over them. The only question I asked during dinner was "Why don't you just grow your own?" From where I stood I watched someone take ten minutes to cut a slice of cheese. There was a topiary in the shape of Elton John in the backyard, next to the rubble-strewn pool. We were eating Vicodin and listening to Nico-era Velvet Underground tapes.
"The petty ugliness of our problems seems so ridiculous in the face of all this natural beauty," I said.
"Baby, that's an Elton John topiary behind you," Chloe said.
Back at the Chateau, CDs were scattered all over the suite and empty Federal Express packages littered the floor. The word "miscellany" seemed to sum up everything we felt about each other or so Chloe said. We had fights at Chaya Brasserie, three in the Beverly Center, one later in Le Colonial at a dinner for Nick Cage, another at House of Blues. We kept telling each other it didn't matter, that we didn't care, f**k it, which was actually pretty easy to do. During one of our fights Chloe called me a "peon" who had about as much ambition as a "parking lot attendant." She wasn't right, she wasn't wrong. If we were stuck in the suite at the Chateau after a fight there was really no place left to go, either the kitchen or the balcony, where two parrots, named Blinky and Scrubby the Gibbering Idiot, hung out. She lay in bed in her underwear, light from the TV flooding the darkened suite, the Cocteau Twins droning from the stereo, and during these lulls I would wander out by the pool and chew gum and drink Fruitopia while reading an old issue of Film Threat or the book Final Exit, rereading a chapter titled "Self-Deliverance via the Plastic Bag." We were in a nonzone.
Ten or eleven producers were found dead in various Bel Air mansions. I autographed the back of a Jones matchbook in my "nearly indecipherable scrawl" for some young thing. I mused about publishing my journal entries in Details. There was a sale at Maxfields but we had no patience. We ate tamales in empty skyscrapers and ordered bizarre handrolls in sushi bars done up in industrial-chic decor, in restaurants with names like Muse, Fusion, Buffalo Club, with people like Jack Nicholson, Ann Magnuson, Los Lobos, Sean MacPherson, a. fourteen-year-old male model named Dragonfly who Jimmy Rip really dug. We spent too much time at the Four Seasons bar and not enough at the beach. A friend of Chloe's gave birth to a dead baby. I left ICM. People told us that they either were vampires or knew someone who was a vampire. Drinks with Depeche Mode. So many people we vaguely knew died or disappeared the weeks we were there-car accidents, AIDS, murders, overdoses, run over by a truck, fell into vats of acid or maybe were pushed-that the amount for funeral wreaths on Chloe's Visa was almost five thousand dollars. I looked really great.