The Informers (Vintage Contemporaries)

“Let’s catch a midnight flick in Westwood,” she suggests, eyes brightening at her own suggestion.

She just stares at me blankly like she didn’t hear a word, then checks her lips in a compact and stares at me some more, asks me what a wok is, what the word “invisible” means.

Bruce is not the kind of man I usually go out with. He’s married, not tall, when I reach him he pays for my diet Coke with the change he kept from me for parking.

I’m at another club, Rampage (but pronounce it French), and I find a pseudo-hot-looking Valley bitch and she seems really slow and stupid like she’s completely stoned or drunk or something but she’s got great tits and a pretty hot body, not too heavy, maybe a little too skinny, and basically her emptiness thrills me.

It’s a warm night and I pop open the sunroof, play the radio loud. Stop off at Tower Records and buy a couple of tapes, then it’s to the twenty-four-hour Hughes on Beverly and Doheny and pick up a lot of steak in case I don’t feel like going out next week because raw meat is okay even though the juice is thin and not salty enough.

“You would be fucking an abyss,” Martin says, yawning, stretching. “A clean, vaguely talented abyss. But an abyss nonetheless.”

About a week ago I was sitting in L.A.’s chicest nightclub with a few friends and the DJ was playing Yaz and Bowie and the videos were on and I was on my third gin and tonic and I realized that no matter where I am it’s always the same.

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.

“Adjust my dreams for me, Roger,” I whisper. “Adjust my dreams for me.”