Lunar Park

smack. Without drugs I became convinced that a bookstore owner in Baltimore was in fact a mountain lion. If that was happening how could I endure the six-hour flight to Portland sober? My solution? Find more drugs. And so I kept scoring dope and continued to nod off during interviews in hotel bars. I passed out on planes, lying sprawled and unconscious in first class before being wheelchaired through airports with an airline attendant by my side to keep me from sliding out. “Food poisoning,” the press was told by Paul Bogaards, now the head of publicity at Knopf. “He was poisoned by . . . um . . . y’know, food.”

And the tour roared on.

I woke up in Milan. I woke up in Singapore. I woke up in Moscow. I woke up in Helsinki. I woke up in Cologne. I woke up in various cities along the eastern seaboard. I woke up cradling a bottle of tequila in a white limo with bullhorns attached to its front fender as it raced across Texas. “Why did Bret miss the reading?” Paul Bogaards was constantly asked by the press. After a pause Paul would answer with his now customary vagueness. “Um, fatigue . . .” A new tack: “Why did Bret postpone this whole leg of the tour?” Another long pause before “Um, allergies.” Then a longer pause before the confused journalist tentatively mentioned, “But it’s January, Mr. Bogaards.” Finally, after another drawn-out pause on Bogaards’s part, in a small voice: “Fatigue . . .” This was followed by yet another very long pause and then in barely a whisper: “Food poisoning.” But people were making so much money (there was enough pornography and dismemberment to appease my fan base so the book was on just about every best seller list despite reviews that usually ended with the word “Yuck”) that schedules were inevitably readjusted, because if they weren’t my publisher would suffer huge financial losses. Everything about my career was now measured in economics, and giant bouquets of flowers had to be sent to my hotel suites in order to soothe my “insecurity rages.” Every hotel on the Glamorama world tour was required to provide “ten votive candles, a box of chewable vitamin-C tablets, an assortment of Ricola throat lozenges, fresh gingerroot, three large bags of Cool Ranch Doritos, a chilled bottle of Cristal, and an unlisted outgoing-only phone line,” and at all readings the lights above the podium had to be “orange-tinted” because this would bring out the darkness of my salon- induced tan. If these contractual demands weren’t met the fine would be split between Knopf and myself. No one said being a Bret Easton Ellis fan was easy.

An actual “drug cop” was hired for the second U.S. tour; somehow during all of this the paperback had been published (I had been on the road that long). Terence had slipped out of the picture months ago and a fresh-faced young woman—“motivational helper” or “celebrity babysitter” or “sober companion,” or whatever—was now on hand to basically make sure I didn’t snort heroin before the readings. But of course she was hired to protect my publisher, not me. They didn’t really care about the underlying reasons of my addiction (but then neither did I) and were only interested in the amount of book sales the tour was generating. I thought I was “fragile yet functioning,” but according to memos the drug cop e-mailed to Knopf’s publicity department from the road, I was most decidedly not functioning.

E-mail memo #6: “15 miles southwest of Detroit writer was found hiding in back of stalled van on the median of a divided highway, picking at nonexistent scabs.”

E-mail memo #9: “Somehow writer has been teargassed at anti-globalization demonstration in Chicago.”

E-mail memo #13: “Berkeley; angry drug dealer was found choking writer due to ‘lack of payment’ in alley behind Barnes & Noble.”

E-mail memo #18: “Cleveland; writer slept until three p.m., missing all morning and lunch interviews; was then found ‘pigging out on junk food’ until compelled to ‘throw up.’ Also witnessed standing in front of hotel mirror sobbing ‘I’m getting so old.’ ”

E-mail memo #27: “Santa Fe; writer allegedly encouraged a Doberman pinscher to perform cunnilingus on unconscious groupie and when said animal failed to show interest in said groupie writer punched said animal in head and was severely bitten.”

E-mail memo #34: “Miami Book Fair; writer locked himself in bookstore bathroom repeatedly yelling at concerned employees to ‘Go away!’ When writer emerged an hour later he started to ‘freak out’ again. ‘I have a snake on me!’ writer screamed. ‘It’s biting me! It’s IN MY MOUTH!’ Writer was dragged to a waiting squad car while holding on to bewildered young yeshiva student attending the reading—whom writer continuously fondled and groped—until ambulance arrived. His eyes rolling back into his head, writer’s last words—shouted—before being driven off were quote ‘I am keeping the Jew-boy’ unquote.”

Paul Bogaards would respond with his own e-mails, such as: “I don’t care if you have to stick a broom up writer’s ass to get him upright and onstage—Just Do It.” I felt as if I had been hijacked. The tour seemed so long and monstrously unfair. I kept fainting from the endless pressure of it all. Wellbutrin helped me cope, along with my refusal to admit anything was wrong. My handler was now calling the tour “a legitimately traumatic experience.” When I countered with “It’s an escapade!” she snapped back, “You need to hit rock bottom.” But it’s a difficult thing to hit rock bottom when you are making close to $3 million a year.

The reviews of my readings did not vary: “Rambling, unfocused and self-obsessed, Ellis buried the night under the weight of so much gibberish that all his appearance offered was the experience of seeing a celebrity author unravel” was not an atypical critical response. Because of the Internet, word raced through cyberspace of my “bedraggled” and “unintentionally humorous” signings, and this made people buy books. It put asses in all those folding chairs at the readings the publisher had set up, which ended up being massive affairs because I was radiating the numb, burned-out cool so popular during that particular moment in the culture. But the desire to erase myself was too great—it was winning at a game in which there were no winners. I had become so malnourished that in the middle of a reading in Philadelphia (where I had thrown the book aside and started ranting about my father) a front tooth came loose.

I was exhausted by the nonstop barrage of press (and my duplicity and the truths I hid) and after the premiere of the movie version of American Psycho—which is what the sixteen-month Glamorama world tour was heading for, what it was culminating toward—I realized that if I wanted to live again (i.e., not die) I had to flee New York. I was that burned out. A weeklong coke and heroin binge began in the limo during the drive to the premiere at the Sony Theater on Broadway and 68th and continued into the long night of parties that started at the Cerruti store on Madison (they had supplied the movie’s fashions), moved downtown to Pop, then danced itself to Spa and then dragged itself into my condo on 13th Street, where the cast members and their various agents and PR reps and DJs and other notable members of young Hollywood boogied until the building’s superintendent arrived the following morning and demanded I kick everyone out due to the intolerable noise level, even though, high and reeking of vodka and base, I tried bribing him with a roll of hundreds. After all that, I lay alone in bed for the next seven days, watching porn DVDs with the sound off and snorting maybe forty bags of heroin, a blue plastic bucket that I vomited into continually by my side, and telling myself that the lack of respect from the critical community was what hurt so much and why I had to drug myself away from the pain. I just lay back and kept waiting for the tawdry end of the incendiary career.

The following week there was a useless stint at the Exodus Clinic in Marina del Ray (where I was diagnosed with something called “acquired situational narcissism”). It didn’t help. Only the speedballs and cocaine and the blotters of acid stamped with Bart Simpson and Pikachu meant anything to me, were the only things that made me feel something. Cocaine was destroying the lining of my nose and I honestly thought a good solution was to switch solely to basing, but the two quarts of vodka I was drinking daily made even that goal seem hazy and unattainable. I also realized I had written only one thing in the last two years: a horrible short story involving space aliens, a fast food restaurant and a talking bisexual scarecrow, even though I had promised ICM the first draft of my memoir. Since, according to Binky, we were turning down authorized biography requests at least twice a month, more than a dozen publishers had made inquiries about the memoir. I had talked brazenly about it during the Glamorama tour, where it was most prominently detailed in the (incoherent) Rolling Stone interview I did in the 1998 year-end double issue. I had even given it a title without having written a single usable sentence: Where I Went I Would Not Go Back. It was to deal primarily with the transforming events of my childhood and adolescence, ending with my junior year at Camden, a month before Less Than Zero was published. But even when I simply thought about the memoir it wouldn’t go anywhere (I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of nonfiction as I could in any of my novels) and so I gave up. (There is, however, an unauthorized biography Bloomsbury is publishing next year by a writer named Jaime Clarke that I will vehemently protest the publication of—its title: Ellis Island.) And the drugs continued.