I open the door of the apartment and walk in and turn on the television and put the overnight bag down in the sink. Martin’s not here. I pull a bottle of apricot-apple juice out of the refrigerator and sit on the balcony waiting for Martin or Christie. I get up, open the overnight bag and find the GQ and read it out on the balcony and then I finish the juice. The sky gets dark. I wonder if Spin called. I don’t hear Martin open the door. The ice machine in the refrigerator clanks out cubes of ice.
“Man, it was hot today,” Martin says, holding a beach towel and a volleyball.
“Was it?” I ask him. “I heard it snowed.”
“Do any gambling?”
“I lost about twenty thousand dollars. It was okay.”
After a while Martin says, “Spin called.”
I don’t say anything.
“He’s a little pissed, Graham,” Martin says. “You should have called him.”
“Oops big-time,” I say. “I’ll give him a call.”
“We have reservations at Chinois at nine.”
I look up. “Great.”
The music from the television carries out to the balcony. Martin turns away and walks back into the apartment. “I’m gonna peel a pomegranate, then take a shower, okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.” I move off the balcony too and try to find Spin’s number but then I’m following Martin into the bathroom and later I find Christie’s Guess jeans by the side of Martin’s bed and underneath that is a bayonet.
Next day we’re sitting at Carny’s and Martin’s eating a cheeseburger and he can’t believe that an ex-girlfriend of mine is on the cover of this week’s People. I tell him I can’t believe it either. I finish my french fries, take a swallow of Coke and tell Martin I want to get stoned. Martin also slept with the girl on the cover of this week’s People. I watch as a red Mercedes passes by slowly in the heat, a shirtless guy at the wheel, who Martin also slept with, and in an instant my and Martin’s reflection flashes by in the side of the car. Martin starts complaining that he hasn’t finished the English Prices video yet, that Leon’s causing hassles, that the smoke machine still doesn’t work, will probably never work, that Christie is a drag, that yellow is his favorite color, that he recently made friends with a tumbleweed named Roy.
“Why do you shoot those things?” I ask.
“Videos? Why?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.” He looks at me and then at the cars passing by on Sunset. “Not everyone has a rich mommy and daddy. I mean, mommy. And”—he takes a swallow of my Coke—“not everyone deals drugs.”
“But your parents are loaded,” I protest.
“Loaded can be interpreted in a lot of ways, dude,” Martin says.
I sigh, pick at a napkin. “You’re a real … enigma.”
“Listen, Graham. I feel bad enough crashing out at your place. You footing the bill for Nautilus, Maxfield’s. All that.”
Another red Mercedes passes by.
“Listen,” Martin’s saying. “After these next two videos I’ll be hot.”
“Hot?” I ask.
“Yeah, hot,” he says.
“Like, how hot? Medium hot? How hot?” I ask.
“Maybe really hot. Maybe spicy,” he says. “The English Prices are big. Heavy rotation on MTV. Opening for Bryan Metro. Big.”
“Yeah?” I ask. “Hot and big?”
“Sure. Easy. Leon is a star.”
“Did you sleep with Christie while I was gone?” I ask.
He looks at me, groaning. “Oh man, of course I did.”
Christie and I are standing in line for a movie in Westwood. It’s almost midnight and hot and Westwood is packed. The sidewalks are so crowded in fact that the movie line merges with the people walking along the street and the people on the other side of the movie line coming out of shoe stores and places that sell frozen yogurt and posters. Christie is eating Italian ice cream and telling me that Tommy is actually hanging out in Delaware and that it was Monty and not Tommy who was found hacked to death in San Diego, not Mexico, his blood drained, not Tommy’s, like she heard, because she got a postcard with Richard Gere on it from Tommy but Corey was found sealed in a metal drum buried in the desert. She asks me if Delaware is a state and I tell her that I’m not too sure but that I’m really certain I saw Jim Morrison at a car wash on Pico this morning. He was drinking soda and minding his own business. Christie finishes the ice cream and wipes her lips with a napkin, complains about her implants.
