Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis Read Free Book Online Page A

pushing through the crowd while paparazzi who couldn’t get in try desperately to snap my photo, calling out my name as I follow Liam Neeson, Carol Alt and Spike Lee up to Chad and Anton, who help pull us inside, where the opening riffs of Matthew Sweet’s “Sick of Myself” start booming. The bar is mobbed, white boys with dreadlocks, black girls wearing Nirvana T-shirts, grungy homeboys, gym queens with buzz cuts, mohair, neon, Janice Dickerson, bodyguards and their models from the shows today looking hot but exhausted, fleece and neoprene and pigtails and silicone and Brent Fraser as well as Brendan Fraser and pom-poms and chenille sleeves and falconer gloves and everyone’s smoochy. I wave over at Pell and Vivien, who are drinking Cosmopolitans with Marcus—who’s wearing an English barrister’s wig—and this really cool lesbian, Egg, who’s wearing an Imperial margarine crown, and she’s sitting next to two people dressed like two of the Banana Splits, which two I couldn’t possibly tell. It’s a kitsch-is-cool kind of night and there are tons of chic admirers.
    While scanning the dining room for Chloe (which I realize a little too slowly is totally useless since she’s always in one of the three big A booths), I notice Richard Johnson from “Page Six” next to me, also scanning the room, along with Mick and Anne Jones, and I sidle up to him and offer a high five.
    “Hey Dick,” I shout over the din. “I need to ask you about something, por favor.”
    “Sure, Victor,” Richard says. “But I’m looking for Jenny Shimuzu and Scott Bakula.”
    “Hey, Jenny lives in my building and she’s supercool and very fond of Häagen-Dazs frozen yogurt bars, preferably piña colada, not to mention a good friend. But hey, man, have you heard about a photograph that’s gonna run in like the
News
tomorrow?”
    “A photograph?” he asks. “A photograph?”
    “B-b-baby,” I stammer. “That sounds kind of sinister when you ask it twice. But it’s, um, do you know Alison Poole?”
    “Sure, she’s Damien Nutchs Ross’s squeeze,” he says, spotting someone, giving thumbs-up, thumbs-down, then thumbs-up again. “How are things with the club? Everything nice and tidy for tomorrow night?”
    “Cool, cool, cool. But it’s like an, um, embarrassing photo like maybe of me?”
    Richard has turned his attention to a journalist standing by us who’s interviewing a very good-looking busboy.
    “Victor, this is Byron from
Time
magazine.” Richard motions with a hand.
    “Love your work, man. Peace,” I tell Byron. “Richard, about—”
    “Byron’s doing an article on very good-looking busboys for
Time,”
Richard says dispassionately.
    “Well,
finally,”
I tell Byron. “Wait, Richard—”
    “If it’s an odious photograph the
Post
won’t run an odious photograph, blah blah blah,” Richard says, moving away.
    “Hey, who said anything about
odious
?” I shout. “I said
embarrassing.”
    Candy Bushnell suddenly pushes through the crowd screaming “Richard,” and then when she sees me her voice goes up eighty octaves and she screams
“Pony!”
and places an enormous kiss on my face while slipping me a half and Richard finds Jenny Shimuzu but not Scott Bakula and Chloe is surrounded by Roy Liebenthal, Eric Goode, Quentin Tarantino, Kato Kaelin and Baxter Priestly, who is sitting way too close to her in the giant aquamarine booth and I have to put a stop to this or else deal with an unbelievably painful headache. Waving over at John Cusack, who’s sharing calamari with Julien Temple, I move through the crowd toward the booth where Chloe, pretending to be engaged, is nervously smoking a Marlboro Light.
    Chloe was born in 1970, a Pisces and a CAA client. Full lips, bone-thin, big breasts (implants), long muscular legs, high cheekbones, large blue eyes, flawless skin, straight nose, waistline of twenty-three inches, a smile that never becomes a smirk, a cellular-phone bill that runs $1,200 a month, hates