L.A. for the aged

Twenty-five years after the publication of “Less Than Zero,” Bret Easton Ellis’ shocking and seminal blockbuster novel about disaffected Los Angeles youth, the author has released a sequel, “Imperial Bedrooms,” that revisits his privileged, clubgoing, drug-using characters into middle age. As the literati buzzes about the new book — “Ellis remains a twisted soul, unafraid to state the worst in human behavior,” said one HuffPost blogger/fan — I have learned that the author has a third installment in the works. “Slightly Less Than Eighty” (working title) offers a glimpse of Ellis’ promiscuous, alienated glitterati as senior citizens. What follows is an excerpt so exclusive not even the author knows it exists:

Trent got a place at a high-end assisted-living center on Wilshire. Normally it takes years to get off the waiting list, but his dealer knew a girl from the club scene back in the ‘80s. One time this girl did so much coke that she nearly let this slasher film producer take her to his condo and shoot video of her cutting her arms with his Ginsu knives, but Trent’s dealer took her to his place instead and let her just chill out listening to Sheena Easton while he lay by the pool all night. Anyway, next thing you know it’s 50 years later and she’s on the board of directors for the assisted living center, and Trent’s dealer calls her with a sob story about how Trent’s having bladder-control issues and is increasingly non compos mentis (he thinks anyone wearing Elvis Costello glasses actually is Elvis Costello), and she moves him up on the list.

So Trent’s been shacked up there since 2033 or so and he seems, if not exactly happy, at least mellow in a way none of us has managed to be since about 1985, when it always seemed like someone in our gang was running over a coyote or watching a snuff film without meaning to and then feeling weird about it.

When I enter Trent’s room, he’s about to do a line of cocaine off a large-print edition of “The Pill Book.” He’s wearing a Marc Jacobs suit he bought on Rodeo Drive in the mid-aughts, though the effect is lessened somewhat by the fact that his perfectly straight, too-white teeth sit in a jar by his bed.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks.

It’s not that I’m looking at him in any particular way; this is how we talk to each other. It’s how we’ve always talked to each other. It’s what the city has done to us. It’s what life has done to us.

“I’m worried about Blair,” I say.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I ran into her the other day at Denny’s on Sunset. Even though she’s using a walker, she’s still anorexic, addicted to opiates, acting in porn films, even turning tricks at the W Hotel to pay for her last face-lift. It’s weird. I remember when she considered herself a minimalist.”

“Your sentimentality has always been boring,” Trent says. He snorts the cocaine through a flexible straw.

“Plus, Rain came over to my table at the Polo Lounge the other day. It was 5:30. I was in the middle of dinner. She told me that Rip’s been kidnapping teenage girls from the Beverly Center and forcing them to sit in his BMW and listen to Culture Club for hours. Really demented stuff.”

Trent pauses for a moment, as if deep in thought, then lights a cigarette and puts on his Ray-Bans. I do the same because I usually do what everyone else does, that is, when I’m not being the cool observer who just takes it all in.

Outside the assisted living center, the hazy, putrid-pink magic hour light reflects off the mirrored buildings of Wilshire. Somewhere out there, Blair is turning tricks with some studio exec with a fetish for geriatrics. Somewhere out there, Rip is lecturing a girl who’s young enough to be his daughter (or, actually, his daughter’s hot friend) on the subtext of “Karma Chameleon.” Somewhere out there is a Los Angeles that, however toxic and totally, totally noir, once made sense to me. Even though “me” is just a construct. Even though now I can’t shake the image of Trent’s perfectly white teeth in that jar. I once saw a dead girl who’d been strangled with an elastic Pilates band. But this is so much worse.

“Who are you?” Trent asks me.

Is he asking because he senses the degree to which I’ve become disconnected from the world and from myself? Is he asking me because this is the question we ask ourselves all the time? Or is it the early stage of Alzheimer’s?

I wish I could care. I also wish he’d put his teeth in.

mdaum@latimescolumnists.com