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Chapter 1

They had made a movie about us The movie was based on a book written by so about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our na in it that hadn't happened For exa of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to consoletortured were faked, but he was s as he said this and I had to turn away Other exairlfriend had in fact run over a coyote in the canyons below Mulholland, and a Christmas Eve dinner at Chasen's with my family that I had casually complained about to the author was faithfully rendered And a twelve-year-old girl really had been gang-raped - I was in that room in West Hollyith the writer, who in the book noted just a vague reluctance on my part and failed to accurately describe how I had actually felt that night - the desire, the shock, how afraid I was of the writer, a blond and isolated boy who had halfway fallen in love with But the writer would never fully return her love because he was too lost in his own passivity to make the connection she needed from him, and so she had turned to me, but by then it was too late, and because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness That's how I becae, blood strea questions that never required answers That's how I beca worked That's how I became the boy ouldn't save a friend That's how I becairl

The scenes from the novel that hurt the most chronicled my relationship with Blair, especially in a scene near the novel's end when I broke it off with her on a restaurant patio overlooking Sunset Boulevard and where a billboard that read DISAPPEAR HERE kept distracting lasses when I told Blair that I never loved her) I hadn't mentioned that painful afternoon to the author but it appeared verbati to Blair and couldn't listen to the Elvis Costello songs we knew by heart ("You Little Fool," "Man Out of Tiiven me a scarf at a Christ Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" and yes, she had called irl I picked up on a rainy night at the Whisky, and yes, the author had informed her of that He wasn't, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close to any of us - except of course to Blair, and really not even to her He was sih our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the glea the horror of it all

But there was no point in being angry with hi of 1985, the author had already left Los Angeles In 1982 he attended the sae in New Hampshire that I'd tried to disappear into, and where we had little or no contact (There's a chapter in his second novel, which takes place at Caesture, another cruel reminder of how he felt about , it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's "I Love LA") Because of his presence I stayed at Cah in the second novel I' the fall term of 1985 I told myself it shouldn't bother ht lines for an unco to become a writer as well, and that I had wanted to write that first novel the author had written after I finished reading it - it was my life and he had hijacked it But I quickly had to accept that I didn't have the talent or the drive I didn't have the patience I just wanted to be able to do it I raduating fro to happen

The only person who expressed any embarrassment or disdain about the novel was Julian Wells - Blair was still in love with the author and didn't care, nor did leefully arrogant h the author had exposed not only Julian's heroin addiction but also the fact that he was basically a hustler in debt to a drug dealer (Finn Delaney) and pio or San Francisco in the hotels that lined Sunset from Beverly Hills to Silver Lake Julian, wasted and self-pitying, had told the author everything, and there was so Julian that seeive Julian some kind of focus that bordered on hope and I think he was secretly pleased with it because Julian had no shame - he only pretended that he did And Julian was even more excited when the movie version opened in the fall of 1987, just two years after the novel was published