The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

Writing this now, I can’t believe that I was left to my own devices for twenty minutes, just idly sitting there, thinking about things, about Thom and about Susan, waiting without a phone to look at, waiting without something to distract me. Instead, I took in the theater—my favorite in Westwood and the largest, with over fourteen hundred seats;

Nineteen eighty-one was a time before private schools in L.A. had waiting lists thousands of names long and parents lost their minds trying to get their children onto those lists let alone into the schools themselves, and in 1981 if you could afford the tuition you basically got your kid in anywhere—there was no competition for any of the open slots that were available, no testing, no belabored meetings with staff, no gifts; if you could write the check to cover tuition you were in. That’s how it worked.

My parents would be away most of the fall, traveling through Europe on a number of cruises trying to repair their flailing marriage after numerous separations and I had zero interest in the outcome—divorce was preferable to the agonies that the marriage played out, and it became increasingly apparent as I moved through my adolescence that I wasn’t particularly close to either my mother or my father. We were all distant from each other even though the public façade, the Boomer narrative, suggested otherwise: the Christmas card with the posed family photo emblazoned on it, the sleepovers I had where my mother acted like a concerned chaperone checking in on us as we watched the Z Channel, the days at the beach club with Thom and Jeff and Kyle that my father oversaw and where he acted as if he was our best friend—all of it seemed fake, performative, unreal. There was no doubt my parents loved me and if pressed I would admit I loved them back but I was becoming an autonomous adult and realized that I didn’t need them in the ways I once had.

Everything at Buckley was outside: there were no hallways, each classroom was, in fact, its own bungalow, with walkways connecting them protected by eaves, and it was the administration office that I drifted into as if in a dream on that first day of school.

The lack of engagement from the no longer tangible participant, I noted, was vast and spreading. Sex and novels and music and movies were the things that made life bearable—not friends, not family, not school, not social scenes, not interactions—and that was the summer when I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark every other week but barely had dinner with my separated parents even twice. I had no stakes in the real world—why would I? It wasn’t built for me or my needs or desires.

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.