S2 | Ep 3: An Alley Along Melrose

Hi, this is Jill Slesinger, CBS News Business Analyst, Certified Financial Planner and the host of the Jill on Money Podcast. With a new year upon us, there's no better time to take control of your financial life and the Jill on Money Podcast is here to help. It's your questions that make it possible for me to provide unconventional and I hope entertaining insights on your money more importantly on your life. Follow and listen to Jill on Money wherever you get your podcasts. The last episode was set in LA, 1980. We got a glimpse of the exclusive Hollywood world that bred a junior at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks. Suddenly has Entretube, thanks to his classmate and new girlfriend, Julie Forman, the daughter of a powerful movie producer. Julie will become the bassist for Blair, Clay's girlfriend in less than zero. That same year, Brett Gaines entry into a second exclusive Hollywood world. His tour guide this time, another Buckley classmate, Dominic Gross. Dominic will become the loose, very loose, bassist for Julian, Clay's best friend and addict hustler. Dominic's Hollywood is downmarked compared to Julie's. The movie stars in it are movie stars on the slide and not quite yet movie stars and the sex partners of movie stars on the slide and not quite yet movie stars. But it's younger, wilder, and far more titillating. We're going to spend real time in it and with Dominic, because it's this Hollywood that stirs Brett's imagination, and it's this boy who serves as the unwitting muse of less than zero. I'm the Liannlich, and this is once upon a time at Bennington College. There's things first, who's Dominic Gross? Here's Ajay Sagar, a classmate and friend to both Brett and Dominic. There are these twins that ended up coming to Buckley and they had an outrageous amount of freedom and money. All the girls liked him, especially Dominic, the younger, like two minutes one. One girl gets him again, Ajay Sagar. I'm going to find the cutest boy and that's going to be my boyfriend and she was hot and manipulative and so she became his girlfriend. So Nicolette had made, this is like high school drama that I'm really living in, I can't believe I still remember it, but I do. It's formative here. So Dominic was like her kind of trophy boyfriend and Nicolette's whole world. We're riding around in a park, we're going to go to this place where we can go to any restaurant we want. We've got my name, we're cool. If Dominic, a surfer, is being treated as a beach boy toy though, he doesn't seem to mind. Here he is. So Nicolette and I started dating. I think she was in the 10th grade and I was in the 9th grade. I was 14 going on 15 and she was 15 going on 16. She just had this natural beauty, I mean she was very pretty girl. Like we used to go down to Westwood and we'd be holding each other and walking and all these guys would be looking at her, all these guys and I just knew that she had something. Indeed she does. Nicolette is Nicolette Sheridan, Edie of the hit NBC show Desperate Housewives. This is before that though. This is before she's the living embodiment of the California Dream Girl in the Rob Riner Romantic Comedy, the sure thing, or the home wrecker, Paige Matheson, on Nott's Landing, or the cutie on roller skates and that famous Martini and Rossi commercial. This is when she's Nicolette Savales, stepdaughter of Telly Savales, or I guess common law stepdaughter of Telly Savales, since her mother Sally never quite got around to marrying Telly. Sally and Telly met on the set of a Bond movie, The George Lassenby One, on Her Majesty's Secret Service. Telly played the villain, Ernst Stavro Blowfeld. Sally, credited as Danny Sheridan, one of Blowfeld's 12 Angels of Death, or I guess X Common Lost Up Daughter of Telly Savales, since Telly and Sally have recently split. Comment it on Sally. When Nicolette and Sally would go out, just like shopping for the supermarket, Nicolette's mom didn't really want people to know that that was her daughter. And so when they would go out, it's like sisters and kind of wear the same clothes. So that's kind of that relationship there. A sister's sister kind of mother-daughter relationship. Telly's new love is pre-myami-viced Don Johnson, whose biggest claim to fame thus far, is doing full frontal in 1973's A Herod Experiment. His other biggest claim to fame, living with Melanie Griffith, the then 15-year-old daughter of his Herod Experiment co-star, Tippie Hendren, Dominic on Sally and Don. Sally dated Don Johnson, I mean, wasn't anything big back then, but they were good-looking couple. Sally and Don. Don was from Missouri, so he would get a cowboy hat for himself and Sally, and then they'd go out and dress to the hilt, you know, and have fun with each other. I mean, the person would probably feel sorry for it with Telly Savales, right, because he's paying for the South. And you got Don Johnson hanging out with Sally, right? Got me hanging out with Nicolette. And the House was amazing. It was in Bel-Air, it was on Copa de Aura, and got a killer pool, killer shooter house right across the street from UCLA, and there was no reason to leave. Sometimes though, he's forced to. I would spend all night at Nicolette's house, I mean, we were just physical all night long, and I would wake up with this bad hunger pain. And so I would get on my motorcycle, drive down to Westwood early in the morning and go to McDonald, and I would see Bruce, I would see Chip, and I would see Brett there getting ready to go to the movies. This is Freshman or Sophomore Year, and presumably a Saturday morning. So of course, getting ready to go to the movies is what Bruce, Chip, and Brett are doing. Brett was really, I was the obnoxious, surfer kid, Brett, that always bully, I would say, and tease people, and Brett always took it with, you know, with stride, he was a good kid, and I would just try to shock him, you know, with the most gnarliest stories about, you know, facts or whatever, and he would just chuckle and laugh, and he was always good-natured about it. Let's try to picture, for a minute, this early morning scene at the Westwood McDonald's. Brett, pasty, pudgy, introverted. Remember, he's still in his wallflower phase, is hunkered down in a booth with his egg McMuffin, arguing with Bruce and Chip over whether to see the prisoner of Zenda or Zulu Don first. And then, all of a sudden, there's Dominic Gross, Tossil-haired and tawny-skinned, reeking of girl in good times, thinking about heading to Malibu to catch a waiver too. Imagine the impression he'd have made on Brett. It would have been as if Jan Michael Vincent, star of Instant Surfer Classic, Big Wednesday, and a major crush of Brett's, stepped off the screen and into the local fast food joint, stayed just long enough to talk a little sex trash before breezing out the door with a grin. As for Dominic, he's spending the night at Nicolette's routinely. I was basically living at her house, or sometimes going to Eric's place, you know, just like I was not living over there because their mom might have gotten upset because I was basically there too often, you know what I mean? So if I felt like I was hanging out too much, I could go hang out in Beverly Hills with my brother's apartment. So as I mentioned that Dominic is a twin, well, Eric is Dominic's twin brother, which means that Eric is 14-15 too. So what's Eric doing with his own apartment and in Beverly Hills, no less? After all, Dominic and Eric are, like Brett, from the valley. My dad, he started off as no BGYN, and then he started doing drug testing. So he developed the drug testing for marijuana, cocaine, PCP, and then he made a business out of it. And you did actually pretty well. My dad was a single dad, and we were living in a house in Encino, and Eric got kicked out of Buckley. Eric, I kicked out because he had a bong and his locker, and you couldn't go to Beverly Hills High School unless you were in the district. So my dad got an apartment in the district on Lasky Drive. Lasky Drive is for all intents and purposes, an adult free zone. So Dominic and those in Dominic's immediate circle are living in a kind of teen Eden, a place in which high school kids have total autonomy, their own apartments, modes of transportation, money. And if a parent is around, it's a parent like Sally, who is really just an older sibling in disguise, one with clothes you can borrow, and boy troubles worse than yours. Listeners, you see how Dominic's world is distinct from Julie Formans, don't you? Julie might be allowed into the grown up realm, attending her parent's star-studded parties, for example, but only for brief stints, and only on the grown-ups terms. After all, the celebrities in her house are her mom and dad's friends, not hers. She's treated like a sophisticated child, a precocious child, a child whose thoughts and opinions deserve to be taken seriously, still though like a child, not so with Dominic and his crowd. We were basically left unsupervised. It was the great place to hang out, I mean all the kids would drop in, you could, you know, bring your girlfriend there and she could spend the night, and Eric could have his girlfriend, those were great times. And then, Nicolette is cast out of Eden, shipped off to boarding school in England. And though she returns to L.A. a year later, Eden isn't so easy to get back to. I picked her up at L.A. X, and she's still beautiful, but she fundamentally changed. She was skinnier, she smoked marble red, that innocence was missing. So we started off right where we left off, but there's something not right with her. Dominic and Eric throw themselves a birthday party at a restaurant on sunset. And after party at Nicolette's house follows, it's with a bunch of Dominic's new buds, Girls from Lise Françaix, a French-style private school in West Los Angeles. Tatum O'Neill, star at the Bad News Bears, and the youngest Academy Award winner in history for her supporting role in Paper Moon. And Lave Garrett, then among the biggest teen idols in the world. His song, "I Was Made For Dancing," one of the anthems of 1978. So these girls were friends with Tatum O'Neill, and they used to do drugs like crazy. So they were kind of a drug e-crow. So Lave liked to hang out with rich people, too. And so what ended up happening is I became friends with Lave, so did Eric, because you know he had star power. He was starting to wane, but it wasn't completely. But Lave would just hang out all day long and do drugs all day long. Dominic leaves Nicolette and Lave alone together that night. Big mistake. I shouldn't have done this but Nicolette and Lave were in her swimming pool hooking out. And I'm like, "Oh, that's not good." So I introduced Lave and Nicolette. That's that for Dominic and Nicolette, who'll move in with Lave and his mother a few months later. That's that for Dominic and Buckley, too. The people in Buckley were starting to get inbred, you know? It's a very small school, so people start dating each other when they shouldn't be dating each other. They didn't like me because I was too snobby or I wasn't really friendly. And they became cool and I didn't think they should have been cool. You know, the people there were like Ajay, they were like Landon, Julie Foreman, and you know, they became like the overpopular people and I was like, "Okay, I got it. I got it." Dominic's been senior year at Northfield Mount Hermann in Massachusetts, then comes back to LA for college. But what I want to talk about now is that year I fast-forwarded through. Junior year, 1980 to 1981. The year Nicolette is in England and Brett is in with the in-crowd. This is the year that Brett and Dominic actually start hanging out. I remember Brett blew me away, absolutely blew me away. So the Disney went to the Buckley High School and they had the Roy Disney Pavilion and they had this wonderful grand piano. And then Brett belted out on the piano, the most amazing for a title. It was that Robert Brett heard in Paul Newman's. What's that movie? And this is the year that Brett is on Dominic's scene. Well, maybe not quite on it, but close enough to sniff it out. Now, Dominic is not sexually ambiguous, is unambiguously heterosexual, yet his scene is sexually ambiguous, or becomes so with Nicolette absent from it. He's spending a lot more time at his brother, Eric's Beverly Hills apartment, and with Eric's Beverly Hills high friends, including Dean and Davis Factor, the great grandsons of makeup tycoon, Max Factor, and Dean and Davis are, according to Dominic, tight with Eric's neighbor, Ron Levin. Ron is middle aged, gay, socially connected, he's all over the Andy Warhol diaries, and a professional con artist, Dominic on Ron. So the Factor's all into Beverly. And so I don't know how they knew Ron, but they were friends with Ron, and Ron would open up his apartment or house in Beverly Hills to all the kids that hung around the Factor's. You could hang out in a cool atmosphere, sometimes Warhol would show up or some famous people. And Ron Levin liked to have young, rich, attractive boys around his house. I would go over there and I introduce Brett to Ron Levin. Brett well remembers. He and I discuss. I knew a boy who was the best looking boy in high school, and his twin brother, Ronny, knew them, and would take them, me and all other boys, who were 16, to this disco roller ring on wheat nice, and his convertible rolls were going to give us cocaine, and there was like Dominic, look, and jerk them off or whatever, because he was giving him clothes. Brett's swallowing his words a bit, so I'll regurgitate the key ones. He's saying that Ron Levin took him, Dominic, and a few other high school boys, to a roller ring disco in a Rolls Royce convertible, fed them cocaine. He's also saying that Dominic let Ron masturbate him in exchange for clothes Ron provided. Teen Eden is suddenly looking a whole lot less adenic, isn't it? As a matter of fact, Teen Eden is looking downright hellish, with parental figures praying on children who are materially indulged and emotionally deprived, or does Brett have a wrong. Let's hold up his memory of events to Dominic, compare the two. Brett and Dominic match on the roller ring disco, Flippers roller boogie palace on La Sienega, and on the rolls, but they clash on the coke. Ron was in a drug guy. No, no, no. He was not a drug guy in fact. He wanted you to be clean. He was kind of Jewish grandmother. He wanted you to do well, and whatever you decided to do. So I never got drugs from Ron, and he would never do that. They clash harder on the sex. He didn't try to make moves on young men. We kind of knew he was gay, but he wasn't a pedophile or anything. He was a decent man. I remember him giving out, I don't know if they were real, $100 bills to homeless people, and Hollywood laid at night. I mean, yeah, he was kind of a crook, but he was a good guy. Hang on, Dominic's not done. He has more to say on the topic of Ron, and the sex Ron isn't having with underage boys. That's a real quick way to scare kids so they don't come back ever again if he crossed the line. And he never did with me, or Eric, or Dean, or Davis, and he didn't cross the line, give drugs, or try to get somebody to have sex with them. That's definitely not what Ron was about. He was more of a place to hang out and shoot the bull, and you could rate his refrigerator. I mean, it's like, "Oh, let's go raid Ron's refrigerator." As I mentioned, Ron appears in the Andy Warhol diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, Warhol's frequent collaborator. Pat was close with Ron. She admits that he was a con artist, but she puts the emphasis on artist. Nothing Ronny did was ever sneaky. It was always just so bald and outrageous that, you know, you had to laugh. And one of the diary entries that I think that was the complaint that he had gone into one of the galleries where there was the show of Andes rolled up some drawing, and then came back and tried to sell it back to them. And it was just so interesting to watch somebody who had, you know, no rules would just see what he could get away with. Furthermore, Ron, according to Pat, is a con artist with an open and magnanimous nature. You know, "Oh, give me a kiss. You know, come over here. Oh, you know, your complexion is so beautiful. Come here." He really was always, he was always very lonely, you know, and he was always so happy to see everybody. He bought all his friends' clothes and things like that, you know, "Do you want this?" And he was, you know, I don't know if you can say generous with the person who's paying for everything with stolen credit cards, but he was generous with them. Pat objects strenuously to the idea that Ron would push drugs on miners or sex. I don't believe at all that he bought them coke, not at all. Jugs are not part of, you know, him. You know, I wasn't in, you know, LA that often, but when I go there, that's when I'd see Ronnie and, yeah, the factor boys were there. You know, you love to have those kids around. You know, it wasn't anything sinister at all. He was a thief, but he did have character. Brett is projecting something that was not there. The funny thing is, Brett knows he's projecting, or at least he strongly suspects it. He told me that if Dominic heard his theory, i.e. that Dominic was trading sexual favors for clothing and other goods, Dominic would say to him, quote, "you're insane," unquote. And Dominic does think Brett's insane, as does Ajay, who also hung out with Dominic and Ron Levin. You know, there was nothing like that happening. Brett kind of got jammed in there. Um, my guess is he just wanted to be with the coolest people in a porch that he could be with, and he probably had some, you know, unspoken, deep, crazy attraction to Dominic. Okay, let's say Brett is drawn to Dominic, a rich and gorgeous straight boy, and sexually unattainable. So he imagines a scenario in which Dominic can be attained sexually, if not by him, by some other male. Basically, what he's done is take Dominic, a human being he can't control, and turn him into Julian, a character he can. A simple case of an artist exercising his prerogative, and yet, maybe not so simple. Yes, listeners, this screw is about to get turned again. Go behind the scenes of one of TV's most launched true crime series, with the 48 hours post-mortem podcast, where correspondence and producers take you inside each case. Every Monday, listen to a new episode of 48 Hours, and then join me, 48 Hours Correspondent and Marie Green, every Tuesday for a new episode of post-mortem. Follow and listen to 48 Hours on the free Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Emma Gray, host of Aspire with Emma Gray, a podcast where I sit down with people who don't just drink big, they build big. From culture-shaping voices like Mel Robbins to leaders redefining success like Tracy Ellis Ross, to game-changing entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, Aspire is about mindset ambition and doing the work that actually moves the needle. If you're ready to raise your standards and take charge about the life and career you're building, Aspire is where you start. Follow and listen to Aspire with me, Emma Gray, an Odyssey podcast available wherever you get your podcasts. Brett surmise about Ron and Dominic isn't accurate, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. It is true, at least in the spiritual sense, by which I mean the possibility of sexual exploitation is in the air. And if Dominic had been a little more desperate or castrapped, actually strung out on heroin and not driving a cherry-red Porsche Carrera, and if Ron had been a little less principled or concerned with appearances, not at heart a Jewish grandmother, then who knows? Ron might have been less than Zero's Finn, the rare adult character and a cast of teenage characters, the gay Pimp who runs a stable of boys, many of them drug addicted, including Julian. That possibility is something Ajay picks up on, if only in hindsight. And excuse the gusting wind sound, this interview was conducted in the middle of the Santa Ana's and Ajay was trying to find his dog. Dominic, he looked, you know, he like he could be like Richard Gears cousin. Like he was like, good looking and kind of had a pull. Like again, the Richard Gear American Jigalo feeling that he had. I just remember being at Ron 11's house, he got the guy to wait, Dominic or Eric or whoever, and there's like a war hall on the wall, big bags of clothes that he would buy from this store called @EasonWestward and just give them out to the young man who lived there or hung out there. I was so unsophisticated at the time that I was just like, I was nice getting Ron 11. But then, you know, Brett was not unsophisticated and Brett would say, yeah, those are boys that he's fucking, you know, a guy who was probably in his 40s or 50s hanging out with a bunch of, you know, good looking team, you know, there weren't any fat and ugly boys there. So Brett's right even if he's wrong, which is how Dominic gross, the Richard Gear look alike and Julian K, the character Richard Gear plays in American Jigalo fused together in his mind. And Voila, he has his Julian. For Brett, still a junior, all the essential elements of Lesson Zero are now there. Voice, point-of-view, characters. And so he's able to write the novel. So it was 80, say 80, 81 that I wrote a kind of very quickly, obsessively wrote a long draft of what ultimately became Lesson Zero. It was like my reaction to Didian, my writing style change and Steve Robbins noticed. Steve Robbins is of course Brett's English teacher at Buckley and Steve Robbins is one of the very few people to whom Brett shows this draft. I remember he just dropped off this piece of the title Lesson Zero and he didn't want to say much about it. He just gave it to me and it was Didian S. in his style and so that got my attention right away. I was looking at it and saying, my God, I mean he has, at his age, gained a mastery of a style of writing that the rest of the country is reading and admiring. And yet, Lesson Zero isn't working. What's more, it isn't actually Lesson Zero. Brett clarifies. I think there are six things that are kept. It kind of morphed into many versions of it from 81, 82, 83 and also being quite you know obsessed. Steve Robbins also clarifies. It was the first piece titled Lesson Zero. I don't think it was an early version of the Lesson Zero he eventually published. It felt like journalism to me with some fictional elements and he was having trouble developing plot. That's what I felt was a problem in that early piece. So Brett has everything he needs except the last thing he needs, which is, well, he doesn't know what it is. Steve Robbins diagnosis the missing ingredient as plot, only that can't be right since Lesson Zero never really gets one of those. Maybe by plot, Steve means structure or framework. All of this suggests that in 1981, Lesson Zero is just a title, a mood, a set of intriguing scenes, characters and situations, even if a physical manuscript exists. The moment of transcendence when notes become writing pages a book has yet to occur. First, Brett's skill must catch up with his ambition. Meanwhile, Brett is beginning his senior year and though his creation Lesson Zero is not complete, his self-creation very nearly is. Brett's junior yearbook photo shows Brett Ellis. His face is still a little blobby and unformed looking. His hair too long, his posture hunched to the point of turtled, head almost fully retracted inside a pair of rounded shoulders and he isn't smiling at the camera, he's snickering at it. Brett's senior yearbook photo on the other hand shows Brett Easton Ellis. Lean and handsome and clean cut, shoulders squared and thrown back, smile wide and white toothed, beaming. One reason he's beaming, his dad isn't around much anymore. Bob Ellis has left Coldwold Banker commercial brokerage where he spends since the late 60s to set up shop for himself and he's working day and night to make his company, the Robert M. Ellis company Takeoff, which it's doing. Brett's Buckley classmate and best friend, Bruce Taylor. His dad, his picture is his bedroom that was from some magazine coverup, him holding up two skyscrapers. He closed his first big commercial deal and he'd been on the cover of white. I don't know if it was a financial magazine but he had it blown up and he had a picture of that on the wall, I remember. Success, however, doesn't have a mellowing effect on Bob Ellis. In a 1999 profile in the Guardian, Brett is quoted as saying, "I think it was a bar mitzvah for the family next door at a dance hall or something at noon. My father did not want to go. He drank a lot at the party and left with the car. Didn't tell us. So we had to take a cab home. He'd locked all the doors, locked the gate. I finally climbed over. We broke a window with a baseball bat. The next day, he was gone. Again, Bruce Taylor. Brett's mother and father separated and he left and he went over to condo in Century City. I would see him every once in a while. Brett would say, "Oh, you want to go have dinner with me and my dad. He would like to have other people." With the monster in retreat, the house on Valley Vista is a much quieter and more tranquil place. Brett is writing his book there, obviously. He's also writing his music. By senior year, Brett has a band. His bandmate, John Shanks, who will go on to produce albums by Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Melissa Etheridge, and Miley Cyrus, among others. And who will win a Grammy for producer of the year in 2005. We were in a band together, John and I. He would click the card to keep ours. We would write the songs together. I wrote most of them, John, competitive. We sell ones, a very good friend of mine. We was going to be our producer and he was there in a rehearsal that he never happened. That was a summer of '82 and I went to college. But something could have happened. In fact, Brett is serious enough about the band that he considers putting off going to college to pursue it, which would mean putting off less than zero, too. That's an alternate reality to contemplate. One in which Brett Easton Ellis is a famous writer of pop songs, rather than a famous writer of pop novels. A semi-funny side note, Brett and John's producer Lee Selwyn is the reason Eric Gross had to get that apartment on Lasky Drive in the first place. According to Dominic, it was Lee who ratted out Eric for stashing that pong in his locker. So Brett starts high school on the outside. Ends it on the inside. I did have a girlfriend. I went to parties. We all went to the beach. I helped decorate the floor. I was part of the crew. He has a public persona and it very much involves his girlfriend, Julie Foreman. Ajay on Brett and Julie. Brett was just like the cute guy that had been overlooked and he was very smart and funny as opposed to some of the other guys in high school, but we're kind of not that interesting, but nice guys. Julie just, you know, he could do no wrong. Brett also has a private persona and it very much does not involve his girlfriend, Julie Foreman. There were no openly gay dudes, even at a ritzy private high school in Los Angeles back then. And yet we knew of each other like secret agents and it wasn't difficult to connect to read the signs, to crack the code. Brett becomes infatuated with one of these secret agents. The porn fantasy, the jock, the hot football player, the one who just grinned and told dirty jokes masking the torture of it all, we became close and it often seemed that something was going to happen but I was falling for him hard because he was charismatic, free-wheeling and funny. He was also way too popular to endanger his reputation. It was just easier for him to flirt and laugh about everything until he could just get the fuck out of here and be himself. Ultimately, the jock proves elusive. Still though, there are others who are not. I was having sex with a couple of guys. One turned out to be straight, married a woman, had a child, all quite normally without any torture backstory. And the other one was the stoner, Jewish, tall, green-eyed and with a killer body, who my guess is, would have sex with anyone. So Brett, by senior year, is actively if secretly gay. And the secrecy has got to be a source of pleasure for him. It heightens the excitement. What he's doing is verboten. Julie is his serious girlfriend, which means he's having affairs, is in corrupt adult sexuality territory. And a corrupt adult is what he's wanted to be since he was an innocent kid. Ajay. Brett really wanted to enter the world of adults. Much faster than all the rest of us. We would dip our toes in and smoke cigarettes and drink and have sex or whatever, but Brett was very into like, "I want to enter the world of the darkest parts of Joan Didian's psyche." The secrecy, though, is also, I'd imagine, a source of pain. It's a form of dishonesty after all. A betrayal. Not only of Julie, but of who he is. And he's connecting with these boys in a way that isn't quite genuine or on the up and up. They aren't actually into guys as he is, are just looking for sexual release. And what they're doing with him is, in their minds, shameful. Something they'd lie about if confronted, which must leave him feeling disconnected. Being gay and being a writer, I think you begin to see the world as it really is. You see through the facade of it. You see through kind of the poses everyone is making in order to get through, and you really see the lie of high school in so many ways. When you're gay and you're standing on the sideline, and no song is about you, and no movie is about you, and you have to kind of reprocess everything. Was it traumatic? Did it make me want to become an artist? I certainly don't think I would have been a writer if I'd been Captain the football team or the prom king. I mean, well, look, it was nothing that ever I ever agonized over. It was something I just kind of accepted and said, okay, this is another thing that I've got to deal with. How am I going to navigate through this? So I had a very even keel acceptance of that. I don't know that I believe his acceptance is even keeled, though I believe it looks even keeled, just as he looks cool and passive, like his literary stand-in clay. But what is the opposite of coolness and passivity? Of not wanting anything, or needing anything, or caring about anything. It's rage, desire, passion, despair, exhilaration, love. It's life and a word. And all of these things are what he's going to reject, deny in less than zero. And I wonder if it's at this precise moment that the shy, sensitive, scary-capped boy from suburban Los Angeles, who likes nothing better than to peer through the keyhole that is the movie screen, realizes that he can turn his weakness into well, his degradation into glory, his terrors and incapacities into the very source and vector of his art. If Brett is at some level living ally, he isn't writing one. And he is, tentatively, selectively, beginning to show his work, not to his classmates, but to his teachers, and to teachers other than Steve Robbins. I did a non-fiction piece for my sexual moray's class. I wrote a ditty-in-like 30-page piece about my sex life then. The problem is that I was secretly seeing a straight guy who was aggressively straight. I was in love with this person who was not going to go there. And I wrote about him. I wrote about my girlfriend, Julie Foreman, who put up with me in a way. She initiated this relationship, her father was gay, whatever. So I talked honestly about that. I talked about some of these other guys that I had been with that year. And again, just describing scenes. Not like my feelings for Matt were complicated. Like, Matt reminds me over, we hang out by the pool. His parents aren't home. He wants to go skinny-dippy. So the one teacher, my English teacher, who I showed it to, was horrified and very worried. And I had a private meeting with me. I didn't care. She was a little uptight. She wanted an essay about feminism, men and women relationships. Your feelings about love, and I dream this in. And he's getting closer on less than zero without quite breaking through. Brad again. They had written a chapter where Julian was the narrator and describing a sexual trust yet with an older businessman in the motel room. That scene will appear in the book, but from the perspective of Clay, the story's center. As I said, Brett is not showing his writing to his classmates. And yet rumors are beginning to swirl. Steve Robbins. I remember there was some incident that there was. This other kid who was kind of outing Brett in class. It was a big argument. And this kid went way too far with it. I saw that he was upset by it, but he wasn't going to say anything about it. Buckley, a small school to begin with, is feeling even smaller. Graduation can't come fast enough. When it lasts it does, Steve Robbins takes Brett for a celebratory lunch at Mousseau and Frank Grill, a favorite spot of James M. Kane, Ex-Coffee Sterled, Dorothy Parker, and other literary luminaries slumming it in Hollywood. I knew he was going to go off and continue to write, and I had confidence that he was going to be successful as a writer. So I wanted to bring him to the place where writers who came to Hollywood, expats from the East Coast usually, went to find a home. When we went to Mousseau in Frank's, Brett brought Julie. I'd never seen him smoke because where would I see that? And I don't think I'd ever seen closed cigarettes before. And probably to test me, he took out the closed cigarette and didn't work at me and he lit it. But I don't know if this is the oil or there are closed seeds in there or something, but they were kind of sparking. He was reacting to blanking or turning his head away, but trying not to draw too much attention to himself. And it was really funny, and I don't remember if I said anything to him. I probably didn't want to embarrass him, but of course it looked like a teenager trying to act like it's not a teenager. Evidently, Brett hasn't fully entered the world of adults quite yet. I said a few minutes ago that Brett at this stage doesn't know what quality or element less than zero is lacking, and he doesn't. But he does know how to acquire it, if not at a conscious level, by objective estrangement. He needs to leave LA to write about it, leave Buckley people to write about them. And so to the dismay of Bob Ellis, who is urging him to go to USC to study business, he requests an application form for Bennington College, an art school in Bennington, Vermont, about as far from Southern California as you can get while still remaining in the continental United States. Bruce Taylor. He always wanted to go to Bennington. He wanted to go to Bennington specifically, and he loved New York, and he was ready to have that new sort of adventure in his life. I don't even think he applied to any California schools. He wanted to be on the East Coast. Brett is a fantasist, and the East Coast embodies a certain kind of fantasy. New England colleges look the way colleges are supposed to look, and New York is where you go if you want to contend as an artist. I really wanted to get out. I just didn't want to be in LA anymore. When I was writing less than zero, I could only imagine New York. I don't want it to live back east. I want to go to college back east and go and live in New York. Adding to Brett's sense of urgency, the dead bodies of teenagers that are starting to pile up. Brett mentions to me an unusually high number of young person car accidents happening during this time. Brett also mentions this. There was a story going around that there had been this person who'd Odeed in an alley, somewhere along Melrose at this rumor went around in 1981-82, and that kids just were brought to see the body of another kid, and people had heard about it, and someone would meet someone at a party, and then people would come over, find the space, and just gawk at this dead body. Odeed's a gall, though, recalls no fatal car accidents among his and Brett's peers during their time at Buckley. And that's for that corpse on Melrose. No, there's no dead body in that alley behind Melrose. And yet Brett isn't imagining things. No, he's divining them. A shadow is about to fall on his sunny world. That shadow is deaf, and it's long, and it's dark, and it's heavy, and it obliterates everything. He is getting out just in time. I felt like beneath the facade of beautiful teenagers and lovely setting and nice houses that there was a darkness that was encroaching upon everything. And it really did notice it much more strongly after I'd left for five or six months, it came back after I went to college for my first term. Next time, on Once Upon a Time at Bennington College. The Brett crowd, their whole narrative seemed to be figuring out who's slept with who. At the parties, you'd see him dressed in black, all going to the bathroom like we were going to come get them. We knew they worked as co-cats. We knew that. Like, I don't want your coke, okay? I am so stoned. This has been a presentation and production of C-13 Originals, a cadence 13 studio. Once upon a time at Bennington College is executive produced by me and Chris Corgren, created and written by me, directed by Zach Levitt, edited by Perry Crowell, script edited by Bruce Handy, production support and additional editing by Ian Mont, mixed and mastered by Bill Schultz, production coordination by Terrence Malangone, studio coordination by Sean Cherry, artwork and design by Kurt Courtney, marketing by Brian Swarth, Josephina Francis, Moira Curran, and Melissa Wester. The original music is by Joel Goodman. Cadence 13 is an Odyssey Company. What's up guys, I'm Candace Deward Bassett and you may know me from my time on the Real Housewives of Potomac or as a part of the latest cast of the Traitors. And I'm Michael Arsino, author of the New York Times bestseller "I Can't Day Jesus." On our podcast "Undemesticated," we don't just say the quiet parts out loud, we're putting it all on a kitchen table and inviting you into the chaos. If you're ready for bold takes, real talk, and a little fun, come join us. Listen to and follow "Undemesticated and Odyssey" podcast wherever you get your podcasts.