Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,63
toying with a mouse, batting me around with her paws, savoring the moments before she sinks her teeth in. The drinks flow, the music blares, the people stare, and suddenly it’s two in the morning and she is asking me what I’m doing now, and if I’d like to come back to her place. She asks this merely as a formality: she knows I’m coming back with her, that we all are, and that we will stay for exactly as long as she wants us to, do anything she asks of us, because she is who she is, and that’s the way it is. We leave the club, and photographers outside take her picture. They shout her name and ask her questions, but she doesn’t even acknowledge their presence. It is as if they don’t even exist to her, and she would walk through them if she could. Her friends form a protective barrier around her, usher her to a waiting SUV. The Disaster and I go with them, eyes wide, dumbfounded. You can see us in the background of some of the pictures. We look ridiculous.
She climbs into the passenger seat of the SUV—the photographers bringing their cameras low just in case she’s not wearing underwear—and we pile in the back. Her friend is driving, driving right through the throngs of photographers, honking her horn almost as an afterthought. They pound on the windshield and snap away; the light from their cameras is blinding. Now I understand why celebrities are always wearing sunglasses. From the front seat, she is laughing, and she turns back and smiles at me.
“Sometimes they’ll stick their feet under the tires on purpose,” she says. “So they can sue you. That’s why Cookie is honking the horn. You have to prove there was no malicious intent. Look at them, they’re so . . . ridiculous.”
She says ridiculous the way normal people say rat or cancer, with pure disdain. We pull away from the madness and head up into the Hills. At a red light, a couple in the car next to us look up and do a double take. They start waving and she smiles, says, “Whateverrr,” under her breath. We pull away and the couple have a nice story to tell everyone at their next dinner party. We climb higher into the night, and she is skipping through tracks on the CD player now and rolling down the window, sticking her head out into the night and shouting to no one in particular, “Fuck!” Everyone in the car laughs and nods. They know exactly what she’s talking about. The Disaster and I exchange glances from the backseat. She lights a cigarette and talks to the car about the house of Balenciaga or something, laughs loudly at some joke Cookie makes, calls her a “cunt.” We bend around curves, the headlights illuminating the road ahead. We pull up to a gate that opens slowly, then we are inside. The lights in the house turn on automatically. No one is amazed by this except for the Disaster and me. Everyone piles out of the car and goes inside. More drinks.
She sits on the floor in the middle of the room, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette and talking about Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull. She makes wild gestures with her arms; her voice is low and scratchy around the edges. It sounds as if it hurts her to speak, but she only stops when the mirror gets passed her way, then she ducks her head down and makes a few lines disappear. Her hair is long and straight and covers her entire face when she’s snorting. When she’s done, she knocks her head back and brushes the hair out of her eyes, laughs, and screams, “Oh, my Goddd.” Her friends all laugh. Now she’s at the stereo—what the rich refer to as “the entertainment center”—fumbling through some CDs, knocking stacks of them onto the tiled floor. She’s shouting for Cookie to come help her find the Stooges album . . . “Cookie! Cooooookie, you cunt, where’s the Stooges?” she cackles. “Cookieeee! Stoooges!” She is out of her mind. “Coo-kie!” she cries, then, silence, some more rummaging, more shit falling onto the ground, followed by “Found it!” She walks away as Raw Power cranks from the speakers at unfathomable volume, pulls open the massive glass doors to her balcony, and dances out into the darkness as Iggy wails about being a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.