But a lot of people thought I was gay so they would soon forget that Bret Easton Ellis had mentioned—raving, coked-up, sucking back another Stoli—that he had fathered a child. The gay thing being the outcome of a drunken British interview I was doing to promote the BBC documentary about my life thus far at thirty-three, its title taken from American Psycho’s last line: This Is Not an Exit: The Bret Easton Ellis Story (the fame, the excess, the falloff, the dysfunction, the heartbreak, the DUI, the shoplifting incident, the arrest in Washington Square Park, the comeback, walking tiredly through a gym in slow motion while Radiohead’s “Creep” blasted over the soundtrack). Noting casually that I appeared “rather effete” in many of the clips, and instead of asking if I was on drugs, the reporter wondered if I was a homosexual. And I said, “Yeah, you bet I am—sure!” adding what I thought to be a jaunty and overtly sarcastic remark about coming out of the closet: “Thank God!” I shouted. “Someone has finally outed me!” I had told countless interviewers about sexually experimenting with men—and went into explicit detail about the collegiate threesomes I had at Camden in a Rolling Stone profile—but this time it struck a nerve. Paul Bogaards, my publicist at Knopf, actually called me a “potty-mouthed butt pirate” after reading the piece in the Independent, while relishing the storm of controversy this admission caused, not to mention the increased sales of my backlist. The creator of Patrick Bateman, author of American Psycho, the most misogynistic novel ever written, was actually—gasp!—a homosexual?!? And the gay thing sort of stuck. After that interview appeared I was even named one of the Advocate’s 100 Most Interesting Gay People of the year, which drove my legitimately gay friends nuts and prompted confused, tearful phone calls from Jayne. But I was just being “rambunctious.” I was just being a “prankster.” I was just being “Bret.” Over the years photos of me in a Jacuzzi at the Playboy Mansion (I was a regular when I was in L.A.) kept appearing in that magazine’s “Hanging with Hef” page, so there was “consternation” about my sexuality. The National Enquirer said I was dating Julianna Margulies or Christy Turlington or Marina Rust. They said I was dating Candace Bushnell, Rupert Everett, Donna Tartt, Sherry Stringfield. Supposedly I was dating George Michael. I was even dating both Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. I wasn’t straight, I wasn’t gay, I wasn’t bi, I didn’t know what I was. But it was all my fault, and I enjoyed the fact that people were actually interested in who I was sleeping with. Did it matter? I was a mystery, an enigma, and that was what mattered—that’s what sold books, that’s what made me even more famous. Propaganda designated to enhance the already very chic image of author as handsome young playboy.
On heroin I thought everything I did was innocent and full of love and I had a yearning to bond with humanity and I was relaxed and serene and focused and I was frank and I was caring and I signed so many autographs and made so many new friends (who dwindled away, who didn’t make it). At the time I discovered dope I also started the decade-long process (the nineties) of outlining, writing and promoting a 500-page novel called Glamorama, about an international terrorist ring using the fashion world as a cover. And the book promised—predictably—to make me a multi-millionaire again and even more famous. But I had to do a world tour. This is what I promised when I signed the contracts; this was what was required of me to become the multimillionaire again; this was what ICM insisted on so they could collect the commissions from the multimillionaire. But I was heavily into smack and the sixteen-month-long tour was considered by the publishing house to be a potentially “precarious” situation, since I was, according to Sonny Mehta, “kind of high all the time.” But they relented. They needed me to do the tour to help recoup the massive advance they’d laid out. (I told them to send Jay McInerney in my place—no one could tell the difference, I argued, plus I was positive Jay would actually do it. Nobody at Knopf thought this was even vaguely feasible.) Besides, I wanted to be that multimillionaire again, so I promised them I was clean—and for a little while I was. An internist they sent me to was convinced I would need a new liver by the time I was forty if I wasn’t careful, which helped. But not enough.
To make sure I stayed drug-free during the first leg of the Glamorama tour, Knopf hired a Jamaican bodyguard to keep an eye on me. Sometimes he was easy to elude; other times he was not. Like many esteemed (albeit sloppy) drug users, I usually had cocaine powder all over my jackets when I came out of bathroom stalls, dusting my lapels, dotting itself in chunks on the trousers of my new Cerruti suits so at times it was noticeable that I wasn’t entirely clean yet, which eventually led to daily searches by Terence, who would find the packets of meth and coke and dope lodged in my Armani overcoats, which he then sent out for dry cleaning. And then there were the more serious side effects of doing drugs on a long, exhausting tour: the seizure in Raleigh and the life-threatening coma in St. Louis. Before long Terence just didn’t care anymore (“Mon, if you wanna do de dope, do de dope,” Terence tiredly told me as he fingered a dreadlock. “Terence don wanna know. Terence? He tired, mon.”) and soon I was doing bumps every ten minutes during interviews in a hotel bar in Cincinnati while guzzling double cosmopolitans at two in the afternoon. I was smuggling propane torches and large quantities of crack onto Delta flights. I overdosed in a bathtub in Seattle (I had technically died for three minutes in the Sorrento). And that was when the real worry began settling in. If the increasing number of handlers in each city couldn’t find me by lunch they were instructed by my publishers to get the house detective of whatever hotel I was staying at to unlock the door—and if the chain was up or I’d wedged a chair under the handle, they were instructed to “kick the fucker in”—to make sure I was still alive, and of course I was always still alive (literally, if not figuratively) but so wasted that PR reps would have to piggyback me from limousine to radio station to bookstore, where I would commence with my reading while sitting slumped in a chair, mumbling into a microphone, while a bookstore clerk nervously stood close by, ready to snap her fingers in front of my face if I zoned out (and sometimes during the signings they held my hand, guiding me to a recognizable signature when all I wanted to sign was an X). And if drugs were unavailable I became less committed to the cause. For example, since a dealer I knew in Denver had been—unbeknownst to me, before my arrival—stabbed to death in the head with a screwdriver I had to cancel an appearance at the Tattered Cover due to lack of dope. (I escaped the Brown Palace and was found on the front lawn of another dealer’s condo, moaning, my shoes and wallet stolen, my pants around my ankles.) Without drugs I couldn’t take showers because I was afraid of what might come out of the showerhead. Occasionally a book signing groupie who’d hinted she had drugs was dragged back to my hotel room and would attempt to revive me with dope and oral sex (which required a lot of patience on the groupie’s part). “It only takes a week to come off heroin,” one of these girls said hopefully while trying to gnaw her own arm off after she realized I had done all six bags of her smack. Without drugs I became convinced that a bookstore owner in Baltimore was in fact a mountain lion. If that was happening how could I endure the six-hour flight to Portland sober? My solution? Find more drugs. And so I kept scoring dope and continued to nod off during interviews in hotel bars. I passed out on planes, lying sprawled and unconscious in first class before being wheelchaired through airports with an airline attendant by my side to keep me from sliding out. “Food poisoning,” the press was told by Paul Bogaards, now the head of publicity at Knopf. “He was poisoned by . . . um . . . y’know, food.”