The Rules of Attraction

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis Page B

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Authors: Bret Easton Ellis
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me since I was always hoping to run into Paul Denton.
    The first time I met Paul was in an acting class and we had to do an improv scene together and I was so bowled over by how handsome he was that I botched the scene up and I think he could tell. I was so embarrassed that I dropped the class and made sure to keep out of his way. He’ll probably loathe the fact that I moved in across from him and ignore me, but at least we’ll get to share the same bathroom.

 
    SEAN Sitting in class, staring at the desk, someone’s carved “Whatever Happened To Hippie Love?” I guess the first girl I kind of liked at Camden was this hippie I met my Freshman year. She was really stupid but so gorgeous and so insatiable in bed that I couldn’t help myself. I had met her once, before I fucked her, at a party off-campus my first term. The hippie had offered me some pot and I was drunk so I smoked it. I was so drunk in fact and the pot was so bad that I threw up in the backyard and passed out in some girl’s car who had brought me. I was embarrassed but not really, even though the girl who drove was pissed off since I lost it again all over the backseat ofher Alfa Romeo on the way back to campus, and was jealous since she could tell that the hippie and I had been making eyes at each other all night, and had seen the hippie even kiss me before I left to throw up in back.
    I really got to meet her the following term when another person I knew when I first came to Camden (and who had been a hippie but quit) introduced us at a party at my urging. I cringed, mortified, when to my shock I realized I had been in the hippie’s Intro to Poetry Workshop my first term and this girl on the first day of class, so high her head looked like it was on springs, like some doped-up jack-in-the-box, raised her hand and said slowly, “This class is a total mindfuck.” I dropped the class, disconcerted, but still wanting to fuck the hippie.
    This was the Eighties, I kept thinking. How could there be any hippies left? I knew no hippies when I was growing up in New York. But here was a
hippie,
from a small town in Pennsylvania, no less. A hippie who was not too tall, who had long blond hair, features sharp, not soft like one would expect a hippie’s features to resemble, yet distant, too. And the skin smooth as brown marble and as clean. She always seemed clean; in fact she seemed abnormally healthy. A hippie who would say things like, “None of your beeswax,” or commenting on food, “This is really mellow chili.” A hippie who would bring her own chopsticks to every meal. A hippie who had a cat named Tahini.
    JIMI LIVES was painted in big purple letters on her door. She was constantly stoned. Her favorite question was “Are you high?” She wore tie-dyed shirts. She had beautiful smallish firm tits. She wore bell-bottoms and tried to learn how to play the sitar but she was always too stoned. She tried to dress me up one night: bell-bottoms, tie-dyed shirt, headband. Didn’t work. It was extremely embarrassing. She said “beautiful” constantly. She didn’t have any goals. I read the poetry she’d write and lied that I liked it. She had a BMW 2002. She carried a bong in a tie-dyed satchel that she had made herself.
    Like all rich hippies (for this hippie was extremelywealthy; her father owned VISA or something) she spent a lot of time following The Dead around. She’d simply split school for a week with other rich hippies and they’d follow them around New England, stoned out of their minds, reserving rooms and suites at Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons and Ramada Inns, making sure to always have enough Blue Dragon or MDA or MDMA or Ecstasy. She’d come back from these excursions ecstatic, claiming that she was indeed one of Jerry’s long lost children; that her mother had made some sort of mistake before she married the VISA guy, that she truly was one of “Jerry’s kids.” I guess she was one of Jerry’s kids, though I wasn’t sure

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