Less Than Zero

When Clay goes to a club called Pages in Encino with Rip and a group of other friends, he sees sexual jokes in the bathroom, including one that reads, “Julian gives good head, and is dead” (125).

Clay has a flashback to a point in the past. After spending nine weeks in Palm Springs, at which point everyone had gone home except for his grandfather, he ate a steak that was flown in from his grandfather’s hotel in Nevada.

Back in the present, Clay drinks gin and tonics at Kim’s house when Blair suggests going to a new club called the Garage. At the club, Clay sees Blair flirt with a younger man. Dimitri, another member of their party, gets drunk and needs to go to the hospital after cutting his hand on glass from a broken window.

Clay goes home and watches another religious program, and he thinks about calling in, but he doesn’t know what he would say. Clay calls Blair and asks if she will go to a concert with him, and she says yes but then hangs up. Clay apologizes again for cheating, but Kim tells him to forget it.