The Brooklyn Rail

Susie Vogelman, a protagonist who initially sees herself as “a failed attempt at form,” finds definition through outrage. Her roommate has overdosed on Oxycontin, causing Susie to retreat to Los Angeles. If you hear a simmer in the background of the prose, it’s likely because the author Luke Goebel lost his brother to an Oxy overdose. There’s an outraged urgency that keeps Kill Dick a glowing fireball meeting the friction of atmosphere. Although Susie describes herself as “anti-gravity,” her novel has both the inevitability and the fireworks of a disintegrating asteroid.

Comparisons will be made to the classics of LA noir—works of Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, Bret Easton Ellis—or a more sunshiney obverse, like Eve Babitz’s LA Woman. Of the four, Babitz fits best, but to me Kill Dick is most similar to DeLillo’s White Noise. Specifically, in that the 2016 that Goebel documents is only comprehensible with the barrage of absurdities (parataxis) that DeLillo deployed to make sense of ’80s consumerism. The lack of order is the point. Contemporary culture is amoeba-like at best, and Los Angeles itself is a “failed attempt at form.” But it all works, largely due to the pull of the inevitable. Once the reader discovers who “Dick” is, they see that the inevitability was right there in the title.

*

In Brentwood Circle, Los Angeles . . .

Here they came again, the winds, blowing through Hollywood, up and around the hills—dry and hot—roaming across Mulholland into Sherman Oaks and onto Burbank, or whooshing Laurel Canyon and down Beverly Glen, sifting buttermilk-pancake dust up through Beverly Hills and Bel Air—rustling clusters of pines and palms, sun-lashed sycamore and coastal redwood, rows of Italian Cypress, sun-hot oranges and lemons—before finally touching down in Brentwood, where Susie Vogelman lay stoned on a chaise longue by the swimming pool in her backyard, wiggling her toes indifferently in the rushing air.

She’d be sober in two weeks and a couple of boys would be dead at her hands, but she had no idea what to do now, plastered to the upholstered chair in her mother’s La Perla bathrobe. That fall was full of drama, but Susie wasn’t paying too much attention. Not to the coming election, or “the killings,” or the orange haze of doom that loomed on the horizon. Her mind was on the winds that carried the tawny dust from all over Los Angeles. She listened to the howling, slurped some drool. Her skin was burning through her tanning oil, but that was okay. Back in New York, she’d always stayed so pale. She’d been home since she’d dropped out of NYU about, what—a year, year and a half ago? Who could keep track of all that time? She’d spent most of it snoozing by the pool, feeling nothing, high. Dried cornflakes on her chin stuck like glue. She was safe. This was Brentwood. The barbarians at the gate didn’t know the guards in the entrance pavilion.

A neighbor’s yard wafted charred death into range, disturbingly seductive, warm animal flesh. Though she’d given up eating meat years ago, it was making her mouth water. The meal was likely being tended to by some interchangeable house staff, who from the smell of things was sneaking a cigarette. She knew cigarettes had been tested on lab beagles. Susie was pro-animal rights, anti-vivisection, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-end-stage-capitalist—even as a child of fortune—but mostly she was anti-labels, anti-gravity, stoned as she had to stay upon the chaise by the water in order to tolerate her still life. The usual birds flitted and hummed in the pale air, fighting the autumnal gusts by the pool’s teal surface. They landed in her trees in the backyard—hiding out with Susie from the terrible fates that were coming that miserable fall.

***

This version of things begins with me windswept and stoned on the chaise, completely unaware of the changes that would drop me into the light of the platinum city and the world of “the killings” which would come to define this season in Los Angeles. I didn’t know it then, bombed on Oxy, the drug that was killing the world, but my young life was about to come rushing at me like a murderer. Everything was fate, like the wind, and blew past me unnoticed. I barely caught mention of “the killings” on the news, which I avoided at least so much as I could help it. When I had, on rare occasions, seen news of the deaths on TV of a few fellow junkies hanging from hooks by their skulls or with zip ties slipped around their throats, dead in motels across Hollywood, they only registered as random bodies mutilated in bad hotels. There were other, more compelling horrors capturing the attention of the nation in those months during the fall of my nineteenth year. Early victims of “the killings” were simply addicts who had overdosed and had their hair cut off—hard to say in which order—and then it was parlor tricks of nipples severed and glued to eyelids, all that loud dross attention-getting by some Los Angeles sicko who wanted to be Charles Manson . . . or maybe they lived in Upland, or out in The Valley. No one I’d ever know.

I turned it into art—that’s what this novelization is about, this roman à clef: how protest was created, and how I, both an enfant terrible and an ingénue, was subjected to so much horror and engaged with it all. As a learning tool, or a study, a dead body is not new. I was the first to use the form as a medium for artistic protest. Or I became known as the first, which of course I wasn’t. It incurred plenty of hatred in the public sphere, but I stay out of the public sphere, like anyone with half a brain. I am a private person, but all I went through had a cinematic quality, an artistic sense of public drama appropriate for these commercial times.

I, of course, learned that the first “murder,” which had occurred a year before, was a young woman I knew. I later became convinced “the killer” was someone very, very close to me. As the writer of this piece, I don’t want to be in relationship to confession. I’m not carving a statue of myself. In court, where you first heard from me, I was left having to account for myself after the events unfolded and often in ways that weren’t entirely fulfilling. So much cannot be fully accounted for by myself or anyone else, now that they’re gone: the victims. In order to craft this, I need to include multiple points of view, inviting the characters into the story, wrestling with their metaphysics as best I can. I’ll slip back into my role of third person narrator, where I’m more comfortable, rejoining those terrible winds.

***

Susie Vogelman scratched the lapel of her mother’s bathrobe, marred with breakfast cereal—the downers made it hard to keep her mouth closed while chewing—or, she wondered, was she just lazy? Her hair was a mess, but she figured she looked fine in her white Eres triangle bikini. Inside she felt like a late Picasso, one of those portraits of his wife Jacqueline that made Susie giggle at LACMA and MoMA. The open misogyny of it was funny from such a playful genius. Women were freaks.

Life in Manhattan had been a shock of stress after living in the slow town of LA; her sharp, Franco-Jewish features drew too much male attention. She looked like Mélanie Laurent from Inglourious Basterds. They had the same placid nose and cheekbones, which Susie believed hid her own inner landscape of chaos, her Jacqueline. She looked friendlier than she really was, which meant she had to act meaner than she was to rebuff those who thought they saw an opening, which was annoying—to have to play the bitch.

She was a bottle blonde but dark at the roots now. She knew she was pretty—not Hollywood pretty, but New York pretty, a shade too bony in the shoulders and hips for waist trainers and Brazilian butt lifts.

Fuck it. “You look French,” the men in New York had said to her. “You look like a Parisian teenager.” Sometimes she wore a scarf over her throat to hide the scar on her neck, not because she thought the scar was ugly, but because it was hers, like a private part, and men liked to point and say, “You have a scar,” as though she didn’t know that. As though she’d never even noticed the scar before. As if a scar could appear out of nowhere. As if the scratch hadn’t even hurt. She’d been struck by a ricochet she’d caught the first time her father had taken her to a shooting range, when some idiot with a handgun shot a metal post. She clutched her bleeding windpipe while troglodytes with American flag hats and gun shirts stared blankly, not even half a hero in the bunch.

It was one of the most terrifying experiences of her life up to that point. While the injury was utterly superficial, superficiality was one of the defining characteristics of preteens on the West Side. So, no, she didn’t want to hear about it from losers in New York; as if men in Manhattan could come up with anything original to say to anyone, nonetheless to a genius.

From professors to brokers to meatheads in the West Village, shitheads in the Meatpacking District, they said the corniest lines. “Are you a student? What’s your major? What are you into? You look like that girl from Inglourious Basterds.” From Washington Square Park to the Bowery. SoHo. Chinatown. The city had become a bad trip, one long night of partying that resulted in eyes crusted over with sleep and mascara, pockets full of snotted cocktail napkins from bars she couldn’t remember going to, names and numbers scrawled in ballpoint pen—“Lovely to meet you.” “I’m staying at the Standard. 317.” “To my little French coquette.” And her mind had slid out from underneath her. She’d failed her classes, all but the easiest one: it was an English course taught by Professor Krolik.

Susie was hungry, wondered if she needed another pill, then smelled the meat next door, and glanced at her body stretched below, almost transparent but leaden, like tanned solid glass. Peeking from the cups of Mom’s Eres swimwear, she could say she didn’t like her upward-turned breasts, nipples the color of pink carnations, the cheapest flowers, but she loved all flowers. She resented her body, like a friend she reluctantly took around, who solicited unwanted attention and was probably likewise annoyed with Susie for her lack of passion. She appeared like glass, transparent, fragile, invisible. She felt like lead at the deep end of the swimming pool.

Lying out by the water in the late sun, she was hoping to feel something special unfurling and curling around her finger, a new unseen mystical feeling beckoned like a gift from the chemical romance she could purchase in pill form and be close to, as it took this and gave that in exchange for her time, money, and selfhood. Living at Mommy and Daddy’s was a mirror of self-hatred. She was a failed attempt at form at nineteen. An outline. A blob. But she took comfort in being blobby until the wind blew the blob into worse memories.

Finding her NYU roommate dead on their gray dorm room carpet hadn’t helped her state of mind, with campus police swarming, a body bag, all of the questions. The roommate had OD’d while on prescription drugs—downers and OTC antihistamines; she was allergic to the city dust, or she had a heart condition—Susie never knew the whole story. There were inconsistencies, an investigation. The pills were never found. The girl’s dark hair had been cut off in uneven hunks.

Susie had palmed the pills before campus security could get to them. Maybe she’d grabbed them to protect her roommate’s privacy, although the pills showed up on the toxicology report. Maybe it was a proprietary sense of guilt, since Susie’s own father was in the business of pain management. Maybe it was her karma. Or fate. Maybe she was just doing what her mother had done before her, reaching for pills, leaning into a void. Susie checked into The Carlyle Hotel, where she ordered truffle-dusted French fries and bottles of Veuve Clicquot, took the girl’s Oxy, kept the TV on mute, hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign, skipped the funeral.

Susie thought of her old friend Faia after her roommate’s death. Faia had stalked Susie for a time after high school, the summer before heading off to their respective colleges. Had Faia been watching her in New York? Hanging around Third North? Or the Village East while Susie caught the opening credits of an afternoon matinee before she passed out, drooling on her Moschino hoodie? No. Faia was back in Palo Alto, learning to be a robot. Susie hadn’t even known her roommate was using Oxy.

She had turned her cell phone off, let her parents flip out with worry from across the country. She stared at the hotel walls remembering colors, no, not colors, but sensations, memories of an LA childhood that could make her sob, but she didn’t sob—the downers. The times.

She felt like she had spiritually nuked herself now. An amoeba, by the water’s edge. That’s basically what one candidate was offering, the happy end of all compromise. Fascistic annihilation of all doubt and remorse. Susie took her annihilation in pill form.

In New York, the art students Susie knew were either wealthy or hustling to strike it rich, or else they were screaming and throwing their shit against a wall, passing it off as performance art. If anyone was looking, it was only to dismiss them as anonymous rats who wouldn’t be any competition. They wouldn’t be a target either, though. Fucking rats, they’d outlive us all. They had no ego, running the rails in ratty fur coats. The next day they were gone.

When she was accepted to NYU, her parents ordered her a cake with a mock copy of The New Yorker on it displaying Susie’s face. God, it was humiliating. The magazine was a pitiful cunt rag of stupid snippets in response to lame art, tidbits of idiocy from people whose opinions were as tight-assed as their screwed-up faces. New Yorkers were mostly stupid and pretentious, practically glued to the guardrail of commercial groupthink and liberal brainwashing. In LA at least people didn’t dare expose themselves. They smiled and ate the blinis and risked nothing, waiting to be entertained, talking about who they knew or what they’d seen or who they collected.

Upstairs, her mother clicked around on high heels and came down in a gust of perfume meant for a younger woman that smelled like a million flowers mixed with what—battery acid? Exhaust off the 101? Dior or Nina Ricci. Both trash. Her mother’s Botox and fillers and facelifts. Her constantly rotating wardrobe of size six, thousand-dollar shift dresses. Her taut, freckled arms. Her mother whooshing in and out of wherever. She was like that flower whose name Susie couldn’t remember—a vase of whatevers on the mahogany table in the foyer that the housekeeper kept replacing and replacing the minute they started to wither. An obligatory beauty. What were the flowers on the kitchen island called? She had painted them in elementary school. Bleeding hearts? No. Never in this house.

“I’m off,” she’d say now, jangling her keys, leaving Susie to pant by the pool. No conversation. No air kiss. Just the lingering sting of mom’s perfume, which was, Susie knew, distilled from a flower called Disappointment. She remembered her father from when she was a kid, and the Russian nanny who cared for her and had driven her back and forth to Marlborough. All her friends went there. She remembered the doodles she drew on the knees of her jeans. The housekeeper always scrubbed them out, erasing her art. The giant Flemish rabbit in the laundry room, the old pool, and the summer light on the pool—its shallow shimmer, the kind that doesn’t settle, just keeps flickering, each ripple catching the light, holding it for a split second before it slides away, indifferently, into the next moment, and the next. The new pool was shaped like a kidney. Was Oxy bad for your kidneys? She could find out but she didn’t care.