ELMO KEEP

I used to spend an inordinate amount of time in my father’s study, as a child. Because it was the 80s, everything in it was either metallic and black, or white, or made of glass. Everything inside there was perfectly ordered, and more so it was quiet; a sharp, cool riposte to the rest of the house which was shambolic and dark and things always seemed to be clattering somewhere, or tripping you over. It was not like that in my father’s study, where during the day the sunlight came in filtered through the blinds which were drawn, those white aluminium venetian blinds people used to be crazy for which made such a vicious, high-pitched sound when pulled by the rip chord. The room smelled of two things; stale cigarettes, and leather. The leather of his chair which swamped me when I sat in it; the leather of his heavy appointment book with the year embossed in gold on the front, the thick red ribbon to bookmark the days sticking out the bottom. The leather of his briefcase, which was always locked, its combination of numbers a mystery to me (I learned later that it was just three zeroes which he’d never bothered to reset).

I would go in there in the evenings when my mother was downstairs, occupied, and my father was at the pub down the road, and I would sit in the still of that room, on the white carpeted floor under my father’s desk, and read.

In the summer of 1991, I was ten, and my father had bought a copy of American Psycho. He sat one Saturday afternoon in the living room in his armchair, reading it. I remember this extremely vividly for two reasons: one was that I was both fascinated and terrified by the cover art, which depicted what looked like a man wearing a mask made of flesh; and the other was a typically understated warning from my father, who looked at me over his glasses and the top of the book at once, saying,

“You can never, ever, read this book, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you promise?”

“Okay. But why?”

“Because it’s definitely not suitable. For anyone.”

He said this as he turned back to the pages.

So this was a bind: I wanted to do what my father told me, but more than that I wanted to read American Psycho.

In Australia, American Psycho was “Category 1 Restricted” and it still comes in shrink-wrap today. You have to be over eighteen to buy it. The last book our Government had restricted the selling of was Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. So when this happened with American Psycho, it was a big deal. Everyone was talking about it. Opinion pages burned with it. People on television warned against it. Older kids at my school reckoned they’d read parts of it, or all of it, or at least had heard about the very worst passages (the rat in the plastic container scene got a lot of milage being retold), but no copy of it ever materialised in anyone’s hands. There was a copy at my house! This naturally only fuelled the feelings of intense curiosity/repulsion I had for the book — which I’d seen my father place on the uppermost shelf in his study, a bookshelf which towered over his desk, the top of which was made of glass. My father knew I liked to spend time in his room in the house, so he put the things he really didn’t want me to get at on that shelf; cigarettes, his lighter, magazines that weren’t “suitable”. If I’d stood on the glass desk top, I might have been able to reach the top shelf, but I never dared try it. Several experiments I’d undertaken leaning my full weight on my hands on the glass while standing on the chair pulled up to the desk, lead to me believe that it would not withstand me standing on it. I was less concerned with falling through a pane of glass, than incurring my father’s wrath and never being allowed in the study again.

Eventually my obsession with reading the book waned, until months later when in some momentary lapse, my father had left it on his desk within my reach. “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE”, it famously begins, “is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.” WYNN? Les Miserables? Be My Baby? None meant anything to me. I was equally disappointed and relieved to have not read a scene of unimaginable horror (the rat!), still I skipped ahead to a random page, hoping, and read what was one of countless passages of mundane description; it could have been about which tie knot was less bulky than a Windsor, or how to wear a pocket square. Or a monologue about watermarked business cards or a treatise on Huey Lewis and the News, or an argument about which was the best restaurant table in Manhattan. Whatever it was I was definitely not scandalised, carefully returned the book exactly as it was on the desk, and didn’t think about it again for about fifteen years.

I have read every Bret Easton Ellis novel except American Psycho, which I could never finish. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. I just can’t cope with the violence, even when I can read something like Blood Meridian, twice. When my father died I got all his books, but the copy of American Psycho was not among them. Just lots of really weird esoteric stuff, like Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches, The Philosophy Gym, loads of John Updike and Martin Amis, which all just makes me think of him whenever I read Bret Easton Ellis and wonder, Who were you?

Also published here.