Los Angeles-based novelist Bret Easton Ellis threw a drive-by grenade at New York City while promoting his latest disgusting — oops, “disturbing” — book, “The Shards,” here this month.
“How does anyone live here? How in the f–k does anyone live here?” the author told Vanity Fair, which has yet to meet a Left-Coast arts-world “icon” it doesn’t love.
What set poor Ellis off was that eternal scourge of Big Apple life: He had to wait for his luggage at the airport.
That ordeal, mind you, came on the heels of another urban nightmare: He arrived “during this horrible storm.”
LA’s record 8.95 inches of January rain must have just missed his place on Doheny Drive.
Ellis, who lived in NYC for two decades as part of the Jay McInerney-Tama Janowitz literary “Brat Pack,” ignored the cardinal rule of New York bitching.
We who live and work here are entitled to trash it. It’s our sacred right to bemoan rising crime, awful schools and the stink of pot on every corner.
But outsiders who trash-talk us should not only be “roped and bound” like a serial killer’s victims in “The Shards,” but ball-gagged to boot. Especially hypocrites like Ellis who milked the city for every dime with sex- and drug-filled books that he wrote here — and then returned to LA when he decided that, for all the jolly nocturnal thrills to be had, his life sucked.
Ellis blew out in 2004, but claims he had a ball living in Gotham. The ’90s were “a glorious time to be in New York,” he recalled to VF. “I talk to a lot of people who just simply agree — to be youngish and living in New York during that period, and to be involved in the magazine world, the glorious magazine world.”
Translation: The thankfully departed world of depraved fashion photographers, heroin-addicted models and debaucheries toned down for popular taste on Page Six.
Ellis clearly misses the nights when he and he and his pals did “pretty much every drug. But mainly college-educated, white people drugs. Coke. Coke and wine, basically,” as he once told The Guardian.
What fun it was, cruising by limo to the Odeon, snorting and sipping the white folks’ way, while thousands of non-white New Yorkers were dying from the crack plague!
This is the guy to lecture us about New York today?
Ellis said he found today’s city “unrecognizable.” Thank God. The New York of 1991, when “American Psycho” came out, saw 2,250 homicides. Last year there were 438.
On a 2016 visit here, he said, Ellis was horrified that East 13th Street between Third and Fourth avenues had changed so much. He recounted telling his cab driver, “You’re in the wrong area.” Yup, new condos and bistros have nothing on the East Village squalor that was the setting for “Taxi Driver.”
Ellis’s best-known work, “American Psycho,” was a grotesque stew of hard-core porn and torture porn masquerading as satire. (Which it actually became in the 2000 movie adaptation, with Christian Bale as mass-murdering Wall Street yuppie Patrick Bateman.) Decades before woke-era cancellation, appalled Simon & Schuster scratched the book’s publication, forcing Ellis to scramble for a different house to release it in paperback.
“American Psycho” had one small thing to recommend it. The tale foresaw our city’s culinary degeneration in restaurant dishes such as soft shell crabs with grape jelly (which hardly sounds extreme today).
But eat this, Bret: Too many of us love New York to put up with your stink. Stay in LA where the weather’s just fine.
