Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction Read Online Free PDF Page B

sing on top of pianos while we sipped Tanqueray and tonics. The drag queens loved us, all the gay boys loved us, because we were a couple of cute girls who wanted to have fun. I loved gay men, and I still do.
    Kara and I had a friend who lived in Emerald Bay, which was our way of getting into the parties there. And they were the best parties. Our high school girlfriends were so jealous; if you had a house there, you were golden. They were doubly impressed when my newly acquired boyfriend picked me up from school in his Porsche.
    Arthur Ash Wilder, III, Esq. (a.k.a. Tre) was only 5'11", but he had blond hair, beautiful blue-green eyes, and was he built. A six-pack, perfect body weight; you could crack an egg on his butt.
    Kara and I had sneaked into this Newport Beach party. We were fifteen years old, but we were all dressed up and could have passed for twenty. I’d recently jumped up in size and filled out a bit, and now grown men wanted to meet me. It was a totally weird experience. I had been a fourth son, a tomboy. Three brothers had treated me like a fellow member of the Lost Boys from the minute I was born, and then one of them died and the others were so messed up by that that they didn’t pay me any attention. Add to that the fact that my dad was gone all the time and that when he was home he was too busy fighting with my mom to pay his daughter a compliment. And Tre picked up on that. He was a real sweet talker, and I fell for him hook, line, and sinker. I thought, “This guy is serious.” He was a lawyer, he was in tip-top shape, and he said that he wanted to see the world and conquer it at the same time, which was all very intriguing to me. It didn’t occur to me that a thirty-year-old lawyer should know better than to sleep with a fifteen-year-old high school student. We’d go out and I’d drink Dom Perignon and Cristal; he’d drink single malt scotch whiskey with his friends. I’d always thought of myself as an older person trapped in a younger person’s body, and here I was, hanging out with grown-ups. Cocaine was everywhere; it was the older person’s drug. The first time I saw it was in a bathroom, thousands of dollars worth of powder laid out on a mirror. I tried it once and it was okay, but I didn’t feel that I needed it. I was happy with champagne; I was having a good time. And besides, I’d learned a little something about drugs since moving to Laguna Beach.

    Before I met Tre I’d dated a football player named Ricky. His parents went on vacations all the time, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the empty house was instantly filled with partying teenagers. I went into the kitchen and saw a blender with a vanilla milkshake in it. I thought the brown specks in it were vanilla bean; it tasted great. One of the guys on the football team came into the kitchen.
    “Hey! Who drank the shake?”
    “I did. Sorry, I didn’t know it was yours.”
    “You drank the whole thing?”
    “Yeah, I’m sorry.”
    “You are so fucked! Ricky! Check this out!”
    It turned out the brown specks were mushrooms, the hallucinogenic type. Suddenly I didn’t feel so good. The walls were moving like waves, and the floor was falling out from under my feet. I ran to the living room so I could stand on the sofa. I looked around, and all of the lamps and lights in the house had gargoyles coming out of them. It was like that evil carnival in Ray Bradbury’s book Something Wicked This Way Comes .
    This “high” lasted the entire day and night, and my boyfriend babysat me through the whole thing. The one time he left me by myself, to go to the bathroom, I stripped off my clothes and climbed up onto the roof. He didn’t leave my side after that. It was the pits, and after that hellish experience I decided to stick to champagne.

    Sometimes Tre would pick me up at lunchtime, take me home for a quickie, then drop me back at school. He’d tell his secretary he was out playing golf. To say that the Tre situation didn’t go