I’m having drinks with Charles Murphy at Rusty’s to fortify myself before making an appearance at Evelyn’s Christmas party. I’m wearing a four-button double-breasted wool and silk suit, a cotton shirt with a button-down collar by Valentino Couture, a patterned silk tie by Armani and cap-toed leather slip-ons by Allen-Edmonds. Murphy is wearing a six-button double-breasted wool gabardine suit by Courrèges, a striped cotton shirt with a tab collar and a foulard-patterned silk-crepe tie, both by Hugo Boss. He’s on a tirade about the Japanese—“They’ve bought the Empire State Building and Nell’s. Nell’s, can you believe it, Bateman?” he exclaims over his second Absolut on the rocks—and it moves something in me, it sets something off, and after leaving Rusty’s, while wandering around the Upper West Side, I find myself crouched in the doorway of what used to be Carly Simon’s, a very hot J. Akail restaurant that closed last fall, and leaping out at a passing Japanese delivery boy, I knock him off his bicycle and drag him into the doorway, his legs tangled somehow in the Schwinn he was riding which works to my advantage since when I slit his throat—easily, effortlessly—the spasmodic kicking that usually accompanies this routine is blocked by the bike, which he still manages to lift five, six times while he’s choking on his own hot blood. I open the cartons of Japanese food and dump their contents over him, but to my surprise instead of sushi and teriyaki and hand rolls and soba noodles, chicken with cashew nuts falls all over his gasping bloodied face and beef chow mein and shrimp fried rice and moo shu pork splatter onto his heaving chest, and this irritating setback—accidentally killing the wrong type of Asian—moves me to check where this order was going—Sally Rubinstein—and with my Mont Blanc pen to write I’m gonna get you too … bitch on the back of it, then place the order over the dead kid’s face and shrug apologetically, mumbling “Uh, sorry” and recall that The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Teenage Girls Who Trade Sex for Crack. I spent two hours at the gym today and can now complete two hundred abdominal crunches in less than three minutes. Near Evelyn’s brownstone I hand a freezing bum one of the fortune cookies I took from the delivery boy and he stuffs it, fortune and all, into his mouth, nodding thanks. “Fucking slob,” I mutter loud enough for him to hear. As I turn the corner and head for Evelyn’s, I notice the police lines are still up around the brownstone where her neighbor Victoria Bell was decapitated. Four limousines are parked in front, one still running.

- American Psycho, Christmas Party