B.E.E & Me: A True Story behind Vernon Downs

6 version of Less Than Zero premiered. The knowledge that Ellis had recently graduated from Bennington College in Vermont layered Rules, a multiply narrated tale set at Camden College (a thinly fictionalized Bennington), with potential autobiography. I imagined Ellis revolving in the same world as Lauren and Paul and Sean, the myth about what it must be like to attend Bennington growing large in my mind. I imagined Dressed To Get Screwed Parties spilling out of the common rooms of the clapboard dorms lining both sides of the common lawn, ending in free-for-alls at the End of the World; dorms littered with debris from the last, great can’t-miss party; classmates who lived as if they were rockstars, always on tour. The lack of real biographical material overwhelmed my common sense about reading too much into an author’s work. Plus, if This Side of Paradise was based on Fitzgerald’s experiences at Princeton, who was to say Rules wasn’t informed by Ellis’s experiences at Bennington?

Reading Ellis inspired my latent creative side, and I began taking notes for a novel loosely based on my own experience and my misunderstanding of Jay Gatsby as a sympathetic character to be worshipped and emulated. The main character would be a sensitive, overly romantic narrator beaten up by a romance that was aborted for reasons unknown to him. I managed a first draft titled The Vegetable King—a title derived from two occurrences in my life at that point: (1) I’d just seen the movie The Fisher King for a discount price at the college cinema at Arizona State University, where I’d enrolled, and fell under its spell and (2) I’d just read about how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable had been a colossal flop. I posited that if I could write a successful book titled The Vegetable King, it would banish this particular literary ghost forever.