Los Angeles during the "Imperial" era

“Empire” Los Angeles is the narrator’s name for the prosperous, insulated social world surrounding Buckley and the private-school scene of early-1980s Los Angeles. Its cars, parties, exclusive gatherings, and adult freedoms promise glamour and entry into a larger life; in retrospect, that same world appears as the setting that opened a door to the upheavals of fall 1981. The book’s account treats the “empire” not as a simple synonym for wealth, but as an atmosphere of privilege, performance, and unexamined risk whose apparent ease conceals vulnerability.

A World of Privilege and Access

The narrator places his teenage world alongside the adult social scene he and his friends were beginning to enter. One spring night in 1981, he rode with Thom Wright, Jeff Taylor, and Kyle Colson in Ron Levin’s convertible Rolls-Royce. Levin was an older Beverly Hills resident whom the students had met through Jeff. The teenagers had used cocaine earlier that evening, and the narrator recalls Levin placing a hand on Jeff’s thigh, which Jeff quietly pushed away. The group registered the gesture without turning it into a confrontation. Their youth, intoxication, and excitement at being admitted to an adult world mattered more to them in the moment than the boundaries or risks involved.

The episode also connects the school’s social circle to the wider world of Los Angeles money and status. Levin was later murdered by members of the Billionaire Boys Club, whose founder, Joe Hunt, the narrator encountered socially before the killing. The book is careful to distinguish that later crime from the events of fall 1981: the narrator says the two stories were not causally connected. Their juxtaposition instead places both within the same broader social landscape, where private-school familiarity, wealth, and access to adult circles could make extraordinary circumstances seem ordinary. By the time the Billionaire Boys Club story unfolded in 1983, the events that had altered the narrator’s own life had already occurred.

The school itself reproduces privilege through its routines and social geography. Buckley’s small classes and uniforms were meant to soften visible distinctions, but status remained legible in beauty, athletic ability, family wealth, and proximity to popular students. At lunch, seniors occupied the tables beneath the Pavilion, while younger grades used other designated areas; the central table, set apart with the clearest view of campus, functioned like a throne. Susan Reynolds, Debbie Schaffer, and Thom held particular social power, while the narrator’s place was partly secured by his closeness to them. The school’s promise of order therefore coexisted with a hierarchy its rules could not erase.

Cars, Appearance, and the Performance of Freedom

Cars give the young characters mobility and a visible share in the adult world. The narrator remembers driving his father’s cream-colored Mercedes-Benz 450SL after his parents left for Europe, with the top down and a mixtape playing Blondie’s “Call Me.” He recognized the image he presented—a private-school student crossing Mulholland in a convertible—and felt both self-conscious about its privilege and pleased by its glamour. That display had practical costs: taking a route chosen to show off left him caught in traffic on the way to Buckley. The scene makes the car an emblem of freedom and status, but also of a life organized around how it looks to others.

For the narrator and Ryan Vaughn, mobility has a more private meaning. As they began driving, they found themselves able to create possibilities beyond the tightly observed routines of school. Their attraction developed under the pressure of concealment: Ryan came from a conservative, religious family and planned to leave Los Angeles for college, where he could begin again. He described the discretion their relationship required as a form of subterfuge. The language of a game or spy story gave their secrecy a playful surface, but it also reflected the limits placed on what they could openly acknowledge.

Buckley’s masculine social code sharpened those limits. Thom’s popularity rested partly on his athleticism, ease with other students, and reputation as an attractive, conventionally heterosexual young man. Ryan, similarly handsome and athletic, could pass as a cool loner while keeping his private life hidden. The narrator understood their shared concealment as a response to the world around them, not merely as an individual preference. Their future plans depended on leaving school and Los Angeles before they could imagine living openly.

Social Roles and Private Conflict

The central relationships show how public roles can conceal unequal and changing attachments. Thom and Susan had been together since their sophomore year and were widely regarded as a beautiful, popular couple. The narrator was close to both and secretly loved them, though he did not tell them. By September 1981, the ease and apparent permanence of their relationship had begun to falter: Susan seemed increasingly wary and dissatisfied, and one of the two eventually ceased to be in love. The change unsettled a social arrangement that had seemed nearly fixed.

Robert Mallory’s arrival at Buckley briefly appears as a new social opportunity, but it unsettles the group as well. He arrived late in the morning, having transferred at short notice, and was directed to meet Susan, the student-body president. He had brought no lunch because he mistakenly expected a cafeteria, so the narrator offered him half a sandwich and chips. Debbie’s interest in the new student was practical and social; Susan became guarded, while Thom gave Robert attentive, friendly consideration. The narrator, however, read him as a potential rival. The episode shows how quickly a newcomer is assessed according to the group’s established roles and how much the narrator’s perspective is shaped by desire and suspicion.

That suspicion also appears in Thom’s speculation about Robert. Thom wondered whether Robert might be gay and whether that was what he was concealing about his time in an institution. This was Thom’s conjecture, not a fact established by the scene. Its importance lies in the way the school’s social assumptions turn private identity and psychological trouble into possible explanations for behavior, even when the group lacks reliable knowledge. The “empire” world offers polished roles—popular couple, athletic friend, mysterious new student—while leaving the people occupying them difficult to know.

From an Innocent Night to Retrospective Warning

The spring outing at Flipper’s became, in the narrator’s memory, one of the last apparently innocent nights before the horror of 1981. He recalls only fragments: the drive, the group’s visit to Levin’s apartment, and the friends continuing their night separately before returning to their school routines. The recollection is not innocent in any literal sense—the teenagers were underage, using drugs, and moving through an adult social environment—but its later emotional meaning comes from the contrast between their casual confidence and what the narrator knows followed. The book’s retrospective structure makes the scene a threshold: the characters do not recognize the danger or significance of the world they are entering.

The narrator explicitly associates that adult hedonistic environment with the opening through which Robert Mallory, the Trawler, and the events of that fall entered the group’s lives. He presents this as a retrospective impression, not as a simple causal explanation. The point is that the teenagers’ access to adult spaces, their appetite for glamour, and their belief that they could move freely through them made them less prepared to recognize the price of their exposure. The summer could appear placid and beautiful even though, as they later learned, the horror had already begun beyond their awareness.

The idea of “empire” therefore gathers together both spectacle and limitation. The characters possess money, cars, social access, and apparent freedom, yet their lives remain structured by class hierarchy, school status, gender expectations, and secrets. The narrator’s later account makes the glitter of the period inseparable from its blind spots: what once seemed like an effortless passage into adult life becomes, in memory, an invitation whose consequences the teenagers could not foresee.