Ray LeMoine

Bret Easton Ellis is renting his condo in the American Felt Building. For $5,000 a month, any ol’ chap can live in the loft that spawned Patrick Bateman, the banker/serial-killer protagonist of “American Psycho,” a Wall Street satire that many never saw as a joke, despite all the mentions of Genesis, moisturizing, sit-ups and Vidal Sassoon.

Mr. Ellis announced the rental of apartment 2D, purchased in the ’80s, to his nearly 300,000 followers on Twitter.

But don’t get too excited: though his bed remains, the writer himself hasn’t lived at 114 East 13th Street for six years. Posters and first editions of his books decorated the walls when it was first rented out, but they’ve since been moved, according to Miles Chapin, who showed the loft over the weekend.

Ray LeMoine Imperial bedroom.

The broker at Warburg Realty didn’t expect the site of B.E.E.’s famous Christmas parties to fetch any more than any other unit in the building. “The market is ruthless that way,” he said. “You’re not going to be able to get more for a name rental.” In fact, when The Local stopped by the open house Friday evening, it was sparsely attended. Mr. Chapin said that eight people had inquired about the rental – some of them, he admitted, were presumably voyeurs such as ourselves – and no one showed at the open house on Saturday. As of this morning, the 950-square-foot space with terrace was still available.

On Friday, Mr. Chapin tried to sprinkle some of B.E.E.’s pixie dust on The Local as he showed off white walls, blonde wood trim, and arched ceilings. “He wrote ‘American Psycho’ at the desk here,” informed the broker.

Ray LeMoine

During his years in the loft, Mr. Ellis also wrote the 1999 novel “Glamorama,” about a model, club promoter, and son of a senator who accidentally becomes an international terrorist while being followed by a reality TV crew. Though pre-Gawker, the story is told in a bloggy voice: lists, long sentences, pointless rambles. Critics like Michiko Kakutani of The Times hated it: “This glutinous hodgepodge of a book takes all the most glaring flaws of Mr. Ellis’s recent work – compulsive name-dropping, an obsession with designer clothing, a fascination with gratuitous, gruesome violence and a cast of interchangeable fatuous people – and tries to pass them off as a novel,” she wrote.

Read today, the work seems so timely it’s not surprising that people didn’t get the humor 13 years ago. In fact it may be one of the most underrated skewerings of New York’s bold-face inanity.

In another of Mr. Ellis’s novels, “Lunar Park,” there’s a party scene at the 13th Street loft. After a movie premier at nearby nightclub Spa “the cast members and their various agents and PR reps and DJs and other notable members of young Hollywood boogied until the building’s superintendent arrived the following morning and demanded I kick everyone out, even though, high and reeking of vodka and base, I tried bribing him with a roll of hundreds.” The story continues:

After all that, I lay alone in bed for the next seven days, watching porn DVDs with the sound off and snorting maybe 40 bags of heroin, a blue plastic bucket that I vomited into continually by my side, and telling myself that the lack of respect from the critical community was what hurt so much and why I had to drug myself away from the pain.

Ray LeMoine

Is living in a condo where that scene took place worth $5,000 a month? Before you answer, consider that the loft doesn’t contain any relics aside from a framed photo of the original cast of “West Wing.”And Spa has long since closed. It’s being replaced by a Hyatt hotel.

Mr. Ellis now lives in Los Angeles, but he isn’t giving up the place where he claimed he once almost had “a coked-up threesome with Rielle Hunter” anytime soon.

“He doesn’t want to sell it,” said Mr. Chapin. “It’s his connection with New York.”