He let his head droop. The weight of his gin-swollen brain too much for his aching neck.
Curtis had dedicated the last five years to researching and writing a historical novel about a family of Ethiopian Jews who came to New York City in the late 1940s. It wasn’t your typical assimilation story; this family claimed they were the direct descendants of Moses, and Curtis’s book had a kind of Jewish-immigrant magic-realist quality that the professor in his MFA program said reminded him of Bernard Malamud. And yet, despite his agent’s best efforts, nobody was interested in publishing lengthy Malamudesque novels. They peppered him with compliments. His writing was “luminous” and “lyrical” and had “velocity” and everyone who passed was “positive they were making a big mistake.” One editor made an offer, but only if Curtis was willing to make the family Haitian and cut out all the “mystical Jewish stuff.” He was praised and admired by the publishing elite, but no one would take a chance on him. Not even the hip, indie publishers who were sprouting up all over the country. He was literally typing an email, asking his parents for a loan, when Amy called with the offer to ghostwrite a novel for a reality TV star.
The fact that this book was now on the bestseller list made Curtis want to kill something. Normally he was the kind of guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but today he craved the crunchy satisfaction of crushing something small and nonhuman under his shoe, like, for example, a cockroach. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he could fuck up a roach. But he didn’t see a bug on the train and there was no detectable insect life on the platform when he got off the G train at Flushing Ave.
When he emerged from the station Curtis saw a paper coffee cup from a Greek diner lying on the street. He gave it a kick and it skittered across the sidewalk and bounced against a wall. He walked up to it and gave it a good stomp. That felt good. Curtis sighed with pleasure. It felt so good he stomped it again, harder. And then he did it again, putting all his weight into it, adding a shouted expletive, because the cup wasn’t completely flattened. That felt even better and suddenly he was jumping up and down on it, shouting at the top of his drunken lungs as he crushed the living shit out of that fucking paper cup.
3
Seattle
A cab dropped Sepp back at his hotel, a cozy boutique-style hotel at the bottom of a steep hill in the Pike Place Market. He’d spent more than three hours signing books, chatting with fans, and posing for pictures with his T-shirt pulled up around his neck.
He’d never done a book signing before. This was just the first stop on his seventeen-city, thirty-five-day North American tour, and he was already beat. Not that he would complain; he really liked meeting his fans. It was so much more awesome than being at some TV premiere with a bunch of suits or some VIP after-party with actors and their entourages. At the bookstore he got to get face-to-face with real people and hear how much they liked him. And they really liked him. They thought he was cooler than shit. They said so.
He didn’t go to his room to change clothes. He went straight to the fitness center in the hotel. It turned out to be a tiny gym, just a treadmill, a stationary bike, a bench, and some free weights. It was after ten and he didn’t expect to see anyone else in the gym, so he shrugged off his shirt for like the nine thousandth time that day and stripped out of his pants. It didn’t bother him to work out in his boxer briefs. They don’t really look like underwear.
He found a yoga mat, rolled it out, and began doing a series of abdominal exercises that had been designed by his personal trainer to keep him looking abtastic while on the road.
Sepp had finished his ab work and was just starting to do some bench presses when he heard the door to the gym swing open. He looked up from the bench and saw someone who looked kinda familiar enter the room. Sepp gave her a friendly nod.
Madison grinned and walked toward him. “Remember me? You wrote your name on my boob.”
Sepp remembered. “That’s kinda hard to forget.”
She stood there staring at him. Sepp wondered if she was angry about it.
“You’re not mad are you? It’ll wash off.”
Madison began unbuttoning her shirt. “It was my idea.” She took her flannel shirt off and hung it on a treadmill.
“Want me to spot you?”
Sepp shrugged. “Sure.”
He positioned himself on the bench, making sure that the bar was exactly right. He turned to see if she was ready and saw that she’d removed her camisole and bra and was now topless, his autograph clearly visible. Then he noticed she’d taken off her pants too. She walked over to the bench and straddled him, standing over his rippling torso. It wasn’t really the correct way to spot someone, but he wasn’t lifting that much.
It occurred to Sepp that her finding him in the hotel gym wasn’t an accident. “How did you know I was staying here?”
“I’ve got a friend who works here.”
Sepp nodded and lifted the bar with a sharp exhale. He was only lifting one hundred ten pounds, but he was going for twenty-five reps. Madison counted as he pressed. Sepp didn’t even try not to stare at her breasts. I mean, really, what’s the point of not looking? It helped his workout, that was for sure; he didn’t even think about it and the reps flew by. Madison grabbed the bar at twenty-five and helped him rack the weight. Not that he needed any help. He could’ve done forty or fifty reps. Sepp wondered if he should always work out with a topless trainer. Maybe that could be like some kind of cool new business. Topless gyms. Do they have those?
“Wow. You’re really strong.”
Sepp lay on the bench and looked up at her.
“This is more for endurance. You know? I’m not trying to bulk up.”
Madison nodded. “I don’t like bulky guys.”
She grabbed a towel and began wiping the sweat off his face, moving the towel down to his rippling abs.
“Wow. These are hard as rocks.”
“Yeah. Well. I work ’em a lot.”
She worked the towel down to his crotch and began massaging his penis. “What else is hard down here?”
Sepp squirmed, but she sat down on his stomach, pinning him to the bench while she reached behind her, no longer using the towel, and fished his cock out of his underwear.
Sepp cleared his throat. “I don’t think this is a good time.”
“It’ll be a good time, don’t worry about that.”
“What if someone comes in?”
Madison made a pouty face that Sepp knew girls thought was sexy.
“Are you nervous? Need a little help?”
She stood up and turned around, bending forward so that she could put his cock in her mouth. Sepp looked at her ass as it moved to the rhythm of her sucking.
“I’m sorry. You’re a really hot girl but I’ve been traveling a lot and I’m, like, really, really totally tired.”
Sepp hated the way he sounded. But the truth would’ve been too weird. The truth was that he hadn’t been able to get it up since Roxy had dumped him and it’s not like he hadn’t tried. He’d been with four or five other women since Roxy but every time, he got nothing. No matter what they’d done or how they’d tried or what dirty words they’d said or sexy outfits they’d worn or kinky toys they’d used, it always ended in failure. His cock wouldn’t rise. At best he’d get a kind of squishy half-masted thing. It was totally humiliating. Sepp had been to see a doctor but there was nothing wrong with him physically; the fact that most days he woke up with morning wood that felt like ten inches of rebar proved that. The problem was in his head. The problem was Roxy. Roxy was in his head.
Madison stopped and sat up. She flicked her head and her hair flew out of her face. “It’s okay. It happens.”
He could tell from the sound of her voice that it was not okay and that it didn’t really ever happen to her and she really hadn’t been expecting it to happen right now, not with him.
“I really do think you’re hot. Super hot. It’s just, you know, we’re in a public place and all.”
“Sorry
if I bothered you.”
She grabbed her clothes and scurried out of the gym.
4
San Francisco
Harriet felt her hand tremble. She put down her mug of tea—an Earl Grey from England with real bergamot in it—and steadied herself.
She was sitting in her reading chair, a knockoff of an Eames lounger, listening to National Public Radio’s Bookish. Taped in Seattle and hosted by renowned literary critic Titus Goldberger, Bookish was the only nationally syndicated program devoted exclusively to literature and literary culture. If you asked Harriet, Goldberger was more influential than all the top critics at the London Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and even the Los Angeles Review of Books put together. He operated on the cutting edge, discoursing on authors like Roberto Bolaño, Steve Erickson, John Banville, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Don DeLillo, and he didn’t just review books or interview authors, he “engaged with the text” and had the ability to “limn psychological truth” from the most impenetrable subtext. He often referred to writers he admired as “saviors of the sentence” and was quick to denounce writing that was not up to his standards with his catch phrase “utterly pedestrian.” While Harriet wished that Bookish had more female writers on the program, she couldn’t argue with the capacious intellect of the host. It was her favorite show and she would often download podcasts of the interviews and listen to them over and over.
But today something unusual was happening. Today a reality TV star named Sepp something-or-other was the guest on Bookish. Harriet didn’t own a television—why would she?—but even she knew, in a vague pop-culture-trivia way, who Sepp was. His passionate romance with another reality star and their subsequent breakup had dominated the media when it happened. You couldn’t go out of your house, you couldn’t go online, without hearing about them. Harriet felt that these kinds of people, the Real Housewives and Kardashians of the world, were responsible for the dumbing down of American culture and should be, well . . . exterminated is probably too strong a word, but they should be marginalized in some way.
Harriet had lately become obsessed with the downward spiral of intelligent discourse and literary culture. Ideas and original thought were now taking a backseat to some celebrity’s “baby bump.” The world was drowning in drivel. She liked that word, “drivel.” It was from dreflian, an Old English word meaning to “dribble or run from the nose.” That pretty much summed up celebrity culture: a constant drip of snot.
She’d been writing about this a lot lately in various columns and reviews. She was a frequent contributor to literary websites like The Rumpus and The Millions, and was a freelance book critic and essayist working on assignment for a number of newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and on occasion The New York Times Book Review. She was, essentially, a brain-for-hire and somehow—with the help of the occasional job teaching private writing workshops—managed to piece together enough money to survive on. To cap off all that, she also had her own blog, The Fatal Influence, and tried to tweet as many times a day as possible.
In the elite community of literary critics and commentators —full disclosure, they were all aspiring authors—Harriet was a rising star. Like Titus Goldberger, Harriet admired books of quality and seriousness, and authors who shared her devotion to what she liked to call “the higher mind.” She wasn’t afraid to slam a book that didn’t rise to this level—and, honestly, that meant most of the books currently being published; she wasn’t a chickenshit or a PR fluff service like some reviewers. She told it like it was, called out the pretenders, and, well, if it destroyed a young novelist’s career, then maybe she was just doing the world a favor by getting them to quit writing and start taking their day job seriously. In the book world she attracted attention for her outspokenness, high standards, and intellectual rigor, and occasionally she was asked to be on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air.
Of course not everyone loved her reviews or her blog. She had rivals; one of them—a complete asshole and pothead author of several collections of “humorous” essays—mocked her in print and referred to her blog as “The Influential Flatulence.” But she’d been published—two years ago a novel she’d written was put out by the University of Central South Dakota Press. It had only sold three hundred and twelve copies, but it was a start.
She ran a hand through her hair, pulling a longish strand behind her ear, and pushed her chunky eyeglasses up so they rested on the bridge of her nose. She leaned in toward the radio. She didn’t want to miss a word. Titus Goldberger wasn’t the kind of person to suffer fools and Harriet couldn’t wait to see what he would do to this unsuspecting doofus. She imagined Goldberger leading him down a path, giving him just enough rope to ensnare himself on the bough of his own stupidity. Then Goldberger would mercilessly flay him.
Apparently the reality star had written a novel, which was unusual for a television personality. Don’t they usually write memoirs or guides for picking up women? Harriet hoped that Goldberger would use this opportunity to rail against the dimming of American culture. That’s what she would’ve done.
But today Goldberger—who usually seemed so aloof and erudite—was positively gushing.
“When I think of debut novels, and I’ve read many, many fine books by preternaturally talented young tyros, but when I read them, I rarely find language worth relishing. Sure, there is a captivating raw quality, a brutality of freshness if you will, to the wordplay; but in your book, Totally Reality, I have to admit that I found myself in awe of the maturity of voice and the perfect precision of the narrative.”
There was a long pause and then Harriet heard the author speak.
“Awesome.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say. You see. You have a knack, an incisive, pithy quality. You cut to the heart with the perfect word, the mot juste. I see that over and over in your book.”
“Yeah. I’m like, you know, just, let’s get to it.”
Harriet thought the author sounded like a moron and she kept waiting, hoping, for Titus Goldberger to spring the trap and take him down. How could a reality television star write a book? Had he even written it? Don’t celebrities use ghostwriters?
But Goldberger didn’t spring the trap.
“In your other career, your television career, you’re well known for having an impeccable physique, a torso, if I’m not mistaken, that could’ve been crafted by Michelangelo, it is so similar in appearance to his statue of David.”
“I work out a lot. If that’s what you’re asking.”
“What I’d like to do, and I apologize to my audience because there is no picture in radio, only the aural world, but what I’d like to do is, if you’re willing to indulge me, is to see this body, this majestic abdomen, in the flesh.”
“You want me to take my shirt off?”
“Is that asking too much? Have I crossed a line of propriety?”
And that’s when Harriet’s hand began to twitch.
5
Brooklyn
Curtis woke up to the sound of hammering coming from the kitchen. It wasn’t loud, not like a hammer hitting a nail. It was more of the persistent and highly annoying tap tap tap of careful carpentry. Curtis took a quick inventory of his body; the tap tap tapping wasn’t helping the pounding headache that was reverberating through his cranium, and there was a taste in his mouth that reminded him of licking nine-volt batteries when he was a kid. He blinked and the sound of his eyes flapping caused a stabbing pain in his head to ping from front to back and awaken an unpleasant sensation in his stomach. Curtis couldn’t tell if he needed to vomit or take a dump or both, so he just lay there, hoping the sensations would subside. He shifted in bed and felt a sharp twinge in his right ankle, like it had been dislocated or just wasn’t hooked on to his leg properly.
Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.
Curtis inhaled and, using every single ounce of strength he coul
d muster, pulled himself to a sitting position. The sensation of being upright caused him to gasp and choke back a rush of hot bile rising in his throat. It was acrid and sudden and tasted distinctly of olives. He waited for his guts to settle.
Curtis put on his glasses and looked at his foot. It was slightly swollen, nothing too serious, and there was a ring of soft purple bruises caressing the bones around his ankle.
Testing his ability to put weight on his foot, he stood tentatively, and noticed the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times with Sepp Gregory’s moronic face staring back at him. It was the author photo that went with the review. It was above the fucking fold. The photograph itself was beautiful, unmistakably Marion Ettlinger’s work, and it sent a toxic spasm through Curtis’s body. Why would the most famous literary portrait photographer in America take a picture of Sepp Gregory? Wasn’t that some kind of betrayal?
Curtis read the first line of the review and realized he’d read it last night. Other bits and pieces of the previous night began to fall into place. The martinis. The rave reviews flooding in from every corner of the country. The celebratory champagne. The unmistakable feeling that he was doomed.
A bleary memory emerged from his gin-shriveled hippocampus, a warning buzz that he’d done something incredibly stupid. He’d made a pass at his agent. He was sure of it. A drunken lunge of parted lips and slobbery tongue. She’d parried it skillfully enough; he remembered the powdery taste of the makeup on her cheek. But had he really copped a feel as they’d hugged good night? Yes, he realized. Yes, he had.
Raw: A Love Story Page 2
