Curtis was interrupted by an email from a real estate broker he’d contacted. He followed the links and began reading intently about various carriage houses, convertible 1 + 1s, brownstones, and whatever else the broker could find in his price range. There were listings for a brand-new boutique condo project in Vinegar Hill, and a classic co-op in Cobble Hill. There were so many fantastic choices. This was way more exciting than writing a book. Curtis closed his eyes and smiled, letting the possibilities dance in his head. He’d always wanted to be a part of the home-owning cult and now it was within his reach. He felt a gush of happiness fill his chest. Soon he’d be spending his weekends testing colors on the living room walls and complaining about the cost of curtains to his friends. This was almost as good as a MacArthur genius grant. In fact it was better. He’d earned it. Curtis felt his pants tighten.
“You must be quite a fan.”
Curtis opened his eyes and saw the big-boned businesswoman in the seat next to him—he’d been inhaling her perfume for a couple hours—pointing to his computer screen and an image of Roxy Sandoval in a bikini, bent over and ready to hike a football to some famous quarterback. He cursed himself for not putting his headphones on. Nobody bothers you if you’ve got your Bose QuietComfort clamped over your ears. Now he had to make conversation.
“Oh, um, I’m just doing some research.”
She smiled, revealing bright white teeth framed by orangey-red lipstick.
“You must have an interesting job.”
She seemed to say it without judgment, but it ruined his real estate buzz. Curtis sat up, his penis pushing against his pants. He felt a rush of embarrassment, like when he was in high school fantasizing about the faint outline of the bra of the girl in the seat in front of him and the next thing he knew, he was called to the blackboard to stand in front of the class, hoping nobody noticed his raging teenage boner.
“I’m writing a book.”
The woman laughed. “A book about her?”
Curtis adjusted his glasses and nodded. “According to my publisher, it’s what America’s waiting for.”
16
Los Angeles
Sepp entered the green room and surveyed the offerings. There was a bowl of fresh fruit sitting on the table by a couch, a thermos of coffee with one of those pump squirters, and a little fridge filled with cans of Red Bull. Sepp was reaching for a Red Bull when he saw himself in the mirror. He groaned and lay down on the floor.
LA’s version of Len was a media escort named Kathryn, an attractive woman in her early forties with a wild poodle of blond hair framing a face that now looked down on Sepp with real concern.
“Are you okay?”
Sepp nodded and began doing sit-ups. “Count for me.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Count my crunches.”
“Out loud?”
“Yeah.”
Sepp began to crunch. Kathryn began counting. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen . . .”
A young woman wearing a walkie-talkie headset entered the room. She saw Sepp on the floor, then looked at Kathryn.
“What’s he doing?”
“Crunches.”
Sepp looked up at Kathryn. “Don’t stop counting.”
“Sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five . . .”
The woman looked at a clipboard. “We need to go over a couple things.”
Sepp exhaled and began to bicycle his legs as he did crunches. “Go ahead.”
“Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy . . .”
The woman was obviously flustered. “Why are you doing this?”
“They’re going to ask me to take my shirt off . . .”
“Eighty, eighty-one, eighty-two . . .”
“. . . and I want my abs to look super cut.”
“I can assure you that they won’t ask you to take your shirt off. It’s not in the script.”
“Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two . . .”
Sepp didn’t stop. He knew that you couldn’t trust the script. Life wasn’t scripted, you know, or it shouldn’t be because if it was scripted then it was boring like his friends who went to college and then got out and took stupid jobs and got married. Dude, that’s the script. That’s what they want you to do. Sepp felt better improvising. That’s what you do in a volleyball game. You don’t know where they’re gonna hit it so you got to be on your toes. That’s what was so awesome about reality TV. You don’t know what’s going to happen until you get there and sometimes you still don’t know what happened until the show airs. Isn’t that why people watch? For the unscripted moments?
The count hit one hundred and he switched to alternating his crunches from side to side. The young woman with the clipboard listened to something on her headset, then turned to Kathryn. “I’ll come back. How many of these is he going to do?”
Kathryn shrugged and kept counting. “One twenty-one, one twenty-two, one twenty-three . . .”
Sepp looked up at the producer. “I usually do about five hundred.”
…
It was going to be a busy day. Sepp had already done two phone interviews with East Coast radio stations—Brenda called them “phoners”—as Kathryn drove like Richard Petty, careening through the morning gridlock, to get him from the hotel to the studio on time. Considering the fact that he was being bounced from side to side as the car ricocheted through traffic jams and raced down obscure side streets—the motion causing Sepp to feel slightly carsick—the phoners had gone okay.
The first was with one of those wild and crazy morning shows where the DJs said outrageous things, played goofy sound effects, honked horns, and peppered him with questions about the true heft of Roxy Sandoval’s breasts—“They’re not real, are they?”—and asked if a bisexual woman’s vagina tasted different than a straight one’s. One of the hosts was obsessed with anal sex and kept making jokes about Roxy’s “back door” while the other host kept calling Sepp “Play-yuh” and banging a cowbell every time he said it.
The DJs wanted to know who was riding in the limo with him. Was it another reality star? Pamela Anderson? Kim Kardashian? Kimberly from the LA episode of Love Express? Sepp had to laugh. People who thought that being on book tour was some kind of glamorous babe-magnet all-night rock ’n’ roll party didn’t know what they were talking about. Dude, when he was promoting a TV show it was all fancy champagne, America’s Next Top Model wannabes, and five-star hotels. The network would send over a stylist to dress him, a hair person to put product in, and a town car to take him to all the fancy parties. The book business was totally different. Sepp had to fly business class and didn’t get a limo; he’d be picked up at his destination by media escorts who, while being perfectly nice people, drove Toyotas and Hondas, not banana-yellow super-stretch Hummers.
At first Sepp thought his publisher was just super cheapo, but then he learned that he was getting actual star treatment for an author. This, it seemed, was as good as it got, the book business operating on more of a “Go Greyhound” philosophy than Hollywood.
Sepp didn’t want to tell the DJs that he was driving in a Honda Accord with a middle-aged woman. Although if he were being truthful it wasn’t so bad; the car was probably only six or seven years old and Kathryn was hot in a distinctly milfy way. So when the morning DJs pressed him for details, Sepp said, “More cowbell, amigo.”
That got a big laugh.
Sepp’s next phoner came five minutes after the first. A women’s show about women’s issues. You wouldn’t think it, but this was way easier. He just told them he was looking for love, hoping that someday he’d find a woman who was authentic and real; someone who would “fit” with him. Sepp wasn’t just saying that because chicks like to hear it, he actually believed it. He’d thought he’d found that woman a couple of times, but it hadn’t worked out. That didn’t mean he was going to stop looking.
Sepp’s sincerity was totally genuine and always had an effect: It made women say “Aww,” and it made them look at him with big, sy
mpathetic eyes and reach out to touch him, maybe to see if he was real, because he was almost too good to be true, a genuine romantic with the body of a Chippendales dancer.
Sepp hung up from the phone interview and sat in the passenger seat staring out the window. He let the commercialized clutter—all that signage shouting for attention—of Hollywood roll past. Normally it would’ve excited him. The energy of commerce, the vibe of the metropolis. But today he wasn’t feeling it.
Kathryn must’ve been able to tell that he was in a funk, because she tried to cheer him up.
“That was a good interview. You were great.”
Sepp smiled. “Thanks.”
But despite the smile on his face, he was starting to get a terrible feeling in the center of his stomach. It wasn’t indigestion or acid reflux or anything that you could treat with bicarbonate; this sensation was some kind of anxiety-spewing jellyfish-of-fear spreading its icy tentacles through his body, making his heart pound, twisting his bowels. It was another panic attack. This one came with the creeping realization that maybe, just maybe, he was the butt of some massive joke, a conspiracy to ridicule him, and the whole entire world was in on it. It was not a great feeling. Dude. Not at all.
Sepp wished the Honda Accord had a confessional. That’s the one thing Sepp loved the most about being on a reality TV show—besides all the hooking up with hotties, the free booze and stuff. The confessional was that little private room where you could bare your soul. It’s just you, a chair, a camera, and one of the producers. You just take a seat and start talking. Spill your guts, let it all hang out. Totally tell it like it is. You can be conflicted, upset, bewildered, betrayed, happy, hurt, or ecstatic; you can be a churning ball of confusion and misplaced emotions. You can shout, you can cry, you can make fun of the people who upset you or threaten to punch them in the throat. Over-the-top emotion is encouraged; tantrums, fits, and blubbering like a jilted teenager on prom night are the currency of the confessional and the producer is there to help keep you talking. Sometimes the producer would say stuff to make you mad, like how Bryce or Oscar was hitting on Roxy; other times they’d make you feel great, tell you that you were “King of the Crib.” It was all about getting in touch with your feelings. When you finally saw it on TV, the editors had somehow made sense of it. They made sense of you. It’s like they know you better than you know you. Dude. It’s so weird. There you are on TV and you actually look like you know what you’re talking about. Like you know who you are and all your emotions and feelings and thoughts actually add up to something. It’s not like that in real life.
He was glad he’d made the appointment with Dr. Jan. She’d know what to do.
…
Sepp took the elevator up to the third floor and found Dr. Jan’s office. He opened the door and went into an empty waiting room. The office was in Beverly Hills and looked fancy, like some of the houses he’d seen in Newport Beach when he was working for a catering company—they always had to be super careful not to spill any red wine or drop any salmon mousse on the carpet at those places. There was a nice painting on the wall, a picture of some fields with a barn in the distance.
He sat down and started to read a magazine about golf, but couldn’t concentrate. His nerves were still jangling from the panic he’d had in the car. Dr. Jan opened the door to the waiting room.
“Come on in.”
Dr. Jan’s office had more boxes of tissue than Sepp had ever seen. There were pillows too. Lots and lots of pillows.
“Why don’t you take the couch?” Dr. Jan sat in a chair and pointed to the couch.
Sepp sat down and took a deep breath. He was feeling shaky, like he might hurl, like how he felt when he first got dumped. Dr. Jan didn’t look like she looked on TV. She didn’t have much makeup on and looked older than she had a year ago, and she was wearing glasses—Sepp remembered one time Roxy made fun of some dude because he wore glasses—and on TV, Dr. Jan always wore suits, but here in her office she was wearing blue jeans and a cotton sweater.
Sepp had only had sessions with Dr. Jan on TV, so it was a little weird to be in her office. There was no camera or sound or anything. It was just the two of them.
There was no director to tell him what to do, and, for a few minutes, Sepp didn’t know how he was supposed to start or what to say. But then Dr. Jan asked him why he was there and Sepp told her about his San Francisco sex-panic daydream. She made some notes on a pad and then looked at him.
“Are you afraid of women?”
“I like women.”
“What is your relationship with your mother like?”
Sepp thought about his mother. He hardly saw her anymore. She had gotten remarried to a guy who owned a couple of drag racers and they were always traveling around in an RV going from race to race. Last time he talked to her was almost two months ago when they were getting ready for the Rebel Yell Funny Car Reunion in Marietta, Georgia.
“We get along pretty good. I mean, I love my mom. We’re amigos.”
“Why do you think this daydream caused a panic attack?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
Dr. Jan smiled. “I’d bet you have a pretty good idea.”
Sepp realized that he was hugging one of the pillows. “Roxy.” He sniffled. He wasn’t crying or anything, but his nose was a little drippy like maybe he had allergies, so he reached for a tissue.
Dr. Jan nodded and leaned forward. “Look, Sepp, everyone gets their heart broken. It’s part of life and in this case I don’t think you should take it personally.”
“Why not?
“Because she was a contestant on a TV show. So were you. It’s not real.”
“It seemed real.”
…
How many times had Dr. Jan seen this? Twenty? Thirty? Maybe more. Dr. Jan didn’t want to be unkind, but if she were being objective and honest, she would have to say that, generally speaking, the people who became contestants on reality TV shows had lower IQs than the general public. They were usually pageant queens and jocks, airheads and athletes. You didn’t get a lot of doctors or other professionals on these shows. Usually the women were cosmetologists or bartenders or worked in some kind of marketing. The guys were almost always in sales. They were not the cream of the crop and there was a reason for that. A rational, intelligent person with the ability to think critically would not do half the ridiculous things the producers asked them to do. They wouldn’t, for example, lie to each other and then hook up in the hot tub in full view of the person they’d just lied to. Which is not to say that smart people don’t cheat, but that they don’t do it so stupidly. Reality show contestants were cast because they weren’t the brightest of the bunch and then they were plied with copious amounts of alcohol, innuendo, and misinformation.
When the tribe eventually spoke or the rose was given to someone else, they came down hard. One minute they’re in a fantasy land of hotties and hunks without a care in the world, the next minute they’re back home with a stack of bills to pay, an angry boyfriend or girlfriend, and a feeling of being completely disconnected from the ordinary world. They usually fell into depressed behavior, lying around watching TV, unable to go to work, or they’d swing wildly into partying too much and hooking up with strangers, trying to re-create the feeling they had on the show.
Celebrity, even the passing fifteen minutes of fame you get from being on these shows, is a powerful narcotic, it warps your sense of who you are and where you fit in the world. The camera may add ten pounds to your body, but it also completely distorts your self-perception. Dr. Jan had to counsel lots of deluded reality stars, men and women who thought they were just as talented as George Clooney or Amy Adams and there was no reason why they couldn’t make it big. Those people now waited tables and tended bar at various restaurants in the Valley, although, to be fair, Dr. Jan had seen several working as hostesses.
Sepp was an unusual case. Because he’d been on two shows that were almost back-to-back he’d lived outside of ordinary r
eality for longer than most contestants. And even then, his day-to-day reality consisted of an almost reality TV–like schedule. In other words, he didn’t do much. Had no real responsibilities. His brain might not notice the difference between being on a show and his routine existence.
Dr. Jan thought that there might be a book in this. A real in-depth study of perception and reality framed by the psychological damage reality TV could inflict on a normal psyche. After her appearance on Love Express a few agents had called, including a team from William Morris Endeavor, all wanting to sign her up for a daytime chat show like Dr. Oz. That didn’t interest Dr. Jan. But a book deal? That had prestige written all over it.
She smiled at Sepp. “You just have to get back out there.”
“I’ve been out there, Dr. Jan, and it ain’t workin’.” Sepp tried to hide the pain in his voice, but Dr. Jan could detect it.
She nodded and said, “They always say that there are lots of fish in the sea, and I know it sounds corny, but it’s true. You just have to hang in there.”
Sepp noticed that Dr. Jan nodded a lot. “It’s just . . .” Sepp tried to think of the right word for what he wanted to say. He finally settled on “humiliating.”
Dr. Jan was suddenly more interested. “You mean sexually?”
Sepp nodded as he blew his nose.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Since Roxy.”
Dr. Jan looked surprised. “You’re a young man. Have you seen a urologist?”
Sepp nodded. “I’m fine physically. Until I get with a girl. I mean, I can beat off and everything.”
Dr. Jan stood up and went to her desk. She opened a drawer and pulled out some little packets.
“This issue sounds a little more complicated than anything I can help you with today, but here.” She handed him a couple of packets.
Raw: A Love Story Page 7
