“These are Clonazepam. Take one if you start to have another episode.”
“Okay.”
“But if you do, I want you to call me. Let me know what’s going on.”
Sepp nodded. She handed him another sample packet. “These are Viagra. Try one and see if it doesn’t get you back into the game.”
Sepp looked at the samples. “Can I take them at the same time?”
Dr. Jan smiled. “It’s more fun that way.”
17
Los Angeles
Curtis sat in the back of a taxi and stared at the massive melon of a head plopped atop the body of the cab driver. The driver’s head was shaved, and rolls of fat undulated down his neck like soft-serve ice cream. As far as Curtis could tell the driver didn’t speak any English and an unidentifiable flag hung from the rearview mirror, its blue, black, and white stripes signifying nothing to him.
He looked out the window and leered at Los Angeles. It was one gigantic nightmare, a hideous sprawlscape with generic buildings and traffic so ferocious that the streets were like parking lots; cars were reduced to idling hunks of metal baking in the blistering sun, reflecting glare into Curtis’s eyes, searing his corneas. It was obscene; millions of cars, each one holding precisely one driver, spewing noxious fumes into the atmosphere. No wonder the planet was asphyxiating from greenhouse gases—this is where they were produced. This was all the proof Curtis needed that Los Angeles was destroying the world.
Curtis saw a giant drugstore—the boxy building large enough to hold all the drugstores in his neighborhood in Brooklyn—and a strip mall, a godforsaken L-shaped building that housed a Subway sandwich shop, a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, and an optician. He asked the driver to stop. He had to get a pair of sunglasses or he’d need cataract surgery by the time he got to the hotel.
Curtis entered the optical shop and looked at the sunglasses on display. There were lots of stupid-looking hipster shades, sunglasses that were trying too hard. He’d brought his contacts with him. He didn’t like wearing them in New York—too much grit in the air—but he was prepared to suffer the smog of Los Angeles for the chance to wear some cool shades.
It didn’t take him long to find a pair of Ray-Bans that didn’t look stupid. He put them on and looked at his reflection in the little mirror. They made him look cool, like a Brooklyn Steve McQueen, but weren’t perfect. And he needed to look cool. He was going to be Roxy Sandoval’s guest at a party later tonight, some trashy soiree at the Playboy Mansion, a full immersion in the kind of fucked-up faux-glamour universe of the grotesquely vacuous and self-absorbed. It was going to be awesome.
As a card-carrying member of the literati, Curtis knew that, on some level, partying at the Playboy Mansion should be beneath him; but he had to admit he felt a thrill, a certain frisson about going to the legendary home of Hef. Curtis had spent many hours of his youth—in between reading Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity’s Rainbow—staring at Playboy centerfolds and masturbating, a charter member of the Ham Slammers of America. He and his friends would cut out choice pictures from their fathers’ magazines and hide them in the copy of Stranger in a Strange Land or whatever book it was they passed around at the time. Nothing was more fun than reading Philip K. Dick knowing that, any page now, a topless bunny was going to come leaping out of the book. So even though a part of him, a deeply rational voice buried somewhere in the recesses of his amygdala, told him that he should meet Roxy somewhere other than the Playboy Mansion—find neutral ground for their initial discussions—another part of him was excited. It would be kitsch, ironic, and cool to tell his Brooklyn pals that he’d been to the Playboy Mansion. It would give him some cred and, better, he might get to see some boobs.
Curtis adjusted his new, three-hundred-dollar Persols, paid the cab driver, careful to keep the receipt, and entered the hotel in Beverly Hills. As he waited for the receptionist to check him in, he saw three young women in bikinis out by the pool. They were unique specimens, unlike anything he’d seen before. They were simultaneously scrawny and voluptuous, with oxymoronically massive chests and teeny pinched waists. Their hair was molded into shape, their smooth skin bronzed and oiled and gleaming in the California sun, their breasts bulging out of microscopic triangles of fabric like hippopotami wearing tutus; they were absolutely repulsive, yet undeniably attractive.
The women were sitting together but they weren’t talking to each other. Instead they were each focused on their smartphones.
Curtis had a flash of realization. An epiphany. He suddenly understood that he wasn’t writing trash. Books like Totally Reality weren’t pop-culture detritus or gossipy ephemera —these books were cultural anthropology, a cross-section slice of life as it was being lived in our culture right now. It wasn’t that far removed from Margaret Mead or any of the serious scientists that studied the structure and mores of strange societies. These surgically enhanced skankazons were part of a subculture just as complex, ritualistic, and bizarre as any primitive tribe’s. This was the world that Roxy Sandoval inhabited. These women were her. They just weren’t on a reality TV show yet.
Sandy Panties could be an important book.
18
Century City
The offices of Forward, a talent agency, looked like they were designed by the same guy who did airport terminals in Japan. That’s how it looked to Sepp anyway. There were signs with numbers and signs with colors and signs with colors and numbers and sometimes words and lots of empty white space so that your footsteps would echo when you walked around. Occasionally there would be some futuristic chairs clumped together. Sepp guessed you could sit in them, but he never did. He never had to wait. He was always ushered in like royalty. They would put him in a conference room with a fancy glass table and give him a filtered water or coffee or a Red Bull. They had cookies, too.
Everyone was young and well dressed and moving fast, like they were super busy doing super-important business. Everyone except his agent. She wasn’t like them. That’s why he liked her.
She’d spotted him in the first episode of Sex Crib and signed him. She’d gotten him endorsements—he always wore Adidas-brand shoes and workout clothes because they paid him to—and when Sex Crib was over she had put together the package—the producers and network—to make Love Express happen. It had been her idea to do the book and she found the book agent and the ghostwriter and everything. She was sharp and, even better, she was a cool person.
Sepp stood up when Marybeth entered the conference room.
“Hey!”
She have him a big hug—she smelled good—and then sat down in the chair next to him. He was always impressed how she looked like a total badass in her suits and stuff and, yet, she was naturally sexy. She flipped a strand of hair behind her ear, a sign that meant she was ready to get down to business.
“How’s the publisher treating you?”
Sepp smiled. “I got no complaints. Everybody there is real nice.”
“Well, take care of yourself. Book tours can be grueling. If you need something let me know and I’ll get it handled.”
“Thanks.”
Sepp didn’t know if Marybeth was the person he should talk to about his panic attacks, but then again, Dr. Jan had given him some pills so he thought he’d be okay. Sepp noticed that Marybeth was wearing a wedding ring, a simple gold band with some kind of writing on it.
“Did you get married?”
Marybeth smiled. “Yeah. We’d been together for a few years and it just seemed like time. Plus there were some visa issues.”
“Your husband is a foreigner?”
Marybeth laughed. “Wife. She’s Thai.”
Sepp was surprised. Not that he cared that Marybeth was gay. Dude. Everybody knows that girl-on-girl action is hot. He just figured that after all the time she’d been his agent, he would’ve known that about her.
“That’s so awesome. I’m really happy for you.”
Sepp leaned over and gave Marybeth a hug. “If I’d known I wou
ld’ve bought you a crock pot or something.”
“It was a really small wedding.”
“Crock pots are handy.”
Marybeth laughed. “That I can’t deny.”
Sepp sat back down in his chair as an assistant, a young guy who looked like he was fourteen but was wearing a fancy suit, came in and put a cup of coffee in front of her.
“Thanks, Adam.”
Adam sat down across the table from them and pulled out a notecard. Sepp waved at him.
“Hi, Adam.”
Adam smiled. “Mr. Gregory.”
Marybeth opened a folder and looked at it. “I’ll be honest. There’s not a lot of reality TV in the pipeline that’s right for you. I’ve talked to the people at The Bachelorette and they’re thinking of doing a show called The Third Time which you would be perfect for, but that’s on hold right now.”
“Third time’s the charm?”
“Exactly.”
“But I have some commercial offers.” She flipped some pages around. “Fruit of the Loom is close to making an offer, but it’d just be print, billboards, that kind of thing.”
Sepp felt a chill creep up his spine. “Me in my underwear? On a billboard?”
Marybeth shrugged. “Why not? Mark Wahlberg and David Beckham did it.”
“What else?”
“Wasabi mayonnaise. That could be a good payday. Also Havaianas—you know, the flip-flops. They’re sniffing around.” She closed the folder. “But that’s about it right now. I want to see how the book does and maybe get you something classier.”
“I like wasabi.”
“Yeah, but a national campaign for beer or a car company would be better for your brand than a condiment.”
Marybeth always liked to tell Sepp that he was more than just a dude from San Diego, he was an international brand and they had to make smart choices to build his brand and keep it relevant. Like some reality stars just do all kinds of commercials, and dude, who could forget Roxy’s stupid TV commercials for that all-day energy drink. Those didn’t help her brand. But one of the problems with being a reality star is that, unless you’re a star, you don’t get paid. Contestants on these shows are just that, contestants. Sepp hadn’t been paid anything but his travel expenses to be on Sex Crib, and most people, whether they’re starving on a tropical island, trying to find true love, or racing around the world, don’t get any money. You’re not actors, you don’t get royalties or residuals or anything. You’re on and you get what you get and that’s it. That’s why Love Express was so good. Sepp was the star and associate producer and he got paid some serious money to bare his soul for America.
Sepp got a good payday with the book, but that money wouldn’t last forever and he didn’t want to end up doing nightclub appearances like Cassandra from First World Problems.
“I think they all sound good.”
Marybeth nodded. Adam made some notes.
“Okay. Let me make some calls. I should know something tonight when we go to the party.”
Sepp blinked. “What party?”
Marybeth laughed. “You should read your schedule every now and then. After your reading we’re going to the Playboy Mansion. Apparently Miss June is dying to meet you.”
19
Los Angeles
While she waited for the rental-car clerk to finish processing her credit card and hand her the key to a super-economy car, Harriet typed a Twitter update on her iPhone and hit send. She had decided to microblog her trip to LA, driving a little traffic to her site by creating as much interest as possible in her search to find the ghostwriter. Even the mundane bus ride to the airport was already being retweeted and pingbacked and linked and Tumbled and favorited by hundreds of people.
Harriet was on to something. She could feel it. This was a big story. When she had initially planned this assault on cynical corporate profiteering at the expense of literature’s soul, she had assumed that Totally Reality would be mediocre at best. She hadn’t planned on the book being beautifully written. Now she faced a conundrum. Should the ghostwriter be praised for spinning shit into gold or excoriated for wasting his or her obvious talent? And whose fault was it really? The publisher? The agent? Or was it deeper than that? A civilization obsessed with celebrity is surely a dying culture.
She detailed her confusion, her sincere appreciation of the writing, and her deep anger at the pure sellout of it all in short bursts of text on Twitter.
@fatalinfluence Totally Reality, entirely surprising? Enraging? Brilliant? A must read? A must never read? A supreme waste of real talent?
It wasn’t as if she read only literature. Harriet was a member of two different book groups, one that read the type of books commonly discussed on The Millions and in the pages of The New York Times Book Review and another one she went to with her friend Isabelle. That one was mostly women who did yoga together and read bestsellers and what the publishing industry called “commercial fiction.” Evenings spent with Isabelle were equal parts fun—they usually ate well and drank bottles of wine—and exasperating. She’d given up trying to foist literary fiction on the group; they weren’t interested in great writing, they wanted a story. Harriet began to look upon these meetings as cultural anthropology. Here was a tribe of bright, educated young women who could easily be discussing the finer points of any number of literary works but who, instead, yakked incessantly about their preternaturally gifted toddlers, real estate, and yoga vacations while guzzling glasses of good California chardonnay. Lately they’d been devouring hackneyed erotica as if they’d just discovered sex could be more than the missionary position and, to Harriet’s shock and horror, they discussed these works as if they were legitimate literature. Harriet was usually quiet in these conversations, more an observer than active participant, and while she knew positively that these novels lacked literary merit, she did sometimes find herself, late at night, getting to certain scenes and reaching into her pants.
…
If she were a character in a novel, Harriet might be the loner who drifts in and out of people’s lives offering scathing wisdom tinged with world-weary ennui, like Meursault in The Stranger, or maybe a forthright protofeminist heroine like Jane Eyre. She liked to think of herself, when she did think of herself, as someone who was a combination of the two: brutally honest and of superior intellect. Of course, her friends and family didn’t see it that way. They looked at her life and thought she was lonely. What kind of young woman spends all her time at home with her nose in a book? Didn’t she want a husband?
Of course, why anyone would want a husband was beyond Harriet. Unless it was a purely financial arrangement, why would any self-respecting woman limit herself like that? And men were historically unreliable. How many times had someone given themselves over to a partner only to be betrayed and discarded? Harriet had personal experience of that. Her college boyfriend, a graduate student writing his dissertation on British “Lake Poets” like Wordsworth and Coleridge, had gone to England to do some research and when he returned, presented Harriet with gonorrhea. He defended giving her the clap by reciting stanzas of romantic poetry about mariners and the lure of the sea.
While there were certain aspects of intimacy that she missed, Harriet was happy. At least she felt happy. She could find all the lovers and sex and adventure in the pages of a great book. She could be thrilled and transported and changed by art. She loved a good book more than she’d ever loved a person and there was nothing wrong with that. Wasn’t it better than bragging about your kids or living vicariously through a husband? It was definitely better than getting the clap.
@fatalinfluence We’ve arrived. Los Angeles, the birthplace of the In-N-Out Burger. Which we think is this city’s only contribution to world culture.
Harriet fiddled with the knobs on the dashboard of her rental car. She was trying to get the A/C to come on and cool the broiling car. Traffic was stopped, the 405 freeway a mindless pile of looping on-ramps and off-ramps apparently designed to constrict and coagul
ate the greatest number of cars as efficiently as possible. Harriet didn’t need a dictionary of etymology to know that this section of oxymoronically named “freeway” would be more aptly called “clusterfuck.” That was the perfect word for Los Angeles.
Harriet was planning to stay with an old college friend, a woman she barely knew anymore, but who was nice enough to say, via Facebook, that she had a guest room and Harriet was welcome to it. But that wasn’t until later. First she had to negotiate the traffic and get to Sepp’s signing.
She reached into the fast-food bag sitting on the passenger seat and pulled out an In-N-Out burger, specifically a double-double animal style. Her followers on Twitter had told her about In-N-Out’s secret lexicon and hidden Bible references. None of that impressed her, but she had to admit, as she chewed a big, sloppy bite and felt a drip of sauce slip down her chin, that it was about as good as a fast-food burger could get.
@fatalinfluence In-N-Out Double-Double Animal Style . . . it’s everything you say it is.
As she sat, sweat rolling off her head like she’d just been in a sauna, the car moving forward millimeter by millimeter, she decided she had become an instant Angeleno. She could eat and tweet and drive.
@fatalinfluence Just discovered why people in LA shoot each other.
20
West Hollywood
Curtis stood outside Book Soup, a bookstore on Sunset Boulevard right in the heart of the world-famous Sunset Strip, and glared at the giant photo of Sepp that was hanging in the window. He looked up at the marquee and saw Sepp’s name spelled out next to the names of more illustrious authors. It annoyed Curtis that the bookstore obviously didn’t have more than a couple letter ps. Underneath “Sepp Gregory” were the names “Chuck alahniuk” and “Laura Li man.” Curtis would’ve given all his consonants to see his name up on that marquee.
He had several hours to kill before he was scheduled to meet Roxy Sandoval at the Playboy Mansion and couldn’t contain his morbid curiosity. What were the crowds at a Totally Reality signing like? How was Sepp in front of an audience? Curtis admittedly had mixed emotions. When it first came out he didn’t care if the book tanked, he had hated it, but now he desperately wanted it to succeed. Amy had been adamant about getting him a piece of the royalties, and although it was only a small percent, he’d need it for his new home, for the art he wanted to collect and the bitters he wanted to brew.
Raw: A Love Story Page 8
