Raw: A Love Story

by Mark Haskell Smith

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Sepp couldn’t tell if they wanted him to keep his shirt off or not. He watched as the scruffy guy shook his head and handed the black guy a ten-dollar bill.

  …

  It was a bit of a schlep according to Len, and they really should drop in at Booksmith on Haight Street and Book Passage in the Ferry Building, but Caitlin would only agree to meet Sepp at a café near her apartment on Potrero Hill. While Len sat in the car and checked his email, Sepp entered a ramshackle storefront named Farley’s.

  The café was cool and cozy, mostly filled with with people peering intently at their laptop screens. Sepp didn’t understand that. Why go out and read your computer? Shouldn’t you go out and talk to people? That’s what he did. He had a computer but he hardly used it. He didn’t like porn and otherwise, really, it just seemed like a waste of time. For sure it wasn’t something he’d haul around to look at in public.

  There was only one table without a laptop and that was where Caitlin Hartman had parked her tightly packed jeans.

  When he saw her—he couldn’t help it—his face sparked into a broad smile. Her blond hair was swept back into a tight ponytail, giving her a casual sporty look like she’d just come from a yoga class. And her makeup was all natural, so she had a healthy glow, with bushy brows and bright hazel eyes. She still looked like the girl next door, as wholesome as a glass of milk. That was what made her so popular on the show. She was fresh-faced and innocent and somehow that made her way sexier than your typical reality TV skank. Sepp remembered one producer who said she was hot because she was so clean you wanted to make her dirty. That fantasy was the secret of her appeal.

  Caitlin stood and gave Sepp a quick hug. “You look good.”

  For some reason Sepp found himself blushing at the compliment, a rush of emotion and heat rising through his body. He couldn’t tell if he was happy or angry or sad. “Thanks. So do you.”

  Caitlin sat down. “You want a coffee?”

  Sepp shook his head. “I’m good.”

  He sat across from her and stared. He couldn’t help it. All the emotions that he’d thought he’d processed and dealt with in the care of Dr. Jan, his network-appointed psychiatrist, began to reawaken and percolate inside him. Caitlin sat there grinning and nervously sucking on one of her fingers, a habit she picked up when she quit chewing gum on Season 3 of Celebrity Vice Busters.

  “So? How are you?”

  She pulled her finger out of her mouth, letting a thin strand of saliva shimmer in the light as it bridged the gap between a plump red lip and a manicured pinky. “I’m not very happy about your book.”

  It had never occurred to Sepp that someone might not like being mentioned in his book. It’s cool to be mentioned in a book. Isn’t it? Besides, they hadn’t used her real name. Although, if you knew anything about what he’d been up to, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

  “Why?”

  She laughed. “Are you joking?”

  From his expression it was clear that he was not joking.

  “You made me look like a slut.”

  There were so many things Sepp wanted to say to her. He wanted to tell her that, yes, she probably did look like a slut in the book—not that Sepp knew for sure—but that was because she’d acted pretty slutty in real life.

  “It’s not really you. It’s a fictional novel.”

  Caitlin pouted. “It didn’t seem that fictional to me.”

  “Well it is.”

  “Doesn’t seem that way.”

  Sepp shrugged. “What do you want me to say, Caitlin? That I’m sorry a made-up person seems like you?”

  “I’m not a made-up person. And I’m not a floozy.”

  “I never said you were.”

  Caitlin glared at him and, for a brief second, he thought she might throw her coffee on him or do something dramatic, but she didn’t do or say anything.

  Finally, Sepp asked, “Are you still seeing the doctor?”

  “Screw you, Sepp.” Caitlin began rooting through her purse for something. “Is that all you care about?”

  He held his hands up. “I’m just curious. You guys seemed like you were in love.”

  Caitlin pulled a tissue out of her purse and delicately blew her nose. Then she turned to Sepp.

  “The producers needed me off the bus for the sake of the show and it seemed like a good twist.”

  Sepp’s expression changed. His jaw dropped, baffled. “Who told you that?”

  “It was in the script.”

  Sepp tried to process this new information. “So you weren’t in love?”

  Caitlin laughed. “We’re still friends, but that whole thing was something the writers came up with. You never read the script, did you?”

  Sepp didn’t think he needed to read the scripts. The producers and director always told him what to do and what to say so, like, why waste his time? Wasn’t it better if he was at the gym? He looked up at Caitlin. “I thought we had something special.”

  Caitlin reached over and patted his hand. “We weren’t in love. We were on TV. There’s a big difference.”

  11

  San Francisco

  Harriet sat at her desk and stared at her laptop screen. It amazed her, really, the things people said when they heard she was a writer. Like it was easy. Fun. Something you did on a whim. People just didn’t get it; they didn’t appreciate the level of difficulty, they couldn’t fathom the amount of energy required to pluck thoughts and imaginings out of the ether and craft them into deep, soulful explorations of the human condition. Does that sound easy? Does it?

  People are fucking stupid.

  Harriet had been convinced of this fact for years. For a long time she thought it was because of where she’d grown up, that people in Sacramento were stupid, but as she got older and traveled more, she realized that it was generally true of all people, except maybe people in France; they read books in France.

  She’d had a normal-enough childhood. Both her parents worked for the State of California in various minor bureaucratic positions that kept them immune from changing administrations and they provided her with a stable middle-class life. She’d been a bit of a tomboy when she was younger, playing AYSO soccer on a coed team and scrabbling up trees in the park, but everything changed when she turned twelve and, seemingly overnight, morphed from a scrawny girl into a young woman. The boys who’d been on her soccer team, her tree-climbing colleagues, suddenly acted weird around her, and older teenage boys, the kind of boys who drove cars and smoked cigarettes, began talking to her, asking her questions and staring at her chest. Her girlfriends weren’t much help either. They became distant, jealous, weird.

  Looking back on it now, Harriet realized that she kind of freaked out when she hit puberty; awkward, a mutant. At least that’s how she felt.

  She began avoiding the other kids and went to the one place where no one would find her—the library. It was there that she met a librarian, a friendly young woman who was obsessed with books. The librarian was stylish in a way that Harriet had never seen, with short hair and thick glasses and capri pants, and she was friendlier than any of Harriet’s teachers had ever been, which was weird because Harriet was always a straight-A student. The stylish librarian used to take Harriet by the hand and lead her into the stacks to show her books she might like. She would stand close to her, so that Harriet could feel the heat coming off her body, and tell her why she liked certain books, why they were important to read. Looking back on it now, Harriet realized it was a kind of seduction. It began simply enough with The Awakening by Kate Chopin and Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden and took off from there. Harriet enjoyed the books—some were better than others—but she loved the experience of sitting alone, lost in a story, not worrying about being talked about behind her back or having boys stare at her in the weird way teenage boys stared at girls, so she came back for more.

  By the time she was fourteen she’d read Lolita and most of Tolstoy, with pas
sing glances at Henry James and D. H. Lawrence. She read Flaubert and Balzac and Hugo and kooky West Coast authors like Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins. But it wasn’t until she was sixteen and sat down with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow that Harriet’s life changed. Finally she’d found an author who could give her a jolt of something that felt totally exciting and new. It was like a drug and she was hooked. Sadly that discovery coincided with the librarian’s taking her into the special collection room and planting a kiss on her lips, complete with tongue.

  Harriet got a job at a bookstore, which seemed like it would be the most awesome job in the world until she realized she spent most of her time helping people find the newest Grisham or Stephen King or Danielle Steel. That’s when she figured out that people were fucking stupid.

  …

  Harriet checked to see how many hits her blog had gotten that morning and was pleased to see the number already over two hundred. She had a loyal following: People looked up to her and checked in on her site several times a day. The numbers weren’t huge—she got about five hundred unique hits a day, and then she’d be linked and tweeted and retweeted across the virtual world. The comment threads on her blog were justifiably famous for being well written and lively. She was obviously reaching a very select, sophisticated group of readers and fellow writers. It was what they call in the publishing world a “platform,” something that was supposed to translate into robust sales of her novel, that’s what her editor said, and she was encouraged to blog relentlessly. In the end, she couldn’t do it—she didn’t want her blogging or her reviews and critical writing to become some kind of sales tool. That was too cynical. Her novel would have to stand on its own. Her sales might suffer, but she had integrity.

  Harriet had been working on her new project; it was a novel, although she didn’t really think the word “novel” fully captured the epic scope of her work in progress. Currently the manuscript was a lean nine hundred pages and she was finding it difficult to cut anything. Her agent had said the story was “Byzantine,” but Harriet didn’t know what her book had to do with the machinations of the royal court of Constantinople, so she and that agent parted company. Was it really too long or were readers getting lazy? How can you edit such an intricate work? Pull one thread or remove one character and the whole thing would collapse. A friend in her writing group had suggested she turn it into several distinct books, similar to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Harriet liked this idea.

  So far thirty-six agents had politely passed. Harriet didn’t hold it against them. She knew that it was a combination of laziness on the agents’ part—how could they engage with her work when their submission guidelines only let her send thirty pages and a one-page synopsis?—and she understood their fear when they passed. They were all looking for a beach read or thriller, a paranormal teen romance or a story about gargoyles, any entertainment crafted to be easily digested. One agent went so far as to tell Harriet that her book was a “commercial impossibility.” Harriet took that as a compliment.

  She began composing a new entry for her blog.

  The pages herewith have been slavishly devoted to the exaltation of literature, the celebration of writing as a noble art and the writer’s life as an exalted quest to enrich the soul of civilization. At times we are harsh critics of books and writers that, frankly, just aren’t good enough. It’s a dirty job, but we are the speakers of truths, members of the resistance, the rare few to speak the words that must be spoken.

  Alas, such is the weary state of intellectual discourse in these times that we are forced to take action. To woman the battlements and storm the ramparts, to shout the truth and put an end to literary frauds perpetrated by commercial publishers for the sole purpose of making money.

  If you are, like us, a warrior for literature, a crusader for culture, then you will help us put a stop to these outrages, this callithump of fraud, this spectacle of flimflam masquerading as a novel written by a reality television actor. Now is the time to say ça suffit!

  12

  NYC

  The thing about living in New York City that really bothered Curtis was the lack of easy access to bathrooms. He’d knocked back a couple mugs of coffee at home, then grabbed a third at Café Grumpy to drink on the train and now found himself stuck on the G at Court Square in Long Island City due to some track fire farther up the line. Curtis couldn’t really follow everything that crackled and fritzed over the loudspeaker, but the news wasn’t good, he could tell by the world-weary, no-reason-to-panic inflection in the conductor’s voice. The delay meant that by the time he changed trains and pulled into the Seventh Avenue station, his skinny jeans were pressing on his full bladder, causing him to stare out from under his porkpie hat with a panicky squinch.

  As he hustled toward the building on Broadway he scanned the street for a restaurant or coffee shop, someplace, anyplace, that would let him urinate before he had to go to the publisher’s office, ask for the bathroom key, and suffer the humiliation of knowing that everyone was waiting, looking at their watches and silently judging him.

  Which is exactly what happened.

  Curtis strode into the foyer and, trying to keep from sounding hysterical, asked for directions to the restroom.

  He walked down the hallway, moving as quick as he could without breaking into a sprint. For some reason, the closer he got to the bathroom door the more his bladder shrieked, and by the time he stood over the urinal, watching several cups of recycled coffee hit the porcelain, his eyes welled with tears of relief.

  He studied his reflection in the mirror as he washed his hands. Was this the face of a sellout? Or was this the look of a man who could put a down payment on a two-bedroom in Brooklyn? Maybe there wasn’t a difference.

  It had always annoyed Curtis that, no matter how scrupulously he attempted to dry his hands—and he used multiple paper towels—they never quite got dry. There was always some residual moisture, an aura of clamminess that clung to his fingers long after he’d tried to dry them. He’d shake hands with whomever he was meeting and see the look on their faces, a microbial fear flickering in the eyes, as their smooth, dry hands clasped his moist palms.

  Curtis returned to the receptionist’s desk and noticed a stack of promotional bookmarks heralding a bestselling mystery author famous for writing books with baked goods in the title: “crumpet,” “scone,” and “muffin,” to name a few. He remembered a joke he’d read about the author on a blog about the series being “toast.” He started to repeat it, just as the editor came out to greet him. “Curtis?”

  “Hi.”

  She looked like an editor. In other words, she looked smart and decisive and stylish, and she had cool glasses. She extended her hand. “So nice to meet you. We loved what you did with Sepp Gregory. That was amazing.”

  Curtis had wanted to make a good first impression. So after rinsing, he had really made an effort. He used four paper towels and then flapped his hands around in the air, like a shadow puppeteer controlling spastic pterodactyls, before wiping them on his shirt and jamming them into his trouser pockets.

  Curtis hoped for the best and shook hands with the editor. “Thanks.”

  “C’mon. The team’s waiting.“

  She turned and strode down the hallway. Curtis saw her discreetly wipe her palm on the side of her skirt.

  …

  After having his moist hands clasped halfheartedly by everyone around the table, Curtis slipped into a chair and the meeting began. It was unusual for a publisher to throw together a meeting like this, but Amy had told him that they were fast-tracking this project. They weren’t screwing around, and wanted him to meet the team who would be guiding the book from concept to the bookshelves of America. It would be his team, he was the quarterback, and it was important that he went into the meeting with a positive attitude.

  Around the conference table sat the fresh-faced future of the publishing industry. The editor introduced them, but Curtis wasn’t good with names and they en
tered and exited his consciousness as soon as they were mentioned. There were a couple of publicists and marketing people who all looked friendly and professional and surprisingly peppy, a woman from sales who looked about eighteen, and a slightly scruffy art director. They were all young and hip and Curtis felt like he was in a room full of overachievers, AP honor students eager to prove themselves.

  The art director lifted a mock-up cover of what a Roxy Sandoval novel would look like. “This is just something we threw together yesterday.”

  Curtis looked at the cover. There was a very revealing photo of Roxy Sandoval nearly topless at the beach, with only a light coating of sand covering her breasts, enough to make it somehow palatable for the general public in much the same way a chicken fried steak is somehow more acceptable than raw meat. The title, Sandy Panties, was sprayed across the top in a hot pink graffiti-style font that looked like a calculated attempt to reach the edgy urban market. Curtis leaned forward and squinted. He saw the words “as told to Curtis Berman,” in a microscopic and stunningly dull blue on the bottom. “You put my name on it?”

  The editor smiled at him and folded her hands in front of her. “What do you think?”

  Curtis looked up. “Wow.”

  “Wow is right. This is the book America is waiting for.”

  …

  To celebrate being the writer of the forthcoming and sure to be runaway bestseller, Sandy Panties, and to ease his deep sense of shame and personal failure, Curtis walked out of the publisher’s office and across midtown to the Apple store on Fifth and Fifty-Ninth. He’d considered going to a bar and getting trashed; that’s what a lot of writers do when they sell their souls, that’s what he imagined Faulkner or Franzen or Bret Easton Ellis would do. They would salve their wounded—but greatly enriched—pride with a few doses of pricey firewater. But he could get drunk later. Instead he pulled out his credit card and purchased a top-of-the-line, ultrathin MacBook Air. If he was going to produce dross, he’d at least write it on a nice laptop.