Catwalk Fail

by Jason Godfrey

  A shower with Adidas body wash, styling my hair with emo construction cream, my Guess outfit, I would like these things, but don’t need any of them more than I need to avoid another sexual encounter with Svetlana.

  Sitting on a stool surrounded by boxes of clothing in a storeroom in Lane Crawford, I’m being briefed by their marketing manager and immediately regret taking this job.

  “You know the drill with freeze modelling,” says Eunice, a little woman who as far as I can tell will shrivel and die if she looks away from her phone for more than three seconds. “We need you to do three one-hour shifts.”

  Three hours? Freeze modelling is the absolute ass end of modelling jobs. But since work and castings have dried up, I’ve been doing nothing. I even texted Maxwell Chen yesterday to arrange that test shoot but he hasn’t gotten back to me. With nothing happening, I thought working any job would make me feel better. I was wrong.

  “Uh…Hi,” Taylor says, standing in the doorway with a backpack on. Her hair is down, her makeup is natural, and she looks predictably hot. Though, I’m not feeling diesel, and the light in the change room is much too even to make my muscles look as defined as I’d like, I’m happy to see her.

  “Hey.”

  Taylor pulls out a stool and unshoulders her bag.

  “Working together again.” I say, as she puts her backpack on her lap. She shrugs and begins to dig through it.

  “You two have worked together before?” Eunice reappears, her brow still furled at her phone like she’s reviewing threat assessments from the CIA.

  “Yeah, for a beach resort,” I say. “We were married for a week.”

  I glance over to see if bringing up our pseudo relationship gets any sort of reaction out of Taylor. It doesn’t.

  “You make a good couple, obviously,” Eunice looks up from the glowing little screen for a fraction of a second. “That’s why you get booked together all the time. Clients like couples that look like they belong together.”

  The idea of me belonging with Taylor makes me want to smile, but I don’t because she’s not paying attention to me as she sorts through her bag. “We’re starting soon,” Eunice says. “Get changed.”

  Taylor and I begin stripping out of our clothes.

  “You ever freeze modeled before?” I say, as she pulls her shirt over her head exposing her smooth bare back to me.

  “Nope,” she busies herself folding her shirt. “It sucks,” I take my pants off. “I’m surprised you’d take this job.”

  She doesn’t need it. I’ve seen her book. It’s incredible. Taylor toys with the camera effortlessly in every shot. She’s on the cover of Nylon looking edgy with dark eyes. She’s elegant in an editorial for Italian Vogue in a long flowing dress. She smiles in a headshot in the Benetton campaign. Taylor’s got the fashion world gagging for her and she doesn’t care.

  “I work everything my agency sends me,” she shrugs, pulling a white pair of shorts over her long legs. “Work is work.”

  Taylor approaches modelling like she repairs refrigerators.

  Buttoning up my shirt in silence, I start hoping our freeze modelling pose is a hug. Being locked in a hug with Taylor for three hours would make this job much better.

  “Why did you take this job?” She says, glancing at me.

  Because my fashion week was boned when I missed all the men’s castings. Because except for stressing and eating greasy crap, I have nothing else to occupy my time. Because if I don’t book Gucci for fashion week, my career is over.

  “It’s a job.” I simplify my situation.

  I pull on the khaki pants and tuck in a blue dress shirt. Taylor is wearing a little pair of white shorts and a lime green collared polo shirt. We both look like we stepped out of a country club in the American mid-west. Fashion is always changing, but this kind of department store catalogue shit has looked the same for the past fifty years.

  Eunice returns, carrying two pairs of sunglasses. “Here,” she hands them to us. “Let’s get started.”

  Both in sunglasses, we’re standing totally still on a white platform in the middle of the entrance to Lane Crawford. One hand is in my pocket, the other is in mid-air like I’m about to check the time on my watch—if I had a watch. Taylor is frozen, playing with her fingers, while grinning into space. We are freeze modelling our asses off.

  “You were right,” Taylor says out of the corner of her frozen smile. “This sucks.”

  “Yeah,” I say, staring at the clock. It’s been two and a half minutes. Only one-hundred-and-seventy-seven minutes to go.

  “What have you been up to?” I say, stuck in my pose as throngs of customers stroll past us yammering away, unaware that one mannequin is trying to get the other mannequin to talk to him.

  Taylor gives a little shrug but remains silent. We stand there, rooted to the platform while everything else is moving, like time has stopped only for us. If I’m ever told I only have three months to live, I’ll freeze model the entire time and the three months will feel like twenty-six years.

  “If we don’t talk,” I say. “This is going to go really really slowly.”

  Taylor gives an almost inaudible mannequin sigh and says, “I’m just getting ready for fashion week.”

  Fifteen seconds passes that feels like three minutes, then she says, “You?”

  “Me too.” I say. “I’ve updated my walk so I can—”

  “Wait,” She says through her teeth. “You updated your walk? What do you mean?”

  “I mean I practiced and came up with a new walk.”

  She nods a nod that is only detectable by other mannequins. “What’s wrong with that?” I say.

  “But… guys always walk the same way.” She says. “You just have to walk like a jerk.”

  A passing customer arches his head up, staring at us with a confused look. I’m not sure this whole freeze modelling thing is having the intended effect, unless it was meant to confuse and frighten.

  “That’s a bit of an oversimplification,” I whisper, though she’s got the theory right. We stand there, silent for a bit, and then I realize Taylor is laughing through her teeth.

  “What?” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “Tell me!” I try to keep still.

  “It’s just… I can’t believe you practice modelling.” Taylor says. “Well, I do.”

  “You’re pretty into modelling for a guy.”

  “It’s my job,” I glance at her. “You may think it’s strange, but I think it’s stranger when people make their career doing this and don’t seem to care.”

  “I never thought about it like that.”

  “Hey,” Eunice appears, phone in hand. “Be quiet. You’re supposed to be still and silent! Like mannequins!”

  It seems counterintuitive to hire models to be mannequins when Lane Crawford has lots of plastic ones in a storage room somewhere that I’m certain are quieter and charge less than us. Eunice glares us into stillness as she melts backwards into the crowd of shoppers. Taylor and I stand motionless on the platform. The shoppers barely notice us. We are mannequins.

  Minutes crawl by and we’re invisible—hordes of shoppers splitting around our platform like a river flowing around a protruding rock—until a woman stops at Taylor’s side.

  The woman grabs a bit of Taylor’s white shorts and rubs the fabric between her fingers like she’s wiping something off them. Taylor remains frozen in her pose. Pausing to pick at her teeth, the woman continues to examine the shorts, making a face like something smells bad. Taylor does a slight glance down but the woman doesn’t notice. Taylor’s eyes dart to mine and I know she’s going to do something. Then, keeping the rest of her body still, Taylor spins her head to face the woman and says, “Boo!”

  The woman jolts up, making a weird croaking noise. Taylor and I burst out laughing. Wide eyed, the woman stumbles backward into the shoppers.

  “That was mean, I’m sorry,” Taylor giggles. “I couldn’t resist.”

  Eunice b
ursts from the crowd, waving her finger and saying something, but Taylor and I are laughing too hard to hear.

  “If I thought I had any control over modelling, I’d try, too,” Taylor says as we follow the streetlights up Elgin Street. The restaurants on either side of the road are mostly empty after we freeze modelled the night away. “But I feel like models don’t have any control over their careers. Fashion dictates the look it wants, and fashion might as well be a flip of the coin.”

  I don’t want to believe this. I can’t believe this. I have to believe I can affect my outcome in this industry because, in Taylor’s version of fashion, models are powerless. She glances at me and gives me a little smile.

  “Hey, it’s cool that you work hard at this. At least you’re willing to work. Most model guys are too busy getting drunk to do much else.” Take that Damian.

  “How’s your sister doing?” Taylor says. This makes me feel bad because I still haven’t told her the one-hundred percent Baby Jesus truth. I want to tell her, but today marks a return out of awkwardness for the two of us. Rocking boats isn’t what I want to do.

  “The thing is with my sister,” I say, rationalizing that a vague truth is still the truth. “She just turned seventeen. And she’s hanging around a lot of people she shouldn’t be with. She’s getting pulled away from her goals.” Though I keep talking in vague generalizations, it feels good to say this to somebody. And Taylor soaks up every word. The street lights accentuating her sharp cheekbones, her eyebrows the perfect mix between groomed and natural, and the sheen of her smooth skin making me want to reach out and caress her. This is like getting psychotherapy from a Lancome poster.

  When I’m finished with my half-truth, I feel much better. I realize I can’t remember the last time I spoke about a non-modelling related topic for more than five minutes.

  Taylor stops and says, “This is my place.”

  We’re in front of a gated doorway to an apartment block. She fishes in her bag for her keys and bites her lip. I can’t take my eyes off her. I feel like I just walked her home from a date, which is really sad because Taylor didn’t spend the night with me out of choice. But fuck it, I’ll take it.

  “Got them.” She holds up a keychain in triumph. “Keys.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “To my place.”

  “Yeah,” I say again because I’m smooth.

  Years of preying on girls in clubs and shoots has done nothing for my dating instincts because I’m feeling like this awkwardness could be avoided by a kiss, but I’m not entirely sure. Then I decide it’s a time for Extreme Close Talking.

  “Cool keys.” I lean into Taylors’ space feigning interest in her keychain, which she continues to hold at eye level. Extreme Close Talking is a technique I pioneered for any situation where I’m not completely certain I can go for a kiss.

  “The grooves are really grooved.” I say.

  After squinting at her keychain, my face is so close to hers my stubble brushes her smooth skin. I narrow my eyes, but can’t focus because I’m so close that Taylor is a blur of eyebrows, freckles, and nose. This blurring means I’m in prime close talking position. Kissing is now a forgone conclusion.

  Extreme Close Talking hinges on eliciting a conditioned response. Faces only get this close together before an imminent kiss, therefore getting this close to someone means they’ll eventually kiss you—if only because this is what they’ve done in the past. This always works, though to be honest, all the subjects have been blindly drunk.

  “What are you doing?” Taylor pulls away, leaving my face alone in the kissing zone.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you trying to make me kiss you?”

  “No.” I retract my face, rubbing my neck like it’s stiff.

  “It’s nice to see I’m not the only one who becomes an awkward turtle sometimes.” She grins. “Though I had tequila as an excuse.”

  Taylor wraps her arms around me, the keys dangling cold against the back of my neck. Before I understand what she’s doing, she moves in to kiss me.

  While kissing in Africa was tentative and gentle, this isn’t. Her lips are warm against mine, and we kiss open-mouthed as she runs her hand through my hair. I hold her tighter against me, my hand slipping under the soft cotton of her t-shirt, and caressing the sleek arch of her lower back. She nibbles at my bottom lip, and my penile fracture throbs, sending a jolt of pain through my midsection that reminds me of the threat of horrifying dick surgery.

  “Maybe you should come upstairs,” Taylor breaths. “You know, make sure my keys are working.”

  I would love nothing more than to make sure her keys are working, but more than the risk to my future erections is the risk of not delivering on the sexual experience my good looks promise.

  I’ve always been confident about living up to that promise, but now, I’m badly out of practice. And with the way things have gone lately, who knows what kind of disaster zone a sexual attempt with Taylor could turn into. Last time I tried to have sex someone barfed on my face. “Maybe I can check your keys another time,” I say, stepping away. “It’s just… it’s late, you know?”

  “Really? You sure you don’t want to…” She closes the gap between us and I step back.

  “I really shouldn’t. But I had a great time tonight,” I say, realizing how stupid that sounds when it refers to three hours of freeze modelling. Taylor looks at me like I’m speaking Latin.

  “Wow, this is…” She shakes her head. “I feel like I’m pressuring you or something.”

  “Yeah,” I say, needing to find something to say that will make her understand not having sex tonight, but not scare her away. “You’re the douchebag.”

  I need to learn to stop talking. Taylor cocks her head at me.

  “Oh, really?” She says, then grins. “That’s what this is about? You’re trying to prove to me that you’re not?”

  I’m just a boy standing in front of a girl trying to save his penis from cock surgery, but I’ll take the explanation she’s offering. I shrug and smirk. “Fine, get out of here.” She puts a hand on her hip and puffs out her chest. “I’ll call you, babe. Promise.” This is getting weird. I turn to go.

  Taylor slaps me on the ass. I look back and she’s smiling.

  “If I’m the douchebag, I’m gonna be a proper douchebag,” She says. “Now run along.”

  Walking away, I’m not sure if I should be feeling emasculated or anxious or what. The only thing I am certain of is—that ass slap was oddly arousing.

  CHAPTER 25

  Colin Bryce Hamilton

  Time to bring it! #GucciCasting #BeastMode #ThisIsWhatIDo

  7 people like this.

  IN THE GLIMMERING light of midday, Jasmine’s model apartment goes from looking like a scene from the zombie apocalypse to a scene out of a crack house which is, sadly, an improvement.

  “When I said I wanted to meet, I didn’t mean here,” Jasmine says, leading me past a kitchen that smells like a pile of wet running shoes. “We could’ve gone to Starbucks or something.”

  “This is more economical,” I lie. Money had nothing to do with meeting here. I wanted to make sure conditions weren’t deteriorating in her model brothel. Unfortunately, the current state of disorder isn’t deteriorative, it’s pretty much the same shitty status quo.

  “Bro,” Freduardo nods at me as he walks past bicep curling large jugs of water alternately in each hand while a joint dangles between his lips. He’s wearing the same tank top I saw him in last time. Windows by Felix Snow plays from a tinny speaker somewhere under the trash in his room.

  “I’d hug you hello but you’re all sweaty,” Jasmine says to him, holding her bedroom door open for me. The Brazilian grins—the joint between his teeth—then puts on a fake look of determination as he starts curling the crappy water jugs like he’s working on a solution for clean energy. If he’s trying to impress my sister, he should have picked a spot with better light. Amateur.

  I enter her room and Jasmin
e shuts the door behind me.

  “Honestly, I’d hug him anyway, but I hate the smell of that stuff and I’m not even smoking it. I always keep my door shut.”

  If smoking weed is keeping my sister away from Senor Brazilian biceps, then I hope he smokes that shit until he’s vomiting flat earth theories on YouTube.

  “One Models has a free gym pass, why doesn’t Freduardo work out there?” I say this knowing he probably likes having my sister as an audience while he curls whatever other items of trash he uses as weights.

  “Eduardo!” Jasmine grins and slaps my shoulder. “He says ‘cause he can’t smoke weed at the gym.”

  That answer is just seventeen different kinds of stupid. I’m realizing all those overprotective Dads who want their daughters to wear chastity belts until menopause aren’t crazy, they just know what kind of knuckleheads are out there.

  Jasmine sits on the bottom bunk. Her room an oasis of clean compared to the abomination that is the rest of the apartment. Her drapes are open and the sun shines in on the neatly made beds. An air freshener perched atop her suitcase in the corner of the room puffs and suddenly everything smells like being lost in El Salvador. I know this because the freshener unit reads Lost in El Salvador.

  “Has Damian asked about me?” Jasmine says as I note that Lost in El Salvador smells woody and fresh and not at all like sweat and desperation—

  which is what I thought it would smell like.

  “Tell me that’s not what you wanted to talk about,” I say. “And, no. He hasn’t.”

  My sister frowns. Inside I smile.

  “No, I wanted to ask for some advice,” she says. “Work isn’t picking up. I don’t have my prints. Landing fashion week shows might be my only chance to impress IMD. Runway is huge in Milano, right?”

  “Yeah, especially for show season,” I say though I’d rather talk to my sister about Damian than about her going to Italy. “That’s how you get seen and book bigger and better stuff.”

  “That’s the problem,” Jasmine says. “I’ve been trying to work on my runway walk but I feel stupid. You practice your walk, right?”