by Kate Manning
The first piece I modeled was a one-shoulder job, gathered tight across the chest, with a tulle apron tied over a skirt, slit up the east and slit up the west. Aqua. It was gorgeous, really, and I hoped I’d get to keep it. The Italian heels with it had straps like webs. Glenda and Honey were in the same dress, only Glenda’s was tangerine, Honey’s was magenta. We were wearing baubly earrings, teardrop necklaces. We were gaudy as parrots except for our nightmare hair and makeup.
“Okay,” said Michael. “Ready”—lowering his eye to the viewfinder.
I lifted my arm and leaned on the doorframe. Honey put her weight on her front foot and her hands on her hips. Glenda rested against me, and we vamped and posed as usual. When they were done shooting on the steps we climbed over the broken building on slabs of concrete in our nail-spike heels, holding the hands of Kevin and Keith and Bonni, Michael’s assistants. The air smelled of wet cement. Where we were posing now had been somebody’s apartment. The green paint on one of the standing walls was faded except where the people who lived there had hung things. You could see a blue patch where someone had simply painted green around a picture, without bothering to take it off the hook. Mixed into all the debris were buggies and dishes, chairs and clothes, toys and magazines. People were certainly moved out in a hurry, I thought. I was distracted by one small sock the size of Hallie’s. I bent and picked up a piece of paper that turned out to be the sixth-grade report card of a girl named Latisha Harris. She had mostly Bs that first semester of 1986 at Our Lady of Sorrows Academy on Broad Street.
“C’mon, Charlotte, get into it,” Michael the photographer said. He sounded annoyed. “There’s a girl, that’s it.”
I was having a little trouble. I knew it. We were posing in a wreck of metal and cement where someone had lived. That crowd was watching, a circle of children pointing, teenage boys on bikes, girls smoking cigarettes and pushing strollers, an old lady with a walker, guys with brown paper bags around their cans. It made me embarrassed, which is always deadly in pictures. I moved halfheartedly, distracted and self-conscious.
“Charlotte!” Kevin said. “To the camera, please. Remember, it’s a party.”
We leaned on the one standing wall, put our bare legs up on blocks of concrete. I looked at Glenda to see what she thought, but she was working, concentrating. She smiled into my eyes while Michael clicked away.
The crowd watching us was getting bigger and noisier.
Hey! Hey you! Could I be a model? I got the look, right? I got it? How you get to do that? I wanta be a star! Make me a star. They started clowning around, imitating us. Look how she do that! Look how she lie on the other one, how they stick the butts out. Then a girl about eighteen years old started singing, in a big gospel voice. She sang a few bars of “Amazing Grace” and then did a sweeping, perfect curtsy. Make me famous, y’all! she called, and there was clapping.
We drove back to the trailer to change for the next series of pictures, looking out of the windows like tourists. Garbage was stacked in hills along the sidewalks. Knots of men sat on benches drinking. A hairy black tangle of spray-painted graffiti covered all the low walls, the sides of trucks and dumpsters.
“Look at this place,” I said. “God.” It was hard to believe it was American.
“They should blow it up,” Glenda said. “Looks like Hell. It is Hell.”
“I guess,” I said. “Seems like a waste, all those apartments. Maybe they could fix them up.”
“Would you live here?” she asked. Sarcastically, I thought.
“No,” I said. “Of course not. Neither would you.”
“Got that right,” she said, shuddering again. “They should level the whole place. Horrible.”
Maybe she was right, but it was not the time to discuss it. I had to keep my mind on working, on the party mood Kevin wanted. If I didn’t, he would bark at me again; inhibition and doubt would show up in the pictures.
For the demolition shots Kevin had us change into what he called our urban combat gear. Glenda was in a red suede trench coat over a black brassiere top, narrow satin pants. I was in a black leather flak vest, open over a purple satin teddy, short leather skirt, thigh boots with crèpe heels. Honey had a leather camouflage-pattern dress that was unzipped to the navel, with thick army-style boots and bare knees. It was crowded in the one trailer and we were all cranky and hot. Nobody was enjoying this shoot now except maybe Kevin. Maybe Lucy, who was unredeemably cheerful. “This is brilliant,” she kept saying. “You girls are fantastic.”
Well, it was not brilliant. It was nerve-wracking. We were not fantastic, we were jumpy. Blastoff was in thirty minutes. A siren kept sounding, big whoops of alarm. “They’re warning everyone away from the building,” Lucy said. “They’re sweeping it now.” Every time the siren went off we jumped and shrieked like women in cartoons who have seen mice.
“Okay, get set,” Kevin called us. “Let’s go.”
When we came out of our trailer this time, the parking lot was full of commotion. Police cars stood by, lights flashing. We somehow had to get to our own “set,” a space roped off far to the side of the official platform with the bunting and the dignitaries on it. We trooped in our robes over the hardpack of the courtyard, over the glitter of broken bottles and stubs of cigarettes and colored crack vial stoppers. A straggle of people followed us, watched as we climbed onto a wooden stage where seven photographers, all hired by Edge, had cameras trained on us from various angles, high and low, on tripods and handheld.
“About fifteen minutes,” Kevin said.
“Hey, cocoa.” A man in a black beret and dark-framed glasses had followed our little party as we walked. “Hey, yellowbone.” He was talking to Glenda, staring up at her from the edge of the platform. “Hey, cocoa.”
“Get the guy away,” Glenda asked Lucy.
“What’re you coming in here for?” the man shouted suddenly. “What you white people want coming in here taking pictures for?”
“Oh boy,” Glenda said.
“You people always coming around sticking your cameras in our face,” the man said. “Doing your news, doing your photography, doing your questions! Stick it in your own face! That’s what I say! In your face! Hey, you, cocoa, what you doing in with them?”
A nearby police officer took the man by the elbow and led him away. As he left we heard him, shouting. “Go turn the camera on your own self! Look in your own house! Look who’s the one with the dynamite!”
“Kevin,” I said. I wanted to leave.
“Shhh!” he said.
The mayor was making a speech at the far end of the courtyard. The mike squealed with feedback sound that echoed around the buildings. He said some things about failure and dreams. Crime and time. As he talked, we rolled our necks and limbered our backs. He talked about cleanup, renewal, and hope. The three of us girls stretched, and he mentioned the new replacement units; he mentioned the Phoenix, a glorious bird rising up from ashes. Kevin signaled us and we took off our robes. The men in the group watching us let out a little cheer, which coincided with the mayor’s introduction of a tiny old woman named Beulah Reynolds, a former tenant of the project, the one who was going to press the trigger to blow up her former home. She stood on a plastic crate to reach the microphone. Good-bye and good riddance, she said.
Some official began counting backward, and the small crowd joined in.
Ten, nine, eight…
Lucy said, “Start, girls.”
The cameras clicked and whirred. We began a choreography of poses, slouching and crouching as if we were under fire. Glenda threw her head back in fear and Honey closed her eyes in a spasm meant to look mysterious—ecstatic or petrified, however you wanted to read it. I covered my head in defense but made sure my face was open to the camera, panicking and terrified.
There was a quick series of booms, like backfiring trucks. Then a tearing rumbling that shook our small platform so it was difficult to keep steady. Behind us, the noise built and the crowd burst into bloodlust ch
eers and wild clapping. We couldn’t turn to look, though. We were working. We moved slowly. Kevin sounded like he was whispering but he must have been speaking loudly over the noise. Great, beautiful, wonderful girls. Maybe it lasted sixty seconds? Two minutes? More fear, Michael said. More, more. The rumbling faded. We kept going till Lucy said Okay, enough. We relaxed and turned, expecting to see the building falling behind us, but there was only a choking puff of rising dark dust.
We scrambled shakily off the platform. Kevin and Lucy were ecstatic. The Polaroids were excellent. “This is going to be radical,” Kevin kept saying. “Astonishing.” We walked across the courtyard with everybody hugging and giddy. Me too. I was so happy it was over. That band of kids and the TV crew were following us back to our trailer. Safari Jacket was hustling along trying to keep his microphone wires clear.
“So, ladies, hang on, hang on,” he said to us.
Lucy said we’d talk to him after we changed.
I was just so glad to have that leather vest off. It was over. Done. I could go home and take a shower. Go home and not come back. The air had a smell of cement dust and singe. I sat on the bumper of the limousine drinking seltzer water and waiting for Lucy and Glenda and Honey to finish talking to the news team about our fabulous weird magazine. Then it was my turn, and Honey lingered while the tech took her mike off. Another guy wired me up while Marv chattered away.
Marv: Name?
Me: Charlotte.
Marv: Charlotte …?
Me: Halsey.
Honey said, “Robicheaux,” just casually over her shoulder as she left, like an afterthought. I smiled and said that I preferred to go by Halsey, and Honey said, “Ooops, sorry.”
But Marv perked up. “Cade’s wife? Milo Robicheaux’s wife, right?”
What was I supposed to say? No? I was his wife. Am his wife. I don’t hide it. Why would I?
“I wondered,” Marv said. “I thought so.” He got extra charming then. He asked me, how was Cade doing? When would the next sequel be released? What did I think the box office would do? They were not rolling tape that I could tell so I just answered him. Soon Marv did a white balance for the cameraman, holding up a sheet of blank paper, and started asking me questions.
Marv: So why’d ya pick this location for your fashion spread?
Me: Well, I’m not the editor, I’m just the clotheshorse, but I’d say we picked it because we always try to show off the clothes in a new way, grab your attention with an exotic location like this, and of course anything dramatic, like an explosion, would tend to be a real eye-catching backdrop for a fashion shoot.
Marv: Would you say this event here today is a sign of the failure of public housing?
Me: Well, again, I’m a fashion model, so I don’t know.
Marv: What’s your feeling about this demolition?
Me: My feeling?
My feeling was of being out of my depth. I just knew what Lucy said. What Kevin and Glenda and the mayor said. The perfect ruin, full of drug dealers, looks like hell, urban renewal, new townhouses. Everyone around me was giddy with the celebratory mood of the speeches and the shoot, the sun shining. I heard people saying Congratulations, it all went so well. I was caught up in the mood of it, distracted and still kicking myself for losing my concentration earlier, eager to please, so I said in this chirpy uneasy voice, sort of shrugging:
Me: I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve heard all the buildings were full of drug dealers and criminals, or something. It’s supposed to be Hell.
It came out wrong, the way I said it. Marv just looked at me blankly like he wanted some elaboration and combed his hair with his fingernails. Which were polished! with clear lacquer. He just kept looking at me, and I got more flustered, distracted by his polished nails.
Marv: With all the homelessness we have in the eighties, why
blow up buildings? Why not renovate
Me: Gosh, I don’t know. But maybe no one should have to live in a place that’s not, you know, nice, so they should be blown up, I guess.
Isn’t that what the mayor said? I pictured rows of newly built town-houses with neat lawns, carpeted hallways.
Me: You’d really have to ask the people who live here. I don’t know. I live in California.
Marv: Is your husband a supporter of your work in this magazine?
Me: Well, of course he is! We’re investors in Edge and have been since it started up a year or so ago. It’s doing very well, you know, it’s a wonderful magazine and the new issue will be the greatest ever. It’s called Bombshells!
I said this last part in my best girlish advertising voice, with a little wink. I was glad to push Edge, for Kevin’s sake. He was my friend and he had certainly helped me, so I would do anything I could for him.
Marv: Thank you
Me: No, thank you.
28.
We had dinner late that night. Hallie was still on West Coast time, and it took us forever to get her to sleep. By the time I got downstairs from her room, it was nearly ten o’clock. Milo had Sade on the sound system, singing “Diamond Life,” and we started cooking in the kitchen, feeling happy, as if the song was about us.
“So,” Milo said, “tell me.” He was pouring tequila into triple sec.
“I don’t know, sweetie,” I said. “It was even weirder than the meat shoot.”
“Not possible,” he said. “Not possible to be weirder than the meat shoot.”
I explained the whole thing to him, about the building blowing up, and the mayor and having to climb around a wreck in heels. He was impressed. He kept rearing his head back on his neck in surprise. “Sounds wild,” he said.
“Maybe it will be on the news,” I said. “Reporters were there.”
We turned the kitchen TV on without sound to the ten o’clock news.
“That’s it!” I said. A freeze frame of the derelict projects lingered over the anchorman’s shoulder.
“Lead story?” said Milo.
“That’s where we were.”
“Jesus,” Milo said, turning the sound up and listening.
Boom!
We watched the building collapse in on itself like a falling cake. Marv was talking on the voice-over.
It took tons of dynamite and just about 120 seconds to demolish this urban jungle today, when the Newark, New Jersey, Housing Authority blew up the second building in its long effort to dismantle the thirty-five-year-old Hughes Homes.
“Great footage,” Milo said.
Marv rattled on about vacancies, maintenance problems. He said drug-infested and crime-plagued, voicing over pictures of the men drinking from brown bags and women leaning out of windows.
Next we saw Beulah Reynolds, with “Former Resident” supered underneath her, saying Good-bye and good riddance. They showed the building going down again, in slow motion.
And then there was Charlotte and Honey and Glenda, all of us parading around the wreckage, and Michael snapping away. Marv was voicing over us, too. Unbelievably, a group of models showed up at the demolition ceremonies, shooting a fashion spread. And they touched off dynamite of another kind.
The piece cut to the guy in the beret who’d been bothering Glenda, ranting to Marv, too, now: Why are you here? Why are they here? Why don’t all you people take your TV cameras and check out of here? “Taj, Activist” was supered underneath his picture.
There was more footage of me and Honey and Glenda, vamping around the rubble. Then came a picture of just me and a cover of Edge magazine.
“Jesus,” Milo said.
One of the models, Charlotte Robicheaux, is married to the actor Milo Robicheaux, said Marv, over a clip from Cade, Rebel Fury. Robicheaux, the first black man to win a Winter Olympics medal, and star of the popular Cade films, is a financial backer of the magazine. His wife says they chose today’s demolition for its visual potential.
Then there I was again, brushing my hair off my face, opening my mouth, and speaking: We try to show off the clothes, grab your attention with
an exotic location like this, I said. Anything dramatic, like an explosion, would tend to be an eye-catching backdrop for a fashion shoot.
“Whoa,” said Milo. “What—”
Marv’s voice-over again: Robicheaux said it was a good thing the projects were being destroyed.
Back to Charlotte, saying: The buildings were full of drug dealers and criminals, so, they should be blown up.
There was a little more: a bit from the mayor’s speech, some shots of the dust rising up, people saying it was a blessing, people saying it was a shame and a waste and those new houses would never get built. And then Marv, signing off. Reporting from Newark, I’m Marv James.
I remember it was suddenly hard to swallow. All the regular noises of the kitchen were dulled down; the hum of the refrigerator, the anchorwoman reading more news, the scratch of the phonograph needle picking up off the record, all dropped into the background of one tiny sound, which I heard the way a field mouse hears owl wings in the night. It was the sound of Milo breathing.
His breath was shallow. “Whoa,” he said. He rubbed the ridges on his forehead and blew air through his cheeks. “Jesus.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“That what?”
“That, you know, this, that they would—”
“That was you, talking to the guy, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah, but—”
“Jesus, Charlotte.” He stopped.