Chapter 10
APRIL 1996:
And I miss you... Like the deserts miss the rain...
Dad knew I wanted to be a big celebrity, bigger than Adolf Hitler and Michael Jackson combined. I don't know if he thought the attainment of my megalomaniacal dreams was possible ("there are millions of people in New York and L.A. waiting tables for a living and they all want it more than you do"), but he knew it would be good for me to try. I was a sissy half-fag who hated sports (especially football), but even sensitive, solitary queers need constructive activity in the frame of a structured environment. Modeling was my extracurricular activity, just as my sister played soccer and fiddled with the violin.
And I miss you… Like the deserts miss the rain…
I wanted to be a famous model, actor, comedian, performance artist, screenwriter, director, and producer for three reasons:
And I miss you… Like the deserts miss the rain…
The mid-90s house music pulsed and throbbed through the studio.
I step off the train… I’m walking down your street again…
Wes, a scrawny scrapper, a Punk Rock Cary Elwes, touched the hard and thin pinkish-brown carpet with the tips of his already-cigarette-yellowed fingers. Tar-hands at the age of 23. A recovered addict and alcoholic – an O’Doul’s drinker sober enough to fuck all the drunk girls – he saw modeling as therapy, redemption, a dream of fame and fortune hatched on a no-frills Narcanon napkin. Wes had tattoos, but Jahn said that “tattoos sometimes work” (on an edgy person, but not for me because they saw me as a commercial model, a lad as wholesome as Johnboy from “The Waltons.”)
Vince shrugged his shoulders and made short, elliptical arm circles – and that was about as far as his arms would extend from his chest. Shortish (his fellow guidos would have called him “sawed-off”) and musclebound, “Vin” looked like a thick, super-compressed, ultra-muscled version of Sly Stallone (but with a face scarred almost-James-Woods-handsome by steroid acne.) He was not what Team Model was looking for (they didn’t like “cheesy”), but they had taken him on as a favor for another agency. This other agency wanted Jahn and Mark to refine Vince’s rough edges. “Vin” was a longshoreman from Bayonne, so Jahn and Mark had a task ahead of them equal to that of any Victorian-Era finishing school.
I cracked my back – a timid, tentative crack. What if someone thought my warm-up was weird and made fun of me for it? Inhibited inclines increased my tension. For me, warm-ups were always tense-ups.
Our stretches and hamstring extensions reflected our personalities. Chris Rodgers and Ron Galan – both the people persons of our group - pushed and pulled, dangled and mangled, jacked and slacked one another in a homoerotic ballet of refined two-man isometric exercises. The result mimicked either an acting school mirror practice or a mime pressing his hands against the clear glass of a prison visitation room.
Whereas Mike Siddis, a possibly black, Arab, or Latino loner – a quiet type - stood in a corner and touched his toes, his eyes toward the floor or ceiling but never level with our pecs or peckers.
And past your door… But you don’t live there anymore…
The music flowed from a then-state-of-the-art CD player, a dustless novelty of nouveau-comfort, tucked into the back-left corner of the perfumed studio (the whole agency smelled like Curve cologne.)
“What the fuck is this shit?” said Vince. “I feel like I’m in a fuckin’ queer bar!”
“What the fuck do you want them to play?” asked Sylvan, a chisel-faced Slav. “Slayer’s ‘Dead Skin Mask’? We’re in a fucking modeling studio.”
“This shit is kinda gay yo…” said Jeremy the Ebonics-speaking whiteboy.
We all seemed to agree that the song sucked. A brotherhood of those who hated lame music.
“I’m just saying,” said Vince. “I know we’re all models, but that don’t mean we’re a bunch of fucking fags.”
“You have to be careful what you say, Vin,” said Joe Scaracci from the side of his snaggle-toothed mouth. Jahn and Mark must have liked Joe for his Cagney-esque look (not that I knew/know anything about James Cagney.) “What if they hear you through the door?”
Smooth, finished, sand-papered wooden doors separated our runway and studio from the offices, reception desk, and front waiting area.
“I don’t give a fuck,” said Vince, but he said it quietly as if he very much did give a fuck. “At least change this shit!”
Jason Distefano walked over to the stereo and examined it. Jason was Vince’s lackey, a similar-minded Jersey Shore bar-hopper, a fellow-fucker of dumb girls, an aspiring fitness model. He was taller and leaner than Vince, his bumps and ripples more evenly distributed than Vince’s petite (coiled like a spring) package of tremendous tris and bodacious bis. Though Jason had a more marketable and much less tacky look than Vince, he was the heterosexual bottom, the attentive Patroclus to Vince’s roaring Achilles. Jason, careless of the possibly dire consequences, pushed the skip-forward button. Maybe the next track would be a little less faggoty.
But something went wrong. The CD hiccuped.
Like the deserts…
Like the deserts…
Like the deserts…
Miss the…
Like the deserts..
Da… Da… Da… Da…
Uh-oh.
“Oh Gosh,” said Paul, the ginger of the group, a pastor’s son, a Freshman in Bible college and, hopefully, the only guy in the group with the same amount of sexual experience as me: none.
“Don’t say anything,” said Dan De Soto, the Latin Lover of the group. “Just act like it started skipping on its own.”
The doors opened.
Uh-oh.
Jahn stepped into the studio. The spotlight at the head of the room reflected off the lenses of his round-framed glasses. His neck twitched – and he wasn’t twitchy – against the black collar of his skin-tight turtleneck. He clutched a clipboard against the breast of his tweed suit jacket.
Deserts miss the…
Deserts miss the…
Deserts…
Deserts…
Deserts…
His slight jowl quivered. Though a bit pudgy in middle-age, the younger Jahn had enjoyed a successful career as a commercial model. He had looked like a chestnut-haired yet somehow handsome Howdy Doody, the All-American college kid home for Christmas (and enjoying a hot cup of Folgers with mom, dad, grandma and grandpa.)
But age had robbed Jahn of his boyish looks and by the time I had met him he could have passed as the doppelganger of the grown-up Sean Astin:
Desert…
Desert…
Desert…
Jahn walked to the stereo system, shuffled, sniffed, and tapped the “Power Off” button.
Des…
Silence. We knew we were in for it.
Jahn paced back and forth and examined our crew as if he were a tin-pot dictator inspecting a guard of honor.
“Who touched the stereo?” he asked, sweet and calm as could be (and he was seldom either of those two adjectives.)
We stood there, a brotherhood. None of us would snitch on Jason or anyone else.
Jahn threw his clipboard on the perfumed carpet, bunched himself up, squatted, and channeled his rage into an ear-piercing scream:
“Cut the shit!” he screeched. “What the fuck do you think would happen if you went into a modeling agency in New York and touched one of their stereos? They would throw you out on your fucking ass is what! And then they would blackball you and you would never work anywhere again. You want to touch my fucking stereo? Who wants to touch my fucking stereo?”
Mark, Jahn’s life and business partner, peeked through the door.
“Jahn… What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?”
“They think it’s funny to touch our fucking stereo and cause a CD to skip!”
“Oh my…”
“You tell them, Mark. What would happen if they went to an agency like Ford and did something like that?”
“Oh, they would be finished,” said Mark. The statement oozed from him like a languorous release of deep muscle tension. His boxy glasses also reflected the light. So did his silk, lime-green shirt (which must have been from Barney’s or somewhere like that.) Mark, also more than a few pounds past his runway prime, had a more sandy-haired Teutonic look than the Irish-faced Jahn. He reminded me of a slightly overweight version of Andreas Wisniewski, a German actor best known for playing one of the terrorists in “Die Hard”:
“You’re lucky Mark made three commissions this morning or you would all be in deep shit. I explode all the time, but when Mark explodes it’s like a hydrogen bomb.”
Jahn turned his back to us in disgust and walked to a director’s chair, a red and tan Cecil B. Demille special to the right center of the runway. He sat down, crossed his legs, rolled his eyes (once), and shouted:
“Joe, get up on the fucking runway. Followed by Will, Wes, and Jeremy. Hurry the fuck up! I’m in a bad mood!”
The clipboard remained on the floor for the duration of the session, a silent reproach. Why should he expend the effort to pick up his clipboard and take notes on our runway technique if we did not respect his stereo?
We each paid $2500 or more for three months of Jahn’s guidance. The cost covered the minimum of the training, photoshoot and annual showcase, a glitzy shindig attended by top agents from Ford, Wilhelmina and every other prestigious NYC agency.
Jeremy’s trampy-vampy single mother (we all know the “Stiffler’s Mom” type – except she wasn’t as hot) might have put the fee on her credit card. Matt Colton’s whitebred mom and pop probably wrote a good check. But what about the twenty-something guys, all of them blue collar (at best) workers? Joe Scaracci, a High School dropout and car washer by trade, must have paid for the abuse on layaway.
“Hurry up, Joe! If you don’t know how to take direction you’ll never fucking work in this industry!”
Team Model Management was not a scam nor was it not a scam. Like many queers, Jahn and Mark were shrewd, ruthless businessmen of the sort who value money more than cock (how could anyone prefer filthy lucre to one’s preferred sexual practices?) Their business operated well within the bounds of legality and down to the letter of a lawyer’s finest print, but they did not quite stand on a solid moral or ethical ground (though they “kinda” did.)
Unlike Barbizon or other modeling schools, Team Model did not accept everyone. Judging by the hordes at the open call, they might have had a more stringent acceptance rate than MIT. Some of the rejects were much better-looking than me, but they might not have had a “bookable” look or personality. Some must have projected Jersey Shore vapidity, a provincial arrogance, or a sense of a “we are the beautiful people” entitlement. Jahn’s keen eye picked out the “tells” that might have been missed by someone outside of the industry, the monotone grunt or smart-alecky sneer that suggested a lazy, strident, reckless, rebellious or arrogant disposition. Jahn - and I will always admire him for it - had no tolerance for everyday decadence. He preferred a jet-set decadence, a decadence as far removed from backwoods psilocybin raves decadence as a Pabst Blue Ribbon is to a glass of Dom Perignon. With the exception of Vince (and even he was a favor for another agency, a borrowed mook, a primate who would learn to walk on two feet), Team Model only repped those who were likeable enough to book. (Not that Vince was a “psilocybin rave decadent” – far from it. He was way too stereotypically Italian to know what a “rave” was – he just liked to go to Jenks and fuck guidettes.)
Many of Jahn and Mark’s models worked. A small number of them graced the catwalks of Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and other similarly glamorous (and gayish) locations. Others worked hair or makeup shows in much-less-chic Cherry Hill or Edison, New Jersey. And, yes, some of us went on to appear in television commercials for acne medication (I am not mentioning any names!)
We each had a chance to recoup the $2500, but nothing was guaranteed. Our success in a “tough business” rested on the usual showbiz variables: talent, luck, hard work, persistence, and the mercurial dispositions of our “managers.” Jahn or Mark might or might not have picked up the phone or made the call for any one of us and for any number of petty reasons. They wanted “thank yous” (the more the better) and whoever thanked them the most (sometimes four to five expressions of gratitude in a single interaction) received the most attention. The thoughtful schmoozers trekked to NYC “go-sees” and auditions three or four times a week while the self-absorbed (in the wrong way) “hiders” stayed home and played with themselves in their “duct-tape-wallpaper” bathrooms.
Jahn and Mark yelled, screamed, cursed, thrashed, and trashed…
But worst of all…
Was that sometimes they didn’t call…
***
Lewis lounged, slouched his back against the institutional sea-green tile like an “I don’t give a fuck” Marlboro Man (though he stayed loyal – staunchly so – to his preferred Newport 100s.) His pink, livid, nigger-esque lips jutted out as if he were a muscular 6’2” Kierkegaard, a predator-skeletor bopping through the streets of Copenhagen.
He wore a designer wigger shirt, a Calvin Klein, a Hilniger, a whatever-the-fuck, but a designer shirt as pink as the tongue of a clam. Pig pink… As pink as the Miss Piggy who adorned the front of the tee. For the shirt was a designer Muppet shirt for teen and young adult thugs. Marketed to Harlem drug dealers who liked “Sesame Street.” Expensive threads. Miss Piggy and Kermit framed and splashed along the fabric – “Muppet Life.” The fucking Muppets. The quasi-faggoty shirt made Lewis look all the tougher. No one would question his shirt because he could possibly kill or cripple any pussy who might have catapulted an unwelcome wisecrack in his general direction. In Lewis’ presence verbal diarrhea solidified to lexical chronic constipation.
He said hello to this person or that person who passed by. He had somehow become popular for who he was – a juvenile delinquent (though none of his now-many friends would ever understand his moral, mental, and sexual perversions as well as I did – it takes a fellow moral, mental, and sexual outlaw to understand a particular kind of anality.) I approached him to say “hi” because that’s what friends do and I was still “technically” his best friend (though we had been growing further and further apart by the second, minute, hour, and day.)
“Hey, what’s up, man?”
“Hey Will.”
Hordes of students walked past us, buzzing and bustling from one classroom to another.
Lewis pulled out a stack of hundreds – as if to show off – and counted them. $2000 – a lot of money for a 16-year-old.
“Where the fuck did you get all of that money?”
He must have though I suspected him of dealing drugs.
“It ain’t from dealing drugs. Fat Steve and I have found a new job.”
I didn’t like Fat Steve. Despite the predominance of wiggerdom in their circle he listened to the band Bush (a crime that should have been punishable by death.) He was a corpulent, bespectacled creep, just like the uncle who lived with him and his mother (his uncle enjoyed jerking off into condoms and leaving them around the house.)
“What’s that?”
“Breaking into houses.”
Oh shit…
Jesenia walked by and said, “Hi Lewis” and “Hi Will.”
Did she know of his ill-gotten gains?
Were any Puerto Rican girls civilians or were they all tainted by a close association with criminals?
Not that I hung out with the Chess Club or the National Honor Society.
But I didn’t have a pussy, so there was no reason for me to hang out with civilian “nice boys.” As Axl Rose said, “nice boys don’t play Rock N’ Roll” (nor do they break into people’s houses.)
Jesenia, unlike me, was P.R. (or at least half-P.R.) and so she was one of the most sacred women on earth. Should she have been fraternizing with hoodlums like Lewis or Tommy? Let alone fucking one of them?
This brings to mind the most offensive joke of all time. Here it is:
“Why don’t Puerto Ricans play hide and seek?”
“Because no one would look for them.”
Offensive because any man worth his cum would look for the Puerto Rican girls first and leave all the stupid white sluts hiding until sunrise.
Don’t you think Fat Steve’s lonely, sexually-frustrated uncle would have looked for the Puerto Rican girl?
***
Jahn paced back and forth along the base of the runway.
“Do you guys think you’re hot? Do you think you’re hot shit? Are you here because your mother told you you were hot? Or grandma from Omaha? All grandmas think their grandsons are handsome. But why are you here? There are lots of attractive people in the world but they’re not trying to become models. So, why the fuck are you here? Will, step up to the runway.”
I did as I was told.
“Why the fuck are you crouching as you walk to my runway? Stand up straight! Look at your audience! I don’t care if it’s the other guys in your group. Fucking look at them! Make eye contact with all of them. Chest out, shoulders up, head up straight. Eye contact with everyone. Strength and confidence. You want to be a model? You want to be an actor? Do you think they pay Tom Cruise 20 million dollars a film so he can hide from everyone? No arms in front of your body – that’s hiding! Your shoulder is up by your ear! Relax the tension in your shoulders. Stand up straight – bad posture is just more hiding!”
Jahn stood next to me, sucked in his gut, hunched his back, put his arm in front of his waist as a protective gesture and looked sideways and down. The person he imitated was either me or the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
***
Blue clouds of secondhand smoke wreathed up, (like the tendrils blown from Santa Claus’ pipe), coiled around the mirrors, and spread as sheet-flat against the ceiling as the ocean at lowest tide – and with the same back and forth motion. Most of the smoke was the carcinogenic byproduct of the discount cigarettes (the spent stubs of everything from Doral Filters to Basic Ultra Lights floated over the piss-eroded urinal cakes) stolen from careless-decadent parents, but somewhere in the gaseous soup were a few detectable particles of something much more psychoactive than nicotine. A skunk was loose!
Lewis peeked out from the bathroom stall.
“Oh, it’s only Will.”
He ducked back inside the rectangular pee chamber.
I walked over to the stall, tilted the door, and said hello. To my surprise, he was not alone in there. Tommy (as in Jesenia’s Tommy) crouched against the side of the stall as Lewis squatted (he wasn’t shitting though, of course) on the toilet seat and held a cheap neon green Bic lighter against the metal bowl of a coiled plastic pipe, the plug from a car, a twisted implement of industrial black and gray – the most makeshift weed-smoking device short of a bottle of Aspirin or an indented Coca-Cola can.
Tommy’s presence startled me. I stumbled in the way of a man who opens a cupboard and finds a family of bats nesting in a bowl of cup noodles. He, fortunately, did not seem to notice my awkward stagger. If he had noticed my starstruckness, he did not think to acknowledge it.
Lewis sparked a dusty ember, inhaled the smoke, and exhaled the noxious toxins (I hate pot.) Why does weed smoke always exit the lungs and mouth as transparent ribbons compared to the chimney-like plumes of tobacco smoke?
He passed the bowl to Tommy and Tommy (Jesenia’s Tommy!) took an impressive hit (and without coughing, which suggested either a high tolerance or lungs that were naturally alpha.) How could Tommy run a criminal empire (which I assumed he did) and get high? Didn’t a Don have to keep his head? Did the Corleones ever smoke such a filthy, phantasmagoric, nightmare of a drug? (Pot should be thought of as a very dangerous and mind-altering drug, a trigger to psychosis, a destroyer of artists.)
“Hey Will, this is Tommy.”
Tommy glanced up at me – the wiry hair on the top of his head looked more niggerish than ever (but he wasn’t black.)
“What’s up?”
He took another hit. Oh, okay… Back then pot seemed as glamorous as Tommy’s gold chain or any other wiggerish trapping (mostly because I had not yet tried the devil’s weed.)
“Hu-wha-the-hey, what’s up,” I replied, as if Tommy was Joe Pesci himself. At least he didn’t call me a “stutterin’ prick.”
I didn’t want to end up like Spider from “GoodFellas.”
***
“Our photo shoot is this weekend. I expect you to bring wardrobe, props, accessories, and anything you can think of and to do something very weird, strange, outlandish with all of it… Under my art direction, of course (Jahn pulled the lapels of his tweed jacket.) Let your imagination run wild… But it better not be boring and ordinary. I hate boring! I hate ordinary! I only want to see what’s extraordinary. Everything else is a waste of time! Who wants to be mediocre? Are any of you here because you want to be mediocre? Are you going to put duct tape wallpaper on your walls like they do in Fargo, North Dakota?”
Jahn’s Gospel of Superiority and Coastal Elitism (20 years before Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign) resonated with my wounded soul. How often had I seen the mediocre guy win the affection of pretty girls? Ordinary bastards stole the love and affection that was rightfully mine. The grunters, skaters, surfers, baseball stars, mealy-mouthed punks, and freckly tormentors somehow outdid me in every social situation. Not because they contained or expressed my largeness of soul but because they somehow knew all the right moves of a commonplace social game. My privileged oppressors – the ones who defeated me time and again - were not rewarded for their strengths but for their deficits.
And that wasn’t fair. Especially when it had to do with what was most important of all: sex and love. Shouldn’t the superior always triumph? Every time? And without question or dispute? Shouldn’t the boy with the looks, talent, charisma, and personality always get the girl? Even if he doesn’t know how to play the game? Or if the electrical dynamism of his being blows the other pieces off the chess board (and not even by intent?)
Perhaps then and there I should have turned from the temptation of ressentiment. After all, I had Lewis and Lewis, like a mid-90s Huck Finn, was slowly climbing the ranks of popularity through the sheer glamor of his outlaw ways. Couldn’t I have latched on to his Hale-Boppian rise rather than make myself something so different, a bizarre article, a Mephistophelian cornerstone?
I should have let the chancre of past bitternesses fall from my gut and dissolve in the fresh air.
But this was too good an opportunity to elevate myself above others. This self-elevation was, ironically, for the surrender to love (nothing but love) - the giving and taking of it.
Saturday would be our photoshoot, a group endeavor to individual glory.
More than that (much more important to my concern) was that our group of 12 guys – a gang of testosterone-laden apes - would finally meet the “girl section” of our session, a group of young ladies that ran parallel to our own (the $2500 ladies.) Was Jahn as hard on them or did his homosexuality make him impartial?
They would join us on our photoshoot, a hectic weekend of make-up, poses, and camera clicks that would result in a professional portfolio, a product of both the individual and those around him/her. One’s role in a group shot might make as much difference to the finished/bound product as a standalone photo, a glossy snap made up of nothing but one’s ego and a gray ocean.
We would shoot with them and they would shoot with us and who knew what would happen or who would hook up with who. As an eternal optimist more hopeful than that booze-and-painkiller-addled JFK, I hoped that I too would come into my own in terms of what was/is most important: love and sex with another human being; to know that love, pleasure, and connection with someone else.
The girls! That’s all us then-young’uns talked about – the girls!
And I was excited (even if they were female models.) The tall, willowy types were never my preference (though I now realize that I’ve always pretty much wanted to fuck just about everybody – I’m a hornball!)
Given a choice between the two, I would have chosen the chubby, dirty, smelly and lower-class yet pulchritudinous Alisa over any emaciated maven of Manhattan.
But I would have settled for a Kate Moss! Or a Gisele Bundchen! Or – hell – even a Cindy Crawford or Nikki Taylor! The ultra-thin cover girls whose assholes shoot out like bullseyes as soon as they bend over in doggy (see Chapter 1 for my thoughts on the variety of asses.)
So, I would be like Trump and go for a supermodel even though I liked BBW Mexicans (Aliza looked Mexican) just as much or more. It depended on who gave me a chance. I just wanted to love/fuck someone.
Would the fashionista be a better ally than any regular girl, including Alisa?
What complicates matters is that a girl like Alisa, considered unremarkable (or even dumpy) by both the trendsetters of New York and the boys in our High School, may very well have loved herself and not depended on the validation of New York, Hollywood, a male partner, or anyone else.
Yet the Slav waif feted by Anna Wintour may have felt ugly despite the laurels of fame, fortune, and universal male attention.
How do you figure out the sex and love dynamics of an Alisa who might love herself and a Melania who might hate herself?
Could Alisa love herself in a society that held Cindy Crawford as the ideal of feminine beauty?
No professional photographer in that relatively un-P.C. age would have ever bothered to take a picture of a short, chunky, brown gal like Alisa, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t go on to desire her (I was ahead of my time - it’s now cool to be corpulent.) Didn’t Alisa appreciate (when we dated the very next year) that she was dating a male model? Talk about a catch! Shouldn’t that have impressed her? Especially since she was a mousy, nerdy Latina – an Ugly Betty type? How could she have had more self-confidence and self-esteem than me – a male model? (It boggles my mind to this day.)
Maybe I should have been like our current President and pursued ultra-fit Slovenians (the type who would wear socks while fucking.) Would they have loved me for my purity and wholesomeness? Or were they, in the psycho words of Travis Bickle “just like the rest of them”? Were both Slovenians and Puerto Ricans “just like the rest of them”? And would they – in the words of Taxi Driver – “die in Hell with the rest of them”?
But back to our upcoming weekend, a time of hope.
12 female models would join us for a photoshoot. And we hadn’t met them yet, so how “hot” they were was a total mystery. 12 of them for 12 of us. All the makings for the most lighthearted of Shakespearean comedies. Like “Love’s Labour’s Lost” minus the verbose Elizabethan wordplay (us younger guys in the group used words like “phat” and “dope.”)
And I miss you... Like the deserts miss the rain...
Dad knew I wanted to be a big celebrity, bigger than Adolf Hitler and Michael Jackson combined. I don't know if he thought the attainment of my megalomaniacal dreams was possible ("there are millions of people in New York and L.A. waiting tables for a living and they all want it more than you do"), but he knew it would be good for me to try. I was a sissy half-fag who hated sports (especially football), but even sensitive, solitary queers need constructive activity in the frame of a structured environment. Modeling was my extracurricular activity, just as my sister played soccer and fiddled with the violin.
And I miss you… Like the deserts miss the rain…
I wanted to be a famous model, actor, comedian, performance artist, screenwriter, director, and producer for three reasons:
1.) I
enjoyed living in the imagination. For much of my life up until that point, the
world inside of me was much better than the world outside of me (but let’s not
get into any Cartesian dualisms or some shit like that.)
2.) I
was good at living in the imagination (practice makes perfect.)
3.) I
wanted to channel my imagination into creative works that would win me fame and
money but also, more importantly, the love and attention of beautiful women.
And I miss you… Like the deserts miss the rain…
The mid-90s house music pulsed and throbbed through the studio.
I step off the train… I’m walking down your street again…
Wes, a scrawny scrapper, a Punk Rock Cary Elwes, touched the hard and thin pinkish-brown carpet with the tips of his already-cigarette-yellowed fingers. Tar-hands at the age of 23. A recovered addict and alcoholic – an O’Doul’s drinker sober enough to fuck all the drunk girls – he saw modeling as therapy, redemption, a dream of fame and fortune hatched on a no-frills Narcanon napkin. Wes had tattoos, but Jahn said that “tattoos sometimes work” (on an edgy person, but not for me because they saw me as a commercial model, a lad as wholesome as Johnboy from “The Waltons.”)
Vince shrugged his shoulders and made short, elliptical arm circles – and that was about as far as his arms would extend from his chest. Shortish (his fellow guidos would have called him “sawed-off”) and musclebound, “Vin” looked like a thick, super-compressed, ultra-muscled version of Sly Stallone (but with a face scarred almost-James-Woods-handsome by steroid acne.) He was not what Team Model was looking for (they didn’t like “cheesy”), but they had taken him on as a favor for another agency. This other agency wanted Jahn and Mark to refine Vince’s rough edges. “Vin” was a longshoreman from Bayonne, so Jahn and Mark had a task ahead of them equal to that of any Victorian-Era finishing school.
I cracked my back – a timid, tentative crack. What if someone thought my warm-up was weird and made fun of me for it? Inhibited inclines increased my tension. For me, warm-ups were always tense-ups.
All of us were free to
warm up in our own way – as long as we warmed up.
Our stretches and hamstring extensions reflected our personalities. Chris Rodgers and Ron Galan – both the people persons of our group - pushed and pulled, dangled and mangled, jacked and slacked one another in a homoerotic ballet of refined two-man isometric exercises. The result mimicked either an acting school mirror practice or a mime pressing his hands against the clear glass of a prison visitation room.
Whereas Mike Siddis, a possibly black, Arab, or Latino loner – a quiet type - stood in a corner and touched his toes, his eyes toward the floor or ceiling but never level with our pecs or peckers.
Jeremy, one
of two boys my age, hopped up and down like a wannabe-badass prizefighter. A
wigger from Freehold (of all paradoxically hickish/wiggerish places) he
prepared in the manner of an athletic yet sensitive B-Boy. Unlike the young
Michael Rappaport, I doubt if he seduced bamboo-earring-wearing Harlem
Boricuas, the sort of mouthy girls who frequented the b-ball courts of the
“Crack is Wack” playground (would they have given him a chance?) He might have
just fucked Freehold Boricuas (or white girls.) They were much closer to home
and – unlike me – he seemed to fit in well enough to start from where he was
(I’m the one who would grow up to make several love-seeking forays deep into
the projects of El Barrio and the Boogie-Down – the Wagner and Monroe houses
were both particularly, well, brutal...)
The other
15-year-old, Matt Colton, performed knuckle pushups (learned from karate?)
against the hard, scratchy floor. Matt was an outright jock from lily-white yet
densely populated Manasquan. A yellow-blonde and All-American apple pie fucker.
Though he wouldn’t have fucked a pastry a la “American Pie” (a la mode.) What’s
the point if you’re already finger-banging all the Britneys? He could have all
the Beckies for as much as I gave a fig! They were for guys like him. But it
would have hurt if I had heard of him
fooling around with, say, a Maria, Conchita, Alonsa, or any Latina,
especially a Boricua. They were supposed to be for me or even someone like
Tommy Bryer (or Lewis), but not for boys like Matt Colton. There should be a
law about that: Puerto Rican girls for grimy or outcast whites only!
And past your door… But you don’t live there anymore…
The music flowed from a then-state-of-the-art CD player, a dustless novelty of nouveau-comfort, tucked into the back-left corner of the perfumed studio (the whole agency smelled like Curve cologne.)
“What the fuck is this shit?” said Vince. “I feel like I’m in a fuckin’ queer bar!”
“What the fuck do you want them to play?” asked Sylvan, a chisel-faced Slav. “Slayer’s ‘Dead Skin Mask’? We’re in a fucking modeling studio.”
“This shit is kinda gay yo…” said Jeremy the Ebonics-speaking whiteboy.
We all seemed to agree that the song sucked. A brotherhood of those who hated lame music.
“I’m just saying,” said Vince. “I know we’re all models, but that don’t mean we’re a bunch of fucking fags.”
“You have to be careful what you say, Vin,” said Joe Scaracci from the side of his snaggle-toothed mouth. Jahn and Mark must have liked Joe for his Cagney-esque look (not that I knew/know anything about James Cagney.) “What if they hear you through the door?”
Smooth, finished, sand-papered wooden doors separated our runway and studio from the offices, reception desk, and front waiting area.
“I don’t give a fuck,” said Vince, but he said it quietly as if he very much did give a fuck. “At least change this shit!”
Jason Distefano walked over to the stereo and examined it. Jason was Vince’s lackey, a similar-minded Jersey Shore bar-hopper, a fellow-fucker of dumb girls, an aspiring fitness model. He was taller and leaner than Vince, his bumps and ripples more evenly distributed than Vince’s petite (coiled like a spring) package of tremendous tris and bodacious bis. Though Jason had a more marketable and much less tacky look than Vince, he was the heterosexual bottom, the attentive Patroclus to Vince’s roaring Achilles. Jason, careless of the possibly dire consequences, pushed the skip-forward button. Maybe the next track would be a little less faggoty.
But something went wrong. The CD hiccuped.
Like the deserts…
Like the deserts…
Like the deserts…
Miss the…
Like the deserts..
Da… Da… Da… Da…
Uh-oh.
“Oh Gosh,” said Paul, the ginger of the group, a pastor’s son, a Freshman in Bible college and, hopefully, the only guy in the group with the same amount of sexual experience as me: none.
“Don’t say anything,” said Dan De Soto, the Latin Lover of the group. “Just act like it started skipping on its own.”
The doors opened.
Uh-oh.
Jahn stepped into the studio. The spotlight at the head of the room reflected off the lenses of his round-framed glasses. His neck twitched – and he wasn’t twitchy – against the black collar of his skin-tight turtleneck. He clutched a clipboard against the breast of his tweed suit jacket.
Deserts miss the…
Deserts miss the…
Deserts…
Deserts…
Deserts…
His slight jowl quivered. Though a bit pudgy in middle-age, the younger Jahn had enjoyed a successful career as a commercial model. He had looked like a chestnut-haired yet somehow handsome Howdy Doody, the All-American college kid home for Christmas (and enjoying a hot cup of Folgers with mom, dad, grandma and grandpa.)
But age had robbed Jahn of his boyish looks and by the time I had met him he could have passed as the doppelganger of the grown-up Sean Astin:
Desert…
Desert…
Desert…
Jahn walked to the stereo system, shuffled, sniffed, and tapped the “Power Off” button.
Des…
Silence. We knew we were in for it.
Jahn paced back and forth and examined our crew as if he were a tin-pot dictator inspecting a guard of honor.
“Who touched the stereo?” he asked, sweet and calm as could be (and he was seldom either of those two adjectives.)
We stood there, a brotherhood. None of us would snitch on Jason or anyone else.
Jahn threw his clipboard on the perfumed carpet, bunched himself up, squatted, and channeled his rage into an ear-piercing scream:
“Cut the shit!” he screeched. “What the fuck do you think would happen if you went into a modeling agency in New York and touched one of their stereos? They would throw you out on your fucking ass is what! And then they would blackball you and you would never work anywhere again. You want to touch my fucking stereo? Who wants to touch my fucking stereo?”
Mark, Jahn’s life and business partner, peeked through the door.
“Jahn… What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?”
“They think it’s funny to touch our fucking stereo and cause a CD to skip!”
“Oh my…”
“You tell them, Mark. What would happen if they went to an agency like Ford and did something like that?”
“Oh, they would be finished,” said Mark. The statement oozed from him like a languorous release of deep muscle tension. His boxy glasses also reflected the light. So did his silk, lime-green shirt (which must have been from Barney’s or somewhere like that.) Mark, also more than a few pounds past his runway prime, had a more sandy-haired Teutonic look than the Irish-faced Jahn. He reminded me of a slightly overweight version of Andreas Wisniewski, a German actor best known for playing one of the terrorists in “Die Hard”:
“You’re lucky Mark made three commissions this morning or you would all be in deep shit. I explode all the time, but when Mark explodes it’s like a hydrogen bomb.”
Jahn turned his back to us in disgust and walked to a director’s chair, a red and tan Cecil B. Demille special to the right center of the runway. He sat down, crossed his legs, rolled his eyes (once), and shouted:
“Joe, get up on the fucking runway. Followed by Will, Wes, and Jeremy. Hurry the fuck up! I’m in a bad mood!”
The clipboard remained on the floor for the duration of the session, a silent reproach. Why should he expend the effort to pick up his clipboard and take notes on our runway technique if we did not respect his stereo?
We each paid $2500 or more for three months of Jahn’s guidance. The cost covered the minimum of the training, photoshoot and annual showcase, a glitzy shindig attended by top agents from Ford, Wilhelmina and every other prestigious NYC agency.
Jeremy’s trampy-vampy single mother (we all know the “Stiffler’s Mom” type – except she wasn’t as hot) might have put the fee on her credit card. Matt Colton’s whitebred mom and pop probably wrote a good check. But what about the twenty-something guys, all of them blue collar (at best) workers? Joe Scaracci, a High School dropout and car washer by trade, must have paid for the abuse on layaway.
“Hurry up, Joe! If you don’t know how to take direction you’ll never fucking work in this industry!”
Team Model Management was not a scam nor was it not a scam. Like many queers, Jahn and Mark were shrewd, ruthless businessmen of the sort who value money more than cock (how could anyone prefer filthy lucre to one’s preferred sexual practices?) Their business operated well within the bounds of legality and down to the letter of a lawyer’s finest print, but they did not quite stand on a solid moral or ethical ground (though they “kinda” did.)
Unlike Barbizon or other modeling schools, Team Model did not accept everyone. Judging by the hordes at the open call, they might have had a more stringent acceptance rate than MIT. Some of the rejects were much better-looking than me, but they might not have had a “bookable” look or personality. Some must have projected Jersey Shore vapidity, a provincial arrogance, or a sense of a “we are the beautiful people” entitlement. Jahn’s keen eye picked out the “tells” that might have been missed by someone outside of the industry, the monotone grunt or smart-alecky sneer that suggested a lazy, strident, reckless, rebellious or arrogant disposition. Jahn - and I will always admire him for it - had no tolerance for everyday decadence. He preferred a jet-set decadence, a decadence as far removed from backwoods psilocybin raves decadence as a Pabst Blue Ribbon is to a glass of Dom Perignon. With the exception of Vince (and even he was a favor for another agency, a borrowed mook, a primate who would learn to walk on two feet), Team Model only repped those who were likeable enough to book. (Not that Vince was a “psilocybin rave decadent” – far from it. He was way too stereotypically Italian to know what a “rave” was – he just liked to go to Jenks and fuck guidettes.)
Many of Jahn and Mark’s models worked. A small number of them graced the catwalks of Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and other similarly glamorous (and gayish) locations. Others worked hair or makeup shows in much-less-chic Cherry Hill or Edison, New Jersey. And, yes, some of us went on to appear in television commercials for acne medication (I am not mentioning any names!)
We each had a chance to recoup the $2500, but nothing was guaranteed. Our success in a “tough business” rested on the usual showbiz variables: talent, luck, hard work, persistence, and the mercurial dispositions of our “managers.” Jahn or Mark might or might not have picked up the phone or made the call for any one of us and for any number of petty reasons. They wanted “thank yous” (the more the better) and whoever thanked them the most (sometimes four to five expressions of gratitude in a single interaction) received the most attention. The thoughtful schmoozers trekked to NYC “go-sees” and auditions three or four times a week while the self-absorbed (in the wrong way) “hiders” stayed home and played with themselves in their “duct-tape-wallpaper” bathrooms.
Jahn and Mark yelled, screamed, cursed, thrashed, and trashed…
But worst of all…
Was that sometimes they didn’t call…
***
Lewis lounged, slouched his back against the institutional sea-green tile like an “I don’t give a fuck” Marlboro Man (though he stayed loyal – staunchly so – to his preferred Newport 100s.) His pink, livid, nigger-esque lips jutted out as if he were a muscular 6’2” Kierkegaard, a predator-skeletor bopping through the streets of Copenhagen.
He wore a designer wigger shirt, a Calvin Klein, a Hilniger, a whatever-the-fuck, but a designer shirt as pink as the tongue of a clam. Pig pink… As pink as the Miss Piggy who adorned the front of the tee. For the shirt was a designer Muppet shirt for teen and young adult thugs. Marketed to Harlem drug dealers who liked “Sesame Street.” Expensive threads. Miss Piggy and Kermit framed and splashed along the fabric – “Muppet Life.” The fucking Muppets. The quasi-faggoty shirt made Lewis look all the tougher. No one would question his shirt because he could possibly kill or cripple any pussy who might have catapulted an unwelcome wisecrack in his general direction. In Lewis’ presence verbal diarrhea solidified to lexical chronic constipation.
And where did he get the
money for this DKNY type shit?
He said hello to this person or that person who passed by. He had somehow become popular for who he was – a juvenile delinquent (though none of his now-many friends would ever understand his moral, mental, and sexual perversions as well as I did – it takes a fellow moral, mental, and sexual outlaw to understand a particular kind of anality.) I approached him to say “hi” because that’s what friends do and I was still “technically” his best friend (though we had been growing further and further apart by the second, minute, hour, and day.)
“Hey, what’s up, man?”
“Hey Will.”
Hordes of students walked past us, buzzing and bustling from one classroom to another.
Lewis pulled out a stack of hundreds – as if to show off – and counted them. $2000 – a lot of money for a 16-year-old.
“Where the fuck did you get all of that money?”
He must have though I suspected him of dealing drugs.
“It ain’t from dealing drugs. Fat Steve and I have found a new job.”
I didn’t like Fat Steve. Despite the predominance of wiggerdom in their circle he listened to the band Bush (a crime that should have been punishable by death.) He was a corpulent, bespectacled creep, just like the uncle who lived with him and his mother (his uncle enjoyed jerking off into condoms and leaving them around the house.)
“What’s that?”
“Breaking into houses.”
Oh shit…
Jesenia walked by and said, “Hi Lewis” and “Hi Will.”
Did she know of his ill-gotten gains?
Were any Puerto Rican girls civilians or were they all tainted by a close association with criminals?
Not that I hung out with the Chess Club or the National Honor Society.
But I didn’t have a pussy, so there was no reason for me to hang out with civilian “nice boys.” As Axl Rose said, “nice boys don’t play Rock N’ Roll” (nor do they break into people’s houses.)
Jesenia, unlike me, was P.R. (or at least half-P.R.) and so she was one of the most sacred women on earth. Should she have been fraternizing with hoodlums like Lewis or Tommy? Let alone fucking one of them?
This brings to mind the most offensive joke of all time. Here it is:
“Why don’t Puerto Ricans play hide and seek?”
“Because no one would look for them.”
Offensive because any man worth his cum would look for the Puerto Rican girls first and leave all the stupid white sluts hiding until sunrise.
Don’t you think Fat Steve’s lonely, sexually-frustrated uncle would have looked for the Puerto Rican girl?
***
Jahn paced back and forth along the base of the runway.
“Do you guys think you’re hot? Do you think you’re hot shit? Are you here because your mother told you you were hot? Or grandma from Omaha? All grandmas think their grandsons are handsome. But why are you here? There are lots of attractive people in the world but they’re not trying to become models. So, why the fuck are you here? Will, step up to the runway.”
I did as I was told.
“Why the fuck are you crouching as you walk to my runway? Stand up straight! Look at your audience! I don’t care if it’s the other guys in your group. Fucking look at them! Make eye contact with all of them. Chest out, shoulders up, head up straight. Eye contact with everyone. Strength and confidence. You want to be a model? You want to be an actor? Do you think they pay Tom Cruise 20 million dollars a film so he can hide from everyone? No arms in front of your body – that’s hiding! Your shoulder is up by your ear! Relax the tension in your shoulders. Stand up straight – bad posture is just more hiding!”
Jahn stood next to me, sucked in his gut, hunched his back, put his arm in front of his waist as a protective gesture and looked sideways and down. The person he imitated was either me or the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
“That’s what you look
like! Would you want to book someone like that?”
He mimicked my deep,
manly voice, a bass offset by pubescent squawk and childish eager-to-please
puppy dog inflections: “Ooh! I’m Will! I’m hiding! Don’t look at me! I just
became a model so people wouldn’t
look at me!”
***
Blue clouds of secondhand smoke wreathed up, (like the tendrils blown from Santa Claus’ pipe), coiled around the mirrors, and spread as sheet-flat against the ceiling as the ocean at lowest tide – and with the same back and forth motion. Most of the smoke was the carcinogenic byproduct of the discount cigarettes (the spent stubs of everything from Doral Filters to Basic Ultra Lights floated over the piss-eroded urinal cakes) stolen from careless-decadent parents, but somewhere in the gaseous soup were a few detectable particles of something much more psychoactive than nicotine. A skunk was loose!
Lewis peeked out from the bathroom stall.
“Oh, it’s only Will.”
He ducked back inside the rectangular pee chamber.
I walked over to the stall, tilted the door, and said hello. To my surprise, he was not alone in there. Tommy (as in Jesenia’s Tommy) crouched against the side of the stall as Lewis squatted (he wasn’t shitting though, of course) on the toilet seat and held a cheap neon green Bic lighter against the metal bowl of a coiled plastic pipe, the plug from a car, a twisted implement of industrial black and gray – the most makeshift weed-smoking device short of a bottle of Aspirin or an indented Coca-Cola can.
Tommy’s presence startled me. I stumbled in the way of a man who opens a cupboard and finds a family of bats nesting in a bowl of cup noodles. He, fortunately, did not seem to notice my awkward stagger. If he had noticed my starstruckness, he did not think to acknowledge it.
Lewis sparked a dusty ember, inhaled the smoke, and exhaled the noxious toxins (I hate pot.) Why does weed smoke always exit the lungs and mouth as transparent ribbons compared to the chimney-like plumes of tobacco smoke?
He passed the bowl to Tommy and Tommy (Jesenia’s Tommy!) took an impressive hit (and without coughing, which suggested either a high tolerance or lungs that were naturally alpha.) How could Tommy run a criminal empire (which I assumed he did) and get high? Didn’t a Don have to keep his head? Did the Corleones ever smoke such a filthy, phantasmagoric, nightmare of a drug? (Pot should be thought of as a very dangerous and mind-altering drug, a trigger to psychosis, a destroyer of artists.)
“Hey Will, this is Tommy.”
Tommy glanced up at me – the wiry hair on the top of his head looked more niggerish than ever (but he wasn’t black.)
“What’s up?”
He took another hit. Oh, okay… Back then pot seemed as glamorous as Tommy’s gold chain or any other wiggerish trapping (mostly because I had not yet tried the devil’s weed.)
“Hu-wha-the-hey, what’s up,” I replied, as if Tommy was Joe Pesci himself. At least he didn’t call me a “stutterin’ prick.”
I didn’t want to end up like Spider from “GoodFellas.”
***
“Our photo shoot is this weekend. I expect you to bring wardrobe, props, accessories, and anything you can think of and to do something very weird, strange, outlandish with all of it… Under my art direction, of course (Jahn pulled the lapels of his tweed jacket.) Let your imagination run wild… But it better not be boring and ordinary. I hate boring! I hate ordinary! I only want to see what’s extraordinary. Everything else is a waste of time! Who wants to be mediocre? Are any of you here because you want to be mediocre? Are you going to put duct tape wallpaper on your walls like they do in Fargo, North Dakota?”
Jahn scrunched up his
face and performed a passable imitation of Frances McDormand’s rube policewoman
character from “Fargo”: “Yah, I’m from Fargo! Oh yah, you betcha!”
“We don’t like duct tape
wallpaper people around here!”
Jahn’s Gospel of Superiority and Coastal Elitism (20 years before Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign) resonated with my wounded soul. How often had I seen the mediocre guy win the affection of pretty girls? Ordinary bastards stole the love and affection that was rightfully mine. The grunters, skaters, surfers, baseball stars, mealy-mouthed punks, and freckly tormentors somehow outdid me in every social situation. Not because they contained or expressed my largeness of soul but because they somehow knew all the right moves of a commonplace social game. My privileged oppressors – the ones who defeated me time and again - were not rewarded for their strengths but for their deficits.
And that wasn’t fair. Especially when it had to do with what was most important of all: sex and love. Shouldn’t the superior always triumph? Every time? And without question or dispute? Shouldn’t the boy with the looks, talent, charisma, and personality always get the girl? Even if he doesn’t know how to play the game? Or if the electrical dynamism of his being blows the other pieces off the chess board (and not even by intent?)
Perhaps then and there I should have turned from the temptation of ressentiment. After all, I had Lewis and Lewis, like a mid-90s Huck Finn, was slowly climbing the ranks of popularity through the sheer glamor of his outlaw ways. Couldn’t I have latched on to his Hale-Boppian rise rather than make myself something so different, a bizarre article, a Mephistophelian cornerstone?
I should have let the chancre of past bitternesses fall from my gut and dissolve in the fresh air.
But this was too good an opportunity to elevate myself above others. This self-elevation was, ironically, for the surrender to love (nothing but love) - the giving and taking of it.
Saturday would be our photoshoot, a group endeavor to individual glory.
More than that (much more important to my concern) was that our group of 12 guys – a gang of testosterone-laden apes - would finally meet the “girl section” of our session, a group of young ladies that ran parallel to our own (the $2500 ladies.) Was Jahn as hard on them or did his homosexuality make him impartial?
As a group of young,
horny, single, hetero-oriented guys (the oldest of us was a mere 26) we looked
forward to meeting a bunch of “hot female models.”
They would join us on our photoshoot, a hectic weekend of make-up, poses, and camera clicks that would result in a professional portfolio, a product of both the individual and those around him/her. One’s role in a group shot might make as much difference to the finished/bound product as a standalone photo, a glossy snap made up of nothing but one’s ego and a gray ocean.
We would shoot with them and they would shoot with us and who knew what would happen or who would hook up with who. As an eternal optimist more hopeful than that booze-and-painkiller-addled JFK, I hoped that I too would come into my own in terms of what was/is most important: love and sex with another human being; to know that love, pleasure, and connection with someone else.
The girls! That’s all us then-young’uns talked about – the girls!
And I was excited (even if they were female models.) The tall, willowy types were never my preference (though I now realize that I’ve always pretty much wanted to fuck just about everybody – I’m a hornball!)
Given a choice between the two, I would have chosen the chubby, dirty, smelly and lower-class yet pulchritudinous Alisa over any emaciated maven of Manhattan.
But I would have settled for a Kate Moss! Or a Gisele Bundchen! Or – hell – even a Cindy Crawford or Nikki Taylor! The ultra-thin cover girls whose assholes shoot out like bullseyes as soon as they bend over in doggy (see Chapter 1 for my thoughts on the variety of asses.)
Our model-on-model sex
could be monotonous-glamorous, Central to Eastern European in nature,
slackjawed – one jaded orgasm after another. Pumping and humping all day to a
refined boredom that is, in some ways, superior to innocent giddiness. We would
fuck like fragile, beautiful NY and L.A. people, provincial outcasts who never
really felt beautiful (because we were too angular to fit in with doughy
suburban jocks and WASP cheerleaders.)
So, I would be like Trump and go for a supermodel even though I liked BBW Mexicans (Aliza looked Mexican) just as much or more. It depended on who gave me a chance. I just wanted to love/fuck someone.
Would the fashionista be a better ally than any regular girl, including Alisa?
What complicates matters is that a girl like Alisa, considered unremarkable (or even dumpy) by both the trendsetters of New York and the boys in our High School, may very well have loved herself and not depended on the validation of New York, Hollywood, a male partner, or anyone else.
Yet the Slav waif feted by Anna Wintour may have felt ugly despite the laurels of fame, fortune, and universal male attention.
How do you figure out the sex and love dynamics of an Alisa who might love herself and a Melania who might hate herself?
Could Alisa love herself in a society that held Cindy Crawford as the ideal of feminine beauty?
No professional photographer in that relatively un-P.C. age would have ever bothered to take a picture of a short, chunky, brown gal like Alisa, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t go on to desire her (I was ahead of my time - it’s now cool to be corpulent.) Didn’t Alisa appreciate (when we dated the very next year) that she was dating a male model? Talk about a catch! Shouldn’t that have impressed her? Especially since she was a mousy, nerdy Latina – an Ugly Betty type? How could she have had more self-confidence and self-esteem than me – a male model? (It boggles my mind to this day.)
Maybe I should have been like our current President and pursued ultra-fit Slovenians (the type who would wear socks while fucking.) Would they have loved me for my purity and wholesomeness? Or were they, in the psycho words of Travis Bickle “just like the rest of them”? Were both Slovenians and Puerto Ricans “just like the rest of them”? And would they – in the words of Taxi Driver – “die in Hell with the rest of them”?
But back to our upcoming weekend, a time of hope.
12 female models would join us for a photoshoot. And we hadn’t met them yet, so how “hot” they were was a total mystery. 12 of them for 12 of us. All the makings for the most lighthearted of Shakespearean comedies. Like “Love’s Labour’s Lost” minus the verbose Elizabethan wordplay (us younger guys in the group used words like “phat” and “dope.”)
P.S. I think Shakespeare
in the Park did “Much Ado About Nothing” with an all-black cast this year (I’m
writing this in 2019), so I refuse to see that P.C. shit. African Americans are
already the most privileged group in our country.
Do they need Shakespeare
too?
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