Chapter 11
JUNE 1996:
Anais’ burgundy lips pulled from the Marlboro Red (a manly cigarette for such a delicate girl.)
Anais – a decadent name. Decadent even before I knew it was the name of Henry Miller’s most famous lover. Henry Miller was hot yet gaudy stuff as a writer, but he was also a proto-decadent. He should have rejected a bohemian lifestyle and stayed home with his wife and child (he could have written in his spare time.) Few sins are more egregious than the conscious embrace of la boheme (who doesn’t like hot showers and private shits?)
She pulled again.
I wanted, needed, and deserved a cigarette (after all, I had just worked hard and hard work always deserves a reward.)
“If I ever catch you smoking again, I will call your school principal and I will tell him that Lewis Stinson is giving you cigarettes.”
He sipped his milky tea and flipped through the real estate ads sandwiched in the stuffed Sunday edition of his beloved APP. A boring football game blared on the t.v., but dad did not look up unless someone announced a “first down” or an “off sides” (whatever the fuck those terms meant – I hated football! I was a beta before it was cool to be beta! Nowadays jocks can’t get laid for shit – what a strange world! Buncha quarterback incels! Weird.)
“But Lewis doesn’t give me cigarettes!”
This was true. I bought my cigarettes from Mickey Gallagher, the black-market cigarette dealer of our Freshman class.
Dad’s deep voice rumbled, the ominous thunder of an approaching storm, the menace of apocalyptic doom over an otherwise sunny day:
He continued:
“If I ever catch you smoking again, I will call your school principal and I will tell him that Lewis Stinson is giving you cigarettes. I will show up to his office with you and I will have him call Lewis Stinson into his office. I will say in front of the principal and Lewis Stinson that Lewis is giving my son cigarettes and I want something done about it. I will then have the principal make an announcement to the entire school about you and other kids getting cigarettes from Lewis. I will humiliate you and make you the laughingstock of that school. And then Lewis will probably kick your ass for telling on him. So, I better never catch you with a cigarette again.”
Needless to say, my dad’s threat worked better than the patch or Chantix (such a public spectacle would have been more humiliating to me than the pictures of cat assholes on the back of my mother’s frumpy sweater.)
But we were in the middle of sun-drenched June (one of those perfect days, about 80degrees with low humidity – a butterflies in the tummy and Dunkin Donuts on the palate sorta day) and school had already been out for two days. (Haha, dad! What the fuck are you gonna do now? We’re on summer vacation. If you even smell it on my clothes I’ll just say it was secondhand smoke from other people’s cigarettes! Models smoke a lot, you know! Ha!)
Anais, the model (didn’t they say a lot of models smoke to stay thin?), flicked an ash on the sidewalk and inhaled another drag of thick smoke. She exhaled a funnel that dissipated to a white cloud and then a dissipated soup of molecules; the microscopic mites drifted over the roofs of the frilly, frivolous, fag-maintained Victorians that surrounded Team Model and lined the main streets and back alleys of Ocean Grove, NJ (a borough, a quaint village, historic district, a “dry” town, a densely-populated mix of homosexuals, elderly people, and teetotaling Christian zealots – the perfect place for a business owned by sassy, Sauvignon-sipping Sodomites!)
Anais’ gaggle of gaunt girls gathered here, sauntered there, and a few lit their own cancer sticks. They all variously huddled or dispersed in front of the Team Model building.
What a disappointment it had been to meet the girls.
Heteronormative lugs that we were, we had expected Pam Anderson, Playboy centerfolds, big-breasted bimbos, skinny Scarlets (as in Johansen), or busty Bundchens (as in Gisele.)
But what books is not necessarily what a red-blooded guy wants to fuck. Like a couple o’ jaded pimps, Jahn and Mark did not look at what we might have liked, but what the market liked. And the market wanted odd… Off-kilter… Eccentric… “Heroin chic” as they called it back then (and who wanted to fuck an opiate-addicted AIDS junkie, right?) One girl had a face like a frog… The other looked like a Muy Thai kickboxer. Some were just red (as in ginger) or pale (as in anemic) or weird (as in too-heavily-pierced-or-tattooed.) They were all pleasant (no egomania on their part and what good is a broomstick that doesn’t sweep?), but they were not what we had wanted nor expected.
(I now realize my complicity in my own isolation. If I could go back in time, armed with the wisdom I have won since then, I would have attempted to date or fuck all of them. All of them. Even the most unattractive among them. All of them. No exceptions.)
Jahn and Mark did not want to fuck any of them (of course!) They wanted to book them. And they could have given a fudge-packing shit about our in-the-prime-of-our-sexual-vigor needs.
But Anais proved the rare exception among her curious cohorts: a tall, thin, flat-chested, 0-assed stick figure, but one who had a fair face, cocksucking lips, and a smoldering sensuality that could have lured any straight guy from Brad Pitt to Sad Shit.
Smoking had not stunted her growth – she stood at a rickety 5’11”, 2 inches below my brow (and that was without heels.)
Her tits were nubs, if that (but what I would have given to have nibbled on them.) Narrow, mini-pyramidical bumps (mosquito bites) as arrested as the rest of her was long and extended. Nothing more than puffy nips, the sort of breasts a male to female transsexual would have after only a week of hormones.
Her pouty, make-upped mouth teased out a cloud of smoke – a near French inhale before she breathed the soothing nicotine into her young lungs (ah, it calms ya’ now but it’ll kill ya’ later.)
They had her dressed as a 1920s flapper, a gangster’s mole (if only I could have been the sort of Atlantic City pimp who sported hoes on his arm as if they were just another mink boa.) Her short, auburn hair had been blown into wide curls by Alan, Team Model’s flamboyant but kindhearted hairdresser (one of the kindest people I’ve ever met – how could anyone hate fags?) She wore an elegant black dress that revealed how little there was underneath.
No-Ass-At-All – just a cavity between two legs or so I imagined (and my cock, though I am an ass man, grew at the thought of how spare her backside was.) Shit came out of that prominent (due to lack of other topographical features) hole and that was enough (Lewis and I would have been in agreement on her suitability for either one of us.)
The smoke billowed past her smoky eyes – as smoky as the wisps from her Red - and she, though a smoker, fanned the gaseous toxins away from her heavily-made-up and photoshoot-ready face.
Anais and I had just finished shooting together (and what a hell-of-a-shoot it had been.)
“Anais, this is Will,” shouted Jahn as he set us up for a shot on the edge of Team Model’s elm-lined sidewalk.
“Hi, Will,” said Anais. My heart thrummed.
“Uh, hi…”
“Anais… Grab will’s tie and whisper in his ear!”
Jahn seemed to enjoy the transparency of my hetero jitters (something he must have never felt – did he live it through me?)
“Will, say ‘jeepers!’”
“Jeepers!”
“Ha! Yes, that’s it! We got that shot!”
Why did I always have to play the innocent hayseed type (even though I wanted to eat out Anais’ pussy and ass?)
“Now, Anais… Run your fingers through Will’s hair!”
Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump…
My pulse beat in my ears and my heart throbbed in the center of my brain. I swallowed a thick gulp of saliva. My nerves were visible enough to make for the most authentic photos (people want to see real emotion, not the daguerreotype of heart and soul.) Did the photographer’s camera capture the beads of sweat on my clammy hands?
“Now, Anais… Pull him even closer!”
Oh, God…
After a few more teases and tender embraces, Jahn wrapped our shoot and returned to the studio. His next shoot was indoors and with a different pairing of models, so Anais and I would be free for the next hour or two.
As soon as Jahn walked through the door of his business, Anais pulled out a psychedelic peace sign Zippo and lit a Marlboro Red. She dragged, exhaled, and sat her non-existent (or at least as non-existent as an ass can be) on a portable bench, a black-laminated temporary seat pressed against the Southwestern-tan façade of the Team Model building.
I steeled my courage (it seemed like I was always steeling my courage) and walked up to Anais.
“Hi, would it be okay if I bummed (bummed? Were we in the 1920s as our clothes suggested?) a cigarette off of you?”
Whew! I did it! Asking Anais for a cigarette was the second-bravest act of my life up until that point (the first was asking out Amber.)
“Sure!”
Anais slipped an orange-filtered stoge from the tight, nearly full pack and handed it to me.
“Do you need a light?” she asked.
“Oh, yes… Please…”
She pulled the trashy-decadent-tye-dyed-peace-sign Zippo from her dainty purse, flicked it open and held it against the crisp paper of the perfectly-packed Marlboro (she knew how to pack ‘em.) The first rush of paper and tobacco hit my lungs like a warm cup of milk before bed.
“Thank you.”
“No problem,” she mumbled as she flicked the Zippo shut.
I shuffled my feet and took another hit of nerve-soothing nicotine. I have always preferred to smoke standing up, but even if I had enjoyed smoking in friggin’ beanbag chairs there was no way I would have found the moxie to sit down next to Anais.
“Dude, take a seat! You earned it after posing for all those good shots!”
“Oh… Okay. Sure. Thanks.”
I sat down next to her (following her orders and being next to her outweighed both my diffidence and my preference for smoking while standing.)
“So, uh, what got you into modeling?” I asked.
The “what got you into modeling” question was thrown in there both to return her politeness and to get a conversation going (as with Danielle, talking to Anais was as exhilarating as it was scary.)
“Oh, everybody always told me I should be a model because I’m really tall and thin. And then my dad saw this ad in the paper and I thought I would try it out.”
“Oh, my dad saw it too.”
So, we both had fathers who cared about us (as imperfect as fathers almost always are.) We had that much in common!
I dragged on the Red. Hopefully Jahn would not step outside for any reason. Jahn also disapproved of smoking and I didn’t want to ruin his image of me as the All-American boy next door. But who gave a fuck? I wasn’t gay like Jahn and here I was smoking with a sexy girl!
“Those were some really good shots we took,” I said (not knowing what else to say.)
“Yeah. I can’t wait to see how they turn out. Good job.”
She told me “good job.” A hot girl – a runway model - had thought enough of me to tell me “good job”!
“Oh, you too.”
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Wall Township. How about you?”
“Matawan.”
Was Matawan decadent? I had never been there. Was her school a bit more racially diverse? Did she have black kids in her school? Puerto Ricans? It seemed like every Monmouth County school north of Wall Township had at least a clique of blacks who all ate together at the same lunch table. Wasn’t any school with more than two or three blacks more dangerous than Wall High School?
“Oh, I’ve never been there.”
“It’s all right. It’s like Wall Township. Just a lot of houses.”
But did they have blacks there? Or Puerto Ricans?
She finished her cigarette, flicked it to the street, and lit another. I took two more puffs from my cigarette and half-flicked/half-threw my cigarette over the curb (flicking a cigarette is hard if one thinks about flicking a cigarette – and I overthought everything.) We were both wise enough to toss our butts away from the sidewalk (Jahn would have had a conniption if we had littered his sidewalk with grubby, tar-saturated filters.)
“Do you want another one, dude?”
What was with this dude stuff? Was it like a decadent neo-Deadhead kind of thing or something?
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
She handed me another cigarette and flipped her Zippo. Ah, butane!
She thought enough of me to offer me another cigarette (and cigarettes were already becoming expensive by that time.)
The African-American cop in charge (it’s almost always an African-American cop in charge of fictional fugitive chases) speaks into the bullhorn and says:
“Will and Anais. You are completely surrounded. There is no way out. Surrender peacefully!”
Anais and I look at each other and we see the pact through the other’s eyes. We kiss, say “I love you” one last time (on this plane of existence), interlace our fingers, and then gun the engine over this side of eternity – just like a heterosexual “Thelma and Louise.” A blaze of glory!
A fantasy, like many of the others, constructed from the stockpile of pop culture – and it’s better that way. Unlike Shakespeare, I didn’t have to draw on Roman histories or some shit like that. Like Tarantino, I collected popular trash.
Just as the fireball disintegrates us…
“Eww! Will! You smoke! I didn’t know that about you! That’s disgusting!
Matt Colton and Jeremy stood over Anais and me.
“Yeah, just sometimes. Not often.”
Why did I have to explain myself to that blonde-haired, blue-eyed little fuckin’ punk jocko?
“Yo, Will, that makes me think differently of you, yo…” added Jeremy.
“I just do it sometimes.”
“How can you even do it sometimes?” asked Matt. “It smells like ass!”
He didn’t like the smell of ass either?
“It just helps me relax on days like today,” I said, answering for myself (I should have never answered for myself.)
“A-ight, yo…” said Jeremy.
He said “a-ight,” the Brooklyn nigger wannabe (I’ll bet he had never even been to 90s Brooklyn – too afraid of getting shot! Not that I had been to Brooklyn by that time either!)
“Me and Matt are going to go to the pizza place down the street. Do you guys want to join us?”
“Okay,” said Anais. “Just let me run inside and change first.”
“A-ight. We’ll go there and get a table for everybody.”
Jeremy, the fuckin’ cocky wigger.
Anais flicked another cig toward the gutter, stood up from the bench, and scurried inside the Team Model building.
“I’ll wait for Anais and then walk there with her,” I said, as supreme a gentleman as any incel (and as pussyless. But I made up for it – I have not been an incel since the age of 19!)
“A-ight.”
Matt and Jeremy turned the corner and walked up the block. I remained on the bench and nursed my coffin nail. I liked the Marlboro Man more than I liked those two belongers. Cigarettes are like Lewis Stinson, a loyal but toxic friend.
Anais reemerged after about two minutes (how did she get changed so fast?) She wore a pair of jean shorts and a halter top. That flat belly of hers! My model chick… The Stephanie Seymour to my Axl Rose! Maybe our first date would be on the grounds of a cemetery, the silence of the dead punctuated by the chirping of birds. Just like in GN’R’s “Don’t Cry” video:
“Hey Will! Are you ready?”
Ready to sit among the deceased and sip red wine? Absolutely!
“Yes.”
“I have to ask you… Who is the guy with the blonde hair! He is so hot! Does he have a girlfriend?”
Matt? Why would she want him? He hated cigarettes!
That was the first thought.
“Um, that’s Matt Colton. I don’t know if he has a girlfriend or not.”
“I’m going to find out!”
Why would she want him? He looked like a little boy, Dennis the Menace, a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, patched-up pants and skinned knees, an alfalfa cow-lick, a slingshot in his back pocket, a bag of marbles up his sleeve – he looked like a child! Was she a female pedo, a molester?
A boy who hated cigarettes!
Anais lit up again.
“You want another cigarette?”
How much did this bitch smoke? Well, she would probably die of lung cancer anyway.
“Uh, sure.”
I might as well get something from her…
At least I had a cigarette, a sorry substitute for sex and love.
***
For the rest of the photoshoot, I posed and hosed, plugged and mugged (I made more wacky facial expressions than a tap-dancing Bill Cosby), grimaced and groaned, screamed and screeched, turned and burned, smiled and smirked, harmed and charmed, hammed and slammed and melted the lenses of the clickety-clacketing cameras – until I came up with shots that made for the best portfolio of all! Better than Matt’s, Jeremy’s, Anais’ or anyone else’s. I could do edgy stuff, family-friendly fluff, print, runway, commercial, fashion, hell I could speak too and out-act Al (as in Pacino.) Put me in front of a video camera and I’ll rip through a monologue and outdo De Niro (the young taxi-driving Bobby D who still showed pride in his work!) I could and would do it all!
I didn’t need any of those motherfuckers. Bunch of mediocrities. No-talent, no-personality fucks. Matt and Jeremy might get the girls and Anais might have gotten the cock (anyone who is sexually active at that age fits into society regardless of any outsider pretensions – no exceptions) but I had the fucking talent! And that talent would eventually get me the girls!
In the meantime, I had me – and my work. I felt like Scarface, alone in the hot tub: “Who do I trust? Me! That’s who!”
But I wasn’t quite Tony Montana yet (and even he turned out to need Elba and Manny.) Someone would love me, just not Anais. Anorexic hag!
Fuck the gaunt human clothes hangers! I would go for chubby Latinas – real women!
Chubby Latinas would love me. They would consider it an honor to date me.
Or so I thought.
***
The day after the photoshoot I lay in my bed, playing with my dick (as usual.) Maybe I would do a “cuck” fantasy and think of Matt Colton fucking Anais. But I wanted to fuck her! I wanted to fuck her! And I couldn’t! No access! I couldn’t figure out the password! Just as I was about to cum (while trying to imagine what Anais’ asshole might have looked like) my room phone purred.
“Hello?” (No caller ID on my room phone.)
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey Lewis. What’s up.”
“Nothing much. Me and Fat Steve got arrested last night.”
“For what?”
“For trespassing on private property. We were on the roof of Chase bank.”
“Why the fuck were you on the roof of a bank?”
“We weren’t gonna rob it or nothin’. We just went up there to smoke some weed, but we set off the alarm and by the time we got down there were four cop cars there.”
“Did you go to jail or anything?”
“No, the cops let us go. I just have to go to court in a few months.” (Minors may commit genocide and receive little more than counseling and probation, but Lewis seemed intent on pushing the limits of the lenient law.)
This was Lewis’ third arrest. The first two were small fry charges: public intoxication followed by possession of marijuana.
But Lewis refused relegation to the misdemeanor leagues.
Anais’ burgundy lips pulled from the Marlboro Red (a manly cigarette for such a delicate girl.)
Anais – a decadent name. Decadent even before I knew it was the name of Henry Miller’s most famous lover. Henry Miller was hot yet gaudy stuff as a writer, but he was also a proto-decadent. He should have rejected a bohemian lifestyle and stayed home with his wife and child (he could have written in his spare time.) Few sins are more egregious than the conscious embrace of la boheme (who doesn’t like hot showers and private shits?)
She pulled again.
I wanted, needed, and deserved a cigarette (after all, I had just worked hard and hard work always deserves a reward.)
But what would dad do if
he smelled cigarette smoke on me? He had caught me smoking several months
earlier:
“If I ever catch you smoking again, I will call your school principal and I will tell him that Lewis Stinson is giving you cigarettes.”
He sipped his milky tea and flipped through the real estate ads sandwiched in the stuffed Sunday edition of his beloved APP. A boring football game blared on the t.v., but dad did not look up unless someone announced a “first down” or an “off sides” (whatever the fuck those terms meant – I hated football! I was a beta before it was cool to be beta! Nowadays jocks can’t get laid for shit – what a strange world! Buncha quarterback incels! Weird.)
“But Lewis doesn’t give me cigarettes!”
This was true. I bought my cigarettes from Mickey Gallagher, the black-market cigarette dealer of our Freshman class.
Dad’s deep voice rumbled, the ominous thunder of an approaching storm, the menace of apocalyptic doom over an otherwise sunny day:
“First of all, watch how
the fuck you speak to me right now. I’m not some nigger on the street, boy!”
He continued:
“If I ever catch you smoking again, I will call your school principal and I will tell him that Lewis Stinson is giving you cigarettes. I will show up to his office with you and I will have him call Lewis Stinson into his office. I will say in front of the principal and Lewis Stinson that Lewis is giving my son cigarettes and I want something done about it. I will then have the principal make an announcement to the entire school about you and other kids getting cigarettes from Lewis. I will humiliate you and make you the laughingstock of that school. And then Lewis will probably kick your ass for telling on him. So, I better never catch you with a cigarette again.”
Needless to say, my dad’s threat worked better than the patch or Chantix (such a public spectacle would have been more humiliating to me than the pictures of cat assholes on the back of my mother’s frumpy sweater.)
But we were in the middle of sun-drenched June (one of those perfect days, about 80degrees with low humidity – a butterflies in the tummy and Dunkin Donuts on the palate sorta day) and school had already been out for two days. (Haha, dad! What the fuck are you gonna do now? We’re on summer vacation. If you even smell it on my clothes I’ll just say it was secondhand smoke from other people’s cigarettes! Models smoke a lot, you know! Ha!)
Anais, the model (didn’t they say a lot of models smoke to stay thin?), flicked an ash on the sidewalk and inhaled another drag of thick smoke. She exhaled a funnel that dissipated to a white cloud and then a dissipated soup of molecules; the microscopic mites drifted over the roofs of the frilly, frivolous, fag-maintained Victorians that surrounded Team Model and lined the main streets and back alleys of Ocean Grove, NJ (a borough, a quaint village, historic district, a “dry” town, a densely-populated mix of homosexuals, elderly people, and teetotaling Christian zealots – the perfect place for a business owned by sassy, Sauvignon-sipping Sodomites!)
Anais’ gaggle of gaunt girls gathered here, sauntered there, and a few lit their own cancer sticks. They all variously huddled or dispersed in front of the Team Model building.
What a disappointment it had been to meet the girls.
Heteronormative lugs that we were, we had expected Pam Anderson, Playboy centerfolds, big-breasted bimbos, skinny Scarlets (as in Johansen), or busty Bundchens (as in Gisele.)
But what books is not necessarily what a red-blooded guy wants to fuck. Like a couple o’ jaded pimps, Jahn and Mark did not look at what we might have liked, but what the market liked. And the market wanted odd… Off-kilter… Eccentric… “Heroin chic” as they called it back then (and who wanted to fuck an opiate-addicted AIDS junkie, right?) One girl had a face like a frog… The other looked like a Muy Thai kickboxer. Some were just red (as in ginger) or pale (as in anemic) or weird (as in too-heavily-pierced-or-tattooed.) They were all pleasant (no egomania on their part and what good is a broomstick that doesn’t sweep?), but they were not what we had wanted nor expected.
(I now realize my complicity in my own isolation. If I could go back in time, armed with the wisdom I have won since then, I would have attempted to date or fuck all of them. All of them. Even the most unattractive among them. All of them. No exceptions.)
Jahn and Mark did not want to fuck any of them (of course!) They wanted to book them. And they could have given a fudge-packing shit about our in-the-prime-of-our-sexual-vigor needs.
But Anais proved the rare exception among her curious cohorts: a tall, thin, flat-chested, 0-assed stick figure, but one who had a fair face, cocksucking lips, and a smoldering sensuality that could have lured any straight guy from Brad Pitt to Sad Shit.
Smoking had not stunted her growth – she stood at a rickety 5’11”, 2 inches below my brow (and that was without heels.)
Her tits were nubs, if that (but what I would have given to have nibbled on them.) Narrow, mini-pyramidical bumps (mosquito bites) as arrested as the rest of her was long and extended. Nothing more than puffy nips, the sort of breasts a male to female transsexual would have after only a week of hormones.
Her pouty, make-upped mouth teased out a cloud of smoke – a near French inhale before she breathed the soothing nicotine into her young lungs (ah, it calms ya’ now but it’ll kill ya’ later.)
They had her dressed as a 1920s flapper, a gangster’s mole (if only I could have been the sort of Atlantic City pimp who sported hoes on his arm as if they were just another mink boa.) Her short, auburn hair had been blown into wide curls by Alan, Team Model’s flamboyant but kindhearted hairdresser (one of the kindest people I’ve ever met – how could anyone hate fags?) She wore an elegant black dress that revealed how little there was underneath.
No-Ass-At-All – just a cavity between two legs or so I imagined (and my cock, though I am an ass man, grew at the thought of how spare her backside was.) Shit came out of that prominent (due to lack of other topographical features) hole and that was enough (Lewis and I would have been in agreement on her suitability for either one of us.)
The smoke billowed past her smoky eyes – as smoky as the wisps from her Red - and she, though a smoker, fanned the gaseous toxins away from her heavily-made-up and photoshoot-ready face.
Anais and I had just finished shooting together (and what a hell-of-a-shoot it had been.)
“Anais, this is Will,” shouted Jahn as he set us up for a shot on the edge of Team Model’s elm-lined sidewalk.
“Hi, Will,” said Anais. My heart thrummed.
“Uh, hi…”
“Anais… Grab will’s tie and whisper in his ear!”
Jahn seemed to enjoy the transparency of my hetero jitters (something he must have never felt – did he live it through me?)
“Will, say ‘jeepers!’”
“Jeepers!”
“Ha! Yes, that’s it! We got that shot!”
Why did I always have to play the innocent hayseed type (even though I wanted to eat out Anais’ pussy and ass?)
“Now, Anais… Run your fingers through Will’s hair!”
Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump… Ba-Bump…
My pulse beat in my ears and my heart throbbed in the center of my brain. I swallowed a thick gulp of saliva. My nerves were visible enough to make for the most authentic photos (people want to see real emotion, not the daguerreotype of heart and soul.) Did the photographer’s camera capture the beads of sweat on my clammy hands?
Anais grabbed my sweaty
head and whispered a sweet nothing (literally nothing, she was just pretending
to whisper) in my ear.
This was the most a girl
had ever touched me!
“Now, Anais… Pull him even closer!”
Oh, God…
After a few more teases and tender embraces, Jahn wrapped our shoot and returned to the studio. His next shoot was indoors and with a different pairing of models, so Anais and I would be free for the next hour or two.
As soon as Jahn walked through the door of his business, Anais pulled out a psychedelic peace sign Zippo and lit a Marlboro Red. She dragged, exhaled, and sat her non-existent (or at least as non-existent as an ass can be) on a portable bench, a black-laminated temporary seat pressed against the Southwestern-tan façade of the Team Model building.
I steeled my courage (it seemed like I was always steeling my courage) and walked up to Anais.
“Hi, would it be okay if I bummed (bummed? Were we in the 1920s as our clothes suggested?) a cigarette off of you?”
Whew! I did it! Asking Anais for a cigarette was the second-bravest act of my life up until that point (the first was asking out Amber.)
“Sure!”
Anais slipped an orange-filtered stoge from the tight, nearly full pack and handed it to me.
“Do you need a light?” she asked.
“Oh, yes… Please…”
She pulled the trashy-decadent-tye-dyed-peace-sign Zippo from her dainty purse, flicked it open and held it against the crisp paper of the perfectly-packed Marlboro (she knew how to pack ‘em.) The first rush of paper and tobacco hit my lungs like a warm cup of milk before bed.
“Thank you.”
“No problem,” she mumbled as she flicked the Zippo shut.
I shuffled my feet and took another hit of nerve-soothing nicotine. I have always preferred to smoke standing up, but even if I had enjoyed smoking in friggin’ beanbag chairs there was no way I would have found the moxie to sit down next to Anais.
“Dude, take a seat! You earned it after posing for all those good shots!”
“Oh… Okay. Sure. Thanks.”
I sat down next to her (following her orders and being next to her outweighed both my diffidence and my preference for smoking while standing.)
“So, uh, what got you into modeling?” I asked.
The “what got you into modeling” question was thrown in there both to return her politeness and to get a conversation going (as with Danielle, talking to Anais was as exhilarating as it was scary.)
“Oh, everybody always told me I should be a model because I’m really tall and thin. And then my dad saw this ad in the paper and I thought I would try it out.”
“Oh, my dad saw it too.”
So, we both had fathers who cared about us (as imperfect as fathers almost always are.) We had that much in common!
I dragged on the Red. Hopefully Jahn would not step outside for any reason. Jahn also disapproved of smoking and I didn’t want to ruin his image of me as the All-American boy next door. But who gave a fuck? I wasn’t gay like Jahn and here I was smoking with a sexy girl!
“Those were some really good shots we took,” I said (not knowing what else to say.)
“Yeah. I can’t wait to see how they turn out. Good job.”
She told me “good job.” A hot girl – a runway model - had thought enough of me to tell me “good job”!
“Oh, you too.”
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Wall Township. How about you?”
“Matawan.”
Was Matawan decadent? I had never been there. Was her school a bit more racially diverse? Did she have black kids in her school? Puerto Ricans? It seemed like every Monmouth County school north of Wall Township had at least a clique of blacks who all ate together at the same lunch table. Wasn’t any school with more than two or three blacks more dangerous than Wall High School?
“Oh, I’ve never been there.”
“It’s all right. It’s like Wall Township. Just a lot of houses.”
But did they have blacks there? Or Puerto Ricans?
She finished her cigarette, flicked it to the street, and lit another. I took two more puffs from my cigarette and half-flicked/half-threw my cigarette over the curb (flicking a cigarette is hard if one thinks about flicking a cigarette – and I overthought everything.) We were both wise enough to toss our butts away from the sidewalk (Jahn would have had a conniption if we had littered his sidewalk with grubby, tar-saturated filters.)
“Do you want another one, dude?”
What was with this dude stuff? Was it like a decadent neo-Deadhead kind of thing or something?
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
She handed me another cigarette and flipped her Zippo. Ah, butane!
She thought enough of me to offer me another cigarette (and cigarettes were already becoming expensive by that time.)
That was it! I set to
constructing a fantasy as I sucked the sweet carbon monoxide into my pink lungs.
We would be Bonnie and Clyde, my model chick and me, and go on a cross-country
bank robbing spree (like Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore in the 1987 film
“Wisdom.”)
Somewhere in New Mexico,
the state police get the drop on our ’67 Chevy Impala convertible. After a wild
chase and shootout, the cops hem us in against the edge of a desert cliff.
The African-American cop in charge (it’s almost always an African-American cop in charge of fictional fugitive chases) speaks into the bullhorn and says:
“Will and Anais. You are completely surrounded. There is no way out. Surrender peacefully!”
Anais and I look at each other and we see the pact through the other’s eyes. We kiss, say “I love you” one last time (on this plane of existence), interlace our fingers, and then gun the engine over this side of eternity – just like a heterosexual “Thelma and Louise.” A blaze of glory!
A fantasy, like many of the others, constructed from the stockpile of pop culture – and it’s better that way. Unlike Shakespeare, I didn’t have to draw on Roman histories or some shit like that. Like Tarantino, I collected popular trash.
Just as the fireball disintegrates us…
“Eww! Will! You smoke! I didn’t know that about you! That’s disgusting!
Matt Colton and Jeremy stood over Anais and me.
“Yeah, just sometimes. Not often.”
Why did I have to explain myself to that blonde-haired, blue-eyed little fuckin’ punk jocko?
“Yo, Will, that makes me think differently of you, yo…” added Jeremy.
“I just do it sometimes.”
“How can you even do it sometimes?” asked Matt. “It smells like ass!”
He didn’t like the smell of ass either?
“It just helps me relax on days like today,” I said, answering for myself (I should have never answered for myself.)
“A-ight, yo…” said Jeremy.
He said “a-ight,” the Brooklyn nigger wannabe (I’ll bet he had never even been to 90s Brooklyn – too afraid of getting shot! Not that I had been to Brooklyn by that time either!)
“Me and Matt are going to go to the pizza place down the street. Do you guys want to join us?”
“Okay,” said Anais. “Just let me run inside and change first.”
“A-ight. We’ll go there and get a table for everybody.”
Jeremy, the fuckin’ cocky wigger.
Anais flicked another cig toward the gutter, stood up from the bench, and scurried inside the Team Model building.
“I’ll wait for Anais and then walk there with her,” I said, as supreme a gentleman as any incel (and as pussyless. But I made up for it – I have not been an incel since the age of 19!)
“A-ight.”
Matt and Jeremy turned the corner and walked up the block. I remained on the bench and nursed my coffin nail. I liked the Marlboro Man more than I liked those two belongers. Cigarettes are like Lewis Stinson, a loyal but toxic friend.
Anais reemerged after about two minutes (how did she get changed so fast?) She wore a pair of jean shorts and a halter top. That flat belly of hers! My model chick… The Stephanie Seymour to my Axl Rose! Maybe our first date would be on the grounds of a cemetery, the silence of the dead punctuated by the chirping of birds. Just like in GN’R’s “Don’t Cry” video:
“Hey Will! Are you ready?”
Ready to sit among the deceased and sip red wine? Absolutely!
“Yes.”
“I have to ask you… Who is the guy with the blonde hair! He is so hot! Does he have a girlfriend?”
Matt? Why would she want him? He hated cigarettes!
That was the first thought.
“Um, that’s Matt Colton. I don’t know if he has a girlfriend or not.”
“I’m going to find out!”
Why would she want him? He looked like a little boy, Dennis the Menace, a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, patched-up pants and skinned knees, an alfalfa cow-lick, a slingshot in his back pocket, a bag of marbles up his sleeve – he looked like a child! Was she a female pedo, a molester?
She preferred him over
me! I was 15, but I already looked like a grown man – or close to one. I stood
6’1” 170lbs, and already sprouted patchy spots of dark brown stubble that
popped up like the defiant swaths of crab grass on Alisa’s dusty lawn. If I
were the mature and manly Harrison Ford, Matt Colton was the youngest and most
fresh-faced version of Leonardo DiCaprio (when he did “Titanic” and every
straight guy wanted to give him a beatdown.)
A boy who hated cigarettes!
Anais lit up again.
“You want another cigarette?”
How much did this bitch smoke? Well, she would probably die of lung cancer anyway.
“Uh, sure.”
I might as well get something from her…
At least I had a cigarette, a sorry substitute for sex and love.
***
For the rest of the photoshoot, I posed and hosed, plugged and mugged (I made more wacky facial expressions than a tap-dancing Bill Cosby), grimaced and groaned, screamed and screeched, turned and burned, smiled and smirked, harmed and charmed, hammed and slammed and melted the lenses of the clickety-clacketing cameras – until I came up with shots that made for the best portfolio of all! Better than Matt’s, Jeremy’s, Anais’ or anyone else’s. I could do edgy stuff, family-friendly fluff, print, runway, commercial, fashion, hell I could speak too and out-act Al (as in Pacino.) Put me in front of a video camera and I’ll rip through a monologue and outdo De Niro (the young taxi-driving Bobby D who still showed pride in his work!) I could and would do it all!
I didn’t need any of those motherfuckers. Bunch of mediocrities. No-talent, no-personality fucks. Matt and Jeremy might get the girls and Anais might have gotten the cock (anyone who is sexually active at that age fits into society regardless of any outsider pretensions – no exceptions) but I had the fucking talent! And that talent would eventually get me the girls!
In the meantime, I had me – and my work. I felt like Scarface, alone in the hot tub: “Who do I trust? Me! That’s who!”
But I wasn’t quite Tony Montana yet (and even he turned out to need Elba and Manny.) Someone would love me, just not Anais. Anorexic hag!
Fuck the gaunt human clothes hangers! I would go for chubby Latinas – real women!
Chubby Latinas would love me. They would consider it an honor to date me.
Or so I thought.
***
The day after the photoshoot I lay in my bed, playing with my dick (as usual.) Maybe I would do a “cuck” fantasy and think of Matt Colton fucking Anais. But I wanted to fuck her! I wanted to fuck her! And I couldn’t! No access! I couldn’t figure out the password! Just as I was about to cum (while trying to imagine what Anais’ asshole might have looked like) my room phone purred.
Bulurrrrrrrrr…
I shifted from the bed
and pulled the phone from the dresser to my mattress.
“Hello?” (No caller ID on my room phone.)
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey Lewis. What’s up.”
“Nothing much. Me and Fat Steve got arrested last night.”
“For what?”
“For trespassing on private property. We were on the roof of Chase bank.”
“Why the fuck were you on the roof of a bank?”
“We weren’t gonna rob it or nothin’. We just went up there to smoke some weed, but we set off the alarm and by the time we got down there were four cop cars there.”
“Did you go to jail or anything?”
“No, the cops let us go. I just have to go to court in a few months.” (Minors may commit genocide and receive little more than counseling and probation, but Lewis seemed intent on pushing the limits of the lenient law.)
This was Lewis’ third arrest. The first two were small fry charges: public intoxication followed by possession of marijuana.
But Lewis refused relegation to the misdemeanor leagues.
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