Yes, I was beaten several times for being too pretty.
This originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 19, Issue 3/4.
So, 1:30PM on a Sunday and I’m a plastic surgeon’s office in Manhattan, wearing hospital scrubs and eating a free lunch. I’ve been here since 9AM, along with approximately six thousand other people: A photographer and his assistants, a wardrobe person, a producer, three professional models and many extras, of which I am one.
How I wound up here is unimportant. Suffice to say I didn’t seek out a one-day career as a model, it was thrust upon me. By The Duchess. Need I say more? Probably, but I won’t.
Hurry Up: Wait
I will say this: Modeling, even the half-assed form of it I engaged in wherein I was basically a warm body needed for background shots, a piece of human staging and decoration, is fucking hard work. Obviously not “hard work” in the sense of, say, working in a mine or sewing shoes for Nike in some unventilated Chinese factory, but hard enough for a pudgy boy like myself, used to frequent marinating in liquor and lots of nap time.
First of all: The waiting. You have to show up on time, natch, but then there is a lot of sitting around while they get their shit together or work with other people. So I sat there all morning writing. Not a bad deal, if you’re getting paid – sit around and work on a novel, go home with a check.
But if anyone out there has ever had to put in some serious waiting, you know it’s actually hard work. Reality distorts around you. You begin eating everything in sight. You watch the battery drain on your laptop in despair. After after being somewhat productive for a few hours, you find you just can’t work any more and goddamn you just want the photographer to call your name and ask you to do something. Anything. This is how people are lured into pornography. They hire you to ?model’ and make you sit around for hours and hours until you snap and when they say “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if you took off your top?” you think God yes ANYTHING to relieve the boredom and six weeks later you’re starring with Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons 2: Electric Boogaloo and weeping in public toilets.
But I digress.
Presence
I am finally called, oh happy day. Me and this other fellow are wearing blue surgical scrubs. The three actual professional models are dressed as doctors in white lab coats. This was not lost on us Blueshirts, and as we were assigned background, meaning we would be the blurry people in the background of a shot to give it some depth and make it appear that we were in a bustling medical office and not a bunch of weirdos in costume.
We were game. My new friend and I constructed an elaborate backstory for the medical practice we were fictionally employed by: Murder, tax fraud, and crushing loneliness. We figured if we were just going to be blurred people, we might as well find an inner life.
Being blurred is strange. You can just sort of hang out and have a conversation – no one cares what your facial expressions are, or what you’re doing with your hands, because you’re just blobs of color in the background to give the image some depth.
The photographer at one point kept instructing me to move left. Then more. Then more. Until I was clearly out of the frame. And yet he didn’t just tell me to sit the fuck down. Later I was told he wanted the other extra, the one in the frame, to have someone to realistically interact with so it looked more natural.
Is that a career? Natural Interaction Facilitator on Photoshoots? Why the fuck not. They have Book Therapists[1] now, you know.
Trespass
The strangest part for me was the fact that the company had rented out a real Doctor’s office for the shoot so the photos would have some verisimilitude. This meant we were wandering this posh office all day long like we owned the place. While wearing scrubs.
As far as I know, none of us rifled the drawers or searched through the cabinets for narcotics, but it was kind of creepy anyway. Plus it was a plastic surgeon’s office, so there were breast implants seemingly everywhere – I assume for demonstration purposes, though I would be delighted to discover otherwise – which was a nice bit of extra creepy, especially as we had to keep moving the implants around to get them out of the way.
I imagine that real models, coked-up and totally narcissistic, would have left that place in shambles.
Incompetence
Finally, all of this made me think about the fact that although models do nothing but stand around, I would totally, completely fail at the career. Number one, I’d never be able to wait around all the time. Number two, all that free lunch would quickly transform me from “anonymous man in scrubs blurry in background” to “indoor dirigible of some sort in pastel blue, floating serenely through background.” Not sexy.
Knowing you’d fail as a model is a heavy load to carry, my friends. It’s like failing as a porn star: All you have to do is perform a basic human function. In this case, standing upright. I mean, who in god’s name can’t stand upright for a few hours and be photographed as a blurred image in the background?
For the record: I did manage to stand up.
_______________
[1] This is a thing: http://gawker.com/brooklyns-newest-made-up-job-title-is-book-therapist-1293886262
“For the record: I did manage to stand up.”
How often can you make that claim…….