JAILER SO INEXORABLE
I have been called upon as a “street person” – how casting directors refer to non-models/actresses – multiple times, and I know why. The just-ethnic-but-not-quite formula they seek is readily apparent in my own face. Day-to-day, this means I am attractive primarily to members of irrelevant demographics – older gay men, moms – who, without fail, describe me as “striking,” a euphemism hard to swallow when you’re thirteen and that I’m only just now beginning to accept.
Always the skeptic, my candor blossoms when I smell a lure; I ask very frank questions: How much would this pay? How long would this take? I am not really into this type of thing, so tell me, will everyone else there be twice my height, half my weight, and two-thirds my age?
I don’t experience foreign situations narratively, probably because I so much anticipate recording them that way. But in this case, rather than string the details together with a series of verbs and pronouns, I’ll just resort to my favorite form, the list. Scraps from the Marc Jacobs call:
-The Beth Ditto-look-alike of a receptionist
-The gay stylist, wearing a slinky t-shirt, eating – no joke – a chocolate-covered strawberry
-The assistant, dressed entirely in aubergine, ey(e)ing an anonymous pile of fur behind the front door
-The Russian teenager with pink hair and UFO pants
-The bathroom, which smelled aggressively of jasmine, masking how many quarts of bile God only knows
-The other girls, dead silent, lined up on the couch, all fake-reading, all wearing Doc Martens - in a vast spectrum of authenticity and distress
-Me, asking the photographer if the tank top I had on was “too see-through”
-His response: a laugh
-The Brazilian girl, who, five seconds later, peeled off a motorcycle jacket to reveal a tube top as sheer as a sheet of generic brand parchment paper
-The command to “walk my Times Square At Rush Hour Walk”
What they wanted from me was so obvious in theory but so ineffable in practice. What am I supposed to be doing right now? Why aren’t I the one dictating the terms of this experience? And this same opacity was rehashed the next day when my boyfriend and I went for cut-rate Chinese massages in Greenpoint. Towards the end of the session, the masseuse began what I can only guess was foot reflexology. I’ve never had foot reflexology before, but her version included systematically carving her fingernail into each one of my toes seven times. My immediate impulse was to assume it was a prank. Just like at the casting, I was unclothed and unable to understand how much control I had over the situation. She could do almost anything to my body, and I would have to assume it was customary. As a “street person,” they could have instructed me to cartwheel or burp the alphabet, and I probably would have done it. Here, I lay back, winced as she dug in, digit by digit, and held my breath until it was over.
