Box Girl (9 page)

It was the same dodge-and-flatter dance, week after week, until the afternoon Amanda walked in. Amanda, a statuesque African American woman with incredible calves. Was this the next Naomi Campbell?

“Welcome! Please, take a seat,” I said. She gave her skirt a tug as she crossed her long legs. “So, what's your name?”

“Amanda,” she said. Her voice was reminiscent of something I couldn't quite place. It was rich, velvety, vixen-esque.

“Great, Amanda, tell me a little about yourself.” With that, Amanda placed her hand on my knee and looked me sternly in the eye. Okay, I thought, this was a first. Clearly this Amanda had the boldness it takes to make it in the modeling world. With her hand still on my knee, she headlocked me in eye contact and restated her name, this time dragging out the syllables:

“A-Man-Duh.”

“Right, Amanda, you said that,” I said.

“A man,” she paused. What the hell? Why did she keep repeating her name? And would she please remove her hand from my thigh? She cocked her head at me and batted her false lashes. And then—welcome, Lilibet, welcome—I finally made it to the party. Her Adam's apple appeared as she pronounced the last syllable, “Duh.”

Fortunately, scenarios as such provided endless amounts of amusement for the agency's employees. I loved my coworker's like dysfunctional family members, and we spent a decent portion of our days doubled-over in our ergonomically correct office chairs. You just don't get diversions like Amanda the cross-dressing model in every place of employment. Some of the characters who worked in the office were as ridiculous as those we represented. The guy who sat across from me, Dave, took it upon himself to initiate “Jersey Fridays.” Sort of like “Hat Day” in middle school. On Fridays, he told us, we were allowed to wear our favorite team jersey to work. I am still not entirely sure how this Dave ended up working at a modeling agency, an industry entirely dominated by women and gay men, neither of whom would be caught dead wearing a jersey to work. (Two of the male model agents, both of them flamboyant and overweight, used to bicker like Dorothy and Rose on
The Golden Girls
. When one announced he'd lost ten pounds, the other said, “Oh
please
. That's like throwing a deck chair off the Titanic.”)

It goes without saying that “Jersey Fridays” never caught on, except with its founder. Every Friday, without fail, Dave was clad in one of the following: a boxy mesh Cleveland Browns NFL jersey; a snug, University of Arizona college basketball jersey, which he wore over a tee; or a cotton jersey-esque Mets T-shirt. (Dave was an equal-opportunity fan, not partial to one particular region of the country.) Dave also occasionally brought his cat to the office, stroking it on his lap while he worked. The giant fluff ball, covered in snowy fur, would poke out from under his desk, right on top of his crotch. My favorite
thing about Dave, however, was not the cats or the Cleveland Browns, but the fact that he would take his lunch breaks in the office, and he would take them
very
seriously. If I tried to get his attention during this designated hour, he'd wave his hand frantically in my face—“I'm at lunch! I'm not here! You don't see me!”—and continue walking down the hall.

In the year and a half I worked at the agency, we moved offices three times. While each office was different, one thing remained the same: the towering wall of “comp cards”—glossy paper rectangles, each with a close-up of a model on the front and four smaller pictures of her on the back. All day long, a hundred beautiful faces would stare at us, each with the same pissed-off expression. Across the bottom of the cards were the model's names and heights. They all went by their first names, some sexy and foreign-sounding (Oksana, Michiko, Katarina), others Southern-California-cute (Ashley, Chelsea, Desiree). If there was any overlap, we added a surname initial, like on
The Bachelor
. The clients called them by their first name and last initial as well—heaven forbid they book the busty blonde “Caroline B.” for the Chloe job, when what they really wanted was the waifish, brown-haired “Caroline M.”

Because I'm a borderline hoarder, I still have my notebooks from this job. Based on one entry, it appears I was trying to keep the models straight. I had jotted down a handful of models' names and some identifying triggers to help me remember them. Next to the name “Jamie” it says: “Gave directions, wavy brown,” and next to the name “Nina” it says: “Nice, red hair.” (I'm not sure which was nice: Nina or her hair.) Apparently “Megan” was a golfer because I wrote: “Megan: Blonde, golf, very nice,” while “Amber” gave me less to work with. For her it just says, “Curly blonde.” It seems redundant that I noted “Yalia” was “foreign.” In what is by far my favorite descriptor, next to the name “Sarah,” it simply says: “Dated Leo.” Enough said. I clearly wasn't going to forget her.

When I wasn't making notes about the models, I was handling pictures of their perfectly proportioned faces. Francine wasn't kidding about the scanning; my newly acquired skill took up a large part of my workday. Back then, model agencies re-touched photographs the old fashioned way: someone actually painted over imperfections on large matte photographs, concealing under-eye circles and flyaway hairs. After that, it was my job to scan the now-flawless image back into the computer. We also took Polaroids the old-fashioned way, meaning we took real Polaroids. (They still call it “taking Polaroids,” but they take the pictures with a digital camera.) I'd ask a girl to come in “with clean hair and face” and have her pose next to a window. If a client needed swimsuit Polaroids, there was a spare bikini in the bathroom. Like the woman at
Lucky
, I instructed the girls to look right, look left, face forward, smile.

Doing this, of course, reminded me of that day at
Lucky
and of my circuitous route into the modeling agent world. Although I had absolutely no interest in moving up in this industry, I had somehow stayed for almost two years.

The Polaroids required scanning as well. I'd tape four Polaroids to a piece of 8 x 11 printer paper and write the model's name and height across the bottom of the page with a Sharpie. Then, hunched over the scanner, I'd upload the images. I did this over and over, all day long, which was both incredibly monotonous and crushingly depressing. I wasn't depressed because I wasn't a model, though I often coveted their wasp-like waists and angular faces (my cheekbones had vanished months before). I just wanted to do something with my life that I had even a vague interest in. If I wasn't tracking down a model's UGGs in some wardrobe trailer, I was booking their hair appointments at Frédéric Fekkai, making their travel arrangements for a swimwear shoot in Bora Bora, or dictating directions to a famous director's house in the Pacific Palisades. My job was a relentless reminder that, while I was very busy
making other girls' lives more fabulous—girls who were my exact same age, no less—my life was standing still.

I knew my last day at the agency was inevitable when I returned from lunch one afternoon to find the final straw on my desk. It was in the form of a Post-it note, stuck to my computer screen. I peeled it from the monitor while hooking my purse to the back of my chair. I remained standing while I read it, trying to process the implications: “Morgan H. needs a bikini wax.”
This must be some sort of inside joke
, I thought. Maybe I accidentally snapped an unfortunate Polaroid of Morgan H. revealing an unkempt nether region?

“Dave, did you write this?” I asked.

Dave responded, not looking up from his computer, “She said Tuesday or Wednesday after ten would be good.”

“I'm sorry, I am supposed to
schedule
her bikini wax?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Dave answered, unfazed. “She needs it done before the Quicksilver shoot.”

I sat down at my desk and laid my forehead on top of my keyboard until it started to beep. This was too much. While it was one thing to schedule haircuts and highlights for these girls, it was quite another to make appointments for the removal of their pubic hair. I had to get out. While I loved my colleagues, this job was slowly but surely killing my soul.

It was already easy enough to become invisible in LA, spending most of my time behind the windshield of my car with fast food on my lap. While I wouldn't be caught dead walking down Madison Avenue with a milkshake in hand, I had absolutely no problem driving down Wilshire Boulevard, sucking an Oreo McFlurry through a straw. Behind the anonymous screen of that squawking drive-through speaker,
I had no issue boldly proclaiming, “You know what, make it a large.” Like a true friend, Rachel finally intervened. “Maybe you should switch to frozen coffee drinks,” she suggested.

That “real person” who strutted up Forty-second street like she owned the goddamn place was now buried under fifteen pounds of fast food milkshakes and two years of stroking other people's egos. “You have
amazing
eyes,” I'd say to one of our models. “And those legs!” I'd also turned into the type of person who thinks it's appropriate to wear a hoody sweatshirt to work.

In high school, my girlfriends and I would often say, “Stella's gotta get her groove back.” Why the title of an all-black comedy about middle-aged women became the mantra of our teenage lives, I did not know. All I knew was,
this
Stella needed to get her groove back.

I gave Francine my two-weeks notice, and, just like Shelly Long, she could not have been more supportive. She knew I wasn't long for this world. Francine helped plan a going-away party on my last day of work, which landed on a Jersey Friday. It was supposed to be a civilized, drop-by-the-office-around-six-for-wine-and-cheese affair. We invited all the models, and many of them came, some bearing gifts. (I had legitimately become friends with a few of them.) One of the models (the red-headed and, it turned out, very nice “Nina”) gave me a Def Leppard CD and a bottle of Patrón. That gift, we decided, needed to be opened immediately. Within minutes, the low-key affair turned into, well, whatever you get when you mix a bunch of underweight models, tequila, and hair metal. People were dancing on the desks, and at some point, I initiated a rolling-desk-chair race. As I waited for a cab to pick me up (my car stayed there until the morning), I nudged Dave to tell him the party was over. He was passed out, facedown on his desk. For unknown reasons, his shirt was off, and a backpack was strapped to his back. His Mets T-shirt was in a heap beside his chair.

Paper Planes

Every month there is a new installation in the box, each conceptualized
by a different artist. Sometimes the back wall is covered in a collage of Polaroids. Sometimes it's painted in bold, modern stripes. Sometimes it pulses with Dan Flavinesque neon lights. While some installations are quite pleasant to be a part of—a tranquil surf video projected behind me, say—others are more unnerving.

For a month, green paper lanterns and pink plastic flowers of an undeterminable variety hung from the ceiling of the box. I couldn't sit up without one of them hitting me on the head. While that was annoying, it was actually the least troubling part of the installation. Behind me, on the wall, were pictures of odd little dolls in poses that failed to be cute: at the beach, in a rose garden, in a wedding dress, peering over a sunflower. The worst was a picture of one doll holding a smaller, even creepier doll. No matter what these dolls were up to, their expressions remained unchanged: foreheads too large for their faces, eyes of alien proportions. Dozens of bug-eyes fixed on me, for seven hours straight.