The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (20 page)

No matter how busy we were becoming, however, I refused to give up our Friday-night ritual of stopping in at the American for a drink on our way home from the train station to the Beekman.

“I’m sorry,” Doug said as we entered. “We’re a respectable establishment. We don’t allow prostitution at the bar.”

“You’re just afraid of competition,” I rebutted.

“Well, it is tough to compete when you’re just givin’ it away.
Slut.
”

“Whore.”

Garth stepped in to give both Brent and me a hug. George the bartender/mortician began making my drink.

After we’d exchanged pleasantries, Garth turned a little serious.

“So…how is John doing?” he asked.

For a moment I was worried that he was going to reveal that John had an incurable disease or a secret drug problem. Garth was not the type of person to spread gossip, so his even bringing up the subject meant that whatever the issue was must have great importance.

“He’s doing great,” we said. “We love him.”

“He hasn’t complained about anything to you guys?” Garth asked.

Immediately, our concern turned toward ourselves. We knew that even the slightest bit of information about us usually streaked its way through the village, being twisted and turned as it was repeated.

“Why. What did we do?” Brent asked.

“Well, it’s more of what you didn’t do,” Garth said. “John was in the other night and he seemed kinda down. So we asked him what was wrong and, after two beers, he told us that when he’d moved into the Beekman, he’d thought that you and Brent would be, well, that you’d be…”

Garth struggled getting out the truth. We’d be more
what
? Generous? Were we underpaying him? Not friendly enough? Too New York City abrupt?

“Well, he thought you guys would be…
gayer
.”

“Gayer?”

“Apparently, he read your first book about your days as a drag queen. And he just thought that you’d be a little, I dunno, sassier.”

I couldn’t imagine what John could have possibly meant by that. Did he expect us to have giant rave parties in the backyard? That we’d fill the pool with skinny-dipping hired hustlers? Sure, we had some gay couples come to visit us occasionally, but like us, they were more popcorn-and-pay-per-view-movie gays than poppers-and-pay-by-the-hour gays.

Then again, his timing couldn’t have been more perfect. In a matter of hours the farm would be swarming with male models, fashionistas, and designer labels. The farm would be less about goat herding than animal magnetism, and more about photo cropping than crops.

John wasn’t merely going to get a little more gay this weekend, he was going to be at the epicenter of a gayquake measuring seven on the hipster scale.

“Just come downstairs,” I prodded Brent, who was lying across the bed the next morning paying Beekman bills on his laptop. “For Christ’s sake. There are male models changing clothes in our dining room and you won’t come down to watch?”

“They’re scratching the floor,” he said. “I don’t want to see it.”

“They’re not scratching the floor,” I said, sighing. “The wardrobe racks all have rubber tires.”

“Then they’re getting black scuff marks on the floor.”

Brent had been torn about the prospect of the photo shoot ever since I’d arranged it. It brings into direct conflict his two most prevailing neuroses. His control issues usually mean that we don’t invite more than a couple of guests up at one time. He can’t handle any sort of domestic chaos. Everything in the house always has to look like it’s ready for a magazine shoot.

But today, faced with an
actual
magazine shoot, he was on the verge of a panic attack with all of the crew and models roaming around the house and grounds.

We’d been told that the photo shoot’s “story” was “Depression-era farming” and “dust bowls.” Even after so many years in advertising, I was still just barely fluent in the language of high fashion. Photos aren’t pictures; they’re “narratives.” Models aren’t models; they’re “talent.” On my best days I’m lucky to choose pairs of pants and shirts that have somewhat similar colors. But on fashion shoots, the clothing has “textures,” “shadows,” and “lines,” and can be “derivative” and “expository.”

I went back downstairs alone and found a short, slight, middle-aged Asian man standing in our front hallway.

“Hello, I’m the photographer,” he said, holding his hand out. He’s a very well-known fashion photographer whose work has appeared in nearly every magazine on any newsstand around the world. “This place is beautiful. Amazing. Such historic textures!” Apparently textures exist in time as well as in space.

Two of the models emerged from the dining room for the photographer to inspect. Marcus and Jaithan. They were stunningly beautiful. Marcus had perfectly curled jet-black hair and a jawline sharp enough to cut firewood. Jaithan had close-cropped hair and soft blue-gray eyes that made him seem more vulnerable than his wide shoulders and impossibly broad chest suggested. Both seemed almost not quite human, more like creatures that mustn’t be approached directly for fear of marring their physical perfection with the accidental grit of day-to-day existence. While the crew bustled around setting up its stations, the models waited patiently on the sidelines, waiting to be called into non-action. Jaithan went to lean against the wall and put his hand down on a small collection of zombie flies on the windowsill. He winced and withdrew his hand quicker than last season’s line from a Barneys window.

In addition to turning the dining room into the wardrobe room, the kitchen was taken over as the makeup and hair station, and the center hallway served as the staging area. I turned around to see Brent leaning over the second-floor banister. Curiosity had gotten the better of him, but I could tell from the look on his face that he was not happy with all the activity.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s at least get a little time in the garden while they’re setting up.”

“There are so many of them,” he whispered as we headed out the side door.

“Well, it’s a lot of work,” I said. “The Depression didn’t just
happen.
A lot of work went into plunging the nation into glossy sepia-toned narrative textures.”

We’d at least gotten the garden bed weeded by the time the photographer, crew, and models came out on the porch. They followed the photographer around the yard en masse as he scouted possible locations and angles for the first shot. Finally settling on a spot by the pond, he instructed the models to recline on the grass in their meticulously styled designer “work clothes.”

Brent went down to watch while I continued my war on stinging nettles. He returned in less than fifteen minutes, with John in tow.

“Wow. That’s boring,” Brent remarked. Having once spent two days filming a caramel pull for a candy bar television commercial, their progress seemed almost nimble to me.

“They just take the same picture over and over again,” John said.

“But the models are cute, aren’t they?” I asked John.

“I guess. If you like ’em skinny.”

John joined us with the weeding. He knew how incredibly busy we’d been over the last couple of months, and how busy he’d been trying to pick up our slack.

An hour later, the photographer, the models, and crew moved on to their next location—by the woodpile. We watched from a distance as one of the models carried logs to the other one, who was resting his foot seductively on the large mechanical log splitter.

“Look at the huge log on that model,” I joked.

“Did they even have power log splitters in the Depression?” Brent asked.

“You’re
sooo
literal,” I sighed. “It’s supposed to be derivative.”

I wondered what the Beekman actually did look like during the Depression. We knew the Beekman family no longer lived in the house by then. From the history we’d read, the mansion in the 1930s was only a decade or so away from being completely abandoned. It certainly didn’t look like how it was going to be portrayed in these shots. Whoever the farmer’s wife was at the time wasn’t spending her days weeding a vast formal flower garden. The closest she probably came to makeup and designer labels were soot smudges and hand-me-down aprons.

Eventually either she or someone who came right after her failed in her quest to keep the Beekman alive and productive. From the late 1940s until the day the Selzners purchased it, it disintegrated into a rickety shell. Though we can’t quite piece together the lineage exactly, we knew that it was by turns a boardinghouse, then a camp for migrant laborers, and then, for long stretches, it was simply nothing. We had a photo hanging in the living room of the grand center hallway, given to us by a local, taken sometime in the mid-1970s. Scrap lumber leaned against the peeling plaster walls. A dented birdcage rested on a pile of debris. And someone had spray-painted the name
THEO
in large letters on top of the ripped wallpaper.

I wondered what the Depression-era cross section of Beekman ghosts thought about the re-creation of their time happening around us.

As the fashion mob wandered the grounds finding new shots, I thought about the hundreds of various tableaus the house had staged over the last two centuries. Brent and I would eventually take our place as nothing more than another scene in a very long play. I still wasn’t entirely certain how our scene would eventually play out. Would we be lifetime residents who’d be buried in the crypt? Or will local history remember us as the earnest city folk who dreamed of rebuilding the farm—but didn’t quite make it.

“Jump on the hay pile! Good! Good! Throw some hay at each other.”

The shouted instructions were coming from the other side of the barn. At first Brent, John, and I didn’t even notice them. Lost in our battle against the weeds, we’d tuned out the constant chorus of directives the photographer shouted at the models.

“Okay, now roll around in the hay pile a little!”

Both John and Brent looked at me. I could tell they were thinking exactly what I was thinking: We don’t have a hay pile. We listened a little more until curiosity finally got the better of us.

We cut through the barn to see what was happening on the other side. When we spotted the bunch in the distance, John busted out laughing

Out beyond the garden, the models were indeed rolling in what they believed to be a hay pile. Except it wasn’t. All winter long, when the goats are penned up in the barn due to the freezing weather, John layers fresh straw underneath them each day. By the year’s first thaw, the bedding is allowed to build up to almost four feet deep underneath the goats for two reasons: because it’s impossible to scoop out into the barnyard through the deep and drifting snow, and as the manure builds up in the straw beneath them, its decomposition helps keep the barn a few degrees warmer and more comfortable for the goats. When the snow finally melts, John uses the tractor to scoop up five months’ worth of collected straw and manure, and dumps it in a large pile in the barnyard, to be spread over the hayfields over the course of the summer.

“More rolling! Roll around more!”
the photographer continued to shout, focusing his lens.

Our “Depression-era” models, in their $1,600 pants and $2,300 jackets, were rolling around in a two-story-tall pile of winter manure.

“Shouldn’t we tell them?” Brent asked.

“Nah.” I giggled. “Let’s wait to see if the shot makes it in the magazine.”

We watched them frolic unaware in the goat shit for a few more minutes before I turned to John.

“So…is this gay enough for you?”

He looked surprised that I’d heard about his complaint. But then he chuckled.

“Plenty,” he answered. “Gayer than a goat in clover.”

As the crew members were packing up their gear and loading up their vans to drive back into the city, I picked up my BlackBerry to find that I had missed twelve phone calls from the same 212 area code number. Three seconds into the first voice mail I realized what I’d done. Or rather, not done.

“Josh, hey, it’s Jess. Just checking in to go over those headlines before the call tonight.”

I didn’t bother listening to the next ten messages and skipped to the final one.

“Where the fuck are you? The call is in ten minutes, and you haven’t sent anything to anyone.”

Shit shit shit. I checked my watch. The client conference call had started five minutes ago. I frantically scrolled through my e-mails looking for the call-in conference number.

Right before I was patched into the conference, I took a deep breath and grabbed a pen and paper off of the counter next to me.

“Josh Kilmer-Purcell has joined the call,” said the robot operator.

“Oh good! You’re here,” I heard Jess say in her best calm account executive manner. “I was just telling everyone that you were probably having difficulty printing out the headlines.” Despite her professional demeanor, I knew that she was actually hoping that I’d died in a plane crash—on a competing airline, of course.

“Yes, exactly,” I said. “Boy, how does the toner always know to run out just before a big call,” I joked. Everyone on the line laughed politely. In advertising, everyone always laughs politely at the Creatives. They’re afraid not to be in on the joke—even when there’s not one.

“Let me take you quickly through—” Jess said. She was interrupted by:

HERE COMES THE BRIDE!!!

Jesus. Really? It was six in the evening. The sun hadn’t even gone down yet.

“What was that?” one of the lower-level clients asked.

“Sounded like an air raid siren,” someone on the call remarked.

“Or a broken car horn,” someone else suggested.

“Oh that’s just on my end,” I said. “I have the office window open. Lots of traffic on the street.”

“Let me take you quickly through the strategy,” Jess quickly repeated. She knew damn well what it was, and she didn’t want the client to find out.

At least by going over the strategy deck she’d bought me a little time. When she finally finished droning on about the habits of business travelers and the key insights into their behavior, I had half a dozen lines scribbled on the back of an Agway receipt.