60 -- She wants to be a model

 

 

We must have passed the building at Schrader and the Boulevard a hundred times before Louise took notice of the pictures posted behind glass to either side of the door.

She noticed the pictures first. The caption said, “Girls, women, men,” new faces needed, all types for casting for TV commercials, movies and modelling. No experience necessary.

There was a flyer lying on the ground near by which said: Girls – no experience necessary. For in-up & figure modeling. $50 per day. No fees. Flexible hours. Pretty Girl International Agency.

The images of women in bikinis were set against a black silk backdrop with a smaller sign saying, “you can be a model too.”

The whole thing reminded me of a Miss America beauty contest.

The narrow doorway – surrounded by flashy upscale Hollywood shops led to a dusty hall and a rising staircase to offices on the second floor. More class enclosed display cases with more nearly naked women lined the hall.

“Let’s go up and see what it’s about,” Louise suggested.

I shook my head. The place made me feel nervous. The door sill was cracked and the hallway dusty, and it had a sleazy atmosphere I didn’t trust.

“Why do you want to go up there?” I asked.

“Because I want to find out what it’s all about,” Louise said. “I always wanted to be a model.”

“And I’ve always wanted to be an actor,” I said, half joking. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll ever become one.”

She gave me a wounded look, making me regret my sarcastic tone.

“But we’re here and they’re hiring,” she said, pointing to the small sign. “It says I won’t need experience. They’ll train me.”

I stood determined not to get into this with her; but she was as determined as I was.

“I’m going up” she said, then marched to the door, then through it and into the twilight of the interior towards the stairs.

Still, I remained outside, pedestrians striding passed me over a marble sidewalk filled with the pink stars containing the names of famous actors. I squinted into the lobby, convinced she merely teased me with this, a joke, and she would reemerge at any moment laughing.

She did not come out.

I pushed open the door and heard the scrap of her footsteps on the stairs, beyond the first landing headed for the second floor.

Shivering against the chill of an overly enthusiastic central air-conditioning, I hesitated, sighed, then started up the stairs after her, my feet stumbling over a collection of empty wine bottles littering a corner of the first step.

A thin black rug coated each step, worn gray at the middle of each step from a parade of feet going up and coming down, a shabby black carpet rather than the red carpet Louise envisioned, I thought as my feet followed the thread-bare trail up ten steps to the landing, turning right, up another ten steps to the floor above – Louise just disappearing as I made the turn on the second set.

I called her. With a curious twist of her lip that gave me an odd and victorious smile, she halted, waiting as I huffed and puffed up the rest of the stairs to catch up.

“You didn’t have to come up,” she said. “You could have waited for me outside.”

Her eyes glowed with an odd look, an almost hungry look, a look I’d not seen before, here, in Colorado or even back in New Jersey – showing a new side I wasn’t certain I liked.

“This isn’t like you,” I said breathing hard from the climb, already losing some of that physical edge I had attained while training in the army.

Louise shrugged. “How is it not like me?”

“Impulsive,” I said. “I thought we might talk about it before you did anything.”

“We did talk,” she said. “You didn’t want me to come in here, and I wanted to.”

Her gaze, somewhat detached, stared passed me back the way we’d come, her eyes reflecting the odd glow from the dim light over the landing below and the reflected sunlight on the wall cascading in through the glass doors from the street.

“Why do you want to?” I asked. “Do you really want to be a model that bad?”

Finally, she looked directly at me, her gaze hard, determined, glinting less with reflected light but with some sequence of thought beyond my understanding.

“One of us has to work,” she said, with just enough chill in her tone to alarm me. “If you won’t, then I have to.”

Work? She had mentioned my getting a job several times during the previous few weeks. Not seriously. Just as a thought of what we might need to do when the money I had stolen ran out. I hadn’t discounted the idea; I simply hadn’t seen a need just yet.

“All right we’re here now,” I said, hoping to stifle a bit of Louise’s fury. “We might as well see what it’s all about.”

We stood in a small hall – a single door with frosted glass – directly across from us as more stairs led up to another floor, although from the small sign, this door was the one we wanted.

Something fluttered on the floor to one side of the door, a slick magazine the pages of which had fluttered open from wind coming in with the opening and closing of the door below – not Playboy, yet with a centerfold featuring a similar female nude.

Hanging from the doorknob to the office, another sign said, “knock and come in.”

We knocked and pushed open the door emerging into a wide waiting room with a wide desk directly ahead positioned between two oak doors. Cheap vinyl chairs lined the other three walls, reminding me of waiting rooms I had last seen when still in the army. Larger versions of the photographs we had seen below hung on the walls over the chairs, in aluminum frames. These contrasted sharply with the peeling paint on the walls where they hung.  Large potted plants – some kind of rubber tree – stood in the corners, leaves drooping and yellowing as if someone had neglected watering them for days, maybe weeks.

“Can I help you?” the woman seated at the desk asked.

Since nobody else sat in any of the chairs, we concluded she spoke to us.

Louise stared at her, and frankly so did I, since she looked exactly like one of the models in the pictures, with a plume of bright red hair, eyes painted in silver shadow and black eyelashes thick and long. Her slick red lipstick matched her inch-long red fingernails. Her clothing had come straight out of one of the Boulevard shops like Pecks or Fredericks, a blue blouse so tight she might as well have been naked, the first four buttons open to reveal ample cleavage. Later, when she stood, I noticed pants as tight as her blouse, and stiletto-heeled shoes she somehow managed to navigate, as lethal as the rest of her.

The room reeked of her perfume.

The woman looked and smiled at me; I glanced at Louise, who struggled to speak, and when she accomplished it, spoke in a hoarse near whisper: “I’m enquiring about the modelling job. You have it advertised downstairs.”

The woman’s glittering lips parted in a broad smile; her gaze doing a survey of Louise and clearly approving of what she saw – perhaps even seeing what I saw for the first time back in the print plant in New Jersey – a Doris Day type girl with a deceptive all American, girl-next-door appeal the modeling agency might exploit.

Still smiling, the woman, pulling one of the drawers open from the desk and pulling out a file folder from which she drew several papers, motioned for us to take pens from a cup on the desk. She handed each of us a printed form which had space for our names, ages, address, as well as details such as height, weight, eye color – and most revealing – type of modeling we would like to do.

“I’m not here for a job,” I said, attempting to return the form to the woman.

Her gaze refocused on me, studying me the way she had Louise, the tip of her tongue licking briefly her painted lips as her smile broadened.

“You should be,” she said. “We need men models as much as we need women. After all,” she added, the pupils of her eyes dilating as she looked more closely at me, “where would we be without men?”

I struggled to smile bac, chilled by some forewarning I could not yet pin down, some inner voice screaming at me to grab Louise and run.

But Louise had already settled onto one of the seats, taking up one of the slick magazines abandoned there to use to prop up the application and scratched out the details on the form like a child taking a test at school. She looked utterly innocent.

I sat down in the seat beside her and did the same, filling out my phony name and our real address, though when it came to a phone number, I left this blank.

Have you ever done modeling before?

I wrote, “No.”

Have you acted?

To this I also replied, “No,” then filled out the rest, rose and carried the completed copy back to the woman behind the desk. The woman continued to smile at me, nodded when she looked over the form, and accepted the form when Louise returned her as well.

“Just sit for a moment,” she instructed us. “Someone will be with you shortly.”

We sat. Louise stared into space. I did my best to avoid looking at the woman behind the desk, though she kept looking at me through her long lashes, as if she knew me from somewhere or recognized something about me that she liked. The woman picked up the telephone, pushed one of the buttons at the bottom, spoke briefly.

We waited.

Traffic on the Boulevard buzzed outside like a drone, not loud, but constant, like a headache.

A moment later, the door to the left of the desk popped open and a small woman – or should I say a girl – came out, looked a bit confused, blinking as if coming out the dark into bright light even though the office behind her seemed as bright as the room where we sat. She glanced at the woman behind the desk, then at us, and then left through the door to the hall, her footsteps resounding briefly on the tiled floors, then more muffled by the carpeted stairs, until finally we heard the sound to door open below, and she was gone.

“You can go in now,” the woman behind the desk said, again giving me an odd smile, she is knowing something I didn’t, and it amused her.

We stood and made our way towards the door, Louise a step or two ahead of me, while my feet dragged, reluctant to take the next step, suspicious about where it would lead.

The woman grabbed my arm as I passed her desk, halting me.

“Not you, just her,” she said, her sharp nails biting into the flesh of my forearm, something she was aware of as she stared straight into my eyes.

“But we’re together,” Louise said, pausing before the open door to the inner office.

“Yes, we do interviews one at a time,” the woman said. “Just go in. Your boyfriend will be safe with me, I promise.”

I wasn’t as sure as she was; neither was Louise, but she continued on, and closed the door behind her.

“If you want,” the woman told me, “I can take care of you in the other room. It would save time for both of you.”

I nodded; she stood, then led me through the door to the right of the desk and closed this firmly behind us.

Smaller than the outer office, the room had gear for a photo shoot, stands for lights, and one wall had a white reflecting screen, and a small table – like a doctor’s examination table surrounded by this gear. I saw no cameras, but imagined the photographer would bring them at the right time.

I heard stirring in the other office, where Louise was being interviewed.

The woman turned towards me from behind the light stands and motioned me towards the table.

“Over there,” she said. “And strip.”

“What?” I said, turning towards her, yet backing away, bumping into the table that rattled, the cold metal touching my arm; it was not what made me shiver.

The woman laughed.

“I want you to take off your clothes,” she said, her red lipstick glistening, recently refreshed, though her eyes shimmered more, clearly amused, and curious, perhaps wondering what she might find when I obeyed her command. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

My fingers fumbled as I unbuttoned my jacket, pealed it off, and then again with my shirt – one of those I had purchased downtown just after my getting off the bus from the east.

“Now the pants,” she said. “And yes, the underwear and socks. I need to see what kind of gun you’re packing.”

“Gun?”

“Don’t be cute, you know what I’m talking about.”

I hadn’t, but soon caught on, complying with the additional commands until I stood completely naked, feeling the chill of the room from the central air, especially my toes where they touched the floor tiles. I shivered. She laughed, and circled me, studying me, “not bad. It’s not a shot gun, but it’s not a pea shooter either. I think you’ll do just fine.”

“Fine for what?”

“You’ll find out,” she said, and then began to take off her clothing, too, revealing much more than any of the models did on the pictures outside.

I reacted accordingly, and this broadened her smile, living up to her expectations.

“Maybe you’re a shotgun after all,” she said, her hand touching me, taking hold of me, making me grow even more.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Checking you out,” she said. “We have to do this with all our male clients to determine if they’re up for the task when we put them on camera.”

She played with my foreskin.

“We have a certain image to uphold,” she said, “I mean our magazines, as she knelt down in front of me, her lips inches from the thing she examined. “We only want the best.”

Her examination lasted only a moment longer, at least that part of it. Perhaps it might have gone further, except she saw the look in my eye, and she laughed again, differently, not quite mocking me, but teasingly.

“You’re not up for any of this, are you?” she asked, her smile warmer, more tender, the way a sister might smile at a younger brother.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Yes, you do, you just don’t want to admit it,” she said. “You’re not the type. Why are you here if you’re not willing to go all the way?”

“I’m here because my girlfriend wants to be a model.”

“Does she really?” the woman said, still smiling, her eyes, sad. “You should get her out of here as soon as she’s done with Bob in the other office, and hope for your sake she doesn’t like it too much.”

I glared at her, and then in the direction of the other office, taking a long stride in that direction before the woman grabbed my arm again.

“Are you planning to go beat up Bob dressed like that?” she asked.

I glanced down. I was still naked. I know I blushed.  I grabbed for my clothing; her fingernails dug deeper into my arm.

“The door will be locked,” she said. “You’ll have to wait until they’re done. Don’t hold it against her when they are. Bob can be very persuasive. Just don’t let her come back. Okay, honey.”

I got dressed and pushed my way into the outer office, which was still empty, and the door to the other office, still closed.

I wanted to tear down the door or at least pound on it. I sat in one of the chairs instead, the woman slipping out, still dressing herself as she did, not looking at me exactly, yet aware of me, wondering no doubt what I intended to do.

I wondered the same thing.

Later, from Dan, I learned the sad truth. This agency like a number of similar places down on the street were desperate for new blood, new faces, more importantly new bodies to put into the slick girlie magazines we frequently saw sold in stores up and down the boulevard, such as the one on Vine we passed nearly daily.

The industry had cropped up about five years earlier as part of the adult book market controlled largely as branch operations for a printing plant or distributor, offering to fulfill the male fantasies they could not get enough of with magazines such as Playboy, nude female publications in which the male models served as backdrop. The place on Vine even offered special sales on those magazines that were slow movers.

The industry flourished during the Summer of Love when thousands of young girls flowed into Hollywood to work cheap or for free. Prior to that, they industry had used professional strippers or even prostitutes. But when the hippie girls came, they pushed out the pros, but then the hippie girls became fewer, and the price to replace them went up.

The problem, Dan told me, was the fact that many of these same photographers – mostly with apartments down on Sunset Strip – also worked for a much more lucrative blue magazine and film market – for which these soft core modelling jobs served as recruitment.

“They hire girls to pose for soft core beaver shots as pretty good money,” Dan said. “But after a while, the modelling agencies tell the girls they’ve maxed out at those jobs, and if they want to keep earning good bread, they have to take the next step.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Hard core porno,” he said.

 

  On the lamb menu

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