Catwalk Fail

by Jason Godfrey

  “No,” I say, not wanting to explain my recent catastrophic sex injury. The microwave is humming and ticking down from 3:30. Svetlana must have hit the popcorn button. “It’s your hands… too strong…”

  “What you say? I have man hands?” Svetlana holds her palms out and I can’t help staring. Her hands are lumberjack huge. “Holy shit.”

  Her face turns red and she shoves me with her cooking mitt hand as she stumbles toward the door.

  “You don’t understand,” I say, as one of the Coke Zero’s punctured in the fall sprays a fizzy brown spot into the side of my blue Kenneth Cole loafer.

  “Fuck you!” Svetlana says, probably meaning to punctuate this by slamming the door. But instead she fumbles with the knob for what has to be at least forty-five seconds while trying not to glance back at me. I take a breath. Finally, she manages to leave and I’m alone, the room suddenly quiet, the taste of cigarettes filling my mouth, my feet marinating in cola, and my genitals begging to be submerged in ice water. The microwave dings.

  Collapsing onto my bed, I take a handful of Panadols from the night table and swallow them dry. Then I undo my button fly, and take a cautious look down my pants, hoping it doesn’t look like a plate of rare roast beef, which is unfortunately what it feels like. There’s no roast beef in my pants but it’s not much better.

  A purple bruised ring, about the width of my thumb, around the middle of my shaft glares at me. Looking at it actually seems to make the throbbing pain worse. As I continue staring into my pants, at my penis laying twisted to the left, looking sad and defeated, I’m overcome with despair. It’s like seeing a great champion, clad in his broken armour, weaponless, laying sprawled and limp on a dusty battlefield. A mighty warrior struck down in his prime. As I’m thinking this and staring at my genitals, I squint looking closer, and it looks uneven somehow. Almost like I can see the imprints of Svetlana’s powerful fingers embedded in it. Despair turns to panic.

  I button my pants. What is happening in my underwear is not a problem for over the counter painkillers, I need to show my penis to a medical professional immediately.

  I lay back on my crappy bed, the springs poking into my back, I realize something else is troubling me. Closing my eyes, I promptly drop into REM sleep and dream I’m back in Asylum. Marek materializes, wrapping an arm around me and dragging me deeper into the club where girls of all colours and creeds are sitting in a row on a long red couch. Fresh meat he tells me, as I pan over the smiling models who are all moisturized legs and push-up bras. The girls are eyeing me, and this makes me feel good. Then I pan over to the model at the end of the couch. There—sitting cross legged in a short skirt, her cleavage distressingly noticeable and her eyeliner so smoky she could’ve come from a forest fire—is Jasmine. I want to pull her out of the club but before I can do anything, Taylor appears and tells me that wearing a blazer with no shirt underneath is a wank move.

  When I snap awake, my throat is dry, I’m covered in sweat, my groin aching through the numbness, and though I instinctively flex my abs and rub my hands over the ridges which usually comforts me, everything still feels wrong.

  CHAPTER 3

  Colin Bryce Hamilton

  Recovering from another intense night out!

  44 people like this.

  Sheldon Ferguson

  Party hardcore as usual mate!

  Colin Bryce Hamilton likes this.

  BRITNEY FOLLOWED ME on Instagram and Snapchat this morning and sent me a friend request on Facebook. I don’t particularly like her, and the entire busted cock thing doesn’t help, but I’ll add her anyway. Across all my social media accounts I’ve got access to just under one thousand people I personally know, most of whom are hot girls. And I don’t mean hot like the hottest chick at Applebee’s on a Thursday night, I mean world-class runway-gracing hot. One more can’t hurt. I’ll add Britney, but I’ll wait a couple days and make her sweat it out.

  “There’s a modelling contest at the shopping center,” Jasmine says, confined to a tiny box on the top corner of my MacBook screen. “First prize is becoming the face of their new ad campaign…”

  My sister continues talking about the specifics of the contest and I’m happy this conversation is taking place on Skype. Though I’m looking at the screen, nodding intermittently, so Jasmine thinks I’m concentrating on her and her plans to model in Milano, I’m holding my phone next to the screen, sliding my finger left to right, picking filters for a photo post on Instagram.

  I try to post on Instagram regularly not so much because it’s part of the job but mostly because I have 5000+ followers who want to keep up with what I’m doing. I know that’s not a huge following, especially considering how many shirtless photos I post, but I’m not fussed about it. Lots of models see Instagram as a way to get more jobs, I see it as a cheat. I don’t want to become a top model based on how many people like my pictures, I want to make it on merit. Call me old fashioned.

  I’ve already posted a selfie of me in Spain with Britney where she looks quite cute and not at all capable of destroying a perfectly good penis. I finally settle on the mayfair filter on a shot of me with Damian and Marek, who were so drunk they look like they’re sweating out Hanta virus. I’m looking equally fucked up, except I was faking. I don’t drink much. The calories in alcohol are killer on the abs. But this is a great shot to let people know that despite being a magnet for incredibly hot girls, at the end of the day, I’m just one of the boys.

  I click next.

  “…think I should join?” Jasmine asks. I nod, my conversation autopilot recognizing the tone of a question. “Cause if I win, at least I’ll have a campaign shoot in my book, right?”

  Conversation autopilot recognizes two questions in a row and returns to manual control. Jasmine is staring at me, her big dark eyes full of ridiculously naïve hope that winning an inane suburban shopping centre beauty pageant will carry some kind of weight in Milano.

  “Jas, pageants aren’t fashion,” I say.

  “It’s not a pageant.” She shakes her head. “It’s a modelling contest.”

  “It’s a way for a shitty mall to get a free model for their shitty campaign.” Unless it’s the Elite Model Look, it is not a modelling contest. But I don’t dare divulge this to her, fearing she would join up and win. “It won’t help you in fashion to battle it out with the halfway pretty girl working at the Dairy Queen. Don’t degrade yourself like that.”

  “It’d be better than nothing, no?” Actually, doing a free ad for a crappy mall is worse than nothing by fashion’s standards. I shrug.

  “I shot some new stuff with my friend,” She says, grasping for straws. “Maybe that could help. I’ll send you one of them.”

  A shot of my sister that is so overexposed, it looks like it was shot with the sun in the room, pops up on screen. All the subtle details—wrinkles, eye bags, her actual nose—have been completely washed out. Wannabe Testino strikes again.

  “Your photographer friend shot this?”

  “Yeah,” She says, looking embarrassed. “You recognized the signature style?”

  I do, his particular signature style being shit. I’m about to break my silence about Wannabe Testino’s lack of ability but realize his well-meaning incompetence is doing a better job of stopping my sister from modelling than I am.

  “You should keep shooting with your friend,” I say.

  “Really?” Jasmine’s eyes light up. Then she continues discussing the techniques amateur-night-in-suburbia uses. I’m back to nodding as I notice Damien has tagged me in a photo. I tap the alert which brings up a shot of Svetlana licking my ear with a tongue that is disturbingly reminiscent of a golden retriever’s. Underneath there is a comment from Sheldon, a rich kid nerd who idolizes me for being, well, me.

  Ha! Ha! Every night is the same, mate! Always partying with the most incredible chicks!

  I’m certain Sheldon assumes I had sex last night, which makes me feel better about actually not having sex.

 
“How many photos do you think I need before I try Milano?” my sister interrupts my introspective moment. I’ve let her have her fantasy long enough. It’s time to crush her hopes with a dose of fashion reality.

  “It’s not about how many. Check this out,” I say, and send her a message with the link to Beatrice Models’ webpage in Milano. My sister’s eyes move from the camera to the screen, and I know what she’s looking at: rows of black and white headshots of doe-eyed, lip pouting girls. Clicking on any of these faces leads to the same thing: covers of fashion magazines, glossy ad campaigns, edgy tears from editorials. These are the portfolios of world class models.

  “Wow,” she says, her eyes scanning the screen. “These girls are really, really beautiful…”

  I watch as the Beatrice website, slowly but surely, leads my sister’s burgeoning model dream out behind the barn and puts it down with a shotgun. It had to be done.

  To give this time to sink in, I go back to Instagram on my phone where I can’t help checking out Damian’s profile. His account is inundated with his cheesy grinning face and he has 20k+ followers. Something in my stomach twists and aches and I’m about to return to my own profile when I notice a candid from last night of Damian and Taylor talking. I can’t help but stare. She’s grinning this big beautiful grin and I’m wishing whatever dumb-ass thing Damian is spewing had come out of my mouth instead. I close Instagram and put my phone down.

  “Oh…” Jasmine says. And I turn my focus back to my sister, expecting her to look ashen and hollow, but instead, she looks like a general surveying a battlefield. “I see what you’re saying. I need better photos. Like way, way better.”

  Beatrice didn’t work. That countdown timer I’ve got on my sister beeps twice, down to eight and then seven. I’m thinking of another tactic to defuse her, when she furls her brow at the screen and says, “Hey, I thought you were with Beatrice…”

  “Of course, I am,” I say, my hands whir to life and the Beatrice website pops open on my screen. Immediately, I’m clicking the men’s section and my eyes are drawn to the space between Sandor V and Piero S, where my face has been for the past five years.

  Except now I’m missing.

  “Oh dear,” Dr. Leung says, adjusting his spectacles with a small wrinkled hand as he hunches over my bruised manhood. “There is certainly something wrong with your penis.”

  If this is his diagnosis, there is the distinct possibility I’m paying too much for it. I shiver, and it’s not only because I’m sitting bare-assed in a curtained-off corner of the emergency section of Queen Mary Hospital in Pok Fu Lam. My Top Shop skinny jeans and my Calvin’s are resting unceremoniously around my ankles with Dr. Leung’s wrinkled head, covered in patchy white hair that reminds me of Yoda, between my legs. This isn’t the morning I had hoped for.

  “Are you a sportsman?” He asks, squinting hard at my genitalia like it’s the bottom line on an eye exam, which does nothing for my self-esteem.

  “No,” I say, holding back a comment on the hospitals Alaskan climate to account for shrinkage.

  “Oh, so this trauma didn’t occur during a sporting event.” He angles his head to scrutinize the bruise around the shaft and I’m wondering what kind of sporting event would break a penis. “What happened?”

  “Sex,” I say, not wanting to explain the ironic tragedy of bedding a hot blond model. “I had sex.”

  “Of course!” Dr. Leung looks up at me like he’s had an epiphany. A sparse tuft of his white hair blows in the air-conditioning as he gives me a toothy Yoda smile from between my bare thighs. Star Wars is ruined. “You are a very good looking young man!”

  If Dr. Leung is trying to make this situation as awkward as possible, he deserves a raise.

  “Quite vigorous sex! Young good-looking men usually have vigorous sex!” He says, nodding at my sad battered penis. “You can get dressed.”

  Dr. Leung stands to his full hunched over height, which barely reaches to my shoulder. Pulling my clothes back on I’m ready to get some penile mending cream and get out of here.

  “Mr. Hamilton, you have a badly fractured penis.” He says. “We have a couple of options to correct this damage and avoid long term erectile dysfunction.”

  “—long term erectile—?”

  I’ve never understood the expression blood runs cold until right fucking now.

  “The first option is surgery.”

  Cock surgery? I thought at worst I’d have to wear a little cast, or splint my penis to my thigh for a few days.

  “And the second option—?” I say, desperate for an alternative. There must be some other fix that doesn’t involve slicing my manhood like a bratwurst at Oktoberfest.

  “We simply let it heal on its own.” He gives a slow nod like a JedI Master, all-knowing in art of penis mending.

  “Oh, thank God.” I breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, a morsel of good news in the shit-filled sandwich that has been this entire trip to the hospital. “How much longer until it’s completely healed? A few more days, maybe a week?”

  “Oh, no, no,” he says, still wearing that all-knowing grin. “Without surgery, your injury will take ten to twelve weeks to fully heal. Given the colour and expanse of your bruising—I would say closer to twelve weeks.”

  Nope, that sandwich is 100% shit filled.

  “And, Mr. Hamilton, your penis is in a very fragile state. If you were to suffer any more trauma—even to a lesser degree than the original trauma— you would risk long term erectile dysfunction. Surgery would likely be the only option.” He says this in a cheery matter-of-fact way, like throwing around threats of erectile dysfunction is as normal as flagging down a taxi. “It’s imperative that you participate in absolutely no sex.”

  “None.”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Leung snaps his fingers and shuffles away, leaving me to cope with the realization that I’ve just been ordered to spend the next three months totally sexless in Hong Kong.

  Modelling is a lot of shit work. Work that doesn’t carry any prestige, doesn’t do anything to build your rep as a model, and pays shittier or equal to working an honest job. I hate those bookings.

  That Japanese candy bar commercial in Barcelona, aside from landing me a fractured penis, paid twenty thousand USD gross for a half-day fitting and two days of shooting. Even after deducting the 30% agency fee, this will easily cover my costs for the next few months and allow me to choose what I do. In most model contracts, the agency agrees to front certain costs to the model. Things like airfare and accommodation, plus a feeble allowance that doesn’t actually allow for much. In return, the model agrees to go to any and all ridiculous, time-wasting-castings their bookers send them to. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that being indentured by fronted cash sucks. Never letting an agency front me cash allows certain freedoms. It’s time to exercise some of that freedom.

  “Can I talk to Apple?” I say, walking down the crowded sidewalk.

  I’m repped by agencies all over the world but my agency here is One Models. The very best. My bookers name is Apple. In Hong Kong everyone has two names, a Chinese one and an English one. Apple got her English name from her English teacher when she was a kid. Her expatriate instructor must have been a vindictive asshole because he named everyone after fruit. There was a whole fucking class of kids named things like Grapes and Lychee and Guava. Kids would fight and Pear would beat the shit out of Gooseberry, and next thing you know, Mango was pissed.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Colin.” I pull the iPhone away from my ear and switch on speaker mode so I can check her messages while talking. “I want to go through my castings.”

  There’s silence. I know Apple hates that I do this, but if I don’t, I’ll end up trying my hand at interpretive dance in a department store window. That’s not happening again.

  “What’s this ten o’clock in Quarry Bay?” I ask.

  “That’s a request for an editorial,” Apple pauses like she’s checking the details. Editorials are high fash
ion shoots for magazines and newspapers, and they usually pay crap. But models don’t do them for money. That seven-page fashion spread, of the forehead wrinkling guy draped in Ralph Lauren suits in American GQ—is a fashion editorial, and I’d give my right nut to put a tear sheet like that in my portfolio. Tear sheets—called this because they’re put in a model’s book after being torn out of a magazine, though really models extract these with the precision of a Swiss watch maker—are currency in fashion and what I need to rock it in Milano.

  “…uh, the editorial is for a weekly newspaper…” Apple says.

  “Not doing it.” I answer. I need editorials from edgy fashion mags, not weekly tabloids that are going to end up lining a kitty litter box.

  “How about the eleven-thirty in Kowloon Bay?”

  “That’s for the Hugo Boss Show.”

  “I’ll do it.” Runway pay is shitty but it’s Hugo Boss runway. Shots from the show could end up in magazines. And that will provide some needed Instagram fodder. Exposure is good. And so is wearing Hugo Boss on stage. “The one-thirty?”

  “That’s a property ad,” Apple says, her tone turns pleading. “It’s good money. They have two layouts: one with you and the girl, and the other is for the Easter season. You have to wear a Styrofoam bunny head and—”

  “Stop talking.”

  “But the budget is quite high—”

  “No.”

  “It’s only one—”

  “Apple, no.”

  This shuts her up.

  Editorial is one side of fashion modelling and the other is commercial. Wearing a Styrofoam bunny head is firmly on the commercial side of things. Any grinning shot of some model in a crappy catalogue or holding hemorrhoid cream is commercial. Models lean toward being one of these types: editorial and high fashion, or commercial and being a grinning happy moron selling everything that isn’t high fashion. The irony is commercial models make better steady money, but editorial models are the ones that can blow up to become fashion superstars. Commercial models are safe. They’re the accountant with the family, and duplex in the suburbs. Editorial models are volatile. They’re the rockstar wannabes, partying hard until they either become a legend or end up living in someone’s basement apartment.