Laurence led me over to the cow, which was WAY bigger up close than it had looked from the other side of the barn, where they’d set up hair, makeup, and wardrobe.
“Okay, Bee, the first thing we want you to do is milk this cow,” Laurence said.
“You mean, pretend to milk the cow,” I said. I put my hand on the udder, and it was not a nice feeling. I shivered. I knew my day rate was seven a day, which was ridiculously high. But today I was really, really earning it.
Laurence seemed to feel my pain. “Do whatever makes you comfortable,” he said.
I pretended to milk the cow and tried to remember all the things that Leslie had told me. Connect to the camera with my eyes. Smile, but not so wide that you could see halfway down my throat. I threw my weave around and even wiggled my hips in my Daisy Dukes. It was fun. It felt like I was finally a real model.
Laurence seemed really happy too. He kept jumping all around, catching me from different angles. “That’s great, Bee,” he said. “More like that. Not too sexy; we’re going for all-American-girl sweetness here.”
All of a sudden, I felt like someone had thrown scalding hot water onto my leg. I screamed and slumped onto the floor of the barn. “Ow, ow, ow.”
Everyone came rushing over, and Laurence, who’d apparently grown up on a farm in Wisconsin, was fighting to hold back a grin.
“It burns,” I said, holding on to my leg and rolling around on the floor. “It really, really burns.”
“Cow pee usually does,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “You’ll be okay. Let’s take a break, get you a shower, and have some dinner.”
A cow, an honest-to-goodness cow, used me as her own private urinal. So much for the glamorous life of a fashion model.
By the time I’d showered, had dinner with the crew, and got back into hair, makeup, and wardrobe, it was another two hours. If everything went well, I could be in the car by nine p.m., at Kevin’s party by eleven p.m. A little late, seeing as I had an early morning go-see, but I could at least go in for a hot minute to say hello and congrats.
In the next setup, I was grooming a horse. I wore another pair of Daisy Dukes, a white T-shirt, a suede vest, and a pair of cowboy boots.
It was all good. I don’t know a lot about horses, but this one was a beauty: a gorgeous chestnut brown Appaloosa with patches of white on its haunches.
Then the horse started to poop. I tried not to complain, but the odor got stronger and stronger.
“Oh my God, this horse smells,” I said as quietly and professionally as I could.
“I know, darling,” Laurence said. “But the manure is not in the photograph, and we’ll lose the light if we take the time to muck the stable out.”
I tried to give good strong model faces, to contour my body in interesting shapes against the strong profile of the horse. But after about twenty minutes, I just gave up.
“I can’t take the smell,” I said. I felt like I was going to pass out.
“Sure, you can,” Laurence said. “You’re a pro. Give me some great shots and we’ll move on to the next setup.”
I took the brush from Laurence’s assistant, then lovingly brushed the horse as if his poop didn’t smell to the high heavens. Finally Laurence called, “Okay, next setup.”
I was so excited that I threw the brush down and it hit the horse’s foot. The Appaloosa started to kick up manure, and before I knew it, my bare legs were covered with the stuff.
“No, no, no,” I said, staggering away. “This can’t be happening to me.”
Laurence called out to Rosie, the stylist, “Another shower for Miss Bee, and make it snappy because I’d like a nice twilight for the final shot.” I showered and got dressed again, and the hair and makeup people dolled me up with a new look. Laurence led me over to the pigpen and gave me a feed bag full of corn. I was wearing a 1950s-style housedress and pumps, and my hair had been teased into a giant bouffant.
“This one’s easy,” Laurence said. “You’ll stand on this side of the fence, and all you have to do is toss corn at the pigs. Toss it far and they won’t be anywhere near you.”
“Got it,” I said. “Then we’re out of here, right?”
“You’ll be off faster than a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat,” Laurence said, flashing me a huge smile.
It had been a crappy day, literally and figuratively, and Laurence had kept the mood on the set light.
“Okay, Bee,” he said. “I’m coming in for a close-up.”
“No problem,” I said, smiling sweetly.
“I’d like to get a little closer,” Laurence said, inching in. “Could you arch your back? A little more, a little more? Like a ballet dancer. Did you ever dance ballet?”
The answer to that question is no, I never danced ballet. Which is probably why I ended up toppling over the pigpen fence and plopping right into the mud. And because I was holding a sack of corn feed, I was surrounded by pigs eager to eat the treats that had also fallen in the mud.
Maybe it was because it was so late or maybe it was because I really did look ridiculous, but everyone just burst out laughing. After a while, I started laughing too. Everything that could’ve gone wrong had gone wrong, but I’d survived and it was over.
By the time we’d wrapped, it was nine p.m. and by the time the car dropped me off, it was almost eleven p.m. I thought about going to the party, but one, I was exhausted, two, I couldn’t face the crowds, and three, I wasn’t entirely sure I didn’t smell ever so slightly of cow pee and horse manure.
I picked up my mail, threw it on the kitchen table, took my fourth shower of the day, and crawled into bed to watch the news. When I was still dating Brian, I only watched CNN. But ever since he’d broken up with me, I’d gone back to my old favorite, MTV News.
I was lying in the bed all warm and toasty in my Bewitched flannel pajamas when I saw that the anchor was flashing my picture on the screen. It was of me in Italy, and I was on the speedboat with Lucho “Touch Me Anywhere” Abruzzi.
“The fashion industry is abuzz with talk of a hot young model who they are calling the new Savannah Hughes. Her name is Bee Wilson, and she’s featured in Prada’s new resort wear campaign.”
Oh. My. God.
Then the anchor cut to an interview with Savannah Hughes, walking the red carpet at a movie premiere earlier that evening.
“So Savannah,” the reporter said. “What do you make of this girl they are calling the new Savannah Hughes?”
Her date was some sort of indie rock singer, and she held on to his arm like they were madly in love. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” she said, beaming the happy smile of a woman who’s never known what it’s like to be covered in burning cow pee. “In order for there to be the next Savannah Hughes, the original would have to give up the throne. And as you can see, darling, I’m here and I’m fabulous.”
It was more than a little weird to see myself on TV and to hear Savannah Hughes talk about me as if I were competition. That was the definition of life on planet Strange. But Savannah had echoed my own thoughts. “That’s ridiculous,” I said out loud, and turned off the TV. I was so tired that I quickly fell asleep.
About two hours later, I got a call from Chela. “Yo, turn on your TV,” she said. Her voice sounded extra loud, like she was talking through a megaphone.
“Too sleepy,” I whispered into the phone. You know how sometimes when you wake up in the middle of a dream, you think if you don’t talk or if you talk really quietly, you can get right back to sleep? That was my plan, but it wasn’t happening. Chela was too amped.
“You’re on MTV News! And Savannah Hughes is popping all kinds of mess,” she said.
“I saw it,” I said. “They aired it earlier in the evening. How was the party?”
“It was the bomb,” she said.
“Did you give Kevin my message?”
“Man, I couldn’t get near him,” Chela said. “He was absolutely swamped. It was like he was Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, and Common all rolled into one.
But I gave the message to one of his managers.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Bee, you’re a star, mami,” Chela said. “How can you sleep at a time like this?”
I guess I slept really well because when I woke up the next morning, the phone was off the hook and I had no recollection of telling Chela goodbye.
12
Bee Season
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and Savannah dissing me on MTV turned out to be the biggest boost to my career. Leslie got all these calls from people wanting to meet “the next Savannah Hughes” and I started booking jobs left and right: a Lane Bryant jeans commercial, an ad for Swatch, a catalog shoot for H&M. It was amazing to feel so in demand. The more I worked, the better my modeling got. Tyra Banks once said that a true supe has more than 275 smiles at her disposal. I was nowhere near that good. But as I practiced in the mirror, I realized I had twenty or thirty camera-ready “looks” and the photographers were more and more pleased with my work.
A few weeks later, we got the break that Leslie had been hoping for all along: lingerie, a national campaign with billboards in twenty-six cities. It was an ad for Baby Phat, the hip-hop clothing line. The advertising agency had come up with the idea of casting six plus-size models, of all different races, in a series of ads that read I love my Baby Phat. They were even going to shoot a television commercial, a kind of “behind the scenes” at the photo shoot. I’d gotten used to the chaos of a still photo shoot. But I’d never done TV before. Did I really want to be shaking my moneymaker on national TV?
Chela said, “Come on, Bee. This isn’t about you. It’s about girls seeing healthy-size women looking beautiful.”
I said, “So ‘healthy’ is the new euphemism for ‘fat’?” She sighed. “You are not fat. Just relax and be yourself. Do—”
“I know, I know,” I said. “‘Do you.’ I mean, do me.”
Leslie made sure that I had Andy doing my hair and Syreeta doing my makeup at the Baby Phat shoot so I would feel completely comfortable. I walked into this gigantic studio at Chelsea Piers, and it was like a party had started the night before and never ended. It was seven-thirty a.m., but there was a DJ booth set up and this cool-looking girl with a ’fro that would not quit was spinning tunes. There was a section with film cameras. There were scrims and lights set up for the still photo shoot. There were racks and racks of clothes.
There were five models booked for the shoot, and of course we were all getting ready in one room. I was the first to arrive. After my wakeup call fiasco in Italy, Leslie had drilled it through my head that models have a bad reputation for always being late and that one way to stand out was to be early. “Take your homework with you,” she said. So I made it a point to show up at least an hour before call time. I set myself up at a makeup table near the window and was working on some physics equations when this girl got all in my face. It took me a second to realize who she was: Savannah Hughes.
“You’re in my spot,” she said.
I was too stunned to respond—I was having a hard time registering that, in fact, Savannah Hughes was talking to me. Well, yelling.
“Are you deaf?” she said. “Move.”
Then she shoved me.
I was sure that this couldn’t be happening, with two dozen people running around. But that was the thing: it was early, everyone was prepping, no one was paying attention to the models yet.
I don’t know what gave me the courage to stand up to her or, rather, sit down to her. But I didn’t get up. Maybe I was just too terrified to move. She rolled her eyes at me, issued an additional warning—“You better watch your back, bitch”—and walked away.
I couldn’t believe someone like that would even care about someone as unimportant as me. Savannah was a supermodel. When I was in junior high, she was on the cover of Elle Girl and Seventeen constantly. She dated rock stars and was always on TV, walking the red carpet. Then she had a nervous breakdown and admitted that she had an eating disorder. After her treatment, she gained forty pounds (she’d weighed about ten pounds before) and reinvented herself as a “plus” model.
When Andy showed up and started to work on my hair, he told me the whole story. “Just look at her; she hates herself,” he whispered to me. “She’s not really big enough to be a plus model, and she’s too big to compete with the skinny girls. I heard her tell her makeup artist that this was the last ‘fat girl’ shoot she was going to do, that she’s heard of this new diet pill that’s supposed to be amazing and she’s going to “‘lose the weight once and for all.’”
This just goes to show you how I’m a product of my society because despite the fact that I was now making $10,000 a day as a plus-size model, the only thing I really heard was “new diet pill that’s supposed to be amazing.”
The photographer came over and told us we were going to do two different looks that morning. In one, we’d all be wearing white camisoles and lacy boy shorts. This was for the black-and-white campaign. In the second one, we’d wear color and he’d shoot us lying down in a pile of rose petals.
As we dressed for the black-and-white shoot, I met the other girls. Elsie was like this classic, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl. But the minute she opened her mouth, it was like she was some whiz kid investment banker.
“Sell, no, don’t sell,” she said. “Why do I have a broker if you aren’t going to tell me what you think?”
Then she hung up her cell phone in a huge huff. Listening to her talk, I thought about the savings I had in the bank, earning three percent in my savings account. I was going to ask her for some investment tips when she spoke to me.
“If the Federal Reserve doesn’t lower interest rates, the market’s going to collapse,” she said when I passed her on my way to wardrobe.
“What?” I asked, confused.
Melody, one of the other girls, just laughed. “She’s not talking to you. She’s listening to Bloomberg Radio on her iPod.”
Melody was African American, from California, a complete yoga girl. She was dressed first and had brought along a mat that she laid out in a corner, off to the side. It was amazing, the positions she could put her body into. “Yoga helps to center me in the midst of all this madness,” she said, and everything about her seemed so serene and lovely. Memo to self: Yoga makes you not only bendy, but pretty.
Prageeta was Indian and seemed to be surgically attached to her BlackBerry. Andy told me that Prageeta had a much older boyfriend, this novelist who was really famous, though I’d never heard of him.
Once we were dressed, Syreeta and all the other makeup artists put all kinds of makeup on our legs and stomachs. “Contour lines,” Syreeta explained. “To give you a little definition.” It was weird, and not for nothing, it tickled. I was doing my best not to laugh, but as I looked around, I could see the other girls were struggling too. I caught Elsie’s eye and made a face like my physics professor. She burst out laughing, and soon we were all doubled over. Everyone except for Savannah, of course. Terry, the photographer, came running over and said, “Whatever the joke is, save it! I need this energy for the shoot.”
They rushed us through makeup, and he began to take our picture. It’s strange to model with a group of girls that you’d never met before. The idea was to look like we were all old friends, but in reality, it felt kind of fake and awkward. Savannah was the fakest of them all. The minute Terry started shooting, it was like someone had flipped a switch in her. She came alive. The minute Terry put the camera down, she was cold as ice. It was like that all day. We all got closer and more comfortable, sharing stories about guys and food and clothes: when they let you keep the clothes, when they don’t, what the protocol was. But Savannah made sure we knew that she breathed a higher plane of air. Once the group shot was over, she got on the phone with her agent and screamed, “This is it. I can’t do any more of these jobs. These fat girls disgust me.”
The words just hung in the air, and it seemed, for a moment, that we were all frozen in time as well
. Melody was in downward dog. Prageeta was texting her boyfriend. Elsie and I were buying some boots, at the wholesale price, from the stylists. We all heard her. None of us moved. Then Andy said in this super-loud voice, “Bitch, please.” And the tension was broken; the cord that had been pulled so tight all day just snapped.
We all got dressed for our individual shots, and I was really nervous. I tended to do well with someone else in the picture, if I had someone to play off of, or, to be honest, if I had someone to copy a little bit. But when it was me, all by myself, I still felt really intimidated.
It didn’t help that I was in leopard print baby doll that reminded me of the outfit I’d worn when I tried, very unsuccessfully, to seduce Brian. From the moment I put it on, I had this flashback of bad memories. I felt viscerally sick to my stomach for a minute.
Melody could tell that I was nervous, and she came over to me and whispered in my ear, “Just tune all of these other jokers out. Think about someone you love.” Which, of course, made me think of Brian again and made me feel even worse.
When I walked onto the set, which the production people had covered in all of these funky jungle prints, Terry came over to talk to me.
“I understand you’re nervous,” he said. “It’s always hard to be sexy when a dozen people are watching.”
Sure, that was definitely a factor. But it’s also hard to be sexy when you’ve never actually had sex. Of course, I couldn’t tell him that.
“Just pretend that no one else is here and give me all you’ve got,” Terry said, walking off the set. “Remember, I need you to own it. Make me believe that any guy in the world would be lucky to get a sneak peek of you in your Baby Phat lingerie.”
One of Terry’s assistants started to play some old-school hip hop including one of my favorites, Gym Class Heroes. When “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off (to Have a Good Time)” came on, I really started to vamp it up. In high school, me and my friend Chloe always ran onto the dance floor whenever that song came on at a party.
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