Jenna’s Model Life

In which Jenna goes meta

“We’ve been really looking forward to meeting you,” said the voice on the phone. “We read your blog. That’s partly why we picked you.”

I was talking to a stranger in an unfamiliar city and I was hearing precisely the words a person who lives in fear of getting dooced dreads most. I’d been in Miami long enough to find a credit-card-friendly cab, arrive at the hotel, and lay my swimsuit and a book out hopefully on the bed. And now some stylist was freaking me out with the powers of Google.

“Really?” I replied. “Uh, you couldn’t get Elyse, or what?”

The stylist sounded hurt. “No, we just thought you’d be fun to work with.”

I made some lame comment about hoping nothing in our shoot would inspire me to type a lengthy online harangue. Immediately I thought, what the hell am I doing? Why would I advertise to a client that I sometimes write lengthy online harangues? After stumbling through the thicket of my sentence for a minute, I shut up, and the stylist and I made arrangements to meet for a fitting in the evening. I shook my head, put on my togs and went to the pool, since the hotel didn’t have a beach so much as a rock-and-concrete shore.

By the time the sun had gone down and I’d absorbed some Didion, I felt I could trust myself again to meet some strangers and not immediately fork up my own foot. The stylist, Gabriel, introduced me to his friends — a vintage collector named Keni Valenti, and a Korean-American designer named Min. Keni Valenti frequently refers to himself in the third person; He referred to Min as “the Dragon Lady.” This was all right mainly because Min referred to herself as the Yellow Bitch. We soon figured out that my girl, Zosia the Amazing Pole, had recently shot Min’s look book in New York City, then Keni Valenti mistook the bouclé-and-braid minidress I took about three months to plaid-match two years ago for real Chanel (it was getting dark out), and then we all drank some white wine and became good friends.

When Gabriel and the photographer, Toni (who was also Min’s boyfriend), had finished their work for the day, we all headed to a Chilean restaurant for a great feed. Raw fish in lime! Yuca frita! Agua fresca! Peep my yellow spicy calamari/fish/shrimp/mussels extravaganza:

I had totally already sucked up a third of my dish before I remembered I would be wanting to commemorate the meal later. Weird coincidence: I’ve used those same plates at home since my middle year of college.

“Are you blogging this? Will you write about this? Are you taking mental notes?” Gabriel asked. “Find me a boyfriend on your blog. No, don’t put that.” I moved to take his picture, and he hid behind a menu and changed the subject to how he had always wanted to be an artist, and how grad school still beckoned. I talked about my own plans for an M.F.A., and asked about the concept for the next days’ shoots. “Fashion is obsessed with this idea of the woman perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Gabriel responded, between bites of ceviche. “Her makeup is bedraggled, her dress is askew, her pose is awkward, she’s running away, her eyes are desparate. I wonder why it is we see these kinds of images again and again in editorials. Anyway. That’s sort of what we’ll be doing Thursday.”

“And, Wednesday, we shoot…swimwear,” I said. I had been dreading the swimwear. Models are not supposed to dread: We’re supposed to wear the dead animal, not let our asses get in the way of the designer’s needle, smoke the cigarette, look orgasmic and climb the rock. But I had a knot in my stomach, because I am not your typical swimwear girl. “You do realise,” I continued, “that I have the chest of a 12-year-old boy, and that being raised melanin-free in a country directly beneath the hole in the ozone has given me a vampiric fear of the sun? I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m kind of pasty.”

“Oh, that’s why we wanted you! I have this whole Rudy Gernreich thing planned. Lots of acid colours, bright suits, sunglasses, and kind of Surrealist backgrounds. Art Deco pastels and big plastic jewelry. It’ll be great.”

Just then, someone across the table mentioned Ohio as a great place to buy mid-century modern, Keni Valenti told another story about the time Bergdorf’s bought his line, Min explained how Zosia worked her butt off to finish the look book shoot on schedule, even neglecting to pee until the last frame was captured, Toni laughed, and the Colombian to my left checked his BlackBerry. We all piled in a rented truck to drop off Keni Valenti and head back to the hotel. I slept soundly until my 7 a.m. call.

The worst part of this profession? Sometimes when one goes to shoot swimwear in Miami in February, one awakens to a 50°F/10°C day, a day with thunderstorms, a day where Biscayne Bay, as someone pointed out, “looks like the North Sea.” The wind was so high the hotel sent minions out to bring in the sun shades, which were cracking like whips in the longshore breezes.

We persevered. “Don’t worry about shivering,” Toni said kindly. “I’m using a very fast shutter speed.”

Dinner was consumed at a charming restaurant called Puerto Sagua, where all the waiters were old, dignified, reedy Cubans wearing bow-ties and short-sleeved white shirts. I took a vegetarian holiday to eat my first Cuban sandwich (verdict: Clearly, someone mistranslated Homer. Pork is the food of the Gods.) And they had fish soup and home-made caramel flan! Between the restorative meal, and the forty-five minutes I spent reheating in the hotel steam room and sauna, my internal temperature felt pretty much returned to normal.

The next morning, I awoke to 70-degree sunshine, continental breakfast with fresh-squeezed OJ and pain au chocolat, and a makeup artist who not only asked me about my skin type so he could plan his product usage accordingly, but who actually had me sit down for a mini-facial before setting to work with the rouge. Man was quick and error-free with false lash glue, too. And he gave me a killer brow shape! It was love.

We were doing a 12-page edit for a Spanish magazine, which involved lots of summery clothing and many large accessories (think 4-8 pinching bangles and rings on each hand). Marks were left.

There were three male models, and one other girl. Two of the male models were Brazilians who spent most of the day talking to each other in Portuguese and complaining about the cold (I was all, “Bitches? Yesterday I shot swimwear.”) The girl was a really sweet Canadian giantess with size 6.5 feet.

Here are the Brazilians, huddling against the “cold” at lunchtime.

The third male model immediately did three things that pissed me off. Firstly, he hugged me — close — upon being introduced. I am not a touchy-feely type; Gabriel must’ve seen my expression over the lumbering hulk’s shoulder, because he started laughing.

Secondly, he said he was from Croatia. Even as his American accent was giving me pause, I found myself telling him all about my good friend who spent a summer learning Serbo-Croatian and traveling through the country, and how I used to ice cakes with a super sweet Zagrebian named Mirjana at a supermarket in Minnesota, and how I’d always wanted to go to Croatia, before finally he sheepishly admitted that he had been raised since toddlerhood in Detroit. I realise national identity is a complex thing and I hate to be prescriptive. But I think it’s far fairer and more accurate to claim the country of your acculturation, rather than the location of your birth, as yours in the truest sense. I happen to have been born in the U.S., but when people ask me where I’m from, they mean, Why do you talk like that? And the answer is New Zealand. In my book, the “Croat” was starting to seem dangerously like those legless Americans who’re suddenly all shamrocks and leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day (but who would probably get thrown out of a bar for ordering an Irish Car Bomb or some shit if they ever went to Dublin).

Thirdly, the “Croat” then began bragging about being a wealthy lady’s rentboy. He claimed she gave him three cars for his services. I’m guessing the dude also has a MySpace page loaded with putative club hits, for reporters to “uncover” when the time comes and the divorce proceedings begin.

Before the day was over, this guy had promised to get me an agency in Chicago (”$2,00o daily rates, and it’s all direct-bookings, no need to do anything but fly in for the job,”) taken care to flex his pectorals in my and the other girl model’s direction, and, in a move straight out of The Game for primary schoolers, “accidentally” splashed me while crashing through the pool. It was not hard to pull off the on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown face with this loser around.

But weirdest and most mystifyingly gross of all, the “Croat” took a picture of himself. With my camera. In Gabriel’s room, where we’d been doing the dressing and accessorising. While I was off working with the hothouse-flower Brazilian twins, the “Croat” was fucking around with my goddamn camera, leaving me a present. Do you think if he’d dropped it he would’ve owned up? Fat chance. Do they not teach the kindergarten rule — don’t touch it if it isn’t yours — in Motown? When I uploaded the day’s pictures, long after the “Croat” had hustled off the set, I found one of him, shirtless, lounging in a hotel bathrobe, making bedroom eyes at me.

I just about retched.

Now I’m faced with two choices: Post the picture (thereby potentially feeding the overweening ego of this creep and validating his intentions in taking it), or don’t post it (thereby failing to take a plum opportunity to ridicule this crazed whore).

When I hung out with Gabriel in Los Angeles, I told him what the “Croat” had done.

“No way!” he laughed. “Is it nude? Is it hot?”

“No,” I said. “He’s washed-out because of the flash, it has that obvious self-taken, distorted look where you get a little too much chin, and he looks kind of sleepy. It’s not sexy at all.”

“Damn. I thought he was kind of cute.”

“Gabriel!”

“I would post it. Post it so I can grab it for my own purposes.”

I asked Peter.

“How did he get your camera in a hotel room? Did he steal it? I wouldn’t post it. You are so above that.”

“Am I?”

“We have a saying in Iowa. Don’t ever wrestle with a pig: You get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

“Yeah…”

“Are you gonna blog about this? Blog about deliberating over whether or not to post the picture. I’ll let you quote my pig thing.”

“I was going to anyway.”

“Only say I said ’sully.’ As long as it means the same thing, right?”

“Sullied by the pig. Got it.”

I’m tantalised. I couldn’t bear it if I accidentally flattered this camera-nicking jerk. But the picture is so funny.

I can’t decide what to do.