if he shouldn’t be so pissy and that he should be proud that his girlfriend had a great round ass and was a model. After all, he got to fuck me, even though he wasn’t all that good at it. I had more to be angry about than him.
When the shoot ended, Danny seemed to relax for a while. Weeks later, when I got the photos back, I saw a huge zit on my ass. Needless to say, I didn’t get picked.
Danny hardly ever came to see me in the city. Almost every time he did he informed me proudly that he hated New York.
In Brooklyn Heights I lived in the St George Hotel. I had a roommate and very little privacy, but I had stability, something at the time I took for granted. And although it should have been comforting, it never crossed my mind it could be otherwise. I had no rent to worry about, no bills to pay. The St George was built in the early 1900s and had been converted into a student dorm. The rooms were small and the bathtub made peculiar noises that made me nervous but it was a pretty cool place to live. I had a doorman, and the floor meetings with the residential student adviser weren’t mandatory. In short, I was free to do what I liked, with only classes to disrupt my shoots. I was winging it. No one really knew about these meetings with photographers. I didn’t tell my roommate even though she made every effort to be friendly. She left notes on the bathroom mirror or the door saying things like, ‘You’re the best roommate ever!’ and ‘I hope you have a great day today!’ She was pretty, Dominican, and had a boyfriend down the hall who was over constantly.
They were both studying architecture, and groups of other students would pile into our tiny room, sit for hours smoking pot and laughing too loud, playing ass-shaking Latin reggatone. I didn’t say hello or join in. I thought they were annoying freshmen.
I had only one real friend in New York City, and I could hardly pronounce her name. She was in my advertising class and lived down the hall in the dorms. She was tiny, slender, a little underweight, and had tan skin. We looked almost like sisters.
When she said, ‘My name is Maryam,’ I thought she said, ‘Mary,’ but then she corrected me. ‘No, it’s Maryam.’ I had never heard of that name before. I thought it was weird, but we would meet up at Wendy’s in between classes. Maryam seemed cool enough to tell about my modeling. She approved and admired me. She wouldn’t judge me like others had. I told her she was pretty enough to model too but she never tried it. Unlike me, she was shy about her body.
Just like in Syracuse, I spent my free time stuck to the Internet, working on my mini-site and adding photos every week. I wanted my ass to be voted as the number one pick by the photographers I worked with on Onemodelplace.com. I wanted to be one of their favorites.
In the meantime, my classes were at Columbus Circle, so dorming in Brooklyn meant a good twenty-minute commute. Because of the 9/11 attacks, the trains were all fucked up and usually I was late for every class, but mostly it was because I was planning, preparing, or returning from a shoot and I didn’t care about being on time.
That subway ride was where I really saw New York. Mistakenly, I thought New York would show me the classiest, most dignified and well-dressed people. Yet I never saw a Chanel or Gucci outfit on the subway. Those were names I was just beginning to learn about. In Syracuse I shopped at Deb and JCPenney. I didn’t know about Louis Vuitton until I picked up a Vogue for the first time to get some fashion tips. I also picked up a Stuff magazine and a Playboy for sexier modeling ideas and to compare myself to the models.
School was a drag and a distraction from my newfound sense of purpose. I couldn’t get excited about listening to some professor tell me about math, marketing, or English without thinking, they’re full of shit. With the city buzzing four flights below me, I always tried to sit by the window for inspiration. It was hard to stay still when so much was going on around me. Most of my classes were in the afternoon so it should have been an easy schedule but it was getting more difficult as time went on.
I was no longer running track on a scholarship but I was still fast on my feet when I was racing from classes to photo shoots. On one particular day I ended a photo session completely naked with only twenty minutes to get to my next class five blocks away.
(I was often naked at the end of a shoot, but never at the beginning. This bugged me. Usually the photographer took some shots of me in jeans or a skirt, then I would strip down to bra and panties, gradually building up to the nude poses. Maybe the photographer felt better about himself, knowing we didn’t only shoot nude. But it would have gone a lot faster if I just started butt-ass naked from the first shot.)
I threw on my clothes and sprinted for the closest uptown train. Twenty minutes later I was rushing down the slippery hallway towards my class with my high heels clicking and my panties flying out of my bag. I grabbed the pink pair that had slipped out and shoved them back in with all my school stuff. It was then that I realized I’d forgotten my English book.
I had to share with the professor, and he didn’t look too happy about it. The discussion that day was about Lord of the Flies, which I could swear I read in high school. I wondered why the hell I was reading it again in college. I couldn’t concentrate because I didn’t have a bra on and I was afraid the professor would notice. There hadn’t been enough time to clasp it shut and make the subway, so I sat there feeling exposed. My nipples shrunk with the air conditioning pounding over them. I felt naked sitting at the cold desk and looking out the window onto traffic going around Columbus Circle and the Trump Tower. I felt sure everyone was staring. I hoped they wouldn’t know the truth – that a few minutes earlier I had posed nude for a stranger.
As I sat there, I grew sick of talking about Ralph and Jack and Piggy, and my thong was starting to itch from sitting so long. My eyesight was going blurry from reading and I was fed up with discussing the problems they were having on the island. They were on a fucking island, for God’s sake. They should have been tanning and enjoying the damn coconuts, but they kept killing animals and each other. All that talk about the island made me long to be wearing a bikini. I was always thinking about what would make a good shot for my portfolio.
The photographers I had worked with so far all told me that nude modeling was my future, the only way for me to go. I was too short for catwalk. Too short for fashion. All the supermodels were 5′ 10″ or over and here I was barely 5′ 2″ (almost 5′ 4″ in heels!). To me, modeling was either fashion or Playboy, and I knew I wasn’t a fashion model.
I found myself checking out the competition. I needed to feed my jealousy to motivate myself. I Googled ‘modeling,’ then the word ‘model,’ and finally ‘New York City + models.’ Then the reverse – ‘models + New York City,’ – just in case the results were different. The girls I was looking at were all statuesque, tall, and beautiful. They were Giraffes compared to me. I had to face the fact that I didn’t have a chance in hell at an agency in New York City. I was dizzy with frustration.
As for Danny, I cared for him deeply, wanted his approval, and he did hang a few lingerie photos on the door of his dorm room. But he didn’t think I was doing the right thing by modeling. He said it made me crazy and always in a rush, talking fast and about something he knew nothing about. I would bitch about the perverts who downloaded my photos one minute and then run off to another shoot the next.
He didn’t budge on his feelings about modeling, and couldn’t understand why I wanted to do something that drove me so nuts. I wasn’t complaining, because I wanted to do it, but I was lonely. Still, I was sure I was doing the right thing, even though I kept lots of the shoots