RUNWAY SHOW

I never thought I’d end up escorting celebrities at a red carpet event when Wesley scouted me for his company. He’d been observing me while I waited for my coffee at Panera. When I finally sat down and began to set up my laptop to work, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I pulled out one of my earbuds and looked to see a large well-dressed man with dark skin and a mane of dreadlocks offering me a business card: Reign Model Management. 

“Give me a call if you ever want to do some work,” he stated simply.

I responded with an uncertain “alright,” and a nod, before turning back to my table.

At the time I was living at a homeless shelter / rehab for veterans in Baltimore City. When I returned home that night, I tossed the business card in my wall locker with a laugh. “Me? A model? That’s hilarious.” If it weren’t for the fact that I was used to breaking my back for my daily bread in the Marine’s (payment for simply posing seemed inconceivable) wasn’t enough to

The idea of working as a model was ridiculous. The Marines had built in me an expectation that one must break their back for their daily bread. And break my back I did. I was used to sweating. I was used to coming home with dirt under my nails and nicks and cuts all over. The main reason I excelled as a landscaper was that 

I carried that same intense work ethic into the landscaping job I’d picked up after my wife died, and It was that intense giving of myself to the job that allowed me to keep the job when my tardiness, absence, and other signs of drug abuse began to surface at work. The owner was a former Marine as well, and on top of that, he was familiar with the Battle of Nasiriyah.   

The owner was a Marine too. And he’d heard of the Battle of Nasiriyah. So when I started having issues that other bosses would have fired me for, he tried to work with me. When I’d checked into the program he told me that the job was still waiting for me whenever I was ready to come back and to make sure that I just did what I needed to take care of myself. 

But now, holding the glossy business card in my hand, during this pivotal stage of my life, a chapter of “transformation” I thought, “could it be? Could I go from digging ditches to flashing lights?” Ultimately that voice in my head, the one that usually drove the boat for me made the decision. “No. You don’t have what it takes.” I had been awkward looking as a child and to use the “ugly duckling” term would be appropriate except that I didn’t feel like I’d grown into a swan. Still insecure, still self-critical, still driven by doubt and fear, I tossed the card in the locker, latched the door and ran down stairs to the mandatory nightly NA meeting.

It wasn’t until much later, during a squad bay clean up, that the card resurfaced. One of my roommates was helping me clean my area when it slipped out and fell at his feet. Burley was an intoxicatingly positive guy with big muscles and a bigger smile. “Reign Model Management” he said to himself as he picked the card up. “What’s this”

“Nothing. A job offer.”

“And?”

“And what”

“You called?”

“No

“Why not?”

“Burley, come one, modeling? that’s not who I am”

“How do you know?” 

“Just cause man, that just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Hey, it’s a job. You know how long I’ve been trying to get a job? Most of us here are struggling day in and day out to find any kind of work at all. Meanwhile you have an offer you’re sitting on and not doing anything with? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Alright, alright.”

“Ya know?”

“I’ll call.”

“That’s what I’m talking about Mello.”

“I’m not promising anything else, but I’ll call.”

“Hey, you just promise to introduce me to some of those nice ladies you’ll be working with and we’ll be just fine.”

With a laugh I took the card and went down the hall to call Wesley.

My first job was a runway show at the Engineers’ Club. The engineers’ Club is a gorgeous, historic, {stone} building located in the heart of Mount Vernon, just a stone’s throw from the monument. I followed Wesley’s instructions carefully: cleaning and grooming myself extremely well the night before and packing a backpack with black shoes, black socks, brown shoes, brown socks, and hiked across midtown to the event. 

Upon entering I was directed down a large spiral staircase to a hallway that led to a door, As I passed through it, I found myself on the top of a tall stairway which descended down into a huge room with a high ceiling, art work on the walls, and several dozen people busy preparing for the show. Standing atop the stairs, it was as if I was on a stage looking down at them all. Not a single person noticed me. They were all engrossed in hair, make-up, wardrobe, primping, and picking. At least half of them were half-naked, or more.

“Don’t stare, be professional,” I heard myself say under my breath. I pulled myself together and descended the stairs into the organized chaos. I found the men’s area and a woman with a clipboard who showed me to my “rack.” As I put on my first outfit I looked around at the quick preparation and remembered of quick preparation before, times of more urgency yet less franticness. The stakes were higher when preparing for battle, yet they didn’t feel like it. From the energy in this room, you’d have thought the outcome of the runway show was a life-or-death situation. I guess in the world of fashion, these things are. 

I have to admit, I wasn’t without anxiety myself. Here I was at my first professional modeling job, having no experience, and only a few brief conversations with Wesley about “fierceness” and how if I could walk with arrogance and intensity, I’d do fine. I could run and jump and fire with intensity. I could sound off. Hell, I could scrub a toilet with intensity. Basic training and my time in the fleet had given me that. This felt different though. It had to do with what was needed for this job versus the other and what was being valued. In the Corps no one gives a shit what you look like. True, you’re expected to keep your uniform squared away but nobody expects your form to enhance the aesthetics of it. Yeah you’re expected to stay fit, but the idea of “fit” in the military has nothing to do with western cultural principles of human aesthetics. If you can do your job, if you can complete the mission, if you can keep the man to the left of you and the man to the right of you alive, you’re fit. 

This was different. This was not an environment of cooperation for the benefit of the team. This was not an environment that valued self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. This was a competitive, cut-throat world of passive-aggressiveness, backhanded compliments, manipulation and self-centered strategies. But most of all, it was a world built on the value of physical beauty as it relates to mainstream western fashion ideals. It was about beauty. I was not beautiful; I had never been referred to as hot or gorgeous. Maybe the word handsome had been used a handful of times, but that word does little for confidence especially when it comes from a mother, a grandmother, or a girlfriend. It does even less when it is muffled out by the internal monologue of criticisms and negative self-judgement. Here I was in the trenches of a war that is won by looking beautiful, and I? Well, I felt ugly.

I knew enough to know that just as in the old job, in this job, fear was the enemy. And despite feeling it, I could not allow it to affect me. I moved my body to do the things it needed to do to get ready and eventually found myself at the bottom of a narrow spiral staircase with the other models. We were bunched together so close it reminded me of when the drill instructors would line us up in boot camp. They’d shout “nut to butt, closer, closer, nut to butt!” until the whole platoon was packed together with barely a breath of space between the recruits. The fact that this was actually a term they used in an environment as subliminally homo-erotic as the United States Marine Corps always gave me a laugh.

Standing there, waiting with the others at the bottom of the stairs, I remembered this and laughed. The model in front of me turned and, with a Russian accent, asked, “what’s funny?”

Bartosz was six foot two with a remarkably youthful face. His skin wasn’t simply white; it was porcelain. Along with golden hair, this complexion set the stage for attention to be captured completely by the contrast of his full cardinal red lips and sparkling baby blues. The question had brought me out of the memory and back to the present moment with all of its anxiety.

“Nothing I was just-” I stammered. “It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.”

“Ok.” Bartosz replied simply with a light shrug of his shoulders. Then, examining me a bit closer, he asked, “you ok?”

“Yeah, what? why?” I answered annoyed.

“First time?”

“Ha,” I answered with a half laugh, half exhalation. “Is it that obvious?”

“Do you want a tip?”

“Sure.”

“Sometime I still get nerves. But what I do is- I just tell myself, ‘Bartosz, no reason to be nerves. You are be-you-tee-full, and fierce and like a tiger and they better watch out for you.”

His delivery seemed so genuine that I actually felt less “nerves” As if I had gotten a contact high from his confidence. It didn’t come off pompous or egoistic. It was strange. It could have very easily sounded like something bragged by Paris Hilton or Kylie Jenner. Instead, it sounded more like something being spoken into a mirror by a little back girl, repeating after her father, words of morning motivation. Like a reminder to self-love. It’s easy, and fun, to criticize people in the fashion world as all being egotistical, prideful, vain, and yet shallow and ugly inside. A lot of them are. But, also, a lot of them aren’t. Bartosz wasn’t. 

I once heard that humility is having a realistic understanding of your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Being overly self-critical is just as egoistic as being overly self-confident. They’re both overtly self-obsessed. They both stem from a perspective that is too narrowly focused on the self. This warps very small realities into huge catastrophes. Yes, maybe I struggle with public speaking. That might be a fact. However, the forecast that I’m going to screw up leading that meeting tomorrow and therefore the four horsemen are saddling up for their apocalyptic ride … that? Well, that’s ego. And it’s unrealistic. 

Bartosz was realistic. He had two feet firmly planted in reality. He was very attractive and he was aware of that, without any grandiosity or self-sabotage. He wouldn’t have been standing there in line if someone didn’t think he had what it took. And, I thought to myself, neither would I.

“Thanks, that’s really helpful,” I stated, offering my hand for a shake.

“break a leg,” Bartosz cheered.

“You too.”

The show began. Up the stairs, a runway ran down the center of a large room and, like a capital “T”, turned left and right at the top. We were to move up from the bottom to the top, go to the left end, then to the right end, then back to the center and back down the middle. It was a blur of forward march, column left, about face, forward march, about face, column left, march, and then back down the stairs for a frenzied wardrobe change in the backstage room of unnecessary panic. As soon as I was changed, I was back up again. It was such a fast operation there was barely any time to be nervous once it began. The anticipation had been worse than the event itself. Seems to be the case with most things. I imagine death will be the same.

I remember blurs of the extravagant room and the well-dressed audience watching the clothes move by. In the dark blur of the audience, pairs of eyes would flicker here and there. I felt them on me but it was like they couldn’t catch me.

At Parris Island, when a recruit is not moving fast enough or completing a task with enough energy, the D.I.’s would shout “move with a sense of purpose!” You know how people move down the road when they’re out for a Sunday drive? Yeah, there’s never a time to move like that in boot camp. The movement on the runway had a similar feel, a quickness and a sharpness- a sense of purpose. Because of this pace, as soon as I felt a set of eyes on me, I was past them. It was over before I knew it and I have to admit, it was kind of fun. 

While I may differ from some of the folks I worked with in how my anxiety affected me. I didn’t allow it to manifest in chaotic, catty, conflictual behavior. But I still felt it. I could say I was better at managing my anxiety but I don’t think that was true. but I don’t think that’s what really made the difference. I think what it boiled down to was the difference in how important I believed the success of the event was. 

If you’re ever traveling or living in a new area, chances are there’s times when locals have been a bit nutty about something occurring in the sports world for which you could really care less about. A year after moving to Kansas the Chiefs went to the Super Bowl. Surrounded by excitement and anxious anticipation, I had to remind myself that this was a big deal for them. It had been forty years since this had last happened, and in general, out in Kansas, there’s usually not much going on. Want to know the exciting place to go on a Saturday night in case you ever happen to find yourself in Cowley County? The local Walmart. It’s the mall with self-checkout. So when you’ve been spending your life wandering Walmart, and then your state team goes to the super bowl, it’s a very big deal.

I can’t think of a super bowl, or any sporting event, that felt like much of a big deal for me. Professional football has always felt like old white guys getting rich off the exploitation of minority men at the expense of the ignorant masses; a business model structured around tribalism and violence. I’d worked for a business like that before. It was called the U.S. military. Similar in many ways except that the military offers a chance at exploitation to working class whites as well, and that the athletes are paid more and die less. If, like the Mayan’s, the Chiefs’ were to be executed upon their loss of the game, I might have found it a bit more engaging. I’d also been a bit more interested if, like with the military game, the outcome would have effected geopolitical stability and the welfare of millions of humans. Basically, if anything would have changed. But it didn’t. 

The Chiefs won the Super Bowl and the next day it was barely noticeable. Having skipped watching the game myself, I was unsure of the outcome. It wasn’t until a day or two later, when sitting in a VA waiting room, the TV displaying the welcome home victory parade in Kansas City, that I knew for sure they had won. I spoke to some folks who were pleased, and the die-hard fans certainly made it known, but nothing really was different despite the victory.

After the fashion show at the Engineer’s club, there were high fives and smiles, hugs and even an after party. But the joy for the victory seemed disproportional to the tension that preceded it. Maybe we addict to stress. Maybe we enjoy stressing over the plans for the wedding more than the wedding itself. There isn’t a TV show about brides happily enjoying their nuptials; but there is one about women freaking out over the preparations. There’s a lot of movies about weddings, vacations, and missions going wrong; not many about them going right. 

Stress and drama are our favorite drugs. There’s an intoxicating feel to the distortion of reality that occurs under their influence. The bigger deal it is whether a certain politician wins an election, the smaller the deal is that I am another day closer to death. The feeling that I came into this world alone, will go out of it alone, and that no matter what, am moving through it alone disappears when instead I’m feeling a common, surface level feeling of a current event. I’m alone in my deepest most personal thoughts and emotions, dreams and fears and secrets- things which when attempted to be conveyed always seem to fail to paint a genuine picture, stumbling over the clumsiness of language –but this disappears when I’m engaged in the bonding of mutual stress with another over an event in our life or our society. We’re high on this and we're united over it.

I didn’t feel high, or united, after the fashion show. I threw back on my jeans and hoodie, grabbed my pack, and made my way through the empty, and now vastly hollow rooms of the club as a janitor swept up flowers and confetti. The sun was descending over Baltimore as I headed back to the shelter. I walked along the Fayette St. overpass watching the red and purple light shift on the parking garages, the hospital buildings, and the Baltimore City Central Jail; unaware at the time that in less than two years I’d watch the sunset from inside the latter. 

I took a deep breath and then laughed, “I wonder how those high-fashion folk would’ve reacted if they’d found out they were working with a homeless drug addict.” 

When the guys at MCVET found out about the modeling, there were a few jokes, but ultimately they didn’t accept me any less because of it. I’m not really sure if the models would have accepted me the same if they’d found out about the homelessness and drugs. Regardless, one fact that can certainly be stated is that everyone in both parties certainly accepted me more than I accepted myself. It was only a couple more blocks before I reached the shelter that night but I had many more roads to walk before I reached the ultimate sanctuary, that being a place of self-acceptance.  

 9.8.20