No Lifeguard on Duty Page 4

  Those girls in the magazines. Okay, I admit it. I had my share of crazy childhood fantasies. I wanted to be discovered. I thought, you know, I’d be out at the mall and an elegant older woman would come up to me and say, “Hello, my name is Eileen Ford. I think you have what it takes to be a model. Here’s my card. Please call me as soon as you can, and I’ll send you a first-class ticket to New York.”

  Or I’d be working at the Orange Bowl, and Richard Avedon would come in with Lauren Hutton for a slice of pizza. I’d act real cool, like I didn’t know who they were, and mosey on over to take their order. And Lauren Hutton would look up at me, and her jaw would drop, and she’d say, “My God! Richard! Look at her! Look at those gorgeous lips! This is it! This girl is the Next Big Thing!”

  Yes, it’s true. When I was sixteen, Lauren Hutton was my hero. I loved the way she sailed across the pages of Vogue. I mean, to use an expression of the day, she was bomb-diggedy. This was a girl who had survived her childhood in Florida and made it in the big leagues. I loved her face. I loved the gap between her teeth. I loved that mischievous look in her eyes. I loved her because she gave me hope.

  And Richard Avedon, well—he was The Master. I think back on it, and of course I was only just beginning to appreciate his art. But there was something bright and clean about the images; the way he lit his girls; the way you felt they were literally staring back at you, smiling at you, telling you—me, in this case—that you were one of them.

  “Do you really think I’m as beautiful as they are?” I asked my mother. We were still in the bathroom, facing each other. She reached across and wiped away my tears. I felt so fucking ugly my whole life. I was too thin and I had no tits and I didn’t see them coming in any time soon.

  “More beautiful,” she said.

  And I believed her. I wanted to believe her. By the time I was fourteen, I had probably spent a thousand afternoons on the cold linoleum floor of the local Publix supermarket, poring over the fashion magazines as they arrived. Glamour, Mademoiselle, Vogue. I was a fixture there. Me, little Janice, lost in those pages, my long spindly legs blocking the aisle. The magazines seemed thicker in those days, more substantial, like little phone books, and I studied them as if I were preparing for finals. All those amazing women! Cheryl Tiegs. Rene Russo. Apollonia. Gunilla Lindblad. Lauren Hutton. Yes, especially Lauren Hutton. She was paper thin, and not classically beautiful—like Grace Kelly, say. And even when she was standing still, she looked as if she were flying. And I would think, I can fly, too. And I’m not Grace Kelly, either. And I’m as thin as she is. I figured that I, too, could stand on the snowy slopes behind the Suvretta-Haus resort in Saint Moritz, in my fluffy beaver cap, my gloved hands resting on my ski poles, looking radiant and beautiful and happy.

  I’d turn the page and see Catherine Deneuve in a St. Laurent tuxedo; turn it again and see Marisa Berenson in a billowy Bill Blass gown. I can do that, too, I told myself. I’d look good in a tweed suit by Coco Chanel. Or anything by Halston: I loved the way Halston layered fabrics; he could layer me anytime at all.

  The thing is, I had to believe. I had nothing else. Modeling was going to be the way out for me. Without my crazy fantasy life, I was lost.

  “The new Vogue’s in, Janice!” It was Doris, with her raspy voice. She was in her late fifties and had leathery skin and platinum, bubble-teased hair. She put in forty hours a week as a checker, and Friday nights she went off to play bingo with her friends. This was her life. “What is it with you and these magazines?” she asked. “You’re like a drug addict.” And I thought, Doris, you don’t know how right you are.

  The week after my mother told me I was beautiful, she took a morning off from work and said she had a surprise for me.

  “What’s the surprise?” I asked.

  “It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, now, would it?”

  She told me to dress nice and helped me with my makeup, but she refused to tell me where we were going. I put on a form-fitting silk shirt with high-waisted bolero pants and platform shoes; always the platform shoes.

  We got in the car, and I kept pestering her, and she’d just laugh and smile and say, “You’ll see!” For a moment there I thought, She’s almost like a normal mother.

  And then we pulled off the freeway and she parked in front of a squat little building with a small sign out front that read, John Robert Powers/School of Modeling. I couldn’t believe it. She really did think I was beautiful.

  And we went inside and met the woman who ran the place, Dawn Doyle, a perfect little specimen, all poise and polish. She looked me up and down with obvious displeasure, like this was some kind of joke or something. But then suddenly—ka-ching!—“We have another paying client, people!” So she changed her tune. Smiled. Became pleasant and wonderful. Circled me two or three times. “Yes. Hmmm. I think we can work with Janet.”

  “Janice,” I said.

  She smiled at me, a tight and venomous smile. She turned me around and indicated my reflection in the mirror. She tried hard to look pensive, to convey that she was thinking about how she was going to transform me. And I looked at my reflection, too. My hard little body. Bone thin. Visibly undernourished. Those raisin breasts. My huge lips. It was obvious she thought I didn’t have it. And I hated her for it.

  “Well, we have our work cut out for us, but I see a lot of potential here,” she said brightly.

  You don’t know how right you are, bitch.

  So, yes, I pursued the dream—as they say. Really threw myself into it. This is how you walk the John Powers Walk. This is how you apply makeup the John Powers Way. This is how you smile—from the inside, deep inside, even if you have to fake it.

  The other girls in my class were about the biggest dullards I’d ever met in my life, but we all shared the same, immediate goal: to make it to the annual National John Robert Powers Modeling Contest, to be held later that year in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

  “You’re going to win,” Pam Adams told me. She wasn’t at all interested in modeling—she wanted to be a writer—but she thought I was beautiful, and she knew I saw the fashion business as my way out. “You’re perfect,” she said. “Look at you. You’ve got long thin legs and beautiful stick-thin arms—you look like a plate of spaghetti. Plus you’ve got no tits. None of these girls have tits.” It was true. Haute couture was made for girls who looked like young boys. “And you know what the best part is?” Pam added. “Once you make it, you can have any man you want.” She was right about that, too.

  POSING AT THE JOHN ROBERT POWERS SCHOOL OF MODELING.

  I loved her for believing in me. I loved her friendship. I loved hanging out at her place and stealing prescription pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet and getting high and singing along to James Taylor and talking about guys and where we saw ourselves in ten years. I saw myself in Manhattan, of course. Walking past a billboard of myself: a hugely famous model. Pam had different aspirations. “I see myself on a sailboat in the Caribbean, bronzed gold by the sun, stoned out of my fucking head, getting laid.”

  My mother had promised to buy me a ticket to New York when the time came for the contest, and for a few weeks she even remembered that fateful first morning at John Powers. “Someday you’ll look back and remember that I’m the one who launched your modeling career,” she said, smiling like a regular June Cleaver. But eventually the pills got the better of her, yet again, and she was gone, beyond my reach.

  But not me. I was serious about modeling now. Now it wasn’t just the girls I looked at; I looked to see who took the pictures. Avedon. Horst P. Horst. Guy Bourdin. Helmut Newton. Bill King. Scavullo. Irving Penn. Sometimes they even had little blurbs about the photographers. I was fascinated. I couldn’t wait to meet Avedon. And I was sure he couldn’t wait to meet me. I told myself that he might show up at the modeling contest.

  “I’m going to need that ticket to New York,” I told my mother one night.

  She looked across the table at me as if she was trying t
o figure out who I was. “What?” she said. She always sounded like she was under water.

  “That ticket to New York,” I repeated. “The contest is at the end of the month.”

  “New York?” she repeated, the synapses misfiring. And then it hit her: “Of course. The ticket to New York! Absolutely. Anything you want, dear.”

  Later that week we drove to a travel agency on Las Olas Boulevard, and she paid cash for the ticket. “I thought you’d quit modeling,” she said as we left the agency. I was clutching the ticket as if it were a lifeline. “You never talk about it.” Of course I never talk about it, you bitch. You never ask.

  “Could you drop me at the mall?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. She didn’t pursue it. That was my mother. She was relieved. She really didn’t want to know. She was just making conversation, trying to get through the day. Life for her was about distance; she was happiest when she was disengaged.

  I spent the rest of the day at the mall, looking for a dress. I had seen this little silk number in Vogue, and I wanted something like it. I found an outfit at Burdine’s that was reasonably close. It had this little wraparound motif, with bold blotchy flowers, and it made me look a little Hispanic. I liked the effect. I knew I didn’t look like most of those wholesome all-American girls in the magazine ads, but I also knew that no amount of trying was going to turn a little Polish mutt into a blue-eyed blond. And I didn’t want to be a blue-eyed blond anyway. Nyaa, nyaa, nyaa.

  Okay. I’m a goddamn liar. If someone had asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have probably said: “A blue-eyed blond.” I had a vision of myself, on stage at the Waldorf in midcontest, telling the judges and the assembled guests: “When I grow up, I want to be Cheryl Tiegs.”

  I knew I was going to love New York while we were still circling La Guardia. It was immense. Endless. A girl could get lost in New York. Lost so she’d never be found again.

  I loved everything about it. I loved the noise in the terminal. The strange twanging voices. I loved the energy—the snap and crackle all around you even when you were standing still, with your mouth open, which I guess I was. I even loved waiting for my bags at the conveyor belt.

  I loved the crush of bodies when we got outside. I loved looking for a cab that was big enough for Dawn Doyle and the three other girls who had flown up with us. I loved the ride into the city. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t talk. I loved my first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, all aglitter in the afternoon sun.

  “Why are you crying?” one of the girls asked me.

  I noticed a huge billboard just ahead. A blond, all-American girl, twenty feet tall, smiling down at me, clutching some blond all-American soap in her blond all-American hand. I hated her. She looked like every other whitewashed Wonder Bread girl on every billboard in every city in the country.

  “Because I’m going to win,” I said.

  We stayed at the Waldorf and I got lucky and ended up with a room of my own. I thought it was a sign, the beginning of great good things.

  The next morning, after breakfast, a tour bus came for us. I piled aboard with dozens of other contestants. We were driven through Greenwich Village and SoHo. We had lunch at some Italian place that was crowded with Japanese tourists. We took the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. We went to a ballet. Toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Visited the Whitney. Some of the girls were too cool for all this “culture,” but not me. I loved every minute of it. I was on sensory overload. I thought I was tripping.

  Right then and there I decided that I was going to move to New York as soon as I could. I even thought about never going back to Florida, but I didn’t know how I’d swing it. So I concentrated on the contest.

  I was so fucking nervous, but so were the other girls. We were just kids, after all. And we thought this was the Big Time. So we went through our paces, which involved mostly changing in and out of clothes and going out front and smiling and strutting our stuff for the crowd. “Next we have Susy Murgatroyd!” the MC would say, like he was announcing the Second Coming. Everyone would clap, including the judges, and Susy Murgatroyd would do her thing and hurry back and another girl in another little number would go out and do her best to sell herself and the dress she rode in on.

  When it was my turn, I was shaking like a rosebush in a hurricane. But when I got out there, something happened. Those judges looked like a bunch of dirty old men. Telly Savalas was one of them. He had that Kojak grin going. I half-expected to see a lollipop in his mouth. What a schmuck! He looked like he was drooling.

  So, yeah, I went out there and walked up and down the runway and just looked eminently fuckable. That was it. Simple as that. And I was good at it, too. Knew how to work it. I could hear the judges getting hard. Even the one female judge was getting hard.

  Sure enough, I won the contest, but to this day I don’t know what the fuck I won. Miss High Fashion Model? Explain that! They gave me this cheap little trophy with what looked like a brass penis on top. The judges hovered round, congratulating me, trying to get me alone so they could talk me into dinner, followed perhaps by a pleasant round of fellatio. I smiled a lot. From deep inside. And the next thing I knew I was back on the plane to Florida.

  My father would come home and rib me mercilessly. “Hey, Cheryl, how you doin’ today?” This was a reference to Cheryl Tiegs, the only model whose name he knew. “Where’s your tits? Who stole your tits?” Or he’d say, “How many judges did you have to blow to win that Mickey Mouse contest?” God, I hated him.

  I hadn’t been back a week when he came home one afternoon with a black eye. He was in a hellacious mood. He went and got the phone book and looked through the Yellow Pages and called some fly-by-night lawyer. I could hear him raving about how he was going to put that “fucking nigger” in jail. Somewhere not too far into the conversation, the lawyer at the other end must have hung up on him. Even an ambulance chaser knew better than to deal with a lunatic like Ray.

  WINNING MISS HIGH FASHION MODEL.

  He walked into the kitchen, steaming. I was setting the table. I looked up at him. He was staring at me like he wanted to kill me. “What the hell are you looking at, Cheryl?”

  “I never noticed what nice eyes you have,” I said, focusing on his shiner. I couldn’t believe I’d said it out loud. But I couldn’t help myself. His hatred was contagious.

  He fucking pounced. The sonofabitch started hitting me and at the same time yanking at my pants like he was going to rape me. I was screaming at the top of my voice, fighting back for all I was worth. I kept swinging for his injured eye; I whacked him a couple of good ones, even knocked the bridge out of his mouth. But he kept coming. He was relentless.

  “You perverted motherfucker,” I shouted, swinging blindly. “I know why Alexis left home!” This really got to him. He grabbed my hair and pinned my arm behind my back and I thought for the life of me he was going to snap it at the elbow.

  “You little tramp,” he wheezed. “No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

  He wanted to kill me, and I wanted to kill him. But just then my mother got home and joined the fray.

  Ray threw her across the room, and her head slammed against the coffee table and cracked open. Everything went still for a moment. Panicked, my father went over to see if he could do anything. She slapped his hand away.

  I ran into the kitchen and hurried back with a roll of paper towels, but the blood just seeped through. I grabbed a handful of linen napkins and helped her to the car. Ray looked genuinely scared, just the way he had out in the Everglades.

  I drove Mom to the hospital where she worked, Hollywood Memorial. It was the closest hospital to our house. She was holding a third linen napkin to her head, and it was already soaked with blood.

  “How long has this been going on?” she asked me.

  “It’s not me, Mom,” I said. But I knew she knew. “I never let him get near me. It was Alexis from the start.”

  My mother began to cry, but her sorr
ow was lost on me. Was it my job to comfort her? What I felt like saying to her was, “Where the fuck have you been all my life?” Instead, I didn’t say a word.

  A handsome young doctor stitched Mom up. He knew her from the hospital, of course, and treated us especially well. He said head wounds had a tendency to bleed like a motherfucker, though I believe he used the word profusely. My mother didn’t say anything. This was her own hospital; this is where she had worked for a decade; these were her friends. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell any of them the truth. She told the doctor she’d slipped and fallen. I stormed out in disgust. What hope was there?

  I cooled my heels in the waiting room for half an hour. When she reappeared, she looked at me and said, “You don’t have to worry about your father anymore.”

  I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t believe her. I just got up and walked toward the exit and she followed me to the car. We drove home in silence. It was only when we reached the driveway and I cut the engine that she finally spoke. “I know I haven’t been much of a mother,” she said. I swear to God—if she had started crying, I would have strangled her then and there. To put that kind of shit on a kid. But she didn’t cry. And we got out of the car and I said, “You’re right. You haven’t been much of a mother.”

  Still, something happened that night. I don’t know what exactly, and I don’t understand it to this day. But clearly she said something to Ray; maybe she had something on him, some evidence, something concrete. Maybe she even threatened to go to the police. I really don’t know. All I know is that he pretty much stayed out of my way for the rest of the year.

  And that’s how I got through my senior year in high school. I told myself I was going to make it. I decided to believe that Real Life would start as soon as I graduated. And Real Life meant modeling, of course. Getting the hell out of Florida. And away from him.