Drawing Blood Page 8

  I modeled for Michael Deas, the artist who’d created the image of the Grecian-robed woman holding a torch in the modern version of the Columbia Pictures logo, and for Will Cotton, the famous painter of cotton candy landscapes. I posed for classes of adult amateurs. If an artist failed to capture my face, I’d tell him. If he yelled at me for moving, I’d flip him off. “If you were any good at anatomy, it wouldn’t matter,” I’d reply.

  Inspired by Kiki de Montparnasse’s style, I trawled the Goodwill store for the perfect kimono. I found one in red silk lined with white, embroidered with dragons, with a large rip down one side. When I posed for artists, I’d shuck it off on the stand, as though my body were a revelation.

  But ten dollars an hour wasn’t going to change my life, or even buy me basic artists’ tools. So I returned to the Internet. Back in the 2000s, girls like me—who were too short, thick, or plain to be fashion models, and not willing to shuck off all respectability by posing in actual porn—could tap into a flourishing semi-underground business posing for amateur photographers. We called these photographers “Guys with Cameras,” or GWCs. They paid a hundred bucks an hour.

  For legit photographers—whether in porn or in fashion—the point of any shoot was the finished image. For GWCs, the point was the naked girl in their hotel room. We called ourselves models, but we were more like private strippers. Their camera was the lie they told themselves.

  Because we worked on the margins, we Internet models all knew each other, and we extended one another what protection we could. We spread word about who was a good guy and who was a sociopath, knowing full well that the police would do nothing if one of these sessions ended in rape. I knew a girl who had worked as a bondage model. While she was tied up, the photographer threatened to kill her. She wept. He let her go. When she went to the police, they shrugged her off. Later, the photographer murdered a different model.

  Stewart, the first GWC for whom I posed, met me in a coffee shop with what I can only describe as a binder full of naked women. They seemed so vulnerable, these awkward creatures he proudly thought he’d made sexy. The camera flash highlighted their razor burn, their raw red knees. This I could not abide. What I lacked in modesty, I made up for in vanity. My tits could be on the Internet, but not my vulnerability. I took Stewart’s hundred bucks and posed till my muscles wept, convincing him that black-and-white film would make his photos “artistic.”

  The first time I took off my clothes for Stewart, I thought the world would end. After a few sessions, I kicked my dress away impatiently, indifferent to my skin.

  If I was going to be naked, I didn’t want it to involve unflattering contortions in Stewart’s living room. I took the best of his photos, jacked the contrast on my cracked copy of Photoshop, and put them on a website called One Model Place, which hosted models’ portfolios for ten bucks a month. OMP’s Floridian tackiness and dot-com pretensions came with an insistence that it was used by the fashion industry. It was not.

  Within hours of posting my portfolio, my Hotmail started pinging.

  I posed for a Hasidic Jewish guy in the Bronx amid hundreds of hard-boiled eggs. I was broke enough to take some home to eat later. I posed for sweet, shy accountants, and for fetish photographers who told me my tits looked like I’d had three kids. Each time, I loved two things: painting my mask in the mirror of a hotel room bathroom, and, a few hours later, counting the bills in the same bathroom. I was a sleek machine for extracting money. I remained untouched.

  One GWC, rich enough that he had original Toulouse-Lautrecs in his living room, spent the whole shoot berating my tits. “The model before you had perfect breasts,” he told me. He was in his sixties, and he looked like a hobbit: squat, hunched, and covered in unexpected hair. I’d walked by his wife on the way to his studio. Like him, she was petite and elderly, her finger weighed down by a massive diamond. She did not look my way. Before the shoot, the GWC showed me portfolios of his work. Most were photos of himself, crouching over bound models, holding a vibrator between their legs like an eggbeater. He ran each photo through the sharpen filter on Photoshop until the pixels shook like static, convinced it made the photos “edgy.”

  I took his five hundred bucks and recommended him to a fellow model. “He’s horrible,” I warned her, “but he pays a lot.” He insulted her too. “Your body is hideous,” he told her. “Molly had perfect breasts.”

  One night, I worked a launch party for Café Bohême, a coffee-flavored liqueur. The ad firm in charge of the event wanted to re-create some ersatz Paris at the party. They tried to hire artists to paint, but found real artists too unattractive. Instead, I posed for actors, who spent the night drawing stick figures that the guests then tried to buy.

  The agency’s filmmaker put a camera in my face and asked if I wanted to live in the Paris of Henry Miller and Toulouse-Lautrec. I didn’t bother to tell him the two men lived fifty years apart.

  The company paid me two hundred dollars and a bottle of Café Bohême, whose every sip tasted as sweet as cash. I hid it in the back of the refrigerator, planning to savor it. As I shut the refrigerator door, my roommate came barreling into the kitchen. Apropos of nothing, he told me he’d figured out why men hit on me: because they liked ugly girls. “Low self-esteem,” he said, flashing a knowing grin. Once he got back on his feet, the roommate swore, he’d become an investment banker and fuck fashion models. Unlike me, he had goals.

  The next morning, I looked for my bottle of Café Bohême. My roommate had drunk it all.

  Once when I was very broke, an old client called me, asking if I’d model for a music video. Our previous gigs had been demanding: in one shoot, I’d spent hours silently screaming in the center of the Times Square subway station past midnight, while he filmed me across the tracks.

  For the new shoot, the client spelled out the deal: two hundred dollars to writhe around in a bikini for a heavy metal video. While a grip poured live crickets on my tits.

  I swallowed. “Just my tits?”

  “Just your tits.”

  I hated crickets. But I needed the money.

  On the set (actually an empty parking lot), I lay back on the concrete, closed my eyes, and thought of twenty-dollar bills, stacked in a neat pile. That was a quarter of my rent.

  The grip poured the crickets right onto my face.

  The crew laughed as I screamed.

  Between shoots, I drew compulsively. I was working on borrowed time—I had a few years when I’d be firm and fresh enough to get by on my looks. By the end of those, I’d better have acquired some longer-lasting trading tokens. I drew pictures of all the glamorous alt models I loved—sea-haired Aprella, angular Darenzia with her half-shaved head. My sketchpads grew fat with portraits of New York’s demimonde. I was obsessed with seeing, at the exact moment it most bored me to be seen.

  Decades’ worth of underground artists got their start doing covers for Screw magazine: Joe Coleman, Dame Darcy, Spain Rodriguez. Its founder, Al Goldstein, was a legendary bastard: he stalked employees, abused his ex-wife, and once terrorized a former employee by showing up to harass him at his new job—at the New York Times—in a gorilla suit. Such bastardry came from someone who was also a free-speech knight in the Larry Flynt mold, fighting one court case after another, risking imprisonment, even building a giant middle finger on the lawn of his mansion. By the time I contacted the paper, Goldstein was gone, living in a veterans’ home on Staten Island. He’s dead now, like so many of New York’s saints.

  I found a copy at a newspaper stand at Penn Station, ignoring the scandalized vendor while I scribbled down the address. Then I went home and drew some porn.

  I sent it in with a letter that read: “No one draws tits like Molly Crabapple.”

  A week later, Screw called me. They offered me a cover, for a hundred whole dollars. I thought I’d made it.

  “Molly! I got a cartoon into The New Yorker!”

  John phoned me while I was sitting in my mother’s apartment. While I was having cricke
ts poured on my face, John had been sitting in the New Yorker’s offices day after day, drawing cartoons and waiting for the cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, to reject them. After a year, one of his pieces finally made the cut.

  “How much are you getting?” I asked.

  “Eight hundred dollars! And they might buy more.”

  “That’s wonderful!” I said. I hate you, I thought.

  I slammed shut my laptop. Back to work.

  Want to make three hundred bucks?” Julian asked me.

  Julian was a photographer in his early twenties. He photographed alt models with fashion photography’s glossy precision, but his work never got beyond covers for Gothic Beauty. Julian stood sixty-two resentful inches, with a smirk, a square jaw, and floppy hair he kept pushing out of his eyes. He told me I was too old to use for product shots of makeup. I told him he was too short.

  I sat with him in a windowless room in his Village apartment, staring at the two computer screens that dominated his wall. He brought up photos of tattooed girls pouting coyly and pulling their nipples. On the corner of each photo was a logo I didn’t recognize.

  “Ever heard of SuicideGirls?”

  “Nope.”

  Slickly branded in shades of pink and gray Pepto Dismal, SuicideGirls was a website featuring gallery after gallery of tattooed white girls making out with one another while wearing branded panties. But site members could do more than just ogle the girls: they could also talk with them. The website’s promo copy assured viewers that this was totally punk rock.

  “They pay three hundred dollars for a set of naked photos. I don’t know if they’ll accept you. You don’t have tattoos or anything. But you do look like Wednesday Addams.”

  Three hundred wasn’t bad for a few hours. The next day, I bought some crocheted gloves and a handful of panties from Strawberry’s fancier rack, and then spent an hour mashing my breasts together in front of Julian’s seamless backdrop. He uploaded the photos, and my body became porn.

  By posing for SuicideGirls, where guys paid $7.99 a month to download naked pictures, I was choosing to repurpose my body as content, to reframe it as porn. But one doesn’t need to consent to porn to become it. On revenge sites, pictures of girls’ bodies (procured through love, praise, desire, or coercion) are used to brand them as unemployable sluts. On message boards, men jerk it to surreptitious photos of fully clothed women. The violation of consent is their kink.

  When I thought of every proposition or threat that I got just walking down the street in my girl body, I decided I might as well get paid for the trouble.

  In the SuicideGirls origin myth, Portland, Oregon, was Eden, and Missy Suicide was God. Missy created SuicideGirls to do battle. Instead of clay, she made them from tattoos and skateboards and quotations from Chuck Palahniuk. She used a camera to breathe life into her creations. According to Missy, the company was hers. Woman made. Woman owned. Somewhere in the back, a dude named Sean coded. The PR copy made it easy to assume he didn’t count.

  SuicideGirls marketed itself not as porn but as a “punk rock pinup community.” The models weren’t blond dollies. They were razor-tongued vixens. With tattoos came the right to talk back.

  SuicideGirls must have liked my Wednesday Addams look, because they responded with a link to their online application. As I passed through each step of the process (release, questionnaire, profile), a cartoon punk girl’s head lit up. I didn’t have to show anything explicit, the FAQ reassured me. By this they meant my labia. Please don’t mention your significant other, it cautioned. My availability was a more valuable commodity.

  SuicideGirls forbid “community members” (as those who paid to look at our photos were called) from criticizing the models. Most conflict remained confined to the models’ own raucous message board, called “SG Only.” There we loved, gossiped, and shit-talked one another. The girls supported one another through abortions—but let one girl see a similar star tattoo on another’s back, and suddenly it was the battle of Thermopyle.

  When my first photo set went up, I watched the comments dizzily. “Lovely.” “Perfect.” “I’d eat you up.” Hundreds of people posted about me, saying how beautiful I was, how they loved my eyes, my belly, my nipples, my hair. I gobbled up each one. My body was separated from me, rendered into image, untouchable yet tradable. The people on the other side of the screen might be admiring me, might be envying me, might be jerking off to me—I didn’t care. But they’d never know the tangle of my brain, and I liked it that way.

  I became a SuicideGirl in 2003. A few years later, marketing execs were scrambling to derive the formula for microcelebrity. How could nobodies become somebodies on the Internet? Could everyone be someone? SuicideGirls sorted that for me. I had my photos taken, had them posted, and distanced myself from them. And I held the avatars I chatted with at the same distance.

  Having my photos on SuicideGirls came with unexpected consequences. Men bought me art supplies from my Amazon wish list. Girls stopped me on the street in Williamsburg. “I loved your photo set with the window,” they’d gush. “Do you think I could be an SG?” I’d nod politely, arms sagging from the dirty clothes I was carrying to the laundromat.

  On SuicideGirls, attention was money. The more clicks our photos got, the more photo sets the site bought, and thus the more money we made. We remained safe on our side of the screen—admiring our pixel ghosts, adoring the adoration they got us.

  SuicideGirls dispensed pellets of ego crack. We were Pavlov’s bitches.

  But for all its promised egalitarianism, SG was a capitalist endeavor. Some girls were slimmer, fiercer, more desired. Their sets got more comments. They brought in more subscriptions. They got flown out to LA to pose for the site’s founders, or danced in videos with Dave Grohl, the former drummer for Nirvana. Some SuicideGirls were real rock stars. I was not.

  I stared at the photos of my betters. They were feral beauties who gave no fucks. They smoked Lucky Strikes and cursed while famous tattoo artists etched lightning bolts on their ribs. My eyes traced the seams tattooed down the backs of their gazelle thighs. I ogled their heroin scars, their mouths like bitten plums.

  Stormy Sicily Shera Katie Apnea Quinn, onward and always and replicating and forever.

  There were always more beautiful girls.

  Within six months of my joining, SuicideGirls blew up. They hired so many models that they had to resort to creative spelling to distinguish them: Absinthe, Absynthe, Absyynthyie. These models licked guitars side by side with Guns N’ Roses, and wielded swords in their own comic books. Sean and Missy became rich.

  As the list of models topped a thousand, however, the power of individual girls faded. Before long, the vision of SuicideGirls as indie heroines gave way to one of topless brand-bots who go-go danced at strip clubs for free. Worse, there were girls fighting for these gigs.

  Once, I begged for a slot announcing no-name bands at the legendary punk club CBGB. The club was a crumbling hulk by then, decades past relevance, but for punk kids like me it was a temple. The Ramones had played that stage. So had Patti Smith. And now me.

  The gig didn’t pay, and I’d be one of six girls, but somehow I was convinced it would make me a star. At CB’s, we waited for hours for the band to get ready, jostled by the crowds, sober in our painful high heels. No one thought to give us drink tickets. No one even saved us seats. When the moment finally came, I mispronounced the band’s name. Within seconds, we were back offstage. Whatever money changed hands went to Sean and Missy.

  Walking home that night, my teased hair collapsing under the rain, it hit me: I hadn’t said my own name onstage. All that tedious makeup application, those hours smiling in heels, and no one even knew who I was.

  I thought back to those tapes mi padre used to play me of his fights at the university. “Linda, who has the power here?” he’d ask.

  As I went into the subway on Delancey, I knew it wasn’t me.

  One day I was scrolling through posts on the Craigslist Adult Gigs sect
ion, past seven identical listings from Starfish Man. The alleged photographer had been flooding the board for months, pleading for volunteer female models to allow him to take pictures of their assholes—their “starfish,” in his twee parlance.

  Then another listing caught my eye:

  Hello. I’m an art/fashion model who finds that, after a photo shoot or two, photographers have already taken all the images of me they’ll need for their portfolio. I’m looking for a model working in a similar field to trade databases of photographers, so that we can maximize our client lists. Also, we could pose together. Xoxo.

  “Jen Dziura,” the post was signed. I typed her a quick email, telling her she was bringing too much professionalism to the field. It was the only coherent reply she got.

  A few days later, we met at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. Jen had the precise nose of Sargent’s Madame X and a black bob that was as sharp as her cheekbones. “I’m going to pose for lingerie catalogs,” she told me. “I’m going to write a book. I’m going to . . . I’m going to . . .” She talked very fast, in a voice both certain and ostentatiously clever. I nodded along, staring into her celadon eyes.

  Jen told me she’d graduated from Dartmouth, where she had been the captain of the coed boxing team. Since then, she’d landed—and been laid off from—a well-paying corporate job. But what did that matter? Cubicles were for cows. Now she was trying to make it as a comedian. Her voice grew faster, and her breaths sparse. She sounded like she might break right there in the coffee shop.