Friends & Models & Employers

The best memories of my 20’s have been with my friend Jason. He is an intelligent version of Judd Nelson/Jim Carey/Val Kilmer with the style of a 70’s Chazz Palminteri. He works as a stock broker, or something similar, I’ve never really asked. He bought a jukebox player and put all his own records in it and hand wrote the tags. He brings comic books of Black Bart Simpson with him everywhere and paints his toenails in Chanel Black. He knows the Soulja Boy dance and the first time we hung out he beat me in Nintendo’s Athletic World on his own Power Pad. For his birthday I bought him Bone Thugs N Harmony on vinyl and he loved it. I helped him move once and our reward was any 90’s cassette tape from a giant box he had filled to the brim.

I saw him this past weekend in Brooklyn, he was visiting a girl he had recently fallen in love with. We drank beer and took shots of Absinthe at some loft in Williamsburg where I knew no one, but I was more than happy just to be in his presence. He was demonstrating how to fall down professionally, it looked very convincing. The last time I had seen him was a year ago, sliding down a cardboard slip n slide he made himself at Lollapalooza during Green Day. A few months prior to that we spent a weekend with a group of friends in Palm Springs for Coachella, taking mushrooms, watching Faith No More, and laughing on the ferris wheel. I’m definitely smitten by him, in an envious sort of way. He’s the one person I wish I could be.

Making new friends after 30 seems impossible. Acquaintance replaces the word friend, because what exactly is a friend? I dated a guy once who called everyone he knew his friend. It bothered the shit out of me. We would be watching a movie and he would say “Oh hey that’s my friend Steve!” and I would get annoyed because we’ve been dating for a year and I’ve never met or heard of this person. He was someone you met at a bar probably and added to facebook. I don’t call many people my friends, I have maybe 10 people at the most who I can call legitimate friends. We have history, we’ve had more that 100 conversations, we’ve traveled somewhere together and gotten drunk multiple times. THAT’S a fucking friend.

I see models from my agency at castings and walking around the city everyday. I have nothing in common with them, other than the fact that we’re both tall and skinny, and trying to profit from our attractive bone structure before we turn into old women. The conversations are light and meaningless. I’d rather sit in silence and read my twitter feed than use energy to make small talk. They add me on facebook, I don’t know what to do with them. They’re all younger than me and some still in high school. I want to shake them violently and yell STAY IN SCHOOL MODELING IS THE DEVIL! Like I’m some kind of mother looking out for them. Perhaps they really WANT to be models, there’s no shame in that. I look at modeling as a part-time temporary job that pays well. It’s not a career, unless you’re Kate Moss.

I constantly feel like an outcast within the modeling world. I had to meet with a new booker at my agency yesterday. The first thing she asked was my age, I told her and followed it with “Yeah, I know I should be retired.” She seemed sort of surprised and said I should absolutely not feel like that. I should be happy to have an advantage over the other girls who are young and too shy or cannot carry themselves well because they have less experience. As long as I look the part there’s no reason to feel out of place. I’m constantly booking high paying jobs with repeat clients which means I’m doing something right. She told me of all the girls she met that day she saw something special in me. As much or little as that means I definitely did not take it lightly. It made me happy. Maybe it’s because we bonded over our love of Michigan and the boots I was wearing, but it felt nice to have a real conversation with someone I work with. In a way she made me feel like I’m somewhat on the right path. It’s amazing how talking to someone for 15 minutes can rebuild your faith in humanity.