I was covered with dust. My shirt was splotchy with rusty blood patches and snot smears and I smelled like sweat and skunk anal scent glands. My eyes itched from crying and, when I told Leonard what had happened, tears welled up again. While I confessed to murder, Leonard pulled a shirt and a pair of jeans from a box. He nodded as I recounted the funeral. He handed me the clothes and I changed there on the sidewalk, stopping my story only for a moment when I pulled my shirt off and put the clean one on. I told Leonard how lonely the funeral was, how empty the highway, the forest and the ocean seemed. How a life had passed from the world, how I took it and how I only wanted to do right now that I had done something so permanent and unforgivable.
“You're an idiot,” Leonard said, not condescendingly but more out of a loving kind of pity. He grasped my shoulder. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“No problem.” I blew my nose into my dirty shirt, looked at it, wadded it up and then threw it into a nearby bush.
“I'm all moved out.” Leonard gestured to the boxes. “They needed me out by two o'clock so here's all my stuff. Let's go home.”
We loaded the Magic Wagon and, on the way back out of town, Leonard suggested we stop at a pub to get supper and a beer. I reminded him that I was only seventeen but he brushed off my concern by saying, “I know this dumpy place just off the highway. All the students go there. They never check ID.”
Leonard directed me past a scrapyard to a deserted service road. Twilight settled over the parking lot where the Magic Wagon putter-putter-stalled. A building clad in corrugated metal hunkered down in one corner of the lot, rusty tear-shaped stains dripping from where nails tacked the siding on. The only thing hinting at a place of business was a pink neon
Open
sign. An old biker wearing a leather jacket and bandana stood beside the door, sucking on a cigarette. The dull thudding of loud music played from within.
The old biker grunted and tipped his head at us when we entered. Inside, cigarette smoke hung like a film in the air, probably left over from the previous night. The bar, a large warehouse with wooden picnic tables, pool tables and a dance floor, spread out before us. Everything was lit by feeble bulbs strung from the rafters. There was a strong smell of stale beer and an organic waft from the straw fermenting on the floor. The place was empty save for one scantily clothed buxom beauty leaning against the bar talking to a beefy bartender who watched us suspiciously when we entered. We ordered the Road Kill Sampler Platter and a pitcher of beer.
People trailed in and the cloud of cigarette smoke grew thicker. Every time the door opened, I could see the old biker outside, smoking a cigarette and nodding at everybody who passed by. The music grew louder to the point where Leonard and I were leaning across the table, up on our elbows and shouting. We ordered more beer. Every table filled up and the buxom blond became a blur of waitress. The beefy bartender looked suspiciously at everyone who came through the door.
“I'm going to write obits,” Leonard yelled.
“A bit of what?” I sloshed my beer, tilted my ear so I could hear better. Our picnic table had filled up with round, sweaty, biker bodies.
“Obituaries,” Leonard yelled.
“Oh,” I called. “I thought you were taking journalism.”
“I am. I never realized how little I knew until I looked at other people's lives,” Leonard said. “And you only really get to see what anyone does with their life after they die, otherwise they're still a work-in-progress. A finished life is at its maximum. It can't be anything greater.”
I nodded, glanced sideways and caught a pair of beady eyes staring at me. They shifted as the porcine face they were embedded in moved awkwardly to face the tabletop.
“You know,” Leonard yelled over the din of the music and people, “there are more people dead on earth than live ones? Like fifteen times as many dead people.”
Spittle landed on my face whenever Leonard used a word with the letter
P
in it.
“And each one of them had a life as full as yours or mine,” he yelled.
I nodded and thought of the skunk I killed.
“I want to know those people, know what they did. I want to know their lives. You can know everything there is to be known about them. You can even know everything through them.” Leonard was excited. His eyes sparkled.
I glanced sideways and caught the man staring again. Again, quickly, he looked away.
Leonard's gaze followed mine with no pretense of discreetness. “Maybe he's a cop,” Leonard said.
“He's looking?” I asked. My pulse quickened.
Leonard lifted his beer. “He's getting up and coming this way.”
“No,” I said but Leonard nodded. I couldn't bear to look. I was seventeen, with a beer and we had five hundred kilometres to go until we broke the city limits and got home. All this and I was being approached by a cop to be arrested, tossed in the tank, have Uncle Tony's Magic Wagon impounded and my licence revoked.
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A hand clamped down on my shoulder. I jumped, my muscles snapped taut. I looked to the source of the arm. White smile, tanned skin, blue eyes, earring, hair that looked like it was cut yesterday, fashionable wireless glasses. Probably not a cop. “I saw you,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” I said. I pushed my beer as discreetly as possible toward Leonard, on the off-chance he was an undercover cop.
“Yeah. My name is Chester Leroy, I'm with the Agency. I was wondering if you've ever considered a career in modelling?” Chester extended a card and gave my shoulder a squeeze.
There was a pause so I filled it with my name. “Richard,” I said.
Leonard's smug look slid into one of shock. I must have looked similar because Chester moved to fill in the silence with a stream of uninterrupted chatter.
“Yes, we represent hundreds of fashion models and a gaggle of actors and actresses. You have a look we could really sell. Things are changing right now, they always are really, but there is a shift coming, a big one, and I think the times are ready for you and you are ready for the times. There is a harmony to your features that I think the Agency could really promote. I represent several of the firm's top models and, for you, I see paycheques ranging into the tens of thousands per show if we position you right. I don't want you to rush and there's no obligation. Even if we meet later, there's no obligation to sign up or anything though I think a contract could be a very real option for someone with your look.”
I glanced at Leonard who shrugged, still with a confused expression on his face.
“Sure, I guess,” I said. “But we're leaving town tonight.”
“Not after those beers, surely,” Chester said.
Leonard closed his eyes and nodded.
“Take my card,” Chester said. “I'll see you tomorrow morning at my office before you go.” Without another word, Chester spun on his heel and exited the bar. As the door closed, I saw the old biker outside nod and tip his head, a cigarette held between his fingers glowed in the dark.
“We'll sleep in the van.” Leonard smiled. “We'll leave tomorrow after your interview.” He waved his empty mug for more beer and pointed a finger at mine, too. We still had seventy dollars of gas money to drink.
Mother and Father grew up in the sixties with icons like Burt Reynolds, Sean Connery and Christopher Reeve. Likewise, the models they saw in fashion magazines had ill-defined but undeniable musculature. The women were thin but still had curves and breasts. In the eighties, I grew up with icons like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Likewise models became beefier. The women became gothic muscle action figures like Sigourney Weaver in
Aliens
and Grace Jones.
A face and body that was erotic in one generation may be repulsive in the next. Overall though, the basic tenants of beauty remain unchanged. A healthy bodyâone in which the combination of parts is balanced and in harmonyâis beauty.
I never got bigger like Father had wanted. Luckily the perception of beauty changes. My slim stature, the bane of my and Father's relationship, became a boon to my career. The “contrast effect” in marketing accounts for these swings. Basically one phenomenon, Schwarzenegger, is a foundation for the rise in popularity of the opposite phenomenon, me. Popular perception is framed in the context of the milieu so if everyone is beefy, the slender stands out. There was no planning on my part, no attempt to sway my body into a smaller pair of jeans or a tighter shirtâI just happened to coincide with what would soon be deemed beautiful. I would become the new foundation. The by-product me happened to fit into what was going on at the time. Models started to swing from chiselled men and shapely women to androgynous and childlike. The contrast effect. Had I been born five years earlier or five years later, none of this would have mattered and I would have been nothing more than an attractive barista or handsome accountant.
None of this was going through my mind when I woke up in the Magic Wagon in the bar parking lot, head pounding, grimacing against the early morning sun powering through the windshield. I stepped out of the wagon to stretch and pee. Leonard woke and drove us to the address on Chester's business card.
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The receptionist let me freshen up in the bathroom, seemingly unfazed by my stale alcohol and body odour smell, as if strangers regularly wandered in to wash themselves as best they could in the cramped two-piece bathroom.
There were three people in Chester's office, all sitting. Being that there were no extra chairs, I stood. The office was small, close and crowded. I became very conscious of the smell of my underarms.
“Richard, right on time,” Chester smiled, stood and extended his hand. Someone closed the door, which made the air seem heavy. “Welcome to the Agency. We represent hundreds of models, many of whom I am sure you will recognize. It all started with this woman, Stella Supernova,” he waved a hand at a picture on the wall. It was of a forty-something looking woman who may have been a drag queen. “Stella pulled this agency out of the limelight and into the spotlight over twenty-five years ago and she is still actively modelling. Here's our information package,” he handed me a folder, “here is a benefits sheet,” he handed me a sheet, “and here's a recent client list,” he handed me some more paper, picked up a camera, and clicked a few shots of my face. “Now take your shirt off, I need a picture.”
I lifted my T-shirt over my head, trying to limit the escape of the strong smell of my underarms and the nutty smell of my hungover, unwashed skin. Nobody in the room seemed to notice. Chester looked from me to the two unintroduced people sitting close by. They looked me over.
There is a mathematics to beauty that I didn't understand at the time. Apparently, Pythagoras mathematically answered the question:
What is beautiful?
The answer was 1.618. That is the ratio between two quantities as well as between the sum of those two quantities which, when seen in human features and proportions, is consistently and particularly more appealing than any other. It is a complex addition of both the individual parts as well as the combined effort of these parts to create a harmonious whole. It is inherent that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, it is in the eye of some subconscious calculation that recognizes variation around the symmetry and proportion of parts related to this, the golden ratio.
Chester and the two unintroduced were mathematicians examining my face and body with the cold calculation of any master physicist or actuarial scientist.
Chester clicked a picture.
Symmetry, in artworks, in bodies, in faces, is the basis of what is beautiful. It portrays an absence of defects. Symmetrical growth is portrayed in our subconscious, good genes, good for breeding and therefore attractive on an animalistic level. Greek and Roman men, considered the classics of beauty by many artists and other mathematicians, were tall and muscular.
“He's skinny,” one of the unintroduced said.
“And small,” the other said. “Malnourished with an intrinsic sadness. Like those kids you are supposed to adopt from those villages on TV. Except he's without the bloaty belly.”
Greek and Roman men with full heads of hair and strong jawlines were considered virile. The handsomest of them had bodies that portrayed health.
“I love it. Positively anemic,” the first unintroduced said. “It is unhealthy. I think we have a new look for the Agency to get behind. We will make a beauty the likes of which the world has never seen. This is an opposite to the beauty that's on the market today.”
Greek and Roman statues portrayed intelligence through high, wide foreheads and wide-set eyes, strong mouth lines and sharp noses, not unlike predatory birds.
Chester moved and clicked a profile picture.
“He has nice, thick hair. A good brow line. Nice and strong. Broad but not Cro-Magnon.” Chester started his inventory. “There is a mysterious seriousness in those green eyes, not so much an intimidating intelligence but a misplaced one. If I could remove them and put them on a plate at a party, no one could deny snacking on them,” Chester said.
“His nose is classic though his face is anything but,” the unintroduced said. “Its angles are sharp and perfect and very similar in slope to that of the jaw.”