Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [16]
“Okay, smile,” Phillip said. “And as you do, watch the different stages of the smile. As your lips begin to move up at the corners and then a little higher and then a little higher. When you’re in front of the camera, the photographer is going to expect you to be in complete control of your facial expressions. He’s going to say ‘a little less smile,’ and you’re going to know what ‘a little less’ means.”
For an hour and a half we smiled.
When I began raising my eyebrows, first my right then my left, Phillip stopped me. “Augusten, don’t get ahead of yourself. Today we’re working below the nose. We’re focused on the mouth.”
I felt scolded. And I was surprised that he wasn’t thrilled that I already had independent control over my eyebrows.
“You need to perfect a half smile, a full smile, and everything in between; every smirk and almost smirk.”
He was right, I knew. I needed to memorize every single facial expression I was capable of making. If it meant staring into a mirror for twelve hours a day, I would do it. Which, it turned out, is exactly what I did.
For hours a day, I gazed into the mirror laughing, frowning, flirting. I imagined a camera pointed at my face, a shutter clicking. In my mind, Francesco Scavullo was shouting “Beautiful, wonderful, now just give me eighty percent less smile. Lower on the right side. No, not that much. Yes, just like that!”
I spent so much time making facial expressions in the mirror that to this day, more than two decades later, when I laugh people say it looks fake.
Which it is.
I am now wholly incapable of making a normal, natural facial expression. All my reactions seem studied and rehearsed because they are.
Nobody ever warned me there would be delayed, long-term effects from modeling school. This wasn’t in their gate-fold brochure or in mouse-type on the retail sales agreement. Nobody ever told me that if I went to Barbizon, I’d be fake for the rest of my life.
Graduation wasn’t a black-cape affair with speeches from the dean of students and the class president. It was a fashion show at JC Penney in Agawam. We rehearsed for a month leading up to the event. And during this time we also had classes in assembling our professional portfolios, interview skills, business essentials, and half an hour of ethics.
Sharon pulled me aside after one class and said, “I think you’re going to do really well. You’re the most ambitious student I’ve ever seen in my life.” She was wearing glitter eye shadow, and this touched me because a pretty woman probably would have been too vain to wear glitter. Sharon was able to have some fun with her face, not take it too seriously.
Phillip was cooler. “Good luck out there,” he said, and he gave my hand a firm pump. Because we were standing so close, I detected the slightest hint of alcohol on his breath. So, clearly, graduation was a difficult time for him.
On graduation night, I led my female partner down the runway. The theme of the show was “Romance Is in the Air” because it was late January. I wore a rented pale blue polyester tuxedo, and she wore a beaded fuchsia ball gown and a tiara with glittery pink stones. At the end of the runway, we kissed and then executed flawless pivots before walking back.
And after eight long months, I was a Barbizon model. My whole future as a top male model lay before me, and I was excruciatingly aware of this fact. It seemed predestined. Therefore, all the pressure was suddenly off. I thought, I’m going to be a top male model someday, so for now I’m just gonna hang around the house and smoke.
I DATED AN UNDERTAKER
T
he most distracting thing about getting a blow job at a funeral home wasn’t the fact that there were three fresh bodies downstairs in the cooler or one dead body twenty feet away from me in a casket across the room. The most distracting thing was that I was getting this blow job from an undertaker at a prestigious funeral home, in the exact same viewing room where the wake for Rose Kennedy took place.
“Right over there,” he said,