Le Douche greeted me with a degree of rushed enthusiasm that suggested that he’d either run a marathon, or negotiated several million dollar deals between downing multiple cups of coffee and running a marathon. Dracula graciously shook my hand and commented on how cute I was, the way your aunt Doris might have gushed over that uninspired masterpiece you made with neon crayons in the third grade that was supposed to be a unicorn but looked more like a three-legged manatee with a long face. Dracula winked at Le Douche the way high-class fashionistas do and then disappeared to her lair, leaving me with the man who would ultimately decide my fate, and a receptionist who didn’t seem busy receiving anything.
Le Douche regaled me with tales of Calvin Klein campaigns and Gucci conquests – which explained the posters in the cheap frames on the half painted wall. Le Douche was so powerful, in fact, that he represented the “Gucci monkey”, an actual chimpanzee that, for a time, was prominently featured in the campaigns of high end fashion designers - don’t look at me, I wasn’t advising that brain trust - alongside some of the most famous super models ever to grace a runway and inspire teenage girls everywhere to starve themselves and hate their bodies. I, of course, only developed a keen hatred towards runway models after Le Douche pointed out that my towering 5’8” figure didn’t meet the height requirement to partake of that particular ride. But Le Douche could sure use me for commercials.
“You like those Got Milk? ads on TV?”
“Who doesn’t, Mr. powerful agent?!”
“We do those. I can get you on one, you’ll be perfect.”
“Holy fucksticks!” I thought to myself. “I’m better at this than I gave myself credit for.” I was less than twenty minutes into my first agency meeting, and I was already booking (fancy industry term).
Le Douche then produced the piece de la resistance, a glossy Mas Models brochure from Canada! That’s right, I’d just become part of an international modeling conglomerate! Inside, there was a photo of a tall building with the Mas Models logo at the very top, and a smaller picture of Le Douche in a black suit, leaning against a fancy sports car that may have been a low end Porsche.
My excitement was palpable, and Le Douche knew that he’d found his star. There was just one little thing that he’d need before he could start sending me out (also a fancy industry term, think of it like pimping). I needed photos.
“Golly, Mr. powerful agent, what kind of photos?”
“Modeling photos” said Le Douche, with a hearty chuckle.
“Where can little naïve me get those?”
“Oh, well you can go out and hire a photographer, but we may not like their work and they could be expensive.”
“Well shit, that sounds precarious.”
“Not to worry, as a member of the Mas Models family, you have access to one of our in-house photographers. We’ll guarantee their work, and we can get you a great discount. Three hundred bucks and you’ll be all set.”
If you worked retail for minimum wage in 1996, maybe you have some idea of just how many hours of abject humiliation one had to endure to clear three hundred dollars after taxes. I once sat in traffic for over two hours to get to said minimum wage job, where I went through three rounds of interviews to be granted the privilege of, among other things, processing credit applications for people older than my parents, and then having to explain to them that they were declined and couldn’t buy that big screen television their kids had been clamoring for, thereby ruining not only their Christmas, but that of the sales clerk who’d been breathing down my neck to process the transaction any way I could so he could collect his commission and hire a hooker. There were days I thought about eating cold glass for lunch and writing a suicide note on the wall with the blood I spit up in the employee break room.
I don’t remember how I paid Le Douche that day. I might have run to the ATM across the street and retrieved the funds for my anemic savings account, or perhaps I wrote him a check that would have cleared out everything but the twenty-five cents that would have been left to my name. But the more likely scenario was that we agreed that he’d take the funds from my first paycheck, as his new receptionist.
Lord help me, I needed a fucking job. I was living at home and I was going to school, but it wasn’t lost on me that my family was, how do you say, kinda broke. So, until I became a commercial television sensation, I would chip in for my own gas money (at a mind-blowing nine bucks an hour!!) and answer phones for the man who would make me a legend. Lucky for me, the receptionist they had already put in her notice and I could start the following Monday. Naturally, once I got my pictures and started raking in the big bucks shilling for America’s dairy farmers and Mr. Calvin Kelin himself, I would be replaced at the Mas Models front desk by someone who wasn’t destined for greatness.
“Should I fill out a tax form or something?” I asked my new employer before I left his office. I’d grown accustomed to filling out such documents whenever I got hired for a shit job, thus ensuring my contribution to pot hole repair, fighter jet research and development, and the robust health of a Social Security fund that will likely be bankrupt long before I ever live to share in its bounty.
“Oh, don’t worry about that, we’ll just deduct everything when we do your paycheck.”
What the fuck did I know, I’d never had a real office job before. I was off to share the good news with my skeptical parents, who were just grateful that I’d found gainful employment while getting over my aversion to a college degree. It had been weeks since I’d announced that I’d forsaken Calculus and had chosen instead to devote my life to the theatre (and now, modeling), dead end jobs, and bad decisions.
“I’m doing things my way!” I’d proclaimed loudly.
“But, honey, you’re such an idiot,” said my mother’s kind eyes, before the words made their way from her eyes to her lips and she said aloud “But, honey, you’re such an idiot.”
That Monday, I sat in traffic for an hour the way responsible adults do and made my way across creation to get to my shitty office job. Le Douche and Dracula were there to let me in, and once it was clear that I wasn’t a total fuckup and knew how to write down a phone message, they handed me a key to the building so they could resume sleeping in. I watched the first few appointments roll in, and by lunch I was already feeling sorry for my poor, benevolent employers. If the prospective clients charging through the front door so far were any indication, we were in for much mas desperation than mas models. There were so many single moms coming in with small children, all sure that they’d given birth to the new face of Gerber baby products.
It was sad, but Le Douche was such a nice guy, and he so firmly believed that everyone deserved a chance, that he took three hundred dollars from every one of those single moms willing to invest in the future of their precious children, and booked them for a photo shoot with our exclusive photographer the following weekend. I went home grateful that I’d found a place where raw talent would be nurtured and developed with such unabashed enthusiasm. Surely, after my own face had graced millions of billboards and I’d helped the world buy expensive jeans, I would stand at a podium somewhere and thank Mas Models and the World Fashion Academy for my success.
Within a few days, Le Douche trusted me enough, not just to leave me in charge of the office til noon when his first appointment was booked for 10am, but he’d begun giving me new responsibilities. He saw a spark in me, and, in hushed tones, he spoke to me of his suspicion that I may one day make a fine agent myself.
“But what about my photo shoot?” I asked.
“Soon,” he said. “We’re gonna have all the time in the world for that.”
Before long, Le Douche had shared with me his magical book of leads, which was brimming with hand-written surveys submitted by the fashion hopeful. On each form was contact information, not only for Mas Models’ existing clients, but for at least two of each of their friends deemed beautiful or exciting enough to be models themselves. It was now my duty, when not answering the phones or greeting clients, to call each of these lucky friends, two to a form, and inquire if they might be interested in coming to our fabulous office for an interview like the one that had so dramatically propelled me to fame and fortune, even though I was beginning to learn that dramatic propulsion was a lot less exciting that it sounded.
Like everything else I’d attempted thus far in life, I was an immediate success. I was scheduling interviews for Le Douche so quickly that I was in danger of overbooking and making him look like an inefficient asshole, so I had to space each meeting out in fifteen-minute intervals. The man did, after all, have to have enough time to serve his existing clients and negotiate lucrative deals on their behalf.
Turns out, it was Dracula’s job to do all that, and Le Douche was emphatic that I double and triple book his interviews and make him look like an inefficient asshole – a very in demand inefficient asshole.
Saturdays and Sundays were the busiest days at Mas Models, so I was brought in to work half days to help our exclusive in-house photographer set up the shoots that were set up back to back in our back office. I had to come in early so that when the first round of single moms came in with their children to be photographed, the rolling white paper backdrop was ready for them to frolic in front of and be captured in moments of unplanned candid posing.
The photographer, who was as attractive as he was tall and muscular, would snap two rolls worth of film for each client, and then send them off to the lab to be developed immediately. A week later, each client would have their pictures back, and the agency would get busy pimping them out to the highest bidder. It was magic.
I answered the phones and ushered in a lovely woman, who’d paid six hundred dollars to have her adorable eight-year-old twins photographed under the Mas Models banner. A few clients and successful photo shoots later, I received a phone call from our former receptionist, and man was she a bitch. Maybe she was jealous that I’d taken over the job she quit and was doing better at it than she could have dreamed, or maybe Le Douche really did owe her money as she so emphatically implied. Either way, her tone was inappropriate and I made sure to communicate it to my bosses.
“What a bitch”, said Dracula, before Le Douche assured us both that he’d clear up any misunderstanding that might have existed between him and a former disgruntled employee.
The following week, the army of potential models I’d booked for Le Douche to interview began arriving in earnest. There were so many appointments, in fact, that Le Douche had me schedule people at 9:30 in the morning instead of 10, and he called the office at precisely 9:01 to make sure that I was there, on time, to get everything in order. Precision had become very important since I’d arrived two minutes late the previous week, something Le Douche was quick to point out might jeopardize my promising future at Mas. Some models arrived for their interviews early, some right on time, and some called on the verge of tears, desperately apologetic that they would be late because they only got the time off work at the very last minute and were stuck in bumper to bumper traffic even though they’d already been on the road for hours. Traffic in Atlanta had been notorious for years, so who was I to judge anyone for tardiness? In fact, that traffic was currently preventing Le Douche from making it to the office to meet the growing mass of people assembled in our cramped lobby, all anxious to make his acquaintance.
“It’s okay, get here when you can”, I told both my boss and his clients. Eventually, Le Douche and Dracula, who were each married to other people, rushed into the office with hair still noticeably wet from the shower, and to save on gas, they’d apparently chosen to carpool. In no time at all, they interviewed everyone who’d been able to stay and even the appointments that rolled in after that. Everyone seemed happy, despite their long wait, to come face to face with the levers of power. They were so happy, in fact, that a few of them handed over their three hundred bucks and returned the following weekend to have their pictures taken.
“Welcome to Mas Models” Le Douche said to everyone who gave him a check, shaking their hands heartily as he ushered them past the waiting hopefuls in the lobby and out the front door. He then graciously thanked everyone in the half-painted room for their patience and assured them that he’d be right with each and every one of them, after apologizing for the mess while we remodeled.
The next day, Le Douche and Dracula were stuck at a big shoot for a big client with some of our biggest models, so they arrived around 11:30 and decided to interview the dozen or so people waiting in the lobby for almost two hours as a group. Looking back, I wouldn’t say it was an interview so much as a finely tuned 15-minute pitch, after which you knew who you’d sold by finding the people in your audience who stared at you blankly while drooling. I’d go on to see the same technique employed by admissions officials at highly competitive drama conservatories that left teenagers ready to claw each other’s eyes out for a chance to fork over small fortunes to earn degrees in a field that boasts 90% unemployment.
I listened to Le Douche with rapt attention, picking up on every detail of his carefully crafted speech: General greeting, agency-specific plug, why we were unlike those other agencies up the street where they scammed people for expensive photos and provided no results, making sure to point out the posters in the cheap frames on the wall, another agency-specific plug, apologizing again for the mess while we remodeled, see the Gucci monkey, he’s ours, offices in other large markets and in Canada, three hundred dollar exclusive in-house photographer. He always sold one, if not three or four before lunch, and none of them, it seemed, had or needed any prior experience modeling anything, anywhere, for anyone.
By the end of the week, I was reciting Le Douche’s speech, like a trained parrot, from behind my desk to the first group of models, partly because I felt sorry for keeping them waiting for so long to hear the same thing from my boss, who, it seems, had the same allergy to punctuality that I had to Calculus and pretty girls. I also wanted to see if I could do it, though I never got to the part of the speech that involved the photography transaction because, even though I was blind to everything else, I was starting to feel that there was something rotten about that part of the arrangement. Things weren’t adding up, and though math and I have never been close, I did manage to make it through ninth grade algebra without cheating even once.
Friday came, and at the end of the day, I turned in my hand-written time card, including overtime. Le Douche wrote me a check, minus taxes that he figured out on a calculator then and there. It was more money written out in my own name than I’d seen in my whole life, and today it wouldn’t even cover rent on my studio apartment. On the way out, I passed a lanky middle-aged man who’d come in earlier in the week to discuss his rock band, which Le Douche was considering representing, but instead of a guitar the man had paint rollers and buckets of red paint and he started finishing the paint job someone had started long before I started working there.
One night, when I was working the customer service counter at Best Buy, I helped a very nice man and his family with their home computer. He liked me, and asked what my schedule was like because he had a business opportunity for me. I was about seventeen years old, and I was making $5.20 an hour. After years of studying and making good grades, I’d gotten into one of the best universities in the country, but when I got the financial aid package a few weeks later, I had to call the admissions office to tell them that I wouldn’t be attending in the Fall because my family couldn’t afford it without resorting to prostitution for the rest of our natural lives. So I met the man with the business opportunity at a McDonald’s one afternoon and he asked me how I’d like to have my own company. Later that night, my parents explained what a pyramid scheme was and suggested that when the nice man pointed out that his company, of which I’d be my own little subsidiary, had recently been cleared by the FBI of criminal wrongdoing, I should have gotten up and left after thanking him for my Big Mac. I learned then and there that con artists are people that have business meetings at fast food restaurants.
Two years later, on a bright afternoon, at my completely legitimate office job, I looked up from answering the phones long enough to see two cars collide head on across the street. It was quick, and the sound of those two cars ramming into one another is easily one of the most haunting I’d heard then, or since. White smoke instantly billowed from one of the sedans now incapacitated a few yards away from my desk, and I could see the female driver slumped to the side of her open window to gasp in the fresh air of a brutally clear day.
Dracula was with me in the lobby when it happened, and she’d turned, frozen in horror, facing the thing she’d seen. The crash was so loud that it launched Le Douche from his chair in the back, doing god knows what other than plotting to kill puppies, and brought him running up front – a rare thing for Le Douche under any circumstances.
“What happened?” he asked, before looking across the street, past the gathering crowd of onlookers at the injured woman in the smoking sedan.
And then he did the unexpected for a man I’d begun to suspect of being a thief and a liar. Le Douche kept running, out the front door, across the street, past the crowd, and to the aid of the woman who’d not yet shown the strength to pull herself out of the wreckage in which she had become entwined.
I looked on, now standing next to Dracula, full of pride that we worked for such a courageous man, who’d shown valiance when everyone else had been reduced to petrified gawking. We watched from a distance as Le Douche tended to the woman and touched her cheek, took her hand to give comfort and whispered something we were too far away to hear though it surely brought her a certain sense of healing joy.
As I stared at the two crumbled cars, their engine blocks in the midst of a deeper embrace than I’d yet experienced with another human being, I began to realize that the most awful, gut-wrenching sounds we hear can be deceiving. The wreck was bad, but it was by no means fatal. The woman was fine, and though totaled, she would surely collect enough insurance money from the jackass in the nice car that hit her – who was also uninjured – to get something nicer.
And Le Douche would help her with that as well, because he said so as he strolled back into the office, beaming like he’d just won the lottery.
“I think I just sold a car,” he said, continuing his leisurely stroll to the back office.
Dracula must have sensed the confusion on my face, because she piped in before could ask: “He sells used cars too. You didn’t know that?”
I was part of a pyramid scheme masquerading as a modeling agency that specialized in taking advantage of single mothers for the price of an amateur photographer and the promise of a dream, and it was headed by a fucking used car salesman. Not only that, but it turned out the last receptionist, whose phone messages had become so hostile that I considered burning incense after listening to them, had also been the lucky recipient of Le Douche’s inventory of never-ending bullshit. He’d sold her a white coup that seemed to have enough mechanical problems that she showed up with her mother one day and threatened to call the police before Le Douche cut her a check and sent them both on their way.
There was also the intern from a local university who’d come in to work with the photographer and cultivate his skills as a budding makeup artist. After a day of sorting small paper slips with the names and phone numbers of potential scam victims in, literally, a broom closet, he vanished and was never heard from again.
It took seeing my own unspeakably hideous pictures, taken by that exclusive photographer as an afterthought two weeks prior, to realize that Mas Models was, in fact a complete fraud. Ever the diligent employee, I’d come across three different sets of letterhead with different plays on the Mas Models logo when I attempted to organize the filing cabinets in Le Douche's office. I also found at least a dozen rolls of film that were supposedly sent to the lab for processing within 24 hours of photo shoots that happened weeks prior. One late afternoon, when Le Douche had me call the numbers on the countless slips of paper our intern had organized by stuffing them into a paper bag, I learned that some of these supposedly new contacts had already forked over $300 a piece for pictures they never received when Mas Models was at one of two previous addresses with no forwarding information. Apparently changing the name of your company and corresponding letterhead was all the evasion one needed in the pre-Google age.
The morning after I realized that I was working for a bastard, I went to the office to turn in my key and made up a story about having to rush to Egypt because my grandfather, who was still alive, had died. I was a horrible liar then, and I’m a horrible liar now, so Le Douche, an expert liar, called out my dishonesty. I told him that there were things at Mas Models that made me uncomfortable and that didn’t make sense to me, and that I didn’t want to work for him anymore. He said he understood and then browbeat me into working out a two-week notice while he found a replacement, because that was the professional thing to do. He was also withholding my second paycheck to make sure that I did just that.
My replacement was found within a couple of days. She was loud, eccentric, and soon figured out what it had taken me almost three weeks to; that Le Douche was one conniving son of a harpy. She said her aunt was a private investigator, and that during the countless hours when Le Douche and Dracula were out of the office, presumably selling defective used cars and laughing about it while fucking, she was smuggling out documents and building a case against the Mas Models empire. I didn’t stick around to see if she was full of shit too.
I talked to our exclusive photographer, who was remarkably candid about the scam, and confirmed everything I thought about Le Douche. I called the IRS to report the whole thing, since I couldn’t figure out which law enforcement agency to turn the fuckwads in to and I was pretty sure that lying to the gullible wasn’t breaking any laws. Cashing the checks of the gullible and not paying any taxes on those ill-gotten earnings, however, was a different story.
It didn’t matter. I got as far as an answering machine in a bureaucratic maze where nobody seemed interested in a small time crook taking money from people willing to hand it over and probably too vacant to realize they’d been had in the first place. I tried the Better Business Bureau, which, like that car crash from days before, sounded a lot scarier than it actually was.
The two investigative reporters’ desks I tried at the local channels that busted people with hidden cameras on the evening news never returned my calls. It was the Summer of 1996 and I’d met a con artist while everyone was covering the Olympic Games that brought the city of Atlanta to a virtual standstill, and that was before someone set off a bomb in Midtown and the ensuing investigation occupied the authorities and every ounce of available media for months on end.
On my last day at Mas Models, Le Douche paid me almost half of what he owed me, minus the imaginary taxes he deducted, with a money order he’d received from a new client for pictures they’d likely never get. He’d asked the client to leave the money order blank, and was thus able to turn around and write it out to me. I drove across town to that office every other day for weeks, and each time Le Douche would hand me fifty dollars and tell me to come back in 48 hours for the full balance of what he owed me, even though he swore that he had fifty thousand dollars in cash that he could withdraw from the ATM across the street if he wanted to be irresponsible and take funds away from the business. How could I possibly have asked him to do something like that?
I heard that one of the receptionists Le Douche hired after me had gone in and punched Dracula in the face, but all I did was go and snag my file so that they wouldn’t have the names and telephone numbers of any of my friends who might have been remotely interested in the world of fashion, and then I went and got a job at a coffee shop where I was, quite possibly, the worst waiter in America, and I started doing theatre with legitimate companies that paid less than minimum wage in China. I was poor, I was happy, and I lived in my parents’ house where there were no rats.
Epilogue
Recently, I did a Facebook search and found that Le Douche now resides abroad. Say what you will about the power of prayer, but Le Douche, if that was ever his real name, doesn’t look like he’s been hit by a semi carrying industrial strength hair gel that combusted on impact and liquefied everything but his still-living brain. I have since made a mental note to be less obtuse when placing requests with the Almighty.
Awesome. And to think you lived in famed fashion capital Atlanta! This reminds me of my fellow juror, a young woman who moved to LA from Georgia with her husband and two kids, so her 9 year old son could realize his dream of becoming a model and actor. Oh the future I foresaw for them was not wonderful.
Posted by: Alexi | July 19, 2011 at 06:28 PM