Model Friends

Meaning this quite literally. My girlfriend is a supermodel. It’s not easy, because I don’t see her a lot. Or technically I see her a lot, but not as often as I would like to. But I have accompanied her to all sorts of places, and met quite a few of her friends, who are not, as one might surmise, all beautiful people all the time.

And I’ve just realized that we have been together for close to seven years. Dear God. That’s a long time. That’s longer than nearly all the wives my father has had. Amazing. All these therapy sessions are really bringing out surprising revelations for me.

I met my girlfriend through one of my best buddies. He may be a stodgy old bank officer now, but twenty years ago he was very well on her way up the modeling career ladder. The agency’s star, as it were.  But he left the company because the jobs weren’t really regular enough to pay the rent; plus being a female model didn’t suit him at all. But he retained his friends from those times ( models are very open minded people. So much that some of them have even had their brains fall out. Wonderful, no?) and those friends love having him over to size up the newbies, and on occasion, give advice to the ones who want out about getting a “proper” career and what it’s like to work a nine to five job.

The latter was how my friend met her. Obviously she wasn’t looking to get out of modeling – she was already well off enough to not need to worry particularly about surviving if she was out of work. She was more interested in learning. Just learning. About anything at all. And that quite piqued my friend’s interest. He called me up and told me that he had met someone fun and I should go check her out at this runway party next week downtown. The following, as it is too commonly said, was history.

In any case, I will return to the topic. Having been with her for so long, I’ve of course met many of her friends, most of whom are relatively top tier models, and actually befriended a few of them. It is true that they are rake thin, but definitely untrue that they are less intelligent than any other person I know.  Very many of the ones I know have backgrounds in the arts, like acting or dancing and a lot of them actually hold other jobs, especially in performance arts. All of the models whom I have found interesting have university degrees. My girlfriend, not to boast, is the most beautiful and intelligent person I have ever had the privilege to know. And not all the models I know are female. Quite a few of them are (arguably) men. And a few more are complete paragons of manliness – these are the bodybuilding jocks who pose for men’s health magazines. Why my girlfriend knows them, I have no idea. But she has a lot of contacts.

I don’t know if it’s something friends just do, but my friends – especially my model friends – love giving me advice. They really, really love it. I always step out of a conversation with a model with a brand new shiny anecdote on how to live life. And they really love gossip. Which is a big part of why I like spending time with them, but not too much time because it does tend to wear one down.

They like to give out fashion advice like candy. But their wardrobe out of work, speaking from experience, doesn’t really change a lot. My girlfriend has a huge wardrobe but she almost never wears those clothes, most of which are complimentary sets from the companies she works for. She tends to wear the clothes once to model them, then keeps the clothes, sends them off to the dry cleaner’s and when they come back, she hides them somewhere in one of her clothes racks and forgets about them completely. It’s actually rather fun to take a walk through that room in her apartment where all her clothes go. I call it the glamor graveyard. She calls it a waste and keeps planning to bunch it all off to some charity somewhere but forgets to all the time.

A lot of people don’t realize that beautiful people are really not much different from regular people. In fact, the ones I know are far more normal than I am. Apart from their terrifying beauty regimes. I’ve stayed over at my girlfriend’s apartment many times, and she tends to have friends crashing over at her place most days of the week. A few of them house – hop because their income isn’t regular enough for them to be able to afford a proper place to stay. Some of them have the money to get their own place, but they just like the freedom. So my girlfriend’s living room is kind of like an open party zone for whoever is over at the time. She doesn’t mind it, because it’s usually relatively quiet and the guests always clean up after themselves and make her breakfast to apologize. And whenever it gets crazy she’s free to go to my house anyway, so it’s all good.

Speaking of the house – hopping models, they may not have a home to go to, but they always carry their beauty regime with them in their duffel bags. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been freaked out by men and women with mud masks and whatnot on their faces as I step into the apartment’s open bathroom (as opposed to the closed one adjoining my girlfriend’s room). It’s miraculous, how they pack that many bottles and boxes into a cloth duffel bag without breaking anything or having stuff leak all over other stuff. And they leave a remarkably small footprint. Living footprint, I mean. It’s hard to believe that dozens of people regularly party in that little living room every other day when you are alone in the room. It’s always immaculate, when there’s nobody around. I’ve seen food and blood (yes, blood) stains on the wall during the party which vanish without a trace the next day after the guest is done bustling about the house cleaning up. Maybe I should introduce them to my mother – stepmother I mean; I’m sure they would enjoy sharing cleaning tips with each other.

Merde!

I think my father is going insane. He was talking about death today. His own death. Fine, he is seventy three, but what nonsense to be going over at breakfast. And when I saw him in the morning he was trying to freak out the clown plumber who lives four doors down from us with my sister’s story. I suppose it is all well and good to be happy and open and proud, but him? That’s ridiculous coming from him. What did he ever do for her other than pay the bills?

To be honest, his retirement fund was never enough to pay for her bills. And people always kept wondering what I did with my (rather extravagant, I admit) engineer’s paycheck. I do have a couple of modestly sized properties squirreled away but I’ve never really expected to leave anything to my children. Mostly because I don’t have any. And I don’t plan to get any ever. I have been taking care of babies and kids nearly non stop until just over ten years ago and I am completely and utterly sick of it. Say what you will about what wonderful experiences having children give, but having had to watch over seven children from the age of nine, I will say this once and for all: they are not worth it.

So I let my siblings have whatever they need. I don’t even know why I have those pieces of land and houses, et cetera. They would only go to my siblings or their children when I die. It’s not like I’ll take anything with me when I go.

Now I sound like my father. This is getting stupider by the second. I have no idea why he’s been behaving so strangely recently. Just yesterday he was telling his wife about his third wife. I have never seen him do that before. I must say, she ( meaning his present wife) seemed quite struck silent by all that rambling, but he did not seem to even notice her expression. Is this another one of his games? I know he’s very fond of playing these crazy stunts on people – particularly his wives – to see how much shit they can take before leaving, but they have never been this… odd.

He told me his stupid pet bird was going to kill him.

This morning when I woke up I heard some strange noises coming from downstairs. That’s what woke me up, actually. The screeching, crashing and banging. But I thought that my father would be able to handle it, so I took my time brushing my teeth, putting on my clothes, and all that junk.

Note to self: Clean up room. You do not want to step on a transistor ever again. Especially not the sharp end.

Note to self (2): Get Band – Aids for emergencies ( ie: Holes in foot from stepping on the sharp ends of transistors ).

After managing to find antiseptic and bandages I put on my shoes and went down the stairs to catch my father being a jerk to that clown man and scaring the man off by talking about my sister. I am perfectly fine with her, but to listen to my father speak about her in that way really irritated me, for some reason. Maybe it was the fact that my father seemed to be using her in one of his tricks, and I had never known him to do something like that ever before. It might have even scared me a little.

And then he closed the door and was giggling like a madman. That was truly shocking to see. I don’t remember ever seeing my father laugh for more than three seconds at a go. And never in public have I seen him laugh. He barely smiles unless it is in front of people he has known for years. He never speaks unless spoken to when he meets somebody new. For years as a teenager I was pretty sure he had a social phobia but I eventually outgrew that when I realized he was not afraid of anything, literally.

Which was why I did not move until he actually noticed me staring from the top of the stairs. He seemed so airy and cheerful. I was surprised he wasn’t upset or embarrassed at me having seen him act like a lunatic.

Then he made me breakfast, which isn’t particularly strange. But the oddest thing was that from the moment I set eyes on him he had this huge bloody scratch across his face, and he made absolutely no mention of its existence until I asked him about it. After I was done with breakfast and had cleaned up, I passed by the drawing room to see that my father’s bird – fine, hawk – was not in there as usual. It was perched out in the veranda, drooping considerably as the sun began to make the day swelter. I am heartless, but not that heartless. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t go near that bird with a ten foot pole. It’s a flesh eater, for goodness sakes.  So I told my father about it and he almost ran to save his dear pet Nick ( I wonder why nobody calls the bird by that name, it seems like such an obvious nickname ) from drying out and joining the bleedin’ choir invisible.

I let him recover, kissed him goodbye, and went off to meet my therapist.

And note to self: Try to call a geriatric psychologist, if there’s such a thing.