Copyright © 2016 by D.L. Janney

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Design & Layout by Michael Shaker

Chapters 1 Excerpt

1. Fiction 2. Literary 3. Coming-of-age

ISBN: 0997467819 / 9780997467819

Acknowledgements

I am eternally grateful for the love and support of my beautiful wife Susie and all of my incredible children: Marit, Kasen, Gretchen, Ingrid, Kristofer, Nicholas, and Jeremiah. A special heartfelt thanks to Lee and Judy (aka Grammy and Papa) for “saving us” time and time again. Your love and support in times of our greatest need will never be forgotten. A very special thanks to Michael for believing and taking action to produce the book you now hold in your hands.

From the Author

This is a work of fiction based on a true story. Any similarities to people living or dead are purely coincidental. As in any story, an author writes about the subjects he knows and understands the best. It is through this lens that I hope this book will be viewed.

Chapter 1

Everything was gray...; the sky, the sidewalk, the steel and concrete buildings and the ashen faces of the people rushing by me with wide eyes and downturned mouths. My head and body felt dreamlike, as if they were not my own. The cold air pushed hard and biting from the East River through my thin, unlined wool overcoat. The heavy box trucks lumbered down the broken road, each bump they hit thudding in my chest. A giant heart seemed to pump inside my body without warmth. I felt hollowed out and empty...bone weary from everything and nothing at the same time. I had been at it for two long months, searching for an agency that would give me a chance and send me on a few appointments to get some work. So far, I hadn’t even had a near miss with the open calls at the top agencies. With every rejection my face had grown hot and red with embarrassment. I had mumbled something similar to “thanks” and then found my way to the elevators that would deposit me back on the cold New York streets. Ford, Zoli, Wilhelmina, and Elite had rejected me more than once, each for a different reason.

Joey Collins at Ford had not gotten specific; I had been sent to see him by a friend of a friend who knew him from school, someone old. He seemed annoyed that I was even sitting across from him in his smoky, dimly lit office, taking up space. It was two in the afternoon, but the dark, heavy wooden slats of his blinds were pulled down, blocking almost all the light from the bright winter day. He sat behind his heavy-legged mahogany desk with the old-fashioned black rotary phone perched among the clutter of papers and black and white photos of women’s faces. I got the feeling that he thought I was cutting into his time interviewing Eileen’s new female prospects. His walls were covered with neatly framed magazine covers showing the beautiful women of Ford. He leaned far back in his padded leather chair with the brass studs on the cushioned arms and said to me condescendingly between puffs of his cigar with a supercilious look of the most judging form of condescension;

“You will never be in the top five percent of the modeling business. The lower ninety-five percent don’t make a living; they just tell people that they are models while they go to school or wait tables in Midtown. And then they tell everyone who will listen to them that they are just waiting tables until they get their big modeling break. Kind of pathetic, don’t you think?”

I stared Fat Joey in the eye for a moment and thought, why does he need to say this? He could have said; You are not Ford material, or, Why don’t you get some good pictures and come back? but to say I will never make it in modeling? Who the fuck is he with his wide collared beige golf shirt and fat paunch pushing his pants and shirt out over the front of his too tight, wide white belt? He got way too much pleasure popping my fragile balloon of hope.

I wanted out of his stuffy office. I wanted to get back to the street so that I could breathe. I knew that he was right; I had little or no chance to make it in modeling. What burned me up inside is that people think they can say the shittiest things if you come to them looking for a job or a chance. He acted as if I should have kissed his ass for the pearls of wisdom that he doled out between clouds of foul smoke. Well, not me. Fuck that. Especially if you’re not even giving me a chance. Keep your stupid theories and fat-assed predictions to yourself; let me figure it out on my own. After all, what the fuck do you care? I will never be sitting in your shitty power office again.

I could feel the frustration and anger rising up inside of me like hot water in a pot coming to a boil too fast. I had visions of grabbing him by the hair and sinking my hard fist into the center of his fleshy face. Power does not equal intelligence or wisdom, but everyone with even a modicum of each think that they can say whatever they want to the weak and poor, their successful lives and fat bank accounts proof to the world that they are someone to be listened to, a wise and significant human being. Not to me. If you are smart, you’re smart. If you are stupid then you will always be stupid. No amount of money or power will ever change my mind. I know that this goes against all that the world was built on. I decided not to take Joey’s words to heart, no matter what his credentials were. As far as I was concerned, he was a fat narcissistic loser with a really bad haircut complete with wide and uneven sideburns. I’ll store this shit in my memory to motivate me when I feel like giving up. He will not tell me how to feel about myself, ever. Fuck him.

Kyle from Elite was a different sort. He was a quiet man in his early thirties with puffs of blondish-red hair in the middle and sides of his head. His skin was the color of a sun-bleached seashell, pinkish-white. He wore jeans and short sleeved shirts, both which didn’t seem to fit quite right, as if his body did not work with western style clothes. He had the look of a man that was never good at sports; any sport. He seemed to love being in charge of the men’s division at Elite and took his job very seriously. His meekness turned to power when he realized that a few words from him could determine the fate of a hopeful male model. I met Kyle on a busy Tuesday morning when four other models were waiting in the small, glass walled reception area. The walls were covered with framed pictures of past and present female models on the covers of Vogue, Cosmo, Mademoiselle, Elle and Marie Claire. Kyle looked at my book carefully the first time I met him and diplomatically told me that my pictures were no good, but that I may have a good look. He told me to get more pictures. I agreed with him about the book’s being worthless, but knew that I couldn’t get any more pictures to show him unless I took them myself, and I didn’t have a camera or any money to pay someone to take my picture.

I returned to Elite three more times after that Tuesday morning, twice with some really bad pictures that Lou and his girlfriend, Ginger, took of me on a cold Wednesday night in what he called his studio, but was really just an old barn. Ginger had played make-up artist. She covered my face with foundation, working especially hard on erasing the dark circles beneath my eyes with a bottle of liquid foundation and a dirty looking triangular make-up sponge. The results had been some really bad close-up black and white pictures with the light shining white and bright from behind my head and the make-up accentuating the wrinkles around my eyes. I looked much older than my nineteen years. I never showed them to anyone and let Lou keep all of the copies for his photography business, but I later got a few decent color photos from outside his Weston house. I wore jeans that were close to being too small and a borrowed denim jacket with the red baseball cap that I wore every day at Collingsworth College. Lou didn’t like them because he thought they were not professional looking, but I thought they showed some of my personality. The pictures were not bad, and I thought I almost looked like a model.

Kyle really wanted to find a place in his growing men’s agency for me, but without some good pictures to show the owners of the agency, he wasn’t willing to take the risk of signing me. I almost felt that the rejections were harder on him than on me. I knew he wasn’t going to sign me, so I wasn’t surprised when he flatly told me that I was not really ready to be a model for Elite. My mind was working as he spoke and I agreed with Kyle...I was not right for Elite.

Zoli had been an intimidating experience, with its dark wood paneled waiting room and corporate-like atmosphere. It was filled with pictures of serious dark haired models with chiseled features, each one lit more dramatically than the last. I had noticed that none of them looked like me: wet, slicked back hair, oiled torsos, or fine Italian suits covering fit bodies. They were all either tanned or Sicilian.

I had known I would be rejected before I had a chance to show my portfolio to a booker. I was broad shouldered, 6’1”, with arms like braided whipcords. My eyes were a color green that I had never seen before, looking more like a husky’s eyes than a human’s. Icy and cold and deep set behind high, sharp cheekbones marred by a childhood scar from a run-in with a nursery school bully and a large wooden construction block. The incident left me with two deep scars at the outside edge of my right cheek. An equal sign that marked my imperfect face. Other scars sat upon my face, but required closer investigation. The equal sign jumped right out at you; no one ever missed it. It never bothered me. I always liked scars; thought they were cool. They were a visual reminder of past events etched into my skin. It did not occur to me until I started trying to model that there were adults who survived childhood with unscarred faces. Perfectly smooth faces and bodies, without blemish.

My arms and legs were covered with scars, but they weren’t noticeable unless you looked closely. The one exception was the north-south slash starting above my right collarbone and ending four inches lower. It was pointed at the top and bottom and about a half inch wide in the middle. It had healed up fast and flat to my skin, the pinkish-red color the only clue to the casual observer that the scar even existed.

I had never had stitches due to my religion, and I was convinced that the deep gash healed as beautifully as it did because of that fact. I seemed to always stop bleeding fast and healed quickly, even when my toddler brother got a hold of my dad’s hatchet and swung it down on me when I was tied up playing Indian in the woods of our five acres in Washington Island, Wisconsin. I saw Scotty standing above me with the hatchet held in his two tiny fists raised above his head. At the last minute I lifted my head up from the ground to avoid the blow, but he caught me on the back of the head with the sharp end of the hatchet. There was a lot of blood, but it stopped quickly after matting the hair at the back of my head in the cold fall weather. My brother Warren took one look at the mess and puked in the leaves while Dad played with the cut and decided to shave my head around the crown and put three pieces of white tape to hold the gash together. He was proud of his handiwork and referred to it repeatedly as a butterfly dressing. I knew that my dad made it worse and that I would have to deal with the repercussions of a bald spot in the back of my head for the first half of my sophomore year in high school. I never really trusted my dad to do the right thing in any situation, and this time was no different. Unfortunately, my dad was the biggest human being I had ever seen, and he took the term might makes right to a whole different level. On a physical level, going against my dad was a suicide mission at best. I was the second born in a family of six. I quietly defied my dad most of the time, but when I slipped and put my thoughts into words and directly confronted my dad, the backlash was always swift and unpredictable.

I spent the next six months trying to comb my long seventies styled hair over the three inch round bald spot that Dad had created around the wound. I was made fun of by most of the students that sat directly behind me, but I have to admit, I did look like a monk with a really bad haircut.

When I got the chance to show my book to the receptionist at Zoli, she looked at the cheap, oversized portfolio with a smile-sneer and said to me in her Long Island, nasal toned voice: “I’m sorry, we’re not taking any new models at our agency at this time. Thanks for coming by.” I nodded my head and reached across her desk to retrieve my book. I was okay with the rejection; it’s not like she said, “What are you thinking? A model? Seriously?” I knew that I would never be with an agency like Zoli; it wasn’t me, it was them.

I was feeling down and more foolish than ever. My life seemed an ocean of nothingness; nothing on the shore of the past, nothing on the horizon of the future. I looked down at the cracked and dirty sidewalk as I turned without purpose to cut west on 58th Street towards Park Avenue and start my walk back to Grand Central Terminal. The icy wind cut into my face and through my old Levi’s.

A voice broke the silence, “Hey! Are you a model?” I turned to see two men who had watched me as I walked past them on the sidewalk.

“What?” I asked, confused and caught off guard.

“A model,” he repeated as he pointed to the over-sized portfolio beneath my right arm. “You’re carrying a portfolio. You must be a model.”

“Well, not exactly. Is it really that obvious?”

“Yes,” the taller one replied matter-of-factly, as if he knew me.

“Do you have an agency?” he continued with a large, ultra-white smile.

“No. I’ve been rejected by all of the agencies. I’m thinking of calling it quits,” I said self-consciously, as my words slowed and my eyes turned back towards the ground.

“Don’t,” he said with some urgency. “I think you can make it. You’ve got an unusual look, but that can work to your advantage. My name is Don and this is Marcus,” he said with another thousand-watt smile.

There was an awkward pause as I stared at the pair, trying to work out their connection to each other and at the same time ask myself why they would want to help me.

Don broke the silence and said, “Marcus is my brother,” as he turned towards Marcus and made a slight bow, at which point Marcus burst out laughing;

“Yeah, we’re brothers,” he said hoarsely as he put his hands on his knees and forced out a laugh laced with scorn.

They didn’t look like brothers to me. Don was too blonde and too tan for early March while Marcus was pale with bad skin and was dressed worse than I. Marcus was thin while Don looked as if he spent most of his time in the gym when he wasn’t taking protein supplements.

Don continued where he left off, “I was a model in the seventies. I think I can help you.”

No sooner had he spoken those words than I started to walk away. Something wasn’t right and the word “help” always seemed to come with strings attached. I wasn’t sure how he could help me, anyway.

“Wait!” he called out, “I’m going to give you the name of a men’s agency in New York.”

I stopped walking and turned half way around to listen to him.

“The Agency is Legends and the head of the agency is Phil Crispen. He knows me. You should go there now. It’s on 32nd Street, near Park Avenue.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” I said flatly.

“I know,” he replied, “They just started. Phil used to work for Zoli’s.”

“Okay, thanks for the tip,” I said without emotion as I turned again to walk away.

“No, wait! Listen to me. You should go there now. And when they take your picture, hold your chin down. It will help to hide your jaw.”

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked, getting uncomfortable with the conversation again.

“Trust me, it doesn’t look good in pictures. Your jaw looks like it could overshadow your face.”

“Thanks,” I said, unsure of how to take the information that Don had just shared with me.

“Good luck,” they both said at the same time, as Marcus laughed too hard while I walked away.

“You’d better hurry,” Don added. “They close at five.”

The agency was on the other side of Grand Central and the sun was dropping fast with the temperature. I made a half-hearted decision to make the walk to 32nd. The walk took longer than expected and I was cold from the strong wind pushing up from the south. The sidewalks were almost empty as I turned west onto 32nd Street. I found the street number on the side of the building near the new glass and gold toned metal door and opened the heavy door with the smooth handle. The new lobby was brightly lit and empty except for a large black man with an ill-fitting uniform sitting at a curved, golden desk at the other end of the lobby. The walls were covered with large floor-to-ceiling mirrors and the ceiling was the same shiny gold-toned metal as the desk. I glanced in the mirrored wall at my face. It was red and blotchy from the cold and my hair was flat on one side and sticking up on the other. I did my best to push my hair down with my hand as I walked towards the desk.

“Who are you here to see?” the security guard with the wet-looking afro sticking out from the black-brimmed chauffeurs hat asked as I approached the large desk.

“Phil at Legends,” I said quietly as I looked him in the eye.

“Eighth floor. Sign in,” he said as he pointed to a huge book that was filled with signatures on the raised counter above his desk. “You had better hurry, they leave in a few minutes.”

I scribbled my name and the time in the wide paged ledger and quickly said, “Thanks,” as I sprinted towards the large golden-doored elevators. I stepped through the open doors and pushed the number eight. Thirty seconds later the elevator doors opened to the dimly lit lobby of the Legends agency. I walked over to a young receptionist who ignored me, knowing that acknowledging my existence would allow me to speak to her. I stood in front of her small, sleek desk until she lifted her head slowly and deliberately from the work in front of her.

She spoke with irritation in her voice; “Appointments are over,” she said without changing her expression. She was almost beautiful with her pale skin, dark hair, and brown eyes.

I absently studied her face for a moment before asking her, “Is Phil Crispen here?”

She looked at me with more focus, shook her head and rolled her eyes back with extreme exasperation; she seemed to be working out in her head whether I knew Phil, or simply knew his name and that he was the head of the agency.

“He’s gone for the day. Let me see your book,” she said with a mixture of heat and ice.

I handed her my book over the top of her slim desk and took a seat on the long orange couch without arms. Her body language and tone of voice let me know that this was going to end soon with me heading for the elevators.

She feigned a look of interest as she rapidly flipped through the pictures in my portfolio. After less than a minute she closed my book without picking it up and pushed it to the front edge of her desk with her index finger.

“You’re not right for our agency. Sorry,” she said contemptuously while looking intently at some papers stacked neatly on her desk.

Again I felt the blood rush to my cheeks as I forced out a “Thanks.” I picked up my book from her desk and headed over to the elevators ten steps away. The rejection felt worse coming from a receptionist her age in the lobby of an agency that I had never heard of. It seemed a desperate attempt to find any agency that would represent me, and this time I had failed before I even met any booker in the back. I mumbled, “Thanks,” again to the girl who had already forgotten my existence.

As I was opening the large glass door a man with a rumpled shirt and a brown cardigan walked out from around the glass block wall and said quietly, “I’m Phil,” as he looked directly at my face.

“Hi, I’m Daryl,” I responded tentatively.

“What are you doing here?” he asked with a serious expression pulling at his brow.

“Trying to get someone to look at my book.”

“Let me see it.”

I handed him my book. He sat down on the couch and thumbed through the plastic covered pages thoughtfully as he looked up at me several times.

“Why do you want to be a model?” he asked as he looked up from my portfolio.

“To earn some money,” I replied earnestly.

“It’s not that easy. Your book is terrible, but the pictures don’t really look like you.”

I was puzzled by his comments.

He continued calmly as he held my book on his lap, “Are you in school?”

“I left college after the fall semester. I’m taking some time off to try to get some work as a model.”

“Where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from New York.”

“I’m from Illinois, near Chicago.”

“Ahh that explains it. You should really go back to school. I don’t like to see anyone leave school to become a model. It’s better to finish college and then try modeling. That’s what most of the guys do. How old are you anyway?”

“Nineteen.”

“Wow,” he said quickly as he looked up at my face, “That is really young. I don’t know any models who are that young. Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”

“No,” I said honestly, “I don’t. Do I have an agency?”

“Yes,” Phil answered with some hesitation as he nodded his head as if to convince himself. “I think you have a chance. Come back Monday at nine. We need to get you some better pictures.”

“Thank you Phil, really. I’ll see you then,” I said as my insides jumped with a rush of hope.

I walked to the elevators at the same time as Phil and we rode down to the street level together. He headed west while I headed to the east. He turned and called out from twenty feet away; “I really do hope you go back to school.”

I hesitated for a moment on the wide sidewalk and took in his words. I wouldn’t mind going back to school, but to do that I needed money, and modeling could make me enough to go to a good school, not a shit hole like Collingsworth College. I had an agency. I guessed that meant something.

About the Author

D.L. JANNEY is a happily married father of seven children and lives in Connecticut. He was born in Moorestown, NJ. When he was three years old his family moved to Palatine, IL. At 17 he left home to attend Monmouth College in Monmouth, IL. He left college in the fall of his sophomore year and headed to New York City. After two years working as a professional model he returned to school at Boston University and obtained a degree in English literature with Distinction. He has worked as a carpenter and contractor for the past 25 years and spends time watching his children grow, writing and sleeping. He is currently writing the sequel to Nineteen as well as a collection of short stories.

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