“Hardly,” she laughed, not offended by my gaffe. “I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.” She gave me one of her conspiratorial winks again. It was part of her Southern charm. “We’re not here to draw.”
“Then why are we?” I asked.
“You’ll see. Come with Mama.”
Maude pushed the heavy industrial door open and led me inside. A few shrouded lightbulbs hanging from the high ceiling cast puddles of light on the concrete floor. Gang-related graffiti were spray-painted on the walls.
A freight elevator at the far end of the long corridor carried us up three floors, slowly grinding to a stop with a gnashing of gears. Maude pulled the wooden-slat door open, and we stepped out.
We were in a huge room that took up the entire floor. The plywood subfloors were covered with cracked linoleum that was torn and peeling. The place looked as if it had once housed heavy machinery, like lathes or printing presses. One entire wall, facing north, was floor-to-ceiling windows, the old factory style that would tilt open, rather than rise vertically. Light streamed in across the floor, bathing the room in a wash that was more bright than warm.
Scattered throughout the room, more than a dozen artists were sitting at easels. Most of them were my age or a few years older, but there was a smattering of people in their thirties and forties as well. All but two of them were men. Some were drawing in charcoal, others in watercolor, the rest with oils. The instructor, a middle-aged effeminate man, moved from one artist to another, looking at their work and commenting on it in quiet whispers.
Everyone was drawing the same thing: one of two women who were seated on stools that were set on raised platforms at either end of the room. The women looked bored. One of them was reading a paperback novel.
None of that registered with me at first. All I could see were their bodies. They were completely naked, not a stitch of clothes on, not even a pair of socks. They were both mature women, in their late thirties. One was average looking all around, breasts, hips, face, behind. The other model was shorter and plumper. Her breasts were large and sagging, with long dark nipples. Her behind was heavy, with a roll of flab. Her thighs and arms were heavy, too. Neither woman seemed embarrassed about how they looked, or that a bunch of men were staring at them.
The instructor spotted us. He waved his arm, called out “Hi,” glanced at his watch, and said, “Fifteen minutes.”
Maude led me over to him. “Roy, this is Jessica,” she said, making introductions. “She wants to work. Do you have anything for her?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said, looking me up and down quickly. There was nothing lascivious in his appraisal; it was more that he was checking to see that I had the right number of arms, legs, hands, feet, and the rest. “Celia called in sick,” he explained. He had a pronounced lisp. He gave me another quick evaluation. “Have you modeled before?”
My blush was enough of an answer, but I managed to say, “No.”
“It’s easy,” he told me. “The main requirement is to be still. The artists can’t draw you if you’re moving around. You pose for half an hour, five-minute break, another half hour, same thing. Can you do that?”
“Of course she can,” Maude answered for me. “She’s a natural.” She gave me another wink, this one of reassurance, I assumed.
“Good,” the man said. “Fifteen dollars an hour. We pay in cash at the end of each session. You’ll work two hours today. All right?”
“Perfect,” Maude chimed in again on my behalf. “Come on,” she said to me. “We’ll change in the bathroom.”
Thus began my so-called career as an artist’s model. Initially, posing in the nude was a real challenge for me. Because I hadn’t played sports since the tenth grade, I wasn’t used to being around naked bodies. While I knew I had some good features—long legs, a firm butt, an athletic figure—I was uncomfortable about my breasts, which are small. Also, to my critical eye, my hips were too wide. The idea of stripping down and standing in front of a dozen strangers, most of them men, was flat-out frightening.
There was another reason I was squeamish about standing naked in front of the world. I had not had sex since that one encounter with James Cleveland, four years earlier. I had immediately moved to a new school and never made any real friends there, never had a boyfriend. I was living with kids now who were so sexually profligate that loose sex turned me off. And most important, no one ever had asked me. Customers at the coffee shop would flirt with me, and I’d flirt back with them, but none of them hit me up for a date. Same at the clubs, where it’s hard not to get picked up, if that’s what you want. I know I threw off a vibe that said “Keep away.” It wasn’t the attitude I wanted to present, but I couldn’t help it. Self-protection, self-preservation.
No one knew that I wasn’t getting it on. Among the people I worked and hung with, not having sex would have been analogous to belonging to some weird religious sect. I would have been an object of pity and ridicule, like a sideshow freak. I bantered and flirted as much as anyone else, and I was able to keep my secret well hidden.
With all that psychological baggage hanging over me, being naked and having sex were intertwined and inseparable. By that reasoning, going out there naked would be like inviting those men to violate me.
“I can’t do this,” I pleaded with Maude, as soon as we were in the safe confines of the ladies’ room. I felt a panic attack coming on.
Maude was already disrobing. Looking over in surprise, she asked, “Why not?”
“Because … I never have.”
“So what? There’s a first time for everything.”
I stood there like a mule that wouldn’t budge. “You can pose stark naked in front of a bunch of strangers and not be freaked out?” I said.
Maude put her hands on her hips and gave me a stern look. “This isn’t
Playboy,
Jessica,” she lectured me. “It’s serious work. Artists have been drawing naked women from the dawn of time. Go to any museum in the world, you’ll see hundreds of naked women. Men, too.” She was down to her bra and panties now, removing clothing as she lectured me. “Nobody cares what you look like, how big your tatas are, or how fat your ass is. Christ, look at those women out there. You think any of these guys go home and jack off thinking about them? If anything, it desensitizes you.”
She glanced at her watch. “Come on. Take ’em off.”
I was trapped. I couldn’t leave because we had come here in her car, and I didn’t want her to think of me as the prude I secretly was.
“We’ll compromise,” Maude said. “After this session, if it still bothers you, you don’t have to come back, and no one’s the wiser.”
She was buck naked now. She had a great body, if a bit oversized. Those men out there probably wouldn’t go home thinking about sleeping with the models they were drawing, but I couldn’t believe some of them wouldn’t be turned on by Maude.
Slowly, excruciatingly, I got undressed. My sandals were easy, and my blouse and skirt weren’t too painful. I still had my bra and underpants on—more cloth on my body than when I went to the beach.
“Man, do I wish I had your legs,” Maude remarked as she looked at them. “I always wanted long legs. Not short, stubby ones like these.” She extended a leg and pointed her foot in a classic cheesecake pose. “I’d give anything to have those legs.”
“Yours are very nice,” I told her. Truthfully, they were a bit on the short side compared to her torso, but they were nicely shaped, with large, firm calf muscles. I figured she was either a dancer or exercised a lot.
“Fine, whatever,” she conceded. “Come on. Time’s a-wasting.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and shed my remaining garments. Maude grabbed a couple of well-worn hospital-style robes that were hanging from hooks on the wall. We put them on, and like a child following her mother into the pool, I let her lead me out.
After all the mental torture I had put myself through, the actual posing was a letdown. I could have been wearing a long winter coat and earmuffs for all the prurient looks directed at me. Roy, the teacher Maude had introduced me to, showed me how to pose in a way that was good for the artists to draw. He also showed me how to find a comfortable position that I could maintain without cramping or tightening up.
The process, once I got over my shyness, was boring, but the two hours passed quickly. The next pair of models (one a man in his sixties) relieved us, we changed into our street clothes, and Roy handed me thirty dollars in tens.
“We can use you three times a week, if that works for you,” he told me.
“Sure,” I agreed immediately. Ninety dollars a week, tax-free, for sitting on my butt? Of course I was going to do it.
Maude drove me home. On the way, we stopped at the Dresden Room on Vermont for a celebratory drink, two mai tais apiece. They packed a real wallop. I wanted to treat her, but she wouldn’t let me, she insisted on going Dutch.
“Save as much as you can,” she advised me. “You never know when you’re going to need it.”
That turned out to be some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.
For the next year, I waitressed and modeled. I was making enough money that I could move out of the stoner boarding house and get a room of my own, an illegal studio over a garage in Miracle Mile, near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I also bought my first car, a five-year-old Honda Accord sedan, which I accessorized with love beads and other hanging doodads. I was feeling very grown up and self-sufficient.
I turned twenty on a Tuesday. I wasn’t working that day, either at the coffee shop or the Art School. I had no special plans for celebration. As far as I was concerned, it was just another day. I took a leisurely shower, shaved my legs and underarms, washed my hair, touched up my pedicure, and put on shorts, a tank top, beach flops.
I had just finished getting dressed when the phone rang. It was Aunt Jill calling to wish her special niece a happy birthday. We weren’t in contact very much anymore, and it felt good to hear from her, to know she was still thinking about me. She asked how I was doing and I told her great, and asked about her, and she said she was doing well, too. It was awkward talking to Jill, because we didn’t have much to say to each other, but the feeling of being loved was there, and that’s what counted.
Before we hung up she encouraged me to have a wonderful day and do something special for myself, and I promised her I would, although I didn’t know what that would be. I still didn’t have a boyfriend, and I didn’t want to be with Maude or any of the other women I worked with. None of them knew it was my birthday, which was deliberate. I still kept to myself. It was safer that way.
My mother didn’t call. I didn’t expect her to. I hadn’t heard from her in more than four years.
I walked to The Egg and The Eye on Wilshire and had a caviar omelet, which I washed down with two cups of coffee sweetened with real cream. I felt decadent and pleasurably guilty.
It was a beautiful day, much too nice to be inside, so I decided to go to Venice Beach. Not to swim—the water would be too cold that early in the season. I’d sit on the sand, read a book, work on my tan, check out the hard-body weight lifters. It was my birthday. If I wanted to indulge myself by doing nothing, I was allowed.
I threw my beach paraphernalia into my jazzy little Honda and headed west on Pico Boulevard. The morning rush hour was over, so the traffic was light, by L.A. standards. I cruised through West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, past Fox Studios, Westwood. KRTH was playing the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.” Everything about my life, except for sex and drugs, was Southern California to the max.
The low-slung campus of Santa Monica City College came into view as I got to Twentieth Street. Groups of kids were wandering around. I stared at them as I waited for the light to change.
What would it be like to go to college, I wondered? I was by now a seasoned working woman, with no thought in my head of furthering my education, but something about how these students looked, on their way to class or the bookstore or wherever college kids went, gave me pause. They looked like they knew where they were going.
As the light turned from red to green a car half a block ahead of me pulled out of a parking space. Why I took that spot, instead of continuing on my way, was one of those random decisions that changes your life forever. Seeing those kids triggered something inside me. I didn’t know then what that was, but I went with my spur-of-the-moment impulse. I maneuvered my car into the opening, dropped a quarter in the meter, and wandered onto the campus.
The first thing I noticed was that almost everyone looked like me. Not physically, of course, but age-wise. The people I rubbed elbows with in my daily life were all older than I was, so that without realizing it, I thought of myself as older than my actual age; I was biologically twenty (barely), but I was living and acting as if I were twenty-five.
My teen years had been terrible. Basically, they hadn’t existed. Now it struck me that I was giving up my young adulthood as well. All of a sudden I felt sorry for myself, for the young girl who never was.
It was my birthday. I was supposed to have a happy, carefree day. I spun on my heel and headed back to my car. I didn’t belong here.
“Jessica? Jessica Thompson?”
A girl’s voice, tentative, uncertain. I turned around to see who was calling my name.
The girl was my age. Shorter—most women are—and cute rather than pretty. Red hair, face full of freckles, dressed casually. She was staring into my face as if she were seeing a ghost.
“My God!” she exclaimed. She looked shocked. “It is you.” There was a pause. “Isn’t it?”
I stared back at her. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her face. “Yes, I’m Jessica,” I said, feeling weirded out by her behavior. “Who are you?”
“Cassie Middleton,” she told me. She kept staring at me like I wasn’t real somehow. “We were in the same grade at SaMo.”
Santa Monica High School. Where I had been a student until I was shot and moved out of my mother’s house.
“English, tenth grade,” she further reminded me. “Mr. Cohen.”
I still didn’t remember her, but I faked that I did, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Oh, right. It’s good to see you again, Cassie. How are you?”