Читать книгу Kameleon Man - Kim Barry Brunhuber - Страница 8

“Look up. Look to the side. Wow, your eyes are, like, really scratched, man,” the makeup man says. He gives me drops that make the world go around. “And you have an oil slick happening on your nose.” He wheezes out the contents of a bottle, splurts it onto a cloth, and wipes my face. Then I’m frosted with brown powder.

“I...don’t normally wear makeup.”

“Then you don’t normally work,” he says, and continues dusting with his makeup brush. Craning his head back every so often, he holds me up to the light to make sure there aren’t any patches of my true colour showing through.

“What’s this for, anyway?” Crispen, already made up, is sipping water in the corner.

“I don’t know. I wrote it down somewhere. Something for a software company, I think.” I pull out my appointment book. My go-sees, appointments, and auditions are written in red. This, my first booking, is written in black. Our Feyenoord appointment books are the same ones used by all five Feyenoord agencies across the world—books obviously not manufactured by a Canadian printer. Every page is full of obscure holidays and questionable celebrations. Samoan Independence. Jeudi Noir. All-Cherubs’ Day. And every day, the size of the moon: quarter, half, full, harvest. I can’t figure out who would find that useful other than a werewolf.

“Let’s see. All I wrote down was ‘computer shoot.’ Sorry.” I probably should have paid more attention when Shawna explained it to me. I simply went into shock when she told me I was actually booked.

The photographer, Brian Bean, claps to get our attention. Next to him are a man and a woman, both short, both, it would seem, younger than I. “This is Darryle and Jeanie from Mycrotel. They’d like to go over the concept for this spot.”

Darryle plucks out several sheaves of paper from his briefcase, sets them out in order on the large table by the window. “Hi, everyone,” he says. Everyone is me, Crispen, one female and two male models from other agencies who I’ve seen at auditions but usually ignore, a young black boy, a young white girl, the stylist, his assistant, Brian Bean, and his assistant.

“This is the storyboard. We’re going for a friendly, family fun-type thing. High-tech, but warm. Approachable. Big smiles and all that. Making learning fun.” Jeanie nods. It doesn’t look as if she ever approves of much.

“Does everybody have sunglasses? A white T-shirt?” The stylist takes over, issuing each of us bright silver jackets. “If you do, put them on. These jackets go on top of them.”

“Shawna didn’t tell me anything about bringing anything,” I whisper to Crispen. He pulls out a white T-shirt and sunglasses from his bag. “You should always carry that stuff in your modelling bag, partner. Makeup, tape, a towel, lip balm, a white T-shirt, a black T-shirt, sunglasses...and a book, if you don’t like waiting while you wait. I have an extra T-shirt in my bag, but you might not want it. It’s sort of a backup backup. I call him Old Stinky.”

The stylist spots me. “No shirt?” He turns to his assistant. “Do we have anything for him? Thank you.” He tosses me a white tank top, and I sling it on.

Soon we’re twirling and gyrating to trip-hop as multicoloured lights flash overhead. An intergalactic dance bar. I, as usual, am the family man. In tow, the young black boy—my six-year-old “son,” whose mother is obviously several shades darker than I am. I’m to take the kid in my arms and hold him up to the lights.

“It’ll all make sense in post-production, don’t worry. There’s all kinds of special effects and characters and things that the computer guys are going to cook up for the ad. But I need you to hold him up like you mean it. You’re in love. Not...like that. You know what I mean. Like a son. He just won the pennant, or whatever. Yeah, like that.”

The kid is as light as a Frisbee. I want to wave him around in the air, squeeze him just to hear him wheep like a dog toy.

As usual we spend the first half hour shooting Polaroids. Brian Bean and his assistant set our scene, tell us to freeze, the flash goes off, they empty the camera’s magazine, flap the Polaroid in the air, then huddle together with Darryle and Jeanie in the corner, who tell them how much better it would look if I were Chinese, or if I were holding a puppy instead of a kid. Then Brian and his assistant come back, jiggle the lights a little to the left, and shoot another one. This goes on for an hour. A call-and-response with F-stops and shutter speeds. I’m getting paid to stand on an X made of tape. So I stand. My meter, running.

Eventually the lighting’s just right, we’re clothed in our shiny grey space jackets, and they’re ready to shoot colour. I hold the boy aloft, pretend I’ve won a prize, and smile.

“Chin up. Eyes open. Don’t try to look so sexy. Less smile. It looks like you’re about to eat him. Less...less...okay, now you just look evil. More— that’s it! Magic!”

It’s not long before the boy’s crying, and his mother, who’s drinking something out of a thermos on the sidelines, is forced to waddle onto the set and placate him with promises of video games and Oreo cookies.

“Makeup!” Brian Bean shouts. “His makeup’s running to hell. Where’s Tanya? Why is she out having a butt now? No, I didn’t tell her to. Shit.” To the boy he says, “You’re doing great, little man.” To me, “Just perfect. Keep smiling.” He spins around. “Shit. Okay, let’s take a lunch. Fifteen minutes, please.” He turns to us. “Help yourselves to food. There’s plenty.”

I gouge out a piece of cheese, grab a handful of crackers.

Crispen walks up to me, eyes wide. “What are you doing?” he whispers. “You don’t eat the food!”

“But he offered it to us.”

“Well, you’re not supposed to actually eat it, fool. Models don’t eat.”

“What are we supposed to live off then? Flash-bulb light and runway dust?” I glare as the crew gorge themselves on slivers of tandoori chicken and honeydew melon. I hope it’s all off.

Crispen’s scene is shot next. He’s with an older model and a young girl. They’re supposed to be moving up an escalator, pointing to objects on either side of the stairs, things that will be added in later digitally. The “escalator” is a five-foot stairway to nowhere.

“Hey, it’s Ronald McDonald,” Crispen says, pointing at the distant wall. The young girl looks and laughs. “And over there, it’s your mom in her underwear.” He indicates the other wall, where the child’s mother is standing, definitely not in her underwear, but turning red just the same. The child laughs again.

“Magic! That’s the stuff. More pointing... Well, you all have to point at the same thing. Yeah...no...just decide on a direction, and everybody point there. That’s it. Magic! Out of film.”

Five minutes later they’re done and setting up for my final shot. “Do you always talk when you’re shooting like that?” I ask Crispen.

“Yeah, it helps me get in the moment. Makes it real. As real as it gets with pancake makeup and a fake white daughter, anyway.”

“Are you done?”

“Yep. You have two scenes. I have one. Don’t look so happy. We both get paid the same.”

They’re ready to shoot the bar scene. An older male model with antennae is our waiter. He’s supposed to serve me and my young protege the software, a box on a plate. When we get our huge plate and open the box, we’re to act surprised.

“More surprise, please. Like the box just spoke to you. That’s what happens, right?” Brian Bean asks, turning to the clients.

“The box?” Darryle says. “Yes, in the software, it talks back.”

“Right. So more surprise. Big eyes. Open mouth. Try again in five.”

The waiter comes back and hands us the box. I suspect he stepped in front of me, but I continue, anyway.

“Hey, look at that. A box! That’s not what I ordered,” I say to my new son. He opens his eyes wide, mouth a big O. Nails it.

Brian Bean grins. “Brilliant. That’s the good stuff. A couple more like that and it’s a print. Keep going, guys. Three more.”

Three more, and Brian Bean shows the clients our twelve-second scene. Backward, forward, slow motion, reverse angle. Darryle smiles. Jeanie asks if it’s too late to make me Asian, digitally maybe.

“So now you’re talking to the camera, too,” Crispen says. Stealing my style, eh?”

We’re hanging up our silver jackets, folding our silver pants. “Borrowing it,” I say. “That’s okay, right?”

Crispen thinks for a moment. “Sure. Anything to help out a brother. Did you bring your voucher book?”

“Yeah. But you’ll have to show me how to fill it out. Our DBMI vouchers were tiny. This bastard’s as big as a poster.”

Crispen whips out a pen, starts filling in both of our vouchers. He presses hard—three copies. He writes our names, the client’s name, address, the number of hours, our hourly rates.

“Mine’s $150 an hour,” I tell him. He writes “150” on my form, fills in “220” on his. I almost break my eyebrows. Under “usage fee” he adds $4,000 to the total, the bonus of being used for a national campaign. It looks as if I’ll be able to afford meat for a change.

“Do you want me to take your voucher back with me?” he asks. “I’m going to Feyenoord this afternoon, anyway. Yellow copy’s for the agency.”

Brian Bean signs my voucher. I rip out the white copy, hand it to him. Rip out the yellow copy, hand it to Crispen. The pink copy, the only proof so far that I am, in fact, a real model, flutters alone in the field of blank forms. It can take up to six months to actually get paid. In six months I may no longer be a model. Or real.

The rest of the day, like most, is a blur of go-sees and auditions. Clients thumb through my portfolio, tell me how much potential I have, how much better I’d do in Munich or Miami or Cape Town. Most of them don’t even bother to ask me to walk. When I leave, I have to remind them to take a comp card to remember me by. My new comps—four of my best shots copied onto a small cardboard card—cost $300, most of it borrowed from Crispen. He knows as well as I do that it may take me six months to pay him back.

I’m supposed to see Clive Thompson at 1:30. His studio is somewhere in the grey wasteland of North York, and it takes me an hour to find it, even with a map. The elevator opens into a hall that thumps with dance music. I check my appointment book. Fourth floor, turn left. But I hear something else and turn right.

There are some sounds that will always turn people’s heads, no matter what they’re doing. The sound of falling change. The word nipple. The sound of a young girl crying. She’s in the corner at the other end of the hall, sitting on the floor, her hands clasped around her knees.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing.” Brown hair, decent body. I think she may have served me drinks somewhere before. She doesn’t look up.

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Tough go-see?”

She glances at me. Now that most of her makeup has leaked off, I’m surprised to see she’s only about sixteen.

“He told me I’m not really cut out for it.”

“Modelling?”

She nods.

“Clive Thompson? That’s terrible.” I know he’s right, though. The dance clubs of Toronto are filled with girls like her—young shooter girls who can only make it by on their tips. Because so many guys are always trying to sleep with them, they get the impression they’re hot. By the time they discover they’re not, they’re usually too old or too married to care. This one made the mistake of believing her patrons. The only work she’d be able to get would be in a makeup commercial. They’d hire someone that looks a little like her for the “After.”

“It’s probably just that you’re maybe a little too short.”

“You think?” She lifts her head off her knees.

“Yeah. You know how they like those big, long girls. Why don’t you try acting instead? They don’t care how tall you are.”

“I used to be in the drama club at Sir Leopold Carter, my old school. And my teacher always said I was pretty good. I had a guy come up to me once. From a talent agency, I think.”

My head nods while I escape through the back door of my mind. I wonder if I did the right thing by lying to her. Maybe I should have been honest and told her she’d be better off going back to school. Better to know and accept this now than to have one’s heart broken a thousand times before the age of nineteen. The ancient Greeks actually determined a mathematical equation for beauty. If I knew what it was, I could show this girl her face is a problem that can never be solved. I wonder if the formula still holds. Is math ever wrong?

She thanks me for listening, and I turn left down the corridor, toward Clive Thompson’s studio, knowing that if things go bad, there will be no one out here willing to lie for me.

I’m in the bathroom at a McDonald’s in the Annex, desperately trying to take off my makeup. But not even their industrial soap has any effect. If any man whistles at me, I’ll cut two holes in my jacket and wear it as a mask.

I’m supposed to see an apartment at 2:30 near Avenue Road, but I forget to allow for wind resistance on Bloor Street, and no one’s home by the time I get there. Yesterday I told the agency that I’d be moving out of Breffni, Augustus, and Crispen’s model apartment, and they said a new model from out west would take my room next week. If I don’t find a place soon, I’ll be sleeping next to that guy.

I leave McDonald’s and step around a bare-chested man playing a drum on a plastic barrel. Wearily I pull out my map and weigh my options. Every neighbourhood has a name: the Annex, Swansea, Rosedale, the Beaches, Cabbagetown. I’ve tried the first, following up on ads. The last sounds pleasant enough. Its name reminds me of Sunday-morning British cartoons. I can see Hedgehog and his friend, the talking tugboat, living there. I’ve noticed a lot of FOR RENT signs in other neighbourhoods, so I figure I might as well try my luck.

At Bay and Bloor secretaries and salesclerks are out on their second lunches. They’ll exchange high heels for white sneakers at five. I avoid the streets with more homeless than homes. It’s getting cold, days away from the first snowfall, but it’s still a beautiful afternoon to walk. I’d hate to be driving in this circus—at every intersection accosted by street anemones with dirty squeegees and shiny nose chains who offer to defile your windshield for a dollar. I head down Bay, deciding to cut across town on College or Dundas. The megalopolis is a labyrinth of one-way streets and traffic-control signs, many of them contradictory. On one street a sign reads: 1 HOUR PARKING 9-3. Two feet away another sign warns: NO STOPPING. I have visions of earnest drivers hurling themselves out of their windows as their cars glide along in neutral.

Yonge Street is the hungriest street in the world. Hot-dog carts line up along the curb like taxis. I stop in front of one stand boasting BEST SAUSAGES IN TOWN. Its neighbour proclaims: BEST SAUSAGES IN THE CITY. Clearly one is lying. Either would be gastrointestinal suicide. I halt instead at a newspaper kiosk and buy a bar of happiness and a can of rotten teeth.

I’m still not sure where Cabbagetown begins and ends, so I check my map, stop a passerby, and ask, “Excuse me, is this the best way to Cabbagetown?” I trace my proposed route on the map.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the man says as I lean into his bad breath.

“Okay, thanks,” I mumble as the guy ambles away. In my experience there’s a fifty percent chance people will answer yes or no to any given question, regardless of what the truth actually is. You used to be able to ask directions from gas station attendants. But now that none of them are actually from Toronto, one might as well ask the pump.

I stroll into a restaurant to get detailed directions. It could be a diner off the highway. Small Formica tables. Yellow flycatchers. Everyone in baseball caps. There isn’t a nonsmoking section. A bus driver, teasing the waitress about her new hairdo, is getting the usual. If I buy something, maybe they’ll help me. I glance at the menu, which dangles over a long hot plate. Eggs and hamburgers are being fried together.

“What’ll it be?” the cook asks. A greasy Band-Aid hangs from one finger.

“Thanks, I’m just looking.” Even the carrot cake seems greasy. Now that I’m a working model, I guess I should listen to the boys and watch what I eat. “Could I just get some toast, brown, no butter, and a glass of water?”

He hands me a plate of cremated bread and a paper cup of warm, brown-smelling stuff from an open jug. I think I see plankton. I throw them both out and head outside, directionless.

On Carlton Street I meet more white trash in track suits and ill-fitting tattoos. The obese zip around in mechanized chariots. Construction workers operate heavy machinery in their underwear as I glide by a pawnshop. In the front window little black men with thick red lips and cheap red vests clutch lanterns and pool cues. Nigger art.

Eventually I reach Cabbagetown. The streets are lined with apartment buildings featuring pastel aluminum balconies. The better-looking ones have graffiti spray-painted on their lower walls. The worst are being decorated as I stride by. It seems to me that most of Cabbagetown’s inhabitants must only be able to afford cabbage. One half-decent building has a BACHELOR FOR RENT sign in an upper-floor window. There’s a basketball court nearby and a small restaurant downstairs. On the lawn by the main door a sign announces: IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW. Except somebody has changed HOME to DEAD. I’m not sure what that means, but it doesn’t inspire confidence.

A grey man is doing tai chi in the parking lot. I recognize a few of the forms: White Crane Spreads Its Wings, Push the Boat with the Current, Cloud Hands, Yellow Bee Returns to Nest. I took a couple of tai chi classes by mistake in college. By mistake because I confused tai chi with tae kwon do. When I didn’t hit anybody by the third class, I dropped out and took karate until somebody chopped me. The man teaching our tai chi class always talked of being effortless and yielding, quoted the Tao Te Ching, taught us the proper way to embrace tigers and repulse monkeys, but he was only a master’s student, no older than I was, had pimples, and was failing Introduction to Neurobiology and Behaviour. So what could he know of yellow bees and white cranes? In the class all our movements were rusty, jerky, as if we were breakdancing, popping and locking, doing the Robot. The man in the parking lot is a crane, actually possesses cloud hands. I don’t want to interrupt him, but it’s getting dark and I need a home.

“Sorry to disturb you, but do you live in this building?”

He doesn’t answer. Golden Cock Stands on One Leg.

“Maybe you could tell me what this building’s really like.”

I watch him go through the forms: Wind Rolls the Lotus Leaves, Swallow Skims the Water. Maybe he doesn’t speak English. Maybe he’s one of those monks who’s achieved the Tao and is no longer ruled by his senses. Maybe he’s trying to answer my question another way. I look for hints, a hidden message disguised in the movements—Roaches Scuttle Along the Floors perhaps, or Faucets Drip Through the Night—but he’s inscrutable.

I can’t wait forever. I need a place to live, and this one looks as good as any I’ve seen. There are no police cars outside the building, no laundry strung from the balconies. The address is 555 Munchak Drive. In tai chi, five is a magic number. Five Repulse Monkeys. Five Cloud Hands. To me the magic number is $650 a month. That’s my budget. It’s not much, but I’ll be lucky even to afford that. Bottom line: I’m desperate. As the Tao Te Ching says, “What is firmly established cannot be uprooted. What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.”

The monk’s now into Snake Creeps Down. He’s a personification of the form, a philosopher in motion-yielding, supple, balanced, rooted. Soft, not hard. Always moving. According to the Taoists, stagnation is the cause of disease. Nature moves unceasingly. Movement prevents stagnation. The healthy always go with the flow. So I will, too. If a Chinese monk watching a fight between a bird and a snake led to the development of tai chi, in which symbolism is religion, who knows what my watching this monk performing could lead to? I move toward the door. Every step is slow, effortless, yielding. The symbolism isn’t lost on me. I’m conscious of the delicate balance. Life is like pulling silk from a cocoon. Pull slowly and steadily, the strand unravels nicely. Pull too slow or too fast, it breaks.