‘I’m going to do some laundry.’ Lie. ‘And mail out some more comp cards.’ Another lie; I had no stamps. ‘It’s a nice day in the city. I might go to the…Mom, I gotta go. I’m about to get on the train!’ I lied again. The train was three blocks away.
‘I wanted to see if you were alive. It has been a couple of weeks and you haven’t called.’
She was right. I had avoided calling her for fear that she would ask about my life and I’d be forced to lie, just like I was doing now.
‘Sorry, gotta go!’
Speaking with my Mom reminded me of home. It would be so easy to walk back into the security of my old life. I felt vulnerable hearing her voice. If anything was going to make me give up it was this. I needed to be strong. I had to push away the guilt and stay focused. I consoled myself with the thought that it was often at these lowest moments that a new modeling job would appear.
‘Heather, I need to talk to you.’
We had just finished Thanksgiving dinner: turkey and stuffing, Jell-O and green bean casserole. It was great to be home, to see my mom and sister. It had been a good day, too good to last.
My sister Lara followed me to my mother’s bedroom, walking proudly. She knew what was going on.
‘Is there something you want to tell me?’
Of course I said, ‘No.’
She paused, eyeing me carefully. ‘What is this then? Do you know where this came from?’
My mom whipped out the evidence. It was a photo of me posing butt naked. I was only wearing a smile and an American flag that barely covered my nipples and crotch. I looked at it in disbelief.
‘When did you do this?’
Heart racing, I recalled the face of that ugly, shaggy, scary old Santa Claus of a photographer and wondered why he would put my photo on his website. Why did I even sign that damn release? Perhaps I could persuade my mother that I had been tricked into doing it – the naïve young model exploited by the seasoned professional.
Fuck! I knew that wasn’t the truth. I had wanted to be naked that day. The photographer had given me $300 and it was my first job as a paid model. I booked it all by myself, too. After the shoot I felt beautiful and radiant. Now everything was ruined and I was back to being that ugly girl again – the one who wore hand-me-downs and glasses, the one who never fit in.
‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled quietly. I hated myself, couldn’t believe I’d been caught. ‘Mom, I just…’ There had to be a way I could explain things in a logical way without sounding like an idiot. Instead, I felt a flush of heat. I couldn’t think straight. My secret was out, loud and obnoxious. I couldn’t shut it up. Before I could think of some explanation, my sister spoke up instead.
‘Everyone knows. How could you do this to us?’
I thought about ‘everyone.’ Did she mean my friends? Did my father know? Did she mean all of Syracuse?
‘Everyone thinks you’re a slut,’ she continued, without letting me say a word. ‘I was working at Kirby’s as a hostess and one of the cooks comes up to me and says, “I saw your sister on the Internet the other day…and she was naked!”’
When she said the word ‘naked,’ my knees buckled and I fell to the floor. I was naked on the Internet for all the world to see. I couldn’t take it back. The words I had spent my whole life running from, words that stung – whore, slut, loser – now reverberated in my ears. I thought no one would know my secrets if I kept them back in New York, yet my family had seen the photo in Syracuse, before I’d had the courage to warn them.
‘You know what Heather,’ my mother said. Oh God help me. ‘You are supposed to be in school!’ Typical for a teacher. I rolled my eyes like a schoolchild.
‘Why are you wasting your life? I have worked so hard for you girls!’ She poured on the guilt. All the car rides, money she didn’t have, always running around to take care of our needs, and how that left her with no life of her own. ‘You are supposed to be making something of yourself, not becoming a whore!’ She sat on the bed staring at the photo, her eyes wide. It was all so predictable and that just made me feel worse.
‘You’ve shamed the family,’ Lara chimed in. Suddenly I was my plump mother’s daughter again. My alcoholic father’s daughter. The below-average scholar. Yet I knew deep down I was doing the right thing. For the rest of my life, if that’s what it took, I would prove to them I hadn’t made a mistake, that modeling wasn’t just another ‘silly phase.’
But right now I had a situation to deal with.
‘I’m sorry.’ I could hardly breathe or speak.
‘And what about me?’ my sister continued. ‘I’m getting dirty looks at school and people are calling her a slut to my face.’
She was still talking as I stormed to my old room and slammed the door shut.
That Thanksgiving Day still haunts me. The look in my mother’s eyes, like I wasn’t her daughter anymore. Lara’s frown, her knowing look, reminding me that this big sister wasn’t worth looking up to anymore. I had lost my father to divorce and the bottle; I had lost my virginity to a boy who didn’t deserve it; I had lost my track scholarship. There was no way in hell I was going to lose my modeling too.
And Heather would not lose again. I would make sure of that. I decided to change my name and really make a go of my modeling career.
My alcoholic father never gave a shit about my modeling, which was a good thing because he was one less person to impress. I don’t think he ever wanted to be a father. He told me so a few times when I was a teenager, but it didn’t bother me. The only good thing he ever did for me was to pass on his gift for running.
Back in the mid-1960s he was a long jumper and a track runner. He had been born in Syracuse and raised in a series of foster homes. His mother was also an alcoholic; his dad left when he was two. As a result, he never really wanted to have kids. He has never paid child support; he could barely even support himself. When he showed up at my track meets in high school, my parents wouldn’t sit together. My mother and Lara would be in the stands, and he was always down by the track. Sometimes he showed up a little tipsy but at least he was there, which was all I needed to know. He called me his ‘running rebel.’
His honesty about not wanting to be a father meant that I could tell him anything and not worry about being judged, the complete opposite of the relationship with my mother. For a while this was pretty cool but I soon realized that I was becoming the parent in the relationship, listening to the many problems and tragedies of his ‘death of a salesman’ life.
I think I understood his troubles from an early age. I can remember as a twelve-year-old pouring a six-pack of beer into the sink, watching it slip down the drain so he couldn’t drink it, wishing I could make him stop. I would stay up all night worrying about him and how I could help to fix things. But there was already too much jail time and rehab for this little girl to make a difference. Even so, I really believed that if I ran fast and performed well on the track it would make him proud of me and that maybe, just maybe, he would stop drinking.
My father’s problems meant I didn’t have a constant, stable man in my life. As a result, I craved male attention and I certainly got it, mostly from immature boys who had just discovered their penises.
And so began my sexual curiosity.