“The scar’s from surgery.”
“Oh, keep it then. Scars are sexy.” He laughs once more, snaps the book shut. “Well, we’ll have to do some testing. I know a few photographers looking to shoot a couple of creatives soon. But your look is catalogue. That’s where you’ll be the most marketable. I’ll get Shawna to arrange some go-sees with The Bay, Sears, the other big ones, and we’ll have to make a new comp card. These old DBMI paper flyers...”
He rips them out of the front pocket of my book. “More souvenirs for Mom. Tomorrow go to Copy Cat and they’ll set you up with a new one. Until you get some new shots, you can use this one, this one, and this one.” He plucks three shots from my book. “For the front.” He greasepencils an F on the top corner of one. “And these two.” He marks a B on the others. “For the back. Highest quality laser copies. Colour on cardboard, of course. They’ll be able to shrink them down to the right size because they have our comp-card format on computer file. It’s all done digitally now. Are all these measurements right? And tell them just to use your first name. From now on you’re Stacey. There can’t be too many other guys around called Stacey.
“We’ll want to put you on the next head sheet. Right here.” He points to a spot at the top of the poster. All the models’ heads are shrunken into little boxes, as in a high-school yearbook. The top row is prime real estate. Oceanfront property. “That’ll be about $400, I think. Shawna will give you the exact amount.”
Four hundred dollars is more than three times what I shelled out to be on the DBMI head sheet. But in Toronto a head-sheet shot pays for itself with one booking. Feyenoord sends the head sheet off to clients. Clients see the head sheet, ask to see your book. If they like your book, they ask to see you. And then they book you. At more than $100 an hour. The head sheet is a bargain at twice the price. It’s like taking an ad out for yourself.
“And here’s a voucher book.” He hands me a small white loose-leaf volume with the Feyenoord F in black on the cover. “The white copy goes to the client, the yellow one goes to me, the pink you can keep. One of the models can show you how to fill it out. Your hourly rate is—let’s make it $150 an hour to start. It’s not much, but we’ll top it up once clients get to know who you are. Then they’ll be lining up all the way down Yonge Street to book you. Of course, twenty-five percent comes off for commission.”
I’m still giddy about my rate—$150 an hour would buy a knapsack full of black-and-white film. Maybe even that digital Nikon I’ve been eyeing for months. I only made $80 an hour in Nepean. But as my elementary arithmetic finally kicks in, I realize that with a twenty-five percent commission I’ll be left with about the same amount of cash.
“I’m just wondering. I only paid a fifteen percent commission at DBMI. Where—”
“We charge the standard fifteen percent. Another five goes to DBMI as the parent agency.”
I forgot about Sherri Davis and Liz Barron. They didn’t send me to Toronto for my health. But my calculator is still working.
“Now...”
“The other five percent? Contingency fee. To cover the cost of the courier service, sending your book off to clients, that sort of thing. If the cost of doing all that is less than the five percent we take off, we give you back the difference at the end of the fiscal year.”
“Oh.”
“But enough about money. Would you like some tea? Where are you staying?”
“With Crispen, Augustus, and Breffni.”
“Is he smoking weed?”
I’m not sure which one he’s referring to, but I shake my head, anyway.
“I can smell it on your shirt. Tell him to give it a rest. Listen, before you go, one thing. This city is the Bermuda Triangle of models. A lot of good ones get lost. Drugs, partying, women. Men. You’re with Feyenoord now. You represent us. Promise me you’re going to keep your ass so clean you fart bubbles.” He snorts and slaps me on the back, then calls after me, “On your way out check with Shawna. I think she has something for you today.”
The hallway is still bumper-to-bumper with models. I elbow through, going out of my way to step on the toes of Crispen’s blond enemy, but he doesn’t feel a thing. He’s up next.
One might think being dunked on is the most humiliating experience in basketball. Not so. If someone crowns you by dunking on your head, as long as it doesn’t look as if you tried too hard to stop him, you can wipe the eggshells from your forehead and jog back on offence. You can still shoot it in his eye—a jumper from the top of the key—then talk some trash. Two points by any other name are just as sweet. Being dunked on is easily forgotten. The shame of having your shot blocked, on the other hand, lasts until you win the next game. It’s not only the shot that’s being rejected, it’s you, your best effort, erased, wiped away by a wave of the arm. The grunt when the basketball hits his hand, the look—is this the best you can do?—and the ball sails away out-of-bounds perhaps, or toward the other basket, the start of a fast break. A four-point turnaround. Return to sender.
I’ve used up all my moves trying to get past the other guy. My knees snap, crackle, and pop. No warm-up. I’m as flexible as a basketball. I stumble forward, lean backward, unable to gather my legs under me to elevate. I resort to the first move you ever learn, the one they teach you in school, the one you unlearn on the playground. The shot of the desperate and the white. The fadeaway. But I can’t fade past him. I’m a flightless Bird. My opponent is bearded and dreaded, with conical calves. He doesn’t even bother to swat my shot. Instead he grabs it out of the air with two hands and is on his way before I can call foul or feign a twisted ankle.
The clients, representing Punch Cola, make notes on their clipboards. A line is drawn left to right. A name, perhaps my own, is crossed out.
“Okay, boys, playtime’s over. Line up, take off your shirts one at a time, then run some lay-ups or whatever. Show us what you’ve got.”
I slink to the back of the line and peel. The only one skinnier than me is the man with the big black clipboard giving the orders. Each model takes his turn, launching himself at the rim, vaulting on unseen springboards. Dunks, double-clutches, three-sixties. Breffni goes for a reverse lay-up off the glass. Augustus frightens the rim with a tomahawk dunk. Crispen draws a murmur, throwing himself an alley-oop, tucking it neatly into the bottom of the net. He jogs back into line behind me.
“You should’ve put some cream on your legs,” he whispers. “You’re ashy like Vesuvius.”
I nod. Right now I have bigger things to worry about than my dry legs. It’s almost my turn.
“And thanks for the shoes.” Crispen hands me back my sneakers. He forgot his.
I lace the sneakers slowly. Like a boxer desperately down on points, I’m reduced to swinging wildly, going for the bomb. On my rare Sunday-afternoon forays onto the basketball court I can usually convince the ball over the rim on the third or fourth attempted dunk, at least on the outdoor hoops bent by the weight of hard-core ballers and kids with chairs. But in recent years basketball rims have receded like my hairline. This elementary-school hoop is shrouded in clouds. Seagulls circle overhead. I think back to high-school days, track and field, sixth place in the class high-jump finals. I breathe. I measure. I run. But my approach is all wrong. More like a triple jump—unnatural, three-legged. The ball and I sail under the rim, through the mesh, and into the wall. Thankfully it’s padded with a blue mat. I peel myself off, leave a vertical pond of sweat on the plastic. Lucky for me the