Auto Lesson

I was going to work with a model last night who told me she was in an accident and couldn't drive her car. It turned out she lived only a couple miles from the studio.  I could easily pick her up.  But wait.  Was I going to drive her in my car?  Both seats are so torn up I have put towels over them as covers.  The brakes are metal to metal in the front so that when I stop it sounds like a freight train.  The left front wheel is loose and begins a violent wobbling at thirty-five.  Etc.  No choice really, though, if I wanted to work that night.  So. . . I went to get her.  Fortunately, the house I went to to pick her up looked like my car.  I walked up the short drive past a broken down Jeep Cherokee, over a brief, cracked sidewalk to the front of the house where two canvas chair dominated the small overhang.  Two ashtrays held about two hundred cigarette butts and a couple pounds of ashes.  Sentimental people, I thought.

I had no idea what would happen when I rang the bell, but I could have guessed.  A tall, beautiful woman answered the door rather sullenly.  In back of her, a white boy was trying to restrain the biggest pit bull I've ever seen.

"I'll wait for you in the car," I bravely told her.  The white boy had a look in his eye.

I helped her put her small bags into the backseat because the door doesn't open on her side.

"My car's kind of a wreck," I said.

"Yea," she said rolling her eyes.

"I almost didn't pick you up.  Nobody ever rides in my car.  My stamped on date just expired in my relationship and now I will have to date.  You think I can get a girl to ride around with me in this?"

She just laughed.  A lot.  By now we were on the road and the left tire was dancing.

"Good start," I said.

We worked for a couple fun hours with my newly refurbished lens that had fallen apart in my hand two weeks before.  My friend the repairman didn't like me any more after working on it.  I guess it was no fun.  But it was working now and my contact, my film pusher, had been over with a big batch of street film for which she charged me a hideously inflated price, so I could shoot like this a little while longer.

After the shoot, we were hungry, so I took her to eat.

"You like sushi?" I asked her.

"Yea," she said, eyes widening.  "You paying?"

"No," I said.  "You trying to work me?  . . . . . Of course I am, silly."

At the restaurant, I told her to get what she wanted because she was looking at all the prices.

"This isn't a date.  You don't have to be careful to give a good impression.  I'm starving.  Let's eat."

It is fun to talk to people after you've formed your ideas about them.  She is beautiful and tall and long, a Mexican/Indian with a wide mouth and dark hair.  But she is living with five guys and working at a sub shop.  All the boys are friends of her ex-boyfriend.

"That's weird.  Do you still see him?"

"Yea.  We share a room."

"??????  Like you sleep together?"

"Yea."

"Do you kiss?"

"Not on the lips."

"But you sleep in the same bed?"

"Yea."

"And you don't cuddle?"

"Well, I do sometimes."

"Then he's not an ex.  Why do you say he's an ex?"

"He lied to me?'

"About what?"

"I told him not to look at porn on my computer, but I keep getting these porn sites popping up on my computer screen.  I told him not to use my computer for that, and he lied."

"How old is he?"

"Twenty-three."

"And you think he isn't going to look at porn?"

"I don't want him to do it on my computer.  And he keeps saying he didn't."

"I don't think that's a lie.  He's just embarrassed to get caught like if your mother walks in while you're masturbating."

"I don't like it.  I've watched some of it.  I'm trying, you know."

"Huh?  You're trying what?"

"To like porn.  So far I've only liked the ones that have married couples."

She came from a very conservative family, she said.  Her mother and father were very religious.  That is how she grew up.  She was ready to settle down, she said, but her boyfriend was immature.  And he had a kid in New Jersey.

"Listen, I'm going to write all this, O.K."

"Sure."

"I just want to make certain because I got into trouble writing some stuff about another model.  I dramatize a bit and it hurt her feelings and I was devastated.  She was the sweetest girl."

"I don't care.  You can write it all."

I rubbed my hands together like a fiend.

"You know what will happen if you keep watching internet porn, don't you?"

"What?"

"You'll start thinking about it all the time and then you will want to do it."

She looked at me trying to figure me out and then she laughed suddenly.

"I'm serious.  You'll start watching girls and then you will want to try and then you will have a girlfriend for a few years until you find out that they are as horrible as boys."

Her eyes were dancing.  "You're crazy."

"That's what they say, but I'm serious.  You don't need to be watching that."

I felt good and moral now.  I was trying to save America's youth.  Our future.  But there is no saving anybody.  She's drifting far from her parents' values.  She's even started using a different name than the one they use for her.  Late night car wrecks, working at the sub shop, living with her "ex-boyfriend"and four other boys.  And that fucking pit bull.  I told her she was aiming low.  I described another kind of life, the kind that was sitting at tables all around us.  Her mouth turned down into a serious smirk.  "I don't like that," she said.

I guess not.  And in a little while, we got back into my moving wreck and bumped and screeched back to the house where she was staying.  There is no helping anybody, I reckon.