Healer

She showed up late.  She had cancelled the week before, but she had done it early enough that I didn't mind.  It was one of those days when I was not looking forward to working in the studio after work anyway.  Now, I sat on the loading dock in the back of the studio in the late afternoon's waning light eating a Popeye's chicken dinner and drinking a sorghum beer that really didn't go right with the meal.  But the light was fine and the air cooling and I had not felt well all day but just tired and a bit achy down.  I didn't want to shoot this night, either, but I had committed.  I'd dreaded it all day.

She showed up in a beater, both the front and backseat full of stuff, wrappers and footballs and various bits of flotsam and jetsam.

"Hello," I said with a smile trying to psyche myself to work.  "Here, let me carry your bag."  I tried not to lean against the car as I reached into the backseat knowing my shirt would be covered in road grime.

She didn't look like the photos on her site at all.  They rarely do.  Often they have posted photos that are a few years old when they were young and slim, before the baby and the bad boyfriend and the job and the rougher times.  But this didn't look like the same person at all.  I kept trying to recall who she was.  Obviously I'd experienced a stroke.  That was why I'd felt so shitty all day.  I couldn't recall ever seeing anything resembling her before.

She was a pixie, 5'1" or so, a hundred pounds.  She had driven about an hour to get here in bad workday traffic, and I figured she'd need to chill for a bit with something to drink, but she was bounding around like Silly Putty or Flubber.

"Do you want something to drink," I asked when we were inside?

"Do you have any water?"

"Sure, here," and I handed her a bottle of designer water that was sitting unopened by the fridge.  "Let me show you what I do."  I began my normal spiel motioning to the big framed prints and pulling out some other things I had done, transfers and hand-colored, coffee-stained works, prints on glass and oiled butcher paper I'd printed on and put into the oven, and encaustic pieces that were still in progress.

"You should open a gallery," she said.

"Yes, sure, I should do a lot of things.  But now what I want to do is shoot with you.  Let's look at what you brought."

She obviously hadn't read what I'd sent her about the project.  It wasn't unusual.  Many of them don't.  She had a bag full of contemporary clothes and thong underwear, some crazy tops, and high heeled shoes.  It looked pretty hopeless.  And not being able to place her, I couldn't remember what her profile said.  I couldn't remember much at all.

"I don't know.  I hope you don't mind shooting naked."

"No, I don't care, I just don't shoot porn."

"What do you mean, 'porn?'"

"One guy tried to touch me.  I've got a taser in my bag now."

"Jesus Christ!" I said, "I'm not going to try to touch you.  I'm glad you told me about the taser, though.  I'd hate to end up on the floor flopping around and holding my heart," I laughed.

"Well, I'm a country girl.  I can take care of myself.  I'm not masturbating or anything like that."

"No. . . no. . . nothing like that," I said awkwardly.  What can you possibly say to something like that, so unusual and unexpected.  Of course now that was all I could think about.  I could see the moment when everything went irreparably wrong, the taser against my jugular making that hideous electrical sound.

"Well. . . let me show you the studio.  I may have some things."

We walked back and stood on the little platform looking into the mirrored back wall.

"Wow, this is cool," she said bouncing around.  Suddenly she was throwing ninja kicks and jumping around from combat pose to combat pose.

"You can put your makeup on over here," I said.

"I don't usually wear makeup, but I'll do whatever you want.  What do you want?"

"Hell, I don't care.  I just want you to feel good."

And so she began doodling about her eyes a bit.

This is where I start learning something about the person I am going to work with.  I ask them where they grew up, about their parents, about their siblings.  I am looking for a way to write them, I guess.  She grew up on the Florida/Alabama borderline, a redneck girl who liked pickup trucks, horses, fishing, and the rest.  Had a longtime boyfriend who she had just broken up with.  She caught him cheating on her, she said.  Twice.  "You don't cheat on me," she said like a line in a movie.  When I asked her if she liked "Country Strong," she said, "I don't know.  I don't watch t.v."  Her parents had been divorced since she was a teenager.  I asked her which one she liked better.

"I get along better with my mom, but I'm closer to my dad.  I took care of him since I was fifteen."

"What do you mean 'took care of?'"

"He was addicted to porn, so he lost his job.  Twice.   I had to go to work so we could pay the mortgage."

"Addicted to porn?  What does that mean?"  I thought somehow that he had spent all his money on it.

"He got caught looking at it on the computers at work.  He couldn't quit," she said matter-of-factly. "When I was seventeen, I moved out and he lost the house.  He was taking all the money I was giving him and spending it on women, I guess."

"I can see why you don't want to shoot porn," I said.

She paused a minute and looked at me.  "I had never thought of that," she said.  "Yea, I guess so."

She'd moved here to take care of her grandfather who was dying of cancer.

"That's a tough one," I said.

"Yea.  I hope he sticks around."

"What do you do for fun?"

"I like going fishing with my grandpa," she said.

"You really are a redneck, aren't you?" I offered.

"Yep.  I'm a redneck girl.  You like my haircut?"

I looked at her as she nodded her head back and forth.

"I just cut it.  Do you like it better this way?"

"I don't know.  I didn't see it before," I said not wanting to say more.

"You saw my pictures.  Did you like it better long?"

What was the point, I wondered.  But really, I couldn't remember a damn thing about her.

"I don't usually say things like this, but you are really a surprise.  I mean, you are sooo much prettier than the pictures on your site.  Really."

"Really?  I've been getting that a lot lately."

"Well it's true," I said knowing she felt pretty.

"My hair used to be really long, down to here," she said touching the lower part of her calf just above the ankle.

"No."

"Yes.  I was raised a Pentecostal."

That stunned me a bit.  I thought of dad racing through the porn sites like a demon, forgetting all else, losing the jobs, working his daughter, spending the money and losing the house.  I looked at the naked girl in front of me with no tan lines making herself up for the camera, a girl who took care of her dying grandfather who said she just wanted to be remembered for loving her family.  She didn't want kids, she told me, didn't want a family herself.

Maybe, I thought, if I'm lucky, something good will happen tonight.  Maybe. . . she will begin speaking in tongues.  I knew, though, that would be asking too much.  But I was glad that I'd come to the studio now, glad I decided to shoot.  I liked this girl who had not finished school, who didn't watch television but read all the time, fantasy things, she said, a girl who didn't date, who liked to fish, who cared for the sick and dying.  A girl who wouldn't do porn.  And when she was ready and stepped up on the little constructed platform in front of the curtains and the strobes, she hit the first most beautiful pose.  And just then, I was healed.  All the tiredness and pain of the day was gone.  It would be, I could tell, a most remarkable shoot.