Come Back, Come Back

How do I get so lucky?  I can't answer that.  Do I deserve it?  I can't answer that, either, but somehow I feel I deserve it, if not better.

So here's the deal.  Tonight I shot with a model who drove two hours just to make some pictures with me.  I was flattered already, but when she showed up at my studio at exactly the time she said, I was floored.  She was a knockout.  I could never have guessed it.

Everybody has a story if you listen.  I listen.  She was from Indiana where she grew up with white kids in a private Catholic school.  She never knew any black kids.  Her voice was unexpected, so flat and midwestern.  It spoke of dirt roads and State Fairs and kids who never go any further from home than Michigan or Ohio or Kentucky.  Ever.

But she fell in love with a white boy she'd known since she was seven.  They had sex at sixteen, and then he followed her to Florida.

"What twisted you up?" I asked her.

"He cheated on me."

"What about all that Christian upbringing?  You know. . . forgiveness."

"You know what that kind of education does to you?  Marylin Manson went to Catholic school."

I didn't know that.

She was a bartender, she said.  Mmm hmm.  We shot.  We talked.  She was as friendly a person as I had ever met.  I was already half in love with her.  She must be crazy, I thought.  Why?

"You know, I thought you were probably a stripper, " I said.

"Why do you say that?"

"The hours.  You said you get off work at four a.m."

"Bartenders get off then, too."

"Did you ever dance?"

"Did I ever dance?"

"O.K.  I have my answer."

"I dance sometimes.  Football season is coming up.  I'll dance then.  I do both."

Score one for me and my ability to read human behavior.

Turned out she was staying the night with her ex-boyfriend.  He was from Ohio and owned a string of gyms, one of them was in a nearby town.  Since he was here for the weekend, she would stay the night.

I asked and she said yes.  She had been her high school Homecoming Queen.  No kidding.  She still had the dress.  She would get her father to send it down so we could shoot in it, she said.

"Have you ever dated a black boy?"

She looked at me a moment before she answered.

"No."

"Only white boys?"

"Yes.  Why?"

"Do you like white people?"

"I find them O.K." she said, smiling.  "My dad asked me if I was ever going to date somebody black."

She was killing me.  Every move she made. . . I just wanted to make a video of the way she moved.

"Hey, look me in the eye.  Have you ever had sex for money?"

She couldn't look hold the eye contact.

"Yes."

"Why'd you look away?"

"I answered you."

"Yea, but you looked away."

"I don't know."

"What's the most you ever got paid?"

She paused.

"It depends on what you mean by 'paid'."

"Cash."

"Two thousand dollars, but that doesn't include the airfare to Las Vegas or the hotel or the. . . . "

"I know, I know," I said, though I really didn't.

"What's the least?"

I don't think I ever got an answer.

She had never been married, didn't want kids, and loved to travel.  She was the happiest woman I'd ever met.

If she lived in my own hometown, I would be her best friend.  I loved being around her.  She was beautiful and honest and everything else I seem to like.

When I came home, I worked on one of the pictures from the shoot right away and sent it to her.

"Come back, come back," I said to her in a text.

"I will," she said.  "I will."