Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,42
I did it. I took his yoga mat and my two dollars and walked over to Plummer Park in West Hollywood, where I took yoga three times a week with Jewish seniors. Rudolf was right again. I was obsessed with this class and I became one of the regulars with Bending Norma and Angry Mildred. Everyone but me was eighty-five years old.
The only bad thing about this class was that sometimes you’d get there and ask, “Hey, where’s Jerome?”
And then everyone in the class would look down sadly. “Oh . . . Yeah. Jerome . . . you know, he had a good life.”
Damn, they were dropping like flies. But other than that, these people were amazing. They were doing headstands and handstands and downward dog. They would do it all. I’m actually kind of surprised they let me, a young gentile, in the room.
The instructor at the Jewish Senior Center was an ex-con named Ralph. He was covered in tattoos and had this brash New York accent that cut through the typical soothing yoga effect quite a bit. His teaching method was to bark orders at us. “ALL RIGHT, EVERYONE, WE’RE GETTING IN SHAVASANA, CALM DOWN. CALM DOWN.”
He would get into arguments with all the old people, too, especially Betty.
“You know, Ralph, you shouldn’t have all those tattoos,” she would nag.
“You know what, Betty, there are no judgments in yoga class, so I don’t want to hear another word from you!”
“Ralph, don’t you talk to me like that. I could be your mother!”
“Well you’re not! My mother is dead! Shavasana now!”
One of the ladies there even knitted a little sweater for Comet. It was like I was part of a weird little elderly community. It was the greatest. I just . . . started to feel good. All of these things have since become such important aspects of my sobriety today: eating right, getting up early, doing yoga. I owe it to Rudolf for giving me those tools.
With Rudolf’s encouragement, I also started working again. A model friend insisted I meet her agent, and I agreed—because I had such a great history with it. Might as well take another shot . . .
Today, when people ask me if I’ve modeled or if I’m a model, I usually respond with, “Oh, I could never. Doing something based completely on my looks just sounds so superficial and shallow. I could never.”
Now, this has a grain of truth. I love doing work that I think is meaningful, where I get to be creative. But also it’s because I tried modeling when people told me to and it did not work out. For whatever reason, my life is peppered with failed modeling endeavors, bookended with me wondering why I even tried to do something that I don’t care about.
When I was fifteen, this model came up to me, stunned by my height and perhaps by my bony elbows. I really don’t know. But she told me to go downtown to meet with Wilhelmina in Chicago. I sat down across from Wilhelmina for thirty seconds before she said, “You need to lose ten pounds and grow your eyebrows out.”
I distinctly remember thinking, Oh, fuck this lady. Fuck everything here.
Admittedly, my eyebrows did need some help. I tweezed a bit too hard that summer. But ten pounds? Asking someone to lose ten pounds who was already very thin was ridiculous. Don’t tell anyone to change their physical appearance. I’m more than that, and that’s how I grew up. It was always about who we were on the inside.
One of my neighbors was this beautiful, arrogant Israeli model. She would say things like, “You know what is so annoying to me? I am trying to take a bad selfie and I cannot! I just cannot for some reason, it is like I don’t have a bad angle. Like I am trying so hard and I cannot.”
On this particular day, Rudolf was out of town shooting a movie and I was hanging out by the pool. She had a model friend over and they both saw me and said, “Oh you haaave to be a model; you are fabulous.”
I didn’t have a lot going on otherwise. So I said sure.
I let her drag me along to different agencies that they had connections to—and I kept getting rejected. For a split second, I wondered if they were just doing a long-form prank on me with the intention of making me feel bad about my appearance. BECAUSE IT WASN’T