She Lies to Watch

"Christ, David, she's only half alive," I said of the model he brought into the studio this morning, "where did you find her, in an opium den?"

"Hey," he said to me, "I am David LaChapelle, I find beauty in unexpected places. It is my job to find beauty and to photograph it. You are the makeup artist, and it is not your place to question the beauty I find."

"Fine," I said, "you're the boss."

"Lorena," he told the girl, "I want to take some test shots, stand before the camera and try to look natural, OK." She stood there in her black bodycon dress and g-string, hair all in her face, looking mechanical rather than natural, as David snapped a few "test shots". "All right," he said, "now I want you to go see Georgia in makeup. Georgia, see what you can do to make Lorena come alive." I'd worked with David many times before, I knew what that meant. I reached into my makeup kit and brought out a glassine envelope of pure Peruvian cocaine.

Lorena sat down in the makeup chair and I draped a sheet over her so as not to ruin her wardrobe. "OK, sweetie the first thing is we're going to powder your nose. She looked at me with empty eyes. I shook a line of coke out onto the makeup table, rolled up a twenty dollar bill, and handed it to her. "Don't act like you've never done this before, you won't be fooling either one of us, OK." With that tacit permission, she bent over the table and hoovered up the coke.

"More," she said in a thick Spanish accent, her blue lips quivering with the raw hunger of a long time addict. I shook out another line for her, and she hoovered that up as quickly as the first.

"All right," I told her, "that's enough for now. You behave yourself and there'll be more later, OK."

"You're very fat," she announced.

"Tell me somethin' I don't know," I shot back. "But fat as I am, I'm gonna exfoliate your skin and do your makeup and you're gonna behave your goddamn self for me. Do we understand each other?" She nodded. I got to work exfoliating her face and then started on her makeup. Her eyes were rather yellow, and I presumed she'd been taking her fix that way, by moistening her eyes with liquified heroin, rather than shooting up. I dug through my makeup kit and found eye drops. "Tilt your head back...this is gonna burn," I told her, as I put the eye drops in both her eyes. That helped to clear up her eyes, but I knew it was a temporary fix.

Her skin was deathly pale under the studio's yellow lights, but I managed to find a foundation that matched her. Sultry eye makeup, red lipstick. She had a couple bruises on her arms. "Have we been bumping into walls?" I asked as I applied body makeup with a cosmetic sponge. "Stand up, let's see your legs." Her legs were bruised as well. "Damn it, woman," as I applied more body makeup, "the world already has a Lindsey Lohan."

Finally finished with her makeup, I sent her back to David. He stood her before the camera again. Only this time, he put the camera on the tripod and put it on a timer. There would be no test shots. He took his shirt off and stepped into the frame with Lorena. I turned the makeup chair facing away from the mirror, towards the two of them, sat my fat ass in it, and lit a cigarette. It was showtime. Lorena may have been a junkie rather than a professional model, but junkies do things to feed their habit all the time. And Lorena was no exception. She'd done it before, and so she knew how to respond sexually to David as the camera flash went off at intermittent intervals. She took down the straps of her dress and showed off her decolletage to him. She shook her ass at him. He grabbed her by the arm and unzipped his dress slacks. He pulled her dress down, as I took long, lazy puffs of my cigarette and started to touch myself. Then they were rolling around on the floor, both nude. She had an ugly C-section scar, something neither of us had noticed when she was clothed, but by then it was too late. He simply turned her over, ass up, so the scar wasn't showing. He really was a genius.

After David fucked Lorena up the ass for a good forty-five minutes, the camera taking pictures of them the whole time, I was thoroughly hot. I'd smoked three cigarettes and fingered myself. When they finished, David paid Lorena three thousand dollars cash, gave her the rest of the coke, and walked her out.

My loving husband John came back in from walking her out, and asked me, "So tell me, Carmen, how did you like working with famed photographer David LaChapelle?"

"I definitely need to work with him again," I said, "I found the experience very erotic indeed."