One-Time Bag Model by Christian Harrington

I think I make up for a lack of strength and toughness with above-average situational awareness, a skill I developed in response to my unrelenting fear of everyone and everything around me. It wasn’t until one of my first therapy sessions in Los Angeles I would discover that the habit of suspecting strangers walking by you are about to stab your neck with a tactical pen is not a universal worry. I convinced the therapist that I got over this fear so she would underestimate my response should she ever try to surprise me with a leaping attack from her chair.

My tough-target confidence evaporated at the age of twenty-seven on an afternoon stroll to my neighborhood liquor store in east LA. As a reward for finishing another week in corporate public relations without killing myself or somebody else, I took it easy on weekends, mostly lounging around my studio apartment. Since most of my friends lived a forty-five-minute drive away in Santa Monica—an unimaginable journey to make on a Sunday—I usually opted to save myself the gas money and do some solitary drinking while I watched my best friends—the New England Patriots—play football.

I am not positive what poison I was off to buy that day. If I had money, I would have been purchasing potato vodka and soda water, but, most likely, I was picking up cheap beer. In the middle of my three-block hike—the liquor run came with exercise—a young woman approached me with a notebook and a smile.

Figuring she was a canvasser for some do-gooder organization, I prepared for her to ask me questions like, “Do you think the government should be allowed to turn parrots into killing machines?” or “Are you someone who thinks children should be happy?” Instead, she said, “You have really great style!”

This was a compliment I didn’t hear much. I owned ten shirts and five pairs of pants. Finding it hard to believe that this was her first time seeing somebody match a white button-down with blue jeans, I became suspicious.

As I processed her statement, a group of four men walked up and gathered behind her. Dressed in slim jeans and fancy footwear that fit in that nebulous area between sneakers and dress shoes, they spoke quietly to one another as they huddled around my biggest fan. I didn’t know who these people were. And why were there so many of them? Given my lack of fighting experience, if they were planning on jumping me, they really overestimated the numbers they would need.

Even if the complimentary woman had served as bait to lure me into trouble, the plan didn’t make sense. Noon on Sunset Boulevard seemed like a strange time and place for a mugging, but perhaps that’s what made it so perfect. Inspecting her crew, I saw that one of the men was carrying what looked to be an expensive camera. The use of a non-smartphone camera had to mean something, but what? Either this woman felt compelled to praise my take on business-casual or, more likely, this was a gang that sends a nice woman to praise somebody before they start beating the shit out of him and filming it for their YouTube channel.

“Would you be willing to model for us?” she asked. “You will get eighty dollars.”

This caught me off guard. Completely flattered, the opportunity to model for this woman—and the millions around the world—overpowered my distrust of strangers.

I might have gone out to Los Angeles for an internship in public relations, but once you rub elbows with c-list celebrities at the local coffee shop, you can’t help but mumble under your breath, “Why not me?” If Ashton Kutcher could be discovered by a model scout in Iowa, surely I could be discovered by a group of tastemakers on Sunset Boulevard. This was my shot.

I hemmed and hawed for a few seconds. I didn’t need more than the time it took for one quick inhale to decide that I was going to say yes to this woman and her dapper band of friends, but I wanted them to think I had more on my plate than a booze run.

I ran through what the job might entail. I imagined they would want me to stand against one of the graffitied walls and smile. Worst case, I would have to wear a dumb jacket with way too many zippers. Best case, this was the first step to an international modeling career, walking red carpets by night and giving interviews about the struggles of first-class travel by day. Wrongly assuming my pause was actual hesitancy, she offered up some details.

“We work for a Japanese bag company.”

A Japanese bag company? Japanese fashion? Japan fashion was the pinnacle if anybody asked me. I worshipped at the altar of that country’s minimalist design. While I’ll catch myself cursing the internet for being a time-sucking pixelated wasteland of pornography and political opinions, I remind myself that, if not for the internet, I never would have been exposed to so many slideshows of organization tricks in Japanese apartments.

Nearly lost in daydreams of drawers where pots live in harmony with pans, I snapped back to reality before she found some other beautiful person.

“Yeah, sure!”

I looked around at some of the nearby walls. I didn’t want to tell them how to do their job, but I had a few ideas, depending on the color of their bags of course.

“Awesome. Come to our van!” she said.

Normally, asking me to a stranger’s van is a non-starter. My survivalist instincts tell me never to get in one. That rule applied where I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, let alone Los Angeles, which was home to people like the Manson clan and tourist attractions like Scientology’s anti-psychiatry museum. “Come to our van,” almost seemed like a dare. She wanted to see just how stupid I could be. Or, maybe it was a warning. What if this kind woman, in an attempt to save me from an ass-kicking, figured she would mention a van and I would run? Still, the hopeful narcissist in me, the man about to model for a Japanese fashion house, determined that this whole van thing would be a hilarious big-break tale in The Hollywood Reporter cover story about my cross over into acting.

“Yeah, sure!” I said.

The men smiled at me as I joined their group. We walked up the hill to the parking lot behind my favorite bar. They possessed an effortless cool that LA citizens spend hundreds of dollars to attain. Then again, with their stylish work coats layered over t-shirts for bands I didn’t know and that possibly didn’t exist, maybe they spent hundreds of dollars too. I wanted to hang with these guys. I want to be one of these guys. Feeling optimistic that my life was about to change, I began to brainstorm the final line of my resignation email. Would it be “Goodbye friends” or the more appropriate “Goodbye fuckers”?

I expected to find a minivan rental in the lot, something they picked up for cheap at the airport. Instead, we came upon what looked like an off-brand VW bus. As I took this in, I noticed there was a new man standing at the trunk. I was now outnumbered five to one. For a split second, I worried this might be the muscle to throw me in the back and rough me up until I handed over my cards and coughed up the pin numbers. This concern faded quickly after he flashed a smile at me. I wanted to be his friend too.

I bobbed on my toes, ready for action. I figured they would toss me one of their bags and we would get to it. Then I noticed two of the men sorting through clothes in the trunk. The woman had said nothing about a wardrobe change. They tossed me a shirt, jacket, and pants. Unprepared to disrobe in front of my new colleagues, I looked around for the changing room. Perhaps noticing my panic, the wardrobe manager slid open the back door of the van and waved his palm into the backseat like he had just opened up my suite.

This was it. I was about to get in the van. All I had wanted was to grab some beer for Sunday sports and now I was pulling down my pants in a dirty camper surrounded by one outgoing woman and five polite gentlemen. All of them strangers.

I tried to change as fast as I could. The white linen shirt, blue cotton pants, and gray jacket I had been loaned looked interesting, but there was no full-length mirror in the van so I couldn’t be sure if I pulled it off. Nervous that my friends might have buyer’s remorse once they saw me in a different outfit, I hopped out of the van. They eyed me up and down and seemed satisfied. I got a few thumbs up. They were the ones from a Japanese design company so I trusted them.

As I adjusted myself, I realized the clothes fit pretty well. Almost too well. In my mind, what stood out to them had been my head region. I thought my facial symmetry, something so many people—including myself—had failed to appreciate, was finally being recognized. However, the fit of the clothes revealed it wasn’t about my face at all. It was my body, more specifically, my measurements. They didn’t pick me because they thought I looked like James Dean; they picked me because they thought I was 6’2”.

Forget that, I thought. I couldn’t get picky. After all, maybe this was some new Japanese fashion brand. What if this was the next big brand to hit the states? I couldn’t wait to tell people, “I do corporate communications, but my passion is serving as the body for Japan’s trendiest male backpack company.” I was probably getting in early. This was like being with Bill Gates in his garage, or Steve Jobs in his garage, or Archimedes in his tub.

I exited the vehicle, ready for my image to be captured by a real camera—the first I had seen in years—and distributed all over the bag-enthusiast world. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the satchel. I figured it was going to put my messenger bag to shame in style as well as functionality. One of the helpers grabbed something out of the trunk. When he handed over the item, I was, in a word, underwhelmed. At best, I was whelmed. It was bulky, more of a camera equipment bag than a piece for stylish twenty-somethings to wear over their shoulders as they rode their fixed-gear bike to work at the microbrewery they owned with a friend whose ugly dog ironically serves as the beer’s logo. The shitty van should have been a tip-off. Still, it’s a long list of people and companies who started slow before picking up steam. For all I know, before Coco Chanel came up with the little black dress, she was trying to sell khaki cargo shorts.

We moved back to Sunset where they shot me with a handful of different bags. I stood against a few walls in my neighborhood—the same walls I would have picked—doing my best to act above-it-all cool while hiding my fear that someone I knew would walk by. While I had talked myself into this being something big, I still had the sneaking suspicion that I was being filmed for a new truTV show called “Can You Believe This Guy Thought Anybody Would Want Him to Model Their Sh*t?”  But then, as I scanned over the group, I decided it was a somewhat professional operation. Too professional to be a gag. And too boring. One guy was testing the light. Another guy was holding more jackets and bags. A few others smoked cigarettes, ensuring that people knew we would remain reckless, no matter how many juice bars opened in the neighborhood. No, it wasn’t a big studio production, but, still, we looked the part. Or, at least, they did.

We walked down the street to our final location, a Jiffy Lube parking lot. The photographer didn’t speak English fluently so we struggled to match up our artistic vision.

“Look at the sunset,” he said.

I did just that. Then I turned back, grateful that he had alerted me to the beautiful red sky and ready to return to my modeling. He pointed back at the sunset.

“No, no. Keep turned.”

Ah, I got it. For a moment, I had forgotten that they didn’t need or want my face. I would have to convince people that it was really me in the photo-based only on the gray hairs—if they didn’t photoshop those out.

Twenty-minutes after my transformation from boozehound to bag model, we were back at the van. I had been so distracted by the thoughts of my future stardom that I left my civilian clothes in the car. Jesus, I had even left my wallet in my pants. I was practically begging these people to rob me. The promise of model fame had disarmed me to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for the “please model for us” con.

Once I was back in my clothes, clothes that now felt lame, the woman handed me eighty dollars in cash and thanked me for my service. The rest of the crew gave me a wave. It was a wave goodbye. There would be no post-shoot drinks. We were not going to smoke a joint and talk about the bag-making monopoly stifling creativity in Tokyo. I waved back, pocketed the money, and set off on my original mission. So thrown by the encounter, I forgot to ask what the brand was called.

It turns out I’m pretty easy to manipulate. It takes roughly one English speaker, five cool guys, and a camera. That being said, if my modeling caused even one aspiring Japanese photographer to buy one of those bags, it would have meant more to me than all of the public relations work I was doing at the time. The life of a one-time bag model was not a glamorous life, but damn it if it hadn’t given me a thrill. To this day, I like to imagine that I’m somewhere out there on a billboard, looking off into the sunset with a chunky bag at my waist. People can say whatever they want about me, but, at the end of the day, I might be huge in Japan.

Christian Harrington is a writer and teacher in the Boston area. After a brief public relations career in Los Angeles, he returned east to write material outside the press release genre. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College.