International Hand Model
Milano
He was never an actual international hand model. He told me he wanted none of the grind, but I’m not so sure. He had passed training at a ridiculous expense.
He shucked his mother’s lecture that he should go to Dartmouth like his father, become a banker, live in Greenwich, build her a house, ride exorbitantly priced horses, tease friends about their plastic surgery while he slipped away to the City for his own nip, pretend to be Green, and then age in an assisted living facility that never ran out of shrimp cocktail and played Lionel Richie on Wild Night Thursdays.
His mom was right.
The powers who control the modeling industry told him that his hands lacked the “it” for Clinique, or even for holding Nerf footballs at the local Dick’s Sporting Goods store. He drew the line at modeling baseball gloves. Not. A. Chance.
But what could he do? “It” is it, and he didn’t have it.
Despite his early exit from that glamorous world, for years he convinced others that he was in the prime of his career. He referred to himself simply as a model with the cocksure expectation that “international hand” was understood.
His ruse had a fundamental flaw. He had huge, hairy hands – certainly unseemly enough to debunk his claims, and definitely the root of never having had “it.” You would think that most who meet an international hand model ask the obvious question. “Oh, that’s so interesting, may I see your hands?” In fact, they don’t. The prospect of encountering rarity blinds them. You wouldn’t ask a master sushi chef to show you his best yellowtail sashimi, would you? And so his hands remained colored by fantastical supposition.
The real key to convincing his marks was to wince in agony at the thought of the stress his career inflicted. No one wants to injure a lamb. Lotion, freezing baths, massages, more lotion, physical therapy, immobilization. The pain was palpable.
The final straw was wearing bulbous plaster casts whenever he went out. He looked like a lobster with Q-tip-shaped clubs. Never mind driving or other necessities, such as on long-distance flights. No harm could become his five-digit treasures, even if he knew they would never take him to Paris or Milano – he always added the Italian “o” for effect.
Whenever I tell his cautionary tale, people laugh only at The Gullible, never at him.
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