Blame game - ATM Card

Arrived at the Fort Laud Airport earlier than expected, Oh how I love the convenience of the Self-Check-In-Kiosk, no hassle, no people, no problems! "Please insert a credit or debit card to locate your flight information" Went to pull out my ATM card.... and..... it... was.... not.... there!?  Weird?  Dug around in my purse for a minute, trying not to notice the line of people burning me with their impatient eyeballs.... I tore through receipts, old gum wrappers, a pile of makeup brushes at the bottom of my purse - No ATM card.....

First call was to the Bank - They cancelled my card, re-issued me a new one.

Second call was to the Fraud Department - They informed me that over the course of two days, $580 had been pulled out of my Bank Account... First transaction happened in Ft Laud, second in Jacksonville, third in North Carolina, and a fourth in Richmond VA... They asked me if I had any idea who it could have been, any information I could give them would be used in the investigation....

It was either my Ex or the lady who was hanging out at our campsite on Sunday night.

Regardless of who took it - No one but Patrick and I know my ATM pin number... Have any of you ever heard of someone taking cash out without a pin?  Is that even possible.... I am confused

Jay in Fort Lauderdale...

After his near-death experience with his heroine/coke ball - I distanced myself from Jay. I loved him as a friend but had fallen out of love with him, hard.... I just could not balance his life, his problems, his anger, with the love we had - I returned his keys in his mailbox, I stopped answering his calls, I stopped going to his place, I stopped participating in his life - It was hard - Every night I worried about him.... Every night I hoped that he was safe.

After years of not speaking, you can imagine my surprise when I got a text from him this week.  The text said, "Hey babe, I am in FL. Call me sumtime"  Now Jay is not Internet savvy, he types with his index fingers, he does not have a facebook or a twitter account.. he had absolutely no idea I was in FL.  I wrote him back, "which part of FL" - He typed out "FtLaud"... I called him up.  Guess he was having some trouble back home and was sleeping on a beach, he had been held up twice at gunpoint, he was broke, homeless - I told him, "I am in Fort Laud too. I will pick you up in the morning..."

My current boyfriend sees good in just about everyone - After all these years of watching me model for money, dealing with guys hitting on me, he knows that I live for our relationship... 

When I called him and explained the situation, he said "Don't worry about it - If it was one of my old friends, even an old girlfriend, I would do the same thing... I trust you."

Oh man - When Jay crawled into my car, skinny, lobster-red, wild-eyed, clothes torn up and stinking... I did a double-take.  He looked like someone who had been living on the streets for years .... He launched into a speech about how he was cleaning his life up - no more drugs, no more drinking, no more cigarettes... I nodded and congratulated him (knowing full well that he was trashed) - Hours later, after showering and grabbing some food, he starting catching me up about life.

Guess he had hooked up with a 27 year old girl with three kids, accidentally got her pregnant, had a baby with her.  For the last three years, he has been a dad to all four children, including her one autistic child. Being a father was the one thing keeping him sane and grounded - He talks about kid baths and family dinners, and I see happiness. It beams from his eyes.. But aside from the kids, his relationship was falling apart - One night he got drunk, caught his GF cheating on him, and went crazy - He put his fist through a wall and she beat him with a baseball bat in self defense - The next morning, she took two restraining orders against him.  She found a new boyfriend and told Jay not to worry about Father's Day "You are not seeing your kid anymore" - blah blah blah (God, re-reading this, it sounds like Jerry Springer... oh and it gets worse) - He quits his job. Tries to hang himself in the backyard, but the rope broke (he has quite the scar to prove it... ick) - Eventually, not knowing what to do, he just ran from his problems.... He jumped on a bus and tried to get a job in New Orleans with BP Oil but they were only hiring locals. And so he ended up in Ft Laud, homeless on a beach.

I know the drama involved here. And I know that with Jay comes chaos..

But I invited him to go camping with me in the Keys... He spent the entire time talking about his daughter - I spent those few days trying to talk him into gaining control of his life, to stop complaining and blaming others, to start doing something productive - I talked him into calling his mother, to get a ticket home. Talked him into getting a job that might overlook his past arrests "The military sucks, but if you prove yourself and you want your daughter back, that will be your best option...." Truthfully, I not even sure the military can clean up his record. Truthfully, I am not even sure if sending him home was the right advice... For all I know, next week he could obsess about his daughter so much, he might try to kidnap her or something... *sigh*  Hard situation...

Flashback...

I remember Jay in highschool, two lockers down from me, an entire year went by, he never even said Hello to me - He was part of the drug kids, which I guess, made him 'cool' back then - He went to field parties... I went to movies - He had house parties... I went hiking... He had a hard life - His mom kicked him out at 14, he lived on couches for a bit, did a few runs of smuggling coke over the Mexican boarder.  By the time he was 17, he had gone through school as an undiagnosed dyslexic, a huge disruption in the classroom... He dropped out, did not even attempt to get his GED... At 17, he found a job working construction, pushed for his Hazmat certification. He grew up fast. 

The summer that I turned 21, Jay and I were just really good friends.... I had met him at a party. He did not remember me, I remembered him... First time in my life, I had a straight guy friend and we had no weird, touchy, feely feelings attached.  We were together every day of the week after that - I was his wingman at the bar, we went clubbing together, we partied together, we watched out for one another.  On nights he could not drive, I would pick him up.  On days I was dead broke, he would buy me lunch..... Occasionally on nights we partied too hard. I would crash in his bed - I had my side. He had his, sometimes, we would stay up talking talking about life until the sun came up.

I loved those days.... sitting on his porch, cooking some BBQ, watching the sun go down...

The day after valentine's Day, all teary-eyed, I confided in Jay that I needed more love in my life, and he leaned over and kissed me all romance-novel-cheesey-like and said, "For the past year, you have HAD love in your life..." .... So began a whirlwind of a relationship...

The two of us were great together!  We did everything together, this time as friends and as lovers - Picnics at the beach, candlelight dinners and board games when his power got shut off, camping trips to the lake, long roadtrips through the mountains - We would lay around for hours, this time swapping sides of the bed... I was happy.  

We started dating in Feb but were falling apart by June - Jay was getting jealous.  If we went out and I talked to any other guys, he would get me in the car and scream at me, "You are such a fucking whore!  I should fucking leave you in the parking lot for that."  I would tell him that I did not want anyone else, and he would scream a lot, and then we would drive back home and everything would be OK again.... After the jealousy, came the lies - One day he came home and told me he quit his job... Later that day I ran into one of his work friends - He goes, "Man!  Did Jay tell you how he broke the boss's nose this morning?"  Sometimes he would lie about big stuff, most of the time it was small things.  If he ate a burger, he would say he ate a turkey sandwich - He would lie about stopping for gas or helping someone paint their house... or walking someone's dog... trivial, pointless nothings.  Perhaps he had always done it and I just never noticed, maybe it was a self defense mechanism that started up because of me, whatever it was - It was slowly eating away at the trust we had in our relationship.... The more he lied to me, the worse he felt, the more he drank, the angrier he would get.  I remember several nights where he put his fist through a wall and went speeding away in his truck, only to end up arrested somewhere for smashing someone's face in... I would sit home worried, phone in hand, speed dialing his mother to bail him out of jail....  He never hit me but those nights he would drink, he would become violent, dangerous towards others. I would watch him like he was a bad movie that I could not turn away from - "Is this the same person that I fell in love with?"  

Mid June I came home to find his doing a speedball with a bunch of his old drug friends, he said he was headed to Mexico to do another job with them.  "Fuck no you are not!"  I told his friends to get out of the house.... As they peeled out of the driveway, Jay was yelling at me again - His nose was bleeding, he was passing out, I got him into the tub and turned on the shower, he was puking all over himself, he was not waking up... I was freaking out - I couldn't call 911, he would be caught with a shit ton of drugs... he would violate probation and go to jail ... I knew him, he would rather die.

It was at that moment that I just could not do it anymore.... His problems were heavier than I could deal with... If he loved me, he would not put me in this situation.  If he loved himself, he would not be bleeding in the bathtub, covered in vomit... Obviously he needed help that I could not give him.  I called his mom, waited for her to show up, and with very mixed feelings, I packed up my things and left.

"Miami can suck a dick"

Not all the time - but most of the time, I even wrote a  blog about it last year after Matt and I returned from a trip to the Keys.... I was deathly sick, we were out of cash, no one wanted to hire me because I was not a bikini model and I had to work with that creepy guy in Miami who thought he was Santa Claus, "Come take photos on my lap, baby..." .... Yeaaaa.... I swore to myself that I would never travel to FL for work ever again.... never... ever... again... total nightmare...

... Ha... Well, until Prescott!  This particular photographer sent me the most touching email (.. just went looking for it but seems to have been buried in the avalanche that is my Gmail.... oh well) - To sum it up - He talked about how a group of artists, including himself, have been passionately working on a project called:  Exposed the Art Project - His letter was really sweet, claiming that he wished to do a photography session with a plus-sized model and could not think of better model to use for the project. "Could you come down to Miami for the shoot, I might be able to help with expenses?" - I immeadiately thought of creepy Santa, my reply was instantly explosive "NO way. Not FL.. not gonna happen..." I wrote him back, stating that FL and I are not friends... Thanks for thinking of me, really sorry...

A week or two went by - and he wrote me again, "I have never done this before... give me an idea of what it would take to get you down here and I will see if I can budget it" - I quoted a price... and he said he would make it work.

Two weeks later - I was on a plane to Fort Lauderdale...

Prescott's shoot was one of the highest production shoots I have been on (even Danni.com could not compare)....  He had Edward Cruz as the makeup artist and Troy as the hairstylist - We were shooting at a studio that costs $1900 a day - The place was HUGE, windows straight to the ceiling... Prescott had a photography assistant helping him out, handing him film.  All the Exposed Art Project people were there - There had to be fifteen people in the studio.... shooting, walking around with video cameras, eating, laughing...  creative madness!  If you have not seen some of the candid photos from Prescott's shoot, I had hair extensions put in and they bleached my eyebrows right off my face! (I have since dyed them back again) - Not sure if I will see the final product, since most of the stuff we shot was on 120 film - but the art show should happen sometime in 2011.... so stay tuned for that!

Van Rijn ArtWork

Not entirely sure where I first saw Van Rijn's work (I believe it was on an erotic art site).... But I do remember when I first saw his work, and for the last two years I have completely Internet stalked Van and his artwork all over the place. When I wrote him last month, asking if he might be interested in using some of my photos as a reference.... I half expected Van to retort with a "Sure..... but it is going to cost you a bunch"... As an artist who is usually commissioned for his work, I was pleasantly suprised when he said he would love to draw something for me....

Here is his website: Van Rijn - Just check out the detail in his work - They remind me of those gorgeous old-timey wood etchings, carved out, full of patterns - Check out the hair and the stockings!..... Here are two of the three pieces he sent me (The third one... perhaps my favorite... is very much X-rated and so sadly, I am unable to post it on this blog...sorry guys)  Enjoy!

Panty Dropping at Applebees

Ever had a nightmare where you are walking through a populated place, everyone is staring at you and then, looking down, you realize ... wow... you are naked?  Ha, while that is a nightmare for some... that scenario actually happens to me a lot in real life - At least once a month, I get hired for guerrilla nudes - I get paid to walk around naked in public, everyone stares at me and points (It is oh-SO awkward)  - While I will never be comfortable shooting guerrilla styled stuff, after some forty-odd shoots, as least it is not as terrifying as it once was...

Know what IS terrifying, though!?... Having your underwear slip down to your ankles in the middle of Applebees - Yup..... THAT happened to me Tuesday.

Shot with a photographer who crochets bikinis for models (really sweet guy).  He put together this wonderful scarlet bikini - I drove up from Austin and we shot on a beach in Kileen.. When we finished, I grabbed a sundress, tossed it over my bikini, "Lets get some lunch!"  Well.... did you know that yarn expands when it gets wet?  No one told me that... Nope.  Never knew.

After our meal in Applebees, we got up to leave.... *gasp* I could feel the bikini bottoms starting to slip down my thighs... *gasp again*  I grabbed the bottoms with one hand, I scooted through the restaurant towards the door... scoot scoot - Nearby tables were laughing and giggling - I fumbled with the bottoms... just as I exited the door, my bikini fell to my ankles... Ahhhh!...  Photographer looks at me and goes, "Wish I had my camera.... What a great way to end a shoot!" Oh so embarrassing!

LA in Photos:

Monday 17th:  All three of us, break camp at Joshua Tree - Get to LA at 3pm, crash at Samantha's place....

Tuesday 18th: Matthew flies back home to the Cuse - Tracy and I begin our modeling tour in LA.

Wednesday 19th:  Photographer wakes up at 4am and drives five hours to work with me! *flattered!* - I get covered in vasaline, my greasy butt ruins a new studio backdrop - Great photos emerged from the shoot....

Longggg, seven hour job, shooting Sleepy Fetish videos with Paragon Videos - Paragon takes us out for yummy Italian afterwards, Tracy cannot figure out why her pizza shows up on a tomatoe can... but she just goes with it....

Thursday 20th: I forgot who I worked with - Tracy just texted me and said, "It was the Pot Pussy Guy, remember?..."  Ha.  Indeed I did. We worked in the studio for three hours - And afterwards, the photographer showed Tracy and I photos of a naked lady with Marjuana inside her Pussy "We smoked it after... it was really good stuff..." Ewwww

Scruffy Pirate hires Tracy and I to shoot together on the Queen Mary in Long Beach (an old ship which has been converted into a floating hotel) - Photographer brings TONS of vintage clothing - The place is wooden, rich with history and feels haunted - Someone runs down the hallway screaming, "Red RUM!  Red RUM!":

Friday 21st:  Day off for London!  Tracy works that morning, I spend the entire day talking to Samantha - Tracy and I go shopping at It's A Wrap!

Tracy and I had the chance to check out the 1920's Shanghai adventure!  Great show!

Sat 22nd:  Worked with a young talented college kid, Xeroxed my boobs and my Butt:

Saturday Night Dinner at Hamburger Mary's and an 'attempt' to see the Cemetery Screening of "The Thing" - Parking was insane... We gave up

Sunday May 23rd:  Tracy and I shot a ten hour job for WetandMessy.com:

Monday May 24th: Beware of the Butt Carrot! Muki's Kitchen stuck a fake carrot in my butt and Tracy (the evil pilgrim!) cooked me up for supper!

One of my favorite Modelographers, Trish, shot me with her Daddy's film camera at Don Sir's place while Trace was getting tied up...:

6-11pm: Tracy and I got tied up by Don Sir - I got to do my first suspension (a lot of fun!), Tracy got to do her second, and I had the chance to hopelessy flirt with Don for a few hours... ha:



















Tuesday 25th:  My ass is on a flight back to Austin TX - And I am happy, well photographed, and on my way home to hug my kitty..... Whoooo!

Los Angeles...

Mile-wise the drive from Joshua Tree to LA was short - but covered in dust sporting some brittle dusty hay hair... the drive was not short enough! Oh how I love a good shower!  Although, I have a bunch of friends in the Los Angeles area, Tracy thought it would be fun to crash at Samantha Grace's house for a few days (Sam is another Internet model).  Sam and I used to live about 20 miles from eachother in Cleveland but rarely saw eachother. It is great seeing her in LA.

LA was crazy - Tracy and I were always so busy.... We would leave the house at 10am and get back around 11pm every night - It was an exhausting seven days.

One thing I really enjoyed while I was in LA:  Isobel's amazing friend, Josh, who has been working on the 1920's Shanghai for the past few years - Got Tracy and I a pair of free tickets to the show! - It was so much fun!.... Sex, blood, Opium, slow motion fighting - Half the audience dressed up in old 1920's clothes, with cheap furs and funny hats.... They served absinthe at the bar, and all the actors had really bad french accents and were pretending to be chinese.... If you are in LA and you want to go see a really great show for a reasonable price, I recommend you check it out - It is playing in Culver City for a bit....


Photos:  Studio 5 Nine Photography - LA May 2010