Glamour Girl Road Kill
Monday was Paris, Tuesday Milan. Wednesday was New York and Thursday was Madrid, or was that London? She didn’t know anymore. Somebody else took care of that. She just had to strut Calvin Klein and Tom Ford down the catwalk like she was wearing Tina Turner’s legs and Beyonce’s bootylicious ass. She had all of that and she was made for the walkway — lanky arms and long legs that went on forever. She was thin as matchwood and darkly angelic with flying elbows, a harlot’s sullen eyes and lush full lips that pouted on their own. She was practiced carelessness, reckless abandon, a sulking and seductive wasteland of intolerable beauty. Her eyes said everything — they said nothing. It was all about the Versace.
Erica was 15 when Nazgul spotted her stuffing her freckled ingénue face with a large slice of pepperoni and sausage in Queens, down from upstate New Paltz visiting her grandparents for the weekend. Erica had that thing — that look like she was the new face of fashion or could be made into it. She just needed work, but that’s what the agency did. Nazgul took her over to the agency the next day to see if she could be worked. She could. The following week her picture appeared in the New York Times fashion section. The following month she made the cover of Vogue, and that was that.
Lagerfeld had to have her for the spring collection, and suddenly day turned into night. Her life went from dull to bright in a blink. If she did not actually see Florence or Berlin or Singapore, they all saw her in a million flashing light bulbs, killing Diane von Furstenberg. She became iconic, as if Twiggy ever mattered. When she was not miming her vacant, doe-eyed look for Elle she found her way into the glittery sewer reserved for those who could afford to wallow in it.
Her heartbeat drove the rhythm on a hundred dance floors across Europe and the Mediterranean and she emerged from subterranean nights to the blinding light of day to board jets that took her to the next fabulous locale where paparazzi waited to catch an unguarded tabloid fodder moment. When she faltered Nazgul was always there — a sniff of this, a snort of that — and she was back in the highlife again, vigorous and fresh as ever. She spent her sixteenth birthday dancing naked to Crocodile Rock on a bar in Bangkok where she urinated into a Mai Tai and lost her virginity to the man who merrily drank it down.
When she landed in Tokyo for the new Armani rollout she had been up for four days and nights living on cigarettes and blow. Nazgul made her eat raw fish then throw it back up to make her fitting weight. Her emaciation was a dreary glowing radiance derived of starvation, Quaaludes and smack that black eye shadow could ever only approximate. She had taken on the ghostly visage of a starving African albino hopped up on speedballs. They stripped her down and sewed her into a black pencil dress, stiletto heels, and pointed her.
She dropped her head and hit a stride to the pulse of electronic music that was her ether. She made the round and came back in for a lush evening gown and silk cape that hushed the crowd. She stared off into space as they made up her face for the third run, slashing a red gash across her lips and dressing her in a leather hoop dress and fuck me pumps. She wobbled when they stood her up but Nazgul was there with a fixer upper.
She exploded onto the runway like fire through a tunnel and was on the turn when the room began to spin and she collapsed. She held back the putrid taste in her mouth and perched there on her hands and knees. They stared amid held breaths. A mad, crazy, dizzying ride and suddenly the whole world stopped — but only for a second. From somewhere deeper than she knew it seemed, came forth a fortitude and will she didn’t realize she had, and that coalesced into a guttural primal scream — Get up, Bitch! She raised her head and looked over at Nazgul, but in that moment she was not absolutely sure which one of them had said it.
