By Stephen Keefe

JFK. International departures lounge. 6 PM. The screams get louder as they come down the hallway towards us. I get out of my seat and see four security guards emotionlessly carrying a screaming black man in a straightjacket through the terminal. He writhes desperately in their grip and yells for help in between throaty, incomprehensible shrieks. His head, a mass of dreadlocks atop a white tube of limbs, twists toward me. We make fleeting, piercing eye contact before his head twists back forward.

I look around looking for some other form of human contact — some validation that this really just happened — but find myself in a room just as detached as before. Rows of heads hunched over a sea of glowing rectangles, either indifferent or oblivious to the fact that a hysterically screaming man was just carried through the terminal in a straightjacket.

I had spent a month and a half here and it was time to leave New York City, the greatest place on earth, the piss-drenched center of the universe, the city that makes you ignore the homeless and the insane as a coping mechanism.

I had everything I owned on me- three suitcases- and was going to Europe to take one of the biggest risks of my life: to try to make a career out of being a model.

I started modeling a year ago when I was scouted at 5 AM in the bathroom of a Montreal after-hours club. “We’ll get you walking in two weeks,” he said, looking me up and down under the neon lighting, his jaw grinding from amphetamines, “But right now you’re nothing”

So I dove headfirst into a categorically superficial industry that promises you money, excitement and travel in exchange for a good chunk of your dignity and the respect of everyone who thinks you’ve become a sold-out narcissist. Within months I was optioned for Calvin Klein and Versace, signed in New York and shot with Kate Hudson. Despite being told I was in the 1% of success for this point in my career, I was still occasionally sleeping on couches to make ends meet.

My visions of champagne, cocaine and limousines had faded into me drooling onto a pile of mouse shit off the side of a couch in Brooklyn with perfectly coiffed hair, hoping someone with an inflated sense of self-importance would call my agency for work.

To make it out of tuna can-drenched mediocrity I needed to expand to more, bigger markets, and there is no better place to do so than Europe; the heart of global fashion.

The intercom blasted through the terminal and a few hundred of us were herded onto overnight flight 478 to Istanbul. I’d bought a travel pillow, a magazine and a box of sleeping pills, “I want something that will knock me out,” I told the perma-smiling Asian woman offering foot massages.

I got into my window seat and waited for everyone to shuffle past each other. I inhaled the lingering scent of coffee, jet fuel and crusted-on B.O. Someone handed me a Batman overnight kit containing slippers, a toothbrush and compression socks.

I took a look at the guy waving neon orange cones on the runway outside and thought about how the next time I landed I would be fighting for my livelihood — fully confronting the massive risk I was taking and living with the outcome.

“You know who the first person to get into heaven was? Jesus”, said the guy behind me to the passenger beside him.

I popped three sleeping pills as the stewardesses, who looked like they’d been unfrozen from pre-racial America, gave a Bleach-toothed demonstration of what to do if the plane crashed into the side of a mountain.

We took off as a baby started crying three rows down. The teenage girl beside me captured the moment on snapchat: “omg baby crying kill me now” before scrolling through her Facebook, satisfied with her work.

20 minutes later I felt weak but awake, so I browsed through Air-Turkey’s in-flight entertainment to see if I could ease my way into sleep. I almost chose ‘Murder, She Baked: a Peach Cobbler Mystery’ on title alone but landed on ‘The Martian’, propped up my freakishly long neck with the travel pillow and pressed play.

The plotline filtered through my drugged, distracted mind like a schizophrenic slideshow.

Big storm on mars. They think Matt Damon’s dead but Matt Damon’s not dead. Sexy intern discovers Matt Damon’s not dead. Something about a satellite. I was starting to get a headache from the pills but still couldn’t sleep. Matt Damon makes potatoes with his own shit and does some math. It’s been like two hours and I’m still awake. Bad guy from NASA is a bad guy. Fucking Matt Damon. I really don’t care if he dies or not I need something else.

I put on Modern Family. Boobs. A minivan. I was conscious but barely holding it together. I tried a different position and popped 2 more pills. Their voices were slowing down now, but the pain in my twisted body was keeping me just above sleep.

I was stuck in some kind of cruel sitcom-fueled purgatory, unable to sleep or fully wake up.

The mustached man to my left had his legs up, pointing his soggy, wrinkled ass right at me, reminding me that I would be forced to breathe whatever came out of it for another 7 hours. I would be forced to breathe whatever came out of everyone’s ass for another 7 hours.

I angrily watched the sun set through a crack in the window and then scanned the cabin. Everyone else was asleep, most of them chin-down in a sea of their own fat. I sat there miserably and listened to the chorus of mucusy snoring, grunting and shifting limbs around me.

I curled up in a ball and put on a movie about a dinosaur and a little boy becoming friends. I closed my eyes and after a few hours of anxious, nonsensical thoughts the stewardess slid a tray of rubbery scrambled eggs in front of me.

The Turkish Airlines theme song punctuated the landing and we shuffled off like zombies into a pitch-black Istanbul. I followed about half the passengers through the packed airport onto a bus to the connecting flight to Paris at 6 AM.

My body forced me into micronaps as my neck snapped up and down in a dysfunctional rhythm. The sun rose through the clouds, the theme music played again and we got off in Paris.

I took a taxi into town and he ripped me off for €80 but I was too tired to fight it. I had been travelling sleeplessly for 28 hours and my clothes were drenched in a putrid mixture of old and new sweat.

My host, a friend of a friend, welcomed me in and showed me my room. She went out for drinks and I couldn’t figure out how the bathroom light worked, so I took a shower in the dark and went to bed.

I looked at myself in the bedside mirror. I had meetings with two of the biggest modeling agencies in the world the next day and I looked like I’d just escaped from a Turkish POW Camp. I desperately needed a good night’s sleep.

I popped two more pills and lay there in a frustrated haze staring at the ceiling fan, suspended in insomnia. At 4 AM I went for a walk to calm my nerves.

The streets were eerily quiet. Only the faint hue of the streetlights lit up the cobblestone streets. The rhythmic click-clack of my boots rang out through the walls of the blacked-out apartment buildings and supermarkets that wouldn’t have life for another few hours.

I followed the sound of a motor to find a guy doing donuts on his motorcycle in the village square. I asked him if he knew where to eat and then watched him for a few minutes before going back to bed.

I connected to the wifi and looked at my phone. A random on Instagram wanted to see my dick. I politely declined and lay out my casting clothes for the next day.

I had 3 hours to sleep before my first meeting the next day at 9 AM. My head touched the pillow and I free fell into a coma.

My alarm woke me what felt like seconds later. I slapped myself awake and sat up on the side of the bed, about to take on the day that could change the rest of my life.

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