Horse Barbie, page 18
On the other end of the line, Ericka waited for my sobs to die down, then asked, “Wanna move here so you can be closer to me?”
She lived in a high-rise condo building in Jersey City and had been trying to get me to move across the river for months. This time I was tempted.
The next morning when I told Evan what he’d done, he had no memory of it and was mortified. He sputtered horrified apologies and scrambled, desperately, for a dozen different ways to make it up to me. He would buy me a new mattress, he said. He would give me a discount on next month’s rent, as though a coupon could compensate someone you had pissed on. Words spilled out of his lips, but it was as if he were set on mute. I was watching his mouth make all its hollow little gestures, but my mind was elsewhere—and it was made up.
Compared to getting peed on in New York, Jersey City sounded like paradise. I thought it would be my golden ticket away from all the stress of my New York life. And I was right—at least for a while.
* * *
—
Some people dismiss New Jersey as “the Armpit of America”—but after I moved there, that armpit became my oasis.
Every evening when I went home after modeling in the city, my breathing and heart rate would slow down in time as the PATH train decelerated in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River. My fingers would uncurl from my portfolio, and I’d let it rest on my lap for the rest of the ride. For a night, I could relax and just be.
It was so much easier to lead two lives when there was a river between them. In New Jersey, where I lived in an apartment building one over from Ericka’s, I felt free.
As I got off at the Newport train station in Jersey City after a day in Manhattan, I felt absolute serenity. The high-rises along the waterfront seemed like a shield from the stress of the big city across the water. I had died and gone to Jersey heaven.
But in New York, the stress of staying stealth only intensified—an ever-escalating fear of getting found out.
One day at the MAC Cosmetics corporate office in SoHo, I found myself in an elevator full of models, all of them wide-eyed and full of big dreams. Many had come from countries thousands of miles away. It was a cattle call. You’d know it, as soon as the doors slid open, from the hums of a dozen different accents.
In a room packed with close to a hundred other models, all waiting to be summoned, I took a seat in the crowded waiting area by the receptionist. Everyone’s faces were as anxious as they were beautiful, awash in the glow of enormous LED screens playing a life-size airbrushed MAC ad. We all wanted to be one of those women on TV. But out of all those vying for a spot, the cosmetics giant wanted only a lucky seven.
For its upcoming campaign, MAC was looking for four white models with blond, red, and brunette hair. They also wanted one—only one—Black girl, one Latina, and one Asian. At the time, it was one of the most diverse campaigns I’d ever heard of.
In the mid-2000s, there was almost no talk of improving representation and diversity in the modeling industry. Typically, for every job, a brand would be looking for several white models, from blond to brunette to red, and they were in abundant supply. White-passing girls could compete in that category, too. Apart from that, there was typically space for only one model of color, and companies typically wanted that model to have light skin. That put me at a disadvantage as a self-professed Jungle Asian; if they wanted an Asian girl, they usually chose a light-skinned East Asian model. Complaining about the lack of diversity was out of the question. All of us on the outside of whiteness had to follow an unwritten rule: If you want the job, don’t speak up. It was the opposite of all those “If you see something, say something” messages plastered all over the subway; in the modeling world, the unspoken motto was See nothing, say nothing.
As a dark-skinned model, when you booked a job, you zipped your lips, smiled for the flashing lights, and ignored all the rejection and pain you’d experienced along the way. What else could you do if you wanted to work?
We had no social media platform where we could voice complaints or advocate for greater inclusivity. We had no way to put a brand on blast. And as a stealth trans model, I was always conscious of the fact that I couldn’t even whisper about a company the way some of my peers did. I literally couldn’t afford to be a critic.
As I waited to be called, I surveyed the room, scanning for familiar faces—and I did a double-take when I saw who was sitting across from me. Lucia Santiago, the supermodel of the Philippines, was mere feet away. All the Filipino gays used to call her “the one,” and every designer in the country cited her as a muse. When she walked the runway in fashion shows, it was as if she did it twice, her performance echoing in the excited murmurs of the audience. Everyone was in awe of her bone structure and her command of the light—and for good reason. She was stunning in person.
My model-obsessed gay best friends back home would have freaked out if I told them I was at a casting with Lucia Santiago. Inside, I was fangirling hard. I wanted to approach her, adore her, giggle with her. But she would’ve clocked me right away.
Here in New York, I could only worship her from afar, tortured by the fact that I couldn’t even say hello to one of my idols. In any other world, this would have been a cause for celebration: two Filipinas modeling together in New York. Sisters in the struggle. We were literally the only ones I knew of. We could have bonded over being brown-skinned models who knew that castings like this were biased toward light-skinned Asians. But I couldn’t share any of that with her.
If we had been anywhere else, doing anything else, I would have greeted her with the same jubilation every Filipino does when we recognize each other in foreign lands: “Huy, kamusta ka?” followed by the grounding “Taga san ka satin?” to find out which town within the islands, which barangay district in the city, which dialect of our language—all the rich geography that makes up a person. I couldn’t do that with Lucia. Even a Filipina Power fist bump could happen only in my imagination.
I hid my face from her and pretended not to exist.
Please call me now, I thought.
Mercifully, before I knew it, I was in the room.
Turn to the right profile, click.
Turn to the left profile, click.
“Please pull your hair up,” the casting director asked.
I could feel the lens zooming in, as though the camera were judging my every pore, tracing every one of the laugh lines between my cheeks.
Thank God my Shiseido moisturizer is working its magic, I thought.
But even as I stared the camera down, I felt like I was taking a lie detector test.
Can the camera tell?
I tried to feminize my stare—as if that’s even a thing you can do.
“It was good to see you,” the casting director finally said, dismissing me.
And then, just as fast, I was out of the room. I had passed another test.
But as I pushed open the transparent glass double door in the hallway, I saw a second unexpected face: It was Larry Hashbarger, the fashion creative director at Macy’s in San Francisco. I knew him from working at the cosmetics counter. He knew my T.
“Hey, Geena, how have you been?” he greeted me warmly.
I felt the color drain from my face. “Hey, Larry, how’re you doing? What are you doing here?” I barely managed to force the words out of my mouth.
“Oh, I’m just here to meet the brand executives” was his casual reply.
The screaming chaos in my head felt so loud, I was surprised he couldn’t hear it. I wanted to run straight back through those double doors like a Looney Tune, leaving a human-shaped hole in the glass. But acting scared in front of everyone would have been career suicide. So as Larry pushed through the hallway with his colleagues, I simply said, “It’s good to see you.”
And in my tone was a plea: Don’t tell anyone. Please, Larry, don’t tell anyone.
His response might as well have been uttered in slow motion. “It’s good to see you, too,” he said, holding my gaze for a moment, his eyes twinkling.
A high-stakes negotiation was hidden in that casual exchange. As a gay man, Larry knew what it was like to be persecuted, and I hoped he’d picked up on the subtext layered into our brief greeting. He owned a trans cabaret in San Francisco, so I felt confident he was an ally, but you never knew. Maybe he’d be proud of me, seeing me at a coveted MAC Cosmetics casting, when the last time I saw him in the Bay Area, I’d still been selling makeup over the counter. But then he might also say something off-the-cuff to the MAC execs that would give me away, like, “She’s come so far!”
“What do you mean?” they’d ask him.
And then he’d tell them.
Back at street level, the golden-hour sun illuminated the reflection of my face in the glass SoHo storefronts, and I tried to calm down. As my silhouette strutted from window to window, a hazy profile in motion, I sneaked little side glimpses. It was more than a moment of vanity; it was an affirmation—and an honest assessment of my situation. I was both women at once: the flesh-and-blood model walking down the street and the phantom skittering between the windows. I wanted to be seen and to be a blur at the same time. I wanted to be in a MAC campaign but have no one know my name. My life wasn’t split in two; I was split in two. Moving to New Jersey could only buy me a little time; a river couldn’t keep my worlds from colliding.
I turned to face a shop window, then took a few steps toward it, my reflection disappearing right before I could ask the face looking back, What did I get myself into?
* * *
—
Ericka’s studio apartment was a five-minute walk from mine, but we might as well have been roommates. We slept in the same bed, cooked together, and partied together. We would make fried rice with marinated tapa beef, filling her space with the mouthwatering aroma of garlic and vinegar. She was my family. And her family became mine, too.
On weekend mornings, when we were still in bed, her mom would swing the door open carrying bags bursting with Filipino treats from the nearby Balikbayan store: soft tamarind candy, our favorite instant Lucky Me noodles, and colorful sweet delicacies like purple ube cake. Forget breakfast in bed—this was Sunday Filipino brunch in bed.
There were different kinds of treats near us, too. Hoboken was full of Jersey boys—and I liked Jersey boys. Ericka and I would go out together at night to sample the local men. Away from the prying eyes of the modeling world, I could just be me, single and flirty. We made the rounds, hopping from one bar to the next, one-night stand after one-night stand. Fun, and nothing more.
One day I got a call from my agent. “Want to see your family?”
I was surprised by the question. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve just booked multiple Macy’s catalogs!” he said. “You’re going to San Francisco!”
Oh, boy.
A big part of me was grateful for the booking. It was a huge opportunity, both financially and in terms of visibility. And I could spend time with Mama. My clothes would smell like garlic fried rice again—a maternal aroma I badly missed. I wanted to be a baby bear again, nestled up against her mama. Getting spooned by Jersey boys was fun but not as comforting as home.
But did I really have enough fortitude to deal with the meta, full-circle, “are you fucking kidding me” feeling of being back at that San Francisco Macy’s—a place where everyone knew my T?
Despite my higher-profile jobs, I was still mainly a catalog girl, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I was good at it, too. I had pretty much perfected the laughing midair profile hop that you see on billboards in Herald Square. You’ve seen the pose—it says, I’m just a fun flirty girl jumping in the middle of the street! I could already see myself doing hundreds of those midair profile hops for JCPenney, Nordstrom, and Kohl’s. I had to tell my agent yes, even though I knew it was risky.
Before long I was opening the door to a hotel room in downtown San Francisco. From the window overlooking busy Market Street, I watched the trolleys pass by, indulging in a fleeting moment of nostalgia. But before the anxiety could kick in, I picked up my luggage and took a short cab ride to Mama’s apartment on Fifth Street and Harrison. Checking into the hotel had been a paranoid bit of overperformance: I wanted the client to think I was staying there so that they’d be less likely to connect me to anyone in the area. That way there wouldn’t be any questions about who I was staying with or who I knew.
When I walked into Mama’s apartment, her warm hug seemed to squeeze the tears out of me. “Anak, kamusta flight mo? Miss na miss na kita, kain na, kain na,” she said, expressing her longing, only to follow it up with every Filipino mom’s greeting: guiding me to eat.
We hadn’t seen each other in so long, and all I wanted was her approval of my decision to move to New York. I hoped she would be proud that I had left San Francisco as a cosmetics counter employee and was returning a bona-fide fashion model. She had been scared for me to move so far away, especially because my career path seemed like such a gamble. Whenever we talked on the phone, she always asked me nervous questions: “How was your audition?” “Are you eating well?”
Every time she asked, I felt a twinge in my heart because I wanted to say more, to tell her how I was struggling to balance everything, but I didn’t want to worry her too much. Now, together again at last, I could just hold her. I slept well that night, feeling safe for the first time in God knew how long.
Fortunately, the photo studio for our shoot wasn’t at the Macy’s in Union Square. Instead it was miles away, deep in the industrial Bayview district. Somehow I had got it in my head that I would be shooting the catalog on the top floor of the store, which would have meant dodging everyone I used to know so that I didn’t trigger a cascading game of telephone that would cost me the job—and my career.
But even in a studio across town, I was worried about being discovered. With each click of the camera, each robotic turn to capture every angle of the blue and brown two-piece swimsuit, I quickly followed my “stomach in” gesture with a dread-filled glance at the studio entrance.
Was someone coming?
I managed to put on my million-dollar catalog girl smile even as I remained convinced that someone from the Union Square Macy’s would walk through that door any second. Would it be Larry Hashbarger? Had he gotten me this job? I felt like I was being photographed naked, totally exposed to the people nonchalantly coming and going at the door.
The next outfit was a brown floral halter dress. The fabric was soft and flowy. I twirled as the camera clicked, turning the room into a buzzy blur. For a few seconds, I escaped to a different, more elevated plane. I could breathe as long as I was spinning. The door disappeared in my dizziness. But by the fiftieth dress, I was losing myself in the personas I was inventing for each look, trying as hard as I could to get out of my own head.
And I would have to do it all over again the next day.
* * *
—
After two days of shooting, I sought comfort in the depths of a swirling pot of spaghetti sauce. It was Mama’s sweet Filipino-style recipe. The pasta was perfectly al dente, and the tomato sauce was silky with banana ketchup, all topped with ground beef and sliced hot dogs seasoned with the exact right balance of salt and sugar. My work trip was turning out to be a wild seesaw ride between the fear I felt in the studio and the comforts I enjoyed at home. I spent all day with a pit in my stomach, then at night tried to fill that pit with Mama’s food.
“What do I tell people when the catalog comes out?” Mama asked me that night after a big bite of pasta.
“Ma, I really don’t know po.”
I took a frustrated tone with her, as if I had hit a dead end in a maze and just given up. I didn’t know what to say anymore. Even the guaranteed joy of a Filipina mom’s home cooking wasn’t enough to keep my woes at bay.
I tried to remind myself that Mama was carrying my burden, too. Inasmuch as I had to be in the closet, she was in one, too. She had never told anyone I was a model because I couldn’t risk the word getting out. Our cover stories and our alibis always had to align. We had to work in perfect sync, like the sugar and salt in her spaghetti sauce—our own sweet and salty secret.
But this time the secret felt bitter. This gig wasn’t just hitting close to home, it was a bull’s-eye, dead center. On some level, I knew it would be even harder to stay stealth in the industry if I came here. Everyone in the Macy’s cosmetics department would see my smiling face in those pages. They would spot me and probably be excited to see how far I had made it in the modeling industry, but in the middle of their innocent celebration, one of them would whisper, Do they know?, meaning capital-M Macy’s.
Do they know she’s trans?
* * *
—
Back in New York, I received the kind of text message I had always dreaded.
“You’re in Page Six!” a friend messaged.
The words hit me like a semitruck. Had something come out about me already? I knew going to San Francisco had been a mistake. I flipped open my laptop in a frenzy and found the article online. The New York Post headline read Public Squabble.
Comedian Dave Chappelle had nothing to laugh about after he fought with his wife, Elaine…at Coffee Shop in Union Square the other day. The lunchtime crowd was shocked to see Elaine in tears after the duo battled because Dave had left her side to chat up gorgeous model Geena Rocero. “Geena’s very attractive,” said our spy.
The article was exaggerated and full of lies. A couple of days beforehand, I had been at Coffee Shop with a girlfriend having lunch. Yes, Dave Chappelle and his wife had been sitting at the adjacent booth. But we didn’t interact.
