Grayson appeared to have passed the outer limits of sanity. I asked him what on earth was going on.
Earlier in the day, he explained, he'd called a number given to us by a sympathetic Russian waitress at a restaurant we frequented. He had assumed that it was for an employment agency, but instead he had found himself at a photography studio.
The author poses (at his Atlanta home) for the camera, which wasn't so kind when he was duped by a photographer in Buenos Aires.
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"My boy, you are in luck!" the photographer had told him. "Blond models are in much demand right now!" In fact, the demand was so high . . . did he have any friends?
I have thinning brown hair and am built a bit like a rubber chicken. This did not matter, according to Grayson. Daniel, he told me, was so confident in our future that he'd slashed his up-front charge from $175 to $50 each, willing to gamble that we'd make him more money in the long run. For this bargain price, Daniel would photograph us, construct our portfolios and serve as our agent.
I told Grayson it was a scam. He looked at me as if I had pulled a $100 bill from my pocket and calmly set it on fire.
"Brazil," he insisted, "this guy is totally legit."
There were a billion reasons why it was clear that this guy was not even slightly legit. For one, Argentina is legendary for its beautiful people, and Buenos Aires is replete with women with olive skin and men with legs like soccer stars. It needs to import beauty like Saudi Arabia needs to import oil.
But still . . . could I have underestimated just how different -- how exotic! -- I was here? Sure, I combined the thinning hair of a middle-aged man with the residual acne of an 18-year-old, but maybe that was less important than my alluring, forbidden foreignness. And, oddly, two other Argentines had mentioned modeling to us before, saying that pale-skinned people were in demand. I couldn't deny that I was positively pasty. Pasty was different. And different, perhaps, was good.
Our taxi stopped in front of a dark office building in the Microcentro, a cramped downtown district. We followed Alec to the last office at the end of a hall. Light was streaming from the crack beneath the door.
What happened next is a blur. The door opened in a fluorescent blast and we stepped into a shabby room with pages from fashion magazines plastered on the walls. I then met Daniel, a plump, mustachioed Arab who told us he wanted to help us because he had once been an immigrant, so he knew our struggles.
