Grayson recalls that Daniel favored solid-colored T-shirts, tweedy coats and gold necklaces ("sort of a Ron Jeremy quality," he later said). I remember him more as a used-car salesman.
We were perfect, Daniel said. Of course, we would not begin our modeling careers in Buenos Aires, but rather in the outlying provinces. Nor would we jump straight to TV or magazines -- we would begin with runway work. One thing, however, he guaranteed: We would make it. Of that, there could be no doubt.
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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We handed over our $50 and Grayson's shoot began.
He posed around a chair, his body bathed in white light, his shirt unbuttoned. I stood aside and heckled:
You are a dirty boy, aren't you? A very dirty boy!
You're from Texas. Be a cowboy! I like cowboys!
Grayson glared at me. "Brazil, can you shut up? I'm trying to be serious."
Then, an odd emotion. As the shoot progressed, I began to feel jealous. Grayson was doing well. He looked good. He really was a model. I wanted to be a model.
I went next. Daniel ordered me into a white shirt, which he unbuttoned past my breast bone. This revealed my pallid chest and its small, irregular patch of hair. Then he sent me to the stage where I blinked into the lights and wondered if my hair looked thin.
I was standing wrong! Daniel ordered the hammerhead to show me how to pose. The hammerhead obediently positioned himself beside me, put his hand behind his head and gave an instructive sulk, which I imitated.
The camera began clicking. Although I felt as self-conscious as I ever had before, I followed Daniel's instructions. I glared. I brooded. I slung a sport coat over my shoulder, cool and casual. My eyes were intense; my grins were those of a beautiful scoundrel. Slowly, I began to believe. How could I have not seen it before?
I was an international supermodel.
At the time, with Daniel pacing around me, I did not know that my pictures would reveal a person who looked skinny, pale and sedated by several metric tons of opium -- in short, a person who was emphatically not a model. Nor did I know that Daniel would spend the next several weeks avoiding us, not even returning our pictures. Or that, upon hearing the story recently, an American photographer would laugh and say, "I can't believe people fall for that scam all over the world."
Of course, I would never have considered such a scam at home. But for that brief, intoxicating moment, we believed in the transformative power of travel, in the magic of a foreign place. We had left our natural limits in the States and found not only a new life but a new us. Our post-photo-shoot euphoria was so intense that we could not bear to sit in a taxi; we'd walk home instead. As we walked down the middle of a deserted street, Grayson said what we were all thinking.
"Dude," he exulted into the night air. "I can't wait till we're famous."
Ben Brazil is a frequent contributor to the Travel section who likes to get his picture taken.
