The Real Zoolander

The Secret Male Model

PART. 6: VERTIGO

Lean, muscular torsos strut down the catwalk to overplayed pop music with a techno-twist. Oh, joy. It’s an underwear show. I stand in line waiting to be cued, waiting to take the walk of shame, and I can’t believe my eyes. My expression akin to the face I pull when I attempt any sort of math. All around me men in underpants – really small underpants – squirt baby oil into their hands, slather it

on their washboard stomachs, up and down their exposed thighs, and over their shoulders.

I stand in a daze. A bottle of baby oil is thrust into my hands and without thinking I drizzle some over my chest like it’s caramel sauce and I’m some sort of cake and then oblige another by covering the unreachable parts of his back. Rub it on like I would sun-cream onto my best mate’s shoulders at

the beach, do a good job, but at the same time try not to look too into it. But fail. Fail because I’m practically naked, and he’s practically naked, and it’s not sun-cream its baby oil.

Now all the guys backstage, led by ‘Sparta’ – a particularly keen member of the group who looks like he jumped straight out of the 300 movie – begin working out in unison. Lunges, press ups, squat thrusts, sit ups, star jumps, isometric dip-cuts, bi-lateral side planks, Russian head stands, and the mother of all exercises, the jog on the spot. Suddenly I’ve been transported to the set of a workout DVD whose target market is frustrated housewives and gay men. Muscles bulge, the testosterone in the room triples, and for a second I think the whole room is going to erupt into a massive orgy of hunk and man-beef. Thankfully it doesn’t. Pants are pulled out of cracks and guys fiddle with their packets, aware that when they walk up that catwalk all eyes in the room will be on one thing. I take a moment to look down at my starved stomach – I skipped lunch for fear of looking bloated – and

realise that amongst this chaos of flesh I am by far the least ripped here. Instantaneously that whole world of ‘looking good’ and ‘looking bad’ – one we all know so well – bears its crippling weight upon me and by comparison I begin to feel small, inadequate, and alone. A runt falling behind the herd,

prey to the hungry gaze of an insatiable audience. The need to belong rises up in me like vomit and I drop my chest to the floor, push out fifty press ups, and then sink back into my heels, stick my bum in the air, and stretch out into Downward Facing Dog…but I don’t stay here for long because raising your ass in the air when the testosterone levels in the room are soaring well above even the most excitable of rugby team changing rooms cannot be a good thing. I stand up, get a head-rush, and a built black guy who is shaking out his arms says, “I have to stop working out, I’m getting a sweat patch in my arse-crack,” and directs my gaze accordingly.

Down the runway I go, in my pastel green pants, tensing my stomach so hard my normal gait changes into something I can only imagine looks like I’m a life-size Ken doll. The lights suddenly switch and UV beams illuminate the USP of my marvellous little pants: UV kisses, three of them are

planted around my cock, and on the reverse, written in italics across my bum are the words ‘BIG BOY.’ If only Mum could be here. Or Grandma. But then maybe the shock, the lights, and all this oiled skin would cause Gran to get a little bit excited and no one wants a fainting pensioner ruining their show, do they? It would surely redefine the term ‘killer abs.’

My walk, wonky as it is, is accompanied by whoops and screams. This isn’t your normal show: the audience is largely made up of tickets winners who read ‘Attitude’, the UK’s premier gay lifestyle magazine—who are also sponsoring the show. Now the ‘BIG BOY’ stamp across my ass makes sense. As expected at the end of the runway the cameras are poised to swallow me up, they do so greedily, but it’s only as I turn around that I realise there’s a 10 foot square live-video projection on

as he goes in my footsteps to face the cameras at the end of the runway…and here I am, safe in the knowledge that 10 seconds earlier I was done the very same service, that the whole of me has been

fractionalised. Reduced to a part. A piece of meat. My piece of meat. A penis on a screen.

My guts heave, my fingers press firmly into the back of my throat, and I wretch. For the first time in my life, here in the disabled toilets at passport control at Heathrow Terminal 5, I’m trying to make myself throw up. Try again. Slime on my fingers. Try again. Wretch. Nothing comes. Eyes bulge

from the effort. Fail. Put the seat down and sit on the toilet. Cry. Wash my face. Get a grip. Step back into the world.

As an old man looking back, my belly protruding over the waist of my jeans, my unkempt hair greying, my shoulders hunched my mind will rush thick and full of the moments that formed me and I will not remember the times I felt, lost alone or afraid. I will remember the good times, the joy, the laughter and places and the people. I will remember the day I un-bowed my head to the Gods of fashion and the days they smiled down upon me. But I am not old, the story is far from over, and

I cannot now act, or think as an old man I will be. For now my head remains bowed, gaze lowered to the floor, praying.

NOTION