Personnage Croquis- "Poon"

Poon is the kind of girl that reads well on paper, her vital statistics would tell you that she’s 5’10, has long legs, dark hair and that she’s filled out appropriately in all the right places. They won’t however tell you that she has a penchant for designer high heels and expensive lingerie, or that she volunteers when she can at a soup kitchen. I know this because I know Poon.

We first met years ago when I was a copy editor at a fashion house in Milan, it was at one of those furious after-parties, during fashion week that the industry is notorious for hosting. Her height, angular face and smoke cracked voice made Poon hard to miss. It was one of those first encounters that life packs with enough memories to last a lifetime. The night’s events began with harmless flirtation, spilled on to a Poon inspired brawl, an illegal pig-fight, an unguided tour of a wax museum and had ended in Poon’s fashionable one room, closet like apartment.

These memories flash through me as I find myself looking for the dingy poetry club we decided to meet at when she called me out of the blue two nights ago. It looks like a shady speakeasy from the 20’s on the outside and is stuffed to the brim with people decked in designer doo-dads. Apt, I can’t imagine meeting her anywhere else. I squeeze my way through to a largish man with a clip board manning the narrow entrance and tell him I have a reservation, he shoots me a quizzical glance and bellows- “Name?”, I pause for a second while I regain my lost footing and mumble “…Poon”; “say what?” he bellowed with a slight hint of irritation and I say “Poon… do you want me to spell it?”, he scowls down at his clipboard and his face relaxes as he finds her name on his list, “She’s in there already, go on through”, I thank him as I slide past the annoying fat man next to me blocking a third of the entrance with his protruding belly.

The inside of the club is massive, the ceiling is three storeys high and the floor is littered with flimsy furniture, the kind that’s commonly used in roadside Parisian bistros. It’s dingy and a man on the stage is letting the audience know that the next poet will be up in ten minutes and that they should order drinks in the meanwhile. I find her sitting in a quiet wooden booth, one of many that line the side of the space near the stage, her long legs crossed stylishly and sticking out of the booth, smoking a long, slim cigarette and playing around with a tissue on her table. I make my way through the tiny tables to the booth and wave out to her. She grins broadly and hugs me the way excited school girls do and she drags me into the booth- “You still drink Manhattans right?” and before I can respond she flags down a passing waitress and orders a repeat martini for herself and a Manhattan for me.

We spend the first minute staring at each other in silence, she still had the pixie sparkle in her eyes but she looked more tired now. She sizes me up and tells me she hates me for how good I look right now, I find myself blushing beet and remember that she could always make me blush like that. We start making small talk about our lives, and remark at the similar place we find our lives in, not dating anyone, still tramping about fashion week after-parties when we could, and both of us had moved around a bit. The conversation goes quiet again, the silence weighed heavy and the two years we hadn’t met, made itself felt in the booth. The waitress steps in with our drinks and a poet is introduced on stage, Poon plays with the olives in her glass while I stare at the bald man on stage reading out his poetry.

The piece complete and the audience quiet, the poet starts talking about his politics and beliefs. I turn back to Poon, she is lighting up another cigarette; I ask her why she quit modelling, she grows quiet and stirs her drink - “It stopped being fun…” she exhales smoke and taps the cigarette into the ashtray “ the bullshit got to me- the bitchiness, the asshole photographers, the egomaniacal designers… the whole thing got to me. It was wearing me out…” I stared at her for a while and I told her I didn’t believe her. This made her sullen and she started stirring her drink again “Ok, fine- I screwed up- you remember Johanus?” I nod as I remembered Mark Johanus, a hot shot Austrian designer and his melodramatic tantrums- “I do… what about him?” Poon stubs out her cigarette- “Well I was dating him for about a year- like seriously, and the whole thing was secret. I didn’t want the other girls to know… you know how bitchy they get…anyway so we did this whole secret thing for a year… he was nice, I think he was serious and saw it going somewhere…”  she trailed off and paused to light another cigarette “He said something about getting married and I laughed at the idea- it turned out he was attempting to propose- He had the ring and everything…anyway… so he said he was serious, shows me this massive diamond ring and said that we should do it that day… well… as you can imagine I freaked out and told him he was crazy that we should talk about this…. Well maybe it wasn’t as gentle as that but that’s the gist of what I said”.  A lump forms in my throat and I drink my Manhattan to ease it.

The rejection had its consequences Poon was mysteriously dropped as lead model two weeks before the show, she said something about another fight and how she stormed out of the show on the day. She had packed up her stuff and gone home, her family was concerned at first- “we didn’t really talk or anything, just stuff like “pass the salt”, it was nice to have mama’s food and sleep in my old room but that lasted a couple of weeks and then the questions started, where I was, what I had been up to, why I never called…how they were ashamed… that got to me and I left again”. Poon was seventeen when she ran away from home the first time she left, swearing never to return, and now she had done it again. She stopped talking and stared hard at me- “I don’t like talking about that… fuck this. Do you want another one?” I nodded and she ordered us another round of drinks. The room was filled with applause, the poet had finished talking or performing, I didn’t know and that point I didn’t care. I asked her what she did after she left, she reached for another cigarette but she was out- “ah fuck, just when I need it… do you have any?” I shook my head and tried to get the waitress’ attention to see if she could get us any, but before I could, a swarthy man in the table across from our booth walked up to us and offered Poon a cigarette, she smiled at him wickedly, as she accepted. He introduced himself as Dominic and started talking about how he noticed her from afar and was working up the nerve to speak with her, Poon listened for a bit and nodded politely- “Thanks for the smoke… I was in the middle of a conversation”, Dominic muttered an apology and looked deflated but he walked back to his table with a victorious swagger.

Poon started telling me about her life after modelling, she had travelled around Europe for a bit, living on couches, she managed to land the occasional small modelling jobs wherever she was and that money helped tide her over for a bit. She did this for a year before she ran out of places she could stay in and people she could impose on. Poon was staying with a girl, she used to model with earlier, in Monte Carlo, when she got set up with a job being a casino hostess, the pay was good and the casino let her stay in one of their suites and paid for expenses. She did this for about eight months, but got sick of the old men and needing to be on her guard constantly- the final decision to leave came when someone thought she was a hooker- “I wanted to tell that fat bastard to go fuck himself, but Id learned enough by then, so I kept smiling and told him I wasn’t into that kind of thing and that he needed to go talk to the manager…. I knew what the manager was going to tell me after…. but decided this was enough anyway and I had saved enough money to live well for a few months… so I packed up and left… Nadia was pissed because she got me the job… but she came around later”. Poon then moved to the US and found a job with an event management company, the money wasn’t as glamorous but it was enough to live comfortably and the job kept her travelling so she didn’t really spend enough time in anyone place to make friends and kept to herself at work, there was the occasional lover but nothing serious or real.

Poon sounded uncharacteristically bitter as she finished talking, but that went away by the time our next round of drinks arrived and her eyes lit up again. We spoke about where I had been, my temporary switch over to “serious journalism”, the time I had spent in SE Asia trying to write my Pulitzer worthy story and about how spent I was with the whole experience before I decided to move back to NY.

We talked about the night we first met, the idiotic brawl those two Italian studs had over who was going to buy her the next round, the crazy pig fight, how we broke into to wax museum to get away from the police who raided the place and about how we spent the whole night talking in her one bed closet like room. We laughed till our sides hurt and our eyes began to tear up… for a minute Poon looked like how she did the first night I met her.

It was late by the time we left the club and we were headed in opposite directions, Poon gives me a tight hug and it felt like she didn’t want to let go- “hey… it felt soooo good to see you… lets talk more often ok?”, I promised her we would and she slid into her waiting taxi. I wave at the taxi as it pulls away and start walking, the basking warmth of our meeting making me smile. But as I walked on, a sickening realisation crept up on me- I didn’t know when I would see her again and I pulled my jacket closer around me. The night felt a bit colder than it was.