Big Bitch

A story inspired by America's Next Top Model

Image by Nika Akin from Pixabay

Jerry got reamed for the memo he wrote:

Big Bitch wants a meeting on 9.29.05.

“You imbecile,” screamed the boss, “I don’t care what you call the woman amongst yourselves, but for God’s sake, don’t put it in writing. How did you even get into law school in the first place if this is how your walnut-sized brain works? Fuck up like that again, and you’re out of here.”

Afterwards, the rest of us junior associates took Jerry to the Dresden Room, where we sat under the muted glow of round, filigreed lamps and sipping dirty martinis because that’s what we thought lawyers drank, even though cheap beer was more our speed.

“He called me an imbecile,” Jerry pouted, sinking deeper into a red naugahyde stool. Next to our table, a middle-aged woman sat at a piano, playing jazz standards. It made me think of my grandfather’s collection of Ella Fitzgerald records.

“Well, you were, dude,” I said. “If that memo had fallen into the wrong hands, if she’d seen it, there would have been hell to pay. What were you thinking?”

Jerry shrugged, but I knew the answer. He treated the whole world as an extension of his frat house. It was as if whatever hazing ritual they’d put him through during rush week had captured a part of his soul, and he could swashbuckle his way through life because he believed his “brothers” would always have his back.

But nobody could save you if you got on the wrong side of Big Bitch. Except the Pentagon, maybe.

“I used to have a picture of her above my bed, you know?” Jerry said.

“So did I,” said Mack.

I kept silent. My childhood crush was Queen Latifah, and I didn’t feel like hearing the inevitable guffawing.

“But,” Jerry went on, “meeting in person killed that fantasy. Last week I was with my girlfriend, and Big Bitch popped up in my mind…and then I just couldn’t.”

“What’d you tell her?” I asked.

“I told her the truth. I thought she’d be flattered, you know? Like ‘Babe, you turn me on more than a famous supermodel.’ But she didn’t believe me. And when I tried to explain, she called me a misogynist.”

Mack and I laughed.

“To the face that deflated a thousand boners,” Mack said, hoisting his nearly-empty glass. We clinked and ordered another round.

After scarfing down some iceberg wedges and shrimp cocktails, we parted ways, and I went home to my ground-floor apartment with its tiny cement patio and seashell-pink breeze block that shielded me from the street. Sitting alone on a wicker chair, I thought back to college, how excited I was when I got into law school. I was going to fight for people’s civil rights, defend the Constitution, make the bad guys pay for their mistakes.

But instead, I was a stooge for an aging model who wore enough eyeshadow to cover an aircraft carrier. Reality TV? It was one step above working for the National Enquirer. Jesus, what fucking cliche I was: the naive, altruistic young lawyer who trades his soul for a suit.

I leaned back, shut my eyes, and let the sound of LA traffic drown out my thoughts.

At four am, the phone rang. I wrapped my pillow around my head and tried to ignore it, but the answering machine, and I heard my boss’s voice: Big Bitch had a nuclear meltdown on set and screamed invectives at a contestant, so we all had to be on set for the next shoot. That meant I had to be there in three hours, and stay there for only God knew how long.

The show had taken over a building near Skid Row, an old warehouse where the contestants lived, and the marathon judging panels stretched into the early hours. The sidewalk in front of it reeked of piss and was littered with used needles that glinted in the California sun. The show’s crew had cleared the encampments around it, but blue and green tents dotted the next block. The building itself was up to code — barely.

It didn’t matter that the building had only one stairwell, or that the wiring was old, because the contestants had literally signed their lives away in contracts as big as the Yellow Pages. Contracts they didn’t read and probably wouldn’t have understood if they’d tried, and even if they’d asked to have their own lawyer look it over, they wouldn’t have been given the time. Now or never, they were told. Sign or go home.

Inside, the building was dark, and as my eyes adjusted, it hit me: a cold, creeping dread, the kind you feel when you went to a friend’s house right after his parents had a big blow-up, or visited the site of some historic atrocity. I tried to tell myself I was just being dramatic, but couldn’t stop the pricking feeling in the back of my neck.

Mack and Jerry arrived a moment later, and together, we rode a creaking freight elevator up to the floor where the contestants’ apartment was, because that’s where filming would start.

“What, exactly, are we supposed to do?” Jerry asked. “Put duct tape over her mouth?”

“You’re an imbecile,” Mack teased. But the truth was, I didn’t know either. How do you stop people from breaking laws in advance? Maybe they should have hired a few cops instead.

We followed the film crew into the contestants’ apartment, where they emerged from their rooms in silence, half-dressed, looking like they got less sleep than I did, if they got any at all. A producer was there, trying to get the girls to talk, asking them all kinds of questions, but they just sipped coffee from travel mugs and ignored her.

Big Bitch arrived, grinning like a summer day, clearly pretending she hadn’t used words like worthless toad and braindead whore on camera just a few hours prior. She flubbed her lines a few times as she announced the day’s challenge, but finally got it on the fourth take. The contestants stared at her blankly, but squealed and cheered after some prompting from the production team, and then shuffled like a herd of sheep to the elevator and down to a waiting van.

Big Bitch vanished.

Forty-five minutes of traffic later, we arrived at the challenge site where the contestants were supposed to pose for photographs after rolling around in paint, or some bullshit like that, and that’s when I saw her: tall, dark-skinned, in tailored black tweed, her high cheekbones making her whole face a heart. She looked well-rested but bored.

“Who’s that?” I whispered to Mack.

“Last season’s winner,” he said. “She’s here as part of her contract. She has to appear in at least one episode of this season’s run.”

When they called her name, she stepped into the spotlight, flashed a smile and delivered her lines in one take. Her smile disappeared as soon as she stepped out of the light, and I couldn’t help but catch her rolling her eyes. She caught me watching her, and as our eyes locked, she gave me a sort of half smile, and I felt like I’d been hit by a warm, salty wave.

Fourteen hours later, filming wrapped without incident, and I worked up the nerve to ask last season’s winner to have dinner with me. In the low light of the Dresden Room, she relaxed, and her smile, her real one, made it hard for me to swallow. I ordered a PBR, and she a Blue Hawaiian, and we split an order of shrimp cocktail. Her slightly-faded Southern accent reminded me of my undergrad at Alcorn State.

On the show, she’d gone by Addie, but her full name was Adelaide.

“I hate my name,” she said. “But I’m thinking of going back to it so I can get more work.”

“More work? You won last season. Shouldn’t you be working all over?”

“It turns out, designers don’t like girls from TV walking on their runways. Takes too much attention away from the clothes.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling like a complete ignoramus. I shoved a cold shrimp in my mouth.

“It’s my own fault, really,” she said, absently toying with the paper umbrella in her drink. “I knew what the show did, that it was fake modeling, that it was more about humiliating girls than teaching them anything. But at the time, it seemed like the only way.”

“Addie,” I said, “you can’t blame yourself.”

“Can’t I? I just did.”

“Even if you had misgivings about the show, it doesn’t mean you knew what the outcome would be. You can’t have known.”

She sighed. “Maybe I didn’t know. But I think I had an idea. Then, when I got on the show…the days were so long, and the judging could be so harsh, and some of the challenges were so ridiculous…and every time we went in front of the judging panel, she talked about the prize. What if I convinced myself that it was real? Like, we were going through all this, it had to be real.”

“It’s not your fault,” I told her. “Please believe me.” I held out my hand to her, and she slipped hers into it. An urge to pull her close surged through my body, but I fought it.

She smiled, even as tears glittered in her eyes.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I sat on my patio in the warm air, searching for stars beyond the light pollution, hoping to find some way to help Addie. I put on old episodes of the show, the ones with the judge with the sneering red mouth who insulted every girl who stood in front of her. She had left the show and never told the media the real reason why, but we knew it was because of something between her and Big Bitch.

In the morning, I called her.

“The prize is a scam,” she said. “A complete scam. The designers think the winners are a joke, so the agencies won’t even send them out. They just bench them until their contracts run out.”

“So, what can I do?”

“Listen, son, if you want to help that girl, you’re going to have to get her out of her contract and get her out of the country. Send her to Brazil and let her build herself up.”

Get her out of her contract? First, I’d have to quit my job before she could become my client. And the contract itself had some weaknesses, but not enough to exploit. I’d need a bargaining chip.

My next call was to my grandfather in Chicago: “Boy, why are you setting fire to your career for a woman you’ve only known for 24 hours?”

“Grandpa, I went to law school because I wanted to help. Instead, I feel like I’m part of the problem.”

He sighed, and for a moment, I felt like I was a kid again, playing with Matchbox cars on the braided rug in his book-lined study, in the old Prairie Avenue house he’d spent his life fixing up.

“If you can find video of that woman screaming, you’ll have your bargaining chip.”

“They scrubbed the video right after,” I said.

“Nah. Somebody’s got it. Somebody always keeps a souvenir. Sniff it out.”

Before I hung up, he said, “Derek, I appreciate you wanting to help this young lady. But it could get real ugly. I just want you to know, there’s always a spot for you here at the firm.”

As it turned out, getting the footage was easy. All I had to do was figure out who hated their job the most. A woman who’d been editing for TV for ten years slipped me a thumb drive with all the raw footage she’d saved.

“You’re going to have to quit, too,” I warned her. She shrugged.

“I’m sick of her telling me how to edit anyway,” she said.

Before I could hand my resignation and the thumb drive to my boss, Mack and Jerry stopped me in the hallway. A fluorescent light flickered overhead as they spoke in stage whispers.

“You can’t do this,” Mack said.

“Yeah, you’re a bigger imbecile than me if you do,” Jerry said.

“Out of my way,” I said.

Sunlight baked the windows of the boss’s corner office. He sat at his desk, poring over a brief. His bald scalp was pink from sunburn.

“What do you want?” he said curtly when he finally looked up.

“Get Adelaide Johnson out of her contract,” I said, “or the footage of Big Bitch berating that contestant goes to the press.”

He put his palms on the desk and slowly stood up. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Derek?”

“I’m advocating for my client.”

“The show is your client. The production company is your client.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “Because I no longer work for this firm.”

“You’re goddamn fucking right, you don’t,” he said. He came out from behind the desk, stomping his feet, glaring up at me through his glasses. I stretched to my full height and stared down at him.

“Give me that,” he said, thrusting out his hand.

“You can have it when Adelaide is free of the shitty contract that is weighing her down.”

“This isn’t over,” he said, and for a moment I thought he might have some thugs waiting for me in the lobby to give me a beatdown, but instead he returned to his desk and picked up the phone.

A week later, Adelaide signed with an agency in São Paulo, and I saw her off at LAX. As we stood on the curb outside the terminal, the sun highlighted the angles of her face and glimmered in her molasses-colored eyes.

“You gave it all up to help me,” she said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Just give ‘em hell, Addie,” I said. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek while I breathed in her scent: coconut and lime.

After Addie left, I rented a small office and hung out my shingle. I would help reality show contestants negotiate better contracts and get out of bad ones. My new practice lasted a month. Between Hollywood stooges jamming my phone line with harassing calls and the rafts of nasty letters I received, my potential clients could barely reach me.

But the final straw came one evening, as I was watching a lurid purple and orange sunset on my patio. I heard the screech of tires and a car door opening just before something vaulted over the breeze block. The car sped off just as the dark mass hit the cement patio. My legs shook as I got up to see the body of a strangled cat with a zip tie still around its bloodied neck.

I bent over to look more closely. Its yellow eyes were wide, and its mouth was frozen open. The blood on its neck was like jelly, and the zip tie had a note attached to it.

Get out of town, you worthless toad, it read.

I felt like I had crashed through a frozen lake. I moved back to Chicago two days later.

A year later, on a blustery November day, I walked past a department store with an ad in the window showing a woman holding a box of expensive European chocolates. “The perfect way to say thank you!” My heart fluttered when I recognized the smiling face in the ad.

“You’re welcome, Addie,” I said, pressing my hand against the glass. I took a long look at her face, then turned my gaze forward and walked toward the El.