Relationship In Love

Portrait of a Bulgy Underwear Model: The Bone Pops Out of His Giant Billboard

A door opens at the top of the stairs and the Bone, an underwear model and budding actor, stands silhouetted in the doorway of his apartment. One arm is up and he’s leaning against the doorframe and his dark brown hair is falling in his face and he’s laughing as he watches you trudge breathless up the stairs.
“You’re always on the go,” he says, like all he wants to do is lie around in bed all day. You remember what his friend, screenwriter Stanford Blatch, keeps telling you: “The Bone looks like he travels with his own lighting director.” And then it’s too much: You have to look away.
“The Bone is the human equivalent of a sable coat,” Stanford says. Stanford has been bugging you a lot about the Bone lately. The phone rings and you pick it up and it’s Stanford. “Who’s sexier? The bone or Keanu Reeves?” You sign. And even though you sort of really don’t know who the Bone is and don’t really care, you say, “The Bone.”
Maybe it’s partly out of guilt. You know that you should know who he is: He’s that guy who was splashed—muscled, nearly naked—on that giant billboard in Times Square, and he was all over the buses. But you never go to Times Suqre and you don’t pay attention to buses, except when they’re about to hit you.
But Stanford keeps working on you. “The Bone and I were walking by his billboard the other day,” he says, “and the Bone wanted to get a piece of it to put in his apartment, like maybe his nose. But I told him he should take the bulge in his pants. That way, when women ask him how big he is, he can say fourteen feet.
“The Bone did the cutest thing today,” Stanford says. “He tried to take me out to dinner. He said, ‘Stanford, you’ve done so much for me, I want to do something for you.’ I said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ but you know, he is the only person who’s ever offered to take me out to dinner in my whole life. Can you believe anyone that beautiful is that nice?”
You agree to meet the Bone.

“You’re Going to be A Star”
The first time you meet the bone, at Bowery Bar with stanford at his side, you want to hate him. he’s twenty-two. A model. Et cetera. You pretty much sense that he wants to hate you, too. Is he going to be really stupid? Besides, you don’t think sex symbols are ever really sexy in person. The last one you met reminded you of a worm. Literally.
But not this one. He’s not exactly what he appears to be.
“I have different personalities with different people,” he says.
Then you lose him in the crowd.
About two months later, you’re at that mode’s birthday party at Barocco, and you run into the Bone. He’s standing across the room, leaning against the bar, and he’s smiling at you. He waves. You go over. He keeps hugging you, and photographers keep taking your picture. Then you somehow end up sitting across the table from him. You and your friend are having this huge, never-ending, heated argument.
The Bone keeps leaning over and asking you if you’re okay. And you say yes, thinking he doesn’t understand that you and your friend always talk to each other that way.
Stanford, who knows everyone in Hollywood, sens the Bone out to L.A. to go on auditions for small parts in movies. He leaves Stanford a message. “Everyone’s talking about you,” he says. “You are so great. You’re going to ba a star. Have I told you that enouth times yet? You’re a star, you’re a star, you’re a star.”
Stanford is laughing . “He’s imitating me,” he says.
You and the Bone get drunk at Bowery Bar.

An Easy “A”
The Bone lives in a tiny studio that has white everything: white curtains, white sheets, white comforter, white chaise. When you’re in the bathroom, you look to see if he uses special cosmetics. He doesn’t.
The Bone grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. His father was a teacher. His mother was the school nurse. In high school, the Bone didn’t hang out with the cool kids. He used to make straight A’s and tutor younger children after school. They all looked up to him.
The Bone never thought about becoming a model, but when he ws in eighth grade, he was voted best-looking guy. He secretly wanted to do something exciting. Like being a detective. But he went to the University of Iowa and studied literature for two years. It was what his father wanted. One of his teachers was young and good-looking, and when he called the Bone in for a meeting, he sat next to him and put his hand on the Bone’s leg. He slid his hand up to the bulge said. The Bone never went back to his class. Three months later, he dropped out of college.
Recently, someone’s been calling the Bone’s apartment and leaving messages that are only music. At first, he listend to the songs, because he kept thinking the music was going to stop and one of his friends would start talking. Now, he listens to the songs to see if there is a clue. “I think it’s a man,” he says.

An Iowa Boyhood
You’re lying on the bed with the Bone, like you’re both twelve (lying on your stomach and hanging your legs over the side), and you say, “Tell me a story.” He says, “The story I’m thinking about the most lately is my ex, ex-girlfriend.”
It was the summer of 1986 and the Bone was fourteen. It was one of those summer days in Iowa when the sky is clear and the corn in the fields is so green. And the whole summer, when you drive around in the car with your friends, you see the corn grow.
The Bone and his family went to the state fair. The Bone was walking through the livestock exhibit with his friend when he saw her. She was brushing a baby heifer, and he grabbed his friend’s arm and he said, “That’s going to be my wife!”
He didn’t see her again for a whole year. Then, one evening, he was at one of those youth dances that they have in small towns to keep the teens out of trouble, and she was there. He fooled around with her on Christmas Eve. “Then I got totally dumped,” he says. “It really hurt in a weird way.”
A year and a half later, when she decided she wanted him, he didn’t give in. “Even though I wanted to be with her so bad,” he says. “Then one day I gave in.”
The Bone went out with her on and off for a few years. She’s computer programmer in Iowa city. But they still talk. Maybe he’ll marry her someday? He grins, and when he does, his nose wrinkles at the top. “I might,” he says. “I always think it’s such a beautiful story in my head. It blows my mind away.”
“The Bone is always saying that he could move back to Iowa and have kids and be a cop,” Stanford says.
“It’s adorable, as long as he doesn’t really do it,” you say, then feel cynical for having said it.

“I Know I’m Neurotic”
You and the Bone are hungry, so you go to Bagels “R” Us at six in the evening on a Sunday. Two female cops sit in the corner smoking. People are wearing dirty sweet clothes. The Bone eats half of your ham and cheese sandwich. “I could eat four of these sandwiches,” he says, “but I won’t. if I eat a hamburger, I feel so guilty afterward.”
The Bone cares about the way he looks. “I change my clothes about five times a day,” he says. “Who doesn’t look in the mirror about a hundred times before they go out? I go back and forth between the two mirrors in my apartment like I’m going to look different in each one. It’s like, yeah, I look good in this mirror, let me see if I look as good in the other. Doesn’t everyone do that?”
“Sometimes I get so distracted,” the Bone says. “My thoughts get so scattered in my head. It’s jumbled and it doesn’t make sense.”
“What is distracting you now?” you ask.
“Your nose.”
“Thanks a lot. I hate my nose.”
“I hate my nose too,” he says. “It’s too big. But I think it depends on my hair. The other day Stanford said, ‘I like your hair like that. It’s full. It makes your nose look smaller.’” You both crack up.
Back on the street, the Bone nudges you. “They spelled puppies wrong,” he says. You look. A man in overalls is standing next to a giant gray mastiff and holding a carboard sign that says, PUPPYS FOR SALE.
“Huh?” the man says. There’s a dirty red and white truck parked behind him.
“Puppies. You spelled it wrong,” the Bone says.
The man looks at the sign and grins.
“Hey, they’re selling the same puppies up the street for two hundred dollars instead of two thousand,” the Bone says, and the man laughs.
Later, you’re sitting on the edge of the bed with your head in your hands staring at the Bone, who’s lying on the bed with one hand in the waistband of his jeans.
“One minute, I could be walking down the street totally cool, and the next minute I’m depressed for no reason,” he says. “I know I’m neurotic. I see it. I feel it. I’m self-analytical, self-critical, self-conscious. I’m very aware of everything I say.”
Then the Bone says, “Before I say something, I say it in my head first, so it doesn’t come out wrong.”
“Doesn’t that kind of seem like a waste of time?” you ask.
“It only takes a second.”
He pauses. “If I’m out, and a stranger comes up to me and asks me if I’m a model, I say, ‘No, I’m a student.’”
“And?”
The Bone laughs. “They lose interest,” he says, looking at you like he can’t belive you didn’t know that.
Stanford calls you up. “The Bone left me the custest message,” he says. And he plays it. “Stannie, did you die? Are you dead? You must be dead because you’re not answering your phone. [Laughing.] Call me later.”

“Ivana Trump’s Butler?”
You like hanging out with the Bone in his apartment. It reminds you of when you were sixteen, in your own small town in Connecticut, and you used to hang out with this guy who was really beautiful and you’d smoke pot and your parents would think you were off riding your horse. They’d never know the truth.
You look out his window at the sunlight on the backs of tatty littly brownstones. “I’ve wanted to have kids ever since I was a kid,” the Bone says. “It’s my dream.”
But that was before. Before all this stuff happened to the Bone. Before now.
A couple of week ago, the Bone got offered a second lead in an ensemble movie starring all the cool young Hollywood actors. He went to a party and accidentally ended up going home with one of the other actors’ girlfriends, a new supermodel. The actor threatened to kill the Bone and the supermodel, and she and the Bone temporarily fled the city. Only Stanford knows where they are. Stanford calls and says he’s been on the phone constantly. Hard copy offered the Bone money to appear, and Stanford said to them, “Who do you think he is—Ivana Trump’s burtler?”
The Bone says, “I just don’t believe the bullshit. It’s still me. I haven’t changed. People are always telling me, Don’t ever change. What am I going to change into? An egomaniac? A prick? An asshole? I know myself really well. What do I want to change into?”
“Why are you laughing?” he asks.
“I’m not laughing,” you say. “I’m crying.”
Stanford says, “Have you ever noticed how the Bone has no scent whatsoever?”