Box Girl Read online

  BOX

  GIRL

  Copyright © 2014 Lilibet Snellings

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Excerpt adapted from Against The Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel, copyright © 2008 by Lee Siegel. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, copyright © 1966. Used by permission of Random House LLC. All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Snellings, Lilibet.

  Box Girl : my part time job as an art installation / Lilibet Snellings.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-362-8

  1. Snellings, Lilibet. 2. Models (Persons)—California—Los Angeles—Biography. 3. Performance artists—California—Los Angeles--Biography. 4. Women performance artists—California—Los Angeles--Biography. 5. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social life and customs. 6. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Biography.

  I. Title.

  HD6073.M772U569 2014

  702.81—dc23

  [B]

  2013028208

  Cover Design: Jeff Miller, Faceout Studios

  Interior Design: Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of Counterpoint

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  FOR MY FAMILY.

  And for Peter, my biggest cheerleader.

  Literally. He is 6 foot 9.

  California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

  —JOAN DIDION,

  “Notes from a Native Daughter”

  [ CONTENTS ]

  Uniform

  Box Girl Rule Sheet

  Please Wear Undergarments

  The Box

  Could You Tidy It Up a Bit?

  My Natural Habitat

  Hello, Box Talent!

  Prep

  An Emotional Detroit

  Oh the Horror

  Bam

  The Various Positions in My Rotation

  She’s Got a Good Booty for a White Girl

  Underdog

  Star Gazing

  Not-So-Model Behavior

  Paper Planes

  I Am a Slash

  Run Lilibet Run

  Like Visiting Day in Jail

  Dear Mr. Retoucher

  Metamorphosis

  Out There

  I Am Not a Beagle

  Only the Lonely

  Waitress

  Anatomy of a Haircut

  Entourage

  Signs That You Have Made It

  Signs That You Have Not Made It

  Hooters vs. The Box

  I Was a Box Bunny

  Interview

  The Zoo

  Sometimes I Play Pretend

  A Million Little Pieces (of Paper)

  Numb

  Beach

  Voyeur

  True Facts About a Box Girl

  Sometimes I Wish a Blackberry Was Still Just a Fruit

  The Big One

  Tsunami

  Scotch Please, Splash Soda

  Alone

  Smiling

  I Love You!

  Diorama

  Bathroom Choreography

  Outside the Box

  Amsterdam

  Gobble, Gobble

  Things Even I Am Unwilling to Do

  Clare

  Panopticon

  Mom-Like

  Weltschmerz

  The Concierge Desk

  I’ve Got the Over on Fifteen Minutes

  Tired

  Whitman

  BOX

  GIRL

  Uniform

  I take off my shoes first and crack my toes against the cold lobby floor. Then, I take off my jeans. Finally, my shirt. I am not naked, but close to it—in short white shorts and a tight white tank top. For the next seven hours, this is my uniform.

  Reaching into my bag, I take out the things I want inside with me. Tonight it’s my laptop, my phone, two pens, headphones, this week’s issue of The New Yorker even though I haven’t opened last week’s, a legal pad, lip gloss.

  I comb my fingers through my hair, press my lips together, and glance quickly toward my feet, surveying my uniform, making sure everything important is covered. Finally, I retrieve the stepladder, and, with my hands steadied on its sides, I climb up its stairs and crawl inside the box.

  Box Girl Rule Sheet1

  1.Every shift begins at 7:00 PM and ends at 2:00 AM. You must be inside the box at 7:00 PM promptly. Please arrive to the property by 6:45.2

  2.You can take one thirty-minute break in the Employee Break Room and two bathroom breaks.

  3.No food or drink inside the box.

  4.Headphones are required if you are watching/listening to music.

  5.No eye contact or relations with the guests or staff.

  6.No socializing with guests or hotel employees before, during, or after your shift.

  7.Don’t touch the artwork in the box.

  Uniforms:

  1.The uniform is white boy shorts and white tank top. No alterations are acceptable.

  2.Please wear undergarments.

  3.Bring a robe, sweat pants, and flip-flops for breaks.

  4.Makeup is light and natural.

  5.Ultimately this is a modeling job and you must take care of your body. If you have severe bruises, bandages, or casts, you must wait until your body is healed and then ask to be put on the schedule.

  Schedules:

  1.If you are late twice in one month and you don’t call the front desk to let them know, you will be taken off the schedule the following month. A no-show/no-call may result in a month’s suspension or termination.

  2.You must submit your availabilities by the twenty-fifth of each month for schedule placement consideration.

  3.If someone calls you to cover her shift for her, you must not accept if you are already on the schedule for that week.

  4.All shift changes must be relayed in writing via email to the Talent Coordinator. Text messages and phone calls are not acceptable.

  General:

  1.Valet your car. The front desk will take care of your parking for you.

  2.Switch off the space heater before you leave at night.3

  1 The actual rule sheet, provided by management.

  2 At one point, the box shift was changed from 7:00 PM–2:00 AM to 6:00 PM–1:30 AM, and the pay was increased from $100 to $125/night. Then, during the recession, the shift was changed to 8:00 PM–12:00 AM, and the pay was cut to $60/night.

  3 Another rule, which is absent from this list but I have seen on others, is “No sweatshirts, socks, or blankets.” If a Box Girl gets cold, we are told, she can turn on a space heater, which is hidden below the mattress in a storage area. If she gets hot, she can turn on a fan, which is clipped to the ceiling and also hidden from the guests’ view.

  Please Wear Undergarments

  I never thought I would be employed at a place where that needed to be put in writing.

  The Box

  Since The Standard Hotel opened on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood in 1998, a glass box with the dim
ensions of a large, waterless aquarium—fifteen feet long, four feet wide, five feet tall—has been a permanent art installation behind the front desk. Three sides of the box are glass, while the back wall, the one farthest from the lobby, is solid. The box is big enough for sitting, lying down, or sleeping, but about a foot too short for standing.

  Inside the box, there is only a single mattress with white, starch-smelling sheets tucked and folded crisply at its corners. On top of that, there is one firm pillow. Two, if I’m lucky.

  In front of the box is the concierge desk: a minimalist block of glossy off-white. In front of that are three backless barstools, which no one ever sits on. The floor in the lobby is an eggshell shade too, shiny like it’s just been shellacked with a coat of clear nail polish. Five succulent plants—four that look like legitimate cacti, one that looks more like a desert tree—line the left side of the lobby, a wall of white tiles behind them. Below the plants’ polished white pots, five piles of broken sea glass undulate like a shattered wave. To the right, slouchy brown chairs are clustered in various combinations—two facing each other, six side-by-side to create the effect of a couch. Beneath them, there’s a white shag rug, which is no longer white, and no longer shaggy, but a matted-down gray. A waterfall of pale beads cascades from the ceiling in one corner, and four large silver lamps dip their necks like giraffes toward the center of the room. Their globular metallic heads look like dryers at the hair salon, or something out of The Jetson’s living room.

  This lobby is not sure if it’s from the future or the past. It’s mod in the modernist space-age sense, like what we thought the future was going to look like in the 1950s. In the corner, a maid is dressed like Alice from The Brady Bunch, wearing a pressed, pink uniform with a Peter Pan collar. She sprays Windex on an acrylic bubble chair, which dangles from a chain.

  Automatic sliding-glass doors open onto the hotel’s valet area, where a sign that reads The Standard hangs purposefully upside down. Giant Jurassic Park leaves obscure an unattractive stretch of Sunset Boulevard across the street: a 1970s-style beige office building; a parking lot (ten dollars during the day, twenty at night); a Guess billboard featuring a model gyrating in the sand, wearing a pair of jeans and a denim jacket; and a Cabo Cantina, which looks like it’s decorated for Cinco de Mayo every day of the year.

  During the day, the scene in the lobby rarely changes. Everyone always seems to be waiting for someone else. A man fidgets with his phone. A woman jangles the bracelets on her wrist, digging for a watch under an armful of accessories.

  But by dusk, as the smell of chlorine surrenders to cigarette smoke, the set begins to change. Every night, at seven o’clock, the Box Girl arrives. From 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM, she can do whatever she wants inside the box—read, talk on her phone, use her computer, even sleep. The only thing she absolutely cannot do is make eye contact with anyone outside the box. It is supposed to appear as if this mysterious creature has no idea anyone else is around. No clue that anyone is out there, looking in.

  Once a week, I am that mysterious creature.

  Could You Tidy It Up a Bit?

  I would like to think I’m a fairly responsible Box Girl: I arrive on time; I wear undergarments; I have never shown up to a shift with my leg in a cast. Yet tonight, I find myself reprimanded, the recipient of my very first Box Girl demerit.

  It’s a few hours into the night when the concierge swings open the door, which he never does, so I am sufficiently startled. He takes in the view: me, the mattress, my stuff.

  “You’re not supposed to have so much stuff in the box at once,” he says. “Only one thing at a time.”

  I guess this is an unwritten rule.

  I am, in fact, surrounded. To my left, my laptop. To my right, my phone. Next to that, three books, two spiral-bound notepads, a blue pen, two black pens, headphones, hand cream, a nail file, and my electricity bill. On the periphery, countless pieces of paper are wadded into frustrated little fists. It looks like my apartment. It looks real. It looks too real.

  “Could you tidy it up a bit?” he says. “It looks messy.”

  Well this is mildly mortifying.

  “Oh my god, of course,” I say, groping for the most overtly disposable items. A colony of notebook-paper balls has assembled like dust bunnies where the mattress meets the glass. I crunch the pieces of paper together, unsuccessfully attempting to create one humongous sphere, and start stacking my stuff.

  Did he say I was only allowed to have one thing in here? Only one? Which thing will it be? Obviously it will be the computer, but what if I want the book? While I know I can only do one thing at a time, I’d like to at least have the option of some other distraction.

  My Natural Habitat

  It’s been documented that animals in captivity exhibit some very bizarre behaviors. Primates, for example, often eat and throw their own feces. They are also known to engage in a behavior called “regurgitation and reingestion”—vomiting into their hands and then eating the vomit. While I have never thrown my own feces or voluntarily reingested my own vomit, I can say, with certainty, that how one acts while stuck inside a cage is most definitely not how one acts when left to one’s own free will.

  We are told to behave in the box as if we are alone in our living rooms. First of all, I don’t have a living room. And if I did, when I sat in it, I wouldn’t make sure I was sitting in a way that doesn’t make my thighs look fat. I wouldn’t continually untangle my hair with my fingers. I wouldn’t make sure my lip gloss was not smudged outside my lip area. I do not wear lip gloss at home.

  Observed in my one-room apartment, I’d most likely be wearing my other uniform: a greenish-yellow sweatshirt that most closely resembles the color of diarrhea, pajama pants that are too short, and tube socks that are too tall. If it was chilly, I might have a powder blue bathrobe over that. My hair would be piled into a hay-like heap on top of my head, and I probably would not have shaved my legs even to my knee—forget the elevations my razor has to ascend before a box shift.

  I’d be sitting on my bed, surrounded by a smattering of books and magazines—a New Yorker from weeks before (they just come so frequently), an In Touch from that week—and a variety of items not meant to be on bed sheets: a laptop, a jar of nail polish, various crumbly snacks. I’d probably be neglecting it all while turning up the volume on the latest episode of Extreme Couponing.

  Not only does my apartment not have a living room, it also does not have a bedroom. Technically, a studio does not have a bedroom, a living room, or a kitchen. It’s just one large room having an identity crisis. I can basically open my front door while in the shower. To make matters worse, my address has a half in it—316 ½—the studio apartment’s bastard stepchild. The ½ handle is very confusing for delivery people, and thus very inconvenient for me, a delivery enthusiast.

  “No,” I say, to the Domino’s order-taker, “I’m not the house in the front; I’m up the stairs in the back.” More often than not, my downstairs neighbor has to bring my pizza up to me, which was particularly embarrassing the time I had already fallen asleep and didn’t remember I had ordered pizza in the first place.

  Startled awake by the knocking, I tripped toward the door, disoriented and lacking pants.

  “Who is it?” I said through the door.

  “Your pizza’s here,” the voice answered.

  “My what?” I said, pinching the corners of my eyes, trying to extract some moisture from my contacts.

  “Your pizza!” the voice was shouting now.

  “Who is this?” I said, wishing this person would go away.

  “It’s Ken! From downstairs!”

  “Oh, hey Ken,” I said, relieved, and still through the door. “No listen I’m good, I don’t want any pizza, but thanks though.”

  “No, I’m not offering you pizza,” he said. “You ordered pizza and it was delivered to our house.”

  “Oh right, yeah, obviously. I was totally just messing with you. Want a slice?”

  Or perhaps
an observer might catch me during the day, sitting at my desk, my left foot propped up on my chair, my chin perched on top of my knee. I’d probably be peeling the polish off my nails while staring at the blinking cursor of a blank Microsoft Office document, blink, blink, blink. Like staring into the refrigerator, hoping something will magically appear for me.

  Maybe, on that particular day, I had decided that wearing a hat might make me more focused. But which hat? They were all so disorganized. Maybe I should organize them, I might have thought. It’s amazing all the things I suddenly realize I need to do when I am supposed to be doing something else. Maybe, I might have thought, since I’m up, I should water that plant? Maybe I should tweeze my eyebrows? Maybe I should go through my closet and see what old jeans might make good cut-offs? Maybe I should make a pair of cut-offs and wear them while I Clorox the bathroom? Maybe I’ll bleach the shower in my new shorts, which will be both stylish and utilitarian, and then I’ll have to open every window because of the fumes, have to determine the apartment a biohazard, and be forced to evacuate immediately and seek shelter at the bar down the street, where the air is much safer and where there happens to be a very reasonable Happy Hour going on.

  One might observe that process, were they to see me alone in my lack of living room. But no lip gloss.

  Hello, Box Talent!

  At the end of each month, all the Box Girls receive an emailed schedule marked with the red exclamation point that indicates “High Priority.” These emails typically open with the salutation, “Hello, Box Talent!” A curious phrase for a job that requires no talent. This mass message reminds us that a Box Girl can only work once a week. This is to keep variety. If a guest is staying at the hotel for, say, five days, he’ll see a different girl each day—The Blonde Box Girl, The Brunette Box Girl, The Asian Box Girl, The Hispanic Box Girl, The Black Box Girl, and so on—like his very own bag of Box Girl Skittles.