Broken hands, broken dreams — AJ Unleashed
The elusive industry of hand modeling may be obscured but it sure does pay well. Too bad, I’ll never become a hand model.
THE DAY I learned about the unworldly world of hand modeling was the day I lose the chance of my world becoming and joining theirs.
Don’t get me wrong: I never model-worthy hands. They’re rough and etched with lines traversing across my palms and my fingers like a network of roads. A map. It’s a quality I attribute to my daily dishwashing chore — being the youngest of the bunch indeed entails pitfalls. It also has hair on the most unlikely crevice. Behind them, just above my knuckles, there seems to be a clumped field of jet-black fur. Like the tall grass that grows out vacant untended lots, the kind that is unexpected and unasked, but rarely does miss to show up. In the back of my palms, there’s also hair; they’re shorter than the former. And as if they were mowed lawns, they run toward my wrists and my forearms and slowly thin and end on my shoulders.
SOME PEOPLE just have it. The perfect hands. Some people have exorbitantly moisturized calousless fingers that stick out so perfectly from their equally pristine palms that companies pay them copious salaries to hold their products. And as crazy as it may sound, this job really does exist.
I found out about this elusive career on an Insider video about the model RayMartell Moore, whose hands have been featured in television and print advertisements. Thanks to his androgynous hands and his force of habit of lathering his treasured joints with lotion at least 30 times a day, he’s been up and running in the industry for 10 years and counting.
RayMartell, who’s also an actor, is just one of the many models engaged in a specialized niche in the modeling industry: the parts modeling. Often referred to as parts models, they are often in front of cameras photographing their body parts, which we’ve surely seen from a wide spectrum of advertisements and editorial photos — their lips, nose, legs, and anything you could think of. RayMartell’s hands played as JayZ’s in a Samsung advertisement; it’s the hands that I’m most drawn in.
Mine may not be — in Tyra Bank’s lexicon — flawsome, but they’re not in the closest sense of hideous. Hideous is Duterte’s enlarged pores (and his misogynist remarks, incompetence, killing spree — the list is endless). Or cishet male preaching to people to normalize wearing girls’ clothes never mind that femme queers have been doing it so for so long only to receive homophobic threats and remarks. Now that’s hideous. My hands are not the most disagreeable part of my body either. Far from it — I have had acne. Despite my quizzical body (or hands) hair, I best believe that my hands, while not the best ones to exist, are beautiful.
Think I’m lying? Here’s how my hands fare with a model’s.
OK, yeah maybe you’re right. To be fair, his was shot in a studio while mine was in front of my east-facing window. Let’s talk about unfairness, baby.
MY 3RD GRADE teacher told me that I could be anything I want to be. But that far-fetched future of me becoming a hand model has then been sealed as perpetually improbable. No matter how much I moisturize my hands or how expensive the serums and oil I’d apply. Even if I let go of my dream of adopting a cat and dog in a dainty apartment unit in downtown Manhattan, or buy all the shaving creams there are to obliterate my fur conundrum — or better yet, have them lasered — my fate was already deemed out of question on the night I’d watched RayMartell’s video.
It was already past dusk when I tried to audit the glass jars my best friend Jade and I bought for the small business we had intended to launch last month. There were 20 of them, those little air-tight vessels, which I have had kept in my room. One of them, however, wouldn’t close. Was it the plastic suction perking on the side of the lid? I couldn’t tell and I thought it didn’t matter. I just had to close it. Not that I needed to. I didn’t. I just knew I had to. Jade told me she has already tried closing it to no avail. Maybe she didn’t try hard enough, I thought.
With the jar’s body on my left hand and the lid on the other, I tried to squish it together as if the pieces were molding clay that would adjust and mold to the slightest of touch. I failed. I tried harder. I must’ve grunted while doing so.
Then the thing just shattered. In my hands with a strength of a 10-year-old. There were broken pieces of glass. In my hands. Then there was crimson seeping through my skin. Timidly at first. The calm became a raging faucet in split seconds. There was blood everywhere.
I was frozen in disbelief, thinking how I’ll never become a hand model. My next instinct was to tell Jade, but I had placed my phone on the floor — which I instantly regretted — and it had been surrounded by shattered shards; it’s the shards that had cut me. I made a stride towards my laptop and typed with my left hand, the less injured one. “fuck,” I told Jade in lowercase. If I only had both of my hands to myself that time, I would’ve typed it in all caps; maybe I would’ve cursed long-form (i.e. ‘FUCKPUTANGINAGAGO’, ‘AMPOTA YAWAAAA’). ‘fuck’ was all that I could type. My third instinct was to send her a selfie, which I did with the aid of the webcam timer.
(I won’t post it to save a bit of what’s left of my dignity. Or should I launch my OnlyFans and post it there instead? Account bio: depressing photos that didn’t quite make it into my finsta.)
My mother was on bed rest so I could only ask my father who was flabbergasted by the manner I made my way downstairs; I hadn’t realized my knee had cuts too until I had to walk (which meant I’d lose my chance of becoming a knee model, too). In the background as he tended my wounds, a character was shot and heavily wounded in Ang Probinsyano (my eldest brother is an ardent fan — I’m not even kidding) which made both of us giggle, halting our disagreement after he tried to douse the cuts with an expired bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
I went upstairs to sweep the shattered glass off my bedroom floor — pain hasn’t registered yet — my hands donning a dress of eight band-aids. I tried typing on my laptop again but the crescent-shaped cut in my right thumb begun to bleed further. I slept that night thinking about my hands and the disrupted plans for the month and my hand modeling career that hasn’t even started yet has already ended. I had to bid farewell to the possibility of earning six figures off my hands. May I just be a nose model then?
My hands are still recovering hence my absence from this blog for the past few weeks. I also got a severe fever barely a week after this incident happened; I’m scheduled to get tested for Covid-19 this coming Wednesday. Also a huge thanks to my Occupational Therapy major friend Khrushchev for assessing my cuts!
Stay unleashed. À bientôt !
Originally published at https://www.ajunleashed.com.
