Exhausted (Patreon)

I’m in Antwerp. This won’t be a long post, but more informational. I think I had THE STRANGEST experience of my modeling career last night. I am on mobile, so please excuse any spelling errors or formatting issues.

I arrived in Antwerp from Brussels late Friday. I went to my host’s place and was slightly confused as to how messy it was. By messy, I mean it was clearly a hoarder house. My American counterparts no doubt comprehend what this means. Suffice it to say, there was trash, debris, clutter, random objects, and furniture strewn about haphazardly. Just a bit of a disaster area. I was completely exhausted, and I hate to say it, but I’ve seen this sort of thing before and thought I’d just sleep in the room I was shown (which was not as bad) and it would be okay.

The next morning when I woke up, the reality of the situation began to dawn on me. There was a “stray” cat in the bathroom the host had found the day prior. While that itself would not necessarily be the worst thing, he’d decided the cat must stay in the bathroom. Which then meant that it was stuck alone in the bathroom for hours upon end, alone, often in the dark. The other part of this is that it was not a stray cat. It was very friendly and clearly well cared for - I’m relatively certain this cat belonged to someone else and perhaps was simply outside when he found and brought it into his house.

I went to the kitchen to make coffee. In the kitchen were his two dogs (which he also found on the street I later discovered) and a bird of some kind. One of the dogs was wedged under a low cabinet hiding, and the parrot’s cage was dirty - food from the bird was all over the floor and layers of dried excrement coated the bottom of the cage. While I stood there, the dog that had been hiding underneath the cabinet came up to me, seeming to be friendly. I started to pet it, and after a few moments, its entire mood shifted and it tried to bite me a few times before going to hide again - it is a small dog so I managed to get away from it with just being nipped. 

At this point I was confused, and I don’t know why I didn’t just immediately leave. But I had to get ready for a shoot so I did and left.

Later that day, I met up with a photographer friend, Helene Vienna, and we went back. I warned her about the situation. At this point it was around 6pm that we went to the house. The hosting photographer had been gone since before 8am. I’d been gone since 9:30am.

He told me he’d put the dogs in a basement area that he has for them when he is away working. I heard them bark a few times, but being afraid of the one dog, I decided to leave them alone. The one cat was still in the bathroom upstairs. What was strange about the bathroom was that it had no handle on the outside - just the internal mechanism jutted out of where the handle would attach and I had to open the door with a wrench to get in. Helene and I cuddled with the cat for a bit, and she agreed that it was not a stray - and, further, that even if it was, storing it in a dark, windowless bathroom for days was not appropriate.

We shot a few rolls of film, but we began to get uneasy. I don’t know what it was; it was this uncanny feeling that we both had about the house and what was going on in it. 

We went downstairs at about 10:00pm. The cat that was there (other than the one locked in the bathroom), was crying. I noticed that the bowl was empty of food and went to refill it. There was also no water. The bag of food next to the bowl was empty. At that point, Helene and I looked at each other and recognition of what a bad situation this was dawned on us. We found cat food, put it in the bowl both for the cat in the hall and the one in the bathroom. We realized the dogs downstairs were likely hungry and went to look. When we went down to the basement (the house is about 4/5 stories tall - I don’t remember exactly), we found that the “basement” seemed to consist of a narrow hallway. Off of that hallway was one room just filled with trash and random things. The other door on the hallway led down another dark hall, also with random debris, and that’s where he’d put the dogs. We didn’t feel safe to let the dogs out as the one was aggressive, so we fed treats through the doorway. Helene took photos by slipping her phone through a crack in the door. We saw no food or water. I have no idea how they would use the bathroom at all. By the time he got home and sent me a text, they’d been in the basement for 18 hours. I’m pretty sure they only had the treats we gave them.

It was at that point we decided we had to immediately leave. We packed our things, booked a hotel online, and left. We still don’t know what to do about this - especially for the animals. If anyone else has any experience like this, feel free to let me know. I’ve never seen something like this in person, and describing the level of dirtiness and neglect present there is difficult. I’ve never seen anything like that, and I hope I never do again. It was absolutely appalling - Helene and I both cried and just left. Yes. So. That was yesterday. I made this post available to all models who follow me - feel free to ask for the photographer’s name to avoid.