WILHELMINA GIRLS

So how does a guy get into George's position? "The girls travel in packs," explains Barkley. "It's a very closed group. The models hang out in posses and live in groups in model apart— ments. They don't feel safe unless they go out together. It's intimidating to a guy.

"On the flip side, it works to your advantage, because if there are twenty models in a place, the one you want is not going to be the most beautiful. You have more of a chance. If there's just one, she's the most beautiful, and she can work it. When you go up to one in a group of four or five, it makes that girl feel like she's better than the other girls."

The trick is meeting one girl. The best way is through a mutual friend. "Once a guy has access, once you get validated by one of the girls," says Mr. Felske, "then the guy gets beyond being an ordinary Joe."

Three years ago, George was at a club where he ran into a girl he knew from high school who was with a booker with an agency. He met some models. He had drugs. Eventually, they all went back to the models' apartment. He had enough to keep them going until seven in the morning. He fooled around with one of them. The next day, she agreed to see him again, but only if all the other girls could come, too. He took them all out to dinner. He kept going. "That was the beginning of the obsession," he says.

George knows all of the model apartments now—the places where, for five hundred dollars a month, a new model gets to sleep in a bunk bed in a cramped two— or three-bedroom apartment with five other girls. But he's got to keep up, because the girls come and go all the time, and you have to stay close to at least one girl in the apartment.

Still, there's a free-flowing supply. "It's easy," George says. He picks up the phone and dials a number.

"Hello, is Susan there?" he asks.

"Susan's in Paris."

"Oooooh," he says, sounding disappointed. "I'm an old friend of hers [in truth, he's known her for two months], and I just got back into town myself. Damn. Who's this?"

"Sabrina."

"Hey, Sabrina, I'm George." They chat for about ten minutes. "We're thinking about going to Bowery Bar tonight. Getting a group together. Do you want to come?"

"Ummmm. Sure, why not," Sabrina says. You can practically hear her thumb pop out of her mouth.

"And who else is there with you?" George asks. "Do you think they might want to come too?"

George hangs up the phone. "It's actually better if there are more guys than girls when you go out," he says. "If there are more girls, they get competitive with each other. They get quiet. If a girl is seeing a guy and she lets the other girls know, it can be a mistake. She thinks the girls she's living with are her friends, but they're not. They're girls she just met who happen to be in the same situation. Girls try to steal guys all the time."

"There are a lot of bambis out there," says Mr. Felske.

George says he has a system. "There's a hierarchy of sexual availability in the model apartments," he says. "Wilhelmina girls are the easiest. Willi tends to get girls who grew up in mobile homes or the East End of London. Elite— they have two apartments—one uptown, on 86th Street, and one downtown, on 16th. They keep the nice girls in the uptown apartment. The girls in the downtown apartment are 'friendlier. Girls who live with Eileen Ford are untouchable. One reason is that Eileen's maid hangs up if you call.

"A lot of these girls live between 28th Street and Union Square. There's Zeckendorf Towers on 15th. And a place on 22nd and Park Avenue South. The older models who work a lot tend to live on the East Side."