Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398)

by Mosley, Walter

  “We have to call an ambulance,” she cried.

  “Help put him in my car,” I said, “and follow me.”

  I grabbed Willie’s other arm and, with Tai’s help, hefted him up into the seat. We strapped him in; then she ran to her car. I turned over the engine and said loudly, “Call Neelo Brown.”

  I pulled away from the curb followed by the tattered Saab.

  The car’s speakers engaged and then came the sound of ringing.

  “Dr. Brown’s office,” a pleasant female voice said.

  “Zelda?”

  “Debbie?”

  “I’ve got an emergency.”

  There was a pause on the line. There always was when I called Neelo’s office. Zelda didn’t dislike the syndicate of porn actresses that had sent her boss through medical school, but she was a medical professional and so she perceived us as a threat to his practice.

  “Can you come in?” Zelda asked.

  “I’m a mile or so away.”

  “I’ll set the gate to your garage key.”

  “I’ll be there soon.”

  I could see Tai in the rearview mirror. The fear in her face was apparent even from that distance.

  There were flecks of white foam at the corner of Willie’s mouth. He was shivering and barely conscious.

  Two wrongs, they say, cannot make a right, but if you put enough negatives in the pot there’s a chance, I believe, that they might cancel one another out.

  On the ride up to Sunset Boulevard, with the boy-man maybe dying next to me and the girl crying in the car behind, a familiar numbness entered my heart. I felt patient with the unfolding of events, treating them in my mind as the unavoidable consequences of a life of my own choosing.

  My negativity pot was full to overflowing. There was a dead husband whom I loved but couldn’t bring myself to grieve for, and a young girl, also dead, who wanted a life that would forever elude her; there was the leg breaker and the woman-child, Lana, who wanted to be loved for someone she hoped to be; there was the cop whom I admired and lied to and the hundreds of books I’d read but never understood; there was a boy named Edison who had a perfectly round head and a woman named Delilah who guarded him—even from me.

  The list of ingredients was longer than that. I’d done many things wrong and known many people who were crooked but not bad, pretty but not beautiful, religious with no God, young to look at but never innocent.

  Neelo’s office was in a nondescript nine-story medical building just north of Sunset.

  Approaching the gray-green metal door I pressed the remote control for our garage and the door magically slid open. Tai made it in before the door slid back into place. We drove thirty feet to a set of double doors that were already open.

  Two big men in hospital white were waiting there with a wheelchair between them.

  “What’s the problem, Mrs. Pinkney?” one of the men asked. He was a tall and well-built man of Scandinavian descent.

  “This kid has had some kind of seizure.”

  “What’s going on?” Tai said, running up to us as well as she could in her condition.

  “This is a clinic, ma’am,” the other paramedic said. From his accent I could tell that he was African, probably Nigerian. “We’re taking this man to the doctor.”

  Tai chose that moment to swoon.

  The African ran to her and, with impressive ease, picked her up in the cradle of his arms.

  “Come, miss,” he said to me.

  The waiting room was small and anonymous. Tan walls, light green carpeting, and a low table with magazines like Good Housekeeping and O.

  I felt completely safe. No one knew I was there. There were no cameras or oversize erections on muscular men in the next room waiting to rip off my clothes and fuck me from every angle, in every orifice; there were no gaffers or hot lights, smells of lubricants or alcohol.

  I wanted to read a book about a place so far away that nobody in this world could get there. The story would be about a woman whose hair had turned white from age readying to bury her husband. There would be a problem—something about property and male lineage—but I’d be concerned only with wrapping his limbs tight to his body after washing him clean from a lifetime of honest but dirty labor.

  “Aunt Deb?”

  Neelo Brown was of medium height and always, since childhood, a little chubby. He was only five years younger than I but in his eyes I might as well have been his mother’s age.

  Neelo’s mother, Violet Caracas, was a real porn star out of the eighties. She was one of the first to take her career into her own hands and had shown many of us girls how to do the same.

  I was seventeen when I met her and Neelo; Theon had introduced us. Neelo was so good at his classes that he’d skipped three grades and was about to graduate from junior high school. I had a fake ID and was already making two thousand a week doing DP scenes for Reel Women Pictures in the Valley. Violet got a group of us together and introduced us to her accountant.

  Thirty-six months later she was dying from pancreatic cancer and five of us girls promised to see that Neelo got through college.

  After he graduated from medical school Neelo had his accountant set up a private insurance plan for girls in the business. The primary five got special treatment. We were all his aunts.

  “Hey, baby,” I said. “You’re looking good.”

  I loved how he looked at me. It was the way a young man appreciated a favored relative.

  “You cut your hair,” he said.

  “Theon died.”

  “Oh my God,” he said from knee-jerk emotions that young men in the straight life are guided by. “What happened?”

  “It was an accident. He electrocuted himself.”

  “When?”

  “Last night or maybe yesterday afternoon. When I got home after nine the police were already there.”

  “What does Norman have to do with that?”

  “Norman?”

  “William Norman … the man you brought in.”

  “Oh. Willie. Nothing. I just ran into him and he had this fit. How is he?”

  “I don’t know. He responds to treatment like an epileptic would. I haven’t tested him though. His wife is resting. I didn’t want to give her any drugs because of the pregnancy but all I had to do was tell her that her husband would recover and put her in a dark room and she fell asleep.”

  He smiled. Neelo Brown smiled and my life shifted course, ever so slightly. A breeze blew into that dead calm and my path had changed continents. I didn’t know it at the time. I was still thinking about Theon and Jolie, Big Dick Palmer and the first orgasm I’d had in a decade.

  “What, Aunt Deb?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re smiling.”

  “Can you look after the kids, Neely? I really have to be somewhere.”

  “No problem.”

  “If Willie wants my number give it to him. I slammed into his car so I guess this seizure is my fault. Put it on my bill?”

  “What bill? You know your money’s no good here, Aunt Deb.”

  Rhonda’s Beauty Salon was on Pico a few blocks east of Hauser. Rhonda was petite and mannish, black haired and blue eyed, tender and giggly—she was a white woman raised among black people, a ninety-pound weakling who never went anywhere without a razor somewhere close at hand.

  “Hey, baby,” she said as I walked into the open door of the storefront business.

  There were three young black hairdressers, two women and one man, working on clients along the east wall. Rhonda was in back sitting in her pink leather beauty chair. She lowered a copy of Jet magazine to greet me.

  “Hi, Rhonda,” I said softly. “You got time for me?”

  “I always got time for my movie star,” she said, dropping the tiny magazine in a pouch at the side of the chair. “What you need?”

  “Darken my hair and give it some body. And take this white circle off my cheek.”

  “Uh,” she grunted. “Baby girl is quittin’ the
industry.”

  As I took the seat I thought about Lana telling me that she was through with the business, and the hair on the floor of my bedroom, about an imagined picture of Richard Ness lying at my feet leaking blood onto the kitchen floor through a hole in his eye socket.

  “… yeah,” Rhonda was saying as I thought about a future I could not exactly imagine. “Derek is a no-good lazy niggah but he love my skinny li’l white ass like it was the first peach in season.”

  “What’s he doin’ now?”

  “Nasty young ho named Cassie done messed up my sheets, my sheets, with Derek’s stuff an’ then sit her stank ass in this here chair askin’ for the cut rate. You know I did her whole head an’ then I put a razor to her neck an’ whispered in her ear that if I evah saw her again I was gonna cut that pretty black th’oat from one side all the way to the othah.” Then she let out a deep, sinister chuckle. “You know Miss Cassie Ass-Worth done left the neighborhood since then.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t cut off Derek’s thing,” I said.

  “I would if I didn’t like the way he work it so good. You know, Deb, I ain’t nevah had a man love me like he do. He know every touch on my body and every word in my head.”

  I could almost experience the thrumming passion in Rhonda’s body as she leaned close to massage my scalp. It was as if her emotion was water or air passing over me. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  “What’s happenin’ with you, girl?” Rhonda asked after the tide of her emotions ebbed a bit. “How come you quittin’?”

  “Theon’s dead.”

  “What?”

  Rhonda levered the chair up from its reclining position and twirled me around until I was facing her.

  “He what?”

  I told her most of the story, everything except the part about me knowing Jolie.

  “Oh my God,” Rhonda said when I’d finished. “Well … I guess they got what they deserved.”

  “Nobody deserves to die when they have a chance at life,” I said.

  “So you forgive Theon like I did Derek?”

  “I fuck for a living, Rhon. You know the best thing Theon could do for me after a hard day was make me some chamomile tea and rub between my toe bones.”

  Hearing this Rhonda took on an expression of confusion wrapped in pity.

  My hair was dark brown and wavy and the tattoo was almost completely gone. Rhonda explained that the dyes used over the years to maintain the white circle and disk had stained the skin and that it would take a while for the pale shadow to recede.

  On my way to the accounting offices of Mintoff and Myers I called a number that Theon’s car phone knew by heart.

  “Threadley Brothers Mortuary,” a woman said with liveliness you wouldn’t expect from an undertaker.

  “Hi, I’m calling about Theon Pinkney. This is his wife.”

  “Oh yes. We have the remains and were wondering what to do.”

  “I want to come in around six to make the arrangements. Will Lewis be there?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Pinkney,” the woman said. Even though I’d never gone by the name Pinkney, I liked the anonymity of its usage. It was as if I were somebody else—hiding in plain sight.

  I drove straight down Pico toward the ocean. When I got to Lincoln I turned left and went for about a mile or so. On the way no one tooted their horns or made lewd gestures as was often the case. My look had been so unique and pornography was so widely viewed that I was more recognizable than most movie stars. Men (and women) asked for my autograph, honked their horns, and offered me money to show my breasts—I didn’t always refuse them.

  Chas Mintoff and Darla Myers’s office was on the second floor of a shabby building three blocks up from the beach. They were both surfers and musicians. Sometimes they were lovers. Now and again I joined them. But our only real connection was that they were honest accountants who took care of our investments.

  “Hey, Deb,” Juana Juarez, the receptionist, greeted. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  Juana was the color of amber, freckled, and afflicted with a smile that would not be dominated. If she knew about my work she refused to comment on it. If I ever needed a friend she would have been the person I would have chosen.

  “Are they in?” I asked.

  Juana pushed a button on the big blue office phone.

  “Yes, Juana?” a woman said.

  “It’s Debbie for you guys.”

  “Send her in.”

  Their desks were positioned across the room from each other, slanted away so that where they’d meet (if you continued the lines) they would form a perfect right angle. This seemed appropriate; they led away from and toward each other at the same time.

  “Hey, Deb,” blond-haired, green-eyed Chas said.

  “Hi,” his counterpart, the mousy brunette Darla, murmured.

  Whenever approaching the partners you were faced with a choice: sitting next to one desk or the other. This wasn’t odd seeing that they rarely represented the same client.

  Theon and I were one of the few exceptions.

  “You cut your hair,” Chas noticed.

  “And had your tattoo removed,” Darla added.

  “Theon got electrocuted in the bathtub with some teenage girl. They were trying to make a movie but the camera fell in.”

  The accountants stood in unison and moved toward me, Chas pulling his chair and the guest seat and Darla rolling her own, specially made, wicker office chair.

  “I can’t believe it,” Chas mumbled.

  “Sit down,” Darla said.

  I went over the details I cared to share. Big Dick Palmer didn’t make the cut; neither did the name Jolie. I went into detail about Richard Ness and his seventy-two-thousand-dollar request.

  “But, baby, you guys are in hock up over the line,” Darla told me. “You know that, don’t you? You signed all the documents.”

  “Sign the papers on the kitchen table, will ya, babe?” How many times had Theon said that to me? I hated legal mumbo jumbo, so I rarely read, and never understood, what I was signing.

  “There’s nothing left?”

  Darla squinted while Chas looked down at his feet and hands. There was no sense in me blaming them. There was no comfort to be found in recriminations or rage.

  “What about the Hummer?” I asked.

  “If you don’t pay fifteen hundred dollars a month the bank will take it away,” Darla said softly.

  “Where did all the money go?”

  “I don’t know what all he spent it on,” Chas added, “but he was funding some preproduction expenses for a movie with Johnny Preston.”

  “A legit?”

  “I think so. We’ve been in contact with Preston’s business office.”

  “Any money on the horizon?”

  “Not yet.”

  The youngish surfers each took one of my hands.

  I held on tight. I don’t think I would have ever let go except I had a funeral to plan.

  I looked at my watch before getting out of the Hummer. It was five fifty-eight. I was almost always on time to any meeting or appointment. It’s not that I looked at the clock or anything; it was more of an internal timepiece that ran like a little motor in the center of my being.

  “Hello, Mrs. Pinkney,” Lewis Dardanelle said when I walked through the front door of Threadley Brothers Mortuary.

  The entrance hall was large, pretending to be vast. The floors and walls, even the ceiling, were tiled with varying shades of gray and green marble. The only furniture was a unique stone desk that the undertaker sat behind.

  “Hey, Lew,” I said.

  He was up on his feet before I crossed the bleak expanse to the granite table. He gestured at an aluminum chair with a dull finish and I sat as demurely as the occasion required.

  “I’m very sorry, Deb,” he said. “Theon was so full of life.”

  “He was. Thank you.”

  “It was so unexpected.”

  Dardanelle was created to
be a mortician; nearly six-six, he didn’t weigh a pound over one sixty. His skin was pale, head bald, with rectangular glasses that were both thick and wide. Lew’s fingers would have made great albino daddy longlegs; when they moved they seemed to have lives of their own.

  He sat down, lacing the lanky digits of his hands.

  “What shall we do?” he asked.

  Theon and I had spent an inordinate amount of time and money at Threadley’s. People died in our business with frightening regularity. STDs and cancers, some murders and a nauseating number of suicides, drug overdoses, and the odd death that even the county coroner couldn’t explain—people who died in their rented houses, apartments, and trailers simply by exhaling and leaving this world behind.

  We had paid out of pocket and chipped in with friends for many funerals: longtime acquaintances and one-night stands and ex-lovers who didn’t have family. If I still had the money we’d spent at Threadley’s I could have retired and moved to Wyoming, where the cost of living would have fit my purse.

  “I’m broke, Lew,” I said. “No stocks, no bonds, no cash, no property. Theon wasted it all. Or maybe he stole it—I don’t really know.”

  Lewis’s gray eyes were magnified and elongated by his lenses. They widened further to take in my words.

  I’d spent a week with him when we planned the funeral of Oceanna Patel, who knew men so well that she could make them ejaculate without touching their genitals—on camera.

  That funeral cost eighteen thousand dollars.

  Death wasn’t cheap and the funeral director met with would-be charity cases every day. Poor sad widows and confused children, brokenhearted lovers … they all came to him asking for a deal.

  “There are certain rules,” I once heard Dardanelle say to a sad, fat, fifty-year-old woman whose husband had killed himself. “We cannot make monetary exceptions. The city has resources for people in your circumstance.”

  I wasn’t expecting Lew to help me but I had to ask—not for Theon but for myself. Nothing turns to dust faster than a dead sex worker. When I died no one would lift a finger to lay me to rest. At least I could try.