“I heard about Theon from Trixie Ballstrom,” Moana Bone said on message seventy-nine. She had been a real porn star back in Theon’s day. They had done revolutionary work in the field: quadruple penetrations, multiple simultaneous ejaculations, and possibly the first-ever scene to be done completely underwater.
Moana never failed to forget my name. I don’t know if she even recognized me from one chance meeting to the next. Her eyes were always on Theon—willing him to see her as the ravishing beauty of the past.
“I was devastated,” Moana continued. “Theon was a wonderful man and I can’t imagine what you must be going through. He was so vital when he was young, before you could have known him. What we did together was never pornographic. We weren’t just actors; we brought love onto those sets. We brought feeling.…”
Her message went on for a full eight minutes. Toward the end she stopped mentioning Theon. There were rock stars and movie stars and political office holders and millionaires whom she spoke of in reference to her career, which, according to her, was far beyond the petty business that I, the current bimbo, was accustomed to.
I listened to every word. I sometimes, even today, replay her monologue. I wasn’t angry at her self-centered soliloquy; I wasn’t insulted. I didn’t laugh at her, because she was the voice of so many men and women who fed the rapacious sexual hunger of the Western world while trying to keep their heads above water.
We have eight young men and a four-hour time slot, a young producer-director once said to me. I’d get seven hundred per come shot—a thousand for every time I swallowed. We all had those kinds of days. How could Moana or anybody else think of their life like that and survive?
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Pinkney,” Lewis Dardanelle said at the beginning of message one seventeen. I had been listening to the machine for almost three hours. “Talia has made over seven hundred calls on your husband’s behalf and the great majority have offered to donate money or services to the funeral. We have raised, in real dollars, nearly thirty-five thousand. And if the promises are met we will have at least fifty. We, the brothers and I, would like to have the service next Saturday afternoon at two forty-five. If the costs go over the collection, the business will cover the extra expense. Please call or come in anytime after six in the next few days and we will make the arrangements.”
There were other messages from Perry Mendelson, Lana and Linda, loan companies and debt reduction services, more porn actors, and one from Marcia Pinkney.
“Hello, dear,” the elderly woman said, her voice frail and ragged. “This is Marcia, your mother-in-law. I heard from one of my church friends that Theon … that he passed away. They saw it on the Internet. I’m so sad and so sorry for you. I know we never really got along and I see now that as a Christian I treated you and my son badly. The moment I heard about Theon’s transition I realized that I might have helped you and have been closer to my own son if I was not blinded by the feelings I had about your … his lifestyle. Now Theon is gone and I can’t speak to him. But I hope that you call me and maybe even come see me so that I can make you tea and apologize in person.
“Are you having a funeral? Do you need some help? Please call me, Sandra. God bless you.”
Toward the end of the litany of condolences and threats was a message from a man I knew and didn’t know. His voice was strained with real emotion.
“Hello, Deb,” he said. “This is Jude Lyon. I heard about Theon. Call me if you need to talk or anything else. I’m bereft.”
Bereft. That was the word he used. I remember thinking that Jude Lyon was one of the few people I knew who could put that word in a sentence without sounding pompous or awkward.
Jude Lyon was in love with my Theon. He followed him around and did odd jobs for him, and for me too sometimes. Jude was gay but rarely had a lover. Theon was straight but I suspected that he’d had sex with Jude a time or two.
When Theon couldn’t make it to pick me up at the airport or accompany me to one of the dozens of porn industry galas, Jude would show up in his vintage BMW dressed in just the right clothes.
Jude loved Theon with an uncritical passion. Though he had no interest in things like baseball, barbecues, or me, he learned to care for these things because Theon did.
“What’s up with that guy?” I once asked my husband. “I mean are you two in love or what?”
“It’s not like that, babe,” he said. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking cognac from juice glasses.
“Then what?”
“You don’t want to know too much about JL,” he said. “He’s probably the most dangerous man I ever met.”
“Jude? He doesn’t look like he could do five reps with my three-pound dumbbells.”
“Don’t be fooled; that little faggot could carry the whole world on his shoulders if he had to.”
I asked more, and at other times, but that’s all I ever got about Jude and what Theon thought of him.
The last message was from a collection agency. The loan company that Theon was borrowing from was dunning him for a sixteen-thousand-dollar payment. They would repossess everything that he’d put up for collateral: the Humvee, the house, the condo in Aspen, even certain pieces of jewelry that were being held by a third party.
It was like the first page of the first tale in a short-story collection, the first line in a romance of descent.
The red phone was my most precious possession. It was a ruby-colored, semiopaque, glistening cell phone that only a few people had the number of. Built into it was a device that recorded every time someone spoke into the line. It had more than sixty-four gigabytes of memory.
I picked up the little phone in Las Vegas when there was both an adult film convention and a tech convention in the same hotel.
The pasty-faced kid who was in charge of the spy booth was a young man named Bobby Seaton. I asked him to give me one of the samples and he refused.
“If you give it to me I’ll fuck you till the ache in your nuts won’t stop for a week.”
Bobby wasn’t fat but his body was very soft. There was no definition or strength. He insisted on wearing two condoms and had a scared look on his face the whole time we were in his hotel bed.
The only indication he gave that he wanted to be with me was a small, unflagging erection.
“Can, can we stop now?” he asked after his fourth ejaculation.
“Give me the phone,” I said.
He hesitated and I grabbed his dick.
He took the phone out of his pants on the floor and handed it to me.
“You can’t tell anybody where you got it,” he stammered. “It’s a federal crime to record phone conversations without consent.”
He showed me how to change the chip and use the various features. When he’d finished I reached for his cock again—it was erect immediately.
He actually whimpered.
“Lie down, white boy,” I whispered.
He got down on the bed and I fucked him twice more.
If he’d worn only one condom at a time I don’t think I would have tortured him so. I hated his fear but reveled in my power to frighten him. I loved it that he could cringe and orgasm almost simultaneously but I loved that phone even more.
I entered a certain code and was told by the display that I had three unanswered calls from Linda Love’s number. I erased them without listening. Then I noticed that the battery was at half power and that the ringer was on. I did a different search and saw that there was another call answered and recorded.…
“Hello,” Theon said in his faux-distracted tone.
If you knew Theon you knew that this quality of voice was a ploy on his part. He was trying to keep the caller from understanding his intentions; in this case he didn’t want the caller to know that he was secretly spying on me.
My stardom didn’t raise envy in Theon’s heart but rather he was hungry to share in that success, like an elder in a pride of lions wanted to share in the kill. He must have been overjoyed that I’d forgo
tten the phone with the ringer on. That way he’d be able to spy on me like a little boy peeking through the keyhole of his mother’s boudoir.
“Hi,” a girl’s voice said—Jolie Wins, Myrtle May. “Is Deb there?”
“She’s not in right now,” my husband said. “Can I help you?”
“Who, who are you?”
“My name’s Axel. I’m Deb’s manager. She’s out of town and left her phone here at her house. Who’s speaking?”
“Jolie. Jolie Wins. Did Deb tell you about me?”
“Jolie? Yeah. Met you the other day at that thing, right? Can I do anything to help?”
“I wanted to ask Deb if maybe there was some kind of job I could do on the set of her new movie. I’m unemployed and they kicked me out of my place. I mean I don’t blame ’em. I couldn’t pay the rent and so I had to go. Deb’s the only kind person I’ve met in Hollywood. I’d work real hard.”
“Well,” Theon mused, “like I said, Debbie’s out of town on one of her exotic shoots … in Tahiti actually.”
“Tahiti,” Jolie said breathlessly. “Man, I’d love to be there.”
“Yeah, me too. But I’ll tell you what, Jolie. This is Deb’s private line. If you have this number that must mean that you’re important to her. So what I’ll do is send a car over to get you and bring you here. Maybe I can help you out until Deb gets back.…”
They talked a little longer. She was down on Alvarado at a diner. The cook was buying her coffee and doughnuts, probably with the same intentions of my sometimes-slimeball husband. Theon promised to send a limo over to pick her up.
The rest was obvious.
When Theon took one look at Jolie he saw dollar signs and got an erection too. He told her that she could make the same kind of money that I did when I was a kid and that all he had to do was see how she worked on camera. The date on the recording was a week before the two died. He might have been fucking her that whole time for all I knew. Maybe he was putting her up somewhere, promising her a starring role in his upcoming feature-length adult masterpiece.
It was my fault. I should have kept tabs on her. Or I should have ignored her at the hip-hop party and let her find her own way down. Instead I gave her false hope and a phone number that Theon had access to.
I had killed them both.
“Hello,” Kip Rhinehart said, answering his phone.
“Hey, Kip, it’s me—Deb.”
“Hey, babe. Long time no see.”
“I been kinda busy.”
“I know, big important woman like you. What can I do for you?”
“I was just wondering …”
“Yeah?”
“Did Theon have a girl in one of your rooms up there?”
“I heard he died,” Kip said.
“Yeah. Him and this sixteen-year-old. They let a camera fall in the bathtub and electrocuted themselves while fucking.”
“That’s hard.”
“Was she there?”
Silence.
“Come on now, Kip,” I said. “He’s dead. She’s dead. There’s no one left to protect. You’re the first person Theon’d call if he needed to put up someone on the QT.”
“Yeah. She had one of the garden rooms. Nice kid. Fucked-up, but she was nice. Had manners, you know?”
“I’m gonna wanna see the room and her stuff,” I said.
“Sure, Deb. Nothing worth anything there but I’ll lock it up until you come.”
“I’ll drop by tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning.”
“Whenever. I’m here day and night.”
After calling Kip I lost steam for a while again. My life was in its uphill phase (a term I once read in a self-help book). Every step I took was a strain. I wanted to go to bed but I knew that I’d sleep for another three days if I did.
So I sat in the polar bear room staring at the thick white carpeting.
“How do you feel, Deb?” I asked after twenty or more minutes had passed.
“Like shit.”
An hour went by. I began registering sounds from various sources. There was ticking from an antique porcelain couple fornicating on the white marble end table. Theon had bought the little sculpture for me but I never realized that the platinum disk on the side was also a clock.
One of the fourteen environmentally friendly ceiling lights was whining softly. A strong breeze was blowing and the sliding glass doors that led to the patio and swimming pool rumbled gently on their tracks.
I realized that I’d agreed on buying the house because it resembled the home of the shoot I’d done in the south of France—the one I dreamed about.
Why hadn’t I known that?
“Really, Deb,” I said. “How are you?
“I’m cut off,” I said. “A junkie in paradise. A bitch in heat locked in a room full of doggie dolls.
“Write that down.”
I don’t usually talk to myself. As a matter of fact I had never done so (or at least I don’t remember doing it) before that day. But I got up and went to the kitchen where our housekeeper, Mrs. Slatkin, usually kept a blank book diary where she wrote down the things she wanted us to buy. This little journal was fairly new. Only a few pages had been scribbled on. I tore out the used sheets and jotted down the words I’d asked myself to write.
Only the first few words, I’m cut off, seemed to go anywhere. A junkie in paradise was more like a book or movie title, and a bitch in heat locked in a room full of doggie dolls used too many words to get the point across.
My father’s midnight special was on the kitchen table next to where I wrote. I was wondering about the significance of this, this juxtaposition, when the doorbell sounded.
It was the first nineteen notes from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. That was the only classical music that Theon knew. He’d loved it as the orchestration of the Sean Connery movie Zardoz.
I put the pistol in the pocket of my tatty blue-and-yellow dress and wandered up toward the front door thinking that everything was connected but, at the same time, nothing mattered.
She was tall and austere-looking in her navy blue, calf-length dress suit and maroon high-heeled shoes. Dr. Anna Karin was ten years older than I but in some ways her face seemed younger, at least more innocent. She smiled when I opened the door. I could imagine why. When last she saw me I was in a tight red vinyl minidress with white hair nearly down to my tailbone. My eyes were oceanic blue and I had glossy platinum-colored nails longer than a toddler’s fingers.
“Hello, Sandra,” she said.
Karin was born in Copenhagen but she didn’t have an accent. Her enunciation was very, very American, more so than most people you meet who were born here. That was how I could tell that she wasn’t—American, that is.
We met when I was going through a bout of anorexia. Theon was afraid that I’d hurt my health (and our income) and so he got Karin’s name from one of his legit Hollywood friends.
“A house call?” I said.
“I was concerned.”
We stood at the threshold staring at each other—the handsome Scandinavian and I.
I wondered why she was there and what my black skin would look like next to hers. This latter thought wasn’t sexual musing but professional reflex. How women looked on a set when paired up with one or many men often made a scene work.
But I was retired.
“Come on in,” I said, turning my back and leading her into the white-on-white-in-white living room.
“Have a seat,” I offered, and she lowered herself into one of the three oversize stuffed chairs that were upholstered in lambskin.
“This room is quite stark,” she said. “Is it your husband’s design?”
“No. This is the only room in the house that I’m responsible for.”
“You look very different.”
“So do you.”
“How do you mean?” Anna asked, holding her hands up a few inches, indicating the space around her as if it were a permanent aura.
“I’ve never seen yo
u outside of your office before.”
“How are you, Sandra?”
“I haven’t shaved my pussy for days. It itches.”
“What does that mean to you?”
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“You’re a visitor in my house, Anna. I’m not on your couch; I haven’t asked for a session. If you want to be a friend I’m happy to offer you some wine or mineral water. I’ll even make an omelet if you’re hungry. But I will not be psychoanalyzed in my own home—by a guest.”
Ideas and convictions were already coming out of me and I’d only written a few words in my journal.
“What happened?” Anna asked.
I told her the story of Theon and Jolie, of Big Dick and my first orgasm in years, of the gangster, the cop, and Rash Vineland, who could get me to talk like no one had in a very long time.
“I don’t want to sound like a therapist in your own home,” Anna said. “But you sound so detached. It’s like you have no connection to these tragedies or any other feelings.”
“I’m a spiritual paraplegic,” I agreed. “I’m stuck, cut off, and numb.”
Concern creased the sophisticated brow of the descendant of bloodthirsty Vikings.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“I’m broke, Anna. That’s why I didn’t return your call. Theon spent all our money, every cent, before he died. I can’t afford to see you. In a couple of months I won’t even have my own bed to sleep in.”
For a long while she stared at me. I thought that she was looking for a friendly way to excuse herself. The world we lived in was defined by the ability to pay, and I no longer had that talent. Her accent alone was enough to tell me that she couldn’t, that she wouldn’t and even shouldn’t reach out across the void of poverty.
“I work from eight in the morning until five every afternoon,” Anna said after a long span of silence. “You can choose any two mornings at six and I will be there to meet with you.”
Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) Page 7