Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (5 page)

“I could just take your key and drive your Humvee outta here.”

“Then I'd call the cops and you can play Grand Theft Auto with the other fools in jail.”

It was a dangerous game but Richard was forcing it. He wasn't the kind of guy who gave away anything—no real loan shark is. They always move straight ahead; that's why they called them sharks.

“I'll call you,” he said.

“And we'll meet someplace public,” I added. “Not here. If I see your ass here again I'll put a cap in it.”

I should have gone back in the house and had some tea after Richard left for the second time. My body chemistry was way off and I needed to calm down. But the adrenaline in my blood wouldn't let me even try to relax.

On La Brea just south of Wilshire I tried to change lanes without putting on the blinker and smacked into a navy blue Saab. I pulled to the curb and waited. The young black man driving the Saab jerked his car up behind mine and leaped out. He walked around, assessing the damage to his car in a herky-jerky manner that would have been funny if I didn't know what had just happened.

I climbed over to the passenger's side and emerged slowly, perusing the damage to his car and mine.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” he shouted.

There was good reason for his rage. My car barely had a scratch while his was pretty torn up. Theon had an ornamental pipe running along the side of his car. This garish accessory gouged a deep gash along the side of the Swedish-made car.

A young Asian girl, who was at least seven months pregnant, got out of the Saab. She waddled up next to the lanky driver, willing him, it seemed, to calm down.

“I was in the wrong,” I said. “I'm very sorry.”

“It was your fault!” he hollered.

“That's what she said, Willie,” the girl murmured.

“Stay out of this, Tai.”

“We should trade insurance numbers,” I suggested.

Tai was staring at my face.

“What the hell are you gonna do about my car?” he replied.

“We can wait for the police to come if you want,” I said
calmly. I didn't want the police there. I never much liked being around cops.

“Willie,” Tai said.

His eyes were bulging and a tremor was going through his thin frame.

“Willie,” pregnant Tai said, some fear now in her voice.

I wondered if I should be afraid, if Willie was about to lose his mind and kill me right there on La Brea.

Then the young man fell to his knees.

“Help me,” Tai cried. She went down too, grabbing Willie by his left arm.

“What's wrong with him?” I asked.

“Seizures,” she said. “He has them sometimes when he gets upset.”

I suspected that Tai was not from the United States, though she certainly spoke English well enough. Maybe she was from some ex–English colony somewhere. I say this because any good Angeleno would know that I could take the knowledge of his condition and use it against him in traffic court.

“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.