Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (9 page)

“Hm,” I mused. “How are you, Lana?”

“What?”

“How are you?”

“I understand that your husband's dead and all, baby, but you have commitments.”

“Who's that guy?” I said. “The carpenter that works on the sets on all Linda's shoots?”

“Richie,” Lana answered, upset to be derailed from her line of questioning.

“Richie—that's right. Call him and ask him to fix the window you guys broke. There's an extra set of keys in the knife drawer in the kitchen. The security code for the alarm system is
bilbo
.”

The bubbles were rising quickly and so Perry chanced a glance in my direction.

“We've identified the woman who was with your husband,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Her name was Myrtle May. She was a minor from out near Barstow.”

“And how did she know my husband?”

“We haven't figured that out yet.”

“Hm.”

“Myrtle's mother told us that she found out about her daughter's death from a black woman who came to her home in the late hours of the night a few days ago.”

“Really? And what does that have to do with her identity?”

“Was it you?”

“No.”

I expected the tightening of his eyes. Seeing this expression made me smile.

“Would you like to put me in a lineup?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“You seem to think I'm lying.”

“What about Linda?” Lana asked me.

“You know, Lana, dear, I haven't shaved my pussy in three days—no, five. It's all stubbly.”

“Deb,” she pleaded.

“No, honey. I'm not going back. Theon was my husband and I have to bury him and then … then I have to settle his affairs.”

“You have to work,” Lana said, taking on the unwieldy mantle of maturity and logic.

I put my feet up on either side of the tub and laid my head back against the edge. I was still exhausted.

“You haven't met the woman who works harder than I do, babe. You know it; I know it; Linda fuckin' Love does too. I'm tired, I'm broke, my husband is dead, and I need a moment. Like that guy with the candy bar on the TV commercial.”

Perry Mendelson was staring at me now that my nakedness was mostly covered. He was feeling something—what, I couldn't tell.

“Linda's gonna be mad,” Lana said again, “real mad.”

I wanted to say more but I was too tired under the hot water. I closed my eyes for a minute or so and when I opened them again Lana had gone.

Perry was still there though, still staring.

“Was it you who went out to Barstow in the middle of the night?”

“No.”

“I'm not trying to get you in trouble. There's no crime in notifying parents that their daughter has died.”

“There is if I was aware of what my husband was doing with an underage minor.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“I just want to know what happened.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It's my job.” The words sounded feeble—no, they sounded distant, as if the man who spoke them had moved past that identity but had not yet picked up a new one.

I realized then that he had somehow identified with me, that the last vestiges of his professionalism had deduced that I had shed an identity the night my husband died.

“Do you want to fuck me, Lieutenant Perry?”

“It's not like that,” he said. “That's not why I'm here.”

“That's not why you're in a woman's bathroom when she's naked in her tub?”

“You asked me in.”

“Do you do everything a woman says?”

Anger replaced innocent confusion in his face.

I laughed. It wasn't a pretty sound.

Perry turned and walked away without another word.

I didn't miss him or Lana. I liked them both but they wanted answers that I either did not have or found intolerable. I was no longer able to function as a proxy for other people's desires.

My life, I felt, was like moisture on the cars and leaves, gates and painted walls of morning. I was evaporating like that dew and I had only a few minutes of life to say good-bye.

I considered putting my head under the water and breathing in. I'd known whores who had killed themselves in that manner.

But I was too drained even to want death. It was too much work to die—hardly worth the effort.

“I want my money,” Richard Ness said.

There were one hundred and thirty-nine messages on
my phone. He counted for sixteen of them. He never really made a threat, because he knew that could be used against him. He didn't even say my name, just that he wanted his money. In court he could have said that he was calling Theon. He had no proof that my husband was dead. Lieutenant Mendelson hadn't even shown him a badge.

There were dozens of messages from sex workers who had known Theon either through me or from doing business with him. Prince Spear, Mocha Elan, Aphrodite Affair, Darlenee Fox, Johnny “On the Spot” Myles, and many others left their condolences on the tape.

“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 forgotten 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.”