Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (22 page)

Coco's nostrils flared. He pushed the leather bag six inches across the table in my direction. Then he stood up, refusing to look at me. I knew by this avoidance that I was safe.

As Coco walked out of the restaurant I said, “Thanks, Jude. Thanks a lot.”

“Theon knew that he could pay off Ness but he died before we saw each other. And Dick and Coco know there's no insurance in the loan-sharking business. Call me if you need anything else.”

Jude left soon after Coco. I stayed because I didn't trust my legs to carry me or my hands to steer a three-ton automobile.

I ordered pounded pork chops with brussels sprouts and new potatoes and waited for the food to come. My mother was crying somewhere in a room far away and long ago. She was crying, night after night, because my father was out with his thug friends getting into trouble, breaking the law.

When he'd come home my mother stayed in the bedroom while Aldo poured himself a drink in the dining room.

On one such evening, when I was ten, I climbed out of bed and went to see my father while his wife dried her tears and waited.

“Hey, baby girl,” he said when I walked in. He was drinking scotch and smoking a filterless cigarette.

“Daddy?”

He held out his arms and I ran to sit in his lap.

“Yeah, babe?”

“How come you stay out late with them men an' make Mama cry?”

It was a dangerous question. Aldo Peel had a bad temper and when he was mad anything could happen. I knew I was risking something terrible, but still I needed to know why my mother had to suffer.

Instead of shouting and throwing me to the floor my father laughed. He kissed my cheek and hugged me tightly.

“Does that make you mad?” he asked.

“It makes me feel bad for Mama. I don't like it for her to be so sad.”

“You don't like it and I don't neither,” he said. “You think I wanna be out in the street with them fools? You think I wouldn't rather be in the house with my wife and children?”

“Then how come you don't stay home?”

“Because I will not be a slave, dear heart.” He took a deep drag off his cigarette.

“I don't understand, Daddy.”

“This country is run by big men,” he said. “There ain't too many of 'em. Most the men in this land is little like me and all the other men an' women on this block, in this neighborhood. The big men put all the little people in cages so small that a little man or woman got to ask the big man to open the door just to turn around.”

“Like a jail?” I asked.

Aldo Peel nodded vigorously. “Except the do' ain't locked. The little man could walk outta there anytime he wanted.”

“Then why don't he?”

My father brought his face very close to mine. I remember clearly the sour scent of cigarettes and whiskey.

“Because the only way the little people could eat is to stay in that cage like the do' really was locked. Even if they just open the do' to turn around without askin' they don't eat that week.

“That's why I go out at night. That's why I run with bad men and do things they say is wrong—because I will not live in the big man's cage. I will not be his punk.”

I wanted to hold my father right then. I wanted to shield him from the big men and their power.

“Aldo,” my mother said from the doorway behind me.

My father kissed me on the lips and hugged me to his chest. There were tears in his eyes when he put me down.

My mother told me to go to bed and then took my father by his waist and walked him to their bedroom.

I didn't go to bed but instead stayed at the dining room table, sitting in the chair where my father sat. I understood something that I could not have explained, something that I would have forgotten if I had gone to bed like my mother said. I stayed up all night, until the birds were singing and the sun reached around the far corner of the earth, because I needed to hold on to the sad truth my father had transmitted to me.

I sat in the darkness, and then in light, imagining the world as long hallways of small cells holding all of my friends and their parents and all of their friends. Giant men and women with bullwhips patrolled the hallways, snapping at hands and feet that stuck out from the cells. People were crying and moaning like my mother. Electric light filtered down through the bars and I knew that there was no sunlight or moonlight anywhere in that world.

“Excuse me,” a woman said.

I looked up from my half-eaten meal to see a young white woman with bleached hair and a silver stud on the left side of her nose.

“Yes?”

“We're getting ready to close up.”

“Oh.”

I sat in the driver's seat of my car for more than an hour, afraid to turn the ignition. The scenario of the night my father kissed me kept going through my mind. I understood now, twenty years later, that X-rated moviemaking had become my cage. When Coco said that I had to work for him I realized that either I would shoot myself or him at that table. I would not, like my father would not, go back into that cold cell.

This conviction finally overcame my fears and I drove home at a normal speed, managing to keep my wheels within the lines but wanting to crash into every car and pedestrian I passed.

Anna Karin's office was on Wilshire not far from La Cienega. It was on the third floor of a boxy brown office building. I was at her gray door by five fifty the next morning, Wednesday. I knocked and, after a brief wait, she pulled the door open and smiled. She was wearing a coral-colored dress with a string of light green stone beads around her neck.

The office was as I remembered: rented furniture that was designed for function and not beauty. I'd shot many a sex scene in offices like this one, anonymous rooms that some secretary leased on the sly.

“I like your outfit,” Anna said of the tan-and-blue dress I wore.

“Thanks.”

I made it to the brown leather chair that was there for
her patients. She sat on a maple chair that had a checkered cushion as its seat. The window behind her looked out on Wilshire and there were paintings of forest scenes on three walls.

“You said that your first session was at eight, didn't you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then why did you want me here at six?”

“Because I have the feeling we might go over and I didn't want to rush you or have my next patient wait.”

“How are we going to do this?” I asked.

“Nothing has changed,” she said, smiling. “We'll talk and try to see where you are.”

“I haven't shaved my cunt or fucked anybody in over a week.”

“Hiatus?”

“I quit.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

I could see by Anna's face that she wanted to smile; maybe there was even a laugh dammed up behind her faltering professionalism.

“I think we should start from the beginning,” she suggested.

I went at the story like a novice craftsman practicing laying brick. I'd gone over it a hundred times in my head and told parts of the tale to this one and that. When I'd come to the end I'd knock it over, a child with her blocks, and then build again—each time constructing a slightly different explanation.

The events were familiar in my mouth. The only difference with Anna Karin is that I told her everything.

I included the gun and my intentions to kill or die, the fact that I knew Jolie, and even what happened between Coco and Jude.

“Did you ever want to shoot Cornell?” she asked at one point.

“No … never.”

“Are you still considering suicide?” she asked at another juncture.

“Only when I think that I might have to go back to making films.”

I'd been regaling her for well over an hour when she said, “Tell me more about this orgasm you had on the set.”

“It was nothing special.… I mean it didn't have to do with Theon or Jolie—I didn't even know that they were dead yet. It's just that … I don't know.…”

“Do you often have orgasms on the set?”

“I'm too busy pretending to have any real feeling.”

“Then why did you have one that day?”

The question was like the sounding of a huge Buddhist gong. It vibrated in the air around me. Instead of ideas the experience of that room came back to me. I could hear Carmen Alia's camera clicking and buzzing and the footsteps of the cameramen as they shifted with the gyrations Myron was putting me through. I heard Linda Love's voice but not the words, and most of all, I felt the hot lights on my skin. It was music and it was dance and I was a dead woman being flung about in the pretense of celebration
and abandon, and somewhere in the rising and falling, the lifting and heartlessness … I came alive.

“It just all came together,” I said. “The sounds and light, the pain inside me. It just all came together and I was coming harder than I ever had—ever.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“No, not at all. As a matter of fact I wanted to get away from it. It was like I passed out on purpose just to stop feeling.”

For a while there we were both quiet. I appreciated the silence and wondered why I had that sexual awakening as Theon was dying. What sense did it make? It was as if, in some cockeyed way, we traded places.

“What will you do?” Anna Karin asked me.

“I like reading books.”

“What will you do for work?”

“That'll come,” I said. “I have to finish quitting before I can start working again.”

Anna smiled then.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“See you tomorrow morning?”

“You bet.”

At nine o'clock I was at a park bench just outside the fenced-in La Brea Tar Pits, looking at the plaster statue of a great woolly mammoth stuck and being pulled down into the muck.

The red phone in the blue bag rang.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Aunt Deb,” Dr. Neelo Brown said, “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

The phone made some transfer noises and then a masculine voice said, “Hello?”

“Yes?” I said. “Who's this?”

“Willie Norman, Mrs. Pinkney.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I just wanted to thank you, ma'am, for putting me together with Dr. Brown and making it so that I could get my spells under control.”

“Neelo's been treating you?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah. I never went to no doctor before 'cause I didn't think they could do anything, but Dr. Brown gave me these pills and this light I could look at and now I'm almost perfect. So I just wanted to tell you thanks from me and, and, and Tai too. And I wanted to tell you that you don't have to worry about my car. I can fix that myself.”

“Thank you, Willie. Thanks a lot.”

“And I wanted to say that I'm sorry about your husband. I'm sorry he died.”

Anna Karin asked me if I wanted to kill myself and I told her that the idea entered my mind only when I thought about making films again. But I realized later that that wasn't the case, I wrote in my pilfered journal:
The truth is I'm thinking about it all the time. It's like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that
door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop—no, not only confusion but pain too
.

In Anna's office I realized that fucking Myron Palmer somehow jump-started me back to life like a woman finding herself suddenly awake after years and years in a coma. It hurts to feel all these things and to know that all I have to do is shut them off again and the pain will stop
.

Just breathing hurts me. Feeling love for my son hurts me. The idea of the sun shining cuts at me with red-hot blades.…

The phone was ringing again.

“Hello,” I whispered.

“Deb? It's Bertha, Bertha Renoir.”