Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

The extra-wide door of the mortuary swung inward and the lean mortician bowed for me to enter.

“Let’s go to my office,” he said with a wan and yet somehow a profound smile. Or maybe I was just reading things into every gesture and motion; maybe the only truth in my world was a fabrication perpetrated by a state of shock.

He led me through the barren stone room to a small hallway. At the end of this shabby lane of coffin-lid-thin doors we came to a small elevator. It was crowded in there with just the two of us.

The vestibule moved slowly past the second floor and the third. I could hear Dardanelle’s bellowslike breath coming slowly and strong.

“He wants to what?” I had asked Theon one evening when he had come home from planning the burial of Sack “Big Daddy” Pounds.

“He wants to have sex with you in this special coffin he keeps in a room next to his office,” Theon said, as if my answer were a foregone conclusion. “He says that he’ll give us Sack’s coffin at half off if we do.”

“We?”

Passing the fourth floor of the six-story house of death I was brought back to the night Theon expected me to whore for his dead friend. I considered walking out, calling Theon a bastard, breaking the glass I held in my hand. It wasn’t so much that I was appalled by Lewis or by having sex with someone and being paid for it. Almost every woman I knew considered the monetary value of the man she took off her clothes for.

What upset me was the thought of having to fuck for money after I died (even if that death was only a metaphor), of being lowered into a coffin and having some man with a hard-on put on top of me instead of a cool muslin shroud.

I wanted to scream and run from the image Theon had conjured up for our death-house discount, but instead a pastel calm came over me.

“Theon,” I said, looking into his eyes with my head cocked and my fake blue eyes beaming.

He saw in me the turmoil of a life under hot lights, of marriage to a man who was sometimes no better than a pimp, of sores and viruses and intimacies that no living being could endure without some kind of protection.

I saw my thoughts roll around behind his eyes and he saw me observing his most vulnerable insights.

“I’m sorry, babe,” he said.

When we went to bed that night he held me and kissed my neck.

There was a cricket somewhere in the house calling out for a mate. I smiled at the memory of a husband who, for all his flaws, managed to get it right every once in a while.

“Here we are,” Lewis Dardanelle said.

The elevator had stopped and the towering man was holding the door for me.

I wondered why I wasn’t afraid. Why hadn’t I, in years, felt the tremors of fear around violent men who hated women with their sex and their words?

Slap her tits while you’re fucking that cunt , one director said in every scene I did for him, and I did four scenes a day, three days a week for eighteen months.

Dardanelle’s office contained the dark and cool calm of a peaceful dream about to end. His desk was white ash and there were paintings of flowers hung on every wall. There was no bookcase, just a round oak table with various religious texts strewn upon it.

“Let’s sit at the table,” Lewis said, gesturing for me to choose a seat.

He sat after I did, lacing his arachnidlike fingers and smiling just under the threshold of humor.

“We have received sixty-eight thousand dollars in cash and credit card accounts,” he said, explaining the smile’s nature with these words.

“That’s wonderful.”

“We could take the big chapel up at Day’s Rest.”

“I like the idea of having the service near the grave,” I said. “How many people have given money?”

“Four hundred and ninety-eight.”

“Then we should plan on a service for, say... seven hundred?”

“Yes.”

“I guess the big room would be appropriate then.”

“Yes. Would you like to view coffins this evening?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I want him in a plain pine box, Lew. Light wood with no flourishes, no finish, if you can find something like that.”

“I’m sure we have something.”

“Take what’s left from the service and get Talia to see to the catering at our house. You have the address?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get Lana Leer to call Talia. I’ll give Lana the key, so all they have to do is work out the logistics.”

Dardanelle and I were as peaceful as the grave; there was no conflict among the dead.

We sat there in the soft light of the silent office. Now and then an errant sound wafted up from the street.

I don’t remember leaving Threadley’s that evening: not standing up from the round table or saying good night, not thanking Lewis for the work he and Talia had done or filling out the papers that I must have signed. The next thing I knew I was pulling into my driveway, wondering if Richard Ness would be waiting for me.

The night passed like waves that back up on themselves and then press forward again. This feeling was in the form of dreams and half-conscious musings. The ideas from both states of awareness traded places, moved back and forth almost as if I were a fabricated notion of some other being who had conjured me as a character in fiction or a play.

The character, me — young Sandy Peel — was fifteen and on the run from the police. I had been giving blow jobs in a parking lot south of Hollywood Boulevard and the cops were cracking down on that activity. My best friend at the time, Amy Chapman, had been arrested and sent to jail for thirty days even though she was my age.

I saw the cops and they saw me. I went through a wire gate into an alley that split into three directions. I went straight ahead, climbed into a backyard where a dog tried to bite me, and made it to the boulevard. I walked into a chain coffee shop and took a seat at a table where a man was drinking expensive coffee served in a paper cup.

“Excuse me,” I said to the gentleman. “Can I sit here with you for a little while?”

“You solo?” he asked.

“Huh?”

He smiled at my naïveté.

His smile made me mad and I would have gotten up and left, but I saw the uniforms that had been chasing me right outside the coffee shop window.

The man saw my fear and its source with a glance and moved his chair so that his body blocked me from being seen.

“My name is Theon Pinkney,” he said.

He was around forty, ancient to my teenage eyes, wearing gray slacks and a maroon dress shirt open to show off his chest hair.

“I’m Debbie Dare,” I said, making up a whole new life then and there.

“My car’s in the parking lot out back,” he said. “Would you like me to drive you somewhere?”

“Out from this life into another one where a girl could hit a break,” I said.

I had heard these words from Mela David, an older prostitute who sometimes threw work our way. If all a guy wanted was a fifteen-dollar blow job, she’d send him to the parking lot that Amy and I haunted.

Theon smiled and gestured toward the back of the restaurant with his right hand. He wore three thick gold rings, with a single gem embedded in each: one ruby, one emerald, and a yellow diamond. The brightness of those jewels took my breath away.

He drove a red Rolls with the softest calfskin seats I ever sat in.

He reached over and pulled my seat belt on for me. This was also a first in my experience. Every other time I got in a strange man’s car it was to suck his dick, and you couldn’t do that in a harness.

As he turned left onto Hollywood he asked, “Now, where is this life you were talking about?”

“Where you live at?” I asked, and he smiled again.

“Do you know who I am?”