Walter Mosley: Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

His fists clenched and I took in a deep breath — ready to scream.

I was counting on the fact that Theon always said that Richard was an intelligent man in spite of his looks.

His hands unclenched and he took in a deep breath.

“He owes me seventy-two grand.”

“Can you prove it?”

“He signed my book.”

“You got it on you?”

“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.