Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

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.

“So you forgive Theon like I did Derek?”

“I fuck for a living, Rhon. You know the best thing Theon could do for me after a hard day was make me some chamomile tea and rub between my toe bones.”

Hearing this Rhonda took on an expression of confusion wrapped in pity.

My hair was dark brown and wavy and the tattoo was almost completely gone. Rhonda explained that the dyes used over the years to maintain the white circle and disk had stained the skin and that it would take a while for the pale shadow to recede.

On my way to the accounting offices of Mintoff and Myers I called a number that Theon’s car phone knew by heart.

“Threadley Brothers Mortuary,” a woman said with liveliness you wouldn’t expect from an undertaker.

“Hi, I’m calling about Theon Pinkney. This is his wife.”

“Oh yes. We have the remains and were wondering what to do.”

“I want to come in around six to make the arrangements. Will Lewis be there?”

“Yes, Mrs. Pinkney,” the woman said. Even though I’d never gone by the name Pinkney, I liked the anonymity of its usage. It was as if I were somebody else — hiding in plain sight.

I drove straight down Pico toward the ocean. When I got to Lincoln I turned left and went for about a mile or so. On the way no one tooted their horns or made lewd gestures as was often the case. My look had been so unique and pornography was so widely viewed that I was more recognizable than most movie stars. Men (and women) asked for my autograph, honked their horns, and offered me money to show my breasts — I didn’t always refuse them.

Chas Mintoff and Darla Myers’s office was on the second floor of a shabby building three blocks up from the beach. They were both surfers and musicians. Sometimes they were lovers. Now and again I joined them. But our only real connection was that they were honest accountants who took care of our investments.

“Hey, Deb,” Juana Juarez, the receptionist, greeted. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Juana was the color of amber, freckled, and afflicted with a smile that would not be dominated. If she knew about my work she refused to comment on it. If I ever needed a friend she would have been the person I would have chosen.

“Are they in?” I asked.