I nodded uncertainly and bit into my fancy French pastry.
“Who beat you, Deb?”
I decided to stay Deb with Jude. I also, somewhat contradictorily, determined not to lie to him.
“I’d really rather not say.”
He nodded.
“I never trusted you,” he said. “I always thought that you were using Theon somehow. I guess it was because I was so enchanted with him. He was quite a guy. Crazy and lost but he could be a good friend. He never told you about what I did?”
“Never.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Why would it? I knew you guys were friends. Even if it was more than that, we never had an exclusive relationship—sexually. How could we? I have lots of friends who tell me secrets that I’m not supposed to tell. If it didn’t have to do with Theon directly, he didn’t expect to know them, and neither did I.”
Again Jude took a sip of his coffee. He watched me as an infant might study some new person who had come into his line of sight.
“Are you wired?” he asked.
“No.”
He took a bite of bread and wondered some more.
“I need to know who beat you, Deb. I owe Theon at least that much.”
Something in his tone reassured me. I had kept quiet about the gangster because I didn’t think that anyone could help me with him. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“Coco Manetti.”
“From Manhattan Beach?”
“I don’t know where he’s from. Theon owed Richard Ness money, but when he came to collect I pulled a gun on him. I guess he got scared, ’cause he sold the debt to Manetti.”
“How much you owe him?”
I told him.
“Theo invested money with me,” Jude said, “in one of my businesses. That’s what I do. I take investments, buy product, and distribute. A certain percentage goes back to my investors. I was thinking, because Theon died, that the profit would stay with me, but I guess the money he gave me was yours, huh?”
“I was the only one making a salary.”
“I can have what you owe Manetti in an hour. You could call him and make a six-o’clock meeting at a place I know—the Black Forest Restaurant.”
“Uh … okay.”
I didn’t tell Jude that I knew what the cops suspected him of. I didn’t expect to get the money I owed Manetti. I really didn’t know what I was doing. But I couldn’t refuse the cash. Getting Manetti off my back would ease my life greatly.
Using the number he called me from, I called Manetti from the coffee shop.
“Yeah?” he answered.
“It’s Theon’s wife,” I said.
“You ready to do what I asked?”
“Meet me at six at the Black Forest Restaurant on Melrose.”
“This better not be some trick,” he said.
After the call I drove Jude to a house in the Bel-Air area. He went in and came out with a small satchel.
“This is a hundred and twenty-seven thousand,” he said, “in two packages. The one with the blue X on it is seventy-two thousand. The other one contains the rest. Now you can drop me off at the playhouse, go meet Coco, and settle the debt.”
“It doesn’t feel that easy.”
“It will be,” Jude said with a conviction I found it hard to deny.
Jude’s certainty lost its strength when I was sitting at the mostly empty restaurant. It was an open room with a broad west-facing window. Light poured in over the potted bamboo plants placed here and there to break up the seating. I was sipping a merlot with the black leather satchel on my lap.
After dropping Jude off at Bread and Chocolate I stopped in a garage and took the plastic-wrapped package without the blue X and put it in the trunk. For a full fifteen minutes I considered picking up Edison and going to Texas or North Carolina to start a new life. But I couldn’t put my son in that kind of jeopardy and I wouldn’t leave without him.
That was an important moment for me. I realized if I were to survive, I needed to be with my boy.
I had no idea who his father was. Because of his dark coloring I supposed that he was a black man. There were about thirty possibilities. For some reason my birth-control regimen had been thrown off and somebody’s sperm made it through the war zone of my womb.
Theon was great while I was pregnant. He took on some directing jobs and spent the rest of his time at home. He wanted to keep Edison, but even if Cornell hadn’t threatened to call child services, I knew that our lifestyle would not be good for a kid.
“Ms. Dare,” a man said. It was Coco. He was wearing a gray suit that gave the impression that it was made of metal. He smiled and sat down across from me, an evil Tin Man from an alternate Oz.
I tried to speak but failed. I realized that coming there was a mistake. The leer on Manetti’s face told me that he now saw me as submissive. I had to suppress the urge to shoot him then and there.
“You ready to make some movies?”
“I got you your money,” I said, hefting the little satchel and placing it on the table.
“Seventy-two thousand?” he said as he shifted in his chair.
“Yes.”
“What about the interest?”
“What interest?”
“Two thousand dollars a day late fees. That’s eight thousand more.”
“Can I bring you something to drink?” a waiter asked Manetti. He seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“Go away,” Coco said.
“Can I get you another glass of wine?” the waiter then asked me.
“Didn’t I tell you to go away?” Coco asked.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, sir,” the server said quite pleasantly. “I was speaking to the lady.”
“You better get the fuck away from here.”
The waiter might have been a fool but I appreciated him. He waited to see if I had anything to add and, when I didn’t, he walked off at a leisurely pace.
“One way or another you’re going to work for me,” Coco said.
“No.”
“You need to make a film for a friend of mine,” he said, “to pay your vig. We got it all set up. The shoot starts next Monday.”
“I can’t do that, Mr. Manetti.”
“No? The next time I beat on you there won’t be anyone around to stop me.”
“Hello, Coco,” someone said.
He was standing right next to us but neither of us had any inkling of his approach. It was Jude in a very nice, dark Armani suit. He smiled as the waiter from before pulled a chair up to the table.
Coco was so surprised that he didn’t respond.
“Deb,” Jude said in greeting.
“Hey, Jude.” I liked saying that.
“What are you doing here?” Coco asked, if not with deference at least with respect.
“This is my restaurant. I own the place.”
“We’re doing some business,” Coco said, trying to regain control at the table.
“I didn’t know that you had anything to do with Deb. What’s in the bag?”
“Nuthin’.”
“I only ask,” Jude said, “because I gave a bag just like that to Deb only an hour ago. We’re very good friends, you know. Very close.”
Coco gave me an evil stare.
“I don’t appreciate people fucking with my friends,” Jude added. “I don’t like it when they try to extort them either.”
“I bought her debt.”
“You bought Theon Pinkney’s debt. Deb never borrowed a cent, did she?”
“Listen, man—”
“I asked you a question in my house,” Jude said, cutting the gangster off.
Again Coco was silent.
“You know me, Coco,” Jude said in a soothing tone. “I’m a fair guy. I don’t push people around. I mind my own business. But Theon was my friend and Deb here is too. You have no reason to make her pay for an act of God; neither does Dick Ness.”
“So what you sayin’, Jude?”
“What do you want?”
“Give Deb her money back and tell Dick from me that he should repay you. If he doesn’t like that he knows where to find me. If he needs a friend in some of his work he can call me then too. How’s that?”
“I’ve wasted time on this.”
“Time lived is an eternal blessing,” Jude Lyon quoted from somewhere.
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?”
Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) Page 16
