There were debt collectors sitting across from the sofa, each with a briefcase full of bills that they wanted me to pay; each hiding an erection in his pants, as interest—these two words, erection and interest, hung in the air unrealized and definite.
I was lying there in the darkness but I could see everything quite clearly. I was attempting to trace my steps backward from the parking lot just south of Hollywood Boulevard where I gave blow jobs for fifteen dollars and was just about to meet Theon. I was trying to back into the life with my mother and brothers, my stepsister and long-ago friends Maxine, Oura, Maryanne, and Juan.
I was walking backward, away from the smelly john’s car, down La Cienega Boulevard, past the vice squad police cars headed up toward the avenue. I was going backward in time but everything else was going forward. It was very awkward, moving in reverse through life, but I kept it up because I couldn’t live on the path I’d already traveled. I got all the way back to my mother’s house, my childhood home.
I walked backward through the front door. In the entranceway Cornell had a baseball in his hand but decided not to throw it at me. He looked confused and I smiled at him, moving past him in time and space, avoiding his tortures.
I made it all the way to the living room. There I stopped and found myself once again on the sleeping sofa in Delilah’s house almost twenty years later. The front door banged open and my father staggered in, bleeding from the bullet wound in his chest. The debt collectors scattered. Theon stopped complaining.
“Daddy!” I screamed, and he fell on me, bleeding and choking on the blood.
I came awake in the dark room no longer able to see through the gloom. I was panting, a prayer fragment in my mind. “… and protect Mama and Daddy from harm.”
My red phone showed me that it was four twenty-six in the morning. I stood up, feeling dizzy and weak. I sat down and thirty minutes passed in what felt like an instant. I stood up again and dressed.
It was six-oh-one when I got to Anna Karin’s gray door that morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been late for an appointment.
Anna smiled when she opened the door and moved her body in such a way as to invite me in.
I went to the brown leather seat as she sat in the straight-backed maple chair.
“I’ve been thinking of suicide every other minute since I left yesterday morning,” I said.
“Really? Are you seriously considering it?”
“No,” I lied, “not really. It’s just in my mind after we talked about it. Why do you think that is?”
“What do you think?”
“I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I’m willing to die no one can master me.”
“Do you feel that people are trying to control you?”
“Dead people,” I agreed. “Theon and my father mainly. They have a hold on my heart. I can’t seem to get away from them no matter what I do.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t try to pull away,” Anna said. “Maybe you should face their deaths and come to terms with the reality.”
“The reality is that I’m more a part of them than I am a part of anything in this world. I went to see my son, Edison, last night. He was so happy. He wants to be with me, but I know that he’d be better off with Delilah.”
“But you’re his mother.”
“And what do I say to him when he sees me doing a gangbang scene with three guys inside me at the same time? What can I do for him when his friends laugh and call his mother a whore?”
“You love him and tell him that you made mistakes. You tell him the truth and he will understand. Maybe not at first. But a boy will love his mother no matter what.”
“I just don’t feel like I belong,” I said. “I thought when I had that orgasm on the set that that was the moment I could let go. I mean, I felt what it was like to be just a regular girl even through all that I’d done. But then I got home and Theon was dead and all our money was gone. I tried to go home but even there I didn’t really fit. My mother feels guilty and even my brother Newland made me feel like some kind of alien.”
“But I thought you two got along so well,” Anna said.
“Yeah. He loves me but the life he’s living has nothing to do with where I come from. We don’t have anything in common.
“It’s really only my brother Cornell whom I have any sympathy with. I understand why he hates me. I know in my heart that he’d feel better if I were dead. You can see it in the way he looks at me and in the way I look at myself in the mirror.
“I’m just fucked-up and there’s no way I can undo it. There’s no going back and I can’t move ahead.
“You know how people say, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s missing’?”
“Yes.”
“The few friends I have would miss me if I was gone but they don’t know me. They look at me and see something they need or want. They see somebody that they would rather be but I’m not even that woman. They’d miss me but they don’t know who I am.”
With that I had finished my truth telling for that morning.
While Anna was digesting the words I noticed a huge vulturelike bird perched on the roof of the office building across the street. At first I thought that it might be a statue, some kind of public art piece, but then it shifted.
I worried that maybe the bird was a hallucination, that if I pointed it out it might give Anna reason to have me committed. I couldn’t allow that—not when I was so close to understanding.
I glanced at the kind woman. She gave me a quizzical look. She realized that I was looking out the window. The bird, whatever it was (or wasn’t), decided at that moment to spread its great wings and leap from the rooftop. It seemed to bounce on an invisible current of air. Anna turned to look but before she could the creature lifted up beyond our line of sight.
It was gone.
“What were you looking at?” the therapist asked.
“Nothing,” I said, “just the empty roof.”
“Were you thinking of jumping off?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“A big bird,” I said, “might be on its way somewhere. It could have stopped there to rest and then gone on. That building wasn’t put there for birds to rest on. It’s civilized and humanized but the bird doesn’t know any of that. She just knew she was tired and had to rest for a little while before going on to where her instincts told her.”
“I’m worried about you, Sandra.”
“You shouldn’t be, Anna. I’m on my way. I’ve been places I don’t belong and now I’m just moving on.”
“I’d like to prescribe an antidepressant for you,” she replied.
“If you think I need it—sure.”
My acquiescence seemed to soothe her worry. From there we talked about my father again and how bereft my whole family was at his death.
“It was like a bomb went off in the living room,” I said, “and we were all suffering from shell shock from then on.”
“Does Theon’s death bring up these memories of your father?”
This question was simple and seemingly unobtrusive—at first. I considered it. Theon was an outlaw too, in his own way. I had loved him as women love men in the beginning.
But did his death compare to my father’s? Was his stupid demise an echo of Aldo Peel’s reckless existence?
My father was a warrior, I thought, while Theon was a pimp and a whore. I was that real or imagined bird on the roof across the street from the woman pretending to be me. And Anna was everybody else, recording the complex interrelationships of men and women out there beyond the definitions of who and what and how we should be.
Theon was what Dickens would have called a swollen boy with an engorged member as his cross to bear. Daddy was a street fighter searching for and finding his manhood in back alleys and barroom fights.
“Sandra?” Anna said.
I looked up and out the window expecting
to see a whole flock of condors waiting for me to join them or feed them. But the rooftop was empty.
“I have to go,” I said.
“What were you thinking?”
“I don’t have any answers, Anna. You can call in the prescription to Beacher’s Pharmacy in Pasadena. I’ll pick it up when I get home.”
Anna tried to continue our unwieldy conversation but I needed to leave. I stood up and waded through her questions to the door. Before I left I told her about the funeral and said that it would be good for her to come.
Driving back toward my home I got a call.
“Yes?”
“Sandra?”
“Hey, Rash. Are you coming to the funeral?”
“I am.”
“Is there something wrong?”
“I told Annabella about you.”
“Your girlfriend?”
“She’s pretty mad. It kinda surprised me. I mean, for the last year or so she’s been totally distracted and kept on telling me how things weren’t working. Now it’s like we were married and I was cheating on her.”
“If you can’t come I’ll understand,” I said.
“No,” he said, “I want to be there with you, I mean for you. I need to be there.”
“What if you lose Annabella?”
“Then I won’t have to leave her.”
Maybe I should have said something then. It seemed clear that Rash was using me as the element of change in his life. Rather than just telling Annabella that he wanted to leave he was presenting me as the reason. Maybe I should have said for him to go figure out his relationship with her before coming to me.
But I felt so far away from anything except the actions I had to take that I wasn’t worried about my hapless suitor. Maybe I even felt a little complimented that a man working in the real world would leave a pretty UCLA grad student for me.
Anyway, I’d be dead soon and then Rash could use me as a memory.
“Okay,” I said. “If you get there early we can talk before the ceremony.”
I drove out to LeRoy’s Chicken and Waffle House and ordered two full meals. I ate at an outside table, scanning the skies for that big bird. I didn’t see it but, I thought, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
After eating I went to a big toy store in Santa Monica and bought Edison a boy’s computer that had learning games and a place to keep his diary.
By the time I got home I was happy. There was a silly grin on my face and a lightness in my spirit that I hadn’t felt since I was a little girl. I wasn’t worried about leg breakers or bill collectors, letting down my family, or the loss of people I loved or might have loved.
Even my breathing was cheerful. The air felt good coming in and going out. My entire life had been leading to this moment. No one could take it away. I didn’t have to run or hide or pretend I was somewhere else while a man shoved his nine-inch-long, four-inch-wide dick into my rectum.
The feeling I had was exactly the same as when a young girl falls in love. I was in love with the beauty of finality and I had Theon to thank for that.
I got three sheets of paper from the office desk and sat down to write the eulogy. I sat there for hours writing slowly and surely. I didn’t cross out a word. I wrote the whole thing in medium blue ink from an old-fashioned ballpoint pen. It was a retractable that I had taken from a Best Western motel when we had used a room on the sly to shoot the final scene of Debbie Does It All.
It was well past midnight when I finished the tribute. I slid from the chair onto the carpeted floor and smiled at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and was instantly asleep.
That was the best night of sleep I ever had—ever. It was dreamless and seamless, dark and soft. Any lingering trepidations I had about death were dispersed by the peaceful ecstasy of those eight hours.
I still had a few sore spots from the beating Coco gave me but the pain would end. I felt sadness about Theon and my son, my mother, and others but I knew that the dead were gone and the living could go on without me—had been doing so for years.
It was a lovely, balmy morning. I went barefoot out upon the blue-green grass that Theon cultivated just outside our dinette. He shaded that small lawn from the summer sun and made sure that it was well watered and cooled even in the L.A. desert.
The spiky blades tickled my bare soles, exhilarating me. I was naked out there. No one could see me and that was fine.
I couldn’t remember the last time that I had solitude. I mean, I’d been alone often enough, but to know that I didn’t have to strip down and oil up, to take a preparatory enema for the afternoon shoot, to manicure every square inch of flesh, nail, and hair …
I bathed for an hour listening to Mingus, my father’s absolute favorite musician. I used lavender bubble bath and thought about Perry Mendelson. While I was sitting there, luxuriating, it struck me that I hadn’t turned on the security system. Maybe I was reminded because I might have heard something behind the jazz. The sound, I thought, might have registered without my awareness, because the moment I thought it Richard Ness walked into the bathroom—the same room where my husband had died with the child I could not save.
“Dick,” I said, only mildly surprised.
“I told you I don’t like people calling me that.” He was wearing a shit-brown suit and a green Borsalino hat.
“And I said that I don’t like you.”
“You owe me money, bitch.”
“I thought you sold the debt to Manetti?”
“He gave it back. He said that you had my money now and I’m here to collect. I came here to see your green or your red.”
“How festive.” I had to hold back to keep from laughing.
My obvious good humor disconcerted him.
“Why you got to be like that, Deb?” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“How can we ever come to an understanding if you lie to me, Dick?”
“Say what?”
“You want to hurt me but you know if I die Jude Lyon will be unhappy. And if he’s unhappy you might get damaged.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with him,” he said.
“But it does, sweetheart. It has to. You’re mad and you’re scared, so you came here to bully me to show that you can’t be bossed around.”
I’d hit the bull’s-eye on Ness’s shame. He grimaced and considered mayhem.
“You know I’m gonna have to kill you,” he said.
“I know that you want to, Dick. The only question is if you’re brave enough to murder an unarmed woman in her bath.”
He was like a lover who couldn’t perform. Everything but Dick’s dick was willing. He sat down on the toilet seat and glowered at me.
“You are one crazy bitch.”
“Yeah.”
Warm steam was rising from my tub. My breath was still magical.
“I’m gonna go through your house and take enough stuff to make my nut offa Theon.”
“Be my guest,” I said. “I don’t own this house or anything in it. I don’t want it, and besides, Theon has everything in hock. Take it all, Dick. I don’t care about it or you. You can take everything, but I will call the cops and tell ’em you did it. I sure will.”
Ness stood up and took a pistol from a shit-brown pocket. It was a small revolver made to look even smaller by his big hand. He pulled back the hammer as I had done with him a few mornings before.
I smiled and then grinned.
“You know what I’m gonna do, right?” he said.
I fluttered my eyelashes at him. It was the pretense of innocence that I’d used in a dozen films where I was some chaste child about to be indoctrinated into a brutal carnal world.
Dick raised his arm, leveled the pistol.
He fired. It sounded like a cap gun. Shards of shattered tile pelted my left shoulder from behind.
“You missed,” I told him.
He fired again, this time to my right.
“Maybe you should get a little closer, Dick.”
I fully expected to die in that same bathtub where my husband expired, in the place where Jolie Wins had electrocuted them both. I could have saved myself. I could have begged. I had the money for Ness in the trunk of my car. I didn’t need it. But I wasn’t going to give in. He would have to kill me and I didn’t give a damn.
Dick’s face, already crushed from a lifetime of angry blows, fell in on itself. He lowered the pistol and shook his head.
I wondered if he was looking inside himself for the strength to murder me. I had given him enough reason, enough disrespect. But he just turned around and walked out of the bathroom. I had no idea of the content of the chain reaction of emotions set off inside him.
It was late in the afternoon before I was ready to go out again. I drove my Jaguar down to Threadley Brothers Mortuary. Talia Dean was sitting at the stone desk.
Talia was young and waiflike. Her loose tie-dyed hippie dress and white sandals made her an anomaly in the house of the dead. But there was something perfect about that odd juxtaposition of intense life moving among the shadows of death.
“Hello, Mrs. Pinkney,” the young woman said.
She rose and came around the marble slab to shake my hand. After this friendly and oddly perfunctory welcome she leaned forward and hugged me.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered in my ear.
Then she leaned back and stared into my eyes.
I tried to smile at her. Maybe I succeeded.
“Lewis is downstairs with your husband,” brown-haired Talia said. “I can call him and ask if he’s ready for you to come down.”
I nodded. We both went to sit at the Fred Flintstone desk. While she pressed the right buttons to get to Lewis, my red phone rang.
“Hello,” I said.
“Lewis?” Talia said on her line.
“Sandra?” Marcia Pinkney said over the red phone.
“Can Mrs. Pinkney come down to view her husband?” Talia asked.
“I decided to take you up on your offer,” Marcia said.
“She’s right here,” Talia said.
“… to come and see Theon,” Marcia concluded.
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