Mexico Is Forever

by Benjamin M. Schutz

  I set the photographs in front of me. Five sets of before-and-afters. The first was a front shot waist to shoulder. If Ellen Piersall was correct and she’d had implants, then she had them done elsewhere. Both photos were identical. I went back to the file. Listed as a procedure was bilateral mammoplasty. Next to it was a note: Cancel. Patient has elected to leave implants in. The next photo was a waist to shoulder of a woman’s back. A tattoo, about the size of a softball, decorated her left shoulder. The fax wasn’t great, so I couldn’t tell what it was. A thicket of thorny roses, perhaps. The after photo showed the area without artwork. The third set was a narrow band of the hips and pubic area. On the left side of her pubis was a tattoo. A kitten, its tail straight up, looking back toward the labia with wide-open saucer eyes. The after photo was without adornment. Then came the before-and-afters for Sarabeth Timmons’s face, front and profile. Her hair was wavy and long in both photos. The file said she was a brunette. She didn’t want even the doctor to know what she would finally look like.

  Sarabeth Timmons had been an attractive woman before. It was hard to tell what he’d done to the face at first glance. Then it emerged. Higher cheekbones, a thinner straighter nose, a squarer jaw. The effect wasn’t in the features but in changing the overall shape of her face. The cheeks now drew you to the large eyes. The chin was more harmonious with her full lips. Her original more angular chin had given her a lush-lipped, small-mouthed look. A perpetual pout. The profile was more telling. The nose had a little uplift now, the chin was stronger. What had been good he’d made better.

  I stroked my beard. Now I had a face and a body. Down to her crotch, at least. How to turn that into a name? She liked her new breasts, so she left them alone. She wanted a new face so she took great pains and cost to change an already attractive one. I thought about what she’d done. She must have been in pain and bandages for about a month. And alone in that furnished room. I scribbled a note to get the address from Ellen Piersall. Maybe she’d had someone come in to help her some of the time. I thought about some of my surgeries. None was as extensive as hers. On my own I don’t think I could have made it. She either had friends here or was one tough cookie.

  She had two tattoos and she’d had them removed. Obviously, they were distinctive. If she wore anything sleeveless or backless the tangle of roses would be visible. No halters, no bathing suits. Wait a minute. I pulled out the photos of her pubis and its neighbor. Any respectable bikini bottom would cover that. Who the hell was going to see that? The only people who would recognize it would have seen her buck naked and close up. How many people could that be? Most likely they were all in California anyway. Then it hit me, of course. Suppose you had been seen naked and close up all over the country. Every time a VCR played one of your tapes in a bedroom in America. I looked at her pubis again. Both the before and the after had the same look. No need to shave the area before the dermabrasion. The only hair she had was close-cropped and above the labia. Nothing to blur the clinical clarity of a close-up “monster shot.” That kind of pubic trim was almost a signature for American porn. European actresses were rarely clean shaven, not their armpits, legs, or crotches.

  She wasn’t just the roommate of a woman in the business, she was a performer herself. That narrowed things down quite a bit. The pool of female performers at any one time was probably never more than a couple of hundred. And one man had probably seen almost every movie or video that they’d ever made. All I had to do was find The Professor.

  CHAPTER 12

  “The Professor” was also known as Jack Meehof, one of the three Meehof brothers in the porn business. They weren’t brothers, like the Mitchells or the Zane brothers. Just three friends who dropped out of UCLA Film School. They tried making pornography in the mid-1970s to raise money for something more respectable. They never made the transition. Their early films made so much that they stayed put until the video camera killed them off.

  Once upon a time, pornography had plot lines, dialogue, direction, acting in the upright position. All that cost money, but quality earned its own rewards at the box office.

  The video camera was the end of that. It did more damage than all the Meeseketeers put together. By the mid-1980s pornography had all but disappeared from public theaters and was being produced exclusively for private consumption on VCRs. No public audiences, only private ones. In a theater you had to keep people entertained, since most of them weren’t fucking in their seats. Once the audience became couples in their bedroom, porn became high-tech foreplay. Put it in the machine, watch ’em go at it, and see if we can catch up. Porn was now the mechanical rabbit at a dog race.

  Why shoot on film and transfer to video? Cut costs. Shoot straight on video. Once that took hold, everyone asked, Why spend money at all? We just need a cameraman, lights, and almost-clean sheets in a motel room. Seventy-eight minutes of hide the salami. Box it with a gorgeous woman who isn’t even in the film, cut the price to nineteen ninety-five, collect the money, and run.

  The other two Meehofs were long out of the business. Jack stayed on as historian, critic, and gadfly infuriating the producers with his scathing commentary on their product. I’d first talked to him when I was looking for the runaway daughter of a congressman. Her father was more concerned that when found she not be an embarrassment than that she be found. Eventually, I was connected to The Professor, who knew everyone in the business. He assured me that she was not working and if she showed up he’d let me know. Since then we’d collaborated on an obscenity case and a kiddie porn investigation.

  Jack had an unpublished number that got you an answering machine under an assumed name. I was never sure if he called back from that number or another one. Because of my history of discretion, I was one of the few people outside the business he would speak to directly.

  I rang the message number.

  “Leave your name, number, and the purpose of your call. If so moved I may return your call. Speak now.”

  “Jack, this is Leo Haggerty. I want your help in identifying a woman who I believe to have recently been a performer in the business. Call me anytime on this one, day or night. Thanks.”

  That was all I could do. He’d call or he wouldn’t.

  At five, Kelly and Larry left. Del and Clancy were out following Sarabeth Timmons. I flipped open the case file and studied Larry’s family tree for the first life of “Sarabeth Timmons.”

  I closed the folder and set it out for Kelly to file. I went through the office, locking up. Coffee off, copier off, thermostat down, records room locked, office doors locked, radios off, lights off, answering machine on. I locked the front door and surveyed my infinite future.

  Dinner would have been a waste. The way I pushed food around the plate these days I should have been served with a hockey stick, not cutlery. The job was holding me together and it worked from 5 A.M. to whenever, but on my own, between now and exhaustion, I was a ripping sail in a high wind.

  I’d lost my taste for heart-to-heart combat. Connecting is such a perverse desire. Like a hunger for something that makes you sick when you eat it. Can’t kill it, won’t quench it. Not a lot of room left in between.

  It had been a clean break. Stunningly complete. One day a truck came and removed nearly every trace of her. After the announcement I never saw or heard from Sam again. She left her gifts to me and the ones I’d given her. She was leaving and taking nothing with her. I put those things—trinkets, mementos, I had no idea what to call them any more—in a box, and set it up in the attic. I haven’t been up to look at them once. Someday I will and it’ll mean something, I just don’t know what.

  Afterward I was just numb. I knew why she was leaving. I understood. I accepted what she had to do and why. I had hurt her and lost her as a result. That made sense. It was as it should be. This was the consequence and a well-earned one. So be it.

  She said she wanted to be on her own, to heal. That she couldn’t see me or be with me without pain. So I waited. I still am. I expected to hear from h
er when the baby would have been due. Something. A bomb even. Nothing.

  If she hasn’t healed yet then I hurt her grievously, and for that I am profoundly sorry. Every damn day I am. If she has healed, the cure seemed to be to amputate me. I hope she has some phantom limb pain. I deserve that much.

  I didn’t pursue her, expecting, no, hoping that she’d contact me. To repair ourselves. But this hasn’t happened. It’s sad that our last memories were ugly ones. No chance to remember ourselves being brave or strong, just broken.

  Someday I’ll thaw out the piece of me that seized up the day she left. As time goes by it gets harder to remember that being numb isn’t normal and that I used to be different. Although right now I can’t remember just how.

  I went to the gym and lifted and swam my way closer to exhaustion. I drove home where I showered, watched the late news, and turned in. Around two o’clock the phone rang. I incorporated the first two rings into my dream but then slowly disengaged from its grip and started fumbling for the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Leo, Jack Meehof here. You called.”

  “Yeah, Jack. Hold on a second, let me clear my head. I was sleeping.” I yawned, rubbed my eyes, and massaged my forehead.

  “Okay, I want to run a description of a woman by you. I think she was a performer at least up until the last eight months or so. I need a name and anything else you can tell me. I have photos I can fax you if you need them.”

  “Give me the description.”

  “Brunette, about five nine, one hundred twenty-five pounds, eyes green-hazel, breast implants.”

  “These days that’s like saying she had breasts.”

  “Pretty but not gorgeous. Angular face. Pouty mouth, full lips, straight nose. Eyebrows natural. Two tattoos.”

  “That’s the first useful thing you’ve told me. So far she sounds like any one of a dozen cupcakes.”

  “First tattoo looks like a tangle of roses and thorns, up on her left shoulder.

  “Her nipples, are they pierced?”

  “Jesus, Jack, I don’t think so, but I could have missed that.”

  “The tattooed girls have usually been biker chicks first. There’s not too many of them. There’s one girl in the business that has a tattoo like you described, but she has pierced nipples too.”

  “Let’s leave her as a maybe. The second tattoo is on her pubis. It’s a wide-eyed kitten with its tail up.”

  “No brainer, Leo. Fantasia, two pussies. Your girl is Fantasia, Miss Deep Throat of 1993. Voted most likely to suck-seed.”

  “What can you tell me about her?” I wasn’t going to mention my theories about what kind of trouble she might be in unless I had to.

  “Showed up, oh, about two years ago. She wasn’t anything special to look at, but she could fuck with authority. Looks you can buy or build. The kind of heat she had, you either have it or you don’t.”

  “Was she a big star?”

  “One of the top draws in the business. Not Ashlyn Gere yet but getting there.

  “She made a couple of videos out here under another name. Let’s see. She started out as Mona N. Groner. She took the money from the first flicks she did, got herself a boob job, and came back as Fantasia.

  “Her heat was getting her noticed. PWV wanted to sign her to an exclusive deal but she said no. They’d have had her grinding out a hundred one-day wonders in a year. She’d be used up and gone. She started pitching certain directors for roles in their films. Stagliano, Leslie, De Renzy. She kept her exposure low and she was careful who she worked with. All the projects did well. So her price kept going up. The top directors kept wanting to use her. She was a pretty decent actress and the work appealed to her. She was definitely getting off on it. Putting that over on the screen, that’s what it’s all about. You know me. Porn these days is turning a silk purse into a sow’s rear. Even for the shit that’s coming out, the market is still growing. Lots of very unhappy people out there. The last thing porn should be doing is making sex boring. That’s what real life is for.

  “Anyway, she was one of the handful pulling down over a grand a day to work. Then all of a sudden one day she’s gone. Vanished. Not a word to anybody. Not even her friends. Her house was abandoned. Everything was still there. People were worried about her. Some discreet inquiries were made to sympathetic law enforcement, but they didn’t turn up anything. No Jane Does in the morgue. I mean, quick exits are SOP for this business. People get married, find God, get burned out, decide to become a director, you name it, and quit, but usually they tell someone. They turn down work. They’re around. If they leave, they pack their things and go. This was like poof! One day she just disappeared. Hell, even if she wanted out of the business, she was a top drawer as a dancer. She must have made five grand a week working the circuit. Fact of the matter, she was making most of her money dancing. I don’t think she’d made a half-dozen videos in the last year. Very strange.”

  Tell me about it.

  “And now out of the blue, you tell me you’ve got a picture of her in Virginia. What’s going on, Leo?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. Your ‘Fantasia’ showed up here calling herself ‘Sarabeth Timmons’ and got found out in a contested inheritance case. Now her current lover wants to know what she’s running from. First, I had to find out who she is. Did she have any enemies in the business?”

  “Enemies, no. Lots of competitors who envied her money and the roles she got. But she was real generous to other girls starting out. Gave them lots of tips on how to avoid getting ripped off by the producers or the video companies. She’d been pretty successful in avoiding that herself.”

  “What about the producers?”

  “No. She was laying golden eggs for them. What was she going to do, start a union? They’d have told her you’ll never fuck in this town again. And that would be that. There’s more talent coming into this city from the valleys every day than they could use up, if the cameras ran around the clock.”

  “Do you remember hearing any rumors about her, anything strange at all?”

  “Nothing comes to mind. I can ask around discreetly.”

  “Jack, I need you to do me a big favor. I need Fantasia’s real name. And her social security number.”

  “No way, Leo. You know I never reveal a performer’s identity. I’ll confirm something that’s common knowledge but that’s it.”

  “I know, Jack. I’m asking you to trust me. I need to get into official records to see if she’s running from the law. My client wants to help her if she can. If not, she wants to get out of the way if it’s serious trouble. I’ll tell you what: If the search is negative, I’ll just tell my client her stage name and what she did and leave it at that. If it’s trouble, I’ll tell my client her real name and what the trouble is. I won’t pass on both pieces of her identity, and I won’t put it in writing anywhere. How’s that?”

  “I’m sitting here wondering why I’m getting so tense. You’ve got my phone number. Something I prize more dearly than her name. Yeah, I’ll check the records on her last job. Her release will have her social security number. Her name I know. I’ll call you when I get it.”

  “Great. Thanks, Jack. I owe you one for this.”

  I hung up the phone. Jack was cutting me a break. I may have his phone number, but to this day I don’t know his real name.

  CHAPTER 13

  I was two days later that Jack got back to me.

  “Leo, ‘Fantasia’s’ real name is Darla Jean Sorenson. The social security number on her 1099 is a California one.”

  I wrote it down along with her birth date, November 17, 1969. “Thanks, Jack. If I turn up anything you ought to know, I’ll get back to you.”

  “Adios, amigo.”

  I dialed up an old friend on the D.C. police force, Horace “Hoss the Boss” Wisinski.

  “Hello, Wisinski residence.”

  “Hi, Brenda. Leo Haggerty. Is Hoss around?”

  “He’s sleeping, Leo. Is it important?”
<
br />   “Yeah, it is. Would you rouse the beast? I’ll be forever in your debt.”

  “Leo, you’re already forever in my debt. You can’t string it out any longer. You have to start paying some of it off.”

  “Okay, Brenda. You work out a payment plan while the Hoss and I talk. Fair enough?”

  “Right. You know what I hope? I hope I live long enough to collect from you. If I do that, I’ll be happy. Hold on.”

  Hoss greeted me with “Yo, Hags. How they hanging?”

  “Cozy as ever, Hoss. Thanks for the concern. I need a favor. You still on midnights?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d like you to check out somebody on NCIC.”

  “Who?”

  “White female. Darla Jean Sorenson, date of birth November 17, 1969.”

  “Sure, no problem. I should be able to do it this evening. I’ll call you when I get off shift, okay?”

  “Great. Thanks, Hoss. Say good-bye to Brenda for me.”

  I gave Jack’s information to Larry and then spent the rest of the afternoon reading the first batch of printouts on Clive McNair, Ph.D. The professional papers I scanned, noting dates, positions held, co-authors and colleagues, dedications, anything personal about the work. The critical reviews noted Dr. McNair’s theories on hallucinations and delusions, viewing them as poetic texts needing translation, not Thorazine and the interpersonal function of defenses, what McNeil called “the neurotic’s attempt at extorting or bribing safe passage through life’s better neighborhoods.”

  Sounded good to me. I focused on any tidbits of McNair’s personal life. By three o’clock I had a list of wives, mistresses, colleagues, admirers, and critics.

  Larry stuck his head in around closing time with the result of his phone calls to California on Darla Jean Sorenson.

  “Come on in, Larry. What do you have?”

  He walked around and sat down, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and read from the papers. I swiveled slowly in my chair and put my feet up on the corner of my desk. As I turned away from Larry, he began to lift his head so that while I stared at General Sherman, he was able to look me in the ear and speak.