Author: Walter Mosley
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WORTHY!
For fifteen long, hard years, Sandra Peel Pinkney has hidden behind Debbie Dare, a white-haired, black porn legend with an eye-catching facial tattoo, who has had sex with literally hundreds of men and women, and she's still only in her early thirties. But that's the problem. The porn industry is even more brutal to mature women than is the hypocritical regular film industry and if you don't get out when it's dignified, you're inevitably going to be dumped unceremoniously.
Sandra has never articulated these thoughts before, although she's always been aware, but this one day, the day this story begins, she actually has an orgasm on set. At first she's not even sure what it is, this pleasure being so rare in her life, but then it takes over her whole body and is psychologically shattering. And that's not even the biggest upheaval she will face this day.
Sandra arrives at her elegantly-appointed home to find the police all over her house and yard. Her much older and not-so-retired porn flick husband is dead. He's lying in her bathtub with a sixteen-year-old girl on top of him. The two apparently died while making a porn movie, when the camera fell into the tub and electrocuted them.
This precipitates Sandra's desire to quit her life and start over - or simply to end it. But there are complications. Over the next few days, Sandra learns who her friends and enemies are. She's fired from her current in-progress movie by her producer, Linda Love(!), and bad guy Richard Ness starts cruelly leaning on her to pay off her husband's $79,000 debt, which she can't because her husband has them in hock to the balls, and when she blows "Dick" off (and not in a good way), he sells the debt to Coco Marinetti, who's unafraid to actually carry out the threats Dick only makes. And she has a son.
Sandra wanders blandly through her life trying to make sense, to figure out answers, and to determine direction. Often her actions don't seem to make sense, but as we learn, her actions are informed by her past experiences, and Sandra has two strikes against her: she's black, and she's a porn industry lackey.
We see examples of both of these powerful influences on her life experience as she is, in one case, summarily handcuffed by three white male cops for no crime other than leaving her mother-in-law's house early in the morning! Her mother-in-law is white and lives in an upscale neighborhood. Sandra was only there to patch up a rift between them now that Theon, her husband, is dead, and this is her reward for that generous act of kindness?
I'm still bemused by the review of this in the Chicago Tribune where Carol Memmott writes, "She's beat up by the gangsters to whom Theon owed $72,000." Why use the grammatically correct 'whom' alongside the grammatically incorrect 'beat up'? It should be 'beaten up'. The phrase 'beat up' implies something completely different, but the only thing looking beat up in this story is Sandra's porn life. Rest assured that Walter Mosley writes a lot better than does Memmott, and this is the trigger which finally made me pick-up this book from the shelf. I've never read him before but I did know who he was and I figured his hand on the keyboard might make a difference. It did. This is not a story of erotica or sleaze, but it is written for adults who can handle that world in their literature.
In some ways this book is reminiscent of Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny - a soul adrift, wandering untethered through life looking for something, but this book is leagues better than that crappy movie. Like I said, I'd never read Mosley before, and I passed this novel on the 'new' library shelves several times, looking at it and thinking it wasn't going to impress me, but finally I decided what-the-hell? and I didn't regret it. I owe Mosley for that. The writing is beautiful, well-paced, well-spoken, warm, engrossing, and revelatory.
Talking of crappy movies, this one has its title evidently influenced by Debbie Does Dallas a porn move which has a fame far greater than it deserves, but the title is as far as the similarity goes. The plot is twisted, in more than one way, and the events - and often Sandra's actions - are unexpected. If I had two problems with it, one would be that the racism is overdone. Yes, there is racism in society and it needs to be highlighted, but highlighting it with a strobe-light will only blind people to it, not keep them aware of it.
There's also a dual standard at work here, that only white people can be racist, which is glaringly untrue. You only have to compare the standard schtick of black stand-up comedians with white ones to see this. It's understandable, given what history has done to people, but the way to fix a problem with a pendulum having been stuck in one direction for far too long isn't to purposefully glue it in the opposite direction. It's to lock it dead in the middle and never let it move again.
The second problem was that the ending is abrupt, and seems out of character with the rest of the novel. I think perhaps that it's intended as a warning: even when things seem to have been amicably resolved, Sandra still has a long row to hoe, and it's that mis-applied 'ho' which has taunted and haunted her for fifteen painful years. It isn't going to set her free so easily. I recommend this novel.
