The First Part of Debbie

Debbie Bascomb

 I have always liked and wanted big breasted women in my personal and fictional life. No apologies. There’s a reason  why tall, dark and handsome – not to mention well hung – shows up over and over in fiction and real life as the iconic male sex symbol.

Probably the most ubiquitous of the bombshells in my writing has been Debbie Bascomb. She is one of the most important figures in the ongoing “When We Were Married” series but she has and will pop up  in other books as well.

She is, of course the ex-wife and love of Prosecutor Bill Maitland’s life. Following a painful divorce after 20 years of marriage, both she and Bill are trying to figure out what a life will be like without the other.

Thanks to the efforts of some friends, Debbie has been given a visual identiy. I had  a nebulous vision but when fans showed me what I’d written, I realized what I’d created. She appears to be a pornographic male fantasy. But I have met Debbie, and not on the silver screen or porno films either, but in the  office of a Florida high school. Not exactly as I’d written her, but possessing the same sexual charisma and the ability to enchant men without trying. And I’m sure there are more Debbies.

(Sidenote) When I met her husband, or boyfriend, because he had come in to discuss his son’s progress, I told myself that it would be interesting to see if she came in with him the following year. He was a young, good looking guy. But even though this was real life, not the pages of fiction, I wondered if a normal guy could hold a Debbie. AS it happened, I met with him the following year and she was not there. And he made it clear to me she wouldn’t be coming again.

When I first started writing WWWM, I wrote it from Maitland’s perspective and didn’t get into any third person perspective from Debbie’s viewpoint until a few chapters in. Which meant that from Maitland’s perspective  she was a cold-hearted cheating bitch and most readers adopted that view of her. It isn’t until later in the first book that it’s possible to see there are TWO truths about what is happening – and why.

Maitland is THE central character and the entire series revolves around him. Which makes it possible to underestimate who and what Debbie is. She liked a lot of sex with a lot of different men, but she was the smartest woman – the smartest person – Maitland had ever met. And after  he saved her at the Frat House party, she stayed with him – on and off – for two years when almost any of the men lusting after her could have given her a life Maitland could only imagine.

Debbie went to work at the Hunt Bank in Jacksonville and kept up her studies while supporting Bill financially getting through Law School. When he graduated and went into private practice, she resumed her academic career and eventually became an Associate Professor of Business at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.  Along the way, she made time to give Maitland three children, two of whom lived,  and she raised them.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that she raised them alone, but especially after Bill went into the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville in Florida’s 3^rd Judicial Circuit, his work took up more and more of his time – and his life. That is one of the Big Hurts that destroyed their marriage, which she refers to over and over in WWWM. He spent one of their anniversaries in Paris – without Debbie -working a case of human trafficking of Muslim girls from Paris to Florida for prostitution. You can look at that as either a very good thing, or a very bad thing.

Of course, their marriage eventually  goes down in flames. Bill is free to sample the delights of the women he’d stayed scrupulously away from for 20 years. Debbie begins a torrid affair with a younger, very hot professor she has been mentoring. When that affair burns out and he moves on, she is more selective about the men she takes into her bed.

After Bill crashes a gala at the University and gets both Debbie and her lover  fired, she moves on to the Jacksonville Public Defender’s Office, headed by a friend of both her and Maitland, the blind Attorney Johnny August. She talks herself into a number two position under August as Director with the job of managing a corps of young, ambitious attorneys, which August refers to as “herding cats.”

In the end, while Debbie possesses a lot of positive qualities, none of these really detract from her overwhelming sexual magnetism.  While Bill describe her  in many places as being almost inhumanly beautiful, that assessment has to make allowances for the fact that he is in love with her and probably will be until the day he dies.

So to really get an idea of her appearance and how it affects men, you have to look at other places.

Look At “The Currency of Time” in  1999.

Oil man Michael McCarthy has attended a Christmas Gala at the old Jacksonville Train Station with Deirdre Lancaster, heir  to the $150 million OIL Inc. fortune, the woman he’s fighting against falling for because he already knows she’s in love with a Mafia thug. As he turns his gaze from the flame-haired Deirdre:

“Could you grab a champagne for me?”

I turned and momentarily lost the power to speak.

She was tall, as tall or taller than Deirdre. Blonde as sunlight, a face that could have come from a frieze of an ancient goddess, full red lips, eyes that could pin a man like a butterfly pinned to a page. My eyes dropped and her body was better than her face. Big breasts, a woman’s full hips. She wore a low cut dress that drew the eyes of the half dozen men who swarmed around her.

“I’ll walk with you if you need someone to keep you company,” she said, smiling at her posse to take the sting out. To make it more obvious that she was going to be with me, she slipped her arm inside mine and tugged at me to move me forward.

I let her walk me away from her admirers.

“What just happened,” I asked when I regained the power of speech. “I know I’m catnip to women, but I usually have to work it a little bit.”

She grinned.

“You are an attractive man, but I was honestly using you. You may not have noticed, but men tend to be attracted to me. Normally it’s fun, but once in  a while a woman wants to be able to walk around without a pack of horny men sniffing her.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“You  came in with Orion Lancaster and the tall redhead. Are you with them?”

“I work for him, for both of them, actually.”

“You’ll pardon me, but you don’t look to me to be a paper pusher, an executive type.”

“What do I look like?”

She looked me up and down and the thing that really puzzled me was that my dick didn’t immediately spring to attention.

“A roughneck oil rigger, one of those men who work in the muck and oil, guys that actually work with their muscles.”

“You have a good eye, as well as good everything else. I do physical labor, but I also push some paper once in a while.”

I found an elf and grabbed two champagne flutes. As we both drank we made our way through the crowd moving toward the entrances at the rear of the ball room. When we got close enough to the rear entrance that  we could feel the cold breezes from the outside I watched the goosebumps rise on the gilded flesh of her upper breasts.

She noticed where my gaze went and smiled.

“Why are you in here alone?” I asked. “I noticed your wedding ring. I can’t imagine a husband letting a woman who looks like you wander around unattended.”

“He’s here. I just lost him but we’ll hook up in a little while.”

“That’s dangerous. I honestly don’t know why I haven’t put the moves on you. You’re exactly the kind of woman I’ve always gone after.”

“I’m married?”

“That’s never stopped me before, to tell you the truth.”

I could tell she wasn’t shocked.

“You think there might be a reason why you’re not trying anything with me?”

I shook my head.

“I saw you when you came in with the redhead. You never took her eyes off her when she went off to dance.

“You’re wrong. It’s not like that.”

“She’s a beautiful woman. And there was something in your expression when you watched her walking away.”

“We’re not like that. I’m not like that. She’s the daughter of my employer. I like my job.”

She shrugged.

“It’s  never going to happen,” I said, dismissing the fantasy.

She searched the crowd.

“You never can tell. Fifteen years ago I could never have imagined being married to my husband. Nobody else could have either.”

She saw someone across the room and stepped away from me.

“Thank you for the company. That tall, white haired man over there is State Attorney Austin Edwards, my husband’s boss. He invited us both to this party to celebrate Bill’s being promoted to the number two prosecutor in his office. Bill will be somewhere around him.”

As she swiveled away from me I thought that Bill -whatever his name was- had to be one of the luckiest assholes on earth. And I wondered again why in the hell I hadn’t tried for her. And I told myself there was no way in hell I could possibly be thinking of anything serious with Deirdre Lancaster.

AND LASTLY:

I had another snippet about Debbie that I was going to put in here BUT…

SIDENOTE: Burt Reynolds was at one time probably the country’s biggest male sex symbol. And a major movie star (Financially but not critically. Check out “Smokey And The Bandit” and “Deliverance.”)

In 1974 he made a movie called “The Longest Yard” featuring a football game between prison cons and prison guards inside the prison. Reynolds was a football./NFLsuperstar sent to prison for some bad life decisions.

One of the other cons is trying to cheer him up by telling him all he has to do is “get his shit together.” And at that point Reynolds utters the quote that is my favorite quote EVER.

“I’ve got my shit together,” Reynolds says. “I just can’t lift it.”

Which has been my problem for many years. A friend of mine tells me I’m the most disorganized person he’s ever known. And he’s right. I’ve  been writing for many years. And I can’t tell you exactly how much I’ve written. I know there are stories I loved that I can’t find any more and I doubt I’ll live long enough to find them.

Now that I’m working electronically, it’s even worse. It’s hard to realize this, but I’ve been writing as DQS for almost a decade. You write a lot of stories and novels and partial novels in 10 years.

 I’ve got hundreds of copies of the same story, that I’ve made changes to. Where it gets bad is finding ONE copy in the forest of similarly tagged files. I’m stuck right now on my “BETA MALEs” two-part novel because I wrote an important section I can’t find..

 ENOUGH RAMBLING

The reason for this sidebar is that I;m going to turn to the great resource of all disorganized authors – my wonderful readers 😉

There is a short section in one of the WWWM books – I think it’s #3 – when a man is trying to console Debbie. I think is the Public Defender Patrick Leary.

And he tells her “You’re a beautiful woman. Even men who are too old and fat to believe they can ever have you, want you to smile upon them!”

That’s it. Roughly. I think that one quote explains everything you need to know about Debbie and the effect she has on men. 

NOW, what I’d like is for my intrepid readers to FIND THAT QUOTE and let me know where it is, page number and volume.

My mail list is not set up yet so I’ll be relying on Facebook members and Twitter-ites to do the heavy lifting. UNLESS I HAVE A HUNDRED READERS MEET THE CHALLENGE you can have your choice of both volumes of the BETA MALE/SHARK duology or the upcoming “Stay She Said” volume 5 of WWWM – FREE!

AS always, I’d prefer you to email me at danielqsteele1@aol.com. Although I don’t mind info in facebook or Twitter comments, I’m more like to  see it in the emails.

Disorganized, you know. But I always read my emails.