Peep Show (15 page)

“And it's sunny out too,” my father says.

“You forgot your hair tie,” I repeat, almost pleading as I offer it to Debra. My mother comes between us, her fingers splayed.

“Let him give her the thing, Mick.”

“No!” she declares, and the elevator opens. The three of them get on. I follow them and cram the hair tie into Debra's hand. When I step back, I look only at my sister.

“I love you,” I say.

The doors begin to close, then shut.

G
RIM
. D
EBRA USED TO WALK
on her tiptoes. Tight Achilles tendons or calf muscles, we learned, made her walk like a ballerina in heels. A physical therapist with hairy gray armpits named Trina came to our house and told her to lift coins from the floor without bending her knees. It didn't help. She told my mother to massage the cartilage on Debra's heel by rolling it back and forth like a piece of Play-Doh every night before bed. That didn't help either. Why did I think of this in the first place? In the bathroom at the Moraga in Atlantic City there's a poster of a ballerina mouse. It's gray in a pink leotard and performing a plie. I try to remember what finally made her better. It might have just been time.

“David,” my father says from the stall. “You still there?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Is Brandi dressed?”

“She's waiting for the interviewer.”

“But is she dressed?”

“I don't know.”

“Will you go find out, please?”

An instrumental version of “Rikki Don't Lose That Number” is playing from a speaker in the ceiling. It's coming from a circle of a hundred holes.

My father flushes and I wait for him to come out. He looks awful and his zipper is open. “Go find out,” he says.

“Are you okay?”

“Go.”

Outside the bathroom there's a hallway that leads to dressing rooms, a small kitchen, and then the enormous stage. I gradually hear the audience—over two hundred paid we're told—and they're laughing at and applauding a Catskill clown named Willy Sapley. From my side view, I watch the guy hold his hat down on his head with both hands and run in a tight circle to loud thwacks of the drums. Then he's gone, diving off stage and throwing himself onto the laps of audience members. He climbs on the backs of their chairs, looks like he's swimming, as he takes a man's watch and rummages through a fat lady's purse.

“Hey, kid,” someone says. “You know where Brandi Lady is? I'm supposed to do an interview.”

The guy follows me to one of the dressing rooms and I knock. Brandi, in full fetish garb, opens the door. The corset, the nylons, the leather boots up to her thighs. Her hair is wound in a tall, blue-black beehive with thin wisps
that fall over her shoulders. “Your interviewer is here,” I tell her.

“Where's you father?”

“In the bathroom.”

“Brandi Lady?”

She ignores the man and walks back to her vanity table. “Your mother did this to him. I just want you to know that. He's been doing better, taking his meds, trying to smoke less. He would have been fine but no, fuck no, she had to swoop down on her broomstick and just . . . kill all of it.” I see her chin wrinkle up as she sniffs then carefully dabs her eye with a tissue. “I feel so sorry for you. And Debra.”

“Brandi, this man is here for an interview.”

“Yes, hello,” she says.

“Hi, I'm Rich from the
Peep Show Express
. We met a long time ago in—”

“How long will this take? I have to be on stage in fifteen minutes.”

“I'll make it fast. Do you mind if I record it?”

“No, but it has to be quick.”

The guy puts a tape recorder on the table and connects a microphone. “Ready?”

“Sure,” she says, facing the mirror, still applying makeup.

The man pushes Record. “
Peep Show Express
, June 1975. Brandi Lady interview. I first met Brandi Lady when her name was Luna Von at a convention in Sweden back in 1963. She was nineteen at the time and making her debut film,
Where Ya Puttin' That?
with director Rune Tharsz—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” she interrupts.

In the reflection of the mirror, I watch her lower her head. Luna Von? Debut film?

“Is something wrong?” the man asks.

“I do not want to talk about that,” she says.

“You mean the movies?”

Brandi swivels around in her chair. Her face is flushed and her eyes are on me. “Will you go check on your father, please?”

I nod and walk out of the room but the door stays open a crack.

“Go ahead,” she says. “That's just my stepson.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know. Okay. Uh . . . we sit here today at the Tri-State Burlesque Review at the Moraga in Atlantic City where Brandi will take the stage in minutes.”

“Hi, Brandi.”

“Hi.”

“Do you remember me?”

“No. And I hope you're here to ask me about the updated Imperial Theatre on Eighth Avenue and Broadway in Times Square, the greatest spot on earth for discreet adult mischief, including the brand-new and naughty toy store we call the Sixty-Niner Diner. Where everything you can imagine is for sale and
on
sale.”

“The Imperial in Times Square. Okay. Is it possible to ask you a few questions about your earlier films?”

“I don't talk about that anymore because I don't make them anymore. What do you want to know?”

“You still have a fan base in Europe, a lot of people write in. Why'd you stop making them so long ago.”

“Because I stopped wanting to fuck on film. How's that?”

“
David!
” my father says, and I jump back from the door. He and Ira walk toward me. “Where's Brandi?”

I point at her dressing room.

“Is she dressed?”

“No. I mean
yes
.”

He opens the door a bit, pokes his head in.

“Almost done,” I hear the interviewer say. “Now, in
Ouch Too Deep
, there was a scene where you and Bruce Girth had a standing sixty-nine scene on a cherry picker.”

“That's not a question.”

“Can you tell us a little about that scene?”

“Dwayne Shooter and Bruce Girth. They were veterans and I was a kid, well, we were all kids except Rune, who was more like a dad. We lived together in a house in Stockholm that had a garden and a pool and that's what we did there. We let Rune follow us around with his camera. I remember being very happy and knowing that no one at home would ever speak to me again. Mostly because I'd left high school. That was the big thing in my house. Love was always conditional, all of it, all dependent on God and order and keeping score.”

“Darling?” my father says.

“Yes.”

“It's time to go on.”

“That's all the time I have,” Brandi says.

“Okay, so three nights here at the Moraga for the Tri-State Burlesque Review and then what?”

“Back to the newly renovated Imperial Theatre on Eighth Avenue and Broadway where one can experience a true adult fantasy world where dreams of all kinds can be fulfilled in a clean and safe environment. I'm also performing a fetish act and a new act in which I bathe in a five-foot brandy snifter on Mondays and Fridays at eleven a.m., three p.m., and nine p.m. I begin a half-moon routine on September first but only at the nine p.m. show.”

“Arlene!” my father says.

“I'm coming, Marty.”

Ira pokes his head in the room. “How we doin' in here?”

“She's fine,” my father says, “she's fine. Let's get to the stage, it's time.”

We all walk down the hall and all I can think about is Brandi on a cherry picker in Stockholm. We haven't had eye contact since she came out.

“Don't just stand there,” Ira says. “Take pictures.”

Ira seems to know every dancer and manager we pass. I lift my camera as the curved, lit stage comes into view. Five women in fetish gear just like Brandi's are waiting by the curtain.
Click
.

Ira wants to introduce Brandi to a white-haired guy in billiard-ball suspenders. “Brandi Lady,” he says, “Meet my old, dear friend, Alan Greenstein. Alan owns the Calabra and Mo Mo's and the old Groppler Theatre. We've been friends since we were boys.”

Greenstein takes Brandi's hand and kisses her right leather glove. She curtsies as he does it. “You're lookin' at a headliner,” Ira says. “A girl who's done it all and is still hot at, what now, honey, thirty-six?”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Do I look thirty-six?”

They both laugh with their mouths wide and Greenstein slowly kisses the other hand.

“Marty,” says Ira, “you remember my friend, Alan Greenstein?”

“Yeah, of course, Greenstein. The last time I saw you, you were getting blown by some Asian teenager at the Exotic.”

“
Marty
,” Brandi says.

“You still a fuckin' pedophile?”

Greenstein stares at my father as he walks past him toward the stage. Ira's embarrassed and tries to laugh it off. “Marty's been sick today.”

“Go fuck yourself, Arbus,” Greenstein says.

“Go kill yourself,” my father says.

The day just keeps getting better from here. My dad guides me closer to the stage and points at Willy Sapley. The guy crams his hands in his clown pockets with his arms elbow deep.

“You just
shit
all over a great friend of mine,” Ira says.

“Guy's a Nazi, Ira.”

“
You're
the Nazi. You owe him an apology.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“He sends us dancers, he sends us clients, he's been on the fuckin' strip longer than you, Marty. Okay? Okay, tough guy?”

The lights go out and the curtain drops and the crowd is large and present, a lot of them. Willy Sapley jogs off the other side of the stage. My father kisses Brandi who now lines up with the other five dancers. “You go knock 'em dead now, okay?”

The girls all walk on stage and the set dressers push out six black chairs. Brandi is kneeling in the center of the stage with a bullwhip in her hand. She says something to the other women.

“You should go down front,” my father says and I head toward the steps down. The music starts, a saxophone by itself, and the next thing I hear is a thud, bone on wood. As I turn I see him, my father, lying on his side with his eyes fluttering. The time it takes to run to him is forever in my mind. I roll him over and lift the back of his head. “Dad!”

“What happened?”

When I look up I see Alan Greenstein.

“Please, go get help.
Please!
”

“What's happened to him?” he says, his hand on his forehead.

“I don't know.
Dad?
”

Greenstein kneels next to me. He takes my father's face in his fingers and gives him a light shake. “Don't do it here, Arbus,” he says. “Not in front of your kid. Come on . . . wake
up
!”

My father's eyes open. He swallows and looks in my eyes.

“Get me home.”

T
HE DOCTOR IS A MAN
Ira knows. We've woken him by our phone call but I don't feel bad because it's only eight thirty at night. I find the house about a mile from the Moraga, right next to a church. When we get there, the guy is on the porch in a bathrobe, waving his arms like a castaway. He gives my father a few pokes and checks his temperature. He says it's fatigue, the flu, bad food, an ulcer, or worse. He gives him a pink pill for acid reflux and something to drink and tells my dad he should spend the night. If he feels better tomorrow, we'll drive back to the city to “get the stomach scoped.” He asks me if I'm staying and when I say yes, he tosses me a blanket and slowly clomps up his staircase. The room we're in has a TV and a phone and a mural of a zoo train with a rhinoceros in overalls. My father's
eyes are closed so I lift the phone and call Leo at the theater. He's positive my dad is dying and wants directions. It takes almost two hours but he gets here and rings the bell and wakes up the doctor and his wife. Nine seconds later, Brandi and Ira ring the bell. Brandi, in a Little Bo Peep costume, leans in to kiss my father.