Peep Show (3 page)

In all, we put seven boxes into his trunk and backseat. He wants a standing mirror and an archery set but there isn't any room. “Maybe the mirror will fit in the passenger seat,” I say.

He shakes his head. “No. Passenger seat's for you,” he says.

I smile. “You know I can't go today,” I say, and can already see it in his eyes. He won't let it rest.

“Go get your new camera. It's time for your first class.”

“I have school.”

“No, no, no. I want you to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“It's a surprise.”

I look down at my bare feet.

“What, you don't like surprises?”

“I drive with friends to school. I'd have to call them.”

“Call them.”

I look back at the house, to see if I can see my mother through the window.

“Go,” he says. “Go get some clothes.”

In the house, I don't see her anywhere. I throw on jeans and a T-shirt and grab my camera. I step out and onto the stairs and get halfway down before I hear her.

“Hey.” My mother.

“Hey!”

“Where ya goin?”

“Dad's driving me,” I yell, and keep heading toward the garage.

“David!”

I don't stop until the driveway. My dad is smoking, his back against the driver door.

“She's coming!” I say, and he flicks the butt, opens the door, and has the car started by the time I'm inside. We're
in reverse and moving when she walks out the front door. Her wig is on but it's turned to the right and covering one of her ears and she's waving her arms like a maniac.

“You better stop the car,” I say.

“Don't worry about it.”

“She's running now, Dad.”

“Don't look at her.”

“Stop,
stop
!”

And he does. She comes to my window, knocks on it. I lower it.

“What's going on here?” She ducks to see my father.

“I thought I'd take the boy to work, Mick.”

“First of all, he has
school
. Secondly, I told you, I do not want him in that theater.”

“What makes you think I'm bringing him there?”

“You took him there the other night, Martin.”

“For a few hours.”

“I absolutely forbid you . . .”

“For
bid
? For
bid
, Mickey?”

“I want you out of the car, David. Now!”

“The only people who use the word ‘for
bid
' are religious freaks. Is that you, honey?”

“He is seventeen years old.”

“And he's spending the day with his father.”

“No, he is not. He is going to school.”

“Go back inside and give your daughter breakfast.”

My mother reaches in the window and tries to open my door. “Do not leave this driveway. Do
not
, Martin.”

“I'll have him home for dinner,” he says again, putting the car in reverse. I don't look at her as we pull away, but I know she's witnessing a crime. Maybe I don't want to go. Maybe he's using me to hurt her. My father jams the accelerator when we get in the street and the tires screech as we fly down Healey Road. When I face him he puts his palm on my left knee and smiles. “See,” he says, “I told you she wouldn't mind.”

“R
EAL ESTATE” HAS ALWAYS BEEN
the answer to “What does your father do?” Or at least the words my sister and I have used since kindergarten. On my seventeenth birthday, he took me to Shea Stadium and between innings told me the names of buildings and addresses he'd had money in since his early twenties. From Brooklyn to Queens to Manhattan and Times Square, he spoke of the friends and ex-friends with whom he'd “taken risks” since his dad had died. Shel Friedman and Gil Rottsworth and Ira Saltzman, all theater owners who ran burlesque and vaudeville shows in Times Square in the late fifties. For fifteen years they also jointly owned the Fryer Hotel, a theater on Eighth Avenue that burned down to nothing but a basement in 1970. Across the street from what remains is the Imperial, a two-hundred seater built in 1900, which my father bought with
Ira Saltzman in 1968. It was an homage to his father, Myron Arbus, who had owned a similar theater on Broadway and Forty-third from the time my dad was ten. I was there once and remember the lobby, the velvet drapery, and the enormous gold pillars that bookended the stage. A Catskill comic named Paulie Fishman pulled a quarter from his nose that day and handed it to me. The magic booger coin. There was a water cooler in the office that had cone-shaped cups and a metal dispenser. Paulie made pointy boobs with the cups and pranced around like one of the dancers. Debra laughed so hard she burped twice and Paulie mimicked her until she could hardly breathe.

I reach for my new camera to take a shot of his profile.
Click.

“Grab some of the old pictures,” my dad says.

I get a handful from the backseat and pull them onto my lap. On top is my mother, drawing whiskers on my sister's cheeks. Another sunset. More Halloween. A guy I've never seen before.

“That's my cousin Louie Bernstein,” my father says, pointing. “See, he's the shmuck waving.”

I show him another.

“This is . . . uh . . . her name is not coming to me. But a horrible person.
Hor
rible. Your mother's friend or cousin from somewhere, who the hell knows. She can have this one back.”

The next one is my mother standing on the beach with her arms folded, gazing out at the ocean. As we pull into
the Lincoln Tunnel, the traffic stops and my father takes it from my hand, staring at the picture for a while without saying a word.

“I took this,” he says. “She was in her twenties. Just look at her.”

“You can have it if you want,” I say.

“That's not your mother anymore.” He tosses it on my lap and I gaze forward into the tunnel. Like a tube-shaped pool it curves with no end in sight. As always I think of a leak, from any of the thousands of blue-tiled squares that surround us. A drip, a stream, a catastrophe.
That's not your mother anymore
. When my grandfather died, my mother was already writing three letters a week to the grand rabbi. I watched my father steal one out of the mailbox once. I told him she would find out, to put it back, but instead he opened it and read it to me. She was asking the rabbi's advice on how she should separate her children from their father, since their father refused to learn
halakhah
, Jewish law. After that, the marriage became a contest of who could outscream whom. Debra would get so upset that she'd become nauseous. I'd go into the bathroom with her and wait it out while she knelt over the toilet. Bark, bark, bark, his voice would rattle the walls, and my mother would yell back, throw things at him, tell him he'd ruined her life. It was the beginning of summer and that's when my mother packed for Maine and told me I was coming along. A two-month
baal teshuva
retreat. Me, in a black suit and yarmulke, and five hundred of my mother's new friends.

Now my father drives up Tenth Avenue and makes a right on Forty-second Street. At every light, there's either a man in a business suit, a homeless person, a prostitute or a preacher. A guy in a brown bear outfit is handing out yellow flyers. His pant legs have two big holes in the knees and one of the bear ears is missing. I try to take his picture, but we're already moving. We stop at another light and a man washes our windshield with a squeegee. My father waves his arm and flicks the wipers to stop him. Out my window is an electric bullhorn announcing a third gin and tonic free if you buy two before noon. It's seven thirty in the morning. My father parks in a lot on Forty-fourth Street. He takes a box of records and pictures from the trunk and hands me a smaller one. As I follow him down Broadway toward the Imperial, he stops short, right in the middle of the sidewalk.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

He points up at an enormous neon sign that's moored to the roof of a building on the corner.

“See this place?” he says.

“Yes.”

“This is Sid Lowenstein's joint,” he says. “Two
tons
of metal and glass. Just look at it, look at it. It's a cock, right?”

I didn't notice at first but, yes, it is shaped like that.

“There's only one putz in the world who would drill that many holes into the red bricks of the Marion Theatre, just to put a neon cock on it. And this, David, is why Times Square is finished. This building was one of the true beauties
when I was growing up. The Marion. For years and years there was vaudeville and movies and comedians and burlesque acts in there. Now there's a fuckin' dildo shop in the lobby and a dozen peep windows, and Leo says they're making their own porn in the attic. And this is exactly what Ira wants me to do at the Imperial. He wants
this
!”

When I look up at the marquee, the thousands of bulbs ignite into a rolling upward wave of lit color that runs from the base to the tip before spurting confetti into the air above us. I watch it rain onto my palm as I try to erase the image of my father making porno movies in some attic.

“Before he went and plugged this thing in, the Marion was just like my father's old theater. All these along here, all just grand old cinemas before and into the war.”

A blonde Hispanic girl walks past us and smiles as if she knows my father.

“Take it in, kid,” he says, lifting his box from the ground. “Take pictures. Because one day soon, just like me, it's
all
gonna disappear.”

“You busy?” the girl says to my father.

“Take a hike.”

Thick white steam rises from the manholes and taxis sail through it, dragging it on their way down Broadway. Across the street is an old synagogue and next to that is what my father calls a “tit joint,” the Pussycat Lounge. I smell boiling hot dogs and pretzels as a man right next to us takes a leak on a phone booth. I follow my father down the street. It starts to drizzle and then rain so I put my box on top of my head
and we walk three more blocks, past pinball arcades and bars and dozens of neon twenty-five-cent peep-show signs. When I see an evangelist on an upside-down milk crate, I put the box down to take his picture.
Click
. He waves a tongue-depressor crucifix and talks directly to the sidewalk. Behind him is a bag lady with brown Magic Marker eyebrows. She smiles for the camera; her gums are tan.
Click
. When we get up to Forty-eighth and Eighth, we stand outside the Imperial and look at the marquee above the entrance. Today, the cinematic lettering reads
INTERNATIONAL BURLESQUE SENSATION BRANDI LADY—MAY 3, 4 AND 5
. Under that it says,
HALF-PRICED WELL DRINKS—TUES. TILL CLOSING
. My father and I cross the street to the front doors, where a man with a mustache is pulling on the locked door.

“Not open yet,” my dad says. “Eleven o'clock.”

“You're the owner,” the man says. “You're Marty, right?”

My dad nods.

“I hear you're fuckin' the help, ya lucky Jew bastard.”

My father puts his box on the curb. “What'd you just say?”

“Brandi Lady,” he says. “Aren't you and her doin' the—”

“Hey
dick
head!” my dad says.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Dad?”

“This is my
son
. Okay,
prick
? My son. You talk to me like that in front of my son?”

“Just let it go, Dad.”

“I didn't know he was your boy, Marty.”

“So you call me a Jew bastard? Who the fuck are you?”

He glances at me. “Nobody,” he says. “Just a kike from Queens.”

My father puts his hand on the man's chest and lightly shoves him backward. “Have some manners,” he says.

Thankfully, my father unlocks the door and we're in the lobby. The first and only time I was here, the other night, there was a party in this room for my father's partner, Ira Saltzman. Now, empty, I see a much larger space than I thought, with its own chandelier that sparkles over the faded red carpet. There's a small man on his knees with a bucket near the ticket booth.

“Toilet overflowed,” he says to my father. “Someone crammed a diaper in there and kept flushin'.”

“A
what
?” says my father.

“Hi, I'm Jocko,” he says to me. Jocko's right eye wanders and the knees of his black pants are soaked with toilet water.

“I'm David.”

“Marty's boy?”

I nod.

“I heard you were here the other night.”

“Just for a few minutes. My dad had to—”

“Is that him, is that David Arbus?” A huge black man with a giant bald head walks up to me. He offers his hand. “Leo. Nice to know ya. Sorry I missed you at the party. Your dad's a prince.”

“I'm trying to show my kid how beautiful the theater is and I got scumbags outside and piss inside.”