Peep Show (6 page)

T
HE CEMETERY IS CALLED LIEBERMAN
and Wise. It's set on a very green and mildly sloped hill that blocks the sight of a gun range on one side. A new addition to the neighborhood apparently. The popping of rifle bullets is sporadic and relatively banal but a strange sound to hear in a field of head-stones. My father leads us up a narrow path of small white rocks and leans over to touch a plaque on the grass. “Joseph Tuschsky was my dad's partner,” he says. “The theater they bought was called the Drake, July 1929. I was ten.”

Brandi steps toward my father, puts her hand on his shoulder. “Happy birthday, Mr. Arbus.”

“This is
Tusch
sky,” my father says. “I'm telling a story about Joe Tuschsky. Can't you read?”

“Yes . . . I can read, Marty. Jesus, you're right back at it, aren't ya?”

“Arlene, please.”

“Where's your father's plot?”

“He's over there, we'll go in a second, I'm telling a story.”

“Then go ahead.”

They are a strange couple. The Borscht-belt Jew and his Marilyn Monroe. When I look at my sister she's twenty-two years old with the lips and the eyes and her hair now brushed. I take my camera out, and point it at her.
Click
.

“Don't, David, don't,” she says, holding her palm out the exact way my mother always does.

“You look good.”

“Liar.”

“You look
normal
. Give me a pose.”

“Please don't take my picture.”

I move toward her with the camera high and she squeals and runs behind my father.
Click, click, click
, her face lit up with joy.

“I'm telling a story.”

“Tell him to stop.”

“Can you let her be, David?”

“Sorry.”

“Tuschsky was connected in Los Angeles. He had an uncle who produced movies, cowboy-type movies, and when he died the contact stayed fresh because of another man named Don Micklin.”

“Is he here too?” Brandi asks.

“No! He lives in West Palm Beach.”

My father raises and drops his arms, then walks about
fifty yards up the path we're on. “That's him, right there, you can see the name. You don't want to hear the whole story, I don't care.”

We all get close to the plot and Brandi kneels to touch the engraving. “Happy birthday, Mr. Arbus,” she says. “I hear you were quite a man.”

A deep, deep breath from my father. “You both have about ten relatives on this plot, not including my mother. She wanted to be in Jersey with her sisters. My aunt Gertrude, my father's sister, is somewhere out there, toward those sycamores, along that fence there, ya see where I mean?”

“What's that sound?” Debra says. “Fireworks?”

I point the camera at my grandfather's plot. The engraving, the yellowed grass, the small stones left on top.
Click
.

“Micklin and my father got first-run movies for years. Tell me if I've told you this story already. I ran the projector with Chaplin and Errol Flynn films and everything Lionel Barrymore did in those days.”

“Lionel Barrymore?” Brandi asks.

“The contact wouldn't run dry until the early forties and my father and Uncle Joe started getting films from another source. I'd be the one who went and picked the canisters up at a trucking yard in Jersey City.”

A family of five walks by us. The man and the boy wear yarmulkes. “
Shabbat shalom
,” the man says to my father, who ignores him.

“
Shabbat shalom
,” Debra responds.

“Tuschsky was very kind to me, never once treated me like a kid. He was a big drinker and he liked to gamble all day but that son-of-a-bitch was never afraid to put his arm around me and even used to kiss me . . . on my forehead. Something my father would never ever do.”

My dad kneels on the grass before his father's plot. “Happy ninety-first birthday, Papa.”

Brandi steps closer to him and waves Debra and me toward her. It's awkward for me. Staged sentimentality. I don't really move but then my sister's hand is out and I take it and we all end up behind my dad.

“Family is the only thing that matters. These two people right here are my children. Your beautiful grandchildren,” he tells the stone. “You met David a while back but he's changed a lot. He's a man now. Look at him. I know he's gonna make me so proud out there . . . with his old man. And
this
, this person over here is my girl. I don't get to see her as much as I used to, as much I need to. My God, she's growing up so fast, Papa.”

Debra bends to hug him, and I wish I'd done that too.

My father is silent for a minute and stands, his cheeks lined with tears. “Okay,” he says, “I love ya, and I just wanted to say hello and happy birthday. So, good-bye for now. We're gonna go do something fun. Right?”

“Right!” says Brandi.

We walk back down the path toward the car and I notice that Debra and Brandi aren't next to us. When I look back at them their faces are so close, their noses practically
touching. I lift my camera and decide to call this one
The Hasid and the Stripper. Click
. Top five this week:

5. Smashed TV

4. Styrofoam Wig Head

3. Old Man with Hand in Garbage Can

2. Burnt Orange Sun Setting between Skyscrapers

1. The Hasid and the Stripper

“David,” my father says.

“Looks like Deb and Brandi are friends,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “She can be a nightmare, that one. You wouldn't believe what she was laying on me all night.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go ask her. It's what we were fighting about. Or go ask Ira. He'll tell you.”

“Why can't you tell me?”

“They want to upgrade, like everyone else, just go and turn the place into a goddamn peep show. Big plans, big ideas, put the film peeps in, the live peeps in, just turn it all into a big fuckin' gyno exam. I tell them over and over, nothing brings the scum in faster than the peeps, but they don't care, they see dollar signs in their sleep. And Abromowitz, this shmuck I've known forever, has Ira wanting to buy his inventory. Guy's in the dildo biz. I told him I'd come over tomorrow but I'll tell you right now, I'm not a opening my wallet for shit. You should come with me. It'll be good for ya.”

“Dad?”

“What?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“We're in the mood to see some boys,” Brandi says. “Debra says she wants to get whistled at.”

“No, I don't,” she says. “I never said that.”

“Arlene, don't turn my little girl into someone she's not, okay?”

“Little girl? She's not exactly a baby.”

“Let's get back to city,” my father says. “How 'bout a movie?”

Debra's smile fades as she glances at me. “I think we'd better get back to Newstead.”

“What?”

“The car, mom's car,” I say. “She wouldn't drive us, ya know, the Sabbath and all. I ended up taking it without, really . . .”

“What are you telling me?” He looks at Brandi, his eyes blinking. “What did he just say?”

“I think he said he took the car.”

“It's Shabbat,” Debra says. “We don't drive.”

“We borrowed it,” I say. “I'll call her. I'll call her right now.”

My dad has his hands on his head. “From
where
? She can't pick up the phone anyway.
Christ
, David. That was stupid. Get in the car.
I'm
driving, move over. Move!”

“It'll all work out,” Brandi says.

“You know who's gonna pay for this.
Right?
”

I look at my father as I get in the passenger seat. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, me too!”

Debra looks chastened and stressed. She starts rubbing off the lipstick with the back of her hand. It's smears up onto her cheeks and nose and now her sleeve.

“Um . . . that's not really how I'd do that,” Brandi says, looking for a tissue in her purse. “Stay still. Let's keep it off your clothes.”

“And off your mother's car,” my father says, sitting up to find her in the rearview. “She looks like she's been punched, Arlene.”

“Stay still,” says Brandi. “Let me get your eyelids.”

“She'll probably call the cops.”

Grand theft auto. Kidnapping. Speeding. Cursing. Hating. I'll tell them I was inspired by my own father. He also ignored her and we flew out of there, leaving the smell of rubber on the driveway. I ignore her and I'm going to jail. Why'd you do it, kid? Why'd you steal your mama's car? Because she's a killer of fun. A murderer of energy and glee. She says
no
, you
can't
, the same way her grand rabbi says she can't and won't and shouldn't and, “
Don't!
”

I just yelled that as loud as I could.

My father's eyes are pinned on me. “Don't what?”

I
T'S IMPOSSIBLE TO
miss her. She's the first thing we see when my father pulls up to the curb on East Jerusalem Place. Standing outside the passenger door of a running taxi, her face a furious stone.

“Be calm,” Brandi says. “You've done nothing wrong.”

“You don't understand,” Debra says.

“Help her with her hair,” I say. “Where's the tie?”

“Don't tell me you lost it, Arlene.”

“I didn't lose it,” Brandi says. “Oh, here it is, here it is.”

When my mother sees us she points at the windshield and quickly walks our way.

My father's out of the car first, his hands in the air. “Hey there, gorgeous. I heard there was a misunderstanding.”

“Give me the keys, Martin,” she says, and stabs me with her eyes as I exit the car.

He hands them to her and she walks to the driver's seat and gets in. “Get out,” she says to Brandi.

“You must be Mickey.”

“Will you please get out of my car?” my mother says.

Brandi steps out and walks over to my dad and me. My mother starts the car.

“Mickey,” my father yells. “This is ridiculous. Let me say good-bye to my daughter.”

She goes into a hard U-turn that she can't make and then tries a K-turn, fighting with the steering wheel and jolting forward like a bumper car. She finally straightens out and drives by us.

“Mickey! You're forgetting your son!”

“
Keep
him!” she yells, and I run after the car.

“Finally!” I scream at her. “Thank God! Free of all the
bullshit
.”

As the car pulls away, I stand there in the street, watching it go. My father's got an unlit cigarette between his teeth and he's bouncing on the tips of his toes and smiling.

“I guess I'll stay here tonight,” I say.

“Don't think I've ever seen her this mad.”

“She was shaking,” Brandi says. “Her cheeks were shaking.”

My father lights the cigarette and laughs on the exhale. “See, Arlene. You don't need a baby after all. Congratulations!” he says, and points at me. “It's a
boy
!”

T
HERE ARE NO
extra sheets yet or a blanket or pillow, but Brandi helps me figure it out. She finds an afghan and some towels in a box in the closet and gives me a pillow off my dad's bed. The apartment is empty of a sofa or a television or any type of table, really, and doesn't appear to have any signs of habitation, other than a toaster oven and a few empty ice trays in the freezer. There is, on a bookshelf in my room, my father's Who's Who collection of books, which has always been important to him, even though I've never see him read them.
Who's Who in America, Africa, Germany, France, Spain, Canada
, and so on, probably thirty books.

As I lay on my makeshift bed I think of my sister. How bad was it? The questions. The consequences. The discipline according to God. Maybe nothing happened. Not a word, not a glare, not a mention of me. Just a broom to sweep it somewhere safe and out of reach, like so much in her life. I miss my room. And the things I wish I had here. Is this for real? I tell myself my mother still loves me and decide it doesn't matter. Maybe I don't love her. But
that isn't true. I take a picture of the ceiling and my shoes in the corner. I take a picture of my pants on the radiator in this otherwise empty bedroom. I take a picture of
Who's Who in Arabia
. I don't have any clothes here or even a toothbrush. There are two Instamatics in my closet at home and my tripod and camera bag and all my cassettes and albums. There's my
Hustler
under my bed and a tiny bag of weed in my bottom desk drawer I got from Seth Greenstein, who's going to wonder where I am on Monday morning. My mother will have all of it in a box in the garage by tonight. I get up and call her, to make sure she stays out of my room. No one picks up. I don't even have a shirt to wear tomorrow. Why the hell does she get to decide where I live? It rings and rings and finally I hang up. But then I call again and again and again. No one ever picks up. I go back to my bed and lay there and can't sleep. I open
Who's Who in Germany
:
SCHAPER
, Wolfgang, physiologist, born in Oschersleben, Jan. 11, 1934.
SCHARF
, Albert, broadcasting, born in Munich, Dec. 28, 1934. I hear music from the apartment below me, and mumbled voices, the drone of a TV. I look at the white walls and the sliding mirror on the closet door and tell myself I want to be here. What does she mean, “Keep him”? Keep him, she says, like she's giving away a gerbil. I get up and call yet again. Fifteen rings, sixteen rings. She must know it's me.