by Joshua Braff
“I don’t want to drive back to the city now.”
The sound comes from her nose. She shakes her head all the way to the stairs.
“Wait, Mick. I got you something, a gift.”
“No, thank you.”
“For the occasion, wait.”
“No, thank you,” she says from the hallway. We hear her door slam.
“She’s angry with me. The Hasid is angry with me.”
“Where have you been?” says Debra, and my father laughs.
“What do you mean where have I been? Where have you been?”
“I’m here, Daddy. I’m always here.”
“I’m here too, so don’t worry about what was and what wasn’t. Open up your gifts.”
Debra gets a snow globe with the Empire State Building inside and a porcelain China doll in a green shiny dress. I get a book called Earth’s Filthiest Jokes and a brand new camera by Nikon. It’s beautiful, the SL2, the newest model, and it’s hard to believe he bought it and I’m holding it, so heavy in my hand.
“You’re a photographer, aren’t you?” he says.
“Thank you.”
My father takes his jacket off and yawns with his mouth wide. He tells us he’s pooped and asks if he can sleep in Debra’s room. She nods and smiles and shakes the snow globe. “So where’ve you been?” she says in a younger voice than her own.
He points at the doll. “Do you like it or not?”
“Of course I do.”
“Good then. I’m happy. Anybody got a toothbrush?”
DEBRA WATCHES HIM brush his teeth in the reflection of the bathroom mirror. She follows him into her room and pulls out the trundle bed beneath her mattress. I see them lying together on their sides but cannot hear what they’re saying. When I walk in he asks if I like the joke book and if I’d read “the one about the bull balls.” I grab the filthy joke book and open it to a random page. The one I find to read aloud is about a rooster that gets syphilis in Tijuana. I watch my dad laugh with his mouth wide, as he wipes the deep creases near his eyes. He was forty when I was born in 1958. My mom is forty-two now, eighteen when she met him. They separated more than five times between Debra’s birth and now and neither of us knows if their marriage is officially over or not. Only married women wear sheitels, so at least for today they’re married.
I tell him I found boxes of old pictures in the garage and he sits up and asks to see them. From my room I get the one of him waving from the Cadillac. “A 1964 Caddy,” he says.
I kiss my sister on the cheek and reach to touch my father’s arm. “I’m going to sleep,” I tell him.
He pulls me toward him for a hug and whispers in my ear. “Tomorrow. Come to work with me. Bring the camera.”
I nod, knowing I can’t go, and leave the room.
My father screams, “Mickey! How come you won’t open my gift? I got ya something nice. Just come see it. I think you’ll like it.”
“Stop that!” she says from her doorway. “Shhhhh. They have school in the morning.”
“Okay, then just talk to me for a sec.”
“I’m tired,” she says.
“It took a long time but you . . . finally got what you wanted, huh? The whole Megilla, right, Mick?”
“My name is Miriam,” she says. She turns out the hall light and everything is dark. “They have school in the morning, Martin. Let her sleep.”
“But I got an announcement. A bedtime announcement, for my family. David!”
“Yes?” I call.
“Come back.”
He’s on his feet when I get there, moving toward the doorway.
“I dumped my old apartment. The small one, it wasn’t big enough. My new place is perfect and I’m ready to have my kids come and see me.”
“Where is it?” Debra says.
“In the city.”
“Where was the last one?” Debra says.
“It doesn’t matter, it was too small. The new place is nice and you can have a bed there.”
“Can I come soon?” she says.
“Name the day.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” my mother says. “None of this was discussed. I need to speak to you alone.”
“Why alone? The message is clear and it’s for everyone. I have space now, in the city, bedrooms for my kids.”
“Please. May I see you, Martin?”
“Sure, I’d be glad to,” my father says. “And I’d be glad to make a schedule that works for you.”
“Go to sleep, Dena.”
“So it’s good news. Right? The kids can see the city and their father. Right, Mick?”
Her jaw stiffens as her eyes nearly close. “I told you. My name is Miriam.”
Martin
THERE’S A 180-FOOT-TALL Howard Johnson’s sign on the Parkway that you can see from a mile away. It stands in the parking lot of the restaurant and is surrounded by tall waving weeds and a chain-link fence. At times when my parents split, my mother took Debra and me to visit him there, a halfway point between our home and his. As I lay in bed this morning I remember how he’d light up when he saw us approach and how hard he worked at cramming as much fun into our time together as he could. But it was a diner. On the highway. So there wasn’t much to do after we colored our place mats and ate lunch. The tower is where we’d go, the base of it. My father would make up stories about climbing it as a kid and ask us what we thought we could see if we climbed the ladder to the top. Debra usually said Disneyland—the castle and all the characters, a moat with black swans. Once I said, my mother, driving on the highway, coming to get us so we didn’t have to stand in a parking lot all day. This hurt my father. We went a week or more without talking and I remember fearing that I’d ruined my relationship with him, just as my mother had.
I get out of bed and look out the window to see if he’s left. His car is still in the driveway but it’s in a different spot. Someone knocks gently on my door, then opens it. My mother is wigless and still in her nightclothes.
“I heard something downstairs,” she says.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s Dad.”
“Go look. Please.”
It’s just after six. I walk past her down the stairs and find my father fully dressed in the garage, sitting on a lawn chair near the far wall of boxes.
“Was she gonna throw these out?” he says, lifting a pile of photos from his lap. “There are pictures of me in high school in here.”
“I don’t know.”
“This guy here, see him? This guy? Dickie Brutzman. Could throw a watermelon thirty yards from his knees.”
“How long have you been out here?”
“And this is me. In the back, see?”
It’s him. A teenager with dark hair but the same long straight nose. The deep-set eyes.
“Was she gonna toss these out?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “You should take whatever you want.”
“Who throws out photographs? Your mother’s a lunatic. I don’t know how you live here.”
This is his new line. I don’t know how you live here. He’s said it the last two times I’ve seen him.
“You should live with me,” he says. “You’re seventeen now, you should come live and work with me.”
“Mom says I should go to college.”
“Hasids don’t go to college. They study Talmud and that’s it.”
“But I’m not a Hasid.”
“College is a waste of time and money.” He stands and moves around the garage, checking all the labels on the boxes. “You should come work with me.”
“I think I want to be a photographer.”
“Then take pictures. Walk out the front door with your camera and point the thing at life. It’s everywhere. Beauty and emotion, the sky, the sea. You don’t need a classroom for that.”
He opens another box and flips through some records. “Dave Brubeck, Nat King Cole. Chuck Baker, Sinatra. Help me get these into
the car.”
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 . . .”
“Forbid? Forbid, Mickey?”
“I want you out of the car, David. Now!”
“The only people who use the word ‘forbid’ 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.”
Brandi Lady
“REAL 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. Horrible. 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.
&nb
sp; “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.
