by Joshua Braff
My father’s eyes are pinned on me. “Don’t what?”
IT’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!”
THERE 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.
Strap-a-Long
MY FATHER KNOCKS ON MY door at 7 a.m. and for a minute I have no idea where I am.
“Get showered and dressed, we’re goin’ to Larry’s.”
I don’t find out who Larry is until we’re in the car. He’s a childhood friend of my father’s who owns a “toy store” on Forty-sixth Street. My father speaks a thousand miles per hour, and has an I ♥ New York coffee mug in his hand as he drives.
“Ira never calls this much and never wants to meet, but two weeks ago one of his connected friends wants to show him what the competition is doing so he takes him into Spanky’s and Killowatt and Show World and it changes everything. Ira ends up wanting more than a straight burlesque theater because he’s positive we’re going to be swallowed whole by the peeps but I remind him that the Imperial has always kept its ‘integrity.’ That’s the word I use, one little word that sets him off like a Nazi at a bar mitzvah. I mean he goes fuckin’ ballistic on me and starts yelling and having a coronary about what the investors are saying about me and how we’re losing money and what the strip is today and fuckin’ Betamax sales and I tell him to calm the hell down and he says, ‘Upgrade this fucker yesterday, Martin!’ So I tell him to get out. To go get some fresh air or some scotch and stop talking to me like one of his fat stupid stepchildren. I watch him huff down the street from my office window and think about my father and what he’d say if he were here listening to old Ira spitting and yelling and what he’d do to me if he saw a bunch of dildos hanging in the Imperial Theatre like a row of dead geese in some chink restaurant. A day later Ira has Larry Abromowitz call me, a guy I’ve known since Hebrew school in Hell’s Kitchen. ‘I’m dumpin’ the strap,’ he tells me. ‘I want you to have it. The missus has colon cancer and we’re moving to a condo in Boca.’ So I feel bad now, I’ve known his wife for years, went to their wedding, and I tell him I’m very sorry about it all and wish you all the luck in the world, but I don’t want to be in the toy biz. He says to me, Ira said you wanted it. I say Ira’s full of shit. Larry says you’re outta your mind, the stuff’s been flying off the shelves for a full year now. Bullshit. And I mean bullshit. The guy’s always been full of shit. I remember when he was nine years old and he stuck a pencil eraser in his ear and popped his eardrum. I mean I knew he wasn’t headed to NASA the day I met him. Big surprise, he becomes a salesman in Times Square right out of high school. Sells all that tchotchke crap for years, mounds of fake shit and magic tricks and posters of Houdini and stuff like that. Then it was pinball machines and theater tickets and every goddamn drug you can think of. In the sixties he sold grass by the pounds out of the second floor attic and downstairs was a tourist trap that had King Kong T-shirts and postcards and shit like that. So now it’s dildos. And strap-ons. And who knows what else. Good for you, Larry, you little-dicked Heeb. Your mother must be so proud.”
We park in the same lot as we did the other day and find Leo waiting for us outside a diner called Tilt and Hammer on Forty-third Street. Six feet whatever and just monstrous around the shoulders and neck, Leo has a tiny piece of pink tissue blotting a shaving nick near his chin.
“Where we goin’ so early?” he says, his hands buried in the pockets of his khakis.
“Strap-a-Long,” my father says to him. “A toy store.”
Leo nods and grins. “We buyin’ her?”
“I hope not.”
We all head up the six blocks on Broadway a
nd Leo points to the sign: STRAP-A-LONG-CASSIDY in cursive black neon.
“Is that you, Martin?” a man yells as he walks out to greet us. “The Martin Arbus?”
“Hello there, Larry. You’re lookin’ a little older.”
“Aren’t we all, aren’t we all.”
The top three buttons of his wide-collared shirt are open so his five-pound gold chai can glow in the field of white chest hair. He embraces my father like it’s Passover and Leo and I shake his hand. “This way, boys, the tour starts here.”
Inside the store I see rows and rows of brightly lit shelves and walls of porn magazines. There’s a smell I can’t pinpoint but it’s a little like ammonia and wet dog. Gross. A man wearing bike shorts and an American flag tank top smiles at me before heading into a back room.
“Wait up,” I say, catching up to Leo.
He’s lifts a floppy pile of black leather straps off a discount table and turns to Abromowitz. “What does this do?” he says.
Larry helps him get the thing over his head but pulls shy of placing the ball gag in his mouth. Leo laughs, nods, blushes as he tries to get it off. There are hundreds of items here. A candy store for horny adults. My first thought is there’s no way to picture this mush of color and pink plastic inside the lobby of my dad’s theater. The signs above us are in red glitter. FOR HIM—FROM HER. FOR HER—FROM HIM. FOR HER—FROM HER. FROM HIM—FOR HIM. ONE PRONG. TWO PRONGS. THREE PRONGS?
Larry’s right arm is out and swirling like one of those girls on a game show and he’s lost in a spiel about women coming in from Jersey and eventually my dad’s had enough.
“Time out!” he screams, with his hands a T.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t want to be rude . . . but . . . this isn’t gonna work for me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Larry, I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Ira. So I’ll send him over and you can give him the tour. Okay? I’m not trying to be rude but . . . can you imagine my father’s face, Larry, if he thought I was buying you out.”
Larry steps closer to my father. “It’s like I said, Marty, I made a mint this year. Housewives alone. A fuckin’ mint. It’s a new phenomenon. They wrote about it in the Times. They come from all over. Even Philly.”
“Then keep it.”
“We’re off to Boca, Marty. By the end of the month.”
“Right.”
“Don’t make up your mind so fast. Look around. I got movies too. Please, just look.”
Leo and I follow Larry deeper into the store but my father stays behind with his hand on his forehead. Leo and I can’t help giggling, bumping each other like kids, touching the rubber tit on a human doll. INFLATABLE MEN, WOMEN AND PECKER. NO HOLE LOVE DOLLS FOR YOUR MOUNTING PLEASURE!
“Welcome to your bondage and sadomasochistic wing,” Larry says. “To the left, a smorgasboard of nipple clamps and whips and canes for the spanking. And over this way you got your blindfolds, collars, cuffs, and masks.”
When I face Leo he’s reading the back packaging on a torpedo-sized dildo.
“Female- and animal-shaped love dolls, discreet masturbator pocket pals and blow-up pornstars. Either a you boys want to touch Seka’s ass?” Larry laughs with his head back and I can see every filling he’s ever received.
“And I got movies too. Real cheap, big stars. You runnin’ film peeps yet, Martin? Where’s Martin?”
“No,” says Leo. “We’re not showing peeps.”
“Jesus, man. What’s the holdup? How you guys making any money over there? I got over a thousand feet of stag films you could loop in an afternoon. I’m talkin’ good fresh stuff. Girl-boy, girl-girl, I got teens.”
“I gotta run,” my father says, as he comes in the room. “You’re gonna sell this in a heartbeat, Lawrence. You’re right, it’s very special. I’m happy for ya. Tell Ruth that I hope she feels better soon. I wish I was goin’ with ya. Where in Boca exactly?”
“You didn’t see the magazines yet?”
“Don’t need to, Larry.”
“Just let him show us,” Leo says.
“Come back with Ira. I’m done here.”
We follow my father back toward the exit down a different aisle. ANAL BEADS, BALLS, BULLETS AND EGGS.
Larry jogs up to my dad and puts his arm around his shoulder. “Martin, I’m in a little bit of a jam. I got to sell the store. Ruth is very, very sick.”
“I know. I know, Larry. You told me. But the thing is this, ya see—”
“I’ll give it to you for half the asking. Half, Martin. A steal. But only if you take it off me this week.”
My father steps out of the store and onto the sidewalk. I can’t tell if he’s considering the offer or trying to get away. He starts down Broadway and without looking back lifts his hand, waves and yells, “I’ll call you!” We follow him.
It’s not the friendliest area in the world so I’m sort of pleased to be with Leo. We keep passing quivering bodies in doorways and people with bruised, outstretched hands. At one point Leo is approached by a man in a skirt with tennis-ball boobs who’s lifting his white miniskirt to show us his panties. He flickers his fat, brown tongue at us. Leo bumps the guy, who stumbles hard, nearly tasting the curb.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” the tranny screams, then reaches into a trash can, winds up his arm, and throws a bottle in a brown paper bag. He hurls it like I throw lefty and it breaks without drama on the sidewalk. Leo runs at him and the guy takes off into the street.
When we catch up to my dad, he’s talking as if we’ve been with him the whole time.
“‘Keep up with the Joneses,’ Ira says. ‘When in Rome,’ Brandi says. All they really want to do is kill everything beautiful and sensual and bring scumbags in to jack off in my theater with their pants at their ankles. Fuck that!”
“Then don’t buy it,” I say. “Keep it the way you want it. Don’t have a heart attack over this. Right, Leo?”
Leo doesn’t answer. My father waits and waits and then faces him. “Leo?” he finally says.
“We need ’em,” he says. “Film peeps and live peeps. If we want to stay open near the strip.”
“Bullshit,” my father says.
“Who’s gonna come, boss? There are better spots around the corner. You said it yourself, people buying up leases on the strip for what? Five grand or more for six hundred square feet? If we don’t pull our weight in the spot then—”
“Funny, Leo. I thought you were one of the holdouts. You been talking to Ira? Or Brandi?”
“The thing is, boss, we’re losing money. Forget Ira for a second. Tokens and the peeps are where it’s at. Burlesque? Burlesque is dead.”
“Oh it is? It is, Leo? I can name three spots in Atlantic City that run purely on burlesque.”
“But this is here. We’re talking about here.”
My father says nothing for the rest of the walk back to the Imperial. When we get inside, there’s a silver-haired man with an orange tan standing in the lobby with Brandi and two other men. It’s Ira. Ira Saltzman. I saw him the other night but he didn’t see me. He has lips the color of veal for some reason and they’re puffy, like he’s been sucking on a lozenge. He shakes my father’s hand but not Leo’s.
“You’re interrupting a good story. Where was I?”
One of the men reminds him. “You said the state . . .”
“That’s right, it’s the state who says that by law a theater presenting a drama or a comedy has to charge sales tax on each ticket. The loophole for us: musical performances are exempt. At stake is a quarter million dollars in back taxes. I can’t believe my ears so I say what’s the problem and this fuckin’ tax prick over there says you’re not a musical, you’re a porn theater. I look right in his eyes and ask him how I’m supposed to operate without music. Can you tell me that, shmuck? He says, ‘That’s not my problem, sir.’”
Ira smacks himself on the forehead. “‘Not your problem?’ I say. ‘Fuck you!’ I’m tellin’ ya, I was
gonna murder this cue stick, right there, with my fuckin’ hands.”
All of them laugh and laugh and as it dies down, the other men greet my father with handshakes.
Ira puts his hand on my dad’s back. “We didn’t know what happened to you, Marty. Saul thought you fell through a manhole.”
“I’m here, I’m here. I didn’t realize all the troops were coming today. This is my boy, David.”
I meet Roger Goldman, Harvey Casher, and Corky Lehman. Ira has his fingertips on Brandi’s lower back and I can see that it’s making my father nuts. She’s in a very tight evening gown of blood red sequins and there’s a matching top hat that rests tilted on top of her wig. She isn’t speaking or even acknowledging me so I say, “Hello,” and she smiles, as if not wanting to crack the makeup on her cheeks.
“Hi,” she says. “I can hardly breathe in this dress.”
We all walk into the empty theater and Leo, heading to the bar, asks what everyone is drinking. We sit at one of the VIP circular tables that’s placed in the open nook of the C-shaped stage, about two feet from the edge of the pit. Ira laughs and puts the tip of his thumb on Brandi’s chin. He turns her head toward me.
“See that kid over there with the hair. I knew him when he wasn’t yet a foot tall and still crapping himself. He doesn’t remember me but I came to his bris.”
“I remember you,” I say.
“From the bris?” All the men laugh.
“No. After that. You gave me a giant stuffed monkey. A Curious George.”
My father loosens up and grins at me. “So that’s where that guy came from.”
“Of course, me, I bought it. Your uncle Ira bought it. You done with high school?”
I nod. “Three weeks.”
“Where you headed to college?”
I look at my dad. “Don’t know.”
“Don’t know? Don’t know? Marty, you skimpin’ on the most important time in the boy’s life?”
“College is for suckers,” my father says, and I wonder how many times I’ve heard him say it. “One of the biggest scams of our time.”
