by Joshua Braff
“I’m not being rude. I’m saying God likes you more. Keeps you busy. Makes it hard to see Debra.”
Pause.
“No, no, no. Did he say beach? It’s just a hotel.”
Pause.
“But so what. Beach or no beach, I want to see my girl next weekend. We’re heading off for my birthday. Big, expensive gifts only, please.”
He’s smiling from his joke, but his grin fades as soon as she speaks.
“I, I . . . don’t care about any of that,” he says. “I want to see her. I’ll meet you at the diner or pick her up at the house. It’s up to you. One weekend with her father. One! People do it all the time, Mick. It’s what families do.”
He faces me as she talks and talks and eventually he holds the phone away from his ear and points his fingers at it like a gun. “You done?” he asks. “Yes, I heard you loud and clear, Mickey. Friday’s a school day. I just need her to miss a couple of hours so we can get on the road. How about two o’clock?”
Pause.
“I did listen to you and now I’m done. Give me a time, what? Two thirty?”
Pause.
“It’s a couple of hours of school. She can miss two hours, Mick. And stop telling me she’s too goddamn religious to wear a bathing suit. Do you have any idea how fucked up you’re making that kid?”
More talk from her end and he ends up banging the receiver against his hip. “Excuse me, can I say something? I’m finished with this conversation. Be ready to see me on Friday.”
Pause.
“Good. What time? Just give me a time. Good . . . See you there. Tell her I have suntan lotion. Good-bye.”
The plan is to meet at the same Howard Johnson’s we used to go to during their many separations. Halfway Hojo’s. I’m excited to see my sister. I haven’t heard her voice in nearly a month. In my bedside table I find a letter she wrote me from the compound last year.
Dear David,
Long trip. We just got here. 12:30 a.m. Mom drove seven hours and thirty-three minutes and we only stopped twice to pee. The smell of this place reminds me so much of last year. It’s a wood smell and also the trees around here, so big and so green. The girl in the bed next to me is snoring. When she breathes out it sounds like a whistle or a wheezing. When she breathes in it’s more like a small motor or an old man. I am writing in the dark and can’t see if my letters are on the line or not. It’s like being blind, but I’m sure being blind is worse. This feels like the same cot I had last year. I scratched my name into the metal bed frame the night before I left but it’s too dark to see right now. There is another girl in the room but I cannot hear her or see her. This is a new section of the girl’s dorm that was built over the winter, along with a new synagogue and the boy’s dorm. The building I’m in has ten three-person rooms and mine has a view of the Tree of Life, a huge cyprus that leans out over the outdoor sanctuary. I am thirsty. I’m back now and I have some water. I still feel the tingling in my legs from the drive. We got here and no one on the campus was awake except for Rabbi Fleeter who was in the recreation room playing foosball by himself. He looked very happy to see us and even asked about you. I hear so many crickets outside, like grains of sand on the beach, millions and millions of them rubbing their wings together at the same time. I am tired. I can’t stay awake. Sarah should be here tomorrow morning. I like it here much better when she’s here and I’m sad are dorms are different. The crickets don’t sleep, I guess. They are like Rabbi Fleeter.
Brandi walks in my room with another present. “Open it,” she says. Inside is a book of photographs by various photographers. On the cover is a black and white portrait of a woman looking longingly to her right. It’s by an artist named Dorothea Lange.
“Thank you.”
“Happy graduation!” Brandi says.
My father smokes his brains out in the doorway. “Hey, Mr. Graduate?” he asks.
Brandi takes the book from me. “Look at this page,” she says, flipping to find it.
“Yeah?” I say.
“Tomorrow’s Monday,” he says.
I nod.
“Ready to go to work?”
Monday
AN ELECTRIC SAW CHEWS THROUGH a piece of wood in two-second bursts. It sounds like reeee! The bullet-fire hammering of small metal tacks goes on for hours. They use what’s called a nail gun. Wopboom! Wopboom! The Imperial Theatre. Monday. I write it in the notebook. Day one. Pretty boring. Me and Jocko sit out in front and wait for the van to arrive from the Strap-a-Long. A regular who Leo calls Fat Albert saunters up to us and asks if we’re open.
“Just the bar,” I say, and steer him toward Broadway, to another strip joint. He heads off to the corner, scratches his butt for a second, and comes back. “Thought you were renovating,” he says.
“We are,” I tell him. “But the bar is open.”
Within a half hour, each of the regulars is in their chosen seat, drinking through the sounds of table saws and drills and dust everywhere. Back inside for a break, I shoot three rolls and just know the pics will be filled with movement and story. One old guy that Leo dubbed Grandpa Munster wears the cutoff fingers of surgical gloves on his thumbs and index fingers. He says it’s for counting cash. In this light his cheekbones form sallow, deep grooves that appear like hinges to his jaw. His girlfriend is an elderly ex-dancer named Babs. Every day she wears a black leotard that shows her bony ribs. When she kisses me hello—her idea—her breath and skin give off a mothball scent that triggers depressing thoughts in my brain. Couple that with the Dewars and Vicks and you’ve got Babs. My favorite shot of her is the one in which I caught her applying lipstick, in preparation of being photographed. The excitement in her eyes is raw, as if I just hired her to relive her past, to be the girl she once was. Liberace is in the picture too, helping her pick the right shade. He’s a veteran of “Two Wars,” who hardly speaks until his third shot of Sambuca. After that he brags about the “whores” he slept with the night before and usually asks Leo to smell his fingers. Merv Griffin is a very fat and pimply alcoholic in his early thirties who insists he’s a nephew of Betty Gravel. Mr. Green Jeans has a purple skin disorder on his right cheek and ear and is constantly asking me if I’ve read novels I’ve never heard of. “What are you, a moron?” he says, glaring at me like I’ve been wasting my illiterate life away. Another man they call Rabbi—just Rabbi—wears a yarmulke and only comes in to drink beer in the morning. When Rabbi sees me today, he says, “Happy graduation,” and gives me a long and boozy hug. Ira arrives and everybody stops talking.
“Where’s your father?”
“Home.”
“How’d it go with Abromowitz?”
“Fine. There are three filled trucks, but one is—”
“Good. Ya know your job for now?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why are you in here?”
“Just talking to Babs.”
“I need you out front. Where’s your notebook?”
I show it to him.
“Good. Make sure all these assholes only take short smoke breaks and get back to work. Write it all down, names and times, in and out. Capiche?”
I nod and he grips my chin and wiggles it.
Brandi’s “first baby”—the sex toy shop she’s named the Sixty-Niner Diner—is being built directly into the walls of the lobby. Only three workers are here today and she’s pissed off because there should be more. New everything arrives daily: carpet, lights, countertops, two hundred aluminum shelves—all just strewn all over the place. She tells me she sees order in the clutter and has an opinion about everything from the doorknobs to the toilet paper to how many pairs of crotchless panties she should order for Christmas. She’s also rehearsing a new routine, which is why we’re headed to Atlantic City on Friday. A femme fatale act, they call it. The Moraga Theater, two blocks from the beach. I’ve been taking pictures of Brandi’s rehearsals with a choreographer named Etta, an eighty-year-old Jewish lady from Queens. Just picture a tiny wrinkly woman with a yellow ostrich-fea
ther fan in her hand, sitting on a suspended moon that’s fifty feet in the air.
I see Moses. 8:33 a.m.
I’m supposed to write it down.
The rest of the construction guys arrive too. 8:34 a.m.
Moses is the boss. He has a very photogenic head with perfectly stacked, meaty wrinkles on the back of his neck. He goes into the theater and comes back out a second later.
“Nothing is prepped,” he says, looking like he wants to hurt me. 8:45 a.m. Leo shows up, thank God. They talk and head back inside.
9:29 a.m. The boys, nine of them, are taking a break.
They sit on the edge of the trailer and I can see the peep-show units behind them on pallets. Phone-booth-sized black paneling with huge copper hinges and large sheets of glass. Moses tells us that he’s been installing peep windows all summer and is booked until Christmas. We learn ours is a “fuckload” better than the rickety “Textoil” unit at Show World, which requires ball bearings to lift the shade. Ours utilizes a new invention, a threaded “worm gear,” that will only respond to customized tokens.
Dad arrives and Ira takes him to see Moses downstairs. A functional wine cellar in the fifties, the red-bricked basement has been cleared for nine custom built peep booths. In each, a person will have an option to watch any of five pornographic films that will run in constant loop on a nine-inch screen. When the film ends it will automatically rewind and begin again. The music for the live peeps will be pumped all the way from Soundman Sal’s turntable into two mounted speakers in the ceiling of each booth. The formation of this area is a circle of connected booths in which people can pay to lift their individual shade. The “reveal” is a twenty-by-thirty-foot “sex den” with a mechanical, spinning mattress in the center. Moses says this section of the wine cellar may be too small for nine peep windows. Dad says make less. Ira says make it fit. Moses says he can make a horseshoe out of the shape and it might even buy him more room. Another problem: The mechanical mattress may not have enough power to rotate because of the limited wattage he’s receiving from the electrical sockets. My father walks out as Moses scratches the wrinkles on the back of his neck.
1:30 p.m. Back at the bar, Babs is in a bad mood and cries for ten minutes while sipping her Dewar’s. I think about consoling her but don’t want her to get too attached—words of advice from Leo. The construction guys are punch-drunk right now and howling at anyone female on the sidewalk. “Here, chicky, chicky, chicky. Here, chicky Mama.” Weird. Vern arrives. He’s a quadriplegic who wears sunglasses inside even though he’s not blind. When he sees all his friends at the bar he grins and Babs stops crying long enough to hug him and kiss his forehead. I take a picture of it. Click. The phone rings in the lobby and, as I run to lift it, I want it to be my sister’s voice.
“Happy graduation!” It’s not her. It’s Ira. He wants me to take promotional pictures of Brandi in Atlantic City. He says he’ll give me more “film” work if I rise to the occasion. When I get off the phone I actually yell, “Yes!” and pump my fist like an idiot. I think of my mother and what she’d think of me now, getting paid to take pictures. Brandi and her super-gay friend Hart arrive. He’s a tall black man who carries a Batman lunch box like a purse. Hart says none of the shelves in the store are mounted right and points to wiring in the exposed ceiling. Brandi says, “Fuck!” really loud. The last van from Abromowitz’s inventory arrives. Dad and Ira step on the truck and I take a picture of the two of them. Click. Brandi has a paddle in her hand that says HURT ME on it backward. Jocko’s got a pink dildo the size of a baguette and says, “Merry Christmas,” before handing it to Brandi. She puts it to her ear like a phone. “Is that you, Mom?” she says, and Hart nearly wets himself laughing, his palm to his chest. “Mom, you there? I’m getting a bad connection. Ma! Ma! Maybe it’s this giant, rubber penis in my ear. I’ll call you back!” Funny lady. We unload the truck for the next two hours and I’m exhausted and want to go to bed. The peep windows are nearly finished we’re told.
8:00 p.m. Moses is taking a break.
On the sidewalk out front a man punches a teenager then kicks him in the stomach when he’s down. I don’t know what makes people so vicious here. The heat maybe, the subway steam, the hobo piss and noise. Quiet is relative in the city and the human is certainly a varied beast. The kid who got kicked doesn’t want any help.
10:50 p.m. Moses says the live peeps are up and running. The system hums louder than you’d think, but he says the music should drown it out. Tiki is on her knees, trying to make all the workers nuts as she flirts with taking her T-shirt off. She looks at me.
“David,” she yells, lifting her top to show me her giant, sheet-white breasts. Yup, there they are again. I’ve seen them so many times now, I don’t even care.
“David!” Brandi yells. “It’s Debra! Your sister’s on the phone!”
Hojo’s
BRANDI AND TWO OTHER DANCERS are already at the hotel in Atlantic City. My dad and I will pick up Debra at the Howard Johnson’s and meet them there afterward. My father says he’s nauseous and I find him coughing his lungs out in his office. When he sees me, he’s angry or frustrated or both and says to go help Leo, “Put the shit on the truck.”
Leo and I load the van with all the costumes, wigs, and props. A brand-new six-foot brandy snifter needs to be removed from its coffin-size crate with a power drill. We then need to get it on a dolly and load it on the U-Haul. Once that’s on we need to unhook the hundred-pound half-moon that’s currently dangling over the main stage and somehow fit that on the truck too. It barely fits but we do eventually get the doors closed. Leo honks the tune to “Let’s Go Mets” and is off for the beach without us.
My father’s face is more green than white. He tries to appear okay but he’s sweating and his body is hunched over. I decide to get him a ginger ale but he’s gone when I return. An hour later he walks into the theater with a big wrapped box. Inside are roller skates for Debra, he tells me. “The boardwalk goes forever.”
It takes about an hour with traffic to get to Halfway Hojo’s. When I see the sign, the tower from the highway, I think of my mother’s face and pray it will be smiling or grinning or glad to see me in some way. I envision our kitchen, so long ago, a scene like a dream where I’m small and she’s laughing at something, something I’ve said. The reward in pleasing her marks my mind and memory for life. Her station wagon is in the parking lot when we pull in, sitting right next to a Greyhound bus. The faux wood doors and smashed left taillight can only be hers. My father carries the roller-skate box on top of his head and whistles—he never whistles. I see my mother alone, no Debra, at a booth right across from the pie carousel and cashier. She’s wearing a dark brown handkerchief on her head and it looks like her actual hair underneath.
“Hi,” I say. Her face is more guarded than pleased.
“Where the hell’s Debra?” my father says.
My mother slides out. “At school. I wanted to see you alone first,” she says.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me, Mickey. We had an agreement!”
Two people at the counter face my dad.
“You had an agreement. It’s a Friday afternoon, Martin. I’m here to see David and to talk to both of you as adults. Can we do that? Can we sit here and talk . . . quietly?”
My father puts the box on the table and I hear his jaw pop. “She can’t miss an hour of school? To see her father? You’re the most manipulative person on the goddamn planet, do you know that? I did not drive an hour to see you. I came here to see my daughter and you’re playing too many fuckin’ games right now!”
A waitress in a light blue uniform and doily name tag puts her hands on my father’s shoulder. She asks if there’s a problem and he says, “No.” We all sit but no one says anything.
“Let’s start over,” my mother finally says, and actually smiles. “The first thing I want to say is that . . . I know this must be hard for you.”
“I’ve hired a lawyer,” my father says. A lie.
<
br /> My mother stares at him. I look down at my paper place mat and rip a hole in it with my thumbnail.
“I think that’s a horrible mistake,” she says.
“Yeah?” my dad says. “I’m sure you do.”
“Maybe I should just say what I came here to say.”
“Okay, say it. We’re listening.”
She tugs at the handkerchief on her head and takes a quick deep breath. “What I came here to say is not going to be easy for either of you.”
It sounds like she’s rehearsed this. She isn’t looking at me. The booth is so cramped. I try to push the table, but it’s bolted to the floor.
“Good morning,” chirps the waitress. Her name tag reads Paula. “Who’s ready for breakfast?”
“Nothing for me, thank you,” my mother says.
“I need more time,” my father says.
“How ’bout you?” she asks me.
“Nothing, thanks.”
“Okay, I’ll be back.”
I stare down at the hole in my placemat and tear it more.
“I have decided to get married again.”
My father looks at me, and then my mother does too.
“Married?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Are you even divorced?” I ask.
“Yes,” they say in unison.
My mother’s forehead is sweating and she blinks a lot. “He is a Lichtiger, a widower. He has no children. We’re going to ask the grand rabbi’s permission next week.”
“Next week?” I say.
“And,” she says, “if all goes well, we’d like to move to Brooklyn.”
My father nods, eyes wide. “Brooklyn? Is that it? Is that the news you said we weren’t gonna like?”
“It means a new school for Dena. It means new friends, a new synogogue for us. There will be a lot of changes for her.”
“Where do I sleep?” I say.
My mother looks down at her hands. “You can visit us,” she says softly. “And I can visit you.”
In the silence of the next seconds I am hurt, punched in the face. I begin to envy all the other conversations in earshot, the safe and simple ordering of “rye toast, please, not white.”