by Joshua Braff
“I need to get dressed,” she says to my mother.
My mother glares at the towels and her bare shoulders beneath it. She faces me and then Brandi.
“You’re going to jail,” she says, nodding. “You’re all going to jail.”
“Bullshit!” my father says. “Pure bullshit. You want to ruin our fun, lady? Go ahead. Go fuck up the best day she’s had in her life. You’ll be hearing from my attorney, Mickey.”
Sarah finds her dress and moves toward the bathroom.
“Hurry!” my mother yells at her.
“Give her a second to put her clothes on,” Brandi says. “Give her some respect.”
“Respect?” my mother screams, looking at Brandi in her corset. She practically shoves Debra into my father’s room. I notice my sister’s hair tie on one of the beds.
“You forgot this,” I say to Debra, holding it out to her. My mother pushes Debra away from me. “Don’t . . . come . . . near us.”
“It’s for her hair.”
“Don’t . . . come . . .”
“Fuck you.” It’s what comes from my mouth.
My mother stares deep into my eyes. “Thank you for destroying my week. Son.” She grabs Debra’s hand again and they walk down the hall to the elevators. My father and I follow them with Sarah.
“And it’s sunny out too,” my father says.
“You forgot your hair tie,” I repeat, almost pleading as I offer it to Debra. My mother comes between us, her fingers splayed.
“Let him give her the thing, Mick.”
“No!” she declares, and the elevator opens. The three of them get on. I follow them and cram the hair tie into Debra’s hand. When I step back, I look only at my sister.
“I love you,” I say.
The doors begin to close, then shut.
Get Me Home
GRIM. DEBRA USED TO WALK on her tiptoes. Tight Achilles tendons or calf muscles, we learned, made her walk like a ballerina in heels. A physical therapist with hairy gray armpits named Trina came to our house and told her to lift coins from the floor without bending her knees. It didn’t help. She told my mother to massage the cartilage on Debra’s heel by rolling it back and forth like a piece of Play-Doh every night before bed. That didn’t help either. Why did I think of this in the first place? In the bathroom at the Moraga in Atlantic City there’s a poster of a ballerina mouse. It’s gray in a pink leotard and performing a plie. I try to remember what finally made her better. It might have just been time.
“David,” my father says from the stall. “You still there?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Is Brandi dressed?”
“She’s waiting for the interviewer.”
“But is she dressed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you go find out, please?”
An instrumental version of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” is playing from a speaker in the ceiling. It’s coming from a circle of a hundred holes.
My father flushes and I wait for him to come out. He looks awful and his zipper is open. “Go find out,” he says.
“Are you okay?”
“Go.”
Outside the bathroom there’s a hallway that leads to dressing rooms, a small kitchen, and then the enormous stage. I gradually hear the audience—over two hundred paid we’re told—and they’re laughing at and applauding a Catskill clown named Willy Sapley. From my side view, I watch the guy hold his hat down on his head with both hands and run in a tight circle to loud thwacks of the drums. Then he’s gone, diving off stage and throwing himself onto the laps of audience members. He climbs on the backs of their chairs, looks like he’s swimming, as he takes a man’s watch and rummages through a fat lady’s purse.
“Hey, kid,” someone says. “You know where Brandi Lady is? I’m supposed to do an interview.”
The guy follows me to one of the dressing rooms and I knock. Brandi, in full fetish garb, opens the door. The corset, the nylons, the leather boots up to her thighs. Her hair is wound in a tall, blue-black beehive with thin wisps that fall over her shoulders. “Your interviewer is here,” I tell her.
“Where’s you father?”
“In the bathroom.”
“Brandi Lady?”
She ignores the man and walks back to her vanity table. “Your mother did this to him. I just want you to know that. He’s been doing better, taking his meds, trying to smoke less. He would have been fine but no, fuck no, she had to swoop down on her broomstick and just . . . kill all of it.” I see her chin wrinkle up as she sniffs then carefully dabs her eye with a tissue. “I feel so sorry for you. And Debra.”
“Brandi, this man is here for an interview.”
“Yes, hello,” she says.
“Hi, I’m Rich from the Peep Show Express. We met a long time ago in—”
“How long will this take? I have to be on stage in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll make it fast. Do you mind if I record it?”
“No, but it has to be quick.”
The guy puts a tape recorder on the table and connects a microphone. “Ready?”
“Sure,” she says, facing the mirror, still applying makeup.
The man pushes Record. “Peep Show Express, June 1975. Brandi Lady interview. I first met Brandi Lady when her name was Luna Von at a convention in Sweden back in 1963. She was nineteen at the time and making her debut film, Where Ya Puttin’ That? with director Rune Tharsz—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” she interrupts.
In the reflection of the mirror, I watch her lower her head. Luna Von? Debut film?
“Is something wrong?” the man asks.
“I do not want to talk about that,” she says.
“You mean the movies?”
Brandi swivels around in her chair. Her face is flushed and her eyes are on me. “Will you go check on your father, please?”
I nod and walk out of the room but the door stays open a crack.
“Go ahead,” she says. “That’s just my stepson.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Okay. Uh . . . we sit here today at the Tri-State Burlesque Review at the Moraga in Atlantic City where Brandi will take the stage in minutes.”
“Hi, Brandi.”
“Hi.”
“Do you remember me?”
“No. And I hope you’re here to ask me about the updated Imperial Theatre on Eighth Avenue and Broadway in Times Square, the greatest spot on earth for discreet adult mischief, including the brand-new and naughty toy store we call the Sixty-Niner Diner. Where everything you can imagine is for sale and on sale.”
“The Imperial in Times Square. Okay. Is it possible to ask you a few questions about your earlier films?”
“I don’t talk about that anymore because I don’t make them anymore. What do you want to know?”
“You still have a fan base in Europe, a lot of people write in. Why’d you stop making them so long ago.”
“Because I stopped wanting to fuck on film. How’s that?”
“David!” my father says, and I jump back from the door. He and Ira walk toward me. “Where’s Brandi?”
I point at her dressing room.
“Is she dressed?”
“No. I mean yes.”
He opens the door a bit, pokes his head in.
“Almost done,” I hear the interviewer say. “Now, in Ouch Too Deep, there was a scene where you and Bruce Girth had a standing sixty-nine scene on a cherry picker.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Can you tell us a little about that scene?”
“Dwayne Shooter and Bruce Girth. They were veterans and I was a kid, well, we were all kids except Rune, who was more like a dad. We lived together in a house in Stockholm that had a garden and a pool and that’s what we did there. We let Rune follow us around with his camera. I remember being very happy and knowing that no one at home would ever speak to me again. Mostly because I’d left high school. That was the big thing in my house. Love was
always conditional, all of it, all dependent on God and order and keeping score.”
“Darling?” my father says.
“Yes.”
“It’s time to go on.”
“That’s all the time I have,” Brandi says.
“Okay, so three nights here at the Moraga for the Tri-State Burlesque Review and then what?”
“Back to the newly renovated Imperial Theatre on Eighth Avenue and Broadway where one can experience a true adult fantasy world where dreams of all kinds can be fulfilled in a clean and safe environment. I’m also performing a fetish act and a new act in which I bathe in a five-foot brandy snifter on Mondays and Fridays at eleven a.m., three p.m., and nine p.m. I begin a half-moon routine on September first but only at the nine p.m. show.”
“Arlene!” my father says.
“I’m coming, Marty.”
Ira pokes his head in the room. “How we doin’ in here?”
“She’s fine,” my father says, “she’s fine. Let’s get to the stage, it’s time.”
We all walk down the hall and all I can think about is Brandi on a cherry picker in Stockholm. We haven’t had eye contact since she came out.
“Don’t just stand there,” Ira says. “Take pictures.”
Ira seems to know every dancer and manager we pass. I lift my camera as the curved, lit stage comes into view. Five women in fetish gear just like Brandi’s are waiting by the curtain. Click.
Ira wants to introduce Brandi to a white-haired guy in billiard-ball suspenders. “Brandi Lady,” he says, “Meet my old, dear friend, Alan Greenstein. Alan owns the Calabra and Mo Mo’s and the old Groppler Theatre. We’ve been friends since we were boys.”
Greenstein takes Brandi’s hand and kisses her right leather glove. She curtsies as he does it. “You’re lookin’ at a headliner,” Ira says. “A girl who’s done it all and is still hot at, what now, honey, thirty-six?”
She puts her hands on her hips. “Do I look thirty-six?”
They both laugh with their mouths wide and Greenstein slowly kisses the other hand.
“Marty,” says Ira, “you remember my friend, Alan Greenstein?”
“Yeah, of course, Greenstein. The last time I saw you, you were getting blown by some Asian teenager at the Exotic.”
“Marty,” Brandi says.
“You still a fuckin’ pedophile?”
Greenstein stares at my father as he walks past him toward the stage. Ira’s embarrassed and tries to laugh it off. “Marty’s been sick today.”
“Go fuck yourself, Arbus,” Greenstein says.
“Go kill yourself,” my father says.
The day just keeps getting better from here. My dad guides me closer to the stage and points at Willy Sapley. The guy crams his hands in his clown pockets with his arms elbow deep.
“You just shit all over a great friend of mine,” Ira says.
“Guy’s a Nazi, Ira.”
“You’re the Nazi. You owe him an apology.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“He sends us dancers, he sends us clients, he’s been on the fuckin’ strip longer than you, Marty. Okay? Okay, tough guy?”
The lights go out and the curtain drops and the crowd is large and present, a lot of them. Willy Sapley jogs off the other side of the stage. My father kisses Brandi who now lines up with the other five dancers. “You go knock ’em dead now, okay?”
The girls all walk on stage and the set dressers push out six black chairs. Brandi is kneeling in the center of the stage with a bullwhip in her hand. She says something to the other women.
“You should go down front,” my father says and I head toward the steps down. The music starts, a saxophone by itself, and the next thing I hear is a thud, bone on wood. As I turn I see him, my father, lying on his side with his eyes fluttering. The time it takes to run to him is forever in my mind. I roll him over and lift the back of his head. “Dad!”
“What happened?”
When I look up I see Alan Greenstein.
“Please, go get help. Please!”
“What’s happened to him?” he says, his hand on his forehead.
“I don’t know. Dad?”
Greenstein kneels next to me. He takes my father’s face in his fingers and gives him a light shake. “Don’t do it here, Arbus,” he says. “Not in front of your kid. Come on . . . wake up!”
My father’s eyes open. He swallows and looks in my eyes.
“Get me home.”
Adenomatous
THE DOCTOR IS A MAN Ira knows. We’ve woken him by our phone call but I don’t feel bad because it’s only eight thirty at night. I find the house about a mile from the Moraga, right next to a church. When we get there, the guy is on the porch in a bathrobe, waving his arms like a castaway. He gives my father a few pokes and checks his temperature. He says it’s fatigue, the flu, bad food, an ulcer, or worse. He gives him a pink pill for acid reflux and something to drink and tells my dad he should spend the night. If he feels better tomorrow, we’ll drive back to the city to “get the stomach scoped.” He asks me if I’m staying and when I say yes, he tosses me a blanket and slowly clomps up his staircase. The room we’re in has a TV and a phone and a mural of a zoo train with a rhinoceros in overalls. My father’s eyes are closed so I lift the phone and call Leo at the theater. He’s positive my dad is dying and wants directions. It takes almost two hours but he gets here and rings the bell and wakes up the doctor and his wife. Nine seconds later, Brandi and Ira ring the bell. Brandi, in a Little Bo Peep costume, leans in to kiss my father.
“Marty,” she says. “I’m here. I’m here now.”
“You can’t all stay,” the doctor says.
Ira hands him some cash but the doctor won’t take it. “I’m going back to bed, Ira. Only one of you can stay. Please.”
It’s very hard for me to walk out of the place without my dad. But Leo and I listen to Brandi and decide to go back to the hotel. She stays. When we get there, I feel like I’ve been punched in the chest. Rubbing it doesn’t help. Leo suggests we go home and I agree. In the car he tells me to take deep breaths and tries to put my seat back. I wish I could cry. The wheezing in my father’s breath. The sound of his head on the floor.
“He’s gonna be okay,” Leo says. “Your dad’s one of the toughest guy I know.”
The rain on the windshield is light at first but soon the road grows slick beneath the tires. The wooshing sound is soothing somehow and I close my eyes.
“You want the radio on?” Leo says.
I shake my head and neither of us speaks for an hour or more. In the dream I see my dad and my mom on our front lawn. She’s planting seeds with green rubber gloves and he’s yelling at her, telling her she’s doing it wrong. “I didn’t drop out of my mother’s bunny-hole yesterday,” he yells. “I know how to swim! I know how to fuckin’ swim!”
“Help me, Marty. Help me. I’m trying to get us there.”
“You couldn’t get us there if you tried, baby. You don’t have the balls.”
Leo has his hand on my elbow. “You’re talking all crazy,” he says with a smile.
“I am?”
“What are you dreaming about?”
Out the window the rain picks up. Leo’s windshield wipers fight hard but seem fatigued by the quick back and forth.
“My parents. My mother.”
“Did you know I lost my mom,” Leo says. “She didn’t make it to forty.” A teacher, a churchgoer, a mother of five. But always a sick person, lying in bed with swollen fingers. A “disease” he calls it and I picture her there, under the quilts, medicine bottles and paper cups he brought her with bendy straws. I feel so much sorrow for him as we drive, envisioning this little boy, watching his mother from the hallway, waiting for her to die. By one thirty we’re back and Leo drops me at my father’s apartment. The sounds of the city are louder with no one there. And the loneliness I dread is in every corner. In bed I see Brandi on a cherry picker. My father in a grave. Debra in a tinseled wig. My mo
ther on stage. A poem. Everyone’s an animal and I watch through the cage. This dream’s about a row boat but my mother’s not there. It’s Brandi. My father kisses the hard fabric on the front of her corset before jumping in the black lake water, pinching his nostrils. I wait for him to come up but he doesn’t so I run to the edge and see the back of his head. The sweater he’s wearing is wool and I grip the neck but it’s too wet and heavy with soggy weight. I lift with all my strength. Please, please, help me. But I can’t lift him out. The doorbell wakes me and the clock says 4:16 a.m. It’s Brandi.
“Things got worse,” she says. “He’s over at Roosevelt Hospital.”
THE DOCTOR IS a woman with a Dinah Shore haircut and a chart and an easel and one of those sticks you point with. She speaks to all of us but only looks at my father.
“An adenoma is a type of polyp that is premalignant. They start out as small nodules on the bowel wall and are usually the size of a match head unless they go undetected or ignored for too long, then they can develop a stalk like the one pictured here. What concerns me with yours is the time it’s been permitted to grow so look here, see this? Your polyp is larger than these and is sitting in an area of diverticuli.”
“Of what?” my dad says.
“This pocket here, see?”
“Is it cancer?” Brandi says.
“The biopsy will tell us all we need to know. But I do feel that you should prepare yourself for the possibility, owing to the size and placement.”
“Ffffuck,” my father says, and slaps the part of his stomach that betrayed him. Brandi sniffs twice and walks out of the room and into the hallway. I look at my dad and see tears in is eyes but instead of hugging him or crying with him, I lift a plastic watering can on the table and walk into the bathroom to fill it. I keep the water running hard and loud and see myself at my father’s funeral. Standing there with Ira and Leo—and Harvey Corkman, at the cemetery, right next to his own father’s grave.
“Hello?” my father says. “Arlene?”
“I’m here,” I say. “I’ll be right out.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I’ll go find her.”