by Joshua Braff
It’s a knee-jerk thing, the leaping across Brandi and smashing Ira’s face with his elbow.
“Auuugh!” Ira screams, holding his nose as his knees buckle.
“Jesus Christ,” says Brandi, taking off her heels before kneeling to Ira. My father glares at the two of them before running away.
“Dad!” I’m chasing after him now. Sarah’s with Jocko when I get downstairs. We all watch my father climb up on the stage. Tiki’s got a bachelor on her lap, who’s wearing nothing but his striped boxer briefs. “Jocko, call Leo,” I yell.
“He’s picking up the phone booth, remember? Why’s your dad on stage?”
“Cut it off, cut the music off!” my father screams, waving up at the sound booth. The music lowers and eventually stops. “Get off,” he orders Tiki and the bachelor. “We’re closing early. Get the fuck off my stage!”
Tiki runs off but the drunken bachelor puts his arm around my father. My dad shoves the guy away and he comes back for more.
“Get the hell away from me,” my father barks.
“What are you doing to my party?”
“Look at you, you stupid pig. Pigs!” he says. “Look at all the pigs. Go home to your ugly mothers you pigs! Look at you. You, you . . . you, you. You’d all fuck mud! Horny scumbags!”
Brandi walks on stage and whispers something into my father’s ear.
“Show us your cans!”
“Without further ado,” Sal announces through the speakers, “over a hundred films and over a million rock hard fans and appearing in booths in constant loop downstairs in booths three, eight, and twelve, let’s have a warm Imperial welcome for Las Vegas’s own Ms. Veronica Saint Jaaaames!”
Veronica walks out, frightened, her eyes wide. She drops to her knees, bowing to my father, and Brandi leads him off the stage.
“What is wrong with you?” Brandi chastises him, but he’s gone again, up the stairs.
“Let him cool off,” she tells me. I follow him up there anyway, though, and watch him enter the empty peep chamber. I try to open the employee door in the back. It’s locked so I go around and into one of the peep booths. It smells like B.O. and cleanser but the floor is dry. A miracle. As I put a token in the slot, the shade slowly lifts and there he is with his head in his hands, sitting on the pink circular mattress in the center of the room. He doesn’t look up when I knock on the Plexiglas.
“Dad?” When he finally sees me I try to smile. “Unlock the door.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No!”
The hair on his head is pure white and matted to his scalp. He rubs his temples with fingertips, shakes his head. “I’m done,” he says. “I did it and now I’m done.”
It’s silent as we both hear the bassy thump from downstairs. The sound of applause and whistles for Veronica.
“Will you let me in?” I say.
“Where were you?” he says, looking up at me through the Plexi. He can’t see me. “I was outside.”
“Doing what?”
“Talking to someone.”
“Well I needed you.”
“I have news, Dad.”
“And I couldn’t find you. When I need you I want you here. How am I supposed to find you if I need you?”
“I didn’t know you needed me.”
He nods, concedes, and we’re silent for a while.
“Debra’s back.”
The shade starts to drop and I root around for more tokens. I only have one and I put it in the slot. There’s my father, staring at me as the shade rises.
“She called?” he says.
“No. Sarah is downstairs. Remember Sarah?”
“No.”
“Atlantic City. The rabbi’s daughter. She knows where Debra is.”
He lowers his head into his hands.
“Let’s go together,” I say. “We’ll ring the doorbell.”
“You still don’t get it. I love her, she’s my daughter, but she’s been taught to hate me. Don’t you get it?”
“She’s getting married.”
“Married?”
“I know.” The shade drops again. “I’m out of tokens.”
“She’s sixteen years old.”
“Seventeen, Dad. Her birthday was—”
There’s a knock on the employee door. Then another. “Open the door,” Brandi says. “Marty! Open this door.”
“Talk to her,” I say through the shade. “Just talk to her, Dad.”
I don’t hear anything and then he coughs. Brandi knocks again and I lean against the wall of the booth, just waiting for him to come out. The audience below us is loud for a minute and when it fades we’re left with the music: “Lay down and boogie and play that funky music till you die.”
“Is she gone?” he asks.
“Go talk to her.”
“You love me,” I hear my father say. “That’s why you’re in there. Because you love me.”
My old man. He never says things like this. “I do.”
“I deserved to lose her, ya know. We were both selfish parents.”
“You didn’t lose anything. She’s in New York. Can we talk outside? So I can see you.”
I hear him rise from the mattress and follow the sound of his footsteps. I meet him at the employee door. We pass the office and the dressing rooms without either of us being seen, then head down the stairs and through the theater, where the stage is empty but the bachelor party is in full swing. When we get to the lobby, Brandi and Ira are there. No Sarah.
“Did you see a girl?” I say.
“Instead of my calling the cops,” says Ira, “Why don’t you just pay for my X-rays out of pocket. I take cash.”
“You’re fine,” my father grumbles.
“I’m not here for your morality, you cocksucker. I’m here because this is my business. Gang bangs make money all over the place, not just on the strip. Okay? Burlesque? Comedy? Willy Fuckin’ Sapley? Are you kidding me? They don’t bring in shit and never will again. I don’t commute from Long Island every goddamn day to make friends. I’m here to pay my bills, Martin. Go live in West Palm Beach if it’s too hot for you, pal. Because it’s only gonna get hotter from here on in.”
My father says nothing, just looks up at Brandi.
“Accusing me of adultery when I have a wife and children is pretty fucked up, Martin. You think after all these years I could think of such a thing.” He laughs and looks up at Brandi, a full foot taller than him. “Okay . . . I’m not saying I haven’t thought about it.”
Brandi rolls her eyes and my father clenches his jaw, his teeth. He tries to calm himself by walking to the front window.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”
“He’s kidding, Dad,” I say, suddenly glimpsing Sarah outside. “Look. That’s her. From Atlantic City, remember?”
My father lifts a sample dildo off the counter called Big Black John. He raises it like a machete above his head. “I’m just kidding too!”
“Wait, wait,” I say, as my father swings it at Ira’s face.
“Marty, stop!” Brandi yells, but he chases Ira. It’s like two kids playing tag.
“Come here,” my father barks. “Let me kill you with this thing!”
“You can’t take a goddamn joke?” Ira says, but my father goes right after him.
“Dad, calm down. Hey!”
He swings Big Black John, gets a piece of Ira’s shoulder. “Get this prick away from me, David!”
I watch my dad sort of skip closer and when he’s in range he simply attacks the top of Ira’s head with the weapon, relentless in his determination to hurt him. Two thwacks, three thwacks, four hard thwacks, until I grab his arm. Brandi hurls herself on top of him, her long body sprawled over him like a blanket. I pull Big Black John from his hand. Ira, the victim—his palm on his bald spot, his eyes still closed.
“That’s it. I’m calling my lawyer!” he says, jumping up and running.
“I hate you, Marty,” Brandi says, with a
wobble in her voice.
“Yeah . . . well . . . good. If I ever hear you fucked that Jew bagel, I’m gonna hang myself. Go show your old fuck films, Arlene. Let the whole world beat off to movies you made at the turn of the century.”
“You can’t just talk to each other, can you?” I say. “It has to be a bite? Don’t you hear how fucking tiring it is?”
“Look at him, David, he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t love anyone,” Brandi says.
The door opens and a group of Jersey jocks come in. They lift up everything in sight, laughing. One of them finds a magazine called Boobs and Bush. He holds it up to his friends, who all roar, bending at the knees. “I’m buying this, I’m buying this, how much is it?” he asks me. I point to Brandi. “You work here, lady?”
“We’re closed,” she says, walking behind the counter.
“Forget the magazine, how much are you?” a different guy asks to her. “How much do you cost?”
“She said we’re closed,” my father says.
“Five bucks for the magazine,” she says.
“But I said how much are you?”
“Enough,” I tell him. “Just buy it and get out.”
The guy steps up to me, chin to chin, and turns his baseball hat backward. “What’d you say?”
His friends gather around me and my father picks up Big Black John. “Who wants to fuck with me?”
“Dad.”
“How much for a hand job?” someone says, and takes his wallet out.
Brandi eyes my father with great tedium in her eyes. “How much ya got?”
“Very funny, Arlene.”
The kid reveals a wad of bills just as Leo walks in. He’s carrying a tall houseplant that’s blocking his face. “Girl out here wants to talk to you, David. She’s foxyyyyy.”
My father and Brandi both swivel to see who it is.
“I need you today,” Leo says to me, putting down the plant. “I found a phone booth and I gotta get it to Kingsford. You seen Tiki?”
“It’s Sarah,” Brandi says, and points out at the street. “Look, David.”
“I got fifty bucks,” the Jersey jock says, plopping the money on the counter. Leo lifts the cash. Just as Sarah smiles and enters the store.
Sheitelmacher
WHAT SHE’D SEE, IF SHE saw us, from the window in Brooklyn: a white, dented van with a black man, an old man, and an ex-Hasid in the front seat with Leo’s plant between her legs. Brandi and I split the back and behind us, where two rows of seats once were, the phone booth slides from side to side making a grating sound of weighty glass on steel.
Brandi touches my lip without asking me and I flinch from the pain.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Leo turns his head to me every time he hears the scraping noise. “Don’t let it crack.”
“It’s bumping the spare tire thing,” I say.
“Put your hand on it.”
“I’d have to go back there.”
“How much is that thing costing me?” my father says.
“Got it dirt cheap,” Leo says.
“And what if someone cuts themselves on whatever’s making that noise back there?”
“Nobody’s going to get cut, boss.”
“I bought three mattresses in May and you don’t even use ’em.”
“I use them all the time, Marty. It’s boring already.”
“What the hell difference does it make where they shtup? Just put ’em on the floor and push the button, Leo. This ain’t Ben Hur.”
Sarah’s the only one who laughs. My father’s feeling better. “There,” he says, pointing. “The Kingsford Bridge. The bridge that will drop me on my ex-wife’s doorstep. She’s going to be so happy to see me.”
Sarah’s got a nice laugh. What an audience for the old guy.
“She’ll probably have a heart attack!” he says. “I’m not ringing the doorbell, I can tell you that.”
“Big surprise,” Brandi says. “Our fearless leader.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it’s way, way past time someone steps up to that lady’s door and says, ‘Wake the hell up. You can’t steal someone’s kid.’ Debra should choose the way she wants to live. Look at Sarah. I knew the second I met you, you were gonna run someday. Why? Because you’re a fighter like me and you knew your life was going to suffer. Your parents and their selfish needs and fears and all that bullshit. Insecurities, disenchantment . . . fuckin’ so stupid. My mother did it with food and booze. Mickey does it with God. With God! I don’t know which is worse.”
The van jolts forward and the phone booth shifts, bashing into the rear doors. “David. Please,” Leo begs. “It’s gonna end up on the road.”
I make my way over Brandi’s knees. She’s got her fist against her chin and her eyes pinned on the bridge.
“You didn’t put any blankets down, Leo.”
“They’re in Jocko’s truck.”
“Where are you bringing this thing?”
“I told you. It’s goin’ in the garden behind that loft in Kingsford. Where I shot Three-Way Fuck Fest.”
I remember it well. Tiki on her back in a blue and yellow cheerleader uniform with Stewy Haynes on top of her, doing what Stewy Haynes does for a living. It reminded me of Wild Kingdom. Tiki, the antelope, and Stewy, with his teeth in her neck, waiting for her to stop quivering. His football pants were around his knees and his helmet strewn on a corner of picnic blanket. I knew then I could never do it. I’d never be the director on one of these shoots. There was such imbalance in the dance of it. Nothing sensual. Nothing poetic. Just nothing. The camera rolled all day, hooked on a tripod and Leo was pacing back and forth, occasionally coaching his actors on their objectives: to fuck each other.
I brace the phone booth with both hands but it still wants to slide so I sit on it and push against the back. No one is talking. My father grips the bottom of his seat with both hands. It’s this van, the height and bounce of the chairs, but he looks so small, so vulnerable to me.
“Is it an apartment or a house?” he asks Sarah.
“I’m not sure,” she says.
“But you know where it is.”
“Yes.”
“She told you?”
“I asked her.”
“And who did she say she was marrying? Is he a rabbi or something?”
“His name is Micha and he’s a purebred Lichtiger, not a baal teshuva. The fact that he asked her is very unusual; I mean a very big deal. It’s unheard of, actually, a purebred and a BT writing in to the grand rabbi. When I spoke to her, though, she sounded unhappy about it. Or maybe just uncertain.”
“Ohhhhhhhh boy, this is gonna suck!” My father pulls a cigarette from Leo’s pack.
Brandi sits forward in her seat. “That’s right, cancer-boy, light it up hot and juicy.”
He ignores her and flicks the match out the window. “A goddamn sabotage is what it’s gonna be. A ding-dong and a hello to you, Mickey, and she’ll look at me like I have a swastika on each eyelid and I’ll say, hey, that’s my daughter over there and I am her father, I am her father.”
“Maybe Sarah should ring the bell,” I suggest. “See if they’re even home.”
Brandi nods. “I like that.”
“I know,” my father says, “I’ll ring the bell and tell them I’m a plumber. ‘Where’s the fuckin’ leak?’ I’ll say, and then we’ll all rush the door and throw Debra in the phone booth. Mission accomplished. Or how about a battering ram?”
“Very funny,” says Brandi.
“I can tell ya, back in the day, when I first met Mickey, I thought she was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.”
“Real nice,” Brandi says. “Just great.”
“The way she moved and her skin and her mouth. I couldn’t keep my hands off her. But I’ll tell you, she had some shitty parents. Too much inside her that couldn’t be healed but everything,” he says, now addressing me, “
every little thing your mother said about me . . . was true. I am that person. If I were smart, I’d let them be. Just let them live their lives. I would not handle it this way.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t. That’s why she’s been gone for two years, Martin. You didn’t handle it any way.”
“She took her, Arlene! She disappeared! To fuckin’ Maine or Brooklyn or goddamn Tel Aviv!”
“You could’ve hired someone,” Brandi says, “one of those cops who find people.”
“Why the hell are you even in this car?”
“Great. Let me out. Leo, let me out!”
“Don’t get out here,” Sarah says. “It’s just five more blocks up this way. You want to turn right here.”
The pain in my stomach is fear.
“Stop here,” Sarah announces. “It’s there, it’s that one I think: 6778. That gray building.”
The apartment is blocked by an enormous tree. Both the middle and top front windows are hidden behind the trunk and branches. I lift my camera but even with my zoom lens, I can’t come close to seeing inside.
“Holy shit,” my father says. “My little girl is up there.” He stands from his seat and moves next to Brandi in the back. He takes her hand in his and kisses it. “She’s right up there,” he says.
“Now you love me again.”
“I’ll go,” I say.
“Or I’ll go,” says Sarah. “I’ll just say I was in the neighborhood and see if Dena will come outside.”
“I love you,” I say, and everyone turns. “I mean for volunteering.”
“David’s got a girlfriend?” Leo says, now out of the van, making his way back to his phone booth.
“If she comes out of there,” my father says, “I may just collapse.”
“Tell her you’re sorry instead,” Brandi says. “Just keep saying sorry, I’m sorry I was a jerk and I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you. Something like that.”
She kisses the tip of his nose as he swipes at his eyes.
“They’re home,” I say, zooming in on Sarah leaning into the intercom, speaking to someone. Now she’s running back, across the street to the van.
“She’s at the sheitelmacher’s,” she says. “It’s two blocks from here.”