Peep Show Read Online Free

garage.
    â€œDavid!”
    I don’t stop until the driveway. My dad is smoking, his back against the driver door.
    â€œShe’s coming!” I say, and he flicks the butt, opens the door, and has the car started by the time I’m inside. We’rein 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.
    â€œYou better stop the car,” I say.
    â€œDon’t worry about it.”
    â€œShe’s running now, Dad.”
    â€œDon’t look at her.”
    â€œStop,
stop
!”
    And he does. She comes to my window, knocks on it. I lower it.
    â€œWhat’s going on here?” She ducks to see my father.
    â€œI thought I’d take the boy to work, Mick.”
    â€œFirst of all, he has
school
. Secondly, I told you, I do not want him in that theater.”
    â€œWhat makes you think I’m bringing him there?”
    â€œYou took him there the other night, Martin.”
    â€œFor a few hours.”
    â€œI absolutely forbid you . . .”
    â€œFor
bid
? For
bid
, Mickey?”
    â€œI want you out of the car, David. Now!”
    â€œThe only people who use the word ‘for
bid
’ are religious freaks. Is that you, honey?”
    â€œHe is seventeen years old.”
    â€œAnd he’s spending the day with his father.”
    â€œNo, he is not. He is going to school.”
    â€œGo 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.”
    â€œI’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

    â€œR EAL 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 withIra 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.
    â€œGrab 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