Peep Show Read Online Free Page A

I’ve never seen before.
    â€œThat’s my cousin Louie Bernstein,” my father says, pointing. “See, he’s the shmuck waving.”
    I show him another.
    â€œThis is . . . uh . . . her name is not coming to me. But a horrible person.
Hor
rible. Your mother’s friend or cousin from somewhere, who the hell knows. She can have this one back.”
    The next one is my mother standing on the beach with her arms folded, gazing out at the ocean. As we pull intothe Lincoln Tunnel, the traffic stops and my father takes it from my hand, staring at the picture for a while without saying a word.
    â€œI took this,” he says. “She was in her twenties. Just look at her.”
    â€œYou can have it if you want,” I say.
    â€œThat’s not your mother anymore.” He tosses it on my lap and I gaze forward into the tunnel. Like a tube-shaped pool it curves with no end in sight. As always I think of a leak, from any of the thousands of blue-tiled squares that surround us. A drip, a stream, a catastrophe.
That’s not your mother anymore
. When my grandfather died, my mother was already writing three letters a week to the grand rabbi. I watched my father steal one out of the mailbox once. I told him she would find out, to put it back, but instead he opened it and read it to me. She was asking the rabbi’s advice on how she should separate her children from their father, since their father refused to learn
halakhah
, Jewish law. After that, the marriage became a contest of who could outscream whom. Debra would get so upset that she’d become nauseous. I’d go into the bathroom with her and wait it out while she knelt over the toilet. Bark, bark, bark, his voice would rattle the walls, and my mother would yell back, throw things at him, tell him he’d ruined her life. It was the beginning of summer and that’s when my mother packed for Maine and told me I was coming along. A two-month
baal teshuva
retreat. Me, in a black suit and yarmulke, and five hundred of my mother’s new friends.
    Now my father drives up Tenth Avenue and makes a right on Forty-second Street. At every light, there’s either a man in a business suit, a homeless person, a prostitute or a preacher. A guy in a brown bear outfit is handing out yellow flyers. His pant legs have two big holes in the knees and one of the bear ears is missing. I try to take his picture, but we’re already moving. We stop at another light and a man washes our windshield with a squeegee. My father waves his arm and flicks the wipers to stop him. Out my window is an electric bullhorn announcing a third gin and tonic free if you buy two before noon. It’s seven thirty in the morning. My father parks in a lot on Forty-fourth Street. He takes a box of records and pictures from the trunk and hands me a smaller one. As I follow him down Broadway toward the Imperial, he stops short, right in the middle of the sidewalk.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I ask.
    He points up at an enormous neon sign that’s moored to the roof of a building on the corner.
    â€œSee this place?” he says.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThis is Sid Lowenstein’s joint,” he says. “Two
tons
of metal and glass. Just look at it, look at it. It’s a cock, right?”
    I didn’t notice at first but, yes, it is shaped like that.
    â€œThere’s only one putz in the world who would drill that many holes into the red bricks of the Marion Theatre, just to put a neon cock on it. And this, David, is why Times Square is finished. This building was one of the true beautieswhen I was growing up. The Marion. For years and years there was vaudeville and movies and comedians and burlesque acts in there. Now there’s a fuckin’ dildo shop in the lobby and a dozen peep windows, and Leo says they’re making their own porn in the attic. And this is exactly what Ira wants me to do at the Imperial. He wants
this
!”
    When I