The Peggy Yacyniak Story

    Peggy called a few hours later, establishing what would be a predictable pattern that would wake me out of a sound sleep. Since I had not seen a phone in her apartment, I assumed she was calling from some place else, and I later learned that she frequently used her mother’s apartment on Ray Street as a communication center, a place from which she made and received calls, and where she picked up her mail. “Are you coming to see me dance tonight?” she asked. Still foggy from lack of sleep, I reminded her that I had been banned from the My Way.             “Not the My Way, silly, the Club House Saloon.” As it turns out, the Club House was located on 1&9 in Fairview, near Route 46, in a strip mall along on the south bound side of the highway, a dark little dive in a stucco building with squat windows. I recall several visits to the Club House, which had a violent reputation due to a stabbing that occurred there a year earlier. A lone guy got into a conflict with two m

 (novel chapter -- drawn from journal entry, only condensed somewhat and with a bit more information)               “This is it?” I asked, looking through my salt-splattered windshield at the gawdy exterior of the restaurant Peggy has chosen.             It came straight out of an imitation Godfather movie with a cast of characters that had dressed up for it the way my friends sometimes dressed up for Rocky Horror, men with dark wrap around sunglasses and suits, smoking cigarettes near the door, one woman near them wearing a scarlet evening gown, all of it looking cheap despite the amount of money that must have gone into creating the scene.             I kept thinking of the men I once had the unfortunate experience to see in the downtown Paterson pizza parlor years earlier, who came in and beat the crap out of some poor fool because he hadn’t paid up on a loan or a bet, the men behind the counter doing their best to ignore the whole affair, even later, when they were mopping

 (This journal entry corresponds to the chapter that follows this page)     Journal: March 27, 1987   So where do I begin? Perhaps thinking she wouldn’t call, or that she had at tried during some odd hour over the previous two days, and gave up in disgust when she couldn’t reach me, or perhaps decided from the coolness of our last meeting on Saturday I wasn’t worth the trouble. It was such thinking that left me unprepared for when she did call, while my best friend, Pauly, hounded me with phone call after phone call for me to do “just this little favor,” to pick up some pot from his paranoid dealers in Paterson and drive it out to him in west Jersey, a favor I put off until Thursday until I felt certain Peggy wouldn’t be calling me back, and if she did, I wouldn’t accept it because she waited too long to reply – figuring I would save the hundred dollars I had set aside for the occasion, and then, she called. I’m still not sure whether Peggy is using me or not, the way my ex