01-- Dancer on the Sand
Peggy Yacyniak is dead.
I only learned about her death in December 2010 and though
she died in 1999, it felt as if it had just happened, leaving me in a state of
mourning a whole decade after others has already come to terms with it.
The fact that she died on the eve of St. Valentine’s Day was
not lost on me.
“Since you already know she had problems (mentally) she was
sort of getting her life back together,” her sister Susan told me. “She met
someone and things were not going according to her plan and as you know she had
a hard time dealing with reality. So unfortunately she had decided not to be
here anymore. She is my sister and because of her inner issues we were not very
close but I still loved her as my sister and I know now she is at peace which
is what counts. Since then our mother and step father has past away also so she
is in good company.”
A shock, but not a surprise; Peggy’s early death at age 39 was
inevitable. She had her feet firmly planted on that path when we parted company
in mid-1987, and nothing I did before or after our breakup could convince her to
alter her ways – adding to my own sense of helplessness since at the time I saw
myself as her only hope.
This was an illusion.
I saw myself as one of many in a line of men who walked in
and out of Peggy’s life, no more important to her than any other.
Later, after posting a previous version of this book, I
learned about other men who had felt as strongly about her as I did, some with
whom she had once hoped to build a future, each of us carrying away a special
tenderness for her, she may or may not have reciprocated.
All this, I realized much later, after looking back, after
talking to some of the other men who had shared her life before me.
At the time, I was consumed by her wasted potential, and my
brief contact with her, managed to steer me away from a similar path of self
destruction to what proved to be a more positive road.
I met Peggy in the fall of 1986 just after her beloved New
York Giants won the Superbowl, a subject she ceaselessly went on about with anyone
of the strip club’s patrons would listen.
Born in Garfield in 1959, she had just turned 27, already
seen over the hell for a go go dancer, although since graduating Garfield High School
in 1977, she spent the better part of the decade in the local jet set, dancing
in the best clubs such as Dino’s Palace in Passaic, and what was later to
become Satin Dolls in Lodi. She hobnobbed with football players and rock stars,
giving her glory days long since gone by the time I met her.
As she grew older was condemned to part time go-go dancing
in small bars like the My Way in Passaic on weekends, while she worked a
“straight” job during the week as an accountant.
A 1981-82 graduate of Montclair State College, Peggy worked for a packaging company as the
assistant head accountant.
This dual identity startled me early on, until I later
realized she needed the contacts she made on her weekend gigs to meet men like
me who could help feed her out of control cocaine addiction.
While the My Way (since renamed) tolerated her, partly
because the owner liked her as much as many of the patrons did, but other club
owners, particularly one located a block from my house near Wall Street despised
her, calling her “The witch on the hill,” partly because she felt independent enough
not to tolerate the mistreatment other strippers sometimes suffered.
The Wall Street club many years later was closed down after
the owner and staff forced one of the dancers into a gang rape that was later
posted on a porno website.
Peggy didn’t do the usual favors strippers were otherwise
required to perform for management at these places – unless she wanted to in
the first place.
She had her own scam, often picking up pudgy, lonely patrons
at the bars she worked, bringing them up to her Harrison Avenue Apartment in
Lodi, where she encouraged them to buy her cocaine, before dumping them out,
often without even a good by kiss, let alone what they’d expected.
“She’s a tease,” the Wall Street club owner told me after he
discovered my involvement with her.
His was a particularly sleazy place with deep ties to the
porn film industry and more, a recruitment place for prostitution that still
operated even after he sold the place, and the new owners were convicted for
the rape.
She wouldn’t even put out for him and his staff – which is
often required of many strippers in many bars.
She was always too good for the likes of men like him.
As her sister indicated, Peggy was not particularly close to
her family – although she frequently visited the homes of her mother and father
in Garfield.
She called her mother, “El” which was short for Eleanore.
She later moved in with her sister in Little Falls, and then
eventually moved south near to where Eleanore (who had remarried).
Her 1999 obituary was a little misleading in that it
suggested Peggy lived in Paterson prior to moving to Brick in late 1998, when
other information sources claimed she had briefly lived with her father. She
did live in the Totowa section of Paterson in 1992, after leaving her sister’s
house in Little Falls, then to Fairlawn, then back to Garfield, and finally to
Brick.
She was head teller at the Bank of New York in Verona for
five years before taking up a similar job at its branch in Lakewood four months
before taking her own life.
Although remote, her
family did play a significant role in her life, helping her out when she got
into very serious trouble. At one point, during my foolish effort to “save”
her, I ran into a man I believe was her real father. But her distance from her
family kept them from providing her with the help she needed. They believed she
was mentally ill and not at all in touch with reality.
As sexually involved as she might have been with some men in
her life, Peggy seemed to avoid falling into the trap of becoming a common
whore, part of some inner greatness I sensed the first time I saw her at My Way
around Labor Day weekend 1986, and something of which I became more and more
conscious of as time went on.
She stood out – even beyond the fact that she was 27 in a
world that considered this too old for most strippers. She had an attitude you
just couldn’t ignore, something that insisted on being paid attention to
despite everything you might do to resist.
Peggy was clearly an alcoholic – perhaps self medicating to
heal some inner wound she refused to reveal to the outside world. Her cocaine
addition allowed her to drink in excess without becoming drunk, but as a
result, she constantly struggled to keep down her weight so that club owners
could not use this as an excuse to against hiring her – even though she
maintained a batch of bars through which she could feed off us lonely slobs for
drinks when we were too poor to feed her other habit.
Saddled with a mentally ill mother, a suicidal uncle, and a
junkie for a best friend at the time, I was in a deep malaise typical of many
working class men, and took refuge in the My Way where I could drown my sorrows
over a few beers while watching pretty women dance for me.
If Petty noticed me during those first few months, it was
only as one of the crowd, a familiar face from whom she could elicit tips and
drinks while she harvested a more serious crop from some fool she had spent
months grooming. But I noticed her, though I made no effort to show up every
time she danced the way I would later.
She took notice finally of me around Thanksgiving, 1986 and
from then on made a point of busting my balls each time I came into the bar,
perhaps the early stages of setting me up as her next potential victim. But
since what intrigued me about her had less to do about sex than curiousity
about her, we were already on a different, by far stranger path than either of
us expected.
Love is too strong a word for any of what later occurred,
although it remains to this day the closest thing to how I felt at the time. In
some ways, it was the stuff of a romantic comedy, but with the ghost of tragedy
linger over us always. After the beginning of the new year, I became full
emerced in Peggy’s world and soon saw my life spinning out of control as I
tried first to keep up with her, and then later to try to save her from
herself. Neither task – as it turned out – was possible and I eventually had to
walk away, but even then, I made desperate attempts from a distance to try and
make her change the path of self destruction she had embarked upon.
After I learned of her death, I started to reassemble the
novel I first started to write about her in 1987, based significantly but not
exclusively on the daily journals and poetry journals I have kept since the
1970s. The result was my portion of Peggy’s life story, which I posted on line,
and drew the attention of several men who had dated Peggy prior my association
with her, and along with additional research has given birth to a new version
of the Peggy story – I am posting here.
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