03- Love in Hackensack
I got the email from David Rich in early December 2012,
claiming he had lived with Peggy for about a year until 1985, a year prior to
my meeting her at the My Way Lounge in Passaic.
He had read my book – or at least what I had posted – and said
he wanted to talk to me.
He had loved Peggy once.
When he called, his tone of voice suggested how upset he was
at the news, having had fallen out of touch with Peggy for a number of years just
as I had.
His tale was all new to me since Peggy had rarely talked specifically
about her previous lovers, not even, Bobby, her high school sweetheart.
David wasn’t drunk that night at Dino’s Palace on Main Street
in Passaic. A firefighter out of Hackensack, he had come to Passaic for a few drinks,
a glimpse of tits and ass before going back home.
He had thrown down a few drinks, but nothing to dull his
wits, and was quite sober when he and his friend spilled out onto the street at
closing, the clubs bright red neon lights shutting down, although the marque of
Montauk Theatre next door still glowed with gaudy advertisements for its XXX
features – both many years later subject to a wrecking ball that would demolish
a whole block to make way for a school.
This was the early 1980s, and Passaic still suffered from
the aftermath of the 1970s crime way. Stores still armored their fronts with
bullet proof gates, leaving a dark landscape throughout which drug dealers and
pimps roamed unchallenged by the police. A few down and dirty prostitutes clung
to the shadow of the massive tower at the corner of Broadway, hoping to pick up
one or the horny men spilling out unsatisfied the strip joints like the Palace.
While Hackensack still had a few strip joints, few compared
to the variety in Passaic, or competed with the Palace, the top of the line of
such places, which featured a whole assortment of other things other than near
naked girls, such as an all-girl rock band, and on special occasions, a full
buffet.
The Palace which went under a number of names – Dino’s Palace,
the International Saloon, sometimes confused with the Palace Café – was to
strippers what The Star Club in Hamburg was to Beales era bands, the top of the
heap and the best paying, promising to provide the sexiest dancers – one more
reason David and his friends frequented it.
By this time of early morning, Main Street was mostly
deserted and dark, a broad expanse as wide as an airport runway with two lanes
on either side of four blocks of parking spaces where only two or so decades
earlier, a railroad had run along the middle.
John F. Kennedy had passed this way during this campaign in
1960, making his way from Paterson to Newark, pausing in front of Clifton City
Hall to make a speech.
The diversion of the rail line through Passaic Park occurred
in the mid-1960s, some aspects of night life perished, leaving the heart of the
city to the night crawlers.
David, like most of the other patrons of the club, had
parked in the lot across from the club’s front door, and staggered, wearier
than inebriated, across two lanes of Main Street when he heard the commotion behind
him.
Near the door of the club stood a tall man David had seen
briefly in the bar, tall, thin, yet substantial, shoulders broad enough to
suggest a few years playing high school football, hair slightly longer than
considered conservative, a clean-shaven man, but with something off, maybe
ruthless about him.
This man had come out with one of the dancers, a woman named
Peggy Yacyniak.
David had admired her spunk in the bar, one of those kinds
of girls, who constantly kidded some of the patrons. She seemed to have favorites,
although also liked flirting with some of the new faces that popped up now and
then, often taunting the customers about their favorite football teams,
boasting about being a fan of the New York Giants – although peeved about the
team being called “New York” when their home stadium was in New Jersey.
She stood about five foot seven inches tall with brown hair that
framed an extremely pretty face, and a set of blue eyes that glittered like
precious stones when she smiled.
She was not smiling at that moment as the tall man loomed
over her. But she wasn’t completely intimidated either, shouting back when the
man shouted at her.
“I don’t know exactly what they were arguing about,” David
told me many years later when recalling that night. “But it was mostly him.”
The man, David later learned, was Peggy’s high school
sweetheart, Bobby, who hated her working as a striper, and took exception to
the attention she game some of the cliental.
“I’m supposed to pay attention to them,” she argued back.
“That’s part of my job.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Bobby said. “I don’t like any of
this.”
“Come on, Bobby, it doesn’t mean anything,” Peggy said. “You
know I love to dance. And this let’s me get paid for dancing.”
“This is not dancing,” Bobby argued. “This is cheap.”
“So now I’m cheap,” Peggy said, in a tone that suggested
this was part of a continuing conversation that always ended up at the same
place.
David had halted, key half inserted into the pickup door, his
attention fixed on the man. Something about Bobby’s body language alarmed him.
He suspected he knew what would happen next.
“I didn’t like it,” he said later.
Peggy managed to duck under the first blow when it came; Bobby
never got a chance to strike her again.
David, his friend, and several other of the patrons from the
bar leaped on him, dragging him off.
“We pummeled him,” David told me.”
Shaken, but not seriously hurt, Peggy agreed to allow David
to drive her home to Hackensack – which turned out to be a building on Hobart Street,
owned by Bobby’s family, which he later inherited.
“She told me she would like to see me again sometime,” David
recalled, laughing at he talked to me on the phone more than a decade later. “I
kept thinking ‘sure, sometime,” but knew strippers rarely meant it.”
She asked him where he lived. He told her Hackensack. She
asked him to come see her at the Rivera.
“I couldn’t make it. But my friend went. When he got there,
she asked where I was, and when he told her, she said she needed to see me,”
David said. “After the bar closed my friend drove her to the firehouse where I
was sleeping. She woke me up.”
They talked for hours, and by the time dawn came, he’d gone home
with her, beginning what would become a year-long relationship.
She gave up cocaine and dancing. He said she became pregnant
with twins; he claimed they were his.
“Then, she had a miscarriage,” he said.
She went back to the cocaine. She never ceased. Another man
who dated her a year later and took her to Florida, said she was totally hooked
again when he knew her.
David said he had been married for 25 years before a divorce
in 2009. Peggy was always in the back of his mind, and so he tried to look her
up, only to find out she had died. He didn’t know she had committed suicide
until he talked to me.
His wife always called Peggy a prostitute.
“She wasn’t a nude dancer, and she was always loyal,” David
said.
If anything, Peggy made him feel great about himself,
building him up in a way no one had ever done before or since.
She used to put her hands in his pockets when they were
together, as if telling the world, she belonged to him.
“I never stopped thinking about her even when I was married,”
David said.
Peggy had been close to a Paterson Firefighter named Steve
Kopoliski, a platonic friend like that of Tom – a patron of My Way when I hung
out there.
“Seven kept in touch with her a few years after we broke up,”
David said. “I lost touch with him since.”
This brief glimpse added a whole new dimension to a story I
had been putting together vit by bit for years, giving some sense of the pain
she must have endured leading up to the point when she met me.
Although Peggy manipulated men, she clearly sought love as
well.
She wanted to feel important, which is why she boasted about
the important people she’s associated with, made love to, and yet she seemed incredibly
moral to me, retaining some basic values that she would not surrender despite
her addiction.
David clearly still loved her, and I was sure I would find a
number of other men who still did, too, including myself.
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