04- Roots in the old world
Peggy was particularly attached to her grandmother, Mary,
who she claimed would never die, and almost outlived Peggy, passing away at the
ripe old age of 102 in 1995.
Even though Peggy’s grandparents moved to the Lodi/Garfield
area more than a generation after mine, they must have known members of my
family, who dominated Garfield and Lodi for many decades.
Whereas my family moved to northern New Jersey after the
conclusion of the American Civil war by way of Manhattan, Peggy’s grandfather
and grandmother arrived just prior to World War I from Poland via Connecticut.
George arrived around 1812. Mary – who Peggy adored –
arrived a year later. The two met and married in
George worked at a watchman at nearby Woolen Mill, where
Mary worked at a spinner apparently through the Great Depression. By World War II, George was working across
the river on
Peter, then some kind of semi-skilled machinist, perished on
the beaches during the Normandy Invasion and his remains buried in France as
among the honored dead, and listed among the home town heroes in Garfield.
There were a handful of other Yacyniaks that lived in the
area, but with the exception of Michael, who was born in Garfield in 1924, none
were related to Peggy. I was never able to figure out Michael’s connection to
Peggy, although he clearly was since he named one of his sons, Peter, and
another, Steve.
None of the family members would wander far from the Lanza
Avenue house until after Mary’s death in 1995.
Florence alone moved around the block where she would live
even after she married in 1960 and would die there.
Russell moved when he married to Cottage Street within long
walking distance of his mother’s house, and remained there, until he sold the
house to his son, before relocating to Little Falls.
Peggy lived in the Lanza Avenue house growing up and lived
there until her father and mother divorced in the early 1970s, although her
mother, Eleanor, moved only a few blocks east to Ray Street, where she remained
until her marriage to Charles Moan around 1988, when she moved to Little Falls.
Later, she moved to the area of Brick, joined by Peggy after the house on Lanza
Avenue was sold in 1995.
Steve, Peggy’s father, remained in Lanza Avenue house, as a
caretaker for Mary, even after his divorce from Peggy’s mother and at some
point, Janet Watkins, moved in with him – who he would later apparently marry
years later after moving to Pennsylvania.
Even Peggy’s sister, Susan, stayed local, living for a long
time in an apartment complex near Outwater Lane on the Garfield/Lodi border.
She eventually moved to Little Falls, where Peggy also lived during the late
1980s.
As of this retelling, the entire family has since passed
away, leaving a few of the next generation with little or no memory of Garfield.
Peggy’s early life was very much contained in that small
ethnic world of Lanza Avenue with an Eastern European deli across the street
where English was a foreign language, to the local tavern with similar
clientele. Her elementary school was a block and half from her house, and even
after she moved in with her mother on
Peggy disliked high school so much that she avoided going
there as much as she could – and it remains one of the great mysteries of the
universe how she managed to graduate.
Although she spent as much time away from school as
possible, many of her classmates recalled her outrageous laugh, something that
was a cross between a fog horn and a bullfrog.
She tended to taunt a girl named Tara Crotts, one of the school
cheerleaders, whose father worked at the Marcal Paper Company in nearby Elmwood
Park. Tara was an avid bowler in the local women’s leagues. And married her
childhood sweetheart, Jack, in 1983 – but passed away in 2021 before I could
interview her about Peggy.
Peggy loved music and dancing, but unlike Tara did not get
involved with either at school. She joined no cheer leader squad, nor stage
performance, no other extracurricular activity during her long four years at
Garfield High.
Some classmates recalled her as a bubbly long-haired pretty
girl who trailed after and gushed over her boyfriend, Bobby.
Bobby was and remained the one great love of her life,
someone she continued to have contact with, even after I started seeing Peggy
in late 1986.
She could not stop loving Bobby, even after he started
beating and stalking her, leaving notes under her door – even sometimes when I
was in the apartment with her, a violent man who left mental and physical scars
on her, and a legacy of destruction I even saw in the apartment in broken
mirrors and bric-a-brac.
Peggy claimed she attended Montclair State College after
graduating Garfield High. She may have, but if she did, she never graduated.
She much preferred the night life and managed to connect
with local mobsters, although her whole life growing up was surrounded by them,
operating local businesses and taverns. Her mother and possibly sister worked for
a time across from the legendary Goodfellas in Garfield. Peggy frequently
danced at mob owned dance clubs – some known as havens for illegal drugs. One
of her closest associates was a man named Thomas, who worked the concession
stands at the New Jersey Sports complex in
Peggy emerged into a world at a time when a pretty girl
could party constantly, having men cater to her every need. With her pal
Marsha, Petty took advantage of the 18-year-old drinking age and her ability to
meet important people – sports stars, rock stars and, of course, well-connected
mobsters.
She developed expensive tastes as a party girl, accustomed
to getting the best of everything from the men she dated, a point she often made
with me even as I scraped together just enough money to keep up with her.
But I never bought her drugs, even though she suggested I
should more than once.
Cocaine remained her drug of choice, a habit she developed
during her popular years when she and Marsha scoured night clubs for men who
could feed their insatiable appetites. Later, when Marsha settled down, Peggy
continued to crave the drug and sought new ways to feed her addiction.
Peggy also claimed to have a day job as a certified public
accountant for a Bogota-based company that operated several packaging
companies. This may have been a fabrication, inventing a day time identity
based on what her family members did. When she died, Peggy was employed by The
Bank of New York, as head teller – hardly the stuff a CPA would be doing. Her
mother, however, was employed as a bookkeeper for a packaging firm in Carlstadt
– among several jobs, and her sister worked as a CPA for a
But when I met Peggy for the first time in the fall of 1986,
I was completely taken in by her webs of deceit. Indeed, part of what
fascinated me about her was her ability to live in two worlds simultaneously, a
vixen of the underworld at night, and a member of the corporate world by day. If Peggy was a prostitute, it was not in
the usual manner in which men pay her directly for sex. She certainly did not
see herself as one, in fact, seemed in a perpetual struggle to keep from becoming
one.
The owner of Mr. B’s, a particularly loathsome strip club on
Wall Street in Passaic, called Peggy a tease, referring to her as “that bitch
on the hill” who lured unsuspecting middle class white men up to her place on
Harrison Avenue where she bilked them for food, drugs and whatever else she
could get out of them before dumping them back out onto the street with nothing
to show for the experience.
He may have been peeved at Peggy because she flatly refused
to do what was expected of all strippers in places like his. She not only
refused to service his special customers when she danced her, but refused to
service him or take part in those special film projects that sometimes found
their way to the peep shows on 42nd Street in Manhattan.
“She thinks she something special,” he complained one night
when I was licking my wounds after breaking up with Peggy.
Regardless of how he meant it, Peggy WAS someone special,
someone who mistakenly believed she could ride the tiger of underworld life and
escape unscathed.
I don’t recall exactly when I first took notice of her (best
guess around Labor Day, 1986), only when she took notice of me sometime around
Thanksgiving at the My Way Lounge in Passaic. But once she caught my eye, I
watched her closely.
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