06- The My Way Lounge
David Rich’s tale about Peggy working at The Palace took me
by surprise, which it should not have.
She had launched herself into the strip club scene from the
moment she legal enough to do so, perhaps before.
She knew the scene, and all the stuff that went on behind
closed doors: Pole dances, lap
dances, and other stuff people didn’t openly talk about.
The whole game
was to get patrons to drink – regardless of what that took – and for dancers to
get their share of tips. Whatever side arrangements they made with the patrons,
generally did not take place in the club, except as a launching pad.
Most of the clubs
in Northern Jersey were associated with mobsters, and sometimes served as a
front for drug sales and prostitution – although the mobsters did their best to
hide their interests in these.
Satin Doll in
Lodi was among the most famous – made infamous as the fictional club Bada Bing
in The Sopranos – a place that was shut down along with its associated Aj’s in
Secaucus because authorities discovered it was partly owned by a well-known
mobster.
Peggy apparently
danced there as well when it was still called Tara’s – which had been converted
into a strip club from a diner called Hearth 17.
She danced in
many of the other less famous, but equally notorious places such as Hillside Cleaners in Lodi,
Stage Coach Inn, S. Hackensack, Petrullo Rest in Hackensack, and Gene
Boyle's Lounge, in Clifton.
AJC Amusements Inc, in Lodi, NJ and Automatic Merchandising
Machine operated pretty much openly.
Although I knew Peggy had danced in a number of strip clubs
during her decade-long career as a go-go dancer, I saw her only in a handful of
places, taking note of her first in the My Way Lounge in Passaic when I first
heard her laugh.
Because my one-time best friend Hank routinely dragged me to
such places during the 1970s and early 1980s, I might have actually encountered
Peggy prior to 1986 without knowing it.
Younger and slimmer, Peggy had danced in more high-profile
clubs such as Stilettos in Carlstadt but by Labor Day, 1986 she was already in
the twilight of her career, aging out of a scene meant for younger girls, and
because she was so addicted to cocaine and alcohol.
Because the clubs provided her with access to alcohol and
cocaine, she could not afford to quit dancing and so had to settle for the
circuit of second-rate dives where nearly any near naked body doing nearly
anything that resembled a seductive dance on stage could make a reasonable
living.
Even then, she came dangerously close to having to take the
next step into that underworld, and would have to make up her mind to quite or
slip into prostitution.
The fact that she hadn’t yet slipped over the edge was a
tribute to her powerful will, and her belief that she deserved better than to
become any one man’s sex slave.
I became aware of Peggy long before she became aware of me.
The My Way had become a regular hangout, more of a
neighborhood gin joint that a strip club.
While Mr. B’s was only a half a block from my house, it felt
so raunchy, I went there only when foul weather and a disabled car forced me to
seek a place within walking distance.
Walking to the My Way was a risky business since it required
a ten-block trek through a neighborhood populated with street gangs and drug
dealers, safe enough during day light hours, but after dark a death sentence
for anyone who looked like me.
Hank, who had dragged me to nearly every strip club from
Union City to Elizabeth was particularly fond of the My Way. So, when I moved
to Passaic, I settled into the routine of going there once or twice a month,
sometimes more.
I went to the My Way to escape the doldrums of my existence
– my cold water flat near Eighth Street so stark I felt like I lived in Eastern
Europe – and because the rest of my family had abandoned him, I sometimes was
forced to care for a quite mad uncle who I had housed in the apartment next
door.
Sometimes, I went to the My Way to lick my wounds after some
failed romance, drowning my sorrow in alcohol and near naked flesh, too ignorant
to realize that for a price I could have done something more than look, making
my frustrated fantasies real.
Over time, I made several friends at the club circuit, among
whom was Mary, the plainer of two barmaids at the My Way, one of those “what
if” relationships that hovered on the edge of something romantic, but never
took the plunge.
At some point, the My Way was a legitimate club. I had vague
memories of visiting the place in the early 1970s when it featured bands.
Indeed, in the late 1970s – before the so-called renovation, the stage still
stood at the rear of the long room, with men’s and women’s rooms on either side
of it, and a vast tiled dance floor between it and the large oval bar near the
front door. When it first became a strip club, the women danced on that stage
and men sat at café tables in front of it.
The renovation took place around 1980 – which did very
little except to get rid of the stage in the rear and install one at the center
of the oval bar, leaving the vast space at the rear of the room – which was
partly filled by installing of a pool table.
The café tables found new locations around the outside of
the oval bar with cigarette machine, juke box, a primitive pong video game and
several poker games situated to either side of the front door.
The idea of the change, I suppose, was to give patrons a
better view of the girls, something more intimate than the old stage, and to
keep us drinking.
My journal from Aug. 31, 1986, described the place a little.
“This place never changes. Someone moved the door, but it is
little more than a chin tuck rather than a full-fledged facelift. The overall
scheme is the same, the same oval bar Hank and I used to sit at ten years ago,
the same foot-worn dancer state inside the oval, with two ceiling fans over
each of the two registered and blue and orange ceiling lamps casting the same
odd three-dimensional glow over people, faces and bottles of booze. The ceiling
above the bar is dropped less than around the rest of the place, making room
for some of the taller dancers, though it is still marred in one spot where the
dancers scratch it with their nails and at the other end of the small raised
rectangle, water stains from some ancient roof wound show on either side of the
Miller Lite mirror the dancers use for self-evaluation and by the more
egotistical dancers for self-gratification.”
I didn’t start writing at the bar until after I went back to
college in 1979 and began to take notes there, making word sketches of the
people I saw that I would flesh out to full blown characters when I got back
home.
Most of the time, nobody noticed – too busy staring at the
strippers to notice how furiously I scribbled in my note book.
Unless men came to the bar together, they mostly didn’t
speak to other men or pay much attention to anyone but dancers and barmaids.
I watched the dancers, too, but they were largely a blur,
one dancer looking pretty much the same as another – that is until Peggy came
along.
Her honking laugh alone told the whole bar she was something
different., something that had defined her even in high school, and was made
note of in her graduating year book, along with the mention of her high school
sweetheart, Bobby.
She had a defiant, opinionated attitude hard to ignore,
especially when it came to the New York Giants – and her relentless demand that
we around the bar needed to love the team as much as she did, something that
was, of course, utterly impossible. No one could love the Giants as much as
Peggy did.
Since Sunday night was one of Peggy’s regular nights for dancing,
she often came in hoarse from yelling. She claimed she attended all the Giants
home games at the stadium in East Rutherford – and hoped to procure tickets to
the Super Bowl if and when the Giants managed to get there.
As it turned out, the Giants got there, but she didn’t,
forcing her to attend the ticker tape parade held in the Meadowlands instead of
New York City, because the mayor of New York flatly refused to pay for a team
that played their games in New Jersey – even if the team retained New York as
part of its title.
Well before this, Peggy had already made it clear that she
wanted the team to change its name from New York to New Jersey, and this issue-initiated
contact between us when I – in something of an alcoholic haze at the bar – got
jolted back to reality when she shoved a piece of paper in front of me.
“Sign this,” she demanded.
“What is it?” I asked, squinting at the paper in the dim
light.
Others had signed it, but I could not make out what the
print said.
“It’s a petition to make the Giants change their name.”
“To what?”
“To New Jersey, stupid.”
“I sort of like the name Giants.”
“Not that part. I don’t want to change that,” she said
snorting at me in frustration. “I want them to change the New York part to New
Jersey – after all, they play their home games here.”
Peggy was going to ever patron in the bar to bolster her
cause, glaring each man into submission.
I had heard her rhetoric before, if not this particular
aspect.
When she could still talk after a game, she ranted about the
Giants and how good they were, and how they were destined for greatness.
When they were at home, she screamed at them throughout the whole
game to encourage them. When they were away, she screamed at the television,
convinced they would feel her spirit in that foreign land, and with her
bullhorn of a voice, it was just possible.
“Well?” she asked.
“I’m thinking about it.”
“What’s to think about?” She growled, and then leaned over
the bar, her sharp fingernails gripping my side as if she intended to climb
over, her eyes looking straight into mine with a look so full of fury that
something melted in me. “Unless, of course,” she said, “You don’t like the
Giants.”
Her Polish features were unmistakable this close up. Many of
the girls who danced here came out of local Polish immigrant stock. Passaic and
Garfield were flush with girls like her, all of them aching to find some easy
route out of poverty.
Peggy, however, did not look like a typical go-go dancer
since on nights after a big game – especially after a Giants victory, she wore
a Giants football jersey over her outfit even when she was supposedly dancing,
removing it only when patron complaints raised the ire of the owner who yelled
for Peggy to “strip.”
She wore it as she glared over the petition at me.
I lifted my beer bottle with deliberate slowness, sipped it,
put the bottle down, then shrugged.
“I like the Giants well enough,” I said. “It’s the quarter
back that stink.”
I couldn’t have gotten a more savage reaction than if I had
slapped her. Both of her painted eyebrows rose as her glare turned vicious.
“What the fuck did you just say?” she asked.
“I said Phil Simms sucks.”
If her face had showed the remotest sign of humor prior to
this, it drained from it along with the color. She looked pale even under the
glow of the dime red bar lamp.
“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve coming in here and saying
that” she said, when she finally got her breath back. “Where the hell do you
come from anyway?”
“I live in the neighborhood if that’s what you mean.”
“And you hate the Giants?”
“I never said that.”
“Hating Phil Simms means the same thing,” she snapped. “What
are you, a Jets fan or something?”
“I told you. I like the Giants.”
“Like hell you do. Give that back,” she said and grabbed
back her piece of paper. “I don’t want you to sign my petition.”
She stormed away, shoving the sheet under the nose of the
next man.
“If you tell me, you hate Phil Simms, too, I’ll murder you!”
she warned him.
The man hurriedly scribbled his name and Peggy moved on,
then stepped her drive when the owner yelled for her to stop with the fucking
Giants shit and dance.
But once she climbed back upon the state, she glared at me,
less enraged now than puzzled, as if I had just landed in the middle of her
world from another planet, for the life of her, she could not figure out what I
was all about.
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