13- How old do you think I look?
By the time I met Peggy in the Fall of 1986, she had her
routine for cocaine procurement down to a fine-tuned science. And no doubt part
of her attention on me and the other at the bar was part of what a con artist
might call “baiting the hook.”
We were supposed to wonder about her and while we pondered
the intricacies of the web she weaved, she fleeced us.
All this, however, had its downside.
She was in constant pain, complaining about persistent
headaches, and anyone who came regularly to the My Way and saw her over time,
already knew about her dramatic mood swings.
Her gain in weight was her most obvious problem.
“Which is strange because I hardly eat anything,” she said
one night when several men gave her a hard time about her age.
“How old do I look” she asked angrily.
“30-35,” came one man’s reply.
He got rewarded by her never speaking to him again.
When she looked at me, I knew I was in deep trouble.
Mary had already warned me not to jest about her age or
weight.
“She’s very sensitive about those,” Marry said. “Peggy knows
she has to complete with younger girls here.”
“What about you?” Peggy asked.
‘Huh?” I asked, dragged out of a daze to be confronted by her stare.
“Do I look 35 to you?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“then how hold do I look?”
“I’m not good with ages.”
“Guess.”
Men all around the bar started at me with the obvious relief
that it was me Peggy had picked on and not them.
“I don’t know,” I said finally, “26, maybe?”
“26!” she yelped. “I look that old to you?”
“I told you, I’m not good with ages,” I saw, drawing only a
huff from her and a cold shoulder as she went back to her dancing. But she eyed
me a few times afterwards. As it turned out, she was 27 and would turn 28 the
following spring – an old lady by go-go standards where the scene ate its own
very young.
Wolfman had similar concerns about her weight and during one
exchange with her claimed she looked like a blimp.
“And I don’t need no blimp dancing for me,” he said.
Wolfman knew very well that Peggy’s massive ingestion of
alcohol was the cause of her weight gain.
“A blimp?” she said, standing at the gate waiting to receive
the change she needed to play her tunes on the juke box.
“You’ve gained weight,” he said.
“Fuck you,” she snarled.
“No thanks,” he said. “I’ve seen what you do to your
victims. I’m concerned about the deal we had.”
“What deal?”
“You dance only if you keep the weight off.”
“Come off it, Jim,” she snapped, slashing at a strand of
hair that had fallen across her face. “You can’t afford to fire me. I bring in
the bacon for you.”
“I can’t afford no blimp floating across my dance stage,” he
said, removing the cigar stub from the corner of his mouth. “This is a strip
club, not The Macy’s Day Parade. I’m cutting you off until you shed some
weight.”
“Cutting me off? You mean as in no alcohol?”
“That’s right.”
“Why you son of a bitch!” Peggy growled, and took a step
towards him..
“Touch me, girl,” Wolfman warned, “and you’ll never work in
a strip club again.”
“I wasn’t going to touch you,” she said. “But you’re still a
son of a bitch. I got a day job. I get enough aggravation there without having
to get it here, too.”
“If you didn’t drink so much, you wouldn’t be getting fat.”
“And you wouldn’t be making as much money off the drinks the
men buy me.”
“I want you to get them
to drink, not suck up the alcohol yourself.”
“How about a limit?” Peggy said. “I could live with that.”
“How much of a limit?”
“Six drinks.”
“One.”
“One?” Peggy balked. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Men want
to buy me drinks all night long. How the hell do I led them do that with a
one-drink limit>”
“You could drink soda.”
“Don’t make me sick. Four drinks. That’s the lowest I’ll
go.”
“Two or you can get dressed right now.”
“Three,” Peggy said. “That’s a good compromise, isn’t it?”
Wolfman put the cigar stub back into the corner of his mouth
and gnawed on it a while.
The anger eased out of his eyes. His expression revered to
its usual pained look of indifference.
“All right,” he said. “Three. But if you make a ruckus when
time comes to cut you off, I’ll toss you out onto the street. I don’t want no
more trouble in here, you get me?”
“Me?” Peggy said, deliberately batting her eye lashes.
“Cause trouble?”
“Yeah, you. Not get your quarters and pick your music before
I change my mind. I don’t know why I’m so kind to you. I don’t let other girls
talk to me like you do.”
“None of the other girls deliver like I do,” Peggy said.
“Besides, you know you love me.”
“Get!”
Mary dropped five quarters into the palm of Peggy’s upturned
hand.
Then Peggy paraded around the outside of the bar to the
jukebox near the front door, making sure she went slowly enough so that each of
us had time to run as she passed.
Some men tried to speak to her; she ignored them.
Some cringed expecting her to lash out at them in some way
or treat them with her usual flirtatious mockery.
She said nothing. But from her smug expression, it was easy
to tell she took in all this accolade as deserved, the queen of the My Way
Lounge undergoing her bi-weekly coordination.
But no queen ever strutted her stuff so scantily clad, nor
ruled a world so drench in alcohol and lust.
On this particular night, she wore one of her more elaborate
outfits, tassels dangling from her covered nipples, grand, but not every
revealing, highlighting one of Wolfman’s other pet peeves with Peggy.
While he scolded other girls for flashing too much flesh, he
also wanted them to reveal more than Peggy usually did.
He called what she wore “a swim suit,” which it very likely
was, modified only slightly to pass as a dance outfit.
Conscious of her increased weight, Peggy often wore and
outfit that could help hold in her middle and only if abused by Wolfman did she
wear anything that revealed her stomach – and if she could get away with it,
she even wore at times a –t-shirt or New York Giants jersey over top of that as
well.
Patrons got a glimpse of her amazing legs, but often little
more than that.
On this night – taunted apparently by Wolfman before hand –
Peggy wore a two-piece outfit, the orange tassels dangling from her clearly
rigid nipples.
She was always cold, and always bitched bout it, and Wolfman
always did absolutely nothing about it.
As Peggy glanced around, she looked disappointed.
There were just too few of us here, and most of them were
the real down-and-out variety, too hard up or miserable to provide much in the
way of tips or drinks, let alone cocaine.
She glanced at me and the others, and even as the
disapproving Wolfman, caught in the multiple reflections of the mirrors behind
the bar.
Missing on this particular night were the hordes of men with
money: the horny salesmen, the local store clerks, the government workers from
nearby city hall or the staff from the unemployment office around the corner.
Even the jocks an d other macho losers from
This was late November and unusually cold, and the bulk of
us who shared the bar – the cab drivers, bus drivers, warehouse workers and Wolfman’s
minions – seemed more interested in keeping warm than in Peggy. Some of
Wolfman’s minions – low level hoodlums he let hang around for kicks – giggled.
But they were as worthless to her as the rest of us.
The chill air kept away the high rollers she could county on
for a stiff or two of cocaine, leaving her with a horn crew of laborers and
henpecked husbands who needed a quick peek at some tit and ass before slinking
off to jerk off in the bathroom.
Peggy had too much class to ever feel contempt for us the
way most of the other dancers did, but she could not hide her disappointment.
The whole point of her long stroll was to pick out men she
thought she could feed off of later. So by the time she reached the jukebox she
had already picked out one or two of us along the one side of the oval bar,
wiggling her butt the whole time she selected her tunes so as to keep our
attention, she knowing we could look no place else.
Once done, Peggy made her way back up the other side of the
bar where she evaluated her prospects there, her mood already improved enough
for her to acknowledge with a nod or smile some of the regulars, some she even
patted on the back as she passed calling one man “sweetheart,” and other
“cutie” and still a third man, “Honey,” and thus establishing ground for them to
buy her drinks or at worst, slip her a few tips during her dance.
She even smiled at Wolfman and his collection of minions
before easing finally through the gate to behind the bar and the stage where
she would perform her act.
Why she picked on man over another remained one of the great
unsolved mysteries. But she didn’t pick me that night, but bantered with one of
the men on the first side, complaining about her mother, and her mother being
as bad as Wolfman when it came to her alcohol use.
“She thinking I drink too much,” Peggy said.
“Your boss seems to think so, too,” one man remarked,
drawing a dark glare from Peggy and banishment from her for the rest of the
night.
“My mother even marks the bottles before I come over so she
can check to see how much I drink. I always mark them again so she doesn’t know
which marks are hers.”
“So what happened?” another man asked.
“She figured out what I was doing, and it was my father who
clued her in. He told her to mark the bottles while turned upside down, so when
I marked them again it would look like I drank even more than I actually did.”
At some point, I ran out of money and rose to leave.
Oddly enough, I actually wanted her to notice and when she
didn’t break away from her conversation with one of the other men, I felt
slighted, and a bit more lonely than when I had come in.
Beware the ideas of March.
That’s what Shakespeare tells us, and perhaps my whole life has been filled with superstition, my reading personal change into changes of season.
This, of course, involves Peggy, whose name seems to dominate my every waking moment, filled with an amazing ache that refuses to go away with mere words, a lingering ache that craves past tenderness, and promises to continue on in me long after Peggy has passed out of my life.
I have felt this way with other women, but only afterwards, when I look back on them and what I have. With Peggy, I seem to already looking at once was or what can’t be, as if I know perfectly well it can’t possibly happen or if it does, it will burst into flames the moment I get it.
If I get it.
It may already be too late.
I have hesitated over my last two meetings with Peggy, finding myself unable to say what I came to say.
Last night, I shaved and went to see her at the bar with only six dollars in my pocket, no gas in my car, and the likelihood of running out before I could get to work.
I was too embarrassed to ask her out.
I leaped on the excuse that I could see her again Monday when she dances at another bar, but vow not to get tongue-twisted again. This time I intend to write her a note and give it to her when my mouth ceases to function.
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