20 - Peggy’s World
(This is a somewhat
problematic chapter since I had almost no original notes from it, and several
conflicting fictional versions that placed the events in the early morning
hours after one of Peggy’s gigs or earlier. I blended them for this account. The
detailed descriptions of the interior of Peggy’s apartment come from a much
later journal entry as do some of the references to the Russian Mafia)
As it turned out, I didn’t have to
wait a week to see Peggy again.
I got a
call about mid morning two days later, a jangling that dragged me out of sleep
and told me immediately that some one new was calling, since everybody who
normally called me knew better than to call me before noon, and most were
trained to call even later than that.
“Is that
you, Alfred?” Peggy asked when I finally managed to reach the phone and croak
into it.
“Yes,” I
said.
“Why do you
sound so strange?”
I was too
much in a haze to try and explain and merely grunted, then asked why she’d
called.
“To set up
our date, of course,” she said.
“Our date?”
“You did
ask me, didn’t you?”
I had a
vague recollection that the matter hadn’t been fully settled.
“Yes, I
suppose.”
“So I’m
calling you on it. How does Friday sound – after I get off dancing.”
I said it
sounded fine, even though I had my doubts. She gave me a time to arrive and
some other basic instructions I half acknowledged, then I when back to sleep. Hours later, when I
woke up again, I wondered if it had been a dream.
I didn’t
even remember having given her my number, although I could have. I knew she
never gave me hers.
Peggy told
me to never park in the lot beside her building, even though she did. Her
landlord, she said, got angry when anyone did.
So I parked
up the block on Harrison across Charles Street, where the business district
seemed to merge with a more residential area, and walking towards her three
story apartment building, I could see the light in her apartment building
shinning through what I learned later was a full-sized American flag she had
draped across her fire escape – a flag was issued to the family when her uncle
Peter died during the Normandy Beach invasion.
Her
building sat on top of a long hill as Charles Street descended towards Passaic
Street at the bottom of the hill, my family able to trace their roots back to
the 1880s when great, great grandfather, John the Baptist Sarti finally settled
in that area after his second trip to America. His grave was still located
there in the cemetery that bordered the southern side of
It occurred
to me later that her ancestors and mine had lived their lives side by side,
perhaps even with a nodding acquaintance since my family ran a local bakery, a
general goods store, a hardware store and even a construction company on these
blocks from when they arrived until nearly a decade after the end of World War
II, perhaps even doing business with her family.
With the
exception of the bakery, which did business nearby until the mid-1990s, my
family had begun to scatter just after the war after the death of Gerolama
Favata, the grand dame of our clan – just as Peggy’s family would when her
grand mother, Mary, died in 1995.
Despite all
of the mobsters that still lived in the Lodi-Garfield area, many of the Italian
families had begun to seek greener pastures after World War II, where as
Peggy’s family with the continued influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe must
have continued to feel comfortable there, attending churches where Eastern
European languages were spoken more freely than English, where delis still
served foods that came straight from the old country. One deli across the
street from her grandmother’s house still gave away free coffee every Sunday
even when I wandered there a decade after Peggy’s death, people still clinging
to traditions and customs that made that part of the world a piece of their
home land here in New Jersey.
This was
still a few years ahead of the fall of the Soviet Union, but clearly showed the
foundations on which the Russian Mafia began their take over of local rackets
in the early 1990s – as the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe brought
out an even meaner, less ethical breed of criminal, less interested in maintaining
culture as in taking over.
But Peggy’s
Harrison Avenue apartment sat in the heart of the old Italian neighborhood, and
walking three I saw the ragged edge of what once had been, shoe stores and
delis already on the verge of extinction, buildings still thick with
generations of Italian cooking.
Her
building very much reminded me of the tenements I once lived in on the Lower
East Side of New York, the outer door leading to a small titled vestibule with
brass mail boxes inserted into the right hand wall, slots for the name of each
tenant and a pearl-colored door bell that allowed the visitor to ring upstairs,
and for the tenant to ask via a small speaker who it was before buzzing the
visitor in – a system that apparently no longer worked by the time Peggy moved
in.
The doors
to the mail boxes mostly stood open, locks broken. One or two of the doorbells
were broken as well, made unnecessary by the broken lock to the inner door that
allowed anyone to easily push their way in.
A dim light
glowed from a bare bulb above, allowing me to survey the slots for Peggy’s
name, but for some reason, hers was not among those listed, so I guesses which
button to push, assuming that the fourth button was the one that corresponded
to the top floor apartment whose light I had seen go one after dropping her off
a few nights earlier.
Nothing
happened.
No voice
came over the tiny speaker, no buzzer sounded to release the lock.
Some of the
mail from the overflowing box below it has spilled to the floor and I picked up
a few pieces, but all were addressed to “resident” not “Peggy Yancyniak” or
anyone else.
I did, however, hear music
from inside, muffled until I pushed open the inner door, then it roared at me,
flowing down from some place upstairs.
Another dim
light made the stairs along the right wall visible, but kept the door on the
first floor in shadow – a single beam that made it possible for me to climb up
the splintered stairs if I clung to the banister. This last shook at my touch,
partly because it was loose, but largely due to the volume of the music above
that seemed to send vibrations down through the center of the building, rocking
it all, a volume that grew more intense and more unbearable with each step I
took upwards.
By the time
I reached the second floor, the music hurt my ears and banged on my chest with
each back beat. I could feel it flowing up through the soles of my shoes and
through the walls each time my fingers brushed the pealing paint. Dust flowed
down from above, like a snow storm caught in the dim light.
If anyone
else lived in the building, I could find no clue – and the doors to the second
floor like those on the first, remained firmly shut – though I thought I saw
one peep hole darken as I passed.
By the time
I reached the bottom of the next flight up, I had grown deaf to everything but
the torturous volume of music from above, pouring down at me and over me with
such abuse I staggered, so monstrously loud, I didn’t even know what band it
was.
When I
reached the top of this flight, I found two more doors and another set of
stairs leading to a door to the roof. The door through which the music blared
had a small placard on it saying “Home Sweet Home.”
I knocked
on this door.
But the
stereo volume was so high I knew nobody inside could hear me.
So I
pounded on the door with both fists.
Coincidentally,
the door was not latched and opened several inches. A shadow faced filled the
gap, and the door slammed again, followed by the sound of the lock being
latched.
The music
stopped, leaving a silence nearly as deafening as the noise had been.
This time a
shadow filled the peep hole.
“Who is
it?” Peggy’s nervous voice asked from inside.
“It’s me.”
“Me, who?”
“Al
Sullivan.”
“I don’t
know any Al Sullivan. Go away.”
“But you
asked me to come,” I said, watching the shadow in the peep hole shift as if she
tried to see my face more clearly.
“I did?”
“You old me
to meet you here.”
“Alfred? Is
that you?”
“Yes, I
suppose that’s who I am.”
“Why didn’t
you say so in the first place?” she yelped and unlocked latches and three open
the door.
“I thought
I did,” I mumbled, aware of a new and different Peggy, one dressed in a loose sweat shirt that fell to her
knees.
I liked
this version of Peggy even more than the other, and the real smile she gave me
instead of the sardonic one she routinely gave people at the bar.
She reminded
me of a Tom boy that lived next door to me growing up.
Peggy’s
face alone retained the artificial lines she painted on, down-turned curves for
eyebrows, thick red paint on her lips.
What had
looked almost natural in bar light stood out here as unreal, filled with the
air of extreme calculation, as if she had spent hours with a ruler and compass
to make each line exact.
“You’re
late,” she said, motioning me into the kitchen with a tilt of her head,
glancing passed me into the hall as if she expected to see someone else there,
someone she had mistaken me for in the first place, someone she definitely did
not want on her doorstep.
“I came
alone,” I said.
She glanced
sharply at me. “What do you mean?”
“You seem to be looking for
someone.”
“No, I’m
not,” she said sharply, slamming and locking the door again behind me.
“But…”
“You’re
mistaken,” she said even more sternly.
I shrugged,
but did noticed the splintered wood around the locks, suggesting that something
or someone had exerted significant force from the outside and the new
reinforcement had been added since.
“If you
wait a minute, I’ll finish getting ready so we can go out.”
“Out? Now?
You were serious about that?”
“Yes, out,”
Peggy said, pausing to look over at me from across the kitchen. “to get
something to eat. I’m famished. You don’t think I intend to cook, do you?”
“But it’s
nearly four in the morning.”
“I can tell
time.”
“Where do
we go at this time of day?”
Peggy shook
her head. “You don’t get out much, do you?”
“I guess
not,” I admitted. “I didn’t know you could find a place open, that’s all.”
“There
seems to be quite a lot that you know nothing about. Just stay there. I won’t
be more than a minute. Then we can go someplace where we can talk over food.”
Peggy
vanished through a door near the windows and from the sound of gushing water I
heard next, I assumed it was a bathroom.
Peggy’s
world surprised me, small but functional, a space I would come to know well and
which would remain fixed in my mind for the rest of my life – partly because it
seemed to reflect who she was – a portrait of her inner self and its division,
each room reflecting a different aspect of her character, changing her as she
moved from one part of the place to the other. The kitchen served as a hug with
doors leading to the bedroom, living room and bathroom.
The kitchen
was the largest room, and from a brief glimpse was the largely unused – no
dishes in the skin or dish drain, just a few glasses in the sink, part of a set
to which one on her kitchen table belonged.
During the
next few months, I learned a lot about her routines.
Although
she nearly always turned on the stereo in the living room when she got home
from work or a dance gig, she turned it on loud so she could hear it in the
rest of the house as she moved from room to room, stripping off the
conservative garb of her day job or her dance gear, for some new identity,
sometimes one designed for the external world when she went back out, or a more
intimate identity she kept here in the house.
The kitchen was the place of
transition, where she returned to the moment the stereo was on and she had
changed her clothing. Here, she routinely drew out the ingredients for her
drink from the refrigerator, vodka and juice, and ice from a metal ice tray.
These she deposited on the glass topped table where she had already dumped her
keys and her purse.
The sink,
cabinets and stove were tucked away into a corner to the left coming in from
the hall. She never used the stove. She said she hated to cook and when she
ate, she went out or brought something in from outside, and was particularly
fond of Chinese food and turkey club sandwiches. She also said she hated to
wash dishes clean.
Men usually
paid for her meals, taking her to expensive places when she was young, less
expensive places as she grew older, or brought food to her when she called. She
frequently had me stopped off a deli up the street to bring her a turkey club.
I can’t
recall her ever offering me coffee there, and never saw pots or pans even on
the stove. The only dishes I ever saw in the sink were the glasses from her
drinks, large class, usually, unless she was drinking champagne that night.
The
refrigerator, which stood almost opposite the door from the hall and next to
the window looking out onto the fire escape, was her most used appliance,
something to went to frequently in the endless effort to refresh her drinks.
Her
bathroom, which had a vent where the window should have been, stood to the left
of the kitchen window, a tiny space with a shower, but no bath, a toilet beside
the sink and the usual assortment of ladies products as well as an unusual
number of aspirin bottles – most of the empty.
Peggy spent
a huge amount of time in the bathroom, putting on this face or that, for this
public or that, one face for her straight job, another for her gigs, while
still other faces to meet her mother or friends. The sink was always cluttered
with items for painting on eyebrows or lips, nail polish or some other items,
part of a ritual that actually changed how she acted, often turning her from
warm or depressed into someone cold and calculating, as if the mask gave her
strength she lacked otherwise.
If we
stayed in, Peggy usually deposited me in the living room while she made her
drink, changed her clothing, and put on a new face. This was a room to the
immediate right of the hall door – put parallel to it, a room painted gold
where as the kitchen was white.
This was a
narrow room with a couch along the long wall opposite the door, and two end
tables to either side and a long coffee table immediately in front of it. A
lamp stood on the end table on the far side of the couch near a small window,
and an arm chair angled towards the couch from the corner opposite the lamp.
Along the
wall opposite the couch was Peggy’s entertainment, which included a stereo and
a large-screen color TV. Hundreds of records leaned against the base of the
stereo stretching along its width, situated in a way that allowed her to find
what she wanted by easily thumbing through them.
The most
remarkable feature of the room, however, was the accumulation of photographs
that filled the wall above the stereo and TV, every one of them a picture of
John Wayne in his many incarnations. He was cowboy, soldier, sailor, even Davy
Crockett, and more than once she told me that he was the man of her dreams, the
man who had always wanted to fuck, but came too late.
In this
room, Peggy became the seductress, often coming back from her change of habit
dressed only in a t-shirt or football jersey, her long leg sticking out like a
walking advertisement for sex. She usually had a drink gripped in one hand and
a cigarette smoldering between the fingers of her other. It was here, dressed
like this, that she usually made her conquest, luring poor fools like me from
the bar to share with her their cocaine with the presumption that after that
ritual they would join her in the bedroom when they actually found themselves
back in the hall once the cocaine expired.
In the
living room, she drank, snuggled, sang to the stereo, even watched TV with me,
often making promises with touches and looks that she took weeks to deliver on.
Inevitably with sex as the end game or not, she would stand up and state, “it’s
time for bed and leave the room, leaving me early on with the basic question as
to what I was supposed to do next.
The bedroom
– which was through a wide door off the kitchen to the right – was a fantasy
land with pastel blue walls and soft pillows, as well as an assortment of stuff
animals, posters, and novelties, most of which depicted some kind of unicorn.
Every available surface had some sort of unicorn figurine, most gifts from the
men she had brought up into her world. In between these was the collection of
New York Giants paraphernalia I had given her, part of what I had called “a
survival kit for a New York Giants fanatic,” something I hoped would get her
though the off season now that her
precious Giants had won everything.
More
disturbing was the drug paraphernalia she had on the to of the dresser
immediately to the right of the door coming in. There was also a 38 caliber
pistol bullet – the gun to which she said was stuff in one of the drawers
beneath her underwear. She also claimed to have had a loaded shotgun in the
closet, which I never had the misfortune to actually see.
As much as
she claimed to hate cleaning, the place was generally spotless. She did vacuum
from time to time since I caught her at it, but she was dead set against
dusting.
“I hate
dusting,” she said. “I never dust.”
Despite
this claim, I never saw a speck of dust on anything in any of the rooms.
She had two
dressers in the bedroom, and I vaguely remember a closet, one dresser to the
right of the door facing in, the other to the left of the door facing the foot
of the bed. The closet opened beyond this dresser. The bed occupied most of the
left side of the room, tucked against the wall so that you could get in only at
the foot or along one side.
A small
window – the only one in the room – was in the wall directly across from the
door with a small bedside table just beneath it with a clock radio and lamp on
this. The radio was a classic 1980s variety with flipping numbers that changed
with the minutes and hours, and the lamp had some kind of novelty base that
made finding the switch difficult. So there were times when after Peggy fell
asleep, I simply left the lamp on.
Peggy had a
small black and white TV set on a cart, which was hooked to a wall socket by an
extension cord. She rolled it out when she went to bed and turned it on and off
by remote control, a novelty at a time when I was still getting up and down to
turn my own set off and on at home – though in truth, I watched very little TV
at home during the 1980s, explaining why I knew so little about the
programming, a matter of great amusement to Peggy who wanted to know what I did
with my spare time if I didn’t watch television.
Peggy and I
spent a great deal of time in her apartment, a great gift to me, she said,
since she considered this her private world. She also favored me by wearing
clothing, which she did not wear when in the apartment alone. She said she
didn’t care if people saw her naked through the window, although being as high
up as she was, this was unlikely, although she did claim to spend time on the
fire escape naked on particularly hot nights – a sight I never got to see.
On that
first visit, however, the only room I got to see much of was the kitchen,
taking note of the curious glass-topped table with a heart carved into the wood
beneath. The chair backs matched with carved hearts as well. A single shaded
lamp hung down over the table, similar to the kind I saw as a kid in old
fashioned pool halls.
On the
table stood a half empty bottle of vodka, a container of orange juice and a
half empty glass that contained a mixture of both with a few ice cubes floating
in it.
Beside
these stood a white vase with a dozen fresh roses stick out of it. The note
that accompanied the roses leaned against the vase, unopened.
Peggy poked
her head out of the bathroom doorway and squinted at me, then vanished again,
asking from the bathroom, “Do you like my flowers?”
“Yes,” I
said, fingering the card. “But you don’t know who they’re from.”
“I know who
sent them,” Peggy said, making an appearance, this time with a tooth brush in
her mouth, encircled by foam. “They’re always from the same person.”
“He must
like you a lot.”
“He loves
me.”
“And you
don’t love him?”
Peggy took
the toothbrush out of her mouth and squinted at me again.
“What makes
you say that?” she asked.
“You seem
to care more about the flowers than the man who sent them.”
She
shrugged.
“Men are a
dime a dozen,” she said. “But you can’t get a dozen roses for a dime.”
She vanished
into the bathroom again, turned on the water, spat, gargled, then turned off
the water again, to reappear without the toothbrush.
“I’m
ready,” she announced. “I suppose you’ve had time to look over my small abode?”
“Yes,” I
said. “You can tell a lot about a person from the way he or she lives.”
“What have
you found out about me?” she asked.
“Hard to
tell yet.”
“Did you
look under the rugs or in the closest to make sure you sniffed out everything?”
“Not yet,”
I said. “You didn’t give me enough time.”
“Sniff
around too much and I’ll put you out,” she said with a laugh, but her eyes
looked serious. “I like my privacy.”
“I was
kidding.”
“I’m not,”
Peggy said. “I let you get away with too much and the next thing I’ll have you
moving in.”
“This place
is too small for two people.”
“Which is
why I hate it sometimes,” she said. “There are times when I feel like I’m
inside a cage here.”
“It seems
perfect for one person.”
Peggy
glanced sharply at me, her hand encircling the glass of melting ice.
“Who says I
want to be all by myself?” she asked. “How do you know there isn’t somebody
already?”
I felt my
face flush.
I had
crossed a line between curious and nosy and we both knew it.
I glanced
around, looking over the small alcove to my left, at the stove and the sink and
the number of glasses all with the same mixture of melted ice and juice,
glasses waiting to be washed, but no pots or pans.
“Don’t you
ever cook?” I asked.
“Don’t you
ever stop asking questions? No, I don’t cook. I don’t have to.”
“You mean
you don’t eat?”
“I mean
there’s always someone willing to take me out – like now. If you don’t mind,
let’s go, I’m famished.”
Outside the
window, beyond the flapping flag, pre-dawn light began to show, pale blue
against the distant
But in the shadows,
I could not yet make out the details of the landscape, the landmarks of my
life, the curve the
“Okay,” I
said, “Let’s go.”
****************************
Journal: March 20, 1987
Maybe it is the fact that it is suddenly spring, and my
young man’s fancy has taken a turn for the better (or worse).
Spring fever seems to dominate me yearly, and the more
serious of my forays (foreplays?) into love come this time of year.
The only exception to this, of course, was Fran, and she was
the exception to many rules which there is little time to go into detail about
here..
If you will remember yesterday’s entry into this noble work,
I was discussing the varying aspects of my latest venture – good, bad or
indifferent, an entry that was as much a letter to Roe as it was a journal
entry. (Many years later, I refer to Roe as my cyber nanny, but there was no
internet in 1987, or email, and so we communicated through snail mail, but her
function was the same then as it was later – ADS 2023))
Well, folks, no sooner had I printed the thing out and begun
to fold it into the mailing envelop, then Peggy called, apologizing for her
so-called mistreatment of me at the bar the previous night. Not that she really
mistreated me.
She seems down on herself in a thousand different ways, each
making her think herself less capable than her male counterparts. This may
explain why a woman of reasonable intelligence (I am beginning to realize Peggy
has more than just reasonable intelligence) would dance in a go go bar.
It is obvious she’s never had a feminist course in college
or (as a Republican) even considered it.
Many of her opinions seem to be manufactured by the great
male machine.
This does not make me think any less of her, or make me
think I am capable of changing her. But I do think she needs a change of
environment that will allow her to broaden her perspective.
This makes me think of Pauly and bringing her up there to introduce
her to him. (why do I always bring those I love up to see Pauly for a review?)
A more important aspect of our conversation deals with the
nitty gritty of male/female relations, and a specific area in which I am
weakest.
You might call what goes on between me and Peggy a long
dance which begins with the two partners holding each other at arm’s length,
looking over the prospects before committing to anything closer.
Peggy is full of natural and justified suspicion. She lives
in a world where men are not trustworthy This is not to imply that I am any
different or better.
It was funny to hear her quoting other men yesterday when
they tell her how different they are from other men.
I’m not sure her suspicions would be any less valid in a
more “suitable” environment.
In some ways, she is right when she says I’m not a woman and
so I can never understand how it feels existing in this world as a woman. She
was referring to the more physical aspects of her present life – “that time of
month.” – but it is a valid argument on other levels as well.
It was precisely this matter which got me in the most
trouble the night before at the bar. Peggy, was bent over in pain on the dance
floor. Other women would have called in ill. She had gone to work late – proving
just how much of a fanatic she was in other ways. She made no bones about how
much pain she was in, snarling at the men watching her, at one in particular –
a man wearing a NY Giants shirt, who was mouthing sexual suggestions as a cure
for her pain – with him no doubt. When she got down from the stage to the bar,
she was still snarling and gulped down the drink I bought her before allowing herself
to speak.
Everybody at the bar knew what the issue was, and laughed
about it.
I engaged in a miserable attempt to cheer her up, putting
both feet in my mouth, so to speak.
She kept saying what a nasty person she was when she was
like this. I told her not to worry, she could join the Giants’ line up and be a
holy terror for them once a month.
She glared at me.
“Does everybody in the bar have to know what I problem is?”
she snarled, even though everybody already did.
My face must have fallen completely off. I heard something rattling
on the floor near by feet. I didn’t look. My gaze was locked on her pretty face
as I croaked a quick apology.
“You’re right,” I said. “I got a big mouth.”
My expression altered hers. She had only been kidding.
She was used to the rough and ready of the barroom men, not
a guilt-ridden Catholic boy like me, who was always worried about overstepping
the boundaries of propriety.
“Hey,” she said, seeing my shattered face, “I didn’t mean to…”
She clearly hadn’t meant to hurt me, though in fact, I had
hurt myself. I had stumbled into the game without the notion of how to play it
hard. For me, my invading her privacy was far worse than her snarling response.
She was kidding. Part of the act. I was not kidding, and in
a way, I violated the rules of the game.
People had to have thick skin, which I did not, and she
assumed I did, and it would never have crossed her mind to think differently.
But she is smart and knows how to evade questions she does
not want to answer.
On the phone when she called to apologize, I had tried to
find out her age, under-guessing by five years, but she dodged, telling me the only
reason she called was because she thought she had hurt my feelings.
This may be the reason why she agreed to go out with me on a
dinner date next Thursday.
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