21 - Movie material

   

 

            “Where the fuck are you going?” Peggy asked, her head jerking around as she tried to map out the unfamiliar landscape.

            “To the Alwood Theater,” I said.

            “I’ve been to the Alwood theater a million times, Alfred, and I’ve never seen these streets.”

            “It’s a back way I know.”

            “Back way?” she asked, a painted brow rising high onto her forehead.

            “I went to school around here. I used to hang out on these streets.”

            “And now you’re going to get us lost in them?”

            “I would never do a thing like that.”

            “If we’re late for that movie, Alfred, I’ll make you wait for the second show and then you’ll be late for work.”

            “And in the meantime we can fool around in the car, maybe?”

            “What yourself, buddy – this is only our second date.”

            “Our second date officially,” I said. “We’ve seen a lot of each other inbetween.”

            “Too much maybe. You’re starting to get cocky.”

            “Me, cocky? Never,” I said, feeling freer than I had in a very long time.

            I liked the idea that this woman enjoyed being with me.

            Sure, there were still lots of questions that needed to be answered. But there were other things, too, a tenderness I could feel just under the surface I hoped I could draw out of her.

            Her passion for the New York Giants gave me hope, proving she was capable of love if given a chance. And I liked the idea that she might come to love me with that same passion.

            Ut oh,” I said, pulling the car to a stop. The street had stopped in a small cul de sac framed with bi-level houses.

            “I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere,” I said.

            “I knew it. The minute I let you take me on your own secret route I knew it meant trouble.”

            “They changed the road,” I said. “I knew there was something different back near the factories.”

            “Excuses, excuses,” Peggy said. “On thing is certain. We’re not going to make the first show on time.”

            “I wouldn’t bet on that,” I said, putting the car into reverse for a quick three-point turn in order to race back the way we’d come. “It was a silly mistake, easily corrected.”

            “We’ll see,” Peggy said. “I wonder what your boss will say when you show up late?”

            “Nothing. There’s still time to make the first show.”

            It had been almost 20 years since I had come this way, and the old stomping ground had gone the way of many such places, old factories replaced with housing developments and strip mall. Even the old AMF warehouse where I had worked during high school tossing boxes of bowling balls had vanished.

            “Here’s the road,” I said, finally discovering my mistake – a division in the road.

            I turned and raced down the broader avenue, managing to catch every yellow light before it turned red, turning finally onto the street where the theater was located.

            The once familiar marque had changed, too. Now insteadof one threater, the placed had been divided into four.

            Americans constantly clamored for choices until they got so many they could not make up their minds.

            “I told you I’d get us here on time,” I said.

            “Just park the car and shut up,” Peggy said, refusing to look at me, her expression taunt with indignation.

            I parked the car up the street and we jumped out.

            Whatever tension had existed between us seemed to evaporate.

            I slipped my fingers through hers.

            She didn’t try to stop me or look up to object.

            We strolled towards the theater the way young lovers might, swaying slightly to the same tune mother nature hummed inside our heads.

            I glowed. I was seventeen again, innocent and carefree, walking in a cloud of innocence I wanted to retain forever, trying to forget the strip clubs where Peggy danced and the pain of her growing up.

            I wanted this particular moment to last forever when deep down I knew it could not.

            We crossed over to the theater box office.

            “By two tickets for Blind Date,” Peggy said.

            I pushed the money through the small gap in the ticket booth window in exchange for the tickets, wondering if Peggy had selected this movie for a reason. Was she sending some kind of message?

            I gave up speculating.

            I did not want to ruin a nearly perfect moment by analyizing it.

            But I couldn’t get it out of my head, not just the movie, but all of the circumstances surrounding it – Peggy pretending she was an honest, all American girl next door looking at me as if I was her sweetheart.

            And what about that stranger at her door?

            What business was Peggy really in?

            A friend suggested Peggy might be a prostitute since many strippers were.

            If so, at some point, Peggy would want payment – even from me.

            I hated the idea.

            I already liked Peggy too much for something like that to get in our way.

            The film bothered me, too.

            Bruce Willis played a poor soul who needed to bring a date to an important corporate dinner. Warned not to get her drunk, he got her drunk anyway and she went wild. Pursued by her jealous ex-boyfriend, Willis struggles to make sense of what was going on.

            Through the film, I kept looking over at Peggy to see if she saw the same similarities in this film as I did.

            To me, she seemed just like the woman on the screen, living her life under the influence of booze and cocaine.

            I wondered what Peggy was really like absent the addition, and would she even bother with a slug like me.

            The film reversed course, and came to a happy conclusion, Bruce Willis winning over the girl in the end.

            I couldn’t help but wish I was Bruce Willis.

            Finally the credits rolled and we stumbled out of the theater.

            “What a crappy movie,” Peggy said.
            “I sort of liked it.”

            “You would,” Peggy grumbled. “But love does not conquer all.”

            “I think it does.”

            “PLEASE!” Peggy moaned. “Let’s get out of here. Romantic claptrap like that always vies me a headache. I wish I hadn’t left my aspirin at home.”

            “Are you really in that much pain?”

            “No, I’m holding my head because I have nothing better to do.”

            “You have headaches often?”

            “Often enough,” she said. “I have a constant headache. Sometimes they’re better than other times. Right now, it’s killing me.”

            “Have you seen a doctor?”

            “Here you go with 20 questions again,” she moaned. “Just drive me home so I can get some aspirin.”

            I didn’t move. We both saw the drug store a few doors up the street from the theater.

            I didn’t have much money left. But finally I sighed.

            “Do you want me to buy some aspirin?” I asked.

            “It would help.”

            I slipped out from behind the wheel, fingering the last of this week’s money in my pocket. I was going to have to get another advance from my boss if I expected to have gas for the rest of the week.

            I felt like a zombie with the drug store’s bright light stinging my eyes, and I was glad to escape.

            I handed the package to Peggy as soon as I got back into the car. She slid the bottle out of the bag, savagely ripping off the plastic from around the lid, then she pressed down on the top.

            “Damn this fucking thing,” she scowled. “It takes a fucking rocket scientist to get this fucking lid off.”

`           “You want me to help?”

            “No,” she snapped and after a few more attempts, the lid came off, and she used the tip of her finger nail to remove the cotton from inside. She dumped a bunch of pills into the palm of her hand and gulped them down.

            “No wonder you have ulcers,” I said, engaging the gears of the car for the trip back to Lodi.

            “Mind your own business,” she snapped. “It’s my stomach.”

            She dumped the bottle on the dash board where it rattled as I drove.

            The intensity of her pain diminished as her face took on a less agonized look.

            Finally, I pulled up to the car in front of her building.

            “Well,” I said. “It has been an interesting night.”

            “Aren’t you coming upstairs?” she asked.

            I looked up at her apartment struck by the fact that she had left the lights on.

            “Are you sure you want me?” I asked.

            But Peggy had already started away, leaving me to choose whether or not to follow.

            I put the car in park and shut off the engine, missing its sound as the silence of the street grew around me.

            I followed her like a love-sick puppy.

            Upstairs in her apartment, life became a fairytale again, full of carved hearts, wilting roses, stuffed unicorns and pictures of John Wayne.

            She went through the ritual of undressing and making herself a drink, then drew me into her bedroom where she again expected me to sit with her as she went to sleep.

            “Just hold me until I go to sleep,” she said.

            “Tell me about the man who was here earlier?” I asked.

            “He’s nobody, Alfred. He’s just business.”

            “What kind of business?”

            “Do we need to go into that now?”

            “I need to know.”

            “He’s one of my customers.”

            “For what?”

            “Pot, mostly.”

            “Mostly?”

            “Sometimes other things. I usually do big deals. That’s something you shouldn’t know too much about. Now quit asking questions so I can go to sleep.”

            “All right.”

            “Hold me.”

            So I held her. She shuddered as I did, though I wasn’t sure which one of us it came out of.

            I kept thinking how wrong all this was, about the drugs and the strange me showing up at her door, and yet how right she felt in my arms, as if I could have spent an eternity like that, needing no Bruce Willis or John Wayne to save her.

            Peggy stared at the TV set. I managed to stare there, too, trying not to let that other voice in side me slip out, the one that kept saying, “Get out, stupid, before it’s goo late.”

            I didn’t move.

            I felt her consciousness slowly slipping away, the cocaine and alcohol sweeping her back into the deeper regions of her dreams.

            She cried out: “No, please, don’t hit me.”

            I clung to her; she shoved me away, then clutched me back, her sharp nails biting into my back as if we were making love with me still fully clothed.

            Finally, real sleep flowed over both of us. When I woke a short time later, I found Peggy coiled in a corner of the bed whimpering.

            I got up, found my shoes and carried them out into the hall before I put them on.

            Outside, I found the dark street empty of anyone, only the deep shadows of the old Italian neighborhood and me, one more wraith walking in my family’s footsteps, weary and confused.

 

 

 

The Cave

 

            The phone jangled so persitantly the next morning, I knew it would go on unless I got up to answer it.

            Lack of sleep only added to my overall confusion: between work and Peggy, I had become a stumble, bumbling, sleep-deprived man, so caught up in a dream world I could make sense of nothing.

            “So where the hell did you go last night?” Peggy demanded the moment I said, “Hello.”

            “To work,” I said. “Besides, you fell asleep.”

            “If I promise not to fall asleep, will you come pick me up?”

            “Tonight?”

            “Yes,” she said. “I want to see where you live.”

            I glanced around at my little world, at the piles of stuff, the small islands of clutter had had no time or energy or will power to pick up.

            “You want to come here?”

            “How am I supposed to know you better if I don’t see where you live?”

            “This was a legitimate question.

            “Is something wrong?” she asked, when I did not answer right away.

            “What could be wrong?” I asked weakly.

            “You could be hiding something – like the fact you have a wife or you are living with someone.”

            “I’m not married or living with anyone.”

            “Then what’s the problem?”

            “I just need a little time to straighten up.”

            “So when can I come over?”

            “How does Sunday sound?”

            “No can do. I have to dance.”

            “Monday?”

            She was silent so long I thought at first she had hung up until I heard her breathing, and finally she said, “Monday’s fine.”

            As it turned out, I didn’t need until Monday to get things in order, manageing to shuffle through enough junk to pass muster by Thursday.

            I left a message for her at her mother’s and got a return call from her a short time later.

            “How about coming over for diner?” I asked.

            “Are you doing the cooking?”

            “Not this time. We can buy out and bring it here.”

            “Okay,” she said.

            “You want me there the usual time?”

            She agreed.

            I counted my dwindling cash.

            I would be cutting things close, but I knew I needed particular items to make the evening work such as a bottle of vodka. I had seen her drinking nothing else at her place. So I stopped off at Home Liquor, a discount store near the Lodi border and wandered around the bottle-filled aisles looking for the least expensive brand I could find

            Fortunately, cocaine was not something I needed to supply.

            I also bought a six pack of beer in case she changed her habit. I knew I would need a beer or two just to get through the evening.

            I knew I had to get ice, too, since Peggy’s mixture required it, but my cold water flat came with a refrigerator so small that it barely accommodated groceries, and had a freezer that could fit one package of frozen fish and nothing more. In winter, I used the shelf of my small front porch as a freezer, but Spring had arrived relatively early and any ice I kept there would melt if I bought it too early, so I figured to pick it up when we went to pick up the food.

            I felt as nervous this time as I had during my first day back in high school, scared that I might so something that would scare Peggy off.

            And anything could set her off.

            A few nights earlier, I had sat in her living room watching a movie on TV, some old Alfred Hitchcock flick I’d never seen, full of twists of plat that I was lucky enough to figure out before the film revealed them.

            Peggy sat up and glared at me.

            “I thought you said you never saw this film before?” she said.

            “I haven’t seen it.”

            “Bullshit!”

            At this point, she announced it was time to go to sleep.

            “What about the film?” I asked.

            “What do you care?  You know what it’s about,” she said and stomped out of the room, leaving me to dutifully follow and keep her company until she slipped into sleep.

            After bringing the bottles home and fitting them into the refrigerator, I made my way back out to the car, and drove over the Wall Street Bridge, up Passaic Street and through the maze of streets that were then so familiar to me I could have driving them in my sleep – and felt as if I was, becoming one more ghost of my family destined to haunt that particular landscape.

            Figuring we wouldn’t be long, I parked the car in the lot and made my way into her building, up all three flights as the music once again blared from the top floor.       

            But it was softer music than the usual stuff she’d used to unwind, a Fleetwood Mac song I had taken a fancy to a decade earlier, not one of the big hits, yet one I particularly liked.

            I was surprised to hear her listening to it.

            “It’s my favorite song,” she said. “It says everything you ever need to know about me.”

            “Such as?”

            “I’m not going to build my life around one person ever again. Other people let you down, doing out with Robert taught me that.”

            Robert, she told me over the course of several weeks, was her last lover, the one great love of her life.

            She hinted at his being someone in the underworld who might even have tried to pimp her out. She alluded to beating and public conflicts, which may have explained why Wolfman had put me out a few weeks earlier, since some of the bouts between Peggy and Richard had taken place in the My Way. She had dated him right up until Christmas 1986, months after I had met her.

            Much later, I learned more from other sources, how she and Robert had dated all the way back in high school, and that she so adored him that she could not stop talking about him, or even listen to words of warning from others who perhaps saw what he was more clearly than she did.

            The song and her emphatic statement hit me hard, painting a bleak future for any hopes I might have that the thing we had between us might amount to anything more than a fling.

            The song dampened the positive mood of the whole evening, and I could not get the lyric out of my head as if a landslide had already started inside of me – a landslide I could not stop.

            “All set,” Peggy said, dressing in a shimmering blue New York Giants jacket, a white blouse, blue jeans and pink Pony sneakers, looking exactly like that Tom Boy, All American girl next door I had dreamed up since high school, but could never get. I was never one of the cool kids in leather jackets or a jock, or even one of the bright kids, but that breed of rebel nobody liked or respected, especially girls who looked like Peggy did at this moment, and now two decades later, I followed her down her front stairs to my car, already knowing I was destined to lose her.

            We drove to Wallington for the Chinese food, to a place where the host knew me from my visits there with an old girlfriend. The host was so stiff and formal, Peggy jokingly called him an oriental Rod Sterling, and considering the weird overtones of this date, the description seemed apt.

            Then, we drove back the way we came, through Wallington, passed one of the clubs where my friends’ band used to play, on the road along the river, passing the 8 th Street bridge to the Quik Check for the ice and as it turned out, cigarettes for Peggy.

            The manager was an old friend from the days when I worked in the Fotomat booth outside, handing me his usual one-line insults as I paid. My money was nearly gone.

            In the car again, Peggy sat with my portable radio on her lap, the nearly depleted batteries giving minimal volume to a Madonna song, one she usually danced to at the bar. She hummed along as I steered the car down River Drive, then left over the Wallington Bridge, passed Holy rosary Church for the left onto 8 th Street..

            “Wait a minute!” she scowled as I started to turn the car into the car port. “Are you telling me you live only one block from Mr. B’s?”

            “What’s wrong with that?”

            “Nothing, I suppose,” she said. But she sounded suspicious as if I had kept some important information from her.

            My apartment sat on the first floor of a dilapidated apartment complex, once owned by my best friend’s aunt.

            Complex, of course, was the wrong word. It was a string of four story buildings along Passaic Street with ground flood store front that in years passed had had apartments attached to the rear where proprietors and their families lived – old style immigrant havens very similar to the kind of places my grandparents their grandparents had lived in across the river in Garfield and Lodi, leading up and through the Great Depression.

            At some point in the 1960s, my friend’s aunt sealed off the apartments from the stores renting out these rear apartments to Polish immigrants, many of whom had lived in the neighborhood all their lives never learning one word of English, not needing to with all the Polish businesses here: grocer, butcher, baker, bar.

            My friends and I moved in during the early 1970s as the elderly Polish died, first my friend, then his friends, then me, sometimes all of us crowed into one apartment in a death watch over residents in the other apartment, waiting for them to die off so we could move in. By the time my friend’s aunt sold the place, we had occupied four or five of the apartments, creating a kind of artists’ enclave. But when the new owner took over, he raised the rent and my friends started to move out until eventually only I remained, holding out in two of the apartments – one kept in the name of my uncle who spent most of his time in Graystone mental hospital than here.

            I lived in the larger of the two apartment, which meat I had three rooms instead of two, and a bath instead of a standup stall shower. But like most cold water flats, it’s heat was generated from the side of a stove with metal plates on top. The third room was actually a late addition, and it got nearly no heat from the kitchen, so I rarely used it if the temperature fell below 40 degrees.

 

  Peggy Main Menu

 

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