30 – the Candy Man Can

 

 

  The hospital’s call woke me so early, I thought it was Peggy when I answered.

Such calls were usually bad news and this proved to be the case this time as well.

The voice on the other end of the telephone told me they intended to release my uncle and the end of the week and I should come there to collect him.

Although I had kept the apartment next door to mine for this purpose, his return added complexity to my life I didn’t need. I was his caretaker, the person who had to feed him, clean his clothes, take him to doctors and I resented every bit of it.

No sooner had I hung up the phone, Maryann showed up at my door.

She wanted to make love; I put her off. She didn’t seem to understand why.

I wasn’t engaged the way she was, and it didn’t matter if I was going out with somebody else, she said.

Eventually, I got her to leave. But her words and attitude lingered in my apartment even after she was gone.

Too much of what she’d said echoed sentiments I had heard coming out of Peggy’s mouth, and it made me wonder how out of touch I might be since both of them seemed to live in a world other than the one I did, one filled with dubious values I didn’t understand.

Peggy never used the word “love” with me, and lately talked about taking off somewhere.

“Where?” I asked.

“Anywhere.”

“To do what?”

“Whatever the fuck I want.”

“With who?”

“With whoever I want,” she said, clearly not meaning me, and that hurt.

Yet as rocky as things seemed between us, I actually thought we had begun to build something between us, thought in truth, I pressed her for a commitment she simply refused to give.

May had arrived finally, releasing the world from a bitter spring, cold days filled with cold drizzle that seemed to make my life dull inside and out.

A change of month seemed to have changed the world. Outside my apartment in the car port, Latino men dragged their cars out of the line of garages in the never ending ritual of repair, emitting a special kind of mechanical music winter had censored.

I felt almost alive again, if still weary, and vowed not to – as the Eagles song put it – Let the sound of my own wheels drive me crazy, even though everything Peggy did or said made me crazy inside.

Then, Peggy called.

“My car broke down,” she said.

“What can I do?”

“Can you fix it?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not a great mechanic. I can look at it.”

“Well, if you can’t fix it, can you at least drive me to work? I have to dance tonight.”

“Where?”

“At the My Way.”

This did not pose much of a problem, I thought since it was not one of the more remove clubs she sometimes danced at, so I agreed.

Her car was parked near her moth’s house on Ray Street.  I met Peggy there.

I looked at the car, and could not figure out what was wrong, a dead battery, maybe, faulty wires. I needed more time we didn’t have.

She groaned about it as I drove her to her apartment.

“This is bad,” she mumbled.

“We’ll get the car fixed,” I assured her.

“It’s not just the car. It’s everything. My life is all wrong.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said as I steered my car through what had become very familiar streets.

“None of my friends are like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like I am. They have real lives.”

“You don’t like your life?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t what it was. I miss what I used to do and who I used to hang out with. Somehow I’ve got to get back to that. My car breaking down is a sign.”

“It’s just a malfunction,” I said.

She glared at me.

“What the fuck do you know about anything?”

“Not a lot I suppose.”

Once back at her apartment the first thing she did was make herself a drink. Then, she disappeared into the bedroom for a moment, returning in a much better mood.

I roamed the kitchen, gave her cat a treat, then simply daydreamed about what life would be like later in the week when I had to take care of my uncle again.

I wasn’t up to dealing with his emotional turmoil, the inevitable attempts as suicide before the hospital would readmit him as a danger to himself. I could almost set my watch by these as to when it would all occur again.

Standing in her kitchen for her to come back out from the bathroom, I heard tapping, like a bird trying to crack open a snail shell, only it was a sound I already knew as something else.

“So, you do that, too?” I called out to her.

Peggy’s head popped out of the bathroom door. “Do what?” she asked.

“Tap the top of a disposable razor to get the hair out,” I said.

She gave me a queer look as if she thought I was spying on her somehow.

“How do you know that?” she asked

 “I do the same thing,” I said. “Every time I shave, the disposable razor gets clogged.”

“I hate them,” Peggy said, then disappeared again into the bathroom to finish what she had started, doing her legs.

Her cat brushed my leg. I went into the living room, found her box of treats and tossed on into the kitchen, the way I’d seen Peggy do it a hundred times, the cat, leaping after the treats, slipping and sliding on the slick tiles.

Again, Peggy’s head popped out of the bathroom, this time with a tooth brush in her mouth.

“Hey! Stop that!” she said, talking around the toothbrush.

“Stop what?”

“Teasing my cat. I’m the only one who can tease my cat.”

The cat mewed again. I shrugged, “Sorry, Jesse.”

Peggy finished a few minutes later, and we headed down to my car for the drive to the May Way. I figured I could hang out at the bar a little while before going off to work, leaving her to ask one of the other regulars to drive her back home later.

Tom showed up while I was still at the bar, and Peggy’s extremely warm greeting made me jealous.

Tom was handsome in a way I could never be, my height, but thin, with brown hair and brown eyes, with a twist of lips that gave him something of a wicked smile. He constantly complained about how much his knees hurt from being forced to carry cartons of concessions up and down the stairs at Giant’s Stadium during football season and the off season rock concerts.

Although I never asked, I assumed he was the source of Peggy’s football tickets, although like the business man he was, he refused to give them away – even to Peggy.

Wolfman must have known Tom’s real business at the bar and why the girls loved him so much since Wolfman sometimes called Tom “the candy man” and made no effort to stop him. Nor did he prohibit Tom from socializing with the girls after the bar closed for the night. It is possible that Tom gave wolfman a percentage of the profits from deals he conducted at the bar. I was never able to ascertain the facts behind any of this.

Although early on I had mistaken Tom for a pimp, I believe he had once been as romantically involved with Peggy as I was, a lover she played with for a time before he managed to untangle himself, and had since accepted the less traumatic role of being her friend. Still, not knowing if he continued to have a romantic relationship with her drove me crazy with jealousy. I was scared to ask him, if he even would have told me, and I knew how much worse I would feel if he said “yes.”

In personality, if not looks, Tom was so much like me we could have been twins, finding the same things funny, liking the same kinds of music, often locked into intense conversations when seated together at the bar.

The fact that Peggy eyed him, smiled at him, and teased him with me seated right beside him also drove me crazy with jealousy, which I dared not allow myself to show.

The old 1970s rock and roll song “One of the Boys” rolled through my head making my aching worse.

Was she teaching me a lesson here?

More than once she’d told me that I had no exclusive rights with her, even if she agreed that she was “going out” with me.

“I’m going to see who I want to see, and if I fuck that person that has nothing to do with you,” she told me bluntly one night.

It took this moment for me to truly believe it, and the truth hurt like hell.

I kept asking myself why I was investing so much time and energy in building something Peggy intended to keep from being built.

Years later, long after it was too late for me to rectify the mistake, I would come to realize all this fell back onto the shoulders of her ex-love, Robert, and how after she had spent her whole high school years and part of the decade afterwards, trailing after him, singing his praises to everyone, only to have him betray her, ruining her ability to trust in any one man ever again.

Perhaps had I known, I might have told her how much different I was, how I would never hurt her like that. But she would not have believed me, nor would it have been true as time proved. The men she picked all seem to have come from the same mold: me, Tom, Robert and others.

I didn’t blame Tom.

He could no more help himself than I could, falling victim to Peggy’s stock phrases and seductive glances that had won her a reputation as a tease even in school, phrases and looks she didn’t even reserve for those men she considered “special.” If she wanted a drink, she flirted – and got what she wanted.

The one word she rarely used was “love” and up to that point, never with me.

But with Tom, she flung the word around like chicken feed.

Tom noticed my distress.

“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” he told me. “I don’t mean anything to her any more.”

When he saw me react to the word, “Anymore,” he laughed and said, “She never goes back.”

This was cold comfort since he claimed Peggy had a cycle she went through with men, stages of romance he had witness in others and suffered through himself – the flirting stage, the romantic stage, and that stage where she shed a man like old snake skin.

“Which stage am I in?” I asked in a croak, a lump of self-pity thick in my throat.

“Hard to tell,” he said. “But you’ll know when it’s over.”

“I can’t believe how hung up on her I am,” I said.

Tom only snorted a laugh.

At this point, Peggy frowned down at us from the stage, looking a bit startled as if she’d never noticed me and Tom talking before.

“So, which one of you is going to buy me a drink?” she asked, even though she still had a line of untouched glasses on the stage other men had purchased for her.

I lifted my hand to signal Mary; Mary nodded from down the bar, and began to mix the all too familiar combinations.

“What’s the matter with you?” Peggy asked Tom. “Don’t you love me anymore.”

“Of course, I love you,” he said. “But you drink too much.”

“Not you, too!” Peggy moaned. “Don’t I get enough of that from him?” She tilted her head in the direction of Wolfman seated at the far end of the bar. “And please, keep your voice down or he’ll cut me off again.”

“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” Tom said snidely.

Peggy laughed. “That’s why I love you, Thomas. You’re always a kidder.”

When Peggy came down after her set, she sat between us, putting down her pack of cigarettes on the bar with her light on top, always ready to ignite a new one when the cigarette she held got too low.

She mostly talked in Tom’s direction so, I got a good look at her bare shoulders, but little else.

They talked mostly about an upcoming concert at the stadium in which Gensis would perform, and whether or not Tom could get her tickets at a reasonable price.

He clearly had no intention of just giving her tickets since he claimed he would make a hefty profit selling them elsewhere – as part of his usual scalping operation.

Years later, I would have run-ins with the crime boss that oversaw the concessions at the Meadowlands, who claimed to have a vague recollection of Tom.

Tom and Peggy were still discussing the matter when I had to leave for work, and I hated the idea of leaving them there together, and by the vague wave Peggy gave me as good bye, not even bothering to glance back at me as I left.

 

  Peggy Main Menu

 

email to Al Sullivan