Asking Peggy for a date

 

March 12, 1987

            I’m still caught up on Peggy and still wonder what exactly is it she wants, or means by her hugs and love taps.

            I’ve never been able to pick up well on such clues.

            I’m always afraid of making a mistake.

            I also suffer from the curse of being “a nice guy,” which I learned from a newspaper review some years ago is a bad thing, that nice guys always finish last – at least where the singles scene is concerned. Shy uncertain souls almost certainly take the back seat to the clearly aggressive. There seems to be a significant disadvantage to taking things slow.

            Of course, the go-go-bar-scene comes with presumptions on both sides – and many of the girls here must believe that a nice guy is really a nasty guy in disguise.

            With me, it’s a little of both.

            And I’m as guilty as the next guy in what I presume and what I want.

            I can’t help wondering if Peggy is here in this world she must be a prostitute, and she has to believe that since I’m here gawky at her, I must be a pervert.

            It is hard to escape the basic mistrust that these places cause, and to be truthful, I’m not very clever with a hook or a line.

            So I try to figure out from clues what she wants.

            Last night, she perked right up when she saw me at the bar and came right over to talk with me, spending most of the night seated next to me – drinking too much naturally, but perhaps less interested in making the bar rich than having an excuse to be close to me.

            She hit my arm a number of times over my slightly cynical remarks, hugged me twice as she explain her pain – that ugly, miserable time of month when womanhood becomes unbearable. She hinted and danced around the issue of her looks, saying she is fat while I denied it.

            Her touching is strong evidence of interest. Bars like this are terrifying places where women struggle to survive and to show even a little interest is a huge risk.

            Of course, if she is a prostitute – which I want to doubt – her touching could also be part of the come-on.

            But the hug?

            And why would she be so worried about how I perceive her looks?

            I suspect that part of the reason she dance is for attention, the need to have people think she is sexy and worth looking at.

            She told me she is dancing at a club a half a block from my house on Saturday, hinting I should come, and if I do, I intend to eat the Pruf Rock peach pit and all and ask her for a date.

 

 

March 13, 1987

            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.

 

 

 

 

March 15, 1987

            The question I keep asking myself is: how welcome will I be tonight or have I mistaken everything.

            I’m damned glad I haven’t said anything about any of this to any of my friends or I will have a lot to live down should all of this collapse around my ears.

            I am more than a little excited – and more inspired than I dare admit.
            I’ve been cleaning my apartment all day instead of wasting time writing. Can you believe this?

            I’m even wearing a watch, counting off the minutes when I can actually walk into the bar and meet Peggy again – my head full of fantasies I haven’t imagined recently. I’m 35 going on 36 and need to fall in love again. I miss romance, and have not allowed myself to expose myself to it.

            Of course, this could all be in my head, my need manufacturing something that does not exist, and I am about to make the biggest ass of myself ever.

            But at some point, we all have to take a chance. I have lived my life with great deliberation, hiding inside a shell, careful as to when I stick my nose out and never too far.

            Even now, I’m being remarkably careful, crafting a note I hope I will have a chance to slip her between her dance sets.

            She may even see this as a big weird.

            But I need to say it somehow, and I have kept it all very simple and very direct. The last thing I need now is to be slick.

            I first thought of making up what I call “an off-season NY Giants survival kit,” but put this off until later when I’m on firmer footing with her.

            I don’t want her to mistake anything I do as an insult.

            I know so little about how she might react to anything that I’m terrified. I am simply allowing myself to read into her touches and her hugs in order to make my next step. I’m certainly attracted to her. She has a finger under my collar and yanks me along like a pull-toy.

            It’s now 9:19 p.m., and I’m sitting in the Passaic Dunkin Donuts over my third cup of coffee and as soon as I’m finished with this cup, I’m going to go down to the bar where all this will take place.

            I’m trying hard not to think of what will happen if she refuses my offer for a date.

            My ears burn with the thought of it.

            Well, the coffee’s gone and so am I.

            I’m almost tempted to pray to make everything work out, even if I am on my way to a strip club to ask a stripper for a date.

            She is a special stripper and this means a whole lot to me.

 

March 16, 1987

            If there is one rule of life I should definitely take to heart it is: Never fall in love with a go-go dancer.

            It is a losing proposition from the word “go.”

            Yet I seem to be caught up in it like some jerk, believing I could some how save her from herself when I can’t.

            It is ridiculous and stupid and yet it is exactly what I’ve done.

            The only upside in all of this is that I might be learning some kind of lesson in all this, not so much about Peggy as about myself.

            Some of it has to do with Quiet Tom – who Peggy calls “Thomas” just as she calls me “Alfred” – the man who the go-go girls consider safe.

            He may be quiet, but he’s hardly safe. While he isn’t the pimp I first thought he was, his hands aren’t clean either. While I have nothing against him, I’d be powerless to do anything anyway.

            I guess I just got rocked a little watching Peggy go through her usual routine for securing drinks and tips, stock phrases she pulls out of her hat like rabbits. I watch her handle one of the more vulgar men, teasing him with strong sexual hints to get him to bite on her bait, then throwing him back into the pond.

            The more excited he got the more fun it seemed for her, and it is a side of her I had not seen before, not cruel so much as taunting, and it made me wonder who exactly the real Peggy is, if there is a real Peggy, and how much of what she says can I trust as truth?

            I keep asking the same question as to why she is here, and she keeps giving me the same answer: money, when we both know it is more than money that makes her get up on that stage.

            I ache to see the real Peggy, and wonder if this one, the actress, is showing even a little of her real self when she goes through these routines.

            She drinks so heavily I know this plays a role in her multiple personalities.

            She knows she’s an alcoholic and talked tonight about how her mother marks the liquor bottles at home to see just how much Peggy drinks, a real strong hint as if I needed to be hit over the head.

            Peggy seems to take and take, but rarely stops to ask where it comes from or who gets hurt as long as she keeps getting what she wants.

            This is all part of the game.

            You offer, she takes, and if you don’t offer, she passes you over and sits with somebody else.

            She also seems to crave attention, using whatever it takes, including suggestions of sex, so that she can remain at the center of it all.

            Yet even here, even when she speaks too loudly, laughs too hard, and plays out too vigorously, I feel something hidden, as if all those things are superficial cover for something much more vulnerable, and my one unasked question is: what is she running from? And why does she need to draw everything towards herself?

            Peggy is in every way a remarkable person, someone well-worth loving, but dangerous, too, and perhaps that’s the thing that makes her most attractive, and makes me feel all more like a fool for being drawn into that flame.

 

************

 

            Normally, she only worked once a week, on a weekend if possible, but lately there had been cancellations and she leaped into them and I found myself following behind here, still pondering my question, then it came to me: I’m a writer. Why am I worried about trying to get my mouth to work. So I wrote it down and handed it to her at the bar, but my mouth was working at that moment, and I said, “I was wondering what you might say if I asked you out to dinner?”

            “I might say yes,” she said.

            “Then, we both got drunk and in the middle of it I managed to give her my number.

            I was convinced she would never call. But figured the whole experience was fun, until I ran out of money again and stumbled out, and home and thought about it from the dizzy world of my bed, watching the ceiling turn, wishing I didn’t feel the way I did.

            Who was this girl named Peggy?

            And Why did I like her so much?

            Her alcohol use troubled me – especially the liquid lunches she took at works.

            “I don’t hang around people who want to go to Roy Rogers for lunch,” she said. “Not when there’s a bar nearby.”

            I wondered just how much she was drinking. I had seen her car. It didn’t even have an inspection sticker but this pink card they give at motor vehicles that says “thirty days, “ and even that didn’t belong to her car, but to some guy who once brought a Pinto and gave the card to her.

            Where does all her money go?