Man of Tin

 

 

April 16, 1987

Men of Tin

How do you stand us like this?

Egos protruding from our pointed heads like oil spouts

Letting brains out with such regularity

That we have few thoughts with which to think,

Men of metal whose clomping feet

March over tender blades of grass and women’s souls

So obvious as to be giddy

Intentions imprinted on our faces

You call silly

Lust undisguised

Macho roles around us like Halloween costumes

As if that holiday lasted year round

No time for honesty or self reflection

Only the need to oil ourselves with sin

Every rusting joint creaking with pain

Aching for your touch

Our faces plastered with sports headlines and dirty jokes

And lies so transparent we blush

How do you put up with us?

How can you endure us, invite us in,

Knowing we will never tire of this game

Of trivial pursuit,

Until we have matched wits

And won the bedroom prize

Or walk away with face red from rage?

Oh, don’t tell me,

I already know,

You who watch our every move

For any sign of a heart.

 

 

Seven days straight, eight out of the last nine. This could be a record. This could be serious. Peggy, the girl of my dreams?

            In many ways, she certainly is a treasure, sharp of tongue with a potential for serious thought – though her world seems to prevent her from being too reflective.

            It demands very little of that deeper self.

            Yet, as I learned Sunday, she is not to be underestimated, and I feel her ready to blossom into something grand.

            Over the last several weeks I have seen a remarkable change in her, shifting from the hawkish Peggy of the strip club, to a sensitive Peggy of the bedroom. This is not to say I want to change her, except for her to get rid of her dependence on drugs and alcohol.

            I fear she might deteriorate before she has a chance to bloom.

            She is very vulnerable. For that matter, I’ve discovered I’m vulnerable, too.

            She reacts oddly sometimes when I laugh, thinking I am mocking her, and only reluctantly accepts my pleas that I am not.

            She is overly sensitive to anyone who doubts her intelligence, and grows angry when someone tries to tell her she doesn’t understand and issue that it might be too complicated for her to understand.

            “Do I look that stupid?” she will ask. “Or do you simply think I’m lying?”

 

 

April 18, 1987

            There’s no more doubt in my mind about the violence Peggy’s suffered. She tosses and turns in his sleep, especially when I get up to leave, muttering again and again, “please don’t hit me.”

            I understand how it could happen, how a man might take offense to her cocky attitude and try to put her in her place.

            She’s smart and opinionated, often at men’s expense.

            She is also full of passion.

            But she could also be in trouble with the some of the people she deals drugs to, or from whom she is forced to buy drugs.

            She’s finally admitted she sells drugs sometimes which helps keep her supplied with cocaine.

            I’ve never actually seen her ingesting the drugs, only alcohol, but I believe her.

            Another man knocked on her door tonight. She chased him away.

            Later, in the middle of sex, we started to argue.

            This was made worse when I tried to talk about a woman I used to go out with, and Peggy did not want to hear about it.

            She suddenly got cold and the distance made me wonder if all the progress we made over the last few weeks would come to nothing, and each time I break through one barrier, she puts up another. I begin to wonder if there are just too many barriers and that they will wear me out before I can possibly get passed them all.

            Oddly enough, the core of our argument was over sex itself.

            She said there was something lacking in our togetherness, and that she wanted to feel the pleasure of satisfying me the same way I felt satisfied pleasing her.
            She was talking about control, and the physical buttons I discovered I could push to get her excited – and out of control, when she still hadn’t found similar buttons in me.

            But I’m too scared to let go, to let her have so much power over me, so in some ways this is something of a one-way relationship.

            Then someone came to the door, shoved a note under it, she leaped up, grabbed it and read it tore it up, and began to howl with rage.

            .

 

April 19, 1987

            Morning is not a healthy time for Peggy, which I sensed the first time I accidentally stayed overnight with her. But even after the night time Peggy invited me to stay, things turned out badly in the morning. She had begged me to stay with her and hold her until she fell off, and I fell asleep, too.

            She woke, looked at me and snarled, “What the hell are you doing here?”

            “I fell asleep.”

            “Get out.”

            Apparently, I didn’t move fast enough.

            “Didn’t you hear me? I thought I told you to get the fuck out.”

            “You did.”

            “Well?”

            “I didn’t think you were serious.”

            “You fuck!” she shouted.

            I packed up my stuff and ran out the door.

            Peggy claims she once shot a man in the leg.

            “I was aiming for his groin and missed,” she said.

            Violence, I’m learning, is a very big part of her life, both suffering it and administering it.

            Drugs, I’m discovering, are an even big part, she deals them, uses them, goes up and down depending on her inclination, mixing them with alcohol. It is apparently a significant reason for her sudden shifts of mood, and explains why she lives in a cheap third floor apartment when she has at least three sources of income.

            She claims she has been involved in a number of “big time” drug deals from which she skims off profits and drugs. She makes good money at her day job, and good enough money dancing, and the money evaporates.

            She would be in worse shape if she didn’t deal drugs, because as a dealer, she gets her own drugs cheaper than she might otherwise.

            The dangers are obvious. She is always at risk of arrest. And of course her addition gets worse over time.

            Even when she seems calm, she’s not. The beast lurks behind her passive mask, waiting to leap out.

            Sometimes I don’t know which Peggy to expect.

            Saturday I knocked on her door and she screamed at me.

            I’m so up and down with all this, I feel like I’m the one on drugs, and wonder what the hell I’m doing with her?

            Am I in this just for the sex?

            She’s been with hundreds of guys and sex appears to mean little to her.

            What I really want is her heart and she holds that back from me.

            I certainly have no place in her world of violence and drugs. She claims she’s wanted in four states, and I believe her, she just won’t tell me for what. Drugs or something else?

            She explained later that “a friend of hers” showed up in the middle of the night, drunk and drugged out, and she had to help him, so she was really pissed when I came a knocking. He apparently stashed his “point” with her – meaning his needle for injecting drugs.

            She apparently uses a needle, too, but only, she claims, to do “a skin pop,” by which she means putting some of the drugs under the skin for slow absorption, not directly into a vein the way a mainlining junkie would.

            So it would appear that I’m in deep shit here, and at the core of it is Peggy, almost incomprehensible to me. I would like to believe she is too innocent for any of what she claims but I know better and I believe her.

            But I also believe that sooner or later it is all going to catch up with her and when it does, she will have no hope. She will have weaved a pattern of doom so tightly around herself that we will see no avenue of escape but death.

 

 

April 20, 1987

(from a letter)

            I’m scared now in a way I’ve never been scared before. This is the real world, a dark ugly world that hints of deeper darkness and deadly humors.

            I suppose I should have known better or expected something as bad. But I closed my eyes to it.

            There were clues to it all along, little things that bothered me but I chose to ignore.

            Ignorance is bliss, eh?

            I made the rude assumption that the mirror, the cocaine container and the straw were for personal use. Finding the joint surprised me. Peggy said she doesn’t like pot.

            I let it go.

            After she chased a customer away, it took her a day or two to tell me how deeply she’s involved with the local drug trade.

            “I only get involved with big deals,” she told me, as if that’s somehow better than the dime bad deal on the street or any less dangerous.

            But this explained a few other small mysteries around the house such as the 38 caliber slug I found on top of her dresser once. Apparently there is a weapon to go with it somewhere in one of the drawers, and an even more formidable shotgun in the closet.

            She assures me that she’s only shot one person in her life and that over something much more personal.

            But there are other issues here, deadly and dangerous issues that have little to do with her use of weapons, and considering the presence of such weapons and her attitude towards the police in general, none of these can be explained away as innocence.

            I’m sure she’s an addict, which explains about where her money goes and her insane change of character between morning and night.

            She has a full time job as the assistant head accountant to a seven-company packaging corporation. She dances once or twice a week. She deals drugs in quantity. Yet she lives in a relatively rundown neighborhood, drives a car that is falling apart and generally has little in her refrigerator other than booze.

            Yet I’m convinced the mood swings aren’t totally due to drugs.

            I fell asleep with her, a tender, loving, vulnerable Peggy the other night, and woke up to a snarling and bitter one in the morning. This is a woman who loves to sing to soft records and cuddle with me at night, and in the morning tells me to get the hell out.

            She claims it is must her in the morning. The change is just too acute. Perhaps it is the drugs wearing off over night and she is in need of more before she can face the day.

            The other day, I arrived at her apartment too soon after she came home from work and discovered an in-between Peggy, one that was sharp-tongued but not as hostile as the early morning version. She seems to go through a calming down, the stereo volume on full, as she shouts out the lyrics between gulps of alcohol. It is like the Martini generation syndrome, only more intense.

            The real scare came on Saturday, which just about leveled in a dozen different ways. Violence apparently has always been part of Peggy’s life. She claims her mother beat her as a child. But apparently, her ex-lover Robert beat her repeatedly until last Christmas – even after I met her.

            Sometimes, when I am holding her at night, she falls asleep in my arms, and cries out, “Don’t beat me! Don’t beat me!” and twists around madly in the bed.

            Sometimes, I can calm her without her walking up. Sometimes, I can’t. When she wakes up, she wakes up terrified, and claims that it was just a nightmare. But I am almost certain that she has this reaction every night.

            There are other things, too that I won’t go into, but we did have a brief argument over sexual control and in the middle of it, someone shoved a note under her door. She leaped up, read it, tore it to shreds, shaking the whole time. It might have been Robert, I don’t know.

            Anyway, she fell asleep after another bout with her nightmare. I was concerned and came back in the morning – early Saturday, and I was met by something akin to the woman in the Exorcist, a snarling voice that sent me back out again.

            Later, she called, and explained that someone had come over after I had left, drunk and in trouble, and that she had brought him into the house and spent the rest of the night taking care of him.

            She complained bitterly about something being missing from her dressed (the cocaine and pot kid) and when she mentioned “a point” I got even more frightened. Now I’m not sure about any of this. I pretty sure she doesn’t shoot (although she mentioned skin popping), but I think she hadn’t restricted her drug sales to cocaine and pot.

            I was going to push the issue and demand some more information, but she was fading on from valium and other prescription downs that she had gotten from her girlfriend and was too mellow for me to get any answers from.

            It is clear that we have gone beyond the issue of personal flaws and into a life style that truly offends me. Love can cure a lot of things, but not a stone-cold heart of a major drug dealer.

            And I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

            Peggy isn’t stupid, but she can be hard, and I suspect that it is only the fact that I mean something special to her that she had kept me from seeing the seedier side of her life until now.

            I really don’t want to know any more. For if I found out for a fact that she is dealing heroin, I’d have to turn her in – which of course would drive me crazy.

            Even if she isn’t, the danger of being around her is great. While I’m pretty sure I can resist falling into her world of drugs – I still do a little pot but that’s all – I’m caught up in whirlwind of emotions and the last thing I need is to get in the middle of some drug war.

            As much as I’ve come to love her, I’m not sure how much further I’m willing to go with this. I’m afraid to ask, what comes next.