Messing with Peggy
She comes in late, hoping to catch me with another woman.
This is her usual routine with her men friends, part of social order people around the strip joint expect.
If Peggy don’t flip her lid every once in a while, we think something’s wrong with her,
Only I didn’t figure on being the one she flipped out over.
Like most folks that come in here, I’m too weary to fight. Sometimes I moan a little over my sad fortunes. Sometimes I keep my mouth shut.
The one time I didn’t, she came onto me, and I got locked up in this situation.
She thinks I’m her man.
Just as she thinks every man she’s laid out is,
But I’m nobody’s man or maybe if I get a shot, I’m every gal’s guy.
So if a pretty stripper gives me a nod, I go with her.’
I go with Peggy, too, when she’s around.
But she comes in sniffing around when she’s not supposed to be sniffing around, looking for the least excuse to lay a guilt trip on me.
She tells me when we’re alone that she recognizes the signs, as if I got the Zodiac printed on my forehead and she’s calculating our fortunes from what she sees there.
She says I’m cold when I say hello or good by, and maybe I am.
That’s me. That was me before I met her, it’ll be me right up until they dump me in the ground.
She just doesn’t want to hear it when I say as much.
I do the same thing to her I guess, turn down the volume in my head when she starts into some rant I don’t want to hear.
She gets pissed, too, when she asks a question I ain’t heard, and guesses I hadn’t listened the whole time.
Then she asks if she did anything to chase me away.
I say no. She’s not chasing me away. She’s not anything. I’m just this way because I’m this way.
And she gets pissed when she asks if I love her and I say no, and that I never did.
I want to ask her if all this is about loneliness, and whether she feels as lonely sometimes as I feel most of the time, and whether she’s lonely even when she’s with somebody, even when she’s with me.
I just can’t get questions like that out of me.
They sound too much like excuses for why I cheat.
I don’t need no excuse. I just cheat. That’s all.
So now, she slips through the door and I’m sitting at the bar with another dancer, the dancer’s arms around my neck, she and I sipping on the same bottle of beer, though her slips make me crazy cause she sucks on the bottle pretending she’s sucking on my dick.
I never see the gun. I didn’t even know Peggy had one until the bartender shouts that she’s in here with the gun again and tells everybody to duck.
Everybody does. Even the dancer with me.
I guess I take a little too long to get down and got a bullet up my ass.
Not that Peggy shoots me there intentionally. She just shoots, letting the bullets fly in the general direction she wants. Most hit glass or wood.
Then she runs out of the place again, crying, like she got hit not me.
The bartender calls the cops and the cops call an ambulance, and I get dragged off to the emergency room, thinking about the bottle the strip sucked on, thanking my lucky stars the bullet hit me where it did, and not where it could have hit.
Anyway, I figure I won’t mess with Peggy any more, until at least someone takes the gun away from her.