David Rich emailed me in response to a novel I had posted about my one-time lover, Peggy, telling me he had lived with her for a year prior to my meeting up with her in late 1986.
He had read my book and needed to talk to me about her since he said he had loved her once.
This email came at a very uncomfortable time for me because it seemed to resonate with the situation, I am currently embroiled in.
It hadn’t occurred to me until this point how much my poet friend of today resembled the stripper I had dated all those long years ago.
Since Peggy ultimately killed herself in the late 1990s after I desperately tried to save her a decade earlier, the sudden comparison between her and the poet gave me a better understanding of just why I felt so strongly earlier this year, when my poet friend suggested she might throw herself off her roof.
Suddenly, I realized that the last year drew up strong feelings that I had kept contained since breaking up with Peggy, and just how strongly the two women resembled each other – although the comparison is not exact.
Both women were in search of love – although neither of them seemed to want to admit that fact openly.
Both women knew very well how to manipulate men to get what they needed or wanted, often walking a tight rope of the underworld, savvy enough to understand the danger of falling, yet clever, resourceful and stubborn enough to believe they could survive the balancing act, when in fact society was dead set against them.
Both women needed to feel important, although not quite in the same way.
Both women were brilliant and talented, and yet seemed unable to make their way in a world that seemed to deny them what they deserved.
Both women – like old movie stars – seemed willing to use the producer’s couch to get what they needed.
Strangely, both women, who struggled inside an immoral society, seemed incredibly moral, having set their own rules by which to live by, and refusing to accept other people’s judgements.
Both seemed to retain values deep down that they refused to compromise and walked that thin line on the edge of a deep and dark underworld they hoped not to fall into or get trapped by.
The unwavering intensity of feelings for Peggy appears to have transferred to my poet friend unconsciously, stirring up the same sense of despair I felt when it became clear Peggy could not and would not be rescued. Even the poet made reference to this early on, when she wrote in a poem to me, not to try and rescue her.
As with Peggy all those years ago, I kept a daily journal and poetry journal, if only to try and keep track of what transpired at a time when my emotions clouded my better judgment.
All this became even more evident when I talked to David Rich on the telephone and he spoke about Peggy, and once again, I felt on the edge of something that was well beyond me to control.
In the aftermath of my affair with Peggy, I wrote several fictional accounts of my time with her. But when I found out about her death (on the eve of St. Valentine’s Day, 1999), I resurrected my journals and rebuilt the book as a non-fiction account, posting it, which is what David saw, and responded to, a book I will have to rewrite based partly on what he said to me, an attempt to capture Peggy’s life so that she remains alive for those who loved her.
I hope I do not have to do the same thing in regard to my poet friend, that she will somehow find her path out of darkness and get appreciated for her brilliance.
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