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Driving Miss Diane
I go-go danced in New Jersey for more than eight years and had many
drivers. Since I lived in Manhattan, I’d usually take a bus out, but they
would drive me back over the George Washington Bridge, or under the Hudson
River via the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. For ten dollars plus toll, I
didn't really care what route they took as long as they delivered me home,
intact. I relied on these men. New Jersey Transit stops
running at a certain time, and dancers tend to be easy targets crawling through
Port Authority at three in the morning. They are easy to spot, if you
ever care to try. Just watch for overly made-up women hobbling along on
sore feet, listing to one side in an attempt to balance out the other, which is
always laden down with an oversized bag crammed with dollar bills, g-strings
and high-heels. I was one of those girls at one time, before I met
Charley, a gentle, Big-Ben of a man. Most of the drivers drove for money,
but Charley drove for love.
He was a balding, overweight, middle-aged man who worked as a sales rep for
some plastics company. For two years he drove me home from bars with
names like Puss-n-Boots, The Treasured Chest, and Al's Dancing Lady, even
though his driving made me uneasy. Wedged behind the steering wheel of
his meticulously clean sub-compact, he didn't so much steer as hover over the
wheel, gripping it so tight his knuckles glowed white. Bottle-thick glasses
gave his eyes an almost maniacal bulge, and it didn't help that the
ever-present quavering in his voice hinted a nervous breakdown was not too far
off. The bewildered sad-sack quality about him made you think that when
he claimed he was a doomed man, there was no reason not to believe him.
I however, saw him as more misguided than doomed. When I first started to
ride with him, I was new to the business. An unemployed modern dancer who
had rationalized the way only a twenty-one year old can, that although dancing
in a bikini on a stage in New Jersey was a far cry from Lincoln Center, it was
still dancing. Unfortunately, though my many years of classical
training left me with good posture and grace, these were not qualities much in
demand out in Passaic and Paterson. The men out there liked their dancers
slouchy and sloppy, all the better for a breast to stray out of a padded bra,
or a g-string to slide ever-so-slightly over the pubic hair line. I
didn't fit in very well to the scene, and maybe that's why Charley agreed to
drive me in the first place, because neither did he.
You see, his problem was that he was crazy in love with this dancer named
Diane, a design student at FIT who, like everyone else, needed to make extra
money. Why she thought dancing in a go-go bar was the way to go about it
was something I'll never understand. At least I had the physique of a
dancer, but Diane had the figure of someone you might find sitting behind the
thick glass of a token booth, or behind the check out counter at K-Mart.
She had heavy thighs, hips wide enough to cradle twins and from afar, the bare
cheeks of her behind looked like two enormous honeydew melons set side by
side . . . Italian peasant comes to mind when trying to describe
her. Her most beguiling feature was the way her light green eyes
shimmered from behind her dark hair that was so wild and thick it seemed to
explode from her head. The remarks from the men could be cruel when your
body was in shape; it must have been brutal for Diane. No wonder she had
a hard time getting booked. She was competing with women who spent their
days working out and their money on reconstructive surgery. The only
places that would hire her were the Spanish clubs in the Portuguese section of
Newark, where they liked big-bottomed, wild-haired girls like Diane.
Charley only drove girls he liked. Of course, Diane always came
first. If I got off at one in the morning, and she got off at three, then
I'd have to wait the two hours. But if she got off earlier than me, I'd
have to find another way home. That's just the way it was. So when
Charley picked up Diane, I was sometimes with him. He wouldn't allow me
to stay in the car by myself, because the neighborhoods in Newark were
dangerous, but I hated going inside those bars where she worked. They
were a world unto themselves, filled with short order cooks and drug
dealers. No one spoke English, but even if they did you wouldn't have
been able to hear them, the Spanish disco was played so loud. But what I
especially feared was that first moment when we would step through the door
into that dim world, and all those flat, lifeless eyes would turn to us.
It was the collective appraisal of trapped men in dead-end lives that made me
nervous. Anything could happen in a room full of men with nothing to
lose.
So Charley and I would stay by the door, and wait for Diane to emerge from the
dressing room, not knowing if she'd be alone or with Janet, her friend.
If she were alone, the trip home would be quiet. With barely a word to
either one of us, she'd sink down low in the front seat and wrap herself up in
a blanket of silence. Charley knew better than to try and talk her out of
her gloom. Instead, he'd glance at her worriedly as he tried to
make small talk with me in the rearview mirror. At first I thought she resented
my being there, but Charley assured me I was tolerated. She's just moody,
he'd say, but eventually I came to realize this was Diane when she was
straight.
On the other hand, if Janet were with her, the ride was guaranteed to be
chaotic. Janet was an older woman, a coked-out Joan Collins look-alike.
The only clubs that would hire her did so as a novelty. She didn't dance;
her particular charm was her bawdy sense of humor. Her routine was to
stand in front of a man telling filthy jokes until he finally gave her money;
either out of amusement or to make her get lost, it didn't matter to
Janet. A cocaine habit thickens the skin, and her hide was as tough as
they come.
I didn't mind Janet, but Charley despised her. He blamed her for feeding
Diane drugs, and wouldn't have let her in the car had Diane not insisted, so he
allowed them to climb into his pine-scented car reeking of cigarettes and
beer. In the rearview mirror, I would watch him try to hide his hurt as
Diane would drunkenly shove aside the container of take-out food he often had
waiting for her. "Christ, Charley, that food is going to make me
vomit," she said in disgust once, as she waited for Janet to chop up
lines of coke on a compact mirror, even though she knew how much it upset him
to see her doing drugs.
It was with the air of an anthropologist that I'd sit in the back seat and
study my fellow passengers, searching for clues as to what made them behave the
way they did. As Janet and Diane took turns taking drags off a joint
and passed the mirror back and forth over the car seat, I wondered at Diane's
transformation from sullen retch to the giddy girl before me. Charley had
told me her drug abuse was getting so bad she was in danger of flunking out of
school, but I still couldn't understand how she could sit by and watch her life
go down the drain. Or why she would ally herself with someone like Janet,
whose life was already in the sewer. Looking back, I can see my
arrogance plainly now. But at the time, listening to Janet tease Charley
about his sex life, her voice a coy purr barely concealing her pleasure in
humiliating him, I thought that to be edging in on fifty and still dancing and
drugging, she had to be scraping the very bottom of her soul.
And then I'd turn my attention to Charley. Every once in awhile his loud
hollow laugh would boom through the small car, almost shaking us with its
vibrations. Anyone else would have thought he was having a grand time,
but I knew better. I'd reflect on the times we traveled together, just he
and I, along the turnpikes and highways that snaked endlessly through the
industrial fields of Elizabeth, Linden and Newark. Rivers of sludge and
stagnant pools of water would pass by us on either side of the roadway, as
tears streamed from under his thick glasses. All around us towering
infernos belched out black cinder while foul fumes wove their way through the
cars' vents. It was in this vision of Hell that Charley would divulge how
he often thought of killing himself. He just couldn't understand, he'd
say in that quavering voice of his, why Diane was throwing herself away on a
life of drugs and losers. And then he would hunch even lower over the
wheel, and confess that most of all, he couldn't see why she just couldn't love
him the way he loved her.
I'd never seen a man cry like that before, didn't know what to say, or how to
make him feel better. All I could offer him was the advice of someone
still too young to know it wasn't possible to know your own heart, let alone
another's. "Charley, I don't think you're ever going to find what
you need in these go-go bars," I once said, and went on to say that from
what I'd seen so far, the whole scene was one big miserable tease, a lie, and
anything worth having is based on truth. I didn't want to come right out
and say anything against Diane, but he knew what I meant. I could tell by
the way his hands tightened around the steering wheel as he stared off into the
Dantean Jersey night, repeating how lonely he was, and all he wanted was
someone to love. "You just don't know Diane like I do," he'd
say. "No one does"
These pathetic pep talks of mine left me feeling like a hypocrite, because I
was just as much to blame for his unhappiness as Diane, in a way. After
all, it was our need that kept pulling him out into the wastelands of New Jersey.
Not just for a ride, but for the sense that some one was there to rescue
us. At least that's how I felt when I saw Charley waiting for me at the
end of the night wherever I was working. In that moment, seeing him
stand there, as anxious to get out of there as I was, I knew that everything
was going to be okay; the nightmare of these places was over, if only until the
next shift. How could he not have felt how much he was needed?
Every night he came to pick one of us up, he was a hero.
When Charley had a few accidents, one after another, I found another
driver. Other girls were telling me I was crazy to ride with that
"big weirdo" and were surprised I wasn't already dead. But it
wasn't just his driving that made me stop riding with him. It was those
long rides alone with Charley; through landscape so blighted it mirrored to
perfection his running monologue of despair. As I listened to his voice,
flat as the road underneath us, I began to understand why Diane behaved the way
she did; the sometimes cruel indifference to his kind gestures. It was
because all the men in the bars began to resemble Charley. They wanted
you to fill up their empty lives somehow. They expected you to talk to
them, even when you were tired and had nothing to say. But then they had
just tipped you five dollars and you felt like you owed them something.
Didn't you owe them something? So you'd sit and listen as they told you
about their divorce, that their wife just didn't understand and that if they
were younger, or richer, maybe then you'd give a guy a chance? Because
you're the one; they never talked to anyone so easy like. And so
pretty. But you'd say no, you couldn't. Why? Because, because
. . . then you'd lie and say you already had a boyfriend, or you were married.
They'd say sure, of course a fine girl like you would already be taken.
But their eyes would accuse you of thinking you're too good to go out with
someone like them, you're like all the rest aren't you; seeing what you could
get without giving. That's when you could feel the fuck you underneath
their smile, and you knew that the next time you'd see them they would look
right through you, and tip someone else.
I stopped riding with Charley for the same reasons Diane had to get high every
time she got in the car: After two years of dancing, I no longer needed a hero,
I didn't want to be rescued. All I wanted was a ride home. For some
time after, I'd get cards from him, wishing me a Happy Valentine's Day, or a
Merry Christmas. In one of them he thanked me for being 'a good passenger
and a good friend.' I never wrote him back. It was only after I
stopped getting them did I begin to wonder what had happened to him. I
asked around, but no one really knew. He'd just kind of disappeared.
That bothered me, but I put it out of my mind. I told myself that people
on the go-go circuit had a habit of doing that, fading away or disappearing
altogether. Years later though, I finally did hear something about
Charley.
My driver at the time was an ex-con named Louie, and I had become his
Diane. Even though he was black and middle-aged, he thought we made the
perfect match. "White on the outside, dark on the inside," he
used to say, referring to my bleak outlook on life. It was at the end of
a particularly long night when a dancer I sometimes worked with, climbed into
Louie's broken down Impala.
"Did you hear about Charley," she asked as she began to count her
dollar bills in the back seat. At first I didn't realize whom she was
talking about. I was buzzed by some coke I'd done during my shift.
I'd always sworn that I would never do it while I was working, that I wouldn't
become like Diane and Janet, but that good intention had eroded like so many
others during my tenure in Jersey. Besides, I didn't need it so much
during my shift as I did for the long ride home.
"Diane o.d.'d and he totally whacked out," she went on.
"Tried to kill himself by sticking his head in the oven, only he left a
window open, the big dope. Neighbors smelled the gas." As she spoke,
I kept my eyes straight ahead. Louie was looking at me. He knew
that I used to ride with Charley, and why I had stopped. He asked me if I
wanted a hit, and held out a small plastic bag full of coke, but I turned
around in my seat and asked my friend if she knew what happened to him.
Still counting her money she shrugged her shoulders. "They put him
in some nut joint, I guess," she said. "I'm surprised you didn't
know. Weren't you kind of his friend?" I turned back
around in my seat and mumbled, "not really."
As we headed back to the city that night I wanted to cry. It felt as if a
bruise somewhere deep inside my chest was being pressed on. I had this
sense that if I didn't cry right then, the pain would stay with me
forever. But it was like trying to jump-start a dead engine. The
tears just wouldn't come. Finally, I gave up trying, and took a hit of
Louie's coke instead.
That was years ago, and if you asked me to draw you a map of how I got from
there to here, married with a kid, making my living as, ironically enough, a
dance therapist, the route would be untraceable with all the detours, wrong
turns and dead-ends I'd made along the way. But I can tell you it started
with Louie getting busted, and me having to go back to riding New Jersey
Transit. One night, walking through Port Authority at three in the
morning, I took my dance bag full of costumes, shoes, and make-up, and just
left them with a homeless lady. It was an impulse, but as soon as I did
it, I felt like I'd just slipped off a suit of armor (You'd be surprised how
heavy a g-string can be). She opened the bag, and took out one of my
wigs. When she slipped it over her gray, sparse hair, and said,
"It'll keep me warm in the cold," I knew I'd done the right
thing.
Now when I travel through the industrial fields of Newark, Elizabeth and
Bayonne, I'm behind the wheel of a Volvo and my destination is the shore.
My eight-year-old daughter sits beside me while my husband dozes in the back,
and although the factories still belch unbelievable amounts of smoke, and the
sulphuric fumes still percolate up through the car vents, it no longer feels
like I'm driving through hell. In fact, this is my daughters'
favorite part of the ride. It's along this stretch we play a game of who
can hold their breath the longest.
Perhaps if I hadn't written this down, Charley would have become a vague
memory, like a dream you forget to write down as soon as you wake up. But
the bruise he left behind keeps his impression strong in my mind: Charley, his
big body hulking over the steering wheel, hands knuckle-white from hanging onto
an illusion that as long as he held tight, Diane would stay by his side.
Sometimes the bruise's dull throb is sharper than others, and it’s those
times that I have to remind myself that if I keep my eyes on the road, it will
pass; everything does. I know this as surely as things are not as they
appear in my side-view mirror, or that in some back road of Charley's mind,
he's still driving his Diane home.
Terese Pampellonne's work has been published in The Colorado Review, Caprice,
New Works Review, Flying Horse and Wired Art. Her first novel, The Unwelcome Child,
will be published
this December by Kensington. "Driving Miss Diane", is one of the stories from her collection
Ten Ways to Kill Your Mother.
Email: Terese Pampellonne
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