Mr. Pettigrew’s Passion Pit (or, My Short Life as A Pimp)

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

 

Note to Readers: The following story is absolutely true, but I have changed some of the names. Mr. Pettigrew was not really named Pettigrew, but he may still be alive (though it seems unlikely, since these events took place nearly half a century ago) and may have family somewhere. The Mayflower Hotel still stands in the same spot in a small Georgia city, but its name is not Mayflower. I changed it because the hotel may or may not have cleaned up its act in the last half century and I don’t want to be bad (or good) for business. Delphine’s name, by the way, really was Delphine. That was too good to change.

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—2/28/11—It was the summer of 1964. I was 20 years old and had just finished my sophomore year of college. I was living (still with my parents) in a small Southern city—hot, steamy, sweltering, and dismal, all very Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor—and was, rather half-heartedly looking for summer employment.

I had learned a few years earlier that the summer job market was not very welcoming to me. I had neither the talent nor the inclination to do construction work or carpentry. I was in the throes of self-imagined intellectualism and, therefore, unwilling to flip burgers or mix shakes. And a retail job was out of the question: you had to give change in those positions and my abysmal math skills had left me far too intimidated by numbers ever to want to do that.

I had worked in the past in libraries and as a model for art classes (the latter was my favorite job, since it required that I stand or sit very still for long periods of time; I had that down pat), but those jobs had been during the school year and had effectively ended for the season. The previous summer I had worked as a door-to-door salesman—the worst job ever. Now, the summer’s weeks were passing quickly by and I had had no luck finding work. My parents were getting restless; my girlfriend was getting tired of spending her money on all of our dates.

My girlfriend Maureen (now my wife) worked as a secretary/receptionist in the office of a real estate company. If truth be told, what I really wanted was her job. What few talents I had could be used in abundance in that kind of office setting. I was a good writer. I typed quickly and accurately. I could file and take notes. I didn’t know shorthand, but I was quick at note-taking, having created my own kind of shorthand. I was affable, good with people on the phone or face-to-face. I was a natural.

Unfortunately, as I have lamented so many times in my life, before and since, this was the 20th Century. The day of the 19th Century male amanuensis had gone out with bustles and high-buttoned shoes.

I was as redundant as a buttonhook.

But one day, Maureen phoned me and told me that she thought she might have found the perfect job for me. (She was eager. She had paid for enough movies and malts that summer already.) She told me that a man named Pettigrew, who had a small office upstairs in the same building as her real estate company, was looking for an office aide and had specifically advertised for a “male.” He had left a card on the bulletin board in her office. I can still see that card; its message is permanently seared into my brain:

OFFICE CLERK WANTED. MALE ONLY. FEMALES NEED NOT APPLY. CONTACT ROBERT PETTIGREW

And there was a phone number and an office address.

Yes, of course, I noticed the red flag immediately. Why would he want a “male” for this job? And, rather emphatically, insisted on only a male. Females need not apply. That seemed odd. Nobody wanted a guy for office work. I didn’t get it. I consulted Maureen.

“He’s a very weird man,” she assured me. “But you do well with weird people. You’re perfect for this. He seems very nice and pleasant, at least to me when he comes into the office. I think I know why he might want a man.”

She went on to explain that Mr. Robert Pettigrew was seriously handicapped. He had been in a tragic helicopter crash a few years earlier and had been severely burned over the entire upper half of his body. His nose and ears were burned away, leaving only holes amid the mass of scar tissue that now made up his face. He had no hair, no eyebrows, no lips, no facial features. His fingers were burned away, so that each hand had only raw, red nubs where fingers should have been.

“I think he is painfully self-conscious,” Maureen explained to me. “He knows that he is hard to look at for some people. And, with his hands the way they are, I think he sometimes needs help buttoning his shirts and doing ordinary little things. I think that is why he wants a man in the job. He would be more embarrassed around a woman.”

Well, that made sense to me. And, as it turned out, she was partly right. But only partly right.

I climbed the rickety stairs above Maureen’s office and found Mr. Pettigrew’s door on the second floor. It was a small, hot, untidy office, with only a small window unit air-conditioner as well as a large floor fan to keep things only marginally less hellish in there. Mr. Pettigrew sat behind a desk at the window. Another desk, empty now, was crammed against a wall. He looked up at me with what may or may not have been an angry glare. It was impossible to read the hideously scarred red mask that was now his face. No expression could ever register there. Dark, bloodshot eyes burned from two puffy holes above two other red, raw holes where a nose should have been. He spoke from a slit where lips should have been.

“What do you want?” he asked, accusingly, as if I had suddenly burst into his sanctuary. I did not yet know it, though I was already getting an idea, but Robert Pettigrew turned out to be the most unpleasant man I have ever known. (And that is saying a lot!)

“I came about the job,” I said to him, nervous now, as my welcome was less pleasant than I had expected.

“What job?” he growled.

“You—you advertised about a job on the bulletin board downstairs. Maureen told me about it. The office job?”

“You her boyfriend?” he asked, suspiciously, wondering, no doubt, about my intentions.

I confessed. He scowled again. He asked me a few routine questions, scarcely listening to my answers, all the while his black-and-red eyes burning into me.

He asked me about school, about what my major was.

“English,” I confessed.

“English?” he said. He all but spat. “What the f**k are you going to do with that?”

“Well, I might work in an office,” I said, hopefully.

He almost laughed at that. Or, at least, as close as he ever came to laughing. A kind of snort erupted from his noseless nose.

“You might sh*t if you eat regularly,” he said.

I interpreted that as meaning my chances of working for him were practically nil. And, oddly, I was suddenly OK with that.

But to my surprise he said then, “Sit down at that desk.”

I complied.

“I know you can talk,” he said. “But my big question is this: can you keep quiet?”

“Sir?”

“Can you keep your mouth shut, both in and out of the office? I can’t have no blabbermouth working for me.”

I promised not to be a blabbermouth.

And so I went to work for Mr. Pettigrew. It was, without doubt, the most bizarre job I have ever had. And the shortest-lived. But I have never forgotten a minute of it.

Except for one thing. To this day, I cannot remember what business Mr. Pettigrew was in. It was some sort of construction-y kind of thing, I think, but maybe not. I honestly don’t know what I was doing there. But, as you will see, that really didn’t matter.

Most of the time, I sat quietly at the second desk in the room. Often (happily) Mr. Pettigrew was not there. I tidied up the office. I answered the phone when it rang (rarely); I chatted professionally with visitors who came into the office (even more rarely; usually they had inadvertently come to the wrong place). I received the mail and sorted through it, putting it neatly on Mr. Pettigrew’s desk.

Sometimes (way too often, actually) Mr. Pettigrew would change his sweat-soaked white shirts in the office, giving me a good look at his scar-ravaged upper torso. It was red and lumpy, nipple-less, navel-less, and grotesque. I was always torn between pity and revulsion. There would have been more pity than revulsion if he had been a nice guy but, instead, he usually demanded, snapped, ordered that I help him on with his shirt. I always had to button it up for him, all while he shouted about how poor a job I was doing. In truth, he made me so nervous that I tended to fumble and drop things around him. He was as surly and as unpleasant as a pit bull. And I had always thought my career Army officer father could swear like a champion, but Mr. Pettigrew had him beat by a long shot. His language, shaped and colored by years of bitterness, anger, and cynicism, could not be topped.

One afternoon he gave me a phone number to call.

“Call and make me an appointment with Delphine,” he said. “Make it for two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. If you can’t get me in at two, then ask for three o’clock.”

Delphine? Of course, I had no idea who Delphine might be, but it was not my place to question Mr. Pettigrew and so I dialed the number.

It rang. Someone picked up the phone. A man’s voice.

“Mayflower Hotel,” he said.

Mayflower Hotel? I froze, the phone trembling in my young hand. I knew of the Mayflower Hotel. Indeed, every young boy in town knew, by reputation if nothing else, the Mayflower Hotel. Its reputation had been discussed by high school and college boys all over the city. It was well known that all kinds of sin and corruption and evil could be sampled at the Mayflower Hotel.

I looked at the number Mr. Pettigrew had given me. Had I dialed a wrong number?

“Um,” I said, uncertainly, into the phone. “Is . . . um . . . Delphine there?”

“Yeah, hold on.” Then I heard a muffled shouting: “Delphine! Hey, Delphine! Telephone!”

Suddenly, over the phone came a gruff cigarettes-and-whiskey voice, though an undeniably female one.

“This is Delphine.”

“Um . . . hi. Um . . . Delphine?”

“Yeah, Honey, whatcha need?”

“Um . . . I am calling from Mr. Pettigrew’s office.”

“Oh, yeah, Honey, how is the old peckerwood?”

“Oh, um, well . . . he’s fine. He wanted me to call you.”

“Yeah, well, here I am, Honey.”

“Um . . . Mr. Pettigrew wants me to make an appointment for him with you for tomorrow. At two o’clock?”

“Two o’clock tomorrow? Sure, Honey, send him on down. Delphine’ll take care of him.”

“Oh, well, OK then.”

“Say, you sure sound cute,” Delphine added. “What’s your name?”

“M-m-my name?”

“Sure, Honey, you got a name, right?”

“Oh, yes, I’m Wayne.”

“Wayne? Oh Christ, that was my first boyfriend’s name!”

“Ah.”

“So, you should come along with Bobby sometime,” Delphine said, friendly like. “You sound like a sweetie.”

“Oh, well, thank you, but—“

“Tell Bobby I’ll see him tomorrow. And, for Chrissake, tell him to wear a clean shirt!”

I hung up. In the three long weeks I worked for Mr. Pettigrew, I must have called Delphine at the Mayflower Hotel and made appointments at least half a dozen times. Though we never met, Delphine and I became friendly phone buddies. She became friendlier each time I called.

“I asked Bobby if you were as cute as you sound on the phone,” she said to me once. “And he said that you are even cuter!”

I somehow doubted that Mr. Pettigrew had ever said any such thing. At least, I seriously hoped he had not.

At first I tried to convince myself that Mr. Pettigrew’s appointments with Delphine were completely innocent. I tried to imagine her in all kinds of respectable businesses, anything, really, except what was increasingly more and more obvious.  Finally, some sort of weird, post-adolescent, Puritan guilt thing overcame me. I called Maureen at her office downstairs.

“I am a pimp,” I told her.

“What?”

“A pimp,” I said. “I am working as a pimp. You are dating a pimp.”

“Wayne, what are you talking about?”

I explained to her about Delphine and my scheduling of her appointments.

“That doesn’t make you a pimp,” she said.

“Maureen, I am procuring sex for my employer. That makes me a pimp.”

“You’re not sure it’s for sex,” she said. “Maybe she’s a manicurist.”

“Maureen, he has no fingernails.”

“Oh, I forgot. Well, maybe she’s his barber.”

“No hair.” We both spoke in unison.

“Maybe . . .” she tried again. “Maybe she’s a dental hygienist.”

“He needs his teeth cleaned two or three times a week?”

“He is a smoker,” she reminded me.

“Maureen, Delphine is a whore. And I am a pimp.”

“Well, if you are, you are a damn poorly paid one,” she said.

Life went on in this vein for three weeks, which seemed like three months. It wasn’t my moments on the phone with Delphine that made it seem so. In time, I came to like and respect Delphine. I mean, it could not have been easy to put up with Mr. Pettigrew, to endure his abrasive personality as well as his damaged body. And, sure, Delphine was, I suspect, handsomely paid for her services, but she did, in my opinion, earn every dollar. And then some.

And I came, too, to stop judging Mr. Pettigrew for his frequent need for Delphine. He was a man, after all, still a relatively young man, fortyish or so, who had physical needs that no doubt could not be satisfied in any other way. It was unlikely that Mr. Pettigrew, for many reasons, would ever be able to find a girlfriend or a wife. Not so much because of his damaged body—there are compassionate women who could look beyond that and would willingly do so—but because of his damaged soul. It was his abrasive, angry violence that ultimately drove me to leave him.

As the time passed, he grew more and more unpleasant. He was grouchy and impatient in the extreme. He would misplace things and then shout at me and accuse me of hiding them from him. He would call me names: idiot, asshole, imbecile. But the final straw came one day when he was trying to take a freshly laundered white shirt out of the laundry-wrapped package. His hands fumbled. I tried to help him, but he snatched up the cardboard-wrapped shirt and slapped me across the face with it. I headed for the door.

“Where the hell are you going?” he shouted after me.

“Anywhere,” I said. “Anywhere but here.”

And thus ended my brief sojourn with Mr. Pettigrew.

Maureen told me later that he sometimes came into her office and asked after me, though he could never quite remember my name. She would tell him that I was fine, that I was back in school, that I was still majoring in English.

“What the f**k does he think he is going to do with that?” he would ask her. And then he would trudge back up the stairs to his silent, lonely office.