Chapter 28
WORKING AT PEREGRINE HOUSE INTRODUCED ME TO COOKING, and I realized how much I loved it.
When not waiting tables, I was in the kitchen making Hot Willies with roast beef, green peppers, and provolone on wheat bread.
Or a George with corned beef, coleslaw, and cheese on an onion roll.
We’d heat the sandwiches in the steamer, and they were delicious.
Our most popular pizza was a So’s Your Mother with the works.
We had a pizza oven in back, and some nights I’d be at it nonstop until closing.
I learned new tricks like adding a little honey and olive oil to the dough and extra garlic to the sauce.
I worked late on weekends, sometimes never sitting down until the last customer was gone.
I’d take off my dirty apron and collapse in a chair, lighting a cigarette.
Whoever I closed with would hang out with me for a while, going through a six-pack of Molson Golden Ale.
Then I’d head home to my condemned apartment on Main Street, along the way dropping the restaurant’s cash pouch into the bank’s night deposit box.
It wasn’t smart walking alone after midnight, carrying sometimes a thousand dollars cash.
I was always looking for someone to slip out of the shadows.
Karen White and I were sharing a second-story apartment that was little better than a slum.
Our couch was a bare mattress on the living room floor a safe distance from a vintage gas heater that was the only source of warmth.
In the winter it was so cold I could see my breath.
Raw eggs left out would freeze in the kitchen.
They rolled off the counter because the floor sloped badly.
Before moving in, I’d cruised hardware stores and other shops for carpet and paint samples no one wanted.
I used them to fix up the apartment as much as possible, transforming it into a patchwork of unmatching shapes and colors.
My desk was a section of unpainted plyboard nailed to my bedroom wall.
I’d wear my coat as I hammered away all hours of the night on my pawnshop typewriter.
I had no expectation that my book would be published.
But I felt compelled to do what Ruth said and write my story.
After I turned in the manuscript to Tony Abbott, I didn’t send it anywhere, not believing it was good enough for professional scrutiny.
And it wasn’t. I would never touch it again until lifting it out of an archival box in 2025, marveling over details both whimsical and sad.
By spring term of my senior year, I began applying to graduate schools.
Occasionally, I’d see Charlie. As usual I’d find a way.
Dropping off expired Dannon yogurts, for example.
We couldn’t sell them at Peregrine House, but they were perfectly fine to eat.
When I heard Charlie was under the weather, I delivered food to his door.
He didn’t refuse my gestures but wouldn’t invite me in.
Then in March he invited me to lunch at Peregrine House, and I couldn’t believe it.
My matchmaking friend Suzanne Frye waited on us, opening a bottle of Mouton Cadet white wine that she’d set aside for the special occasion.
Charlie presented me with a leatherbound copy of The Scarlet Letter, his face very tan after baking under a sunlamp.
We sat in front of a window talking until Peregrine House closed after lunch.
We were still sitting there when it was time to reopen at 5 p.m. I told him I’d been applying to graduate schools, and it wasn’t going well.
He asked me which ones. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Virginia, I went down the list. All had turned me down in short order, the letters terse and impersonal, and I wasn’t surprised.
I think it was my subconscious intention when I’d filled out the applications in pencil, knowing that was rather careless and sloppy.
Each time I got a rejection letter, I felt more relieved than disappointed.
After that lunch with Charlie, I called Ruth and asked if I could have the Chaucer book back.
I reminded her why I’d bought it in the first place, and she returned it to me while I was briefly home on March 15.
Soon after I gave it to Charlie, explaining why I’d inscribed it for Ruth almost a year ago, and then she inscribed it back to me.
Finally, I inscribed it for Charlie, and he would return it to me decades later.
Since then, it had been on a bookshelf in my office.
I didn’t look at it until early 2025 when starting this memoir.
As I sat at my desk flipping through Chaucer, I was surprised by what was inside.
The unsealed letter from Ruth had no postage and I don’t think I’d ever seen it before that moment.
It was dated March 16, 1979. Apparently, she’d tucked it in the book when returning it to me. I’m all but certain I never noticed.
“Dear Patsy, Loved your cute letter of request for my gorgeous copy of Chaucer!! Only to you and for such a reason would I relinquish it… Seriously, now, I’ve treasured old Chaucer and am equally tickled you felt free to ask for him back…, Loving you, Ruth.”
This had been pressed between the pages the many years that Charlie owned the book. He never noticed either. Ruth’s note is as clean and crisp as if she’d just written it. I felt she and Charlie were helping me from the Other Side as I’d find things I wasn’t looking for and didn’t know I had.
I couldn’t work at Peregrine House the rest of my life and knew the book I’d written wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
As April approached, I asked Tony Abbott what I was going to do with myself.
I needed to think about a real job, and he suggested The Charlotte Observer.
I had no interest in journalism. But maybe I could write feature stories.
Tony got me an interview with the newspaper’s publisher, Rolfe Neill, and Suzanne Frye let me borrow her MG convertible.
I drove to Charlotte in a downpour, constantly checking my written directions as rain dripped through the leaky rag top.
I was excited as I rode the escalator up to the newspaper’s second floor and met with Rolfe Neill in his big office.
I’d brought a portfolio of cartoons, and articles I’d written for the Davidson College newspaper.
I’d drawn a caricature of Rolfe Neill and he smiled, flipping through my work.
I could tell he had little interest. He seemed more amused than impressed.
After a half hour, he directed me upstairs to the newsroom.
I was to meet with features editor Stuart Dim, and I interpreted that to mean I had a chance at being hired as a features writer. I was encouraged and hopeful as I sat down in Stuart’s office. The first question he asked was if I watched a lot of TV.
“Oh, no, sir. I read,” I replied.
“That’s too bad,” he mused. “I have an opening on our TV magazine.”
“Well, I do watch TV some.”
It wasn’t exactly true. None of the places I’d lived in during college had TVs, and there was no time for watching shows or movies.
Now I was renting a tiny cottage on Lake Norman, and it didn’t have a TV there either.
Stuart Dim told me the paper had a magazine called TV Week, and was I interested?
My job would be to update the blurbs for shows.
I asked if I would get to do any writing.
Maybe, he said. We’d have to see how things went.
I was to start soon, my annual salary $12,000.
Using my savings from Peregrine House, I made a down payment on a 1973 black BMW 2002 that had 100,000 miles, the speedometer broken.
I never knew how fast I was going and started getting speeding tickets, mainly from the Davidson cops, who noticed beer cans on the floor.
Then the fuel gauge went bad, and one day the car conked out on the highway.
Taking my life in my own hands, I accepted a ride with a stranger, a man in a pickup truck who dropped me off at a service station so I could make a few phone calls and have my car towed.
My BMW always had something not working right, but I was proud of it, washing and waxing it during my time off.
I used model paint to restore the badge on the hood.
When the interstate was deserted, I’d floor it while smoking out the open window.
Sometimes I’d throw back a tall boy beer while at it, a terrible idea.
But drinking and driving was rather common back then.
My first day at the Observer was May 14.
I was tasked with learning how to use a cathode-ray tube, or CRT, an early precursor to a computer monitor.
It was grueling getting used to bright green letters against a black background, and inserting nonsensical symbols that were commands.
By the end of my eight-hour shift I was dizzy and exhausted.
“The Charlotte Observer is a cruel taskmaster,” I wrote after nine days on the job. “I am insane with fatigue and frustration by late afternoon.”
I hated updating the TV magazine and wasn’t good at it.
Since I didn’t watch TV, I didn’t know if a blurb was correct or not.
Often, I got them mixed up. One weekend I had an NFL team playing a college one, and the time was incorrect.
The phones rang off the hook. People were furious, my editor Gerry Leland’s face bright red.
I noticed that the longer I worked for him, the worse his eczema got.
“For God’s sake, Patsy! Please be more careful,” he’d exclaim, and at moments I worried he might have a stroke.