Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown (6 page)

The West End

A
LTHOUGH IT IS
now a semiorderly concentration of shops and houses, Provincetown was once so thoroughly devoted to the sea and what it yields as to seem as much a manifestation of the water as a human settlement. During its first hundred years, until the early 1800s, it was not really divided up into streets per se; it was simply a gathering of houses and shops, built on whatever patch of sand their builders selected. Gutted cod for salt cod, one of Provincetown’s most profitable early exports, lay drying on the sand before most of the houses, and cod hung drying from the trees as well. By way of ornamentation, most of the houses offered whale ribs and vertebrae in the stretches of sand where their gardens would have been.

Soil came to Provincetown by way of ships that sailed there from Europe and South America, to load up on salt cod. They carried earth in their holds for ballast, which local citizens were glad to purchase, to spread around their houses for gardens. The ships’ crews refilled their holds with rocks for their return trips. This practice was outlawed as Provincetown became so denuded of rocks that the tides began to encroach upon the houses, but by then the selling of dirt had become a profitable sideline among the crews of the foreign ships. They continued selling earth to the people of Provincetown and stole rocks from the beaches at night.

Provincetown has always divided itself into West End and East End. On this walk start at the West End and work your way east. The West End was traditionally, literally, the wrong side of the tracks. When Provincetown had become a significant whaling port, in the mid-and late 1800s, the most prosperous town in the state of Massachusetts, railroad tracks ran along the Cape right out onto MacMillan Wharf, in the middle of town, so trains could load whale oil, bone, and baleen directly into boxcars. (The trains are by now long gone.) The whaling crews and fishermen, the laborers and clerks and servants, many of them Portuguese, all lived west of the railroad tracks. The wealthy—the whaling captains and merchants, the summer people from Boston and New York—all lived to the east. Most of the gentry never went west of the tracks. It was considered dangerous, and an upstanding member of society seen venturing in that direction could only be after something unseemly.

A version of the old division—reputable versus disreputable—remains, though it no longer has as much to do with economics. Compared to the East End, the West End is younger, sexier, and a bit more prone to noise at night though not, by any urban standards, very noisy at all. It is more gay. The beach where men go to have sex after the bars close is on the West End.

The West End, though every bit as densely inhabited as the East End, is slightly rougher and more random. The houses are more various, since the neighborhood’s history is not as genteel or orderly. You could say that the West End is more American, for better and for worse; it is a bit like West Egg in
The Great Gatsby
, where Jay Gatsby lived; where the newly rich and the newly arrived squeeze their private, personal monuments in among the prim cottages that came over from Long Point 150 years ago. The East End, like East Egg, where Daisy Buchanan lived, is more Cape Cod, more in love with tradition, more likely to house people whose families have owned their shingled, dormered residences for fifty or a hundred years.

J
OHN’S
H
OUSE

On the West End of Commercial Street is my favorite Provincetown house, the home of my friend John Dowd. John’s house stands at the bend in Commercial Street that resulted when, in the mid-1800s, a particularly stubborn citizen refused to move his salt works to accommodate the laying out of the street (which was then called Front Street, as Bradford was sensibly called Back Street).

John is a landscape painter. When he bought his house ten years ago, it was one of the eyesores of town, though the term
eyesore
probably implies a grander awfulness than this house actually possessed. It was simply as devoid of character or charm as a house can be: an old rambling building wrapped in aluminum siding, with a faded asphalt roof. If it were a person, it would have been a server in a high school cafeteria or an attendant at the sort of nursing home you hope never to have to go to; someone stolid and blank, of questionable competence, whose uniform is not quite clean and whose manner suggests a state of exhausted boredom so extreme that an emotion as deep as despair would be a relief.

No one I know thought it was a good idea for John to buy this place, even though the price was low (as, we all felt, it well should have been). Everyone I know is astonished at the house John was able to find under all that aluminum and asphalt, that general air of quiet hopelessness. It turns out that aluminum siding peels off, as John put it, “like foil off a baked potato,” and in this case had actually helped preserve the old wood siding beneath. He replaced the aluminum-frame windows, the sort you find in cheap condos, with six-over-sixes he scavenged from flea markets and demolitions and managed to fill them with panes of the imperfect, slightly wavy glass they would have held when they were new. He put up shutters (also old scavenged ones, from the period when the house was built), replaced the roof, and added a back porch.

As a renovator, John’s true gift lies in his respect for the process of decay. Provincetown is full of “restored” houses that, with every good intention on the part of their owners, have been rendered so pristine, they might be part of a Cape Cod village section in Epcot Center. John’s aesthetic runs more toward the Miss Havisham, and his house is not only lovely but looks as if it has been standing there, more or less unaltered, for at least a hundred years.

Usually in summer someone is staying there, in one of the upstairs bedrooms with an old brass bed and a dormer window. Often more than one or two people are staying there. It is a bit like I imagine English country houses to have been during the days of Jane Austen—a sort of ongoing semiparty with guests who come and go, read books in the garden or cook some dish they’re renowned for, gather at dinnertime, and then disperse again. One guest, an erudite man and a considerable cook, somehow extended his visit to just under four years.

The house has a well-used music room with a player piano and a big closet devoted entirely to costumes. It is possible, at John’s house, to arrive in your street clothes and emerge as a sultan, a Confederate soldier, or a ballerina with feathered wings. The archway that leads from his reading room to the living room has been fitted out with heavy velvet curtains that facilitate the occasional parlor game, play, or evening of tableaux vivants.

If you happen to be in Provincetown on the Fourth of July, you will find a group of us installed on John’s front porch, under the enormous, tattered American flag he hangs every July over his front door, with only forty-five stars on it. It is one of our traditions. We have a grill and a good supply of hot dogs—anyone who wants one is welcome to a hot dog and a glass of whatever we’re serving, if you eat such things and care to linger awhile. We play instruments, very badly, and only until the irritable man three doors down calls the police and makes us stop, though if you arrive before the police do, we’d love for you to take a turn on the drum, saxophone, tambourine, or kazoo. It doesn’t matter if you can’t play. None of us can.

In one of the upstairs windows, the one that looks right up Commercial Street, John has placed a chalky old marble bust of Shakespeare, looking out. You can see it especially well late at night, when everyone has finally gone to bed and Shakespeare shines palely in the dark window, like a little moon.

Downtown

I
F YOU START
on the West End and walk east on Commercial Street, you’ll find that shops and galleries begin to appear among the houses. By the time you reach the intersection of Commercial and Winslow streets, you are in the full-blown commercial district. If you are there during the tourist season, you will find yourself among thicker and thicker crowds until, by the time you reach Town Hall, it will be impossible to walk in any reasonably efficient straight line for more than three or four paces.

For decades there has been an ongoing battle waged by some citizens to have Commercial Street closed to vehicular traffic, but as far as I can see, that will never happen. Commercial is a one-way street—traffic moves from east to west—that has not been widened since it was laid out 150 years ago, well before the birth of the Jeep Cherokee. There is a sidewalk on only one side, and it barely accommodates two average-sized adults walking side by side. Commercial Street faces a considerable challenge as a main thoroughfare for multitudes of strolling pedestrians, families with strollers, bicyclists, delivery trucks, and needlessly large American cars.

The crowds on Commercial Street are extremely difficult to negotiate if you’re trying to arrive at any sort of actual destination with anything resembling alacrity. The people walking along the street are, naturally, almost all browsers and sightseers. They make frequent unscheduled stops. They don’t understand that Commercial Street is, in fact, a street (who can blame them?), and so they wander from side to side—riding through on a bicycle (the preferred and most practical mode of transportation in Provincetown) is like flying a spaceship through a field of sluggish but erratically moving asteroids.

Although the town welcomes these people, needs them for its very livelihood, residents tend to become irritable about the crowds, especially as summer wears on, when the street on which they conduct their necessary business is all but impassable, and the purchase of any rudimentary grocery item may involve waiting in line for half an hour or longer. A visitor strolling on Commercial Street on a summer day should not feel unduly offended if a citizen scowls or mutters as he or she attempts to negotiate the street in order to buy a newspaper or a carton of milk or go to the post office. It isn’t personal; not exactly personal. As a tourist, you are part of the stormy weather that blows through every year, and residents feel as free as anyone anywhere to complain about the weather, knowing, as everyone does everywhere, that their feelings won’t make one bit of difference to the elements at large.

A B
LESSING FROM THE
P
OST
O
FFICE

The Provincetown post office is in the western half of town. For many years one of the women who worked there (I’m sorry to say she has retired) wrote poetry and loved anyone else who wrote poetry, whether they were any good at it or not. If you were sending your poems out in hopes of publication or a grant, and you told her that that was what you were doing, she’d take your envelope into the back of the post office and press it to her bare breast for luck before sending it on.

P
LACES TO
P
EE

There are, as far as I know, only two places where the public is officially permitted to pee without buying anything. You can use the bathrooms in Town Hall, though it closes to the public if a meeting, show, or fund-raising auction is going on inside. There are, more reliably, public bathrooms on the bay side of Town Hall, right by the parking lot next to MacMillan Wharf.

G
OSSIP

Provincetown is, among its many attributes, one of the more impressive rumor mills in the Western world. Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular nineteenth-century journalist, said over a hundred years ago that it was a place with “no secrets, where there is but one accountable path in the whole neighborhood. Everybody at Provincetown knows every time everybody goes out, and every time anybody comes in.” That is still true. Any small town engenders a good deal of gossip, but in this regard Provincetown is to other towns what McDonald’s is to mom-and-pop diners. Most citizens of most small towns must content themselves with a handful of extramarital affairs and a few wayward sons and daughters; they must chew and chew this limited fare. In Provincetown the denizens tend to lead more dramatic lives, and some citizens maintain a more than usually creative relationship to reality. Thus, the offerings are almost embarrassingly rich and varied.

The nerve center of Provincetown’s gossip network is the steps in front of the post office. They were, however, better suited to leisurely tale-telling before post office officials, in an act I can only interpret as conspicuous malice, became concerned that loiterers were interfering with the public’s ability to come and go and so cut the steps in half by installing a wholly unnecessary brick flower box. In response, satellite gossip stations have been established—the bricked yard in front of Joe’s coffee house (the one in the West End, not its sister to the east) and the wooden bench in front of a store called Map are especially fertile.

The gossip season extends from early fall to late spring. In summer, during the tourist assault, everyone is too busy to pay more than glancing attention to questions about who’s doing what to whom and why. By mid-September, however, the feast begins, and it goes on well into June. In a month of average fecundity, someone will have left a lover for that person’s former lover, someone will have gotten drunk and trashed the apartment of an ex, someone will have gotten fired under suspicious circumstances rumored to involve sex or drugs or both, and the members of a newly formed theatrical troupe will have had a screaming fight, disbanded, and then re-formed minus the member considered to be the source of the trouble. The meetings of various twelve-step programs around town have a problem with people who are not really addicts at all but say they are so they can come to meetings and find out what’s going on. During the time it took me to write this chapter on gossip, I received a number of e-mails from several friends in Provincetown who feel particularly obliged to keep me informed. One concerned a young man who stole a car on Commercial Street, crashed it into a van carrying deaf tourists, and ran out into the bay, believing that would throw dogs off his scent. The second involved two local men who took a taxi to one of the banks, put on ski masks, and held up the tellers at gunpoint. The men forced the tellers to fill several garbage bags with currency, then got on two getaway bicycles they had left nearby, rode home with the loot, where they were quickly apprehended. Both those stories are true. I checked.

Among the more notable rumors I’ve heard over the years, I offer the following:

Barbra Streisand is buying a house, under an assumed name, in North Truro.

Elton John is trying to buy a house in Provincetown but can’t find one he likes.

Provincetown is one of the designated areas for the federal Witness Protection Program, and many of its innocous-seeming citizens (to whatever extent anyone in Provincetown can be called innocuous) have informed on members of crime syndicates and been resettled in Provincetown with new identities.

Jackie Onassis once showed up at the A-House with Gore Vidal and a phalanx of bodyguards.

It should also be noted that there is always a celebrity who has been seen with absolute certainty somewhere in town. These sightings have ranged, over the years, from Kevin Spacey to Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn (with and without Kurt Russell), and, perennially, Barbra Streisand. The only celebrity I have ever seen there is Gene Rayburn, former host of
The Match Game
, gliding down Commercial Street on Rollerblades.

Conversation in general, which includes but is not limited to gossip, is both valued and widely practiced in Provincetown. Its citizens are a loquacious people, fond of stories of all kinds. It is common for a Provincetownian driving along Commercial Street to see a friend passing on foot or on a bicycle and stop to talk to that person at medium length. If you are in a car behind one of these impromptu klatsches, please do not honk your horn, unless the conversation goes on for a truly unconscionable period or you have mistakenly taken poison and are on your way to procure the antidote. It is impolite. Provincetown is an ecosystem, and these street sessions are among its inhabitants’ innate characteristics. Displays of impatience or aggressiveness are not considered the badges of personal importance they are in some other places. Anyone in a great hurry is generally perceived not as a mover and shaker but simply as an intruder from a noisier, less interesting world and is likely to be ignored.