Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown (8 page)

Staying In, Going Out

P
ROVINCETOWN IS ONE
of the better places in the world for staying home at night. Even in summer the nights are rarely warm, and during the rest of the year they range from brisk to life-threatening. Provincetown is particularly amenable to the bed and the book; its houses and inns tend to maintain a properly strict North Atlantic distinction between the inside and the outside. Inside it is warm and well lit. By being inside we provide squares of lamplight, in various off-whites, yellows, and ambers, to shine against the chaos of the night sky, the Canadian winds, the black glitter of the bay. Wanderers on the dark, leaf-tossed roads can look at our lights and take comfort.

At the same time Provincetown is a lascivious carnival during the summer months, and it would be a shame to miss its gaudier pleasures. At night the town is full of the particular spirit of recklessness that obtains in places full of people fully prepared—eager—to do things they would not consider doing at home.

Nightlife in Provincetown is mainly devoted to wandering from bar to bar. Provincetown boasts several grandly disreputable straight bars and considerably more that cater to gay men and lesbians. As far as I know, no men are denied entrance to the women’s bars or vice versa. This is Provincetown. Although you would not be popular at the Vault, a leather bar, in Weejuns and a rugby shirt, neither would you be stopped at the door.

Bars in Provincetown not only open and close from season to season but rise and fall in popularity—the hottest bar one summer will be empty the next, only to be hot again the following summer. One, however, is a local institution and will surely be in business as long as Provincetown exists.

T
HE
A
TLANTIC
H
OUSE

The A-House (no one calls it by its full name) has operated steadily, in various forms, since the end of the eighteenth century. It has been a hotel, a restaurant, a cabaret, and a bar, sometimes all four at once, and in more restrictive times was notorious for its lax attitude toward drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Billie Holiday played there for a week toward the end of her life, in the fifties. It is on a narrow side street off Commercial—the newly arrived sometimes have a little difficulty finding it. Look for the street between Vorelli’s restaurant and Cape Tip Sports.

The A-House stays open year-round. It is open on snowy winter weeknights in February, and there are always fires in the two fireplaces, even though fewer than a half-dozen people may show up. Although I’m sure the owners are motivated by profit, as any businesspeople are, I consider the A-House’s determination to keep its doors constantly open to be a public service.

The A-House has not changed in any way since I went there for the first time more than twenty years ago. It is, has always been, deeply and utterly brown; its atmosphere is full, at all hours, of a crepuscular, sepia-toned dusk. The disco lights on its dance floor create a nimbus of brighter brown; the remoter sections range from coffee to dark chocolate to a shadowy sable-black. The same posters—Sarah Vaughan, Joe Dallesandro in
Trash
, Candy Darling, the Virgin Mary—hang where they have always hung, as do the ropes, cork floats, and lanterns that are the A-House’s vague nod to its marine habitat. The Little Bar, on the Commercial Street side, is a leather bar, with a separate entrance. The disco is one door over. The A-House, in both its leather and disco sectors, is musky, its walls and floorboards saturated with the odors of beer and sweat and the soap used to scour beer and sweat away. It is imbued, as older bars tend to be, with sex and disappointment—it is sexy in a damp, well-used way; it occupies a locus where sex, optimism, and disappointment meet. All that desire, much of it fierce or wistful or frustrated, night after night, has insinuated itself as deeply as the smell of spilled beer. You can have a wonderful time at the A-House, but it has always reminded me of Orpheus’s descent to search for Eurydice among the shades. It has a furtive aspect, especially as you move away from the dance floor into the deeper darks. This is not entirely disagreeable—why, after all, should the site of so much hope and yearning be cheerful?—but it is unmistakably haunted, the way battlefields are haunted.

In summer, especially on the weekends, the bar is so densely populated by beautiful men, it would be easy to imagine that beauty is the fundamental human state and that you, even if you consider yourself beautiful, have managed to maintain that illusion because you are a fine sturdy goose who has lived long among other geese and only now finds itself in the company of swans. It is not for the faint-hearted, and it is not, I’m sorry to say, full of beauty in its more generous condition, the kind of beauty that includes the beholder, as great courtesans, paintings, and buildings do. It is more the kind of beauty celebrated several hundred years ago in France, when parades involved fully set banquet tables on floats wheeled down the streets with aristocrats consuming lavish dinners on china plates so that the common people could get a glimpse of splendors ordinary invisible to them.

The best times at the A-House are, in my opinion, off season, when most of the other bars in town have closed and everyone in search of anything resembling a party goes there. There are women and men, gay people and straight people. Physical beauty, with all its implied allures and torments, still makes an appearance, but it is rare, as beauty should be, and the people on the dance floor seem generally glad to have been freed from such rampant desire and left to dance in peace.

S
PIRITUS

Although the laws in Massachusetts allow bars to stay open until two
A.M
., Provincetown requires that they close at one, out of consideration for citizens who need their sleep. Many of the people who come in the summertime—gay men in particular—are accustomed to staying out later. At home many don’t
leave
for the bars until one
A.M
., and when the closing lights go on at that hour, there is always a general aspect of shocked disbelief. It is then time for everyone to go up the street to Spiritus.

Spiritus is a converted cottage that sells pizza and ice cream, about five hundred yards west of the A-House. It is open until two in the morning, and when the bars close, everyone goes there, whether or not they have any interest in pizza or ice cream. On summer nights in July and August, literally thousands gather on Commercial Street in front of Spiritus between the hours of one and two
A.M.
There are vast numbers of men, considerably fewer women. Some men, still sweat-slicked from dancing, mingle with their shirts off; some wear leather chaps with nothing underneath. Some are in drag, and if you’re lucky, you might see the Hat Sisters, two ostentatiously mustached gentlemen of a certain age who wear identical drag and make hats for themselves just slightly smaller and considerably more ornate than Christmas trees. The street remains open to traffic—beleaguered cops struggle mightily to clear the crowds away when a car comes through—and if you’re foolish or perverse enough to drive on Commercial Street past Spiritus at that hour, a drag queen or two might very well hop onto the front fender of your car and sing a show tune as you creep along. Please do not discourage this display. You are being blessed.

It’s an orgy of sly desire; it’s the world’s biggest festival for loiterers. It is possible there, if you are a certain kind of person and have lived a certain kind of life, to run into someone you last saw in junior high school in Akron. It is possible to fall suddenly, violently in love, and it is possible to get lucky for the night. It is also possible to have a slice of pizza, talk to an acquaintance or two, and go home to sleep.

That hour at Spiritus is, in a real sense, what the night has been leading up to. Some people, myself included, often skip the bars entirely and go directly to Spiritus at one o’clock. I have been known, on warm nights, to recline on a doorstep across the street from Spiritus with various gaggles of friends, talking and laughing, sometimes with my head in somebody’s lap, until we all look up and realize it’s almost three and the street is practically deserted.

The crowd starts dispersing when Spiritus closes, but the streets in summer never empty out entirely. Men wander around all night, on foot or on bicycles. Men linger in doorways, sit on the steps of darkened shops, and stroll to and from the dick dock, the stretch of beach behind the Boat Slip hotel, where all sorts of things go on. Late night in Provincetown is, of course, all about sex, but the edginess that prevails in the bars and during the Spiritus hour more or less evaporates. Provincetown after two
A.M.
is, on the one hand, a small town gone to bed for the night and, on the other, a labyrinth of languid potentiality. Sex settles over the quiet streets like a blanket; it is sexy simply to walk or pedal around, with no intention of bodily engagement, just to watch and listen and to breathe salty nocturnal air so saturated with want. This late, with most of the lights extinguished, more stars are visible, and the foghorn keeps sounding its single note from the breakwater. The men who speak to each other do so in low tones that could be mistaken for reverence. A gull wheels by every now and then, very white against the starry sky, and you can hear the soft swish of bicycle tires until just before dawn.

T
HE
W
ANT
B
ONE

The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth’s bell
.
Blue, rippled and soaked in the fire of blue
.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side
.

The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing
.
A scalded toothless harp, uncrusted, unstrung
.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O
.

Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals like a summer dress
.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away
.

The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean
.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
My flower my fin my life my lightness my O
.

R
OBERT
P
INSKY

Death and Life

P
ROVINCETOWN HAS BEEN
widowed by the AIDS epidemic. It will never fully recover, though it is accustomed to loss. Over the centuries men and boys in uncountable numbers have been swallowed up by the ocean. Provincetown possesses, has always possessed, a steady, grieving competence in the face of all that can happen to people. It watches and waits; it keeps the lights burning. If you are a man or woman with AIDS there, someone will always drive you to your doctor’s appointments, get your groceries if you can’t get them yourself, and take care of whatever needs taking care of. Several years ago the Provincetown AIDS Support Group opened Foley House, a large house in the East End that has been converted into apartments for PWAs.

B
ILLY

Billy was a baker. He was a compact, dark-haired man with small adroit hands, like an opossum’s. He had not entirely shed his nasal New Jersey accent, though he hadn’t been back to New Jersey in more than twenty years. The word
angel
, in Billy’s mouth, was “ein-jill” (he called all his friends “angel”). He lived, as people in Provincetown do, in a series of apartments, and each time he moved, he invested his new place with an imperturbable, slightly shabby comfort—the effect was roughly equal parts grandmother and graduate student. There was always a big dowdy sofa and a few disreputable chairs that, once you sank into them, were reluctant to let you go, because they were soft and generous and because they were exhausted.

Billy was simple, kind, and hospitable, virtues that count more heavily in Provincetown than they do in many other places. He and I had been friends for more than ten years. For my fortieth birthday he made me an elaborate cake, covered with writing-related decorations: a miniature television set with a picture of a typewriter glued onto the screen, pencils interspersed among the candles. He decided, for obscure reasons, that it should also include fish, and so he surrounded the cake with coils of clear plastic tubes full of water and put a half-dozen live goldfish in them. It should have worked, but the fish got stuck in the tubes, which traumatized several of the party guests to the point of tears. The fish survived the experience, however, and spent the remainder of the evening in the relative comfort of a mixing bowl.

Billy was my most peculiar and domestic intimate. It mattered, and sometimes it mattered a great deal, that if everything collapsed, I knew I could get on a bus, go to Provincetown, and arrive unannounced at his current apartment, wherever it was. Like most people in town, he never locked his door. If it was late, I could have walked in and climbed into bed next to Billy. He’d have half-awakened, and I’d have told him I’d come to live with him for a while. He’d have muttered “Yay” (it was an expression of his), asked no questions unless I wanted him to, and made pancakes the next morning, probably with something exotic and inappropriate in them.

Billy had had AIDS for a long while but was mostly outwardly healthy, if you discount a growing tendency to ramble, which was just an intensified and less cogent version of the way he’d always been. He was carefully watched over by his friends Janice Redman, Michael Landis, and others. Then four years ago he was diagnosed with leukemia. “Are you ready for this?” he’d told me over the phone, as if he were imparting an especially scandalous bit of gossip.
“Leukemia. Yikes!”
Neither he nor I knew then that his particular form of leukemia usually proved fatal within a matter of months.

Several weeks later, when I’d gone to Palo Alto to write a story for a magazine, I got a call from Billy’s sister telling me he was in a hospital in Boston and was not doing very well. It didn’t seem possible—he’d been just fine so recently. I couldn’t tell whether his sister, whom I’d never met, was exaggerating, but I decided not to take the chance. I canceled my interview and got on a plane to Boston early the next morning.

By the time I got there, he wasn’t coherent. He lay in his hospital bed, moaning and whimpering, surrounded by a half-dozen people. I held his hand and whispered to him. There was no telling whether he knew I was there.

We stayed with him, night and day, in shifts, for the next four days. The day he died there were six of us in attendance: his sister Sue Anne Locascio, Janice Redman, Marie Howe, Nick Flynn, Michael Klein, and me. That last day he moaned and cried out almost continually—we couldn’t tell whether he was in pain or having nightmares or both. Toward evening Nick, Michael, and I went out for dinner, and by the time we got back, he had passed away. The three women had been with him. His eyes were still open. His face was blank. The room was full of a silence not quite like other silences: a complete silence, like what it might be like inside a balloon. It seemed that the lights had dimmed, though in fact they had not. After a while, Marie came up to me and said very softly, “I asked the nurse what happens now.”

“What happens now?” I asked.

“She said they clean him up and take him downstairs.”

“Right.”

“I asked her if it would be all right if you three men cleaned him instead. Would you like to?” I nodded.

I pulled down the blanket and took off his hospital gown. He was still warm, still himself. I closed his eyes. It felt, for a moment, like a melodramatic gesture, something I’d gotten out of the movies and was doing for cheap effect, but it did seem that his eyes should be closed. The lids were soft and yielded easily. I felt the tickle of his eyelashes. Although he had not been in any way frightening when his eyes were open, with his eyes closed he looked less dead. Michael, Nick, and I took warm soapy towels and washed his face and body. There was his pale throat and pale fleshy chest; there were his pink-brown nipples, just bigger than quarters; there was his bush of black pubic hair; and there was his dick, deep pink at the tip, edged in purple, canted at a soft angle to his testicles. We turned him over and washed his back, his ass, and his legs. We turned him over again and pulled the blanket back up.

That was October. We scattered his ashes in January. There was some discussion about where, exactly, his ashes should go. Luanne said he’d told her he had a favorite spot in the dunes, where he’d go to meditate, and Marie and I looked at each other in surprise. As far as we knew, Billy never went into the dunes to meditate. He wasn’t fond of sand. We decided he must have said that to his sister to comfort her, to reassure her about his spiritual life.

Nick suggested scattering his ashes in the ocean, but we all agreed that Billy had probably not been entirely certain about just where the ocean was in relation to his living room. It seemed more appropriate to scatter his ashes on the ratty old sofa and turn the television on, but that didn’t seem right either. We settled, finally, on the salt marsh at the end of Commercial Street, where the ashes of so many men and women already resided.

The day before the scattering Marie and I went out into the marsh to find a place. It was bitterly cold, with a foot of snow on the ground. We broke, several times, through ice into pools of frigid water. We said to each other, more than once, “This looks good, it’s not
too
far from the road, it’s sort of pretty if you squint.” We periodically shouted,
“Billy,”
in tones that had more to do with exasperation than with grief, which I suspect he’d have appreciated or at least understood. Billy was opposed, in principle, to too much bother in the search for perfection.

We knew immediately, however, when we’d found the place. It was a high dune that appeared to stand almost exactly halfway between town and the water. From there you could see, with equal clarity, the blue-gray line of the ocean and the roofs and windows of town. We stood there awhile, in the frigid silence, on a circle of frozen sand, the sun knifing up off the fields of snow. A scallop boat churned by across the distant snowy dunes. A gull skreeked overhead and dove for something in a pool of slushy gray water. It would soon be time to dismantle Billy’s kitchen, to decide what to do about his tables and chairs.

The next day a dozen or so of us carried his ashes out there in his favorite vase, which Janice had made for him, and scattered them on the dune. It was stunningly, stupefyingly cold, the sort of cold that seems to sear all the random particles from the air and render it so pure as to be almost unbreathable. Billy’s ashes were creamy gray, studded with chips of yellow-gray bone. When we each took a handful and threw it, some of his ashes lingered in the wind before falling. They did not disappear, as I’d imagined they would. I could see flecks of bone throwing tiny shadows on the sand at our feet. No one delivered a speech or eulogy. It was, to roughly equal extents, solemn and awkward. Some of us had just met. It seemed as if we were waiting for an adult to arrive and tell us what to do. When we were finished, we walked back to town, trying to think of things to say to one another. We got back into our cars, drove to one of the few open restaurants, and had breakfast, as the living do.

Weeks later Marie and I fought over the fact that Billy had, apparently, specifically asked her to carry his ashes when the time came, and I, obsessed with control, determined to be the center of attention, had grabbed them and carried them myself. When we went through his things, a friend of ours, who had scarcely known Billy, was in our opinion far too glad to take one of his belts. This is, as Marie put it, what the living do. We have breakfast with flecks of ash still stuck to our sweaters; we squabble over who behaved insensitively and why.

I go out to Billy’s dune every now and then and build something for him. It seems right that he should have an ongoing series of memorials, all of them swept away by wind and water. Once I planted a big stick like a flagpole on top of the dune. Once I found the top of a fence picket, stuck it in the sand like a miniature house, and surrounded it with a fence made of twigs.