Land's End Part 2

The pharmacy's main attraction is its soda fountain, unaltered since at least the mid-1940s. The fountain is staffed by a succession of buxom, semisullen young girls who make a good frappe (the New England term for milkshake). The fountain's cloudy chrome stools are perennially occupied by middle-aged or elderly people who have lived in town most or all of their lives, dressed in finery of their own (a plaid Carhartt jacket, a bright crocheted cap), usually sipping wan coffee from cone-shaped white paper cups set in brown plastic holders. As you walk through the aisles, you can look over and see their faces in the yellowed mirror behind the fountain, under the big old-fashioned Bulova clock with the red second hand big as a conductor's baton, that makes a soft whirring sound as the seconds disappear.

THE A&P A&P.

Provincetown has several fine little grocery stores-Angel Foods, on the East End, is particularly good-but in addition to shopping there, I maintain a perverse allegiance to the ma.s.sive A&P on Shankpainter Road. In the abstract there is nothing good about this store. It was built on wetlands-what was once home to herons and migrating dragonflies is now a parking lot and a big Olde Cape Cod-style strip mall, replete with faux wood siding and faux dormers, that contains a bank, a liquor store, and the A&P. The A&P should, by all rights, be boycotted. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I go there at least once every time I'm in town.

My devotion stems, in part, from the fact that I live most of the time in New York City, where these gigantic grocery stores are virtually unknown. I shop in corner markets and delicatessens; if it weren't for the A&P in Provincetown, I would have no idea of the number of breakfast cereals produced in America, or of the full range of pork by-products. But more important to me, this standard-issue grocery emporium, being located in Provincetown, is pervaded by a quality I can only call surreal. It is filled, during the summer months, not only with the thriving heteros.e.xual families for whom such a store is intended, but with butches, muscle boys in bathing suits, gay families of various kinds, and the occasional drag queen. Many of the checkout clerks, hired for the summer, check groceries by day and do drag by night. On duty they are brisk and efficient, if more p.r.o.ne to sarcasm than most checkout clerks in most A&Ps. There they stand, every summer, ringing up purchases and putting them in bags, bathed in the fluorescent light-that deeply familiar, shadowless light that fills big stores everywhere; light that is not so much illumination as it is the total obliteration of dark. There they stand, calmly accepting money and making change, ordinary-looking men for the most part, not young, not prosperous, p.r.o.ne to crew cuts and potbellies, with bits of glitter sparking in their hair or on their fingernails, with hints of kohl not quite removed from around their eyes.

MARINE S SPECIALTIES.

Marine Specialties is a store of such surpa.s.sing idiosyncrasy that I can't say, in a simple sentence or two, what exactly it is that it sells. It is a cavern of sorts, something like the genie's cave in the story of Aladdin and the lamp, if by way of treasure the genie had acc.u.mulated scented candles (vanilla being especially well represented), laboratory beakers, safari hats, combat boots, ossified starfish, wool sailor's jerseys, vintage pajamas, wind chimes, seconds from the Gap and Banana Republic, rubber b.a.l.l.s, Red Cross blankets, pea coats, wool undershirts, camouflage pants, and a h.o.a.rd of World War II artifacts, up to and including unopened C-rations. It would not be entirely surprising to see stalact.i.tes growing from the ceiling toward the back of the shop, dripping on the more elderly merchandise.

Marine Specialties sells more apparel than anything else, but really it just has whatever it has at any given time. It is a repository of the overlooked, the lost, the surplus, the irregular, the no longer needed, and the outmoded. I still wear a pair of orange-and-black-striped pajama bottoms I bought there seven or eight years ago. My friend Dennis owns a gla.s.s bottle I bought there for him, prominently labeled HYDROCHLORIC ACID HYDROCHLORIC ACID.

Merchandise moves in and out, but some of it takes up what appears to be permanent residence. Certain eccentric parkas, hats, and other items have been there since I first came twenty years ago, still bravely offering themselves for sale. It is hard to find anything that costs more than thirty dollars, and most items are under ten. On the upper, unreachable shelves stands a jumble of random objects (kiddie cars, pennants, piles of ancient hats) and a series of bronze-painted busts of American presidents, the obscure as well as the legendary ones, looking blankly down like carved saints. Marine Specialties is always full of the same light, a brackish yellow-brown, and of the same smell, composed as far as I can tell of mildew, dust, human oils, and an ineffable something I can only describe as age. It is a museum of the disregarded and overlooked; it is the Land That Time Meant to Have Meant to Have Forgotten but was not allowed to. Forgotten but was not allowed to.

Staying In, Going Out.

PROVINCETOWN 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. 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 inst.i.tution and will surely be in business as long as Provincetown exists.

THE A ATLANTIC H HOUSE.

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 att.i.tude toward drinking, gambling, and prost.i.tution. 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 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 s.e.x and disappointment-it is s.e.xy in a damp, well-used way; it occupies a locus where s.e.x, 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 st.u.r.dy 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.

SPIRITUS.

Although the laws in Ma.s.sachusetts allow bars to stay open until two A.M 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 leave for the bars until one for the bars until one A.M 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. 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. 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 d.i.c.k 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 s.e.x, but the edginess that prevails in the bars and during the Spiritus hour more or less evaporates. Provincetown after two A.M. 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. s.e.x settles over the quiet streets like a blanket; it is s.e.xy 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. is, on the one hand, a small town gone to bed for the night and, on the other, a labyrinth of languid potentiality. s.e.x settles over the quiet streets like a blanket; it is s.e.xy 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.

THE W WANT B BONEThe 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.

ROBERT P PINSKY.

Death and Life.

PROVINCETOWN 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. 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.

BILLY.

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 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!" "Leukemia. Yikes!" Neither he nor I knew then that his particular form of leukemia usually proved fatal within a matter of months. 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.k, deep pink at the tip, edged in purple, canted at a soft angle to his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. We turned him over and washed his back, his a.s.s, 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 rea.s.sure 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 too far from the road, it's sort of pretty if you squint." We periodically shouted, far from the road, it's sort of pretty if you squint." We periodically shouted, "Billy," "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. 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.

LAND'S E ENDProvincetownZero ground, fickle sandbar where graves and gravity conspire,Beer bottle amber and liquor green surrender their killing shards.Like ashes, dust, even gla.s.s turns back into what it was.Skeletal driftwood and seaweed hair beg for a body. Any body.Yet all you see is surf out there, simply more and more of nothing.If you must leave us, now or later, the sea will bring you back.

MELVIN D DIXON.

Where All the Lights Are Bright.

AT ITS CENTER, around the entrance to MacMillan Wharf, the town achieves its height of buxom tawdriness. This is the section that most resembles a carnival midway. It is where every store seems to sell the same souvenir T-shirts; where a shop with a prominently displayed salt.w.a.ter taffy-making machine pumps furiously all day long and into the night. At the intersection of Commercial and Standish streets, where the traffic on a summer afternoon can resemble that in Calcutta, you may be fortunate enough to see a particular traffic cop, a hefty man well into his sixties, who keeps things moving, to whatever extent they can be moved, by means of a whistle, always in his mouth, and a series of pirouettes-he faces traffic in one direction, waves it forward, then abruptly pivots, performs a balletic half turn, stops traffic coming one way, and beckons the others forward. He is like a somber version of the dancing hippos in Fantasia Fantasia.

TOWN H HALL.

The physical center of town (as opposed to its several different aesthetic, spiritual, and s.e.xual centers) is the block that contains the sedate white bulk of Town Hall. The building houses various munic.i.p.al offices on its ground floor, which open off a shadowy, dark-paneled hallway hung with time-darkened paintings of Cape Cod. A hush pervades there, always, even at the height of the business day. All activities are conducted behind ma.s.sive wooden doors fitted with panels of opaque gla.s.s. It has always put me in mind of a small-town museum-it wouldn't be surprising to open any of these doors and find not city workers at their desks but gla.s.s cases full of stuffed birds, Indian artifacts, and petrified sh.e.l.ls.

Up a double flight of wooden stairs, past a mural of fishermen and cranberry pickers, is the auditorium, where town meetings are held. It is also available to anyone who needs to accommodate a large audience. The annual Provincetown AIDS Support Group auction is held there; Karen Finley, Barbara Cook, John Waters, and many others have appeared on its stage.

The auditorium at Town Hall is a big, imperturbably stodgy room, with a bare wood floor and a matronly brown sweep of balcony overhead. It is more cla.s.sically New England than most of the interiors in Provincetown; more stolid and dim; stingier about comfort. It is sad, anachronistic, and somehow rather grand; a thoroughly indifferent room that seems, even when full, to be empty in its heart; to be waiting patiently for these fools to finish up their business so it can return to its dark, musty contemplation of itself.

The outdoor area in front of Town Hall, however, is far more gregarious. It is lined with wooden benches that were once, years ago, known as the meat rack, where gay men hung around after the bars closed. The benches are now mainly the province of weary tourists and the elderly, whether they are Portuguese women who've raised five children or former bad boys who have gotten too old to dance. In summer you will probably see someone performing for change there: a violinist or folk singer or mime, most likely. One summer a group called the Flying Neutrinos worked the bricks in front of town hall, a ragged group of adults and children (they said they were a family, and might in fact have been) who sang, in a way, and banged on various drums, tambourines, and xylophones. They were the rough local equivalent of Gypsies-they had that quality of treacherous seduction, that sly and defiant otherness. They lived on a houseboat moored off the East End, and all that summer you'd see one or more of them around town, dressed in motley clothes, cheerful if deeply odd, reminding Provincetown that even its people, in all their variety and outlandishness, were still part of a world larger and stranger than any of us can imagine. The next summer they were gone and have not been heard from since. Most recently the bricks were the preferred arena of a man in a clown suit who whistled incessantly and made balloon animals for children, and who was frequently drunk, which inspired him to shout insults at anyone he suspected of being h.o.m.os.e.xual. Next summer we feel confident that he too will have moved on and been replaced by someone else.

THE M MAIN D DRAG.

The center of town is also the theater district-the place you go to see drag, comedy, and other sorts of shows, at the Post Office Cafe, Vixen, Tropical Joe's and, back a ways toward the West End, the Universalist church, Town Hall, Antro, and the Crown and Anchor. The acts vary from season to season, but you can rely, every summer, on seeing men perform not only as Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, et cetera, but as divas less often seen on the drag circuit, women like Joni Mitch.e.l.l and Billie Holiday. They generally do their own singing-drag acts have, I'm glad to report, evolved beyond lip-sync. Some, of course, are better than others. I am especially fond of Pearline, who can only be described as a Sherman tank in a wig; Varla Jean Merman, who does a truly filthy rendition of "My Favorite Things" and another number that involves singing while consuming considerable quant.i.ties of cheese; and Randy Roberts. Randy is the only one of these people I know personally. Out of drag (or rather in his male drag-as RuPaul once said, "We're born naked, and everything after that is drag") he is a kind, intelligent, una.s.suming man who lives in Key West in the winters and Provincetown in the summers. In drag he is most visible as Cher, riding up and down Commercial Street to promote his show on a motorized scooter. He is easy to talk to as Randy, somewhat more difficult to talk to as Cher, and I would have to say that I am friendly with one and only acquainted with the other.

Among these artists, but in a category of his own, is Ryan Landry.

RYAN.

Ryan has been a local celebrity for over ten years, which, as such things are reckoned there, might as well be a century. He is in his mid-thirties, a tall, dark-haired man with a handsome, equine face and an aspect of sly, wised-up innocence. I want to call him puckish, but he's more substantial than that. Think of the circus performer played by Richard Basehart in Fellini's La Strada La Strada.

Each summer he produces a show. At first he put on his own versions of Charles Ludlam's versions of Medea Medea and and Camille; Camille; then he began writing his own, which have included his takes on then he began writing his own, which have included his takes on Johnny Guitar, Dracula, Rosemary's Baby Johnny Guitar, Dracula, Rosemary's Baby, and Joan of Arc. He is always the star, as he should be. His sensibility falls somewhere between Ionesco and Lucy Ricardo.

He has also, over the years, put on a series of-what to call them?-revues, I suppose. For me, the greatest is s.p.a.ce p.u.s.s.y, which appears and disappears depending on the summer and is seldom held twice in the same bar or club.

s.p.a.cE P p.u.s.s.y.

s.p.a.ce p.u.s.s.y is presided over by Ryan and the s.p.a.ce p.u.s.s.y band, which includes a straight man, a gay man, a lesbian, and a transs.e.xual on drums. Anyone who wants to-anyone who gets in touch with Ryan sometime during the week before and agrees to come to one rehearsal-can do a number, but it has to be rock 'n' roll, you have to do your own singing, and you have to wear some sort of drag.

These events are hugely popular, and I try never to miss one when I'm in town. It's wonderful, to me, to witness hoots and applause bestowed lavishly by large crowds on anyone who has the courage to get into costume and mangle "Little Red Corvette" or "Jumpin' Jack Flash" or "White Rabbit" in public. And there is always the possibility of transcendence.

Occasionally someone who has never performed before and cannot, technically, sing at all breaks through to the sublime. The sheer, heady strangeness of it-here I am, in strange clothes, with a good band behind me, delivering a song to an eager audience-can inspire performances of which the person in question is not in any real way capable. I have seen a large, ungainly man, not young, deliver Patti Smith's cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria" with such force, it rattled the ice in my drink. I have heard a woman in girl drag (wigs, gowns, and makeup are, of course, every bit as much drag for some women as they are for men) sing "Ruby Tuesday" with a depth of wrenching melancholy Mick Jagger can only imagine.

NIGHT S SONG FOR A B BOYLock up the church, I feel as unasleep as a dead cat: regards are what I want, regards, regards, regards.

A priest after boy's a.s.s feels better than I do: When I walk around ladies on the stoops think I am death: If I had steel plates on my heels Oh they would know it.

I should rape a saint and she could save me from the dangers of life.

ALAN D DUGAN.

The East End.

AS YOU CONTINUE east, away from the center of town, you'll notice that your surroundings are beginning to take on what pa.s.ses in Provincetown for staid respectability. The shops on this end generally aspire to a higher level of dignity. Here you are likelier to find antiques that are genuine antiques, and jewelry that does not intend to be whimsical. It is the only part of town where you could buy a nonsatirical necktie. east, away from the center of town, you'll notice that your surroundings are beginning to take on what pa.s.ses in Provincetown for staid respectability. The shops on this end generally aspire to a higher level of dignity. Here you are likelier to find antiques that are genuine antiques, and jewelry that does not intend to be whimsical. It is the only part of town where you could buy a nonsatirical necktie.

The East End is where most of the art galleries are. Charles Hawthorne taught painting on Miller Hill Road in the East End, and after his death the studio was taken over by Hans Hofmann. Franz Kline studied painting with Henry Hensche in the East End. Mark Rothko bought a house there in the late fifties, though he didn't live in it for long. Milton Avery spent summers there in the fifties; Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner came one summer before settling in Easthampton. Robert Motherwell summered in his house on the East End for the last forty years of his life. The East End is where Eugene O'Neill's first plays were produced.

BIG A ART, LITTLE A ART.

The light in Provincetown rivals that of Paris or Venice. Being in Provincetown is like standing on a raft moored fifty miles out to sea. Its light is aquatic; it falls not only down from the sky but up again from the water, so that when you stand there, you do so as if between two immense platters of mirror. Provincetown's shadows are deeper and more complex than the shadows in most other places; its edges are sharper and its colors clearer. If you go there on a sunny day, you may imagine that you've been wearing tinted gla.s.ses all your life and have only now taken them off. Painters have been drawn to the light of Provincetown for over a century. Edward Hopper lived in Truro, and his paintings of Cape Cod will give you a good idea of the slightly terrifying purity of the light, its capacity to be exquisite, dazzling, beneficent, and merciless all at the same time. Like most things of great beauty, it is not entirely gentle and not merely pretty, not in any way.

Provincetown has long been a member of that rarefied breed, the artists' colony. Like so many places and people of a certain age, it had a heyday, which can be marked with an unusual degree of precision: As a center for the arts, Provincetown reached its acme in the summer of 1916.

Provincetown's metamorphosis from sc.r.a.ppy little fishing village to artists' colony more or less began in 1873, a year before the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris, when railroad lines finally connected Provincetown to Boston. Until then Provincetown had been so difficult to reach that hardly anyone went unless they had business there (which would inevitably have involved whales or fish) or were true adventurers. Provincetown's suddenly increased accessibility was a small part of a t.i.tanic shift in the dispersal of people everywhere. In the mid-1800s, railroads in particular and industrialization in general inspired people to abandon rural areas for what seemed at the time like better lives in the cities. Artists, moving in opposition to the larger trends, as artists tend to do, began fleeing the cities to live more cheaply, closer to nature, in the suddenly depopulated countryside. Artists were properly unnerved by the rise of mechanization and what it betokened about the extinction of the handmade, the particular, and the indigenous, which had never before seemed like endangered species. Painters began preferring the regional to the mythic and began leaving their studios to paint outdoors, where they could try and render life as it occurred and light as it fell. With trains-with easier travel across long distances-came the idea of the summer idyll, and rural villages all over Europe and Russia found themselves made into colonies by painters whose ambitions ranged from dabbling to dead seriousness, most of whom arrived determined to find whatever they could of feral and spontaneous beauty; to do justice of one kind or another to the local fields and mountains, the people and animals. At its highest it was the shift in method and intent that sp.a.w.ned the work of Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Monet.

The same current of altered ambition ran through Provincetown, beginning with the railroad, though in Provincetown it all took a somewhat sterner, more New England-ish turn. The seminal event in Provincetown's early life as an artists' mecca was not the sudden appearance of a genius or two but the establishment, in 1899, of the Cape Cod School of Art by Charles Hawthorne, who produced vaguely Manet-like oils of Provincetown scenes and citizens and who was an early American advocate of Impressionism. Hawthorne was a "gentleman painter" who spent his summers in Provincetown and his winters in France and who was generally congratulated for being so una.s.suming and democratic as to be seen riding a bicycle around town. His Cape Cod School of Art, and several others that started up in Provincetown around the same time, was enormously popular, especially with the wives of wealthy men who began arriving in considerable numbers to spend a summer week or two as bohemians, capped and smocked, laboring at easels set up on the wharves, beaches, and streets.

Provincetown the art colony took a more serious turn with the outbreak of World War I, when artists who might otherwise have gone to Europe found themselves forced to search out some sort of domestic equivalent of the exoticism and low rents their forebears had discovered in Paris. Provincetown naturally suggested itself. And so a new breed of artist-poorer and s.h.a.ggier, more radical-began turning up on the streets and beaches, elbowing out the matrons and dilettantes.

Eugene O'Neill arrived in the 1910s, as did John Dos Pa.s.sos, Mabel Dodge, Edmund Wilson, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Max Bohm, John Reed, and Louise Bryant. They were wild men and women, p.r.o.ne to free love, open marriage, Marxism, psychoa.n.a.lysis, peyote, and Eastern religion. The women bobbed their hair and eschewed corsets; the men wore berets and open-necked working-cla.s.s shirts of flannel or corduroy. Charles Demuth sometimes sported a black shirt and purple c.u.mmerbund, and Marsden Hartley could be seen in an enormous navy blue coat with a gardenia boutonniere.