Provincetown’s retail offerings are narrow in one sense (it is difficult to buy a proper hairbrush there, or good stationery, or a pair of dress shoes) and in another sense vast and rich. Treasures abound, though they are hidden among an enormous amount of questionable merchandise. It is as depressingly easy to procure a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of kittens in bathing suits, a rubber seagull on a string, ugly jewelry, or a “personalized” coffee mug as it is in most beach towns. The town is prone to mysterious retail proclivities that evolve over the years. For quite some time there were a dozen or more shops that sold leather goods—in the business district you were never more than a hundred yards from some place offering an array of leather belts, bags, and jackets. The goods didn’t vary much from store to store; each sold variations on the same essential articles: leather knapsacks and cowboy boots; tooled belts with big silver buckles; unsupple, medium-quality leather jackets that never fully shed the smell of their tanning. Over time the leather shops gradually disappeared and have since been replaced by an equally bewildering profusion of stores that sell esoteric household goods. It is now as easy to buy a pair of sporty Italian salt and pepper shakers or a set of wooden sake boxes as it once was to get a black leather jacket with a half-dozen zippered openings. I can only imagine that the customers of Provincetown have matured along with the times and that a certain general fantasy about outlaw status has been replaced by one of stylish domestic prosperity.
Provincetown also boasts several stores so locally vital I feel I should tell you about them in detail. All of the following are, heroically, open year-round, weekdays as well as weekends.
ADAMS PHARMACY
Adams Pharmacy has been in business for over a century and was, until recently, the only drugstore in town. It is full of a sepia-toned version of any drugstore’s smell—cosmetics and ointments combined with a subtle odor of powdery cleanliness. It has, over the decades, been halfheartedly modernized. Wood-grain Masonite paneling covers its walls; fluorescent tubes hum on its hundred-year-old wooden ceiling. It is a small hole punched into the present, through which you can see the past—not the preserved, romanticized past of faux general stores and various Ye Olde enterprises but the shaggy genuine article, more than a little dog-eared and moth-eaten, the great-grandmother of the monolithic modern drugstores that abound everywhere in North America. Adams Pharmacy is clean enough and prosperous enough—its shelves are well stocked, it does not reek of decline—but unlike its descendants, with their scoured surfaces and perfect light, it has not shed its sense of our collective meagerness in the face of mortal processes. It is palpably stalwart but puny, and although its pharmacists dispense the same drugs you could get anywhere else, it is more difficult to believe that they will do much good. Adams Pharmacy belongs to a different period in the ongoing history of healing; its roots are not in magical machinery but in artificial limbs, in desperate possibilities ground to dark powders with mortars and pestles, in liquids meant to be poured into handkerchiefs and inhaled by wives with nervous conditions.
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
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 massive 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 heterosexual 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 prone 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, prone 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 SPECIALTIES
Marine Specialties is a store of such surpassing 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 accumulated 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 balls, Red Cross blankets, pea coats, wool undershirts, camouflage pants, and a hoard of World War II artifacts, up to and including unopened C-rations. It would not be entirely surprising to see stalactites 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 glass bottle I bought there for him, prominently labeled 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 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 li
fe-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.
THE ATLANTIC 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 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.
SPIRITUS
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 a
fter 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.
THE WANT BONE
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.