ROBERT 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.
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, 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.
LAND’S END
Provincetown
Zero ground, fickle sandbar
where graves and gravity conspire,
Beer bottle amber and liquor green
surrender their killing shards.
Like ashes, dust, even glass
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 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 saltwater 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.
TOWN HALL
The physical center of town (as opposed to its several different aesthetic, spiritual, and sexual centers) is the block that contains the sedate white bulk of Town Hall. The building houses various municipal 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 massive wooden doors fitted with panels of opaque glass. 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 glass cases full of stuffed birds, Indian artifacts, and petrified shells.
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 classically 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 homosexual. Next summer we feel confident that he too will have moved on and been replaced by someone else.
THE MAIN 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 Café, 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 Mitchell 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 quantities 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, unassuming 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.
Each summer he produces a show. At first he put on his own versions of Charle
s Ludlam’s versions of Medea and Camille; then he began writing his own, which have included his takes on 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 Space Pussy, which appears and disappears depending on the summer and is seldom held twice in the same bar or club.
SPACE PUSSY
Space Pussy is presided over by Ryan and the Space Pussy band, which includes a straight man, a gay man, a lesbian, and a transsexual 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.