“Not everyone from Massachusetts sounds like Teddy Kennedy.”
Luke laughs. “And you used to be a hustler?”
I feel my face redden. “Look, it was for a very short period. Before my job at the guesthouse, I worked at an insurance company.”
“So after you punched out, you walked the streets of Boston?”
“No,” I say, surprised at how embarrassed I am remembering that part of my life. It’s never embarrassed me before; in fact, I’ve always been rather proud of it in an odd sort of way—that I’d actually been hot enough to get paid for sex. But now, for whatever reasons, I don’t want to talk about it with Luke. “I had a profile online,” I tell him, trying to find a quick way to end the discussion. “It wasn’t a big deal.” Even though it was.
“I’ve thought about hustling myself,” Luke says, looking down his smooth chest and fingering his navel. “But then I figured, if I’m gonna be a famous writer, I don’t want any skeletons in my past.”
Okay, here it is: the moment when the conversation begins to lead us inexorably to Jeff. I let out a long breath, bracing for it. “And that’s why you moved here,” I say. “To be a writer.”
“Yeah.” Luke’s so natural about it, so confident—as if his dreams will just inevitably come true. “I took a writing class at Nassau Community College and my teacher thought I was a natural-born writer.” He widens his eyes as he looks at me. “I’m not trying to brag, Henry. I’m just telling you the facts. I wrote this short story that not only my teacher but the entire class thought could become a novel.”
“So what’s it about?”
“I’ll tell you over a plate of fried clams.” Luke is standing all of a sudden, adjusting his backpack on his shoulder. “Okay?”
“I’m not really hungry—”
“I am. I haven’t had lunch. And I have a craving for a cigarette—so unless I get some food, I’m gonna smoke. And you agreed to help me quit.”
“I never—”
“Come on, Henry.”
He motions me up.
“Well,” I say, giving in, “we can go over to Mojo’s. It’s quick, it’s cheap, and the food is pretty good, considering it’s a take-out stand. We can sit at the tables in back.”
“Perfect.”
I follow Luke back down the pier. It’s mostly straight tourists out here, women with large butts encased in loud floral print shorts, dragging along husbands who look as if they’d rather be anywhere else. A horde of screaming kids suddenly runs toward us, diverting only at the last possible moment from a collision with my gut. This isn’t the Provincetown of the popular gay imagination. The pier is the flip side of town—where few queers ever venture, except to board the ferry back to Boston. Why I picked this place to meet Luke, I don’t know. It just seemed the best choice—far away from the center of gay P-town. Why that should be important I still haven’t figured out.
In truth, there is no part of Provincetown that is less than beautiful. Even here—even among the tacky T-shirt shops and seashell emporiums—there is a certain exquisiteness to the place. Here, at the end of the earth, even the most ordinary buildings are infused with Provincetown’s particular glow, a result of the sun reflecting off the water all around us. When I first started coming here years ago, Provincetown was just a playground, a place I came with Jeff to take Ecstasy and trick with sexy boys—or attempt to, anyway. I’d dance until two a.m. fuck until five (if I was lucky) and then sleep until noon.
But now Provincetown is home, and my rhythm here is different. I cast my eyes ahead of me, past the colorful kites and Himalayan blankets being hawked in the square. Not far beyond stands the large white nineteenth-century Town Hall, and up on the hill behind it looms the 252-foot Pilgrim Monument. I’m giving Luke a picture postcard view of Provincetown. It’s still sometimes hard to believe that this is my home.
We live here clinging to the last dangling finger of the outstretched arm of Cape Cod, making our lives on a sandy spit that spirals off into the cold Atlantic. No one just “passes through” Provincetown. Only one road leads here, and it ends here, in crumbling asphalt swept over by drifting sand dunes. Here, Thoreau said, you can put all America behind you. The whole world, in fact.
A home at the end of the earth. I remember wondering if it were possible—for anyone other than sea crabs and mussels, that is, or the witless piping plovers forever being chased by the surf. But humans? It’s cold here, and wet, with the bitter winds that blow through here every winter reminding us we sit on just a few square miles of sand in the middle of the sea.
Summers are bliss here. The living—as the song says—is easy. But the winter is a whole other story. New England winters are legendarily tough, but try it out here, with everything boarded up, with the most of the population having headed south to Fort Lauderdale or Miami. Luke has no idea what awaits him. I know I didn’t. Night comes quickly in December, and January, and seemingly even more so in February, despite every logic of the season. “No one passes through Provincetown,” I kept repeating to myself that first winter. The headlights of cars never sliced through my living room. Wayward travelers never stopped me at the gas station to ask where they’d made a wrong turn. Days would go by in my little apartment and I’d see not a single person, or a light in any neighboring window. In those first years, we closed the guesthouse in February and March. Jeff was off on a book tour; Lloyd in a spiritual retreat in upstate New York. I sat out blizzard after blizzard by myself.
At first, I was claustrophobic from the isolation, but that changed. I discovered there was something rather magical about the sea in winter. The way the waves crashed against the hard sand, fierce and brittle, the unrelenting pound of the surf that eats away, bit by bit, year by year, a little more of the land. Looking out at the ocean my first winter in Provincetown, I realized the locals had been right: to say one has lived in Provincetown without experiencing the winter is like saying one has lived in New England without ever once seeing an autumn.
“You’ll get used to it here,” one old timer told me, wearing shorts in a blizzard. “The rules are just a little different.”
Those who live in Provincetown do so purposely. Even without a plan, there is nonetheless purpose. “I just got fed up,” a woman told me last week at the post office, the single point of intersection for many of us. “One day I just quit my job, packed my car, and drove as far as the road went.”
Washashores, the locals call them. I suppose that’s what I am, too, surrounded by writers and painters and people who make little carvings out of driftwood and shells.
But can it be home? Provincetown is a place people come to, not come from. No, that’s wrong: there are still families who’ve been here for generations, descendants of the fishermen of the last century, who cling defensively to their vanishing culture. But the summer population edges fifty thousand; year-round there’s barely three. The old fishing family homesteads are being bought up for exorbitant prices by affluent, mostly gay second-homers who envision Provincetown as the perfect place to retire. They will make it home then, these aging babyboomers, but for now, there’s still no fast food, no giant supermarket, no parking garage, no cinema multiplex, no Kinkos, no Staples, no Home Depot.
Ah, paradise, one might think. And certainly I have no desire to see golden arches looming over Commercial Street. But Luke’s in for a rude awakening when he runs out of printer paper on a late Sunday afternoon. Or tries following a recipe that calls for bok choy in February.
But if home is just convenience, then any strip mall in suburbia could be home. And I suppose it is, to somebody. I’m just glad it’s not me. I’ve come to subversively enjoy the fact that shopkeepers in Provincetown open only when they want to, despite the hours posted on the door. I like that the women in the post office wear outrageous wigs, and that drag queens cash you out at the A&P. Home is a place where you can stand face to face