crossroads of nowhere. This is the end of the road. The people you meet are the people who are here. Some who have dropped out, who have fallen through the cracks. Some who have said the hell with it, and some who have found heaven in a half-mile stretch of sand.
Luke will have to find his own rhythm, discover the town’s secrets for himself. A clerk at the scrimshaw shop once showed me the little shady corner of the town cemetery where on particularly busy days in July he could retreat with his thoughts and his journal. A guy at the Provincetown AIDS Support Group invited me to experience the bleak beauty of Long Point in November. Now I have my own secrets, my own special places.
Working here, living here, I’m not always able to drop what I’m doing when old friends pop in and expect a weekend of revelry. It’s been a very long time since I’ve slept in until noon. I like the sunrise in Provincetown far too much, an event I experienced in the old days only when I staggered home from a trick’s house at dawn. I follow a different rhythm now, but I realize it is the multitude of dances that makes Provincetown so unique. I was once in the same place Luke is in now, wide-eyed as he discovers the magic. And it pleases me to no end that there are still crowds on the steps of Spiritus Pizza at two a.m., still boys sleeping in until noon before stumbling out to Herring Cove beach. I might grumble when the line at the post office extends out the door or when buying a quart of milk at the Grand Union takes an hour and a half, but I’m glad when the boys of summer return. I love the drag queens sashaying down the street, the circuit boys in their spandex, the leather dads and the bear cubs. Each to their own rhythm, their own magic. This is their town as much as mine.
There are those who rue the “commercialization” of Provincetown, who gripe that the place has become too geared to nightclubbing and resort tourism. And yet I remember, soon after arriving here, picking up Time and the Town by Mary Heaton Vorse, published in 1942. Vorse had made Provincetown her home since the days of Eugene O’Neill some three decades earlier, and she was lamenting, “A few people have been allowed to damage the beauty of Provincetown. The rowdy nightclubs, the wholesale selling of worthless knick-knacks, make it possible…to brand the place a ‘honky-tonk.’ Those few who cater to some unwholesome element for a little money rob themselves as well as the whole town.”
Yet Provincetown survived Vorse’s fears, going on to several more “golden ages” after the one she described. Elsewhere, she seemed more optimistic, writing: “The one certainty is that Provincetown is in history’s path as it has always been.” Every season someone new will discover Provincetown and find his or her own rhythm in the place. And so it will go on.
For the boy walking ahead of me—indeed, for all first-timers like him—Provincetown retains its power to bewitch. Here, anything goes. Here one can spot, as Luke and I do now, the fabulous Ellie, a seventy-two-year-young transvestite pulling a sound system in a red wagon down Commercial Street while she croons “My Way” by Frank Sinatra. Watching her, Luke is beaming, pointing her out to me as if I’ve never seen her before—as if Ellie is as new and as fresh as he is. And in that moment, in Luke’s smile, she is. We all are.
At Mojo’s we order fried clams and Diet Cokes and settle in at one of the picnic tables.
“So your novel,” I say.
“Do you really want to hear?”
I smile. “Sure, why not?”
“Well, it’s about this kid, who was homeless, who gets adopted by this really great family but then…”
Luke’s words trail off. He just sits there staring straight ahead.
“But then what?” I ask.
Still he doesn’t say anything. A little voice inside me tells me not to follow Luke’s gaze, not to turn my head and see what he’s seeing. But of course I look anyway.
It’s Jeff, scrutinizing Mojo’s menu a few feet away.
I can’t help but laugh. “Ah,” I say, “if it isn’t your literary idol.”
“Jeffrey O’Brien,” Luke says softly.
“In the flesh,” I say. “What d’ya think?”
“I thought he’d be taller,” Luke says.
I laugh out loud. That one little comment makes my day.
My laughter has drawn Jeff’s attention. He looks over at us.
“Henry,” he says, heading our way. Already I see him checking out Luke. God, do I know that look. It’s the look of a kid in a shopping cart as his mother pushes him down the toy aisle. I want that, his eyes say. But as soon as he’s passed his object of desire, he’s forgotten it and moved on to another.
“Jeff,” I say, accepting the inevitable, “this is Luke. Luke, Jeff.”
“Jeff O’Brien,” Jeff echoes, shaking the kid’s hand.
“I know,” Luke breathes in awe.
“He’s got your book under his bed,” I tell Jeff.
“Actually,” Luke says, unzipping his backpack, “I have it right here.”
Out comes not one book, but three—two in paper, one hardcover.
Jeff beams. “You’ve got the whole Jeffrey O’Brien collection right there. All three of my books.”
Luke spreads them out on the picnic table in front of us, careful to move the fried clams far away first, so they don’t stain his treasures. There’s the well-read, much-creased copy of The Boys of Summer that I saw under Luke’s bed, plus its sequel, More Boys, More Summer. The hardcover is Jeff’s latest, a more “literary” attempt—one without the prerequisite shirtless boy on the front. Finding Home, it’s called.
“I especially loved this one,” Luke says, tapping the cover of Finding Home. “I thought it was just…I don’t know. Just brilliant.”
Jeff sits down on the other side of the picnic table, facing us. “The critics weren’t so sure,” he says, eyes glued on Luke.
“That’s because they pigeon-holed you. They weren’t ready to let you try something different.”
They couldn’t be playing their parts any better if Jeff had written the goddamn script. I lean my head on my hand, watching this little drama unfold.
“Well, that’s what we like to believe,” Jeff says, in that slightly deeper-than-usual voice he uses around fans. “I’m glad you liked it, though.”
“Oh, man, I loved it.”
I wonder. Finding Home has none of the signs of being well read. Unlike The Boys of Summer, its pages aren’t dog-eared. Its binding isn’t even cracked.
Luke is still gushing. “And I loved the interview you gave to The Advocate about it. You know, where you revealed that you, like the protagonist, were also an old movie and TV fan.”
Jeff twinkles on cue. “You mean the interview where I came out of the closet as a secret geek.”
The boy’s smile threatens to close his eyes with his cheeks. “You are so not a geek. I’m a geek.”
“Well, if so,” Jeff says, “geeks are a lot cuter these days than they used to be.”
I feel my stomach roil, and it’s not the fried clams.
Luke is clearly smitten. He’s rummaging in his backpack again, and produces something I can’t at first identify. It’s flat, and wrapped in plastic.
“Take a look at this,” he’s telling Jeff.
It looks like a small movie poster. Slipped into a plastic bag and backed by a piece of a cardboard, it showcases a woman I don’t recognize. Jeff takes it from Luke’s hands and gazes at it with a kind of wonder.
“Holy shit,” he says. “A lobby card from Becky Sharp!”
“Yeah,” Luke replies, in the