by Paul Lisicky
Do I ever express the intuition that our costumes feel undercooked to me? What if we had a dog, a real baby, a hedgehog? I don’t say so, nor do I bring any collaborating energy to the project. Maybe that’s a sign of my unbelief, or maybe I sense that Noah doesn’t want that kind of involvement from me.
On the afternoon of the parade, we mill about with the other participants outside Michael Shay’s, the former Howard Johnson’s. Noah makes a fuss over other participants, they make a fuss over him. Neither of us has bothered to practice walking with our ice cream cones, not even for a hundred feet, much less the length of the two-mile-long parade route. I haven’t considered the rigors of balance, the possibility of a quick wind from the harbor, but summer leaves no time for questioning, pondering, worrying, speculating, rehearsing, getting it right. We’re living right inside the moment. We are always running to work, whether it’s waiting on people, folding sheets and towels, answering memos. There isn’t a spare minute in the day, literally: Town leaves no room for practice. It’s the Town of the first draft, and there’s no time for taking out the gushy superlatives in paragraph two.
So many participants packed in the parking lot. Town’s proportions radically redistributed—put twenty-five percent of the population in one place and it’s different. It never occurred to me until now that my sense of Town has always depended on certain disbursements, crowds in the middle, or at Spiritus, and now that there are hundreds out here, it feels like everyone has gathered on one side of the raft and the raft is about to sink. There is excitement, buzz, a sense of competition keeping us all on our feet. Barbara Cohen takes our picture, and we don’t yet know it will end up as a piece of art, later sold as a refrigerator magnet.
The parade starts. Noah walks ahead of me, strutting in those high heels, waving at people, in character, at ease with the hungry crowd. My cone topples off, falls to the pavement by my feet. I look up at Noah. I am mortified, and I don’t have the stage presence to make a joke of my mishap, or go right on with the show. I am overwhelmed by all those eyes. I thought I was used to people looking at me, but it seems I’m not. If I were performing some other role, say reading from my work, or even teaching, I would know what to do. It feels like the toppling is connected to some secret instinct in myself that is driven to ruin, an instinct I’ve caught in others. Maybe I’d feel differently if I liked my costume, if it made me look remotely handsome in the way Noah’s costume makes him look beautiful and sly, someone you’d want to get to know. I look like a lost and failed Bee Gee, a Gibb who wants to be onstage, but once he’s up there, he sings a shade under pitch, embarrassing and infuriating his harmonizing brothers.
There’s loud music behind us, a float—will big tires run us down if we stop? There are faces, seemingly thousands of them. It’s best not to make eye contact with the faces, but it’s hard not to. The faces aren’t exactly supportive faces. And they’re not homophobic, but they’re starving for entertainment, stimulation, and spectacle, starving for us to do something gay, but not too gay, in order to take the gay out of themselves—if someone else could be a great big sissy for you, then why the hell not let him? They’re not on our side, and until then my experience of straight suburban visitors to Provincetown has been: we might not exactly like you, but we are at least on your side. I look at one young man’s face, and he looks back at me with the face of someone who wants to shoot a poison dart at my cone—the residue sliding down my forehead into my eye. And my relationship to my cone is tainted now: I’ve been thinking too much. I put it back on, try to walk with it for a few feet more, I bend my legs, tip my head just slightly to the left, and off it falls again.
“Fuck,” I cry. “Fuck!” And again and again and again.
The cone is alive. The cone has a personality. The cone is not my friend. The cone wants to humiliate me. Once it knows it can fall off my head, it throws itself off as if to remind me it was never an extension of me, and I never had the right to assume mastery of its weight.
I hate my cone. I want to demolish it as it’s demolishing me. It makes my neck ache. If it were possible I’d leave the parade route, find a baseball bat, and smash my cone to a thousand pieces until it was just useless pieces of plastic.
Halfway through the parade—I think we’re there. Yes, Town Hall’s just ahead, and Noah’s disappointment is clear behind his wave and his wide, wide grin. I know his disappointment isn’t simply in me; it reaches beyond me, and soaks into us. Maybe it’s impossible not to feel disappointment after being taken in by all those eyes. All those eyes have taken some force out of us, and all that’s left is a desire to forget. I wouldn’t even call it emptiness.
I’ll wake up tomorrow and I’ll be the same, Town will be the same. But each time I drop the cone, I lose a bit more of the me I thought I’d built up in Town. I’m getting back the life I thought I’d left behind, the life of awkwardness, diffidence, errors. Sickness too.
And I’m no longer safe in my refuge. I’ve been taken out of my house and these visitors have brought their rules, their fear of shame back to me.
Why don’t I take off the cone, hand it to someone, walk on, and at least have some fun with this time now that there are only a few blocks left? No one should take a parade, much less themselves, so seriously, but I’m too caught up in some act of loyalty to Town, loyalty to Noah.
I look up to see the people I know—Jim and Al, for instance, look at me with pitying smiles. The pain’s about them, too, as no one’s exactly having fun. The look in their eyes suggests we’ll remember all this but we’d prefer to remember something else. Joy, for one, but joy doesn’t etch its letters on your brain. Rather, the brain wants hurt, wants to hold on to it, as it contains the possibility of work, negotiating with it over time.
The cone falls six times. It’s part of a routine now, as reflexive as a cough.
At parade’s end, Noah doesn’t talk. We are exhausted, dehydrated. There is no elation, no fun, no relief that’s it’s over, no adrenaline. We don’t join any of the other revelers but merely walk away from the parade down Pleasant Street. We fold our arms close to our bodies, as if keeping ourselves protected and warm, though a cold breeze hasn’t blown in hours. And Noah doesn’t even have the energy to look at me.
“We got through it,” I finally say, though I don’t quite yet know why that feeling should be so important to see and say. We’ll get through other things we can’t even imagine yet.
28
Friend
Mark calls one morning, asking if I’ll drive him to Hyannis. His car is at the Barnstable airport, and he’s left it there out of some complicated travel scenario. On the drive down Route 6, I’m surprised by how comfortable we are with each other, how easily our conversation moves back and forth, without awkward pauses. We laugh a lot. We finish each other’s sentences, as they say, which is a bit of a surprise, as I’ve always been in awe of Mark. Not just of his poems but of his command of the room at readings. “He’s big,” says David, another poet in Town. Another says, “He’s blowing up,” which seems remotely crass to me, as most of the poems are written out of the landscape of the Epidemic, navigating the inevitable loss of Wally. How do you love someone you’re going to lose? his poems ask. How do you participate in life, all the way down to the work of perception, as in how you see this green crab’s shell? “A Greco-Roman wreck, / patinated and oddly // muscular.” His poems are meaningful not just to other partners of the sick but their parents and siblings too. There isn’t very much out there to give people company, at least when it comes to words or songs or movies. News stories, accounts in magazines, but statistics? They don’t see into your suffering.
Pitch pines flash by. The big sign at the Wellfleet Drive-in: my eyes drift to what’s playing on the marquee. The two-lane Suicide Alley. Do we eat somewhere off the Hyannis Rotary? Possibly. Up until now I’ve really been only a friend of Wally’s, and now it’s a relief to know I have another friend too.
Somehow we never get sick of each
other on that hour-long ride. We never run out of things to say, even though we don’t say the first word about what’s going on at home. We don’t need to.
A few days later I get a phone call from Mark. Wally can’t be left alone at home anymore. He’s going to have full-time live-in help now, and they won’t be needing me to check in on Tuesdays. He thanks me, and is too harried and distracted to say much more.
Hurt
I cannot know what brings it on, but one day the sentence comes out of my mouth, as if it can no longer be trapped. “Noah and I don’t have sex. We stopped having sex months ago.” The confession isn’t exactly received as a shock by Polly. The calm, sympathetic interest on her face says she’s heard such things before—or knows it herself? But to say it aloud burns the sound of the words into the atmosphere. To say it feels like no change is possible, and I’m helping to make sure we never have sex again. It comes with a little shame. I know it reveals that the two of us don’t talk about deep things, how we might negotiate problems, grow with them. It’s easier to rely on our routines to hold the two of us together. Plus, maybe I find it easier to grasp on to the fact that he doesn’t find me attractive any longer and thus I can use that as an occasion to feel hurt, and then resentful. That feeling hurt: Hurt is my biggest drug, even though I don’t often say that to myself. It’s always so tempting to go there, to get that surge, that fix. What else out there, aside from sex, makes me feel more alive from the inside out? What else tests my resilience, reminds me of it?
It’s preferable to simply decide we are happy, because in many ways we are—absolutely. And it feels important to demonstrate that we’re happy when the culture tries everything it can to extinguish the queer couple. No legal protections. Just try to visit your partner when he’s in the hospital.
A couple of days after my confession to Polly, it becomes clear that Noah has his own ideas about this situation, but he does it through humor, and channels it through somebody else. “Poor Paul,” Lark will say to me in front of Noah. “Poor horny Paul,” and I’ll look down at the wood grain on the kitchen table and turn bright red. I’ll laugh along, relieved to laugh the awkwardness away, relieved that Noah has seen the situation as important enough to discuss. Every time I’ve tried to bring it up, it’s been waved away as if it’s nonsense, a nuisance like a housefly darting about. I hear understanding in Lark’s statement, but only some. He’s making fun of me, but in a way that wants to include rather than exclude me. It says, Welcome to being a grown-up, welcome to getting less than you think you deserve. And you better start laughing now, turning the situation into a Borscht Belt joke, because you have no idea of the things to come.
But why shouldn’t I think everything has been for sex? Isn’t that what we’ve been dying for? Isn’t sex more precious because we’re always on the verge of being denied it? If there weren’t AIDS in the picture, would these questions mean so much? Could AIDS make me want sex more than I would otherwise?
For its power, for its danger and rebellion.
India
Noah must be desperate to get away. Even though I love Town, it gets to be too much for me, and all I feel are its tight borders, that cold deep sea on three sides working on me like a ring I can’t pull off my finger. He suggests spending the winter at my parents’ house in Florida. I’m not sure he even likes what he hears about my parents; he thinks I’m not out and open enough to them. Sometimes I think the only parents he might like are so open-minded they don’t exist in the world—at least they won’t spring to life for another decade or so. And when they do, it will be as if supportive parents of LGBTQ children always existed but were too shy to let themselves be counted and known.
It’s impossible to imagine Noah in my parents’ Florida. When he hears “Florida,” he likely sees palms and chickee huts and beaches—a failed take on Goa. I don’t know how to communicate that my parents’ house is another place, a new town spun up out of live oaks and sandhills a few years before: sprinkler systems, frenetically neat Floratam grass, white tile roofs, humans inside their houses or around their caged pools. The occasional armadillo or opossum. A pygmy rattlesnake. An hour from the nearest gay bar and gay neighborhood. A ten-mile drive to the beach, a listless Gulf beach, with sticky, greased barbecue grills and swings, mysterious shine fish slipping alongside your legs, a mile-walk out just to get deeper than your waist. I see him trying his best the first week, then getting bored, resentful, isolated. Who in this part of Florida would welcome him, would understand his humor and play? Perhaps my mother would. After a bit she’d come to care about him, want to be entertained by him, but she’d never be enough audience for him, and of course they’d get on each other’s nerves, if not openly about it to each other, but to me.
What would we be without Town? We are parts of its body now. We are its lungs and feet, but our identification has come at a cost. We can’t live anywhere where the climate conditions are less than hothouse ideal. We fear it’s weakened us, taken away the armor we would have developed if we’d been living elsewhere. So where does that leave us? New York? Too expensive. Montreal? Freezing cold. Los Angeles? Amsterdam? San Miguel de Allende? Puerto Vallarta? Vieques? Tangier? Bali? Noah periodically brings up rural India, and I only wish he hadn’t told me so much about his year of travels there. It all concentrates into a bus ride through the mountains, where Noah pushed himself down the aisle of the bus, crying for the driver to stop, and squatting in a gully to take a big watery crap as the people in their seats looked down and looked away in disgust. To Noah travel must feel like aliveness. In new circumstances, you’re learning how to eat, how to accommodate the needs of your body. Maybe, on a deeper level, it involves saying fuck you to your old expectations, to realize that your manners were part of a system that told you that you were a loser, a good-for-nothing faggot, you were always less than useful, and thus you never got the opportunity to grow your strength.
Right now I don’t have the energy to put myself through any of that. Palm trees, beaches, eighty-eight-degree water, mountains, yes. But hardship? I’ve lived too much of my life inside that word—or at least under the threat of it, which is its own kind of punishment. I don’t want it to be too familiar: I want to shake it off. And aren’t we living hardship in utopia, even when we tell ourselves it’s home?
Speculative
What becomes clear is that I can’t bring Town to another place. I can’t grow a different body if the skeleton has already hardened.
What’s missing in the Hypothetical Place? Sex. By sex I don’t mean fucking. Sex will likely take place inside the houses, on the beds and staircases, but it isn’t talked about. In Town sex is walked down the streets. I’m talking about the eros that keeps people alive, that connects us to others, to animals, to plant life. That takes us out of ourselves and does the same for others. An eros that’s central to our lives as much as making things, paying bills, going out with our friends for dinner and drinks and movies. In the speculative place, bodies are shunted away. Death is directed to funeral parlors where bodies are perfumed, polished, powdered, fragranced, drained, pumiced—turned into something ghastly, as if the body were an aberration, as if death didn’t happen to all of us, as if it were something to be embarrassed about. So much effort to sweep death to the sidelines when that place is all about death. It doesn’t even know that death has always been our sibling.
Joy Williams: “death’s energy, death’s vital energy, is being ignored.”
As to what is gained by this erasure? Privacy. All you have is the silence around your own body, your own head and hands. Ugly voices, rude people: If you put a headset on, you don’t even have to take them in. Walk straight ahead, eyes straight ahead, cold. You know the type.
Which might be why I take the wrong turn when I’m visiting the Hypothetical Place on a trip. I don’t drive down the outer lanes, where I’m supposed to go, but right down the center, which is divided by an abandoned railroad track. There’s no way to get back to the outer lanes. T
here are curbs on either side, walls of tall shrubs, high as a one-story building. I’ve strayed outside my category. I drive faster and faster, there are ruts in the gravel now, I’m sure I’m going to break the axle in half. But a turnout appears and I wrench the wheel to the right. Disaster averted. I get out before the train heads south, but that doesn’t mean I’m not shaken and humbled by my inability to see.
Unspoken
Lands End Inn perches at the top of the tallest dune in the West End, a bit country club, more Monterey Peninsula than New England, with an octagonal observation tower overlooking the hump of the mainland. The annual holiday party is tonight, and Polly, Noah, and I climb the stairs from Commercial Street, drawn to lively voices, the music from the open windows up above. Every year David, the owner, throws open the doors of his guesthouse, and all the hardcore townies are there, from overlapping social circles. Tensions release as soon as we step inside. It’s as if I don’t know what I’ve been missing until I step inside. No one’s drawing lines around themselves—or maybe they’re just relaxing old lines. Everyone is safe—relatively. Unlikely conversations take place between unlikely people, and the spirit of that feels contagious. I wander away from Polly and Noah and end up talking to some guy I’ve seen at the gym for months but have never more than nodded to. It doesn’t bother us that the food is freezer burned, or that the punch is suspect, as if some houseboy opened some cabinet and poured in all the liquor and mixers previous guests left behind. We think of its failures as endearing, even funny, even though David’s health is reportedly taking a turn. We’re riding the wave of death, and the party is meant both to distract us from that wave and to raise a glass to everyone who made it (or not) to another year. Everyone is recorded, remembered. And that is the unspoken story of the night.
