William J. Mann

by Men Who Love Men (lit)

  “Ice cream.” I pat my belly. “As this squishiness demonstrates.”

  “Dude, you’re not that squishy. You need to get over your body hang-ups.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  In my head, I’m keeping a countdown. It’s been nearly two minutes since Luke sat down, and no mention yet of Jeff.

  “So, Henry,” the kid says, “you want to get some food later? Maybe you can show me where to eat cheaply in this town.”

  I lift my eyebrows. “Not too many cheap options here. At least not if you want to avoid clogged arteries and high blood pressure.”

  Listen to me. I sound like my mother. When did I get so old?

  “I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian,” Luke says. “But I figure if I’m going to turn my body into a temple, I gotta quit these things first.” He takes one last, long drag on his cigarette and flicks the butt into the water below. “But that will take some effort.”

  “Well, if I can quit the ice cream, you can quit the nicotine.”

  “Is that a wager?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s a deal.” Luke is smiling. “We can check in every day to make sure we’re not cheating.”

  I let out a sigh. Overhead a seagull swoops down low, arcing over our heads. I decide to move the conversation away from addictive behaviors.

  “Where did you say you were from, Luke?” I ask.

  “I’ve lived all over the country.”

  I look at him closely. “But in what particular part of it were you born?”

  “Long Island, New York.”

  Now it’s me who makes a face. “Lung Gyland?” I ask, using the local vernacular. “You sure don’t sound like you’re from Lung Gyland.”

  He smirks. “I told you. I’ve lived a lot of places. Besides, not everyone from Long Island sounds like Joey Buttafuoco.”

  I can’t help but smile a little. “I guess.”

  “My stepdad was a lawyer,” Luke tells me, “so I had a pretty upscale, middle-class childhood. At least for the later part. The beginning of my life is a whole other story.” He pulls his legs up onto the bench to sit cross-legged next to me. Our knees touch. It distracts me from asking a follow-up question and allows him to keep control of the conversation. “So how about you?” Luke asks. “Where were you born?”

  I’m very conscious of his knee touching mine. “West Springfield,” I say. “Western Massachusetts.”

  He cocks an eye at me. “You sure don’t sound like you come from Massachusetts.”

  “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 afte
r 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 with what’s real in the world, like at the top of a dune, or on a stretch of unspoiled beach.

  That’s what comes with making a home at the end of the earth. The rules are different . You don’t meet people passing through because there aren’t any. This is the 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.”