by Paul Lisicky
5
New Boy
Every season there will be a New Boy—I’ve been told by a few acquaintances to keep an eye out for this phenomenon. He’ll be absurdly handsome, with wavy dark hair and rugged features that set him apart from the prevalent look of white Boston. He’ll have some mystery about him. A distinctive name, a movie star name, likely self-chosen the week before he got to Town. He’ll often be within five years of twenty-seven, and will possess one feature of exaggerated musculature, say, triceps as wide as his neck, or heartbreaking lats. One year his name will be Storm, another year Echo. Once that boy becomes famous in Town, his name will come up at every party, every public event. To claim connection to the New Boy will be to confer prestige and value upon oneself. Have you seen Echo? Echo is looking for a new apartment. You have to see Echo’s old apartment. He has the best view of the harbor. I think I saw Echo the other day? Where? Oh, Echo was at the A&P. Well, the next time you see Storm tell him Echo got a new haircut. Oh, what kind of haircut? A Caesar haircut. Oh my God, Echo’s always so much ahead of the curve.
Will the New Boy enjoy his status? All those faces turned to him when he might once have been bullied or ignored? Of course he will enjoy the attention, but he will also feel the clock in his bones. If he knows his time is now, he will be smart enough to know someone else could sweep into Town and take his designation away. Invariably he will have one season. Invariably he will be trailed by that one season for the rest of his life, if he has a long life. Years later, someone will point to him, now a nice middle-aged man, and say, See that guy? He was once the handsomest guy in Town. And that statement will be delivered in a voice part sympathetic, part respectful, part laced with schadenfreude. And that man, should he hear that voice, will look forward and pull in his lips, carry himself as if those words had always been about someone else.
Mr. Mystery
As for me? I couldn’t care less about the New Boy. He will never be for me; he’s too much involved with himself. Not guys with classical features, not guys in powerful circles, or in any circles, really. Not even guys with personality, which can be collaged from movies and media and trash talk from the street. What do I want? Someone with the ability to turn the inner life outward. A stance that isn’t always participatory. Warm, but a little cold, too, unreachable, elusive, removed. A quality that excludes me, that makes him feel that much more compelling—he’s someone I want to get to the bottom of, even as I know that is as likely as a trip to the moon. He might play up something wrong about himself, a big nose, a jug ear, a broken front tooth, and turn it into the biggest gift of his life.
Factory
The hardest thing to convey: humans get used to this. They don’t fold their arms with their heads hung low. They laugh, maybe they even laugh more than they did in better days. They live alongside this the way they live alongside all the earth’s horrors: mass incarceration, racism, war, the memory or possibility of rape and harassment—where does the list stop? Sometimes there’s rage, pus-filled rage, as livid as a blister, but not every second of the hour. People manage to get through the days, unless they find themselves at a memorial service.
Sometimes all it takes is an unexpected sign, a face or gesture conjured up by one word. And once that choking up happens it’s almost impossible not to wail. It’s almost impossible not to fall down.
Sleepy beach town: factory of death.
Several Feet Above
There were so many deaths that we didn’t even know really whether someone had died or not. Somebody would say, “Oh, so and so died yesterday.” And then I would say, “Well, I saw them at the A&P this morning.” So Katina and I had [our] own way of de … of who was really dead, were they dead or were they dead dead? Dead dead meant that they were actually, truly dead. Dead meant somebody had told us they were dead, but we hadn’t confirmed it yet. That’s the way it was, so many people dying that you had to get to the dead dead level, then you would know there would be a memorial service coming soon.
JAN ICE WALK, Safe Harbor/Provincetown History Project
Billy’s name comes up three times in two days. He isn’t a writer himself but has strong connections to other writers, many of whom I’m getting closer to. All the enthusiasms passed along to me suggest that he and I would get along, either as very good friends or—something more? Oh, you’ll love Billy. He’s watched you walking down Pearl Street. He wants to meet you. Really? Me? Billy wants to meet me? Within a matter of days, Billy morphs into a kind of movie star in my imagination. I am excited about meeting this Billy. Billy is a smartass. Billy is from Lincroft, New Jersey, up the coast from where I spent childhood summers. Billy is an older version of the boys I grew up with, mean boys, snarling boys, boys I’d fantasized about, boys proud of their thick, arrogant dicks, boys who couldn’t wait to take a shower in gym, calling me a fag for covering myself up with a towel the second I took off my pants in front of my locker.
I’m not terribly surprised that the actual Billy has nothing in common with this image. He is not tall, but not short either. He has a sweet face, is quick to laugh. His face is bewildered every time I talk to it, as if it isn’t quite hearing or understanding every word, but thinks it’s better to pretend it does. He is a deliberately ordinary guy, but maybe this ordinariness has been cultivated only in recent times. Maybe Town has cultivated it out of him.
If he looks like a movie star, he looks like Dustin Hoffman, but it’s a younger version of Dustin Hoffman. Not Ratso Rizzo or the guy from The Graduate, but a lesser-known, quieter character.
One of Billy’s projects involves photography. On his walls are his dreamy Polaroids, drenched in rich tones, resembling the dyes in food coloring. A navel orange, some open flowers, the shadow of an off-screen object suggesting a sprained plus sign. But the art closest to his heart appears to be cakes. His cakes are all over Town, from functions at the Art Association to AIDS Support Group dinners. Occasionally something is off about his cakes, though they are reportedly always delicious. Once, one multitiered cake collapsed when a knife touched its white icing. Another involved clear, water-filled tubes, and the goldfish that swam in them came to a tragic end in front of the guests of the party, who were expectedly devastated.
Billy looks at me with adoration, a special moon-eyed look like the look I’d get from a basset hound. When I look back at him with the special moon-eyed look of a basset hound, he looks back at me with confusion, as if I’ve misunderstood an equation as simple as one plus one. There’s an endearing nervousness in his eyes, as if I am watching him take a pee by the road.
I’m supposed to be the adored one. It isn’t the other way around, and when I try to adore I appear to take his power away, so I play.
He makes me dinner one night, but the dinner goes by so fast I’m not sure what I’m eating. We’re pretending to be grown-ups when we have other things on our minds. All of a sudden Billy becomes romantic. He grabs me by the hand and leads me up the stairs to the bedroom, under a white steep-pitched roof, a bedroom inside the letter A. He starts unbuttoning my shirt, which always feels nice; I like to feel owned. It doesn’t even matter whether I like it or not; I’m just relieved to be having sex again: a week is too long. Our clothes are off. The windows wide-open. The paperwhites and their foul smell, like a rotting bone. Fall air cooling our naked skin. Maybe just down the street someone is sitting on the edge of his bed, wondering when his coughs will go away.
“Billy?” someone says, weeks later, after I’ve let out we’ve been close. “You can do better than that.” I feel bad for the character of the person who says that, but not for Billy. Billy will be all right.
There is lube, there is lotion. (I don’t know why there is lotion here as anyone with any sense knows that lotion eats latex.) Condoms? I don’t see a box on the table and I don’t have one in my pocket. Billy’s always been open about the fact that he’s positive, so I don’t know why he rolls over onto his stomach, and I don’t know why I don’t say, Hey, do you have
a condom in the drawer? But anyone who’s ever had sex knows that sex has a life all its own, and that’s true if you’re straight or queer. I want to make Billy happy. I’m afraid of confrontation, awkwardness. I’m watching two other bodies, several feet above the bodies we’re in.
Two things are happening here: my desire to be above, my desire to be in. I must maintain both positions if I’m to get through this experience, the experience I want, but that I’m so afraid of.
I know the facts. I know it’s unlikely anything lethal is running through my bloodstream right now.
And yet that shroud of, what? Guilt? Panic? I pull it around my shoulders, pull it tighter until I feel almost warm inside it. I should have watched out for myself, as if I were someone I actually cared about.
“OK, honey, I’m sleepy,” Billy says, with sweetness, a boyish sweetness that masks the distance in it. “I’m sending you home now.” He kisses me, dryly now, in the space where my two eyebrows almost meet. He sighs, part melancholy, part contented, as if he doesn’t know how we ended up together in this era, in Town, not fifty years from now. As he doesn’t intend to be mean, I don’t receive it as mean. I walk up the street with five words in my head. One of those words is boyfriend.
Blood Brothers
My thoughts go to bleak places in the middle of the night, places they’re not supposed to go. I think about the nineteenth century and Chopin, Keats, Emily Brontë. The romance of tuberculosis. The blood in the corners of the mouth. Bloody cough into the handkerchief. Little lamp on the table. The instant of transmission, voluptuous, fatal. We’re all going to die anyway. Is it so wrong to want a boyfriend with HIV? I’d always be bound in blood, blood brothers. The same virus replicating, multiplying in our bodies in sync. If I were going to seroconvert—and if I had to—it would be preferable to get it from someone I loved. What could be worse than getting it from someone I wasn’t even attracted to, someone I just had boring, rushed, and so-so sex with? We’re all going to die, anyway, and I am tired of living on the outside. I worry about holding myself apart, a fear I’ve had all my life, some residue of my father’s fear in me: distrust of others, their judgment. I want to be part of the story of my time, of my tribe. I’m afraid of never moving into my life, like the guy in his second-floor room around the corner from the head shop.
Maybe it’s impossible to stop it, a wave that looks quieter than a tsunami. I put on my condoms. But blood seeps into a cut, a drop of semen creeps into a cut in the hand. One night I dream of waking up with a tingling in my hand, no feeling. Neuropathy. Or maybe I can’t see out of the right eye, and I open the left even wider, blink blink blink in the hopes of blinking the darkness out. But if I were in love with someone, wouldn’t company help me bear it?
One day a writer in Town reads a story in which the main character deliberately seeks out seroconversion. He wants to get it, with a pathological intensity, wants to give it out. Much later there is an informal name—bug chasers—given to such people, but not yet, and maybe that is why the audience sits through the reading transfixed, galvanized, scared, stricken. The story is too charged for people to talk about. Perhaps it’s too much honesty, perhaps a telling detail or two makes more than one person mad: it pokes at too many taboos. And when the writer finally publishes the story, that aspect is picked clean from the narrative and only the bleached bones of its skeleton remain.
Head
It is said that if you buy a sex toy in the head shop, you must buy it from the guy in the back. Fried from so many drugs, he comments on your purchase, laughs at it, says something creepy, invasive. His brushy mustache, his leather motorcycle vest, his exposed sun-lamped belly, which he displays, as if he’s carrying twins inside him. He doesn’t even like queer people—or any people for that matter. Drugs have probably blasted his brain clean. But maybe some want to be stirred up and tossed around by this person-hating daddy, so when they take their clothes off, they know how precious their purchase is. They know what it cost them, and thus how dirty they are, which has its imaginative uses.
Queer
People can tolerate two homosexuals they see leaving together, but if the next day they’re smiling, holding hands and tenderly embracing one another, then they can’t be forgiven. It is not the departure for pleasure that is intolerable, it is waking up happy.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, “The Gay Daddy”
The Provincetown of Freedom up against the Provincetown of Restraint: it doesn’t take long to figure out that both straight and queer people fall on either side of the line. After all, Provincetown is geographically situated in Puritan New England, and restraint keeps buildings, yards, outfits, clotheslines, manners of speech in check. Restraint, of course, requires its opposite. Restraint tries to discipline and correct every time it encounters what it perceives as chaos, a threat to the social order: a dildo and harness in the window of the sex shop, blow jobs in the dunes of Herring Cove. It fears that Provincetown is continually on the verge of becoming a sex farm, a place in which children could possibly run into unmentionable couplings on the way to the playground. Brakes need to be applied, if it’s even possible to apply brakes to a farm.
And though it’s less often said, the transgressor needs the Puritan. How could a gesture even be experienced as transgressive if there weren’t the possibility of someone with folded arms, a hard, indignant face? Some from outside mistakenly think anything goes here, but they have no clue how necessary they are to the leatherman who walks down the street in a harness and high heels. The heels attack the pavement as if they’re saying, Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you, even though the guy who wears them has the friendliest grin.
Gut Feeling
Confusion may be the only reasonable response to the world at present. And creating confusion may be queer’s most useful weapon. Queer has no fixed fan base. Genders, races, classes: bring them on. But it has one broad political mandate: to foster instability as resistance to any status quo. Resistance is good exercise. It helps keep you young. And it can keep you alert. Even when you lose track of what “normal” is, you know you don’t want to be that.
HOLLAND COTTER, “When It Comes to Gender, Let Confusion Reign”
A stab of ugly deep feeling: I am here, in the place I’ve longed for, and community still won’t come to me. It still won’t close up the space. Town is distant, even though it’s feet away from me. Four drunk women walk toward me, bump into one another, as if the whole point of their togetherness is to remind themselves that they have bodies, bodies that can be ground down, judged, dismissed. They want to transmit that gut, electric feeling into anyone in their vicinity. They’re laughing, but it is a laughter that has much more to do with menace than joy. You don’t have to live like this, I want to say, but maybe that’s too simple. And I walk faster, eyes fixed on a store window, red hooded sweatshirts I couldn’t possibly want or wear. I don’t want them to notice me, don’t want to be part of their continuous self-murder, the tricks they play to feel less alone. In Town, if they wanted to, they could become the bullies who once bullied them back home.
6
Uncharted
Provincetown wouldn’t be nearly so compelling if Race Point weren’t out there, if the Beech Forest weren’t out there, if the fire road to the Hatches Harbor dike weren’t out there. If the entire landscape was as built as the center of Town—houses all of a few feet apart, windows facing into other windows, fire hazard, really—I wouldn’t have as much interest in it. It’s good to remind myself of the uncharted forest, dunes, and marshes a half mile from the stores and bars. Late at night, if Town is quiet, I hear coyotes and foxes calling to each other. Sometimes even thirty-ton humpbacks, groaning and explosive as they shove water up through their blowholes.
Six Dogs
Billy wakes up to the sound of wailing one night. The wailing is ancient; it makes his hairs stand on end. It’s 3 a.m, and outside Billy’s window Anthony, an elderly, straight bachelor who grew up in Town, lifts the body of Charlie,
his dog, into a wheelbarrow. He wraps him in a sheet. Kisses the top of his head, his flanks. Rolls the wheelbarrow forward, still weeping, but quieter, more controlled now, past his house, where shrubs grow through holes in the floor. Rolls Charlie’s body to the dunes, a two-mile walk along the shoulder of Route 6. Is Anthony even aware of all the lost young men who have died in the last few years? Possibly not, but the rituals of burial are as familiar as oatmeal. Once he catches his breath, he starts digging the hole. Buries Charlie in the vicinity of all six dogs of his life. He sits there with his palm atop the sand until the sun comes up, when he has just enough strength to push the empty wheelbarrow back home. He would have buried Charlie during the day if burying dogs wasn’t illegal.
Mountains & Canyons
It is a cold rolled across the sea, a cold pushed up from its bottom, which rises 194 feet (think a twenty-story building) immediately off Race Point. Mountain ranges and canyons hide beneath the surface, and the whales keep that secret to themselves.
I Saw the Plane
A small airplane, a two-seater, flies too low over Town one day, violating aviation rules. It crashes in the campground, killing the pilot, who is said to have been drinking, and his passenger, a woman he’d just proposed to at the Lobster Pot. It goes down in the weeds next to some tourists playing cards. Is there a single living being who didn’t see the plane? “I saw the plane,” says a woman who drives the Town trolley through the tight chute of Commercial Street. “I saw the plane,” says a man buying gin at Yardarm Liquors. “I saw the plane,” says a waiter, in treatment at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital at the hour of the crash, but who insists he’s seen it with all the fervor of a Bernadette at Lourdes. Soon, it’s not enough to have seen it. You talked to the pilot in your kite shop, served the fiancée oysters in your restaurant, drove the two of them in a cab somewhere and they looked edgy and nervous. These reports continue for the remainder of the season, into the next. You’re not quite a member of Town unless you’ve had some congress with the plane.