by Liza Rodman
The Beatles’ first hit, “Love Me Do,” could be heard in the streets. Hippies clad in hip-hugger bell-bottoms and leather sandals danced. Closeted homosexuals, far from America’s mainstream and its judgmental eyes, could finally and literally come out of their closets and front doors to a new and delicious freedom. For many, Provincetown offered a refuge from the ignorant and bigoted thinking that young straight men had to “watch out” for gay men. Even the trusted newsman Mike Wallace warned America on a 1967 episode of CBS Reports that an otherwise “normal-looking man” could attempt to befriend you on the street only to try to turn you into a homosexual.1 But in Provincetown, the weird and eccentric were celebrated, not persecuted. This was twenty years before the AIDS epidemic decimated the gay community, a time when the worst that people feared from indiscriminate sex was a hangover and a penicillin shot.
No matter how hard some of the locals pushed back against the tide, the country’s old and young, Black and White, artists and bohemians, hippies and homosexuals, flooded into Provincetown and changed it forever. Unlike other seaside resort areas, Provincetown historically had not had a huge social divide between the locals and the summer people. Its celebration of the iconoclast allowed for all classes to sit at the same table; it was not unusual to have the local girl who waited on you at lunch be sitting next to you at Tennessee Williams’s dinner party that night. Here, the people who wore IZOD polo shirts and Lilly Pulitzer skirts and those who wore flannel work shirts and blue jeans shiny with dirt and grease sat elbow to elbow at the Atlantic House’s happy hour bar.
* * *
It was on those streets that Tony Costa roamed, encountering Provincetown at its bohemian best—from Divine in her full drag queen glory to the aging Judy Garland, the pied piper to a parade of gay men. He watched men strut down Commercial Street in Speedo bathing suits and women wearing what were called “cunt ticklers”—skirts so short their pubis showed. And he often frequented “the Benches” outside town hall, a favorite gathering place of local teenagers known as the Meat Rack, where easy drugs and a quick blowjob were for the asking—all within just feet of the elementary school and the police station, the latter of which was housed in the basement of the town hall. There was Prescott Townsend, a Boston Brahmin and one of the nation’s first gay activists, who rode the streets and beaches on a motorcycle handing out gay liberation material and who let random youth stay in his house for thirty-five cents a night. And always, there were artists and writers and performers, washing dishes and cleaning fish at the Cold Storage by day in order to pay for a drink or hit of LSD that night. When those starving artists couldn’t afford to buy drinks, they’d go to Piggy’s or the Atlantic House and wait for other patrons to hit the dance floor so they could slip over to the vacated table and drink their beers and finish off their half-eaten hamburgers.
Tony looked like just another stoned loner seeking an escape and his next thrill. Many nights he’d stop by his mother’s apartment for dinner and to do laundry, but he craved solitude and silence. So he walked, often all night, finding his rare moments of peace and calm.
15 TONY
Tony Costa considered himself more than just an intellectual; he considered himself a superior mind. He visited the public library so often that Alice Joseph, the librarian, knew him by name and would hold books aside that she hoped he’d enjoy. He requested volumes on law, psychology, Eastern religion, as well as taxidermy and anatomy.
They’d sit quietly and talk about books and current events. He seemed to know so much about so many topics. He often boasted that he was going to become a doctor, having realized how “easy” it was to perform operations like an appendectomy or even an abortion. He also seemed determined to “better” himself. She’d find him laboriously copying words and their variations from a thesaurus into a notebook he always carried with him, as if for a later quiz. A plump and somewhat dowdy woman, Alice enjoyed the polite young man’s visits. But too many times he’d come with a pack of his friends, friends Alice wished would stay outside. They were too loud, too rude, and unfortunately too unwashed; she always felt as if she needed to check the books they touched for any unsightly stains or grimy fingerprints or for pages that had been torn out. These friends were also years younger than Tony, which she found troubling, and he passed out Juicy Fruit gum to them, as if they were his children. It was almost as if he were grooming them for something. She even heard one of the boys call him Lord Antone and Sire something, and it unsettled her. The entire ragtag group sported odd nicknames: Snowman, Weed, Romulus, Sunshine, Boots, Fluff, Speed, Fingers, Cookie, Bubbles, Shag, Snow. She would watch as Tony and his strange pack left the library, shaking her head, wondering why a man of Tony’s intelligence and, well, his warmth would want to hang out with such a bad lot.
Sometimes he would come to the library with a sweet teenager named Susan Perry, a petite girl with brown eyes and light brown hair who was known as a bit of a tomboy but who otherwise didn’t stand out from the crowd. The librarian felt sorry for her. Town gossip had it that Susan’s mother was an alcoholic who would sit in her easy chair from sunup to sundown chain-smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and drinking beer after beer, occasionally staggering out to her front porch to yell at mischievous boys who dared each other to knock on her door before running away laughing. Susan’s parents had recently divorced, and her father had gained custody of the six children who still lived at home (the eldest daughter had recently gotten married and moved out).
Albert Perry was something of a living legend in town, owning and operating one of Provincetown’s oldest and best-known fishing boats, the Jennie B. Like every captain up and down the Eastern Seaboard, Perry was gone to sea for weeks at a time, leaving his second-oldest child, Susan, in charge of the brood. Barely sixteen when this burden was placed upon her, Susan could only have been overwhelmed and resentful at having to raise five children by herself with just the meager allowance her father left for food while he was at sea.
Alice Joseph anxiously watched Susan and the boys she hung around with. She could see that the girl craved attention and affection, which she often found with the wrong crowd, particularly after she dropped out of high school in her junior year. But Susan had dreams and got a job as a maid at the big Royal Coachman motel out on Beach Point in order to earn money to go to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Alice hoped Susan would make it out of Provincetown, and until then, she trusted that the girl had found in Tony a friend who treated her well.
16 TONY
Christmas 1966 and New Year’s came and went. Avis was once again pregnant, this time with their third baby. As her belly grew, everyone around her, especially Tony, hoped this baby would be a girl. Avis just hoped the baby was healthy.
In March 1967, Tony went back to Dr. Callis’s office complaining of recurrent stomach pain and ongoing depression; Avis was eight months pregnant and exhausted, money was typically tight, and they were once again fighting all the time. Along with more Solacen, Callis prescribed a newly approved drug, Aventyl, for depression. It’s doubtful whether Callis read the warning label: Side effects include hallucinations, mania, severe abdominal pain, persistent heartburn, water retention, and decreased sexual ability. In giving Tony Aventyl, Callis was throwing gasoline on Tony’s already smoldering fires—both physical and emotional. Used sometimes for chronic bedwetting, Aventyl was eventually found to have no real effect in combating depression. And as if all those drugs were not enough, he also gave Tony meprobamate, yet another tranquilizer. For that, Callis didn’t bother writing a prescription; he just gave Tony a handful of samples from his desk drawer. Regardless of the wild side effects that so many concurrent drugs may have had on Tony, it’s safe to say that no one was watching his accelerating symptoms or monitoring the effect of so many drugs. In fact, antidepressants and antianxiety medications were new to the psychopharmaceutical market, and overseeing of their efficacy was rare.
Tony also got prescriptions from their regular family physician, Dr. D
aniel Hiebert, for a laundry list of ailments, some fabricated, some real. Most bothersome and persistent were gastritis and urethritis, the latter a painful inflammation of the urethra, often caused by sexually transmitted diseases. But it hardly mattered to Hiebert if Tony’s ailments were real or imagined: Hiebert was in his late seventies, with tired, watery eyes and stooped shoulders, and was known to fall asleep during patient consultations. He had been practicing medicine in Provincetown since 1919 and had delivered most of the townspeople, including Avis’s mother, as well as many of her and Tony’s relatives. Through the years, Hiebert had witnessed any innocence the old fishing village once held disappear into the new world of rock and roll, psychedelic drugs, gay pride, free love, and flower power. Rather than fight the changing tides, he seemed to embrace them. Around town, people called him Dr. Feelgood1 because he handed out diet pills like candy and even left free samples in his mailbox of the notorious amphetamine “Black Beauty,” which resembled today’s Adderall and was taken off the market in 1998, in part because it was absurdly prone to abuse.
Among Hiebert’s patients was the up-and-coming avant-garde artist John Waters, who at six foot one and 130 pounds hardly qualified for diet pills—but he got them anyway, so many that he was able to sell the surplus for rent money and to help finance his latest theatrical project. Waters became a one-man dispensary who rode up and down Commercial Street on a bicycle selling the extra pills Hiebert had given him.2
Like John Waters, Tony Costa had no problem filling his pockets with drugs from both Hiebert and Callis. And as if those supplies weren’t enough, Tony began visiting the Boston Common, a burgeoning drug scene that, by the mid-1960s, was becoming the city’s own Haight-Ashbury. During those turbulent years, anti-war protestors and civil rights activists often camped out on the Common for days, and drugs of all kinds flowed through the makeshift tent city. Like Waters, Tony began selling drugs he bought on the Common and didn’t consume himself to many of Provincetown’s worst users, running a sideline business in amphetamines, barbiturates, antidepressants, tranquilizers, and painkillers, as well as marijuana, hash, and LSD.
Tony was one of Provincetown’s first drug dealers and soon became its biggest and its only year-round dealer. Some of his steadier customers, many of them barely teenagers, began following him like a guru, calling him Lord Antone, Sire of All Things True, and Antone of Rome—monikers that started as a joke during high school because he told them wild tales of believing himself to be the reincarnation of a medieval Greek warlord who rode around in a chariot and beheaded every opponent in his path. But the joke became serious, at least to him, and he flaunted himself around town like the second coming of Christ. In fact, he called the boys his disciples and the girls his “kid chicks.” He also became the kids’ “go-to guy” when any of them overdosed; he had stolen a copy of The Physicians’ Desk Reference, a catalog of every drug on the market, their side effects, and their overdose antidotes, and touted himself as knowledgeable as an MD when it came to pharmaceuticals.
Later, a member of his defense team asked him, “Tony, was it like you were a drug pusher?”
“It wasn’t ‘like,’ ” Tony said. “I was.”
17 LIZA
A couple of weeks before Easter 1967, Mom had two late-night visitors come to our back door in West Bridgewater. From my room I heard the banging and then Mom clumping down the stairs to answer the door. I leaped out of bed and ran to the window so I could hear the conversation below.
Mom flipped on the outside light and opened the door. Her boyfriend, Tom, and a tall brunette stood on the stoop.
“Tom? What’s going on? Who is this?” she said, but she had to have already known, right? I knew, and I was only eight.
“I’m his wife,” Mrs. Tom said. Her voice was hard and angry.
“His wife? But he told me you had cancer and were dying!” I almost felt bad for Mom. In my whole life, I’d never heard her sound so scared.
“Do I look like I’m dying?” Mrs. Tom asked.
And I could have added, You don’t sound like it either.
So that was the end of Tom, and with him Mom’s hope that he would be the one to take care of her—happily ever after.
“Boy, it’s a good thing I don’t own a gun,” was the last thing I ever heard her say about Tom.
* * *
After her breakup with Tom, Mom decided she needed a road trip, so she and Auntie announced they were taking us all to Jekyll Island, Georgia, for Easter vacation. The two mothers and all four kids crammed into Auntie’s station wagon for the thousand-mile drive south. We hadn’t been on Jekyll Island a full day before things unraveled.
After dinner our first night, the mothers headed to the Beachview Motel’s porch with their drinks and two men they’d met at the pool. With Louisa and Gail already asleep in the room next door, Mom plunked me and Geoff in front of the TV, another one of her favorite babysitters, to keep us out of trouble.
By this time, I had become an expert at making myself “feel good.” It could have started with my uncle Ulle, Nana Noonan’s brother, insisting I sit in his lap when I didn’t want to while we worked on his jigsaw puzzle. I’d have to suffer his lingering embraces and his breath, hot and rotten against my neck, as he rubbed himself against me. But most likely it started because I was an eavesdropper, listening in on the adult conversations around me, hoping to solve my biggest mystery: Why did my mother seem to hate me so much? So I started listening and snooping, going through her bureau drawers, digging into the back of her closet opening boxes, running my fingers through her silky dresses and wool skirts.
One day, I crawled under her double bed and found a shoebox of letters, held together with a rubber band. They were love letters, and they were from Tom. I had never heard some of the words, and certainly never in letters to my mother. I didn’t know what sex was, but its language was fascinating—nipples, ass, cunt, dick, prick, fuck, suck—actually, lots of fucking and sucking—and how he wanted to be hard inside her, whatever that meant. I knew finding and reading the letters was wrong, but even without knowing what they were all about, reading them made me tingle between my legs in a way that was as exciting as it was frightening. I returned to those letters every time I was alone in the house, to feel that tingle. One day while reading them for the umpteenth time, I put my fingers down the front of my shorts and rubbed my fingers around until a great, hot roar moved through my body that was as powerful and wonderful as anything I’d ever felt. It was magic, but it also felt dangerous, and I knew I could never, ever tell anyone. Because along with the explosive roar that I now seemed to crave came shame. I was as bad as my mother always told me I was. I was a liar who kept secrets, and now I was dirty. Maybe there really was something wrong with me.
Still, that tickling, tingling sensation came back to me when I saw Geoff pull his pants down getting ready for bed, revealing the tiny bump of his little-boy penis through his white underpants. Ashamed and excited, I decided I wanted to see him naked.
“Let’s get in the tub together,” I said.
Geoff agreed to play the game, pulled his underpants down, swung one leg and then the other over the edge of the tub, and lay down. I quickly undressed, got in, and lay down next to him. Not quite sure what to do next but excited by my grown-up daring, I put my arms around him and gave him a long Cecelia hug.
“What in hell is going on?”
Mom and Auntie stood at the bathroom door, their eyes huge in their heads and their mouths open in shock. I jumped up, and Mom threw a towel at me while Geoff remained in the tub, dazed.
“Liza wanted to take a bath,” Geoff said, his now-worried eyes looking from mother to mother.
“Oh my God!” Auntie said, and fell to her knees on the floor, reaching into the tub and stroking Geoff’s head and chest, making sure I hadn’t bitten him or something worse.
“Get out of that fucking tub, now,” Mom growled, and without waiting for me to move grabbed my arm and dragged me naked o
ut of the tub, out of Auntie’s hotel room, and out onto the motel’s balcony, where everyone stopped what they were doing to watch the spectacle while I tried desperately to hold the towel against my bare body. Finally, she threw me into our room next door and stepped in after me, slamming the door behind her with such force the map of the hotel on the back fell to the floor. Louisa woke up with a small cry but immediately knew not to ask what had happened. She pulled the covers up to her chin, watching us, her eyes huge and wild with fear.
“What the fuck were you doing?” Mom screamed, her face inches from mine. Her breath was sour, and her beehive hairdo was coming apart and falling over her face. “What were you doing in the tub with Geoff? What are you, some kind of a pervert?”
Pervert. I’d heard the word but always thought it meant sad, old men who hung out near our school or at the package store on a Saturday morning. Sad, lonely, nasty old men like the guy who lived down the street from us whose shades were always drawn and whose house needed a coat of paint. Now my mother thought I was a pervert. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was. A pervert. The word washed through me, filling me with shame. I was only eight years old, but already I was bad and I was disgusting.