The Best Little Boy in the World (19 page)

Provincetown, so much at the tip of the east-jutting Cape that it bends back westward toward Boston, toward California, is one of those places you always wondered about, where the highway finally ends. It doesn't interchange or intersect or angle sharply and slither down the coast. It just comes to the tippy-tip, sniffs the ocean in front and to either side, curls up in a tour of magnificent beaches, and spins you around a rotary and back on your way in the opposite direction—back east, actually, toward California, sort of. (You might say it goes both ways.)

Provincetown is a blustery barnacle in the winter with a small fishing population of Portuguese descent and a few hearth-warmed poets who perhaps find the bleakness "cosmic." In the summer, the Portuguese become hoteliers and restaurateurs; the poets become waiters and busboys. Gay kids come from all over the country to be houseboys and poolside waiters. And Provincetown becomes a cotton-candy-apple carnival or a zoo, depending on your point of view. A resort town, a pickup town, an artist colony gone tourist trap, a sexual melting pot. Liberated. Liberating. Sick. A surfside Forty-second Street in the eyes of some, which, if it must exist at all, is best set at the geographical extremity; a model of lib-and-let-lib in the eyes of others, the nose of the map, not the tail.

There are straight people in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Hell, there is even "Provincetown High," as if this were any sort of place to raise kids! Many of the straight visitors in the summer are families and couples from other parts of the Cape, from Hyannis or Falmouth or Woods Hole, who would never dream of staying overnight in such a place.

The lifeguards are straight, but they only patrol the straight beaches—Race Point and the right side of Herring Cove. The
left
side of Herring Cove has the most crowded parking lot, but no lifeguards. If a lifeguard is a good-looking college boy in the process of finding himself, a summer of patrolling the left side of Herring Cove could rattle him. If he has become a lifeguard in order to flash his Plus-White-Plus smile at young lovelies on the beach, he would be disappointed by the left side of Herring Cove. There are some girls on that side, but they tend to be built like sumo wrestlers, only with shorter hair, and tougher.

The Provincetown police force, one squad car eight months of the year, a regiment from mid-May to mid-September, is straight, a few latencies notwithstanding, and nervous. Homosexuality makes many men nervous, particularly policemen. Last summer one of the policemen patrolling the dunes behind the left side of Herring Cove came upon a young man lying in the nude. Alone, no less. It is illegal to lie in the nude in the dunes of Provincetown, so this policeman
pulled his gun
and told the boy he was under arrest for nudity. "Try to run and I'll shoot." Gun drawn, he ordered the boy to put his skimpy swim suit back on and then marched him off to the police station, where he escaped with a $20 fine. Freud would have had a field day.

Yet there is a strange détente in Provincetown. Loud music and dancing are illegal in Massachusetts on Sundays, so when the man at the Back Room door sees the police coming by to check, he waves to the discothèqueteer, who lifts the needle from the Stones and drops the other needle onto Johnny Mathis (well, almost), and 300 people stop dancing long enough for the men in blue to pop their heads in. It is a courteous arrangement. Except for occasional sorties, like the dunes patrol just mentioned, the police don't bother anyone very much. Their salaries are paid out of tax money, and if the gay crowd left Provincetown, there would be no tax base.

The longtime Portuguese residents of the town seem to like their gay summer guests and neighbors, and not only because they are their bread and butter.

By and large, then, there is an understanding. Really, it is remarkable how there can be such an institution as "Provincetown" without anything in
writing.
We are so used to articles of "incorporation, signs on doors, guidebooks, "colorful brochures." Provincetown is an understanding that is just passed on by word of mouth. Every year the benches in front of the Town Hall become the "meat rack." Every year the left side of Herring Cove is gay, the right side, straight. Of course, inevitably a straight family, either more naïve or more sophisticated than most, will walk left instead of right when they get to the beach. The first fifty yards or so are almost deserted, a sort of no-man's-land, with no lifeguard towers in sight. But if you keep walking, you quickly come to a thirty-yard layer of female sumo wrestlers tossing around footballs and cursing each other out. Maybe you should walk the other way? No? If not, you come to what must seem to an unsuspecting straight father, when his face finally flushes red with understanding, when he remembers how
his
father slapped him for having a gay high school teacher, when his memory flashes against his will to that never-mentioned night in sleep-away camp so many years ago.... you come to what must seem to an unsuspecting straight father like mile upon mile of wildly camping queens swishing to the tape cassette tunes of
No, No Nanette.
"Maybe we should walk down the other way, dear; I don't see any lifeguards here for the children."

Excuse my stereotyping the sumo wrestlers and the camping queens, but it is the stereotypes that would catch the father's eye. Obviously, not all lesbians are diesel dykes; not all gay males lisp; and not all Polacks are stupid. In fact, a favorite Provincetown pastime, for both straight and gay, is to observe the people passing on the street and to try to type them by sexual orientation.

I have to think that the gay players are better at this game than most of the straights.
Everyone
can pick out the stereotypes with a fairly high probability of being right. But the straight people miss a lot of less obvious signs that the gay people pick up like silver dollars. And then there are those people whose gayness is just not detectable. Unless you happen to see them dancing at one of the gay bars, that is.

The game lacks any sort of sophistication. People are not gay or straight, simple as that, as I've said. They fall someplace on my scale from one to ten. Where do you draw the line?
Why
do you draw the line?

I imagine many a straight tourist in Provincetown guesses I am gay. They are the tourists who assume
any
young man walking down the street with another young man at night in Provincetown is gay. (Of course that's not a bad rule of thumb.) On the other hand, put me next to a girl and walk me down Commercial Street—right past the meat rack if you like—and I like to think there would not be a tourist in town who would have as much as an inkling. Three years ago I wouldn't have been caught dead without a girl in a place like that. Now I don't bother to pretend.

The fact is, this trip to Provincetown with Eric was not my first. So, I suppose, before I tell you about who I met on this trip, I should go back and tell you who I didn't meet on the prior trip, some weeks earlier. The first time I came down, alone, I didn't meet anybody.

I didn't meet anybody because the kid at Sporters who gave me directions to P-Town told me only that Herring Cove was the gay beach. I had never been to a gay beach before and didn't know what to expect. I followed signs for Herring Cove, paid my dollar to park, and walked onto the beach. I naturally gravitated toward the lifeguards, who looked anything but gay and all the more attractive for that, and, though I walked a long way and saw a lot of different lifeguards all the way down the beach, which stretches forever, I didn't see anything particularly gay. I saw some kids without dates, some guys lying on blankets next to each other whom I would have been glad to get to know. But you don't just go up to two guys on the beach and introduce yourself! When I had run out of lifeguards to walk past, I walked a little farther until I ran out of people altogether. There is a limit to how far people will walk for a secluded piece of beach, and I had apparently reached that limit. I turned around and walked back. What the hell. I sat down near my favorite lifeguard and spent the afternoon alone on the beach, dozing, reading a crumpled, sweaty
Business Week,
going for an occasional swim.

I hadn't really come down to Provincetown for a good time anyway. I had had the makings of a fever when I left that morning; by the time I got back to Cambridge that evening my temperature was 102°. I had been feeling cosmic again, for the first time in a long while, and I wanted a change of scenery. Oh, cruel, cruel world which hast planned such torments for me! Et cetera, et cetera. You see, I had fallen in love, been led on—and dropped.

Or that's the way it had seemed at the time. I had gone with Eric to one of his gay student meetings at BU, right there in the Student Union Building. With
signs
up for it and everything, and straight people you had to walk past in the reading lounge to get into the clearly labeled STUDENT HOMOPHILE LEAGUE meeting room—but my parents were 200 miles away, and I was, as I say, coming out with a vengeance. That evening I met a lot of kids, too many of whom struck me as the meek-bookwormy type who couldn't play baseball any better than I—nice guys, but nothing like my fantasies.

The "program" was 8-millimeter movies of the recent Student Homophile League outing to Crane's Beach; next week it would be a lady from the VD clinic to give us the lowdown. After the movies, I spotted one kid out on the terrace talking to a few others. When I went for a closer look, I got a good firm handshake, a Southern accent, and a smile that was in between boyish and handsome. There is something about Southern accents—slow, easy, self-assured—that turns me on.

He was Freddie and hadn't seen me here before. I was me and hadn't been around very much. (By this time I knew I got points for being a newcomer.) He was from Atlanta, where he went to Georgia Tech, but was up here at Harvard summer school studying French. I wasn't really a student anymore, but was with my friend Eric—you know Eric? I had been to Yale, and I was just bumming around for the summer. (That image, I figured, would go over better than the IBM image.) He wanted to introduce me to his lover, who was over at the other end of the terrace.

His lover.Hmph. I was new to these things, but I knew enough to know that his lover posed a problem. On the other hand, I had the impression that those things didn't last very long, and when I met his lover, a thirtyish history professor type, the oldest one at the meeting, I knew that Freddie would surely drop him for me, the young, attractive Yalie.

("Lover" is a word that makes me squirm a little, but the only one available I know of. "Husband" or "wife," in the context of two guys, sounds even worse. "Best friend" is what I like—but it does not imply an exclusive, sexual, often cohabitational relationship.)

I didn't feel good about spoiling the professor's love affair, but I was sure he had had plenty of affairs before and would have plenty after. It was
my
turn. Eric was a fine friend, but Freddie was really "my type." I knew, because I got a hard-on when we shook hands, and it took a long time to go away. I was dying to go to bed with him. Here was a gay Brook-from-Tulsa. Here was the kid who would transfer from Georgia Tech to any of the myriad Boston schools, share my apartment in Cambridge, and share my life. I'm not sure I thought about his sharing my life. When I back off from the influence of a body like Freddie's and get my wits together, I realize that I am a rather independent, private person who is not awfully good at sharing things.

His lover was a nice enough guy, whom I made every effort to pretend to like. I was new at the game, but not new to being devious, and I caught on fast. I paid no attention to Freddie and talked and smiled only at his lover. I was all warmth and attention as I mentally jotted down the facts I needed: their last names and the hours Freddie's lover had to be at school. That way, I figured, I could find out their address and maybe just happen to bump into Freddie on the street when his lover was off at school. I was prepared to wait for days on that street, if necessary.

As it happened, it was not necessary. For one thing, Eric knew Freddie and his lover, their names and address. He told me they had been together for about a year. He warned me not to assume that just because Freddie's lover didn't strike
me
as particularly attractive that Freddie felt the same way. And he seemed upset that I would even consider interfering with the good relationship they had going. That would be unfair to both of them and selfish of me. I should just control myself.

Of course, while I agreed it would be selfish for me to try to get involved with Freddie, I could understand that only in a mechanical, analytical sort of way. No one had ever done the same thing to me, so I had no firsthand knowledge of what it would be like for Freddie's lover. Moreover, Freddie's unavailability made him all the more attractive to me. And, God damn it, I was prepared to be as selfish as I had to be: I
had
to become best friends with Freddie. Either Eric just didn't understand the strength of my need, or he was discouraging me out of his own self-interest. Yes! Eric didn't want me to be interested in Freddie; he wanted me to be interested in Eric. It took me a ridiculously long time to catch on to that. I was new to figuring out other people's feelings, figuring out their true intentions and desires, and then acting in such a way as to minimize pain. I would never have droned on to Eric about how crazy I was about Freddie if I had realized that it hurt Eric. Eventually, of course, I realized I had one of my red-white-and-blue striped U.S. Pro Court King Keds in my mouth (nine-and-a-half triple E) so I shut up and kept my thoughts about Freddie to myself.