Remembrances of P-Town Past

This morning, as I put the cream and too much sugar in my coffee, after riding my bike over to the donut shop, I flashed back to the summer of 1984, when I followed my girlfriend's dream to Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

While the majority of the summer population – a number that bloats by a factor of ten every year between Memorial Day and Labor Day – slept in, gearing up for cocktails, Tea Dances and beach time, I was getting up to go to work. I would get on my bicycle every morning and ride from our apartment at 8 Pearl Street, down Shank Painter Road to Route 6 and the MarSpec Warehouse, which supplied Marine Specialties, “Provincetown’s Most Unusual Shop,” and its mail order customers with everything from plastic lobsters to surplus German Mannlicher rifles from World War II.

I worked there as a shipping/receiving clerk. Even though I was not packing sandwiches and beers for the beach, the taste of the salt air was a treat on my lips. I absolutely loved the taste of that place.

Sue and I must have been quite a sight to see for the regulars there – this nubile young hetero couple who chose to come live in the middle of a seaside Bacchanal.

While others were partying at night, I was working my second job, scooping gourmet ice cream into cups and cones for a mostly drunk clientele at “Glaceteria,” right next to the historic Town Hall building. Run by a surly French Canadian couple, it stayed open way too late each night, and catered to customers coming out of the closing bars and clubs on and around Commercial Street. I found that if I smiled shyly at the glassy-eyed men who ordered ice cream for themselves and each other, my tips would increase, at times exponentially.

Even though it was only a few blocks down Commercial Street from the Pearl Street place, Susan would sometimes express concern for my safety, due to how late I worked.

I brushed off her worry; it was a five minute walk home, if that. There were occasions, though, when, after closing up shop at 3 or so in the morning, my walk home was a bit eerie, particularly for a starry-eyed ingénue of 21 with feathered, sun-bleached hair and honey-tanned skin. I looked straight ahead in the direction of my destination, all the while occasionally aware of men doing things, to themselves and each other, in the shadows at the edge of my vision. To this day I’m not sure how much of this is real and how much is a product of my imagination. Even though it would be another year before the death of Rock Hudson, and another six until Magic Johnson’s historic announcement, people were very much aware of AIDS, so the all-night party that had been P-Town was a bit of an anachronism, even then.

Still, there was one night when I became aware of a figure in the shadows that began to move toward me as I made my way home. I quickened my pace, but each time I looked back, the figure was there, the same distance behind. When I finally made it upstairs to my apartment, I turned out all the lights and peeked out to see a man standing under a streetlamp, his features peppered by shadows, straining to get a better look at the Young Thing in the darkened window above.

He lost interest and wandered, stumbling, I now saw, up the street and out of sight. Eventually my heart slowed to its natural rhythms, and I was lulled to sleep by the sounds of the pre-dawn coastal morning.