aspect, especially as you move away from the dance floor into the deeper darks. This is not entirely disagreeable—why, after all, should the site of so much hope and yearning be cheerful?—but it is unmistakably haunted, the way battlefields are haunted.
In summer, especially on the weekends, the bar is so densely populated by beautiful men, it would be easy to imagine that beauty is the fundamental human state and that you, even if you consider yourself beautiful, have managed to maintain that illusion because you are a fine sturdy goose who has lived long among other geese and only now finds itself in the company of swans. It is not for the faint-hearted, and it is not, I’m sorry to say, full of beauty in its more generous condition, the kind of beauty that includes the beholder, as great courtesans, paintings, and buildings do. It is more the kind of beauty celebrated several hundred years ago in France, when parades involved fully set banquet tables on floats wheeled down the streets with aristocrats consuming lavish dinners on china plates so that the common people could get a glimpse of splendors ordinary invisible to them.
The best times at the A-House are, in my opinion, off season, when most of the other bars in town have closed and everyone in search of anything resembling a party goes there. There are women and men, gay people and straight people. Physical beauty, with all its implied allures and torments, still makes an appearance, but it is rare, as beauty should be, and the people on the dance floor seem generally glad to have been freed from such rampant desire and left to dance in peace.
SPIRITUS
Although the laws in Massachusetts allow bars to stay open until two A.M., Provincetown requires that they close at one, out of consideration for citizens who need their sleep. Many of the people who come in the summertime—gay men in particular—are accustomed to staying out later. At home many don’t leave for the bars until one A.M., and when the closing lights go on at that hour, there is always a general aspect of shocked disbelief. It is then time for everyone to go up the street to Spiritus.
Spiritus is a converted cottage that sells pizza and ice cream, about five hundred yards west of the A-House. It is open until two in the morning, and when the bars close, everyone goes there, whether or not they have any interest in pizza or ice cream. On summer nights in July and August, literally thousands gather on Commercial Street in front of Spiritus between the hours of one and two A.M. There are vast numbers of men, considerably fewer women. Some men, still sweat-slicked from dancing, mingle with their shirts off; some wear leather chaps with nothing underneath. Some are in drag, and if you’re lucky, you might see the Hat Sisters, two ostentatiously mustached gentlemen of a certain age who wear identical drag and make hats for themselves just slightly smaller and considerably more ornate than Christmas trees. The street remains open to traffic—beleaguered cops struggle mightily to clear the crowds away when a car comes through—and if you’re foolish or perverse enough to drive on Commercial Street past Spiritus at that hour, a drag queen or two might very well hop onto the front fender of your car and sing a show tune as you creep along. Please do not discourage this display. You are being blessed.
It’s an orgy of sly desire; it’s the world’s biggest festival for loiterers. It is possible there, if you are a certain kind of person and have lived a certain kind of life, to run into someone you last saw in junior high school in Akron. It is possible to fall suddenly, violently in love, and it is possible to get lucky for the night. It is also possible to have a slice of pizza, talk to an acquaintance or two, and go home to sleep.
That hour at Spiritus is, in a real sense, what the night has been leading up to. Some people, myself included, often skip the bars entirely and go directly to Spiritus at one o’clock. I have been known, on warm nights, to recline on a doorstep across the street from Spiritus with various gaggles of friends, talking and laughing, sometimes with my head in somebody’s lap, until we all look up and realize it’s almost three and the street is practically deserted.
The crowd starts dispersing when Spiritus closes,