street (who can blame them?), and so they wander from side to side—riding through on a bicycle (the preferred and most practical mode of transportation in Provincetown) is like flying a spaceship through a field of sluggish but erratically moving asteroids.
Although the town welcomes these people, needs them for its very livelihood, residents tend to become irritable about the crowds, especially as summer wears on, when the street on which they conduct their necessary business is all but impassable, and the purchase of any rudimentary grocery item may involve waiting in line for half an hour or longer. A visitor strolling on Commercial Street on a summer day should not feel unduly offended if a citizen scowls or mutters as he or she attempts to negotiate the street in order to buy a newspaper or a carton of milk or go to the post office. It isn’t personal; not exactly personal. As a tourist, you are part of the stormy weather that blows through every year, and residents feel as free as anyone anywhere to complain about the weather, knowing, as everyone does everywhere, that their feelings won’t make one bit of difference to the elements at large.
A BLESSING FROM THE POST OFFICE
The Provincetown post office is in the western half of town. For many years one of the women who worked there (I’m sorry to say she has retired) wrote poetry and loved anyone else who wrote poetry, whether they were any good at it or not. If you were sending your poems out in hopes of publication or a grant, and you told her that that was what you were doing, she’d take your envelope into the back of the post office and press it to her bare breast for luck before sending it on.
PLACES TO PEE
There are, as far as I know, only two places where the public is officially permitted to pee without buying anything. You can use the bathrooms in Town Hall, though it closes to the public if a meeting, show, or fund-raising auction is going on inside. There are, more reliably, public bathrooms on the bay side of Town Hall, right by the parking lot next to MacMillan Wharf.
GOSSIP
Provincetown is, among its many attributes, one of the more impressive rumor mills in the Western world. Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular nineteenth-century journalist, said over a hundred years ago that it was a place with “no secrets, where there is but one accountable path in the whole neighborhood. Everybody at Provincetown knows every time everybody goes out, and every time anybody comes in.” That is still true. Any small town engenders a good deal of gossip, but in this regard Provincetown is to other towns what McDonald’s is to mom-and-pop diners. Most citizens of most small towns must content themselves with a handful of extramarital affairs and a few wayward sons and daughters; they must chew and chew this limited fare. In Provincetown the denizens tend to lead more dramatic lives, and some citizens maintain a more than usually creative relationship to reality. Thus, the offerings are almost embarrassingly rich and varied.
The nerve center of Provincetown’s gossip network is the steps in front of the post office. They were, however, better suited to leisurely tale-telling before post office officials, in an act I can only interpret as conspicuous malice, became concerned that loiterers were interfering with the public’s ability to come and go and so cut the steps in half by installing a wholly unnecessary brick flower box. In response, satellite gossip stations have been established—the bricked yard in front of Joe’s coffee house (the one in the West End, not its sister to the east) and the wooden bench in front of a store called Map are especially fertile.
The gossip season extends from early fall to late spring. In summer, during the tourist assault, everyone is too busy to pay more than glancing attention to questions about who’s doing what to whom and why. By mid-September, however, the feast begins, and it goes on well into June. In a month of average fecundity, someone will have left a lover for that person’s former lover, someone will have gotten drunk and trashed the apartment of an ex, someone will have gotten fired under suspicious circumstances rumored to involve sex or drugs or both, and the members of a newly formed theatrical troupe will have had a screaming fight, disbanded, and then re-formed minus the member considered to be the source of the trouble. The