A Moveable Famine by John Skoyles

Author:John Skoyles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579623586
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2014-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THAT’S P’TOWN—THE MEAT RACK—FAWC—EVERYONE BUT HESTER—A FREE FALL INTO RELATIVITY—THE VICTIM WAS ALONE—THE DROP-IN CENTER—CORSO ARRIVES

There are two main streets in Provincetown: Commercial Street, along the water, and Bradford, parallel to it, once simply called Front and Back Streets. Porter and I walked past Town Hall’s little rectangle of benches known as “The Meat Rack,” an after-hours cruising place. He told me that when the bars close in summer, it filled with hundreds of men. Although it was October, tourists still paraded the streets, mixing with gay couples and fishermen in rubber boots on their way to the wharf. We passed the library where the housepainter, still wobbly, shook his tarp over the grass next to the building and wandered through his truck looking for brushes. A library official stood on the steps, arms folded. “No ladders today!” he said, “today, no ladders!”

It was then that Porter spoke the slogan, the short anthem of the area that I heard for the first time—“That’s P’town.”

At Tip for Tops’n, we had a breakfast of coffee and flippers—fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. The menu explained the restaurant’s name—The Tip of the Cape for The Tops in Food. I thought Vince’s acronym might win after all.

A sign on Pearl Street read A Winter Community of Artists and Writers. The Fine Arts Work Center, FAWC for short, was a converted lumberyard, and the rickety, worn façade looked more like a set for a western than a forge of artistic activity. It consisted of a long two-story wooden building, unheated coal bins, a shed once housing lobster traps, and a barn. Raised windows showed the studios of the visual artists who worked and slept in the same space. We ducked under a white oar painted with the word Office nailed to a doorframe tangled in wisteria.

Bonnie, the secretary, handed me my stipend check of a hundred fifty dollars across her IBM Selectric, and said to Porter, “Would you talk to Case about keeping the shower curtain inside the stall! This is the third time.” She pointed to a full bucket.

“Sorry!” A voice came through the ceiling. Exposed wires and pipes crisscrossed the rafters, dangling with tags written in shaky cursive.

“Thank you, Case,” Bonnie yelled, and we could hear his footfalls creak. She answered the phone and, when she got off, she said it was the new pastor of the Universalist Church who wanted the name of a carpenter. “He said all the windows stick and he has trouble opening them.”

“He better get used to it,” Porter said. “There’s not a right angle in town.”

Porter took me down a narrow hall crowded with books, paintings, and cartons leading to two wooden crates that served as steps to the sunken common room. A pay phone hung between a row of wooden mailboxes and a tilted metal bookcase. Jeanne East, a second-year writing fellow, entered through a sliding glass door facing the parking lot. A short broad-shouldered brunette, she carried herself with authority. In New York, I

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