July 20th 1978 - Provincetown - Journal Entry

 

In Provincetown with Alice. Commercial Street is packed with fey homos and hippies retreated to this end of the road refuge. Both can be who they acre without pretending to be what the rest of America wants them to be. I look for any old friends from the 1270 in front to the afternoon Meat Rack. I recognize none of the face, but want in their eyes, saying, “Lose the fag hag.”

Alice yogas on the beach like she was Isadora Duncan. A bulk dyke shoots fotos. Alice obliges her. It’s a lovely pad de deluxe. I wander off to the Atlantic Bar. More gay men. One buys me a beer. We talked who knows who. He comes from Boston. He knows my good friend Donny Ward from the 1270. We both love the black dancer extraordinaire. We huff poppers.

I reject his offers of sin. For some reason I don’t queer any more. Sexually.

Alice is finished her session. The bulk dyke scowls at me. She’s not Alice’s type. She likes them femme.

We go back to our hotel room. She throws up in the shower. A sensitive stomach. I stand on the deck naked. The Atlantic air medicine. We fuck. I feel great. Away from New York. Away from the sullen summer of West Virginia. The pollution of Manhattan, and the imprisoning familiarity of Boston. Our problems two hundred miles away. We both have money in our pockets from my painting her father’s house, even in thought I got paint on some of the bushes. Alice is in a good moon. She’s singing a parody of Patti Smith’s HORSES with Race Point in view,

I love the dead end on the Cape.

Later a naked gay man with a small penis approached us and said I looked like Jesus’ brother.

“No bearded.” He eyes my crotchet.

I laugh and he drifted away to the dunes with a backward glance, as if he expected me to follow. Alice shrugs like she doesn’t care. I stayed with her.

Suddenly think of whether Jesus had a younger brother or a son with Mary Magdalene. She was no whore, although the nuns taught she was.

I wondered if Jesus had a brother or son. Blasphemy. A mortal sin for the Church. Worthy of eternal damnation, unless I ask for a pArdon from Hell. Atheists don’t fear an afterlife.