Death and Life
PROVINCETOWN HAS BEEN widowed by the AIDS epidemic. It will never fully recover, though it is accustomed to loss. Over the centuries men and boys in uncountable numbers have been swallowed up by the ocean. Provincetown possesses, has always possessed, a steady, grieving competence in the face of all that can happen to people. It watches and waits; it keeps the lights burning. If you are a man or woman with AIDS there, someone will always drive you to your doctor’s appointments, get your groceries if you can’t get them yourself, and take care of whatever needs taking care of. Several years ago the Provincetown AIDS Support Group opened Foley House, a large house in the East End that has been converted into apartments for PWAs.
BILLY
Billy was a baker. He was a compact, dark-haired man with small adroit hands, like an opossum’s. He had not entirely shed his nasal New Jersey accent, though he hadn’t been back to New Jersey in more than twenty years. The word angel, in Billy’s mouth, was “ein-jill” (he called all his friends “angel”). He lived, as people in Provincetown do, in a series of apartments, and each time he moved, he invested his new place with an imperturbable, slightly shabby comfort—the effect was roughly equal parts grandmother and graduate student. There was always a big dowdy sofa and a few disreputable chairs that, once you sank into them, were reluctant to let you go, because they were soft and generous and because they were exhausted.
Billy was simple, kind, and hospitable, virtues that count more heavily in Provincetown than they do in many other places. He and I had been friends for more than ten years. For my fortieth birthday he made me an elaborate cake, covered with writing-related decorations: a miniature television set with a picture of a typewriter glued onto the screen, pencils interspersed among the candles. He decided, for obscure reasons, that it should also include fish, and so he surrounded the cake with coils of clear plastic tubes full of water and put a half-dozen live goldfish in them. It should have worked, but the fish got stuck in the tubes, which traumatized several of the party guests to the point of tears. The fish survived the experience, however, and spent the remainder of the evening in the relative comfort of a mixing bowl.
Billy was my most peculiar and domestic intimate. It mattered, and sometimes it mattered a great deal, that if everything collapsed, I knew I could get on a bus, go to Provincetown, and arrive unannounced at his current apartment, wherever it was. Like most people in town, he never locked his door. If it was late, I could have walked in and climbed into bed next to Billy. He’d have half-awakened, and I’d have told him I’d come to live with him for a while. He’d have muttered “Yay” (it was an expression of his), asked no questions unless I wanted him to, and made pancakes the next morning, probably with something exotic and inappropriate in them.
Billy had had AIDS for a long while but was mostly outwardly healthy, if you discount a growing tendency to ramble, which was just an intensified and less cogent version of the way he’d always been. He was carefully watched over by his friends Janice Redman, Michael Landis, and others. Then four years ago he was diagnosed with leukemia. “Are you ready for this?” he’d told me over the phone, as if he were imparting an especially scandalous bit of gossip. “Leukemia. Yikes!” Neither he nor I knew then that his particular form of leukemia usually proved fatal within a matter of months.
Several weeks later, when I’d gone to Palo Alto to write a story for a magazine, I got a call from Billy’s sister telling me he was in a hospital in Boston and was not doing very well. It didn’t seem possible—he’d been just fine so recently. I couldn’t tell whether his sister, whom I’d never met, was exaggerating, but I decided not to take the chance. I canceled my interview and got on a plane to Boston early the next morning.
By the time I got there, he wasn’t coherent. He lay in his hospital bed, moaning and whimpering, surrounded by a half-dozen people. I held his hand and whispered to him. There was no telling whether he knew I was there.
We stayed with him, night and day, in shifts, for the next four days. The day he died there were six of us in attendance: his sister Sue Anne Locascio, Janice Redman, Marie Howe, Nick Flynn, Michael Klein, and me. That last day he moaned and cried out almost continually—we couldn’t tell whether he was in pain or having nightmares or both. Toward evening Nick, Michael, and I went out for dinner, and by the time we got back, he had passed away. The three women had been with him. His eyes were still open. His face was blank. The room was full of a silence not quite like other silences: a complete silence, like what it might be like inside a balloon. It seemed that the lights had dimmed, though in fact they had not. After a while, Marie came up to me and said very softly, “I asked the nurse what happens now.”
“What happens now?” I asked.
“She said they clean him up and take him downstairs.”
“Right.”
“I asked her if it would be all right if you three men cleaned him instead. Would you like to?” I nodded.
I pulled down the blanket and took off his hospital gown. He was still warm, still himself. I closed his eyes. It felt, for a moment, like a melodramatic gesture, something I’d gotten out of the movies and was doing for cheap effect, but it did seem that his eyes should be closed. The lids were soft and yielded easily. I felt the tickle of his eyelashes. Although he had not been in any way frightening when his eyes were open, with his eyes closed he looked less dead. Michael, Nick, and I took warm soapy towels and washed his face and body. There was his pale throat and pale fleshy chest; there were his pink-brown nipples, just bigger than quarters; there was his bush of black pubic hair; and there was his dick, deep pink at the tip, edged in purple, canted at a soft angle to his testicles. We turned him over and washed his back, his ass, and his legs. We turned him over again and pulled the blanket back up.
That was October. We scattered his ashes in January. There was some discussion about where, exactly, his ashes should go. Luanne said he’d told her he had a favorite spot in the dunes, where he’d go to meditate, and Marie and I looked at each other in surprise. As far as we knew, Billy never went into the dunes to meditate. He wasn’t fond of sand. We decided he must have said that to his sister to comfort her, to reassure her about his spiritual life.
Nick suggested scattering his ashes in the ocean, but we all agreed that Billy had probably not been entirely certain about just where the ocean was in relation to his living room. It seemed more appropriate to scatter his ashes on the ratty old sofa and turn the television on, but that didn’t seem right either. We settled, finally, on the salt marsh at the end of Commercial Street, where the ashes of so many men and women already resided.
The day before the scattering Marie and I went out into the marsh to find a place. It was bitterly cold, with a foot of snow on the ground. We broke, several times, through ice into pools of frigid water. We said to each other, more than once, “This looks good, it’s not too far from the road, it’s sort of pretty if you squint.” We periodically shouted, “Billy,” in tones that had more to do with exasperation than with grief, which I suspect he’d have appreciated or at least understood. Billy was opposed, in principle, to too much bother in the search for perfection.
We knew immediately, however, when we’d found the place. It was a high dune that appeared to stand almost exactly halfway between town and the water. From there you could see, with equal clarity, the blue-gray line of the ocean and the roofs and windows of town. We stood there awhile, in the frigid silence, on a circle of frozen sand, the sun knifing up off the fields of snow. A scallop boat churned by across the distant snowy dunes. A gull skreeked overhead and dove for something in a pool of slushy gray water. It would soon be time to dismantle Billy’s kitchen, to decide what to do about his tables and chairs.
The next day a dozen or so of us carried his ashes out there in his favorite vase, which Janice had made for him, and scattered them on the dune. It was stunningly, stupefyingly cold, the sort of cold that seems to sear all the random particles from the air and render it so pure as to be almost unbreathable. Billy’s ashes were creamy gray, studded with chips of yellow-gray bone. When we each took a handful and threw it, some of his ashes lingered in the wind before falling. They did not disappear, as I’d imagined they would. I could see flecks of bone throwing tiny shadows on the sand at our feet. No one delivered a speech or eulogy. It was, to roughly equal extents, solemn and awkward. Some of us had just met. It seemed as if we were waiting for an adult to arrive and tell us what to do. When we were finished, we walked back to town, trying to think of things to say to one another. We got back into our cars, drove to one of the few open restaurants, and had breakfast, as the living do.
Weeks later Marie and I fought over the fact that Billy had, apparently, specifically asked her to carry his ashes when the time came, and I, obsessed with control, determined to be the center of attention, had grabbed them and carried them myself. When we went through his things, a friend of ours, who had scarcely known Billy, was in our opinion far too glad to take one of his belts. This is, as Marie put it, what the living do. We have breakfast with flecks of ash still stuck to our sweaters; we squabble over who behaved insensitively and why.
I go out to Billy’s dune every now and then and build something for him. It seems right that he should have an ongoing series of memorials, all of them swept away by wind and water. Once I planted a big stick like a flagpole on top of the dune. Once I found the top of a fence picket, stuck it in the sand like a miniature house, and surrounded it with a fence made of twigs.