miCRo: “Thirty-Five-Year-Old Man Shares Joint near Harbor of Gay Resort Town” by John Bonanni

I bought a six-pack & sat down by Provincetown Harbor. Just off Commercial Street, which is always busy with the ruin of homosexually gentrified tourism, you can sneak away, down an alleyway by the Julie Heller Gallery, to a stretch of beach behind all the restaurants & retail stores. Here, you can catch the sunlight with an eerie feeling of privacy that isn’t really at all private. If you plant yourself somewhere on the sand, you can listen to the even, calm bayside waves.

After I finished my first beer, two boys ambled from behind the alleyway & sat down near some driftwood, about ten feet away. What? Him? He doesn’t care.

Because I was a little buzzed, I said, Yeah. If anything, I’d take a puff. I was kidding, of course, but not really. I hadn’t been high in a while, & I did, admittedly, miss that tingly feeling I got in my face, that sense of knowing some secret joke.

Sure, man. You want some? The older one was frayed in every direction. Young, but holding onto old grit. Someone I would have felt immense affinity for as a kid in the ’90s. Maybe missing a tooth or two, but still gorgeous in that way only some combination of urban wildness & youth can make one gorgeous. He introduced his friend, some nineteen-year-old whose name I can’t remember. Still a baby, the boy said.

I took a few puffs because that’s all I needed now. I never liked being high when I was closeted. It made me paranoid, & I nearly always overdid it, sinking into a couch, worrying about identity, never speaking. I chose to drink instead, picked a substance that would lower my inhibitions rather than magnify them. After I came out, though, I understood the draw. The heightened sensitivity. The connectedness in passing around a joint & feeling that same prickle.

The older one kept talking. His conversation was really one-way, so I didn’t have to say much about myself, & I was thankful for that. He was a local. He went to Provincetown High School, which was now closed. We knew some of the same families. I acted local even though I lived about forty minutes away.

What kind of beer you drinking?

I showed it to him.

Oh, damn. That shit used to be like two bucks when they first started. That family, the Souzas, started it outta my boy’s basement. How much did you pay for it?

Eleven.

His brow rose toward the sun. Eleven? Shit’s a rip-off.

I felt like a fake momentarily. Posh. Tourist gay. Gentrified. I remembered when I drank Pabst Blue Ribbon because there were no other options. Then I thought: I will likely never see these boys again, & even if I do, I can ignore them. Being here was a kind of vacation for me, whereas for them it was a place they were stuck, straight boys, breeders, feet buried in the harbor. I would teach their kids at the local middle school.

High & sensitive, I changed the subject. I just checked out that AIDS memorial in the center of town. Have you guys seen it?

AIDS is like the new thing, the fringe boy said. Ya know why? Everyone died, & now those people who died, their friends are dying because now they’re old. & they’re all realizing there’s gonna be no one left to say anything.

The nineteen-year-old said, Didn’t some flight attendant spread it around?