Mr. Know-It-All, page 24
Bodysurfing in the ocean at Longnook is perhaps the happiest feeling in my life. It makes every bit of past troubles disappear. Looking up from the surf to the steep mountains of sand and the clear blue sky above, I feel healthy—a sensation that does not come easily to me anywhere else in the world. I experience complete bliss for seconds at a time, and a feeling of well-being washes over me every time a wave knocks me down. This is why I come to Provincetown every summer. Plain and simple.
Sometimes I run errands after leaving the beach, such as going to the only real grocery store in Provincetown, the Stop & Shop, even though like all old-timers I still call it the A&P because that’s what it was called when I first arrived. Here’s a supermarket that respects the demographics of the town and its traditions. During Bear Week, the annual celebration of hairy, overweight homosexuals and those who love them, there are giant display bins of candies, cookies, crackers, and all sorts of fattening foods for the fellas, all up and down the aisles. Provincetown has all sorts of “weeks” dedicated to different sexual minorities, and the Chamber of Commerce lists lots of them. There’s Single Women Weekend, on Memorial Day, and it’s like a lesbian version of Girls Gone Wild. College girls drinking, fighting, going topless—Burning Man goes to the Isle of Lesbos. July 4 is Circuit Queens, and the disco beat is heard everywhere in the still of the night. Special K and meth rule, and the Stop & Shop can look like The Day After in the bottled-water department because, apparently, the more water you drink on these drugs, the higher you get. Girl Splash week is later in July and it’s sporty dykes—the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament types.
Bear Week seemed a little less crowded this year. I’m worried because these guys seem to be getting fatter and fatter. I saw one walking down the street shirtless that was so huge and so hairy that I thought it was a hedge, but it was a person! I hope these big boys aren’t having heart attacks. Family Week is supposed to be for heteros, too, but gay parents seem to have dominated. A lot of the shop owners secretly hate it because the parents want to take cell phone pictures of their kids with all the items for sale and not buy anything. “This is not a prop house for children,” a friend of mine who owns a shop sniffed. There’s Women Craft Week, which used to be for prison-guard, old-school Johnny Cash look-alike gals, but that seems to have faded. And both Daddy Week (I hope nobody thinks I’m here for that!) and Gay Pilot’s Week (huh?) have seemingly faded in popularity. I want Fag Hag Week. Both kinds could come—the mentally healthy ones who hang around all gay men as friends but have a hetero male fuck buddy, and the twisted sick ones who fall in love with gay men, thinking they can change them, and then get suicidal when they can’t.
Actually, the ones who really deserve a special week in Provincetown are straight people. Aren’t they the minority? There are only a few straight bars, almost no children were born here all year, and the high school closed. Hetero Pride Week. Let’s have it off-season in February to be even more outrageous. Think of the support groups: Parents of Provincetown Hetero Children (“My straight son is so brave—he works at Tea Dance!” or “Our hetero daughters actually live among these lesbians, yet have never experimented with cunnilingus despite being feminists”). We could honor heterosexual folk dancing (the Electric Slide), have male male-impersonators doing imitations of Norman Mailer, and women’s softball games ironically played by heterosexual femmes.
Sometimes, usually on Friday nights, I still go to the bars. In theory, the Underground, located in the worst tourist-filled block in town, is my favorite since it’s a straight-minority bar in a gay mecca and filled with locals and hipsters, some of whom are definitely on the down-low. My kind of place. Unfortunately, drunken bachelorette parties have also discovered this watering hole and, whenever they barge in en masse, act as real cock-blockers in the pickup department no matter what your sexual tastes may be.
Scream Along with Billy is a great event on Friday nights at the Grotta Bar, and a mixed, cool crowd is always on hand to see and hear Billy Hough sing tributes to his very un-gay-favorite performers while he plays the piano accompanied by his sidekick, Susan Goldberg, on the guitar. What other gay man do you know who can sing entire Eminem or Velvet Underground albums in between patter about his own bad nights of shooting up drugs or having lewd sex with crazy people? Billy’s an amazing talent who has to be seen live and in person in Provincetown to be believed. He puts the queer straight in covers like no other.
I don’t go to the gay bars in town much these days because I’m against mandatory fixed sexual identity, but the history of some of these places has always fascinated me. When I first got here in the mid-sixties, every summer on Memorial Day the gay and straight clientele of the two biggest bars in town, the A-House (still there) and the Back Room (now the Crown), would draw their sexual lines in the sand. One bar would end up the gay one for the summer, the other one straight. Both were good. It happened spontaneously. At the end of the first night of the season, each sexual team would choose, and that’s the way it stayed until Labor Day. But you couldn’t be sure it would stay that way next year. It was back and forth, gay one year, straight the next. But never the two shall meet.
Then Piggie’s opened in the early seventies and everything changed. Gays danced with straights. Bisexuals cruised fishermen. Townies and fashionistas took drugs together for the first time. It was the best bar Provincetown ever had. Since it was located outside town on Shank Painter Road, the entire crowd had to walk back into town together once the bar closed, and the shortest route was through the graveyard, where many, in these pre-AIDS days, had sex. Very Zabriskie Point orgy scene meets Night of the Living Dead. Nobody seemed to mind. Including the deceased.
Provincetown is a lot like Mortville, that fictional town in my film Desperate Living. If you reside here year-round there are no real laws—you live outside polite society freely as long as you don’t ever leave. So of course there are characters. Everybody remembers the late Ellie, the onetime straight male Christian evangelist who had three ex-wives and five children who came to town and began living as a woman. At first she worked in drag at the local supermarket and was often seen at night making out with biological women in the local straight bar, but then she found her true calling, standing out front of Town Hall (even in the dead of winter) in full female attire singing along to Frank Sinatra albums (the same one, day after day) that blared from her boom box she pulled along in a wagon. LIVING MY DREAM, her handmade sign read.
But I remember Moulty even more fondly. He was a teenage townie who became famous all over the world in 1965 (the second summer I was here) with his band the Barbarians, who had one big hit, “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl.” The first time I saw Moulty hanging outside the bar he played in, the Rumpus Room (I love that name), I was starstruck. His hair was so long! “How could he have grown it to the middle of his back when the Beatles had just come out?!” I’d ask anyone who’d listen. I knew his song wasn’t about gay or straight or unheard-of-at-the-time transgender rights, it was just about getting hassled for your hirsute splendor. I remember pulling into gas stations when I had long hair and the attendant would approach from behind and say, “Fill it up, miss?” Then I’d turn around and snarl, “A dollar’s worth, funny!” Hairdo politics were a big deal then and Moulty was my leader. Better yet, he had a hook for a hand. Oh, God, how I idolized him. I had always wanted to have a hook for a hand. Even as a child, I bent coat hangers and wore them up my sleeve to pretend I was Captain Hook, and now, right before my eyes, here he was: a hippie Captain Hook, a reason to live. When the follow-up record “Moulty” was released, I was even more excited to hear in the melodramatic lyrics that his hook was a result of a homemade pipe bomb’s exploding in his hands in 1959! A fashion explosion that to this day excites me. Moulty is still alive. I read he lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, right outside Boston, and I think he owns an upholstery-cleaning company. I’m gonna call him up. Right now.
Don’t be afraid to contact your idols. You never know. As I’ve said one thousand times, a no is free. What are they gonna do? Hang up on you? Beat you up? Call the police? Most famous people pretend they hate being well-known, but they’re liars. It may help if the idols you are trying to reach are slightly fallen. Doesn’t that make your love for them even more special? Isn’t the fan-idol relationship now on a more dignified and even term? Their vulnerability is suddenly human in a way that is untarnished by the vulgarity of mass success.
Yay! The number I found for Moulty by spying online on Intelius still works—I can tell by his voice on his answering machine. As I start to hurriedly leave a message explaining who I am, he picks up. Moulty himself! Other people’s bucket lists may include talking to Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan on the phone, but not me—it’s Moulty! I’ve been wanting to hear his voice for half a century.
When I introduce myself and start gushing (“I like you already,” he jokes), Moulty explains that he can’t talk now, but could I call back tomorrow? We pick a time. I don’t think he knows who I am, but why should he? I never had a hit record or a hook, so just by these facts alone, I am a lesser man. I accept this with humility. Moulty is the man.
When I call back at our appointed time the next day, he picks right up (“Glad you’re punctual”), and he’s just what I had hoped he’d be: unpretentious, funny, and, well … ever hip. And yes, everybody does still call him Moulty even though his real name is Victor Moulton. “In the first grade in Provincetown,” he remembers, “they had to tell me, ‘Your name is Victor, you ignorant Portugee, don’t say Moulty!’” But that nickname could never be crushed.
“As you know,” he continued, “Provincetown is a fabulous place. I love Ptown so much tears come to my eyes when I think of it. I was a wild son of a gun and a guitar player when I was just fourteen. Then I made a bomb and blew myself up.” “What were you going to do with that bomb?” I asked, thinking today he’d have Homeland Security up his ass in thirty seconds. “Oh, blow up the railroad tracks—just act crazy. Not going to kill anyone.” Knowing these train tracks were no longer active even then, I knew he wasn’t a terrorist, and I told him so. “I wasn’t a bad guy either,” he says, just so he’s sure I understand. Ah, the days when a boy and his bomb could still be innocent.
“But how,” I wondered for the millionth time since first seeing Moulty, “did you grow your hair so long then? The Beatles had just come out and their hair was positively short compared to yours.” “I was wild, I grew up on the beaches of Provincetown,” he explains. “I wasn’t like the other people. I really wasn’t. My idol was Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan. That long beautiful hair. So I had long hair before anybody. When the music business came along, I just let my hair grow longer and longer, and then when we hit, I had the longest hair in rock and roll.” “Weren’t your parents pissed?” I quiz him, remembering my own mom and dad’s horror. “Oh, yes!” he cries, then imitates his father: “‘Your grandma doesn’t want to tell you she’s ashamed of you. Cut that hair!’ Big fights! But then as soon as we hit—‘Look at my son!’”
When I tell Moulty “I spent a year of my childhood with a coat hanger up my sleeve pretending I was Captain Hook,” he stammers for the first time. “Wow … hahaha,” he says as I continue blurting my obsession with his prosthetic hand, not realizing at first that pretending to have a hook and really having one are two very different things. “When I first saw you, I couldn’t believe it,” I continue, maybe digging myself deeper into a hole. “Here is the guy I want to be, and you made that hook a complete fashion statement.” “A lot of people say to me,” he replies with a little bit of concern, “‘One of the reasons you made it in the business and had hits and everything is because you had that hook,’ and I say, ‘Stop it right here. Let me tell you something. In those days no one saw you until after your records came out, and they knew what you looked like after they bought your stuff, so it had nothing to do with that!’”
“Did you know Provincetown was a gay town then?” I ask, bringing up for the first time something that could be touchy for the townie kids growing up here. “Fags!” the other high school teams would taunt the Provincetown High School teams whenever they’d play other schools in sporting events down Cape. “Provincetown began as a fishing village,” Moulty remembers, “with a small community of gay folks—we were kids—the queers were over here. We didn’t care. Everybody got along. When our song came out in 1965, a lot of the gays in Ptown thought I made it for them. I didn’t make it for them, but I didn’t say anything. Let ’em buy it.” That’s the first time I’ve heard “gay for pay” applied to record sales, but I sure as hell get what he means. Straight people love Hairspray and I just keep on letting them buy the different soundtracks, too. We’re both gay-for-music-pay.
His much lesser known song “Moulty” is my favorite. It’s kind of like a male Shangri-Las record, emotionally distraught, talky, and hilariously over-the-top. Moulty didn’t even want to record it, but the follow-up hit to “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl,” “Hey, Little Bird,” the one they did on The T.A.M.I. Show, costarring the Rolling Stones and James Brown, didn’t chart, and neither did their next single, “What the New Breed Say,” so their manager, Doug Morris, who later went on to be CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, pleaded with Moulty to release this crazy almost-novelty record that explained how after losing his hand, “something deep” inside Moulty told him “over and over to keep on going” and that all he needed now was “not pity, but a girl” to make him a “complete man.” Oh, brother. Moulty at first refused to sing it, but after much pleading from his manager, he reluctantly agreed, and since the other Barbarians were not even on the record, Moulty still wouldn’t approve the release. The label put it out anyway without telling him, and it became the hit they needed. Even though Moulty admits today that song sometimes gets even more attention than their first hit, neither the Barbarians nor Moulty ever played this record live even once. Not then. Not in their later different reunion tours. Not ever.
Moulty may have been back on the charts in 1966, but suddenly he was busted for possessing pot in Provincetown and had to serve four months in prison. “You got time for just pot?!” I marveled. “Yep,” he responds without any apparent bitterness. “They said I was a bad influence and I was. A year later it would have helped our careers,” he reasons, since by then many big rock-and-roll stars were having their own legendary drug problems, but in 1966 it was the final curtain. “That ended your career?” I ask sadly. “Yes, it did,” he says. The Barbarians were over.
Suddenly I remember the final question I’ve been wanting to ask Moulty forever: “Did you know Tony Costa?” He was Provincetown’s most famous Life-magazine-covered hippie murderer—kind of a pre–Charles Manson who was suspected of killing seven young women but convicted in 1965 of murdering only two and cutting up their bodies in his marijuana-growing patch in the woods and gnawing on their remains. “Very well,” Moulty answers without missing a beat. “There were many other girls killed,” he continues, and “nobody knows about [that].” “Did you suspect?” I wonder. “We knew girls that he had killed, but we don’t know where he hid the bodies. A lot of us knew what was going on. I was traveling so I didn’t see as much as my friends in Provincetown did. They’d tell me … [a last name] … ‘Oh my God! I went out with her! She’s gone! Tony got her!’” “This was common knowledge?” I ask incredulously. “Oh, yeah,” he deadpans, still the most unruffled and unaffected man on earth. Moulty, I love you. Please do one more Barbarians reunion tour and for the first time sing your song “Moulty” live. Just for me, your number one fan.
When I think of the Town Crier, I go beyond even my Moulty obsession. In my mind, I am the Town Crier of Provincetown. There’ve been many of them over the years and I’ve followed the career of each. My favorite was Fred Baldwin, the grouchy one that scared children even when he gave out lollipops and was really mean to all hippies. One day, I saw him picking up his Pilgrim outfit at the dry cleaner’s, and it struck me in such a beautifully pitiful way that I started to spy on him. What an existence he had, every day walking up and down Commercial Street in Provincetown, ringing that damn bell, yelling “Hear, ye! Hear, ye!” and posing with tourists. He seemed to have no friends. Then he’d go home, change into some drab clothes, and watch TV. Such a double life, so Clark Kent.
For many years the Chamber of Commerce paid the Town Crier and a gift shop was even named after him. He’d announce official events such as the Blessing of the Fleet, ride in parades, and appear at church bingo events. But as the town got gayer, the role of the Town Crier seemed to fade. The town stopped paying him and it became a volunteer job. One crier seemed antigay in his public behavior, and there were whispers of child abuse against another. Then Ken Lonergan got the job and the Town Crier was back in a big way. He was “openly gay” as they say these days and would often belt out show tunes while keeping up the tradition of bell ringing. Not everybody approved. “I think it’s awful the Town Crier is now gay,” complained a friend of mine’s liberal mother, who was supportive of her only son’s gayness. “He used to be serious,” she griped, unfairly in my opinion, “but now he’s just gay. It’s not right.” Go figure.
I decided I wanted to experience what it would be like to actually be the Town Crier. So I plotted to have myself photographed dressed as the Town Crier for purely artistic reasons and hang the results in an upcoming art show I was having at the Albert Merola Gallery. But like a cheapskate drag queen I had to ask the real Town Crier if I could borrow his outfit. Ken was quite understanding. I went over to his modest but neat apartment (I’m always trembling with excitement whenever I’m near a Town Crier’s actual living space) and tried on one of his tunic tops and drawstring knee breeches. I slipped on the white Pilgrim collar and felt for the first time like a complete public figure. Was I a film director caught in the body of a Town Crier who suddenly felt the urge to “pass”? Ken patiently explained where I could send away to get the white leggings I would need plus lent me the buckles to clip on any pair of black oxfords I might have with me. When I tried on his floppy hat, it fit! My transformation into total Yankee lunacy was almost complete. “Could I hold your bell?” I asked in cross-dressing glee. “Yes, you can,” Mr. Lonergan answered benevolently, handing me the prop I’d so long yearned to ring.
