Provincetown can barely contain its contradictions. It could be the perfect place to go for an epic bender or it might be your last chance to find sobriety. Some vacation here hoping for hot sweaty sex with a stranger they’ll never see again, while others come on their honeymoon with the person of their dreams. Here you’ll find aspiring entertainers in search of their first big break and broken-down writers in the twilight of their careers.
Ptown combines the energy of a wild summer weekend with the still melancholy of a failed love affair. It mixes industrious Portuguese fishing families with over-confident, newly-minted biotech millionaires and tosses no-nonsense Coast Guard lifesaving crews in with razzle dazzle piano players. Three miles long and barely a thousand feet wide, inside its confines you’ll meet drag queens, grifters, poets, entrepreneurs, and retired schoolteachers bubbling in a frothy mix of humanity.
Floating at the top of this pile of lovable losers and intolerable winners is Luna, whose regal presence dominates all. Tonight, our Queen of Lands End’s feet bite at her as more than a century of bunions and blisters conspire to make every step a pain. Trying to maintain her trademark strut in heels way too high for a half mile walk down Provincetown’s narrow brick sidewalks, she feels every year of her extremely long lifetime of wearing oh-too fashionable women’s shoes despite her extra-large feet. Luna first put on women’s boots when she stood up to sing in a dive bar on Boston’s notorious waterfront in 1882. One hundred and forty years later, and after countless nights wearing stilettos, her feet need a rest. So does she. But for some strange reason, God has decided to grant her immortality and here she is, well into her second century with only a couple of gray hairs to show for it. Except for her feet. She is grateful for this gift of infinite life, but dear lord, couldn’t it have come with better arches?
Luna takes in all the people who’ve washed ashore here at the end of Cape Cod. She collects the strays, the hard to love, and those not wanted elsewhere. The town is full of eccentrics, those who never quite fit in where they came from, and those too stubborn to leave. She loves the fact that everyone here is a bit crazy and somewhat off-kilter. Before Luna performs tonight, she checks in on Meg DeLuca, whose cancer treatments are getting the best of her. Even in a town of cranks and characters, Meg stands out for her crabbiness. Despite her support socks, old leather sandals, and a body that has grown to look like an overripe pear, Meg has an air about her that reflects her earlier glamorous self. Luna would do anything to ease her pain.
Meg’s orneriness is legendary. Like so many others in Provincetown she has smoked and drank too much for decades, and Luna can hear the crust of nicotine and tar on her vocal cords every time she talks. Meg had been the most beautiful flower back when the great lesbian bar, The Pied Piper, had featured a dazzling bouquet of women. Her years of bartending had ruined her back while disappointments and setbacks deeply lined her face. Weighed down by bad luck, Meg’s personality crinkles and crackles. Last January, Luna remarked on the splendor of feeling the warmth of the sun on her face on a cold winter day, only for Meg to say, “Skin cancer knows no season.” This June, when they were driving through the National Seashore, Luna complimented the beautiful yellow flowers lining the road. Meg pointed out that Scotch Broom was an invasive species. “I wish someone would dig them up, throw them all into a pile, and burn them to ashes.” Luna puts up with Meg’s complaints out of compassion. Meg’s lover of thirty years died of cirrhosis just a week after they were finally able to marry in 2004 and she has never been the same. And since Meg’s stomach cancer returned, Luna has been there to hold her hand. What would this town be without Meg’s morbidly robust opinions?
After checking in on Meg and two others who need attention, Luna makes slow progress down Commercial Street as she turns heads and signs autographs on her way to The Standish Hotel. Every inch of her tall, lean body reflects her mixture of African, Taino, and Spanish ancestry. Her skin is a dark honey-brown, her eyes as green as the harbor after a storm, and she has let her hair grow long and wild ever since she grew tired of using caustic chemicals to straighten it. Being immortal, Luna does not have to worry about cancer, heart disease, or degenerative diseases of the mind. Perhaps the only potential downside to living forever is boredom, but Luna has her hands full.
She devotes her time to helping preserve the independent way of life that clings to this narrow spit of sand. Everything here challenges convention down to the way it stubbornly refuses to use an apostrophe to spell Lands End. Provincetown is built on sand and dreams, and all it takes is a harsh wave of reality to sweep people away. Some of Luna’s tasks are simple, last night she alerted a cab driver to a pile of drunk young men by the Coast Guard station who needed a ride home and assisted two helpless tourists to get the gate at the parking lot on the wharf to work. She freed a fox stuck in a garbage can and picked up a bunch of penis hats discarded by a bachelorette party. Easy. A couple from New York wanted to know where the nearest ATM was. A piece of cake. Luna often wonders who would keep the town running if anything ever happened to her.
She has greater responsibilities. Luna manages the tides in the harbor, keeping them aligned with her namesake moon because like everything and everyone else in this town, if left to their own devices they’d end up out of synch with the rest of the world, and who knew what would happen if opposing currents collided. She coaxed the forests in the National Seashore to regrow after centuries of townies cutting down trees for fuel and persuaded the lighthouse at Long Point not to tumble into the sea. Luna knows that she will eventually lose her fight with rising ocean levels, but she vows to use every last bit of her stubborn Cuban energy to stretch out the time Ptown has left.
There were limits to her power. She spends hours every week helping the poor right whales, a struggle she is losing. Despite her desperate assistance, their numbers continue to decline. Saddest of all, Luna is still in mourning over the hundreds of young men she was unable to save during the 1980s and 1990s when the AIDS epidemic burned through the town. She tries to find solace in her helping folks today get drugs to prevent HIV infections and seeks to soothe the spirits of those lost by regularly purchasing mass cards in their memories, but Luna has learned that the biggest burden of immortality is the accumulation of sorrows over time.
She will be the first to tell you she is no saint. Luna has little patience for the bicyclists who roar down Commercial Street, coming within a hair of knocking down pedestrians, and don’t get her started on people who don’t clean up after their dogs. Though she has infinite time, she lacks the patience to sit on the benches in front of Town Hall, and she has told more than one passionate, but slow, young lover they need to finish and leave as she has places to go.
Stepping up to the mic for her regular gig in the backroom at The Standish, Luna has the self-confidence of someone with more than a century of experience before an audience. Because she has outlived a dozen lovers, torch songs come easy, and when Luna sings of failed love affairs, her audiences cry into their stylish martinis. If she belts out a song about betrayal, and Luna has been on both sides of the perfidy line, she has to hold herself back lest a fistfight erupt among the waitstaff. People in this laidback town do not take infidelity lightly, at least when it isn’t themselves doing the straying. Luna would spend every penny of her fortune to dry the tears that soak this town, but even with her millions, she can’t buy anyone happiness. It amazes her that a town built on hedonism can be so awash in melancholy.
Because she has outlasted everyone, she is the town’s largest property owner with three dozen buildings in her portfolio. She bought her first property back in 1897 and by the beginning of the Great War she owned three rooming houses. She almost lost her largest building when Eugene O’Neill knocked over a candle while in a drunken rage in 1917. After that, she never again rented rooms to playwrights, though Tennessee Williams spent so many nights with one of her tenants that she should have charged him rent. Sampling his talents herself, Luna had been impressed by his sexual energy as well as his smooth charm and wit. But she thought Tennessee was an overanxious blowhard who would never amount to anything. When he read her excerpts from A Streetcar Named Desire over shots at The Barn—Luna buying, of course—she didn’t think it would become an American masterpiece. She financed the production anyway and went on to make a fortune on Broadway. Luck is everything. She runs her portfolio out of a little office on Bradford Street near Town Hall. A sign on the door proclaims it is the home of Joe Santos and Sons, though everyone calls her Luna and she has never fathered a son. She keeps her rents low, only charging enough to pay her expenses and has most of her assets with a money management firm in the city. She owns a fifteen-year-old car, never travels beyond Boston, and has no expensive vices beyond shoes that hurt her feet. So why be greedy?
When you are one hundred and ninety-six years old, the rule that you should never date anyone younger than half your age plus ten doesn’t work. Her current boyfriend, Jimmy Almeida, is twenty-seven and the great great-grandson of the woman who rented a room to Luna the first night she came to Ptown. Jimmy works for his family business that has built or renovated almost every structure in town. His connection to the Portuguese community energizes Luna, not to mention she has always had a thing for beefy young construction workers. She hopes that her relationship with Jimmy will last fifty or so years. Then it will be time for the next boyfriend because Luna is not the marrying kind.
She still marvels that she found this place. After decades of singing in Boston, she was performing in a dirty little bar on the back slope of Beacon Hill when a dashing Harvard student with an enchanting smile and terrible alcohol problem told her about this wild outpost at the tip of Cape Cod. “They call it Lands End,” he said, sliding a hand up her leg, “because there is nothing beyond except the cold empty sea. With nowhere else to go, the things that happen in that town would make mining camp saloonkeepers blush.” He paused to swig down another mouthful of whiskey. “Anyplace that bad must be damned fun.” With his stories about crews of savage scavengers, many of whom were among the most respected members of the town’s establishment, its bars where people made out with anyone they wanted safe from the disapproving eyes of Puritan Boston, and the raw beauty of sand and sea, it sounded like her place in the world. Luna hitched a ride on a fishing boat and just stepping out on the pier, she knew this was where she was meant to be.
As a teenager, Luna had desperately wanted out of Cuba, seeing nothing but a life of struggle and exploitation if she stayed. Her ticket off the island was a job on a boat that carried molasses to the United States from various Caribbean ports. She jumped ship in Boston on a whim. After a night of hard drinking in a bar just off the waterfront, she woke up in a dark tenement in Boston’s African American neighborhood. The sex with her bedmate was so good, going back on her ship seemed a burden. She sang to support herself.
Like many immigrants, she feels the loss of her land of origin in her soul. She can never go back, everyone she had known there was long dead, but there is a place in her heart for those she will never see again. Luna particularly feels that ache on those rare warm humid summer nights when she is reminded of the weather back in Cuba.
Leaving The Standish after two encores, Luna gets ready for her real work. She checks under the dock to make sure no one has passed out there, nods to a stray cat to tell him he will find the love he is looking for behind the hardware store and returns a book to the library for her piano player. Then she walks over to Bas Relief Park at the base of the monument which she has visited every night since she arrived in town. A small patch of grass behind Town Hall, it is dominated by a big bronze frieze honoring the Pilgrims who landed here before moving on to Plymouth Rock. This is the spot where she feels most connected to this ephemeral little settlement on a fragile sand bar.
Luna kicks off her shoes, feeling relief from their tight pinching as well as luxuriating in the feel of cool, dew-covered grass between her toes. She looks up at the moon, a pale sliver at this time of the month and summons everything she loves, and all the things she doesn’t like but accepts anyway, about the town. This is home, this is where she belongs. As memories and hopes, fears and many things long forgotten flood into her mind, she feels the weight of history and the heaviness of the future in her blood.
Honoring it all, Luna dances. She waives her arms in time with the rhythm of the stars and stomps her feet to the driving beat of the music of the spheres. She claps for those from the past who have left her and sings for the people yet to come. Leaping and twirling for everyone who deserves love and the many who do not, Luna is ferocious and tender in her steps, her moves are both celebratory and funereal. Passersby don’t notice anything other than a call of a stray coyote and a slight rustling of a sea breeze, but Luna is there, dancing for us all.
Russ López is the author of six nonfiction books including The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond. He is the editor of LatineLit, an online magazine that publishes fiction by and about Latinx people, and his work has appeared in The Fictional Café, Somos en escrito, Bar Bar, Northeast Atlantic, Agapanthus Collective, Night Picnic, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. López has written numerous academic articles, book reviews, and works in other formats. Originally from California with degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and Boston University, Russ lives in Boston and Provincetown.