someone shouted.
“So let’s begin—”
“Hey,” the heckler repeated. It was Ian, staggering through the audience in a yellow-and-black rugby shirt spotted with ketchup. His eyes and nose looked runny, like he’d been fighting flu. “How come you weren’t in the last skit, Mark? I think you could’ve added a lot of…authenticity.”
“Where is the goddamn bouncer?” Roberto was asking.
“I think you’ve had a few too many,” I told Ian. Then, without thinking, I repeated my gesture from years before, under the Gothic arches on the chapel’s crypt: I touched his shoulder.
And he repeated his response, this time in public, for my troupe and our entire audience to hear—“Take your fucking hands off me, you son of a whore!”
To my right, a straight couple was beginning a pitcher of beer. Everything felt tenuous, like the landscapes in lucid dreams; I felt that I could fly if I chose to. I said, “I don’t usually use props, but tonight I’m making an exception.”
Then I seized the pitcher of beer and emptied it over Ian Drummond’s head.
Chapter Six
The next day, Sunday, I went to church as a kind of penance, to the Unitarian/Universalist meetinghouse in Provincetown. It’s right there on Commercial Street, with its white clapboards and prim spire, amid the shops selling incense and tarot cards and tit clamps. Inside,
tromp l’oeil
paintings gave an added dimension to its ceiling and walls, pulling niches, cornices, pilasters, and rosettes from flat, oyster-colored plaster. Suspended from the ceiling hung a Victorian lamp, all prisms and glass globes, the sort Mary Lincoln might have read by. Pews which once held whalers’ widows and sailors familiar with Cape Horn and islands of cannibals were now filled with drag queens and software executives masquerading as beachboys.
I felt awful, for all sorts of reasons: for disgracing myself with my improv colleagues, for fleeing Quahog as soon the bouncer pried Ian and me apart. An angry friend is more dreaded than any enemy, so meeting Roberto or Roger Morton terrified me.
And I was wary that the Christian Soldiers, or whoever was responsible for the hate crime at Arthur’s, might sabotage a service at this most lavender of congregations. So when Edward settled into the pew in front of me, a little to my left so that I could observe him without his knowing, it was somehow comforting. Upon sitting, he began to pray, shutting his eyes as tightly as a child counting while playing hide-and-go-seek.
The first hymn was, ironically, “Forward Through the Ages,” that is, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with lyrics editing Jesus and war out of the picture. Christian Soldiers, I thought, would haunt this service.
And I was right. When the congregation was invited to share its “joys and sorrows,” several people took the microphone to express concern for Arthur and the “spirit” or “soul” of Provincetown. A Canadian lesbian, an Olympic kayaking gold medalist, spoke sadly about “the five men—they looked like Christian Soldiers, they had the uniforms—who screamed insults at me and at my partner from a car on Bradford Street.” Some in the church clapped at compliments to Arthur, while others whirled two fingers above their heads, in the Unitarian “gesture of affirmation.”
Edward coughed into a tissue during the sermon, which was about hatred. The African-American minister, a lesbian graduate of Harvard Divinity School, said, “We have to look inside our hearts, to ask ourselves: Is there hatred within us too? What kind of garden are we growing within our souls? Is it full of nettles and thistles and briars? Or does it bring forth the sweet, nourishing fruit of forgiveness?”
Were Hollings Fair’s followers the forgiving sort? Fair himself had left Cape Cod the day after his speech at the town meeting. He was needed, evidently, at his trademark church, with its concrete angel with an observation deck lodged in her halo. Were the
“So let’s begin—”
“Hey,” the heckler repeated. It was Ian, staggering through the audience in a yellow-and-black rugby shirt spotted with ketchup. His eyes and nose looked runny, like he’d been fighting flu. “How come you weren’t in the last skit, Mark? I think you could’ve added a lot of…authenticity.”
“Where is the goddamn bouncer?” Roberto was asking.
“I think you’ve had a few too many,” I told Ian. Then, without thinking, I repeated my gesture from years before, under the Gothic arches on the chapel’s crypt: I touched his shoulder.
And he repeated his response, this time in public, for my troupe and our entire audience to hear—“Take your fucking hands off me, you son of a whore!”
To my right, a straight couple was beginning a pitcher of beer. Everything felt tenuous, like the landscapes in lucid dreams; I felt that I could fly if I chose to. I said, “I don’t usually use props, but tonight I’m making an exception.”
Then I seized the pitcher of beer and emptied it over Ian Drummond’s head.
Chapter Six
The next day, Sunday, I went to church as a kind of penance, to the Unitarian/Universalist meetinghouse in Provincetown. It’s right there on Commercial Street, with its white clapboards and prim spire, amid the shops selling incense and tarot cards and tit clamps. Inside,
tromp l’oeil
paintings gave an added dimension to its ceiling and walls, pulling niches, cornices, pilasters, and rosettes from flat, oyster-colored plaster. Suspended from the ceiling hung a Victorian lamp, all prisms and glass globes, the sort Mary Lincoln might have read by. Pews which once held whalers’ widows and sailors familiar with Cape Horn and islands of cannibals were now filled with drag queens and software executives masquerading as beachboys.
I felt awful, for all sorts of reasons: for disgracing myself with my improv colleagues, for fleeing Quahog as soon the bouncer pried Ian and me apart. An angry friend is more dreaded than any enemy, so meeting Roberto or Roger Morton terrified me.
And I was wary that the Christian Soldiers, or whoever was responsible for the hate crime at Arthur’s, might sabotage a service at this most lavender of congregations. So when Edward settled into the pew in front of me, a little to my left so that I could observe him without his knowing, it was somehow comforting. Upon sitting, he began to pray, shutting his eyes as tightly as a child counting while playing hide-and-go-seek.
The first hymn was, ironically, “Forward Through the Ages,” that is, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with lyrics editing Jesus and war out of the picture. Christian Soldiers, I thought, would haunt this service.
And I was right. When the congregation was invited to share its “joys and sorrows,” several people took the microphone to express concern for Arthur and the “spirit” or “soul” of Provincetown. A Canadian lesbian, an Olympic kayaking gold medalist, spoke sadly about “the five men—they looked like Christian Soldiers, they had the uniforms—who screamed insults at me and at my partner from a car on Bradford Street.” Some in the church clapped at compliments to Arthur, while others whirled two fingers above their heads, in the Unitarian “gesture of affirmation.”
Edward coughed into a tissue during the sermon, which was about hatred. The African-American minister, a lesbian graduate of Harvard Divinity School, said, “We have to look inside our hearts, to ask ourselves: Is there hatred within us too? What kind of garden are we growing within our souls? Is it full of nettles and thistles and briars? Or does it bring forth the sweet, nourishing fruit of forgiveness?”
Were Hollings Fair’s followers the forgiving sort? Fair himself had left Cape Cod the day after his speech at the town meeting. He was needed, evidently, at his trademark church, with its concrete angel with an observation deck lodged in her halo. Were the
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