Free Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham

hopes of publication or a grant, and you told her that that was what you were doing, she’d take your envelope into the back of the post office and press it to her bare breast for luck before sending it on.
    P LACES TO P EE
    There are, as far as I know, only two places where the public is officially permitted to pee without buying anything. You can use the bathrooms in Town Hall, though it closes to the public if a meeting, show, or fund-raising auction is going on inside. There are, more reliably, public bathrooms on the bay side of Town Hall, right by the parking lot next to MacMillan Wharf.
    G OSSIP
    Provincetown is, among its many attributes, one of the more impressive rumor mills in the Western world. Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular nineteenth-century journalist, said over a hundred years ago that it was a place with “no secrets, where there is but one accountable path in the whole neighborhood. Everybody at Provincetown knows every time everybody goes out, and every time anybody comes in.” That is still true. Any small town engenders a good deal of gossip, but in this regard Provincetown is to other towns what McDonald’s is to mom-and-pop diners. Most citizens of most small towns must content themselves with a handful of extramarital affairs and a few wayward sons and daughters; they must chew and chew this limited fare. In Provincetown the denizens tend to lead more dramatic lives, and some citizens maintain a more than usually creative relationship to reality. Thus, the offerings are almost embarrassingly rich and varied.
    The nerve center of Provincetown’s gossip network is the steps in front of the post office. They were, however, better suited to leisurely tale-telling before post office officials, in an act I can only interpret as conspicuous malice, became concerned that loiterers were interfering with the public’s ability to come and go and so cut the steps in half by installing a wholly unnecessary brick flower box. In response, satellite gossip stations have been established—the bricked yard in front of Joe’s coffee house (the one in the West End, not its sister to the east) and the wooden bench in front of a store called Map are especially fertile.
    The gossip season extends from early fall to late spring. In summer, during the tourist assault, everyone is too busy to pay more than glancing attention to questions about who’s doing what to whom and why. By mid-September, however, the feast begins, and it goes on well into June. In a month of average fecundity, someone will have left a lover for that person’s former lover, someone will have gotten drunk and trashed the apartment of an ex, someone will have gotten fired under suspicious circumstances rumored to involve sex or drugs or both, and the members of a newly formed theatrical troupe will have had a screaming fight, disbanded, and then re-formed minus the member considered to be the source of the trouble. The meetings of various twelve-step programs around town have a problem with people who are not really addicts at all but say they are so they can come to meetings and find out what’s going on. During the time it took me to write this chapter on gossip, I received a number of e-mails from several friends in Provincetown who feel particularly obliged to keep me informed. One concerned a young man who stole a car on Commercial Street, crashed it into a van carrying deaf tourists, and ran out into the bay, believing that would throw dogs off his scent. The second involved two local men who took a taxi to one of the banks, put on ski masks, and held up the tellers at gunpoint. The men forced the tellers to fill several garbage bags with currency, then got on two getaway bicycles they had left nearby, rode home with the loot, where they were quickly apprehended. Both those stories are true. I checked.
    Among the more notable rumors I’ve heard over the years, I offer the following:
    Barbra Streisand is buying a house, under an assumed