The Fisher Boy Read Free Page B

don’t ever call me Doug.” No surname was ever mentioned, nor was the identity of his ship, and the records I’d consulted—the Navy’s, the Port Authority’s, the newspapers on microfiche at various libraries—yielded no clues. A Liberian tanker had docked that weekend, and a cruise ship, the
Bimini Prize,
but no American vessels, so my father became lost, stolen by long-ago tides.
    “Neither of us knew you were on the way,” my mother said. I arrived the first day of April, under the sign of the ram.
    After my mother dropped out of the Conservatory, she supported herself by singing jazz in clubs and acting in summer stock. She’d finished a run of
The
King and I
at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis when she took the gig at Jubilee’s. The owner of the club was quite struck by her. Grenadian by birth, almost seven feet tall, he had skin the color of toffee and a diamond set in one of his canine teeth. He’d been baptized Alphonse, but everyone called him Jubilee.
    He put us up in an apartment in a series of shacks built out on a pier. It’s still there today, gull-gray and hung with ropes and lanterns and blue glass Japanese fishermen’s floats. It was sufficiently rickety to serve in my imagination as a pirate ship, and the smell of the sea permeated everything: our sheets, our clothing, even the corn flakes we kept in our refrigerator. I would play on the beach underneath the pier, between the wet, slick pilings, which, studded with periwinkles and barnacles, seemed part of the sea, like the wreck of a galleon full of skeletons and chests of rubies.
    Sometimes, late at night, after the club had closed and Jubilee had driven us home—I always attended my mother’s shows—we would sit outside on the pier in the dark, my mother drinking tea “with just a smidgen of gin” while I nursed a 7-Up and gobbled the barbecue-flavored peanuts the bartenders gave me to keep me quiet. My mother would still be in her “working clothes,” the long sequined gown, glittery like a boat’s wake in moonlight. She’d hum a few bars of “Satin Doll” or do some husky parody of a nursery rhyme and we’d both just stare out to sea. I’d always assumed she was thinking about my father, where he was and what he was doing, sailing off Madagascar, getting a tattoo in Yokohama…We’d stare out to sea like those whalers’ wives who kept watching horizons long after they knew their husbands had drowned.
    I don’t remember noticing the gay men in Provincetown that summer when I was eight. Raised in a house with brassieres but no neckties, with Midol and douche but no Cruex or Old Spice, all men seemed exotic to me. Yet that first summer in Provincetown, I vividly recall seeing my first naked man, not flesh and blood, but paint and canvas—Thomas Royall’s masterpiece,
The Fisher Boy
. In the Provincetown Municipal Museum.
    Since then, I’ve seen that painting a thousand times, on jigsaw puzzles and postcards, on tote bags and key chains and magnets, even parodied in pornography and political cartoons. It’s almost as ubiquitous as Michelangelo’s
David,
in the gay world, anyway—this naked youth, kneeling in a dory, holding a halibut so silver and unworldly it could be an idol of some sea deity.
    The light—on his chest and darker genitals, on the crests of the waves and emphasizing the scales of the fish—all this light on these naked surfaces made the scene throb with sensuality, as if the painting itself had a pulse. I wanted to plunge into that sea, swim to his dory, and have the Fisher Boy lift me from the water.
    “Who is he?” I asked my mother.
    “He’s some model, darling.”
    “Is he out in the harbor?”
    “I doubt it, Mark. This picture was painted in…1916, so I doubt if he’s hauling nets these days. He’s probably playing a harp.” She drew the tube of scarlet lipstick over her lips, as careful as I was with my crayons, careful to stay within the lines…From that point on, I saw Provincetown