DELTA DAWN WHAT’S THAT FLOWER YOU HAVE ON?
COULD IT BE A FADED ROSES FORM TIME GONE BY?
AND DID I HEAR YOU SAY HE WAS MEETING YOU HERE TODAY
TO TAKE YOU TO HIS MANSION IN THE SKY?
A Tanqueray and tonic.
A wrap-around porch in Provincetown.
An evening cocktail with a cherished friend.
The drink sat before me with a requisite lime, made by a bartender who learned it instantly and who would remember it for all my time there. My friend Kristen sat beside me as we waited for the rest of our group to make it to the very tip of the Cape. We were all of twenty-five or twenty-six years old, and this would prove to be one of the first, and one of the last, of our youthful vacations together.
At the Gifford House, just down the road from the place we had rented out, a gaggle of gays had already started gathering. In mid to late July, the height and hounding of deep summer had commenced. Men milled about while a few ladies laughed and tore through the place in summer shorts and sun-blonde hair.
SHE’S FORTY-ONE AND HER DADDY STILL CALLS HER BABY
ALL THE FOLKS AROUND BROWNSVILLE SAY SHE’S CRAZY
CAUSE SHE WALKS DOWNTOWN WITH A SUITCASE IN HER HAND
LOOKING FOR A MYSTERIOUS DARK-HAIRED MAN…
It came on the sound system at the bar and everyone except me immediately began singing along. We had apparently landed in the very gay world of ‘Delta Dawn’ – a world I didn’t even realize was slipping away before I even had a chance to learn its wondrous ways. I sat there with Kristen and we looked around in happy amusement. Our extended weekend had started when we boarded the ferry in Boston – I didn’t have a boyfriend and it was already summer and we just wanted to have fun. Kristen was game for anything, so we sat there people-watching, and now listening as the whole place sang along to a song I’d never heard. Making a mental note that this was something I needed to learn, we listened as guys intermittently laughed, joked, talked, smoked, and sang along. It was the end of the 90’s – the end of the world’s innocence. I ordered another Tanqueray and tonic and we moved to the outside porch. It was still light out, and we were going out for dinner. Kristen had a boyfriend – she drew people to her and captivated them with an outgoing friendliness that I adored and envied. That night I was just happy that she was my friend. It emboldened me to be brave, and brave meant that I could flirt with a guy without worry or care.
At the other end of the porch, a handsome man was sizing me up, and I was doing the same. We would go our separate ways before ending up back at this porch by the end of the night. Without Kristen by my side, I had only my own wiles and wit to sustain conversation, and I tended to veer into cutting criticism far too easily. He didn’t seem to mind, and after a while of feeling him out I decided it was better to be kind.
He was cute. I was available. It was the end of the night. We were so young.
Moving shadows, soft moans, summer mugginess, sweaty stickiness, salty sweetness… he came and went and in the coolness of the night I waited for the next chapter to begin. When we saw each other on Commercial Street the next day it was as if we had never met.
How long it seemed to have taken for a man to be a mere footnote in my story, and how soon I’d learn to relegate them to even less. My heart had been slow to understand, but once the lesson was figured out, once I understood the basic mechanism of the thing and how everything related, it was impossible to forget. I would never not be a little cold again. That’s how the heart protects; that’s how the heart heals.
IN HER YOUNGER DAYS THEY CALLED HER DELTA DAWN
PRETTIEST WOMAN YOU EVER LAID EYES ON
THEN A MAN OF LOW DEGREE STOOD BY HER SIDE
AND PROMISED HER HE’S TAKE HER FOR HIS BRIDE…
As for Ms. Dawn, she knew her way around heartache. It debilitated her, but she lived with it. Dwelling inside perpetual disappointment is also dwelling within the realm of hope. They are sister spirits, and one is rarely encountered without the other. Not to say that it makes the hurt any less, and sometimes I think the smallest bit of hope is the most dangerous thing in the world. How long had she waited? Is she waiting still?
In Savannah, there’s a statue of a young woman by the river, looking out to the water and waiting for a sailor she loved who never returned. As the boats pass by her, some blow their horns in honor of this woman-in-waiting. In a city renowned for being so haunted, that might be the most haunting story of them all.
In that last summer of youth in Provincetown, we left our own ghosts behind. Friends and strangers, lovers and dangers, they wander the nights of memory, summer phantoms carried on the sweet, rotting scent of privet and salty sea mist.
