Characters Who Are… Characters

Provincetown has more than its share of real ghosts. We remember a time when men came here to die of a plague that didn’t even have a name; back then, there was a new funeral every week. Or we can listen to the wind that whispers over the dunes, reminding us of all the shipwrecked victims who died on our shores when the Cape was still the Atlantic’s favorite graveyard. 

I strive to see the ghosts of my literary predecessors here, of Edna St. Vincent Millay scratching away in a cold attic room, of Eugene O’Neill staging plays on Lewis Wharf, Tennessee Williams at the Little Bar of the Atlantic House, Norman Mailer roaringly drunk and brawling with fishermen, John Dos Passos decrying war in three volumes of work. I don’t even expect most people are looking for the same ghosts I am.

Of course, realistically, my own perspective is valid. But I also wonder if I have a responsibility toward those other ghosts. Am I being honest in not including them? Yet how can I access things I don’t know about?

The one thing I know I can do is keep some of it alive. Honor some of the people who lived and died here and whose lives were so meaningful to the town. Ellie, the transgender woman who used to—at age 78—belt out Frank Sinatra in front of Town Hall.

Richard Olson, the amateur historian who served in town government and for years sat at the bar at Napi’s and dispensed amazing wisdom. Tim McCarthy, activist, who was never without his video camera, documenting life. Names that in another ten years will have disappeared from memory, because they weren’t famous anywhere but here. But they were part of here, and so I’m remembering them as I write about this place. In A Killer Carnival, Ellie was remembered; it’s Richard’s turn in my newest release, A Fatal Folly. And perhaps someone will pick up the book and muse, “Yeah, right, I remember Richard! Gosh, I’d forgotten all about him.”

And maybe somewhere Richard will be smiling.