Well, I got through my week with Brandon Gonzalez, the kid I mentor. (See picture below of me along with Brandon and my friend, Michael Rourke, a television honcho who has now created a trifecta of court shows - Judge Hatchett, Judge Lopez, and the upcoming first gay jurist in the genre, Judge David Young.) Yesterday, Friday, Brandon turned 13. It was the last day of his visit. I gave him an early birthday party on Wednesday and had a few people over. He ended up getting lots of loot and cash - which I have to be careful about since I don’t want him to see me as an ATM machine or his visits here to Ptown as a kind of mercenary mission. We’ve known each other for six years now so I don’t think he harbors those kinds of attitudes about me anymore, but I always have to be vigilant not to spoil him. When I was first getting to know him, he could push all my buttons - he is a bit of a street kid with a very complicated family history and his mode of survival is one of emotional manipulation, I can’t blame him for that - but he no longer is able to target my buttons with such acuity. Others aren’t so highly attuned to his methods, however, so I do have a kind of bemused resentment toward him when I watch him launch one of his charm offenses with a group of my friends when we’re on the beach or in town or at someone else’s house.

Two summers ago, photographer and artist, Jack Pierson, took a lovely series of portraits of Brandon, then ten years old, on the wharf we shared at Poor Richard’s Landing here in town. Jack has promised since then to give Brandon and me copies of a couple of the portraits. Brandon, when he discovered after Googling him, that Jack was famous and that one of his “word sculptures” had fetched $140,000 at auction, kept saying he was going to sell his on Ebay when he got back to Brooklyn. I told him it was a gift and he couldn’t do that, that it would be rude. Jack has said that his art is about “the disaster inherent in the search for glamour.” I kept thinking about that description as we all watched the Carnival parade floats and their costumed denizens here in Ptown on Thursday. After the parade - which we watched with Jack and Michael and some of my other friends from the porch of the great old captain’s house in the East End that Manhattan interiors maven John Derian bought this summer in Ptown (if you’re here be sure to check out John’s wonderful boutique version of his Manhattan store in the back of the house off Commercial Street) - Jack offered to give Brandon a ride back in his boat to the West End of town where I now live. He even let him steer the thing and Brandon arrived all hopped up from his maiden nautical advernture. “Driving a boat was the best 13th birthday present I could have ever got!” he exclaimed. “I ain’t never done nothing like that before. I didn’t even ax him if I could. He just let me. And he gave me these pictures. I ain’t gonna sell mine on Ebay. You didn’t tell me, dude, they were big pictures like this,” he said, showing me the two giant portraits Jack had given him on the ride back to my cottage. Brandon had chosen the more pensive pose and told me I could have the one of him grinning and looking more like a little boy. “He don’t take little pictures. I thought they were gonna be little like out of a Kodak. I ain’t selling this. Look how good I look.”

As you can tell from that exchange, the one thing I have no patience for is the atrocious state of the kid’s grammar; it has worsened since I’ve known him. There has been such a digression in that regard. I know he became bored and frustrated by my constantly correcting him this past week. But no amount of correction seemed to work. His sentences were filled with “ain’t” and double negatives and wrong verb tenses and “ax” and “axed” instead of “ask” and “asked.” As someone who makes his living from the use of language, I was maddened by it. All I can hope is my schoolmarmish voice remains in his head and we can slowly wean him from such woeful use of English. The exhaustion I felt at the end of his visit - the constant correcting of his language and cleaning up after him and feeling of low-grade stress as I worried about his safety and telling him to flush every time I walked into the bathroom after one of his visits and having to see what he left behind in the toilet - was made worse by the fact that Archie, my dog, came down with a virulent strain of Kennel Cough after boarding him at the Dickensian kennel we have here in Ptown when I went down to Manhattan last week to pick up Brandon and bring him back. The morning I took him to the vet after I realized he was sick with it - the Wednesday of the birthday party when I was baking my first cake and getting my place ready for our guests and running errands for supplies and decorations, etc. - and was told I would have to bring him back at the exact hour that the party was scheduled to start … well, all the pressure and exhaustion of the week came crashing down around my bald head. On the walk home - with Archie hacking and wheezing at the end of his leash- I had a good five-minute cry.

All of that said, yesterday after I took Brandon on the ferry to Boston and put him on the Acela train back to New York, I felt a twinge of sadness and emptiness when I walked down the platform at the station without him by my side. It happens every year when he comes up here. I can’t wait for him to leave and yet when he leaves there are several days of having to get used to his not being here. I feel a bit lost in the quiet and solitude, though I do agree with Jodi Foster who, in an interview published this month in More, said, when asked what she missed about her life pre-motherhood: “I miss being alone.” Mentoring is a far five-minute cry from motherhood, yet I knew exactly what she meant. On that solitary walk yesterday down the Amtrak platform, however, I remembered one of the first afternoons I spent with Brandon. We had gone to a matinee of The Lion King and during the overly crowded intermission, as we went to the bathroom, I told him to meet me at a specific spot in the downstairs lobby. I couldn’t find him for a few minutes when I emerged from the stall and finally found him in a corner. He was frightened and his face was a fist of tears. Still only seven at the time, he thought I had walked off and left him and he was all alone in a very strange environment for it was his first time experiencing a Broadway musical. I grabbed him and put my arms around him and led him up the big winding staircase to the orchestra section and, as I maneuvered us both back through the crowd, said to him, the words escaping from my mouth before I knew what I was saying, “I will never abandon you.” Those were the five words that I, orphaned at age seven myself, had spent my whole life searching for. I had always assumed that they would be spoken to me once I found them. I had no idea that when I finally heard them that they would be coming out of my mouth and spoken to someone else. It was in that instant that I knew Brandon’s presence in my life was a gift. A kind of healing had begun. And no amount of exhaustion or bewilderment at his behavior or language skills would ever alter that in my now less lonely life.

I’m here sitting at my cottage in Ptown - or Land’s End, as Michael Cunningham’s book about his love of the place is called. My dog, Archie, and Brandon, the kid I’ve mentored for the last five years who always comes for a week-long visit with me every summer, are, thankfully, asleep on my sofa so I have a few minutes to myself right now. I went down to Manhattan on the day the tornado hit Brooklyn to pick up Brandon and bring him back up here. It’s always a week I have to buck up for because by the fourth or fifth day of his visit after having to be both motherly and fatherly toward him, I have to admit I want to strangle him when my patience, not fatherly or motherly at all, begins to wear thin. On the way up here I was already so frazzled by keeping him in check as we traveled that I lost my cellphone either on the Amtrak train or in the station in Boston when we stopped to eat a sandwich on the way to the ferry to Ptown. And last night when there was no hot water after his shower and this morning after I went to the bathroom and discovered he’d used all the toilet tissue and there was no more in the cottage, my patience, alas, was already beginning to fray even before the first 48 hours were over. I say all that just to let you know though I know mentoring a street kid from the wilds of Brooklyn can be construed as an altruistic endeavor, one still can have emotions that aren’t altruistic when in the midst of the reality of the mentoring is taking place. But I told Brandon when I first met him through an organization called The Family Center that I would be in his life at least until he’s 18. I’ve grown to love him and there is an emotional intimacy - call it family-like- when we’re together. We do know each other very well after five years - he’ll be 13 this week and I’m throwing him a birthday party. But he sure can drive me crazy at times. My hat goes off to mothers and fathers who do this 24/7. Although, I do think it’s a bit more stressful for someone like me who mentors a kid and is entrusted with his safety for a week. One is extra vigilant to make sure nothing happens to harm the child. There is a low-grade stress that by the end of the week ain’t so low-grade. Brandon would strangle me himself if he knew I used the word “ain’t” in that sentence since I get to slap his shoulder every time he uses it in my presence. (He just woke up and I read him all that and got his permission to keep it in my post so I’m not talking behind his already sunburned back.)

While down in New York for a couple of days before picking up Brandon, I had a meeting with the great marketing team at Picador, the trade paperback publisher of Mississippi Sissy (watch for it in March 2008). They were Darin Keesler, the Marketing Director, and Lisa Mondello, the Senior Publicist, and Tanya Farrell, the Director of Publicity, as well as Picador’s publisher, the - how to describe someone as singular as she? - daringly smart (as in deeply chic and keenly intelligent) Frances Coady. I also was photographed for the upcoming OUT 100 December issue by French photographer Francois Rousseau. I was shot with Will Schwalbe, the editor-in-chief of Hyperion and co-author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email. I had talked about Will a lot the first of the summer with my old buddy, Larry Kramer, who was visiting Ptown, since Will is also the sturdy soul who is going to edit Larry’s eagerly awaited 3000 page opus which encompasses all of gay American history - “his own Scheherazade” according to Will. The night before the photo shoot and Picador meeting, I had a catch-up dinner with my dear friend - emphasis on the dear - Tim Tompkins, who runs the Times Square Business District. Tim is also a sailor - he’s been chartering sails on his new sailboat this summer in the Hudson - and a newly certified yoga instructor. He’s an inspiration. He’s even got a new boyfriend, an architect from Nigeria. An architect from Nigeria? Now that sounds deeply chic and keenly intelligent.

Also an inspiration to me are two writers of books I read the last few weeks in manuscript form. The first was an upcoming book from St. Martins that was sent to me to blurb. It’s called Memoir of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux, a recent grad of Sarah Lawrence. I’ll just paraphrase my blurb for you since I loved it: Memoir of a Beautiful Boy is in a word just that: beautiful. It is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Robert Leleux, whose talent is as big as his home state of Texas, is more than a survivor, he is, with this glory of a book, triumphant. The other manuscript was an early draft of a novel, Everybody’s Everything, by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni. (She’s the daughter of historian Lady Antonia Fraser and the step-daughter of Nobel Prize winning playwright Sir Harold Pinter.) The novel takes place in the highest echelons of the fashion world of Paris, where Natasha lives. I gave her one of her first jobs when I hired her as my assistant when I was Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. She was but a girl back then but now she is an amazing woman with twin girls who went on to be the Paris editor of W and then the Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Her biography of legendary Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel was a critical and commercial success. And now she has written this wordly, emotionally complex novel. If I were an editor I’d scoop it up in a hot second.

And finally, before I went down to Manhattan last week, I was riding my bike down Commercial Street here in Ptown and rode by a big, gangly handsome young guy with a cute little kid in tow. For some reason I knew he was Tony Perkins son. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of him - maybe somewhere I did and it stuck with me but I have no memory of it. It was as if Tony swept through on a sea breeze and whispered to me, “That’s my boy. Stop your bike. Say something to him.” I did stop the bike. I turned around and said, “Excuse me, is your last name Perkins?” He looked shocked. “Yes,” he said. “Are you Osgood or Elvis?” I asked, naming Tony’s two sons he talked about all the time to me when I was in Equus with him almost 30 years ago when they were as small as the child that was in tow. “I”m Os,” he said. I told him I was in Equus with his father and that Tony talked about his brother and him all the time. “You’re dad really loved you,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know that. You were loved.” The shock in his eyes at being stopped on the street by a total stranger disappeared and a misty-eyed gratefulness replaced it. I rode on and suddenly remembered reading that his mother, Berry Berenson, who was killed in the Boston-to-LA flight that was crashed into the World Trade Center, had a home close by over in Truro. He must still summer there. Maybe it was she who had wafted through my consciousness on Commercial. As I was locking up my bike, I caught a glimpse of him putting an arm around his own son. The Land’s End light encircled them - a kind of spectral glow, fatherly and motherly at the same time - and seemed to lead them along.

If you want to read a couple of great posts about Provincetown go to Andrewsullivan.com and read two of his on his blog. One is titled Always and the other is Poem for a Friday. I can’t do any better than those two postings in relating what it’s like to be here once two months have passed and one is finally relaxing into the ebbing and flowing of Cape Cod village life. Every summer I think it will be my last one here in Ptown and I always end up coming back. Part of the allure is, of course, the debauchery found here along with the artistic dedication, a coupling that has somehow always flourished from generation to generation in the florid sunshine of the place, a coupling that finds a home in the heady flush of conversations one is able to conjur with a strikingly interesting stranger or a life-long friend as well as the stretches of contemplative silence one can attain on a bit of deserted beach or an achingly lonely patch of dune. That dedication to debauchery and art has always been part of the enduring appeal - it’s there for the scratching just beneath the town’s omni-sexual surface, as I’m sure Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams and Jack Reed and Louise Bryant and Stanley Kunitz and Franz Kline and Tallulah Bankhead and Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner and Hans Hoffman and Norman Mailer and Mabel Dodge and Marlon Brando and Mary Heaton Vorse (a Greenwich Village novelist and labor organizer who was the town’s bohemian pioneer in the summer of 1907) all did as they dug their fingernails, already dirty with artistry, into it, dirtying them even more, making them even more artistic. Yet it’s the simplicity of village life and the play of light which daily amazes me and, in some sense I can’t quite quantify, restores my battered soul. I am a loner by nature but I do find a kind of solace in the sweet-natured yet cantankerous comaraderie I feel with my summer-long compatriots here as we sit around and watch the, yes, ebbing and flowing of the weekly visitors who spice up the lanquor of our lives.

The town is now filled with drag shows - both old-fashioned and good-naturedly-neo- as well as comedians and not-one-but-two reviews with naked-male-nymphs-singing as their curb appeal. The days have long passed when O’Neill would stage his one-acts on the makeshift theatre at the end of a wharf or Williams welcomed his own rush of words in his cabin at Captain Jack’s Wharf - though Captain Jack’s still colorfully stakes its claim jutting out into the bay with its array of cottages and cabins and loft-like spaces. Every time I walk by Capt. Jack’s with my dog Archie - who loves to hang there with his friends Julius The Schnauzer and Henry The Pug - I think of the twenty-something Tennessee pining for some summer boyfriend with as much ardor as he pined for success and recognition and a bit of peace for his own battered southern soul. On Wednesday, I went to the Provincetown Theater to see a staging of a play he wrote in 1940 in longhand in his journal there at Capt. Jack’s Wharf. It is titled The Parade, or Approaching the End of Summer. He left the play unfinished, tore out the journal pages, and gave them to his roommate, Joe Hazan. The play - full of arduous pining - is about his tortured love affair that summer of 1940 with a young dancer in town. In 1962, a researcher discovered the pages and gave them to Williams to complete. Last October a young troupe here, Shakespeare on the Cape, staged its world premiere as part of Ptown’s first Tennessee Williams Festival. I’d seen the troupe’s production of Much Ado About Nothing and was immediately a fan of its youthful members, most of whom met as students at the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theatre BFA Actor Training Program. The company has revived its production of Parade this summer as part of the Provincetown Theater’s season. Though certainly not a great play, it is nonetheless heartbreaking in its glimpse not of Williams talent but of his achingly lonely, uncertain self before success and fame curdled that loneliness and uncertainty to the point that his great, unequaled talent curdled, sadly, a bit as well. There were lovely performances by Elliot Eustis as the dancer and Ben Griessmeyer as the Williams stand-in and especially Grant Heuke as the rich Jewish Hegel-reading platonic girlfriend of the lead Williams character. I walked out of the play in an odd mood - always delighted to see young actors of real talent tackle a difficult text yet realizing in that difficult text which contained the inchoate voice that would a few years later rock the theatre world with its power (indeed, Williams wrote much of Streetcar and Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke and Night of the Iguana during his four summers in Ptown) was a plea for understanding and acceptance on a very personal level that was finally left unanswered. Tennessee, take it from another southern sissy, a Mississippi one, you should have kept summering in Ptown where understanding and acceptance are part of the Cape Cod air if only you breathe it in deeply enough. I took deep breaths all the way home that night and gave Archie a midnight walk by Capt. Jack’s. The moon was three nights past its fullness yet its light was able to dance - its beauty as untouchable as Tennessee’s own dancer that summer sixty-seven years ago now - atop the bay.