When I woke up, the Australian topless tourist and her three kids had cleared out of the hotel and flew back to Perth. Amy and I took an Uber into town, and I did my reading at the Provincetown Book Shop at 229 Commercial Street. The shop’s mascot was an owl peering out at readers, in the front window the cartoon, an animated sticker was cute as hell. Later, I noticed the owl on different bumper stickers all over cars in town.

“It’s a beach day, a perfect one at that,” the store manager, Billy, told me at the shop. “Four days from Labor Day in 2024 and I’m telling you our tourists will skip a reading for some sunshine every damn time.”

“Unless it’s Jesus Christ appearing with his latest novel, right?” I asked.

“Bingo,” Billy said. “Nothing personal, of course, but sunshine rules the day.”

“We sold seven novels of Wolf-Boy today,” I told an audience member after reading for twenty minutes. 

“What would you say the novel is about?” a therapist from Delaware asks me.  

“There’s naïve, doe-eyed sixteen-year-old named Danny Halligan from Limewood, Connecticut and it’s how he unravels one summer with all the sex, drugs and music going on all over the Cape with his older pal and lover, Liam, and a Yale dropout named Gracie who works miracles with her camera and poses nude with the two other masked young men.”

“And?” she asked.

“She takes sexy pics of Danny with a wolf mask on, and Liam as The Lone Ranger and Gracie is twenty-one and a year and change later, her book of candid and explicit shots becomes a runaway bestseller.”