The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (17 page)

P
ONDERING THAT STATEMENT
makes me emotional.

Anger on his behalf. Also a sense of confirmation—as I often
felt when Ken and I talked about the family. Hence renewed sadness that we can no longer have such conversations.

To be clear, “don’t feel” wasn’t always the message. Sometimes we got sympathy, sometimes derision, sometimes indifference,
depending on the feelings we expressed, depending on our parents’ moods.

What Ken confirms is the uncertainty, the constant self-doubt.

My mother liked to tell a story of how my sister Helen once fell down and skinned her knee but did not start crying until
she saw my mother. To her, this meant Helen didn’t actually feel significant pain but was merely “trying to get attention.”

Wanting attention was the feeling my mother considered most suspect.

With similar myopia, I had difficulty accepting Ken’s decision to pursue abstinence. I considered pot the least of his troubles
and wrote derisively of Narcotics Anonymous in
The Hurry-Up Song
, calling the program an extreme solution to a minor problem.

But now, as I read the words “don’t feel,” suddenly I understand. Pot was sopping up his unwanted emotions, and he decided
he didn’t want to live that way anymore.

The journal itself is a forum for those unwanted emotions.

As if to reward himself for this new insight, that same day, August 15, 1984, Ken goes on to recount a moment of ordinary
happiness: “Jeff Wynne called at 8 p.m.—joked with him and felt better.”

In five years of journal entries, this is one of only three mentions of Jeff, which I assume indicates, paradoxically, just
how important Jeff’s friendship was to him as a source of unfreighted everyday cheerfulness.

August 19:

Cf. my secrets in Egypt.

Still, on August 21 Ken acknowledges that Arthur has “opened up” to him (though he doesn’t note how) and that such disclosures
are “the building blocks of intimacy and a serious relationship.”

August 23:

Six days later he writes: “Payoff of my anger is withdrawal. Withdrawal is ‘safe’; because it puts me into an ‘invincible’
and ‘invulnerable’ position.”

Again, the psychic flavor is very close to my own, like red raspberries vs. yellow. (For example: a late childhood memory
of hiding in my bedroom closet after an argument with Ken himself.)

That month Ken also writes of “a fear that if people see the real me they won’t like what they see and/or they will then know
what openings to use in order to ‘get’ to me.”

My own persistent belief that whenever I feel good, someone is bound to come along and deflate me.

On August 31 Ken writes: “Making love to Arthur was
wonderful
Thursday. I was holding his cock and he was holding mine, but it was feeling so good, it was as if I was not sure if I was
holding him or myself.”

Then once again a nightmare: “Outside, a backyard with a solid fence & a gate. Satan is behind gate. [I’m] pounding on the
gate, tempting Satan to come get me. He starts to come for me, I barely escape. I wake up scared.”

The deeply destabilizing influence of HIV; the deeply destabilizing influence of childhood.

I picture the high redwood slats surrounding Ken’s concrete backyard, or the fence around the yard in San Jose.

In early September the
San Diego Union
reported that a member of the county board of supervisors had expressed concern
that improved services “for homosexuals with AIDS might attract other victims of the deadly disorder to the region.”

However Ken reacted to such stories, as I read through them I feel like I’m watching him get kicked.

September 20: “… Not feeling good about myself … Wondering why I am not enough for Arthur …”

October 10: “… fear of a world full of ogres …”

Later in October he recounts various small tiffs with Arthur. To me, the disagreements don’t appear insurmountable—but I say
this with many more years of life experience than Ken had as of 1984. He was thirty-two. I’m now fifty-two. I’ve been with
John seventeen years, with all their ups and downs.

And then there’s the fact that I’m not facing a life-threatening disease.

Later that fall, Ken mentions wanting to talk to his therapist about someone named Bill, so he must have been seeing him on
the side.

Knowing what I now know about Arthur, I can’t help but view this, again, as an evasion. Ken dated both Bill and Arthur for
the next several months, seeming to grow more and more convinced that he preferred Bill.

Jeff describes Bill as “very cute” but “not the brightest bulb.”

January 8, 1985:

“Bill loves me”—and by implication Arthur doesn’t? But unless Arthur is now wildly romanticizing the past, Ken couldn’t have
been more wrong.

Possibly at some point he told me about these two men, and if so, he would have couched things in just this way, so that I
would have advised him to go with Bill.

January 19: “Why is Arthur never happy when he’s with me? Why do I make him crazy?”

Arthur tells me that when he met Ken, he had only recently moved into his own apartment, after years of living with roommates.
He had also recently gone back to college and then dropped out again. “So I felt like I was still getting my bearings,” he
recalls. “I felt like his house would be good for a couple, and even so it felt a bit small. He even said, ‘We can find a
bigger house to rent and I can rent my house out.’ He was thinking how to work this out. I was like, OK, good—and suddenly
it was ‘I can’t do this anymore, I have to stop dating you.’”

No mention of this conversation in Ken’s journal. Was he trying not to think about it?

“I can’t say it was devastating, that sounds so dramatic,” Arthur continues. “It was just so unsettling. I said, ‘Can’t we
just continue on a bit? I’m close but I’m not quite there yet.’ He went back to seeing someone I knew very casually [Bill],
who I think he’d been dating before. I couldn’t understand it other than he felt he needed to break the connection with me
because I wasn’t ready to move as quickly as he was. He had just bought this house. It was a really cute little house.”

Possibly I hear Arthur sniffle. I’m afraid if I speak my voice will crack.

He was so surprised by Ken’s decision that he briefly resorted to stalking him: “Because I was so upset about this and couldn’t
believe this was happening … I can laugh about [the stalking] now because it’s like a movie of the week. One day I drove over
to 35th Street [where Ken lived]. I saw Ken’s car, so I was like following him. There was someone else in the car, and I could
tell it was Bill. Then I realized they knew I was following them. They turned [a corner], and I thought, ‘I’ve got to stop
doing this.’”

Even in this story of questionable behavior, I see Arthur’s self-awareness in stark contrast to the picture of Bill that soon
emerges in Ken’s journal—and from the bitter things Ken said to me about Bill later.

Late in February, “a sticky white rain fell across Southern California,” reports the National Weather Service, which attributes
the unusual phenomenon to desert dust blown by high winds into rainclouds. Characteristically, Ken’s diary makes no reference
to this event. I picture him hosing the storm’s white, gritty residue from his driveway.

As it turned out, Bill was Ken’s final boyfriend.

Arthur: “That night that he said, ‘I’m positive, I knew I had to tell you this’—it was kind of one of those moments you get
very thoughtful and real about life. And when I was reading your book, it really hit, because I thought—I got the feeling
that here’s this person who wanted me to live with him and I couldn’t quite do it fast enough. And when I was reading about
his [negative] attitude about taking medicine, I wished I could have been there… But it’s always what might have happened.”

O
N
M
ARCH
11, 1985, a dream: “Judge is talking to me about trust. He says to trust and extends his hand, when I reach for it he pulls
it back, he then talks about trust again, extends his hand and says trust me, take my hand; I refuse to reach for his hand.”

The entry continues:

Ken records these scenes with a specificity rare in his journal. Maybe he hopes to convince himself that Bill really is that
awful. Indeed, entries of this sort continue for several more months.

My theory is that Bill enjoyed stealing Ken away from Arthur but, once he got him, didn’t want him anymore.

Again I feel protective of Ken, angry with him, embarrassed for him. Embarrassed because of the resemblance to my own love
life back then, starting with the creep I was seeing that same year (my boyfriend before G.)—the impossibility of getting
more than the tiniest amounts of affection from him, and how that impossibility mesmerized me for months. (After we broke
up I had my own dream about a judge, in this case explicitly my father, before whom I made an impassioned argument that the
dog didn’t have to be left home all day alone.)

On April 10 Ken writes, “Tonight he hung up on me.”

April 25: “… the lack of sympathy when I tell him about something that’s bothering me. He either gets mad at me, criticizes
me or makes fun of me …”

In May, a list of Bill’s good and bad traits.

In late June a fire erupted in a canyon next to Normal Heights and destroyed seventy-six homes. Ken doesn’t mention this,
though I recall he had to evacuate. Did he take refuge with Bill?

In August AIDS appeared on the covers of both
Time
and the
magazine I worked for. “No one has ever recovered from the disease,” reads the latter, under a photo of actor Rock Hudson’s
ravaged face. I, for one, was now officially terrified.

In September, Bill’s “consistent refusal to hold me when I want to be held.”

Later in September: “The feeling that I will never experience the closeness that I want.”

It’s precisely this despair that tempts me to hold back with John: a damning certainty that he can’t give me what I want.

The day after Christmas: “Bill is completely incapable of dealing with feelings … However,
he doesn’t think it’s a problem
.”

G. was similarly uncomfortable with emotion. Not that he lacked good qualities, but for four years I was always trying to
figure him out, doubting myself, hoping to stretch his brief moments of tenderness into something more.

In late December Ken decided once and for all to stop smoking pot. In January he asks, “Why am I so drawn to this relationship
where I constantly have excuses to be angry all the time? Answer: alcoholic behavior! When I collect enough anger points,
then I get stoned. And when I am so angry, and then I smoke pot, it gets me really high. When I smoke it when I am not angry
like this, I can’t get stoned enough.”

My own penchant for squirreling away indignation, reserving it for imaginary arguments. Similarly, Ken refers (elsewhere in
his journal) to “vignettes” in which “I am the ‘triumphant’ orator brutally crushing the ‘fool’ who didn’t
do what I wanted him to do, regardless of the fact that my desires were not well articulated. I then stomp out the door in
disgust …”

In an undated entry from the spring of 1986, he writes, “What do I really want from life, the universe and everything?” It’s
around this time that he finally breaks up with Bill.

He also starts recording various symptoms—a sore throat, a rash, “continuous mental fog all afternoon,” “sore gums,” “fatigue:
mild.”

Another undated entry:

But on June 23 he writes: “Getting some insight over the anger I still feel toward Bill. It’s OK to feel that anger … to experience
its exact texture; but it’s not good to be paralyzed by it.”

He has traveled all the way from “don’t feel” to “experience its exact texture.”

A
S
K
EN GREW
sicker, his personality became increasingly distorted by terror, rage, and self-hatred.

His illness also warped my memories of him, overshadowing all that came before.

The diary becomes increasingly difficult to read, and I have to tell myself over and over that it isn’t the whole story.

The collective white space here represents several months in 2009 and 2010 of trying to absorb and understand his suffering.

July 30, 1986:

Front page news: the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s anti-sodomy law, five to four.

Local news: after a gay man bit two San Diego policemen during an altercation, prosecutors sought to test his blood for HIV
without his consent, in case the charge could be upgraded from simple battery to attempted murder.

August 12: “My self-esteem is fragile—[Bill’s] constant criticism … left me feeling just like I did as a child when Paul would
pick at me.”

Every night Ken went to a meeting of either NA or AA.

He grew increasingly unhappy at work.

November 14: “… my need to never make a mistake and thus avoid criticism …”

December 15: “Situation: car in shop for repairs … Why does it upset me so much?”

I found his irritability over such things hard to take. It felt like we were never talking about the real problem, his health.

His irritability also resembled my mother’s from when I was a kid.

I imagine my own reaction to a terminal illness would be similar.

February 14, 1987: “1) My fear of people. When someone looks at me, a stab of fear goes through my heart/stomach. Why? How
to overcome? …”

On April 1 Ronald Reagan advised abstinence and monogamy to combat AIDS, adding, “… don’t medicine and morality teach the
same lessons?”

That spring Ken lost his job, for which he blamed himself.

Months passed. He accepted a position up in San Jose and found a buyer for his house in San Diego.

Then, after much agonizing—I had several phone conversations with him about it—he changed his mind and took a job in San Diego
instead.

On some level he must have realized he wasn’t physically able to make such a big change. But he had to pay a penalty to the
buyer of his house, and the episode left him feeling humiliated and defeated.

My mother had very much wanted him to move to San Jose.

He considered going on an antidepressant but decided against it, possibly influenced by the sternest faction of Narcotics
Anonymous.

He decided to try AZT, which had been approved by the FDA earlier that year.

October 29: “I am well and healthy,” written eleven times.

That weekend my parents celebrated their 50
^th
wedding anniversary, in San Jose, but Ken was unable to come because he had the flu.

Undated entry: A drawing of a drip with stick legs, its stick arms manipulating some dark spots in a circle. Then the same
figure again, smiling, with thought balloon, “Zippity dooda zippity-ay …”

Undated: “I am frustrated and angry about being sick for so long. Powerless.”

November 10: “… 3) I am healthy and well,” written seven times.

November 13: “I am so fucking lazy and so fucking cheap.”

November 15:

Evidently he had been reading Louise Hay, whose books prescribe “positive ideas” to fight any disease.

Three days later he went into the hospital with what turned out to be pneumocystis. Thus he was formally diagnosed with “full-blown”
AIDS.

He received this news in a brusque phone call from his internist.

On Jeff’s advice, he telephoned my parents, and they headed down to San Diego to take care of him when he got home. This was
heroic of them, though they didn’t tell me or my siblings that Ken had been hospitalized. I didn’t find out until I tried
calling him, wondering why I hadn’t heard from him lately, and my mother answered his phone. “Mom?” I said.

November 24: He plans to talk to his sponsor about having taken a single sleeping pill.

November 28: “5) Must completely turn life around; fill it with love and health and wonderful people …”

In a letter to me, he writes of stirring conversations with my parents about being gay and his addiction to pot. At the time,
his confessional mood struck me as abject, and I wished he hadn’t shared with Mom and Dad the part about NA.

I myself wasn’t yet out to my parents.

Given their right-wing views, I had never expected a good reaction. Now I wondered if they had accepted Ken only because he
was sick.

We had Christmas that year in San Diego. It was unusually cold, with snow flurries Christmas Eve. That day he writes: “1)
Why do I get depressed after being around Mom and
Dad for a while? I think it is because of my expectations that something wonderful is going to happen, but it never does.
Mom and Dad have their roles and they always play them.”

At meals he swallowed vitamin after vitamin.

His ice cube trays filled with a yellowish substance called AL-721, which at that moment held some sort of promise.

The new books on his shelf:
You Can Heal Your Life
.
Love, Medicine and Miracles
.

He recovered from the pneumonia and returned to work, but his health remained tenuous.

As with his previous job, this one required a security clearance, so he remained closeted at the office; I assume he didn’t
specify to coworkers which kind of pneumonia he’d suffered from, though they must have suspected.

His face had taken on that particular AIDS gauntness, common before treatment improved.

At some point the side effects of AZT got to be too much, and he had to stop taking it.

February 2, 1988:

The eerie kinship between such notions and “don’t feel.”

More than once he lists “reasons why I hate myself.”

More than once he writes that he’s a “slut” who deserved to get AIDS.

I don’t remember him actually saying that to me, but I had many difficult conversations with him that year about various things
that worried him, such as a lawsuit stemming from a car accident he had had while on vacation with Bill in Hawaii.

That summer I visited him in San Diego. At some point he tried to make amends with me over childhood, and I brushed him aside,
saying it wasn’t important.

I tried to get him to go back into therapy, but he said he already saw too many doctors.

He was also surrounded by the epidemic: as the
Union
reported later that year, “San Diego County has seen a higher rate of increase in AIDS cases in 1988 than any other metropolitan
area …”

Undated: “fear fear fear”

Undated:

Undated: “I need to forgive myself”

Undated: “feeling suicidal—afraid to live and afraid to die”

Undated:

The helplessness I felt that year whenever I saw him or spoke to him—leaden and pervasive.

Of my last visit with him, the week of Christmas 1988, I wrote in
The Hurry-Up Song:

My turning away, and my guilt at turning away.