The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (5 page)

O
F MY BROTHER
’
S
homosexuality, Christine said, “I think it was a phase, and he got stuck in it.” As far as I knew, Ken had slept only with
men for the last eight years of his life. Moreover, he had told me unequivocally that he was gay. “Huh—really?” I asked. “Ken
went through phases,” Christine
replied. “He did everything in extremes.” This was an interesting and possibly true statement, which I would have liked to
evaluate apart from her views on his sexuality. She said there had been a period when he dropped acid twice a week and went
surfing both morning and night, and in college they had had sex two or three times a day. “Our friends called us the rabbits,”
she said. I had known this to be their mutual endearment but had never known why. “You have to understand,” she declared,
“Ken was
not
like other people.” In Christine’s telling he began to take on a scary-alluring aura not unlike the scary-alluring aura that
drugs, surfing, and sex had held for me when I was thirteen and looked up to my presumably straight brother who was in college.
Christine’s stories: All their friends would come over at two every day to get high and watch
Highway Patrol
, and they used to have nude swimming parties in the apartment complex pool. Throwing trash out the car window at Jack in
the Box, Ken said, very stoned, “I’m contributing to the gross national product!” In his living room he apologized to a potential
roommate for the mess, offered him a beer, then realized there was a cigarette floating in the bottle—“Oh, I guess you don’t
want that,” Ken said. After my father refused to pay for graduate school in math, Ken tried to work his way through, flunked
out his first semester, and grew dangerously depressed. Strolling on the beach one evening, on acid, Ken said, “Why don’t
we go walk along the moonbeam?” Sometimes he used to risk surfing between the pilings of the pier, at night. He asked Christine
if she wanted to do a three-way, and she said no. In the Sierras he tried skiing down the most difficult slope and wiped out
spectacularly. Later, after he and Christine had broken up and he had begun sleeping with men, he scandalized his old college
friends by arriving at a party in white satin shorts. So much new information, from so long ago, confused me, and my brother’s
image grew unsteady in my mind. I wished I
hadn’t called Christine so late, my first night back in Brooklyn. I remembered once finding in Ken’s desk drawer, not long
after he came out to me—this would have been about 1979—a slip of paper on which he had written over and over the name Keith
Cody—same initials as Ken Chase. Had he ever used the name with a trick? Maybe Christine was right: my brother was a chameleon,
simply trying on different identities to see how each of them felt. Maybe he never knew who he was. “Two or three years after
we broke up,” she was telling me now, “he called me, out of the blue, and asked me to marry him.” She saw this as proof that
Ken was never really gay. “I said no,” she continued, explaining that she had already met her current husband. I wondered
why, in that case, she objected so much to the idea that Ken was gay, since apparently she didn’t want him anyway. The conversation
exhausted me—constantly sifting everything Christine said, trying to decide what was true and to what degree. And conversely
wondering what were my own myths about my brother, what had I never understood about him? “I’m beginning to see that Ken was
more bisexual than I thought,” I offered. She replied, “He was tri-sexual—he’d try anything.” I didn’t know what to say to
this joke, which seemed decades old. At some point I mentioned that Ken had joined Narcotics Anonymous two years before he
died, to quit his pot habit, and Christine replied, “Naturally he would throw himself into that role, too.” I hadn’t intended
to bolster her phases theory. “I guess he really was self-medicating with the pot,” I ventured. “For depression, I mean. That
was one of the hardest things for me to deal with after he died—that he wasn’t a very happy man.” “Oh, he was happy,” Christine
said quickly. “Back in college. He was very happy then.” Evidently she meant to reassure me, but I could hardly feel reassured
by the idea that my brother’s life had been downhill from age twenty-two until his death at thirty-seven. I wanted to get
off the phone now. I
had always liked Christine and even looked up to her as a corollary to looking up to my brother. And I had felt enormous sympathy
for her when she told me, at the beginning of the conversation, that her father had died suddenly, in a car accident, only
a month before Ken—whose death, from her point of view, was also sudden, since she hadn’t known of his illness. I had imagined
moreover that the particular pain of losing her ex-lover would have been difficult to explain to those around her, since by
then she was married with a young daughter. So I had hoped our interaction that night would be helpful to both of us, but
apparently we were at cross-purposes. I said good-night, pleading jet lag. Then I couldn’t sleep.

O
N THE CROWDED
platform a boy pretended to drop coins: “Clink. Clink-clink-clink,” he said.

The continued glacially slow unfolding of non-news on TV.

Noelle said, “The collapse of the World Trade Center has so much symbolic meaning I can’t even begin to fathom it.”

“Calm down,” I told myself, as I entered the fray of Bed Bath & Beyond.

A friend told me about a video artist who slowed down the movie
Psycho
, so that it lasts twenty-four hours.

Of Christine, Gabby wrote, “I think
she’s
stuck.”

I joked to John that an American flag on the antenna of a police car was gilding the lily.

I returned from the bathroom and found myself suddenly in the mood—it had been weeks.

John’s incredibly delicate, sustained touch …

As he read the paper I asked him for the butter, and he replied, with mock annoyance, “Excuse me, I’m busy trying not to get
blown up
.”

E-mail from my mother: “… Sorry to ‘dump’ on you but I needed to blow off steam.”

One of the columnists at the magazine where I worked suggested it was time we “consider” torturing suspected terrorists.

I imagined changing my out-of-office e-mail reply to “Eat me.”

Soon it was the weekend again and John and I saw the most incredible gingko tree, huge and bright yellow in the light.

We descended toward the river, which was now pea green.

Charles Henri Ford: “To understand the mystery of our being in time—the body’s reason and the soul’s future—enough for a lifetime’s
meditation, without bothering about the stars, space and infinity.”

As seen from the promenade, the water was evenly gray and shining under the clouds, and the breeze seemed to be licking it
clean.

I suddenly realized it had been naïve of me to think Christine could be objective about my brother—her ex-lover, after all,
who had left her to be gay—and it didn’t matter how many years ago that was.

My parents’ cruise was canceled because the Delta Queen Steamboat Company went bankrupt.

The box containing Ken’s diary, which I had sent to myself at work, was held up in the mailroom for several days, because
of an anthrax scare.

At the editors’ meeting I attended, they smiled secretly to one another whenever a certain editor spoke, and they asked her
questions as if she were a child.

I know that jockeying for position is simply human nature, a pack animal thing, but it has always revolted me.

We kept hearing the phrase “back to normal,” and John said, “What if you didn’t like normal?”

Down the platform, a low clarinet trilled.

The editors told me to submit the torture column for an award.

So I didn’t know what Ken was on his way to before he died: so what?

Though the fire continued burning, the city seemed to have gotten used to the hole in the ground, and people in the news began
arguing about how to rebuild, and what sort of memorial there should be.

I used the coupon Mom gave me to buy my own Swiffer.

It also occurred to me that Christine’s father’s death, coming so close to Ken’s, must have completely overshadowed the latter
event, preventing her from examining her feelings about my brother, and this might be why her perceptions of him seemed trapped
in amber.

“I
can
be intimate,” I told Noelle, getting back down to business, “I know how to do that, but then I seem to need to withdraw—why
is that?”

“One bright thing in my life right now,” wrote my mother, “is a hummingbird that has been coming to drink the nectar from
the Bouganvilla (spelling?) that has been blooming profusely since I started watering it when I do the watering of the roses.
This morning, it was there when a squirrel came running along on top of the fence and the bird flew up and hovered around
as though it were saying, ‘Squirrel, get out of here. I want my snack.’ Then as soon as the squirrel left, down to a blossom
came the bird. It is so wonderful to watch.”

Over time Ken’s image in my mind no longer seemed upsettingly changeable, as I gradually grew accustomed to the new information
gleaned from Christine.

To a female passerby, a homeless man said, “You love me, I love you. It’s very simple. Very simple indeed.”

After a good cry my face looked rosy and healthy in the mirror.

“And now I’d like to watch
Star Trek
in peace,” I muttered.

In the morning the editor-in-chief was happy to announce that the magazine didn’t have anthrax after all, and soon enough
the box from San Jose arrived in my office.

Mom was very worried they wouldn’t get their $4,000 back from the trip insurance. “Dad never wanted to go on that trip in
the first place.”

I decided to try BuSpar, for anxiety, but it, too, made the tinnitus worse, so I had to stop.

Near the end of the dream, after witnessing a male rape, I received my map and instructions from my mother.

Outline for the previous few months: my usual problems; the suicide hijackings; my parents’ mortality; my brother’s life and
death; my usual problems.

What a sight I must have been in the park, a man in a suit and tie stooping to collect fallen yellow leaves.

Ken was alive to me again for those few weeks following my conversation with Christine, in that he was still able to surprise
me; just as I knew he would be alive to me again when I decided to read his diary.

John loved all the ornaments I’d sent from home.

“This film is a record of a journey,” said
The New Yorker
, “and it leaves us with the dreadful possibility that all highways are lost.”

I told Noelle, “I want a new fucking map, and new instructions.”

Outside it was already dark. I walked up Lexington Avenue.

U
PPER QUAD WAS
a clearing in the redwoods, lower quad a knoll overlooking the ocean; I lived in lower quad, in Dorm 8.

January 1980, my senior year: a prehistoric time, crucial but shrouded.

In this foray into the past, I consider previous quests for maps and instructions.

With some pride I put on my surplus khakis and the white button-down shirt I had discovered in a box at my parents’ house
over Christmas break—my new look.

That fall I had cut my hair for the first time since high school, and grown my first beard.

Between the two quads lay a courtyard and the dining hall, which also overlooked the ocean; by the steps was a white stucco
wall covered in bougainvillea, which bloomed year-round.

As the brand-new record strummed its cockeyed beat, I
stared at the five of them on the cover: angular cut-outs on a flat, horizonless yellow—three boys, two girls—defiant in their
thrift-shop clothes and poofy wigs.

Journal entry: “Legitimate (I think) fears and desires concerning my sexuality are taking the form of guilt.”

Remembering that time requires extra kindness toward myself.

I spooned fuchsia-colored yogurt from the plastic tub.

Under a vaulted timber ceiling, I pulled the heavy blue
Canterbury Tales
from the shelf marked with the course number.

For now, let the white space between these sentences stand for what couldn’t be seen then; or what can’t be remembered now;
or my open fate; or the open, bare-bones arrangement of a B-52’s song (drum kit, guitar, cheesy keyboard, toy piano)—my soundtrack
that winter and spring.

“The person who is writing this journal is perhaps on his way out,” I wrote.

I walked toward some dark trees in the dry yellow light under a pale turquoise cloudless sky.

Particular tension of standing with my tray on the edge of the dining hall, deciding whom to sit with.

My friends: 1. Every night at about nine, Cathy came up to my room with the backgammon board and I pulled our favorite record
from its bright yellow jacket. 2. Like me, Chris had sandy blond hair, a light brown beard, and glasses, and
he covered his mouth and looked sideways when he laughed, as if, also like me, he dwelt perpetually in high school study hall.
3. E. (a girl)—peripheral then; central later—was “intensely neurotic,” I wrote to a friend. 4. I’ve known Mike since I was
twelve, so describing him is like describing the air.

“And also, now that Ken is gay,” my journal continues, “I have lost one more person to identify with. I used to imitate him
quite a bit, I think. But now that is impossible, unless I want to be gay.”

Though I wrote “now that”—as if the event were recent—Ken had come out to me almost a year earlier.

The beeping at the start of “Planet Claire”: signal from some distant part of myself.

Cathy’s short, blond hair, thick glasses and slightly crossed brown eyes; her husky-fluty Peppermint Patty laughter.

I sat alone in the sunshine on last year’s tall dry grass, below which new grass had sprouted with the rain and was already
a few inches tall.

I made a pen and ink drawing of a cluster of trees.

Mike and I ran side by side down the rocky path—pleasure of my feet hitting the earth, in rhythm with his.

The campus was spread across hills and ravines of redwoods, bay trees, the occasional maple, live oaks, ferns, and vast stretches
of tall waving grass—emerald in winter, golden the rest of the year.

In the professor’s office I recited the opening of
The Canterbury Tales
, in Middle English, enjoying the odd-sounding yet familiar words on my tongue and in my throat.

We received narrative evaluations instead of grades (a grand 1960s experiment, later abandoned), and stringy-haired guys sold
pot out of gigantic black garbage bags in their dorm rooms.

I was attending the stoner school of all time and I didn’t even like pot.

When Chris encountered any sort of falseness or stupidity, he said “Ew” in a quick, guttural way that reminded me I had found
a fellow traveler in disgust.

The year before, I had decided the people in the campus Christian group I belonged to were creeps, and I left the group.

I began saying “Ew” exactly as Chris did, and soon Cathy did, too.

I was in the process of forming myself, as if from nothing, from what was available—my classes, my records, my second-hand
clothes, my new friends and our running jokes, my letters to and from old friends—as if from popsicle sticks, tin foil, and
yarn.

To explain Middle English pronunciation to E., I recast a Michael Jackson song as “Ee lavah the way ye shakah yourrr thingah.”

The closet as a kind of innocence.

In Chaucer I was learning to distinguish the teller and his limitations from the tale itself.

“The sturdy and flamboyant Wife of Bath finds herself at a transitional time of life,” I wrote.

Though I wasn’t a Christian anymore, I still believed viscerally in things like demon possession and the notion that certain
actions inevitably bring punishment.

Piercing retro sci-fi organ of “There’s a Moon in the Sky.”

I have little memory of those evenings with Cathy, as if our study breaks took place beyond the long arm of self-consciousness.

My grandmother’s crazy quilt beneath the backgammon board.

The click of dice and checkers, the crackle of the record player.

Cathy and I were barely more than acquaintances then and couldn’t have known we were also knitting a lifelong friendship.

We never danced, instead playing quietly like good children, occasionally bouncing a foot to the quirky tunes.

Screechy guitar. Fred Schneider shouting, “HELLO?” We laughed. More screechy guitar. “HELLO?”

Outside my dorm room window—moonlight, redwoods, the open dry fields descending to the ocean.

In the cool morning air I crossed a ravine on the footbridge, shaded by tangled bay trees.

The Iranian hostage crisis was in full swing, but I didn’t own a TV.

In the clothing store in Monterey, the clerk asked if I was in a fraternity, I said no, we didn’t have fraternities at Santa
Cruz, he seemed disappointed, I tried on a sport coat, he stood behind me grazing my butt with his fingers, explaining that
that was exactly where the jacket should fall.

Slashing guitar sets up pleasure in my throat, a sensation identified by Wayne Koestenbaum with regard to the opera fan, but
I think it applies to all musical enjoyment—a silent, sympathetic hum in the vocal cords.

“I’m afraid again tonight that there is so much keeping me from ever having a sexual relationship,” I wrote in my journal.
“… I keep allowing myself to … laugh at a certain moment, turn my head at a certain moment, etc.—to defuse sexuality.”

Cathy liked to imitate the way the girls sang “Jackie O,” the percussive
k
, the long
o
.

I tried to think about women when I masturbated and often succeeded.

“But the Wife of Bath has expressed earlier an almost despairing awareness of the intractability of her own spirit,
which is unwilling to restrain its ‘immoral’ impulses.”

Were my professors perhaps moved by how lost I was?

The guy with washboard abs playing Ping-Pong; the hairy-chested guy riding his skateboard in and out of the quad; the poet-mathematician
who lingered in my dorm room one night and I didn’t know why; the guy who wore shorts all winter, who invited me into his
dorm room, shut the door, and lay there grinning at me through his sparse but attractive beard, and I didn’t know why.

“Dance this mess around.”

The paved path skirted a dry, sunny hillside.

I’m trying to grasp the nature of dreaming and living despite myself.

Wet Speedo of a professor hanging to dry on the casement window of his office.

Periodically Cathy and I tried to parse this odd, ironic kind of music that was totally new to us—playful, nostalgic, assembled
from junk and nonsense.

We misidentified the opening “Peter Gunn” riff as James Bond, though this correctly located the sound in childhood memories
of sexiness, swank, and intrigue, as seen on TV.

We decided that the planet where people had no heads was San Jose, the endless suburb where Cathy, too, had grown up.

The one openly gay student I knew seemed to dwell on the outside of everything—I always saw him sitting alone in the same
spot, on bare concrete, his back against the rough concrete wall, rolling a cigarette.

I lay in bed with a cold, my fourth that year.

Dream: “A vague sex scene of great passion. I am avoiding saying that I kissed his ass, and that it was extremely smooth and
muscular and white … I was in a sense a different person—fear and conscience and guilt siphoned off. Except … I think my mother
was there.”

The year before, after the gay grad student moved out of the dorm, the stoners claimed to have found a jar of Vaseline under
his bed.

I ran alone through the dry scrub and woods.

I stopped to say hi to a girl from the dorm named Patty. She said, “You look cute in your running shorts.” “With these skinny
arms?” I asked, lifting them. She shook her head. “It’s the whole
package
, Cliff.” I ran on.

These ideas about myself, in the forest of myself.

I hadn’t even kissed a girl (or anyone) since I was 14.

In “There’s a Moon in the Sky,” Fred assured me that if I felt like a misfit, there were, in fact, “thousands of others like
you! Others like you!” and since he didn’t specify what those others were, I didn’t have to be afraid.

Queer child looks up at the night sky, in search of sympathy.

“E. and I and Chris and another guy slept outside last Friday night,” I wrote in my journal. “E. and I stayed up talking,
and reality began to fade. She began to say how no one was ever attracted to her. So I (fearfully) said that I didn’t consider
our friendship as entirely Platonic … She said, ‘Well, thanks. I think you’re attractive too.’ I felt brushed aside.”

We woke surrounded by cows.

I wrote, “Perhaps I need to allow myself to be a fool, to fail, to cease analyzing, to get drunk, to make a pass … How does
romance ‘happen’?”

I arranged to have a picnic with Marya, a girl I knew from my dorm the previous year.

We lay on a blanket in a field and I was almost attracted to her—her white round face and long peasant skirt.

It’s as if my own desire were a doll—I was always trying to make it do things, act out a story, sit or stand or pretend to
walk.

Marya and I talked “deeply,” there on the grass in the sun, but then we folded up the blanket and walked back to the dorms
without even a kiss.

I wrote of
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale:
“The Priest also appears quite interested in the problem of ‘vanitee,’ in a broad sense of the word as inadequate and illusory
ways of thinking (and speaking) that inevitably deceive and prejudice us …”

Fred Schneider’s unsuccessful attempt to call a number written
on the bathroom wall—“I dial stupid number ALL DAY LONG!”

Journal: “I had set a goal for myself to become sexually involved with someone before I graduate. I would have few regrets
about UCSC if that happened …”

It seems like Cathy and I spent many months playing backgammon and listening to records, but actually it was only a single
quarter, just ten weeks.

Motown fragments in “Dance This Mess Around”: my introduction to pastiche.

“Ska-doo-da-bop—Eeww”: delight or disgust?

The enigma of “Rock Lobster”: my introduction to nonsense, and its importance.

Cathy graduated; I had one more term to go.