The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (6 page)

F
OR AS LONG
as I can remember, I have castigated myself for not properly enjoying things, first toys, later people, moments, and landscapes.

No record or memory of what I did over spring break.

Patch of pale blue ocean in the distance, which I always tried to appreciate as lovely and serene, but which mostly seemed
to disappear in my mind.

The stoners sat shirtless in front of the dorm; constant snickering and hacking and mulling over “buds” and “sin-semilla”;
continual drone of Pink Floyd, speakers pointed out the window.

I was indeed lost to myself and on myself and yet I was also completely myself, as much as any weird prehistoric creature
was itself, if doomed, if purely transitional on the evolutionary ladder, completely itself and utterly unseen, except for
the fossil, a kind of shadow across time.

Chris and I jumped over the four-foot wall that everyone jumped over to get to the mailboxes.

It was beautiful everywhere you looked: bright gold poppies appeared in all the fields, and wisteria draped the walkways of
the college next to mine.

I sat on a bench in the sunshine reading my evaluations.

My Chaucer professor praised my “detailed familiarity with the text” as well as my “hard work and keen intelligence.”

I enrolled in his course on Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
.

The fiction teacher let me into her workshop because I said I liked Flannery O’Connor.

“Let the games begin,” said Chris, imitating a creature on
Star Trek
, and he pretended to click his alien fingers. “Khee! Khee!”

Cathy came to visit for a few days, before moving to New York; she slept on the floor of my dorm room.

“I finally got up the nerve to ask her to sleep with me … I got scared though. We kissed and held each other. I was shaking.
Eventually I relaxed though. We couldn’t have intercourse because she had no protection … I never came … We laughed a lot
and made jokes while we were making love … Finally we just went to sleep … I felt like I had gone as far as I wanted … such
a shock, really, to make love, to be naked, to sleep with another … the night was awful. I couldn’t sleep … I felt so boxed
in with her sleeping beside me, in the narrow bed … In the morning we made love a bit more … She seemed to be doing the wrong
thing. I just felt rubbed and wiggled … She would breath in my ear and lick it and I would practically go wild. But when she
tried to make me come, I couldn’t.”

Fred yelling “having fun!”—either forced, manic enjoyment or enraged sarcasm.

Mike asked, “Well, Cliff, wasn’t it pleasurable?”

I started seeing a counselor at the university’s health center.

Now that Cathy was gone, I listened to the B-52’s by myself.

Cindy or Kate going “wild” over her idol, growling, screeching—

At breakfast I overheard someone say the super muscular guy from Dorm Six had freaked out on acid, and it took several people
to hold him down; I feigned disinterest, stirring my burned granola.

The cafeteria overlooked the distant bay, like a restaurant in a National Park.

I lay in bed with another bad cold, my fingers grazing the short, brown, napless carpet.

Dream: “Ken’s arm was cut off. He was acting strangely, down and out … He said his supervisor pulled at his arm and it came
off … [Later] Mom sent me a letter saying something like, ‘I no longer curse fate. My rebellious children are mutilated, slain,
ill …’”

I policed everything I thought and said but occasionally let slip a telling lie: of Mike’s red-haired roommate, I said, “His
hair is the most amazing color. What I want to know is, does he have a sister?”

Looking back at myself then is a little like watching
Mr. Magoo
.

Mike was tall, with dirty-blond hair that curled on his shoulders, gray eyes, a wide face and aquiline nose.

Regarding psychotherapy: “I feel so ugly, bleeding, exposed. And I need to be exposed. The rationalizations are fading … Greg
[my therapist] said I have to come down from the mountain and be part of the human race … I feel so ugly, so juvenile, so
wrong, wrong, wrong.”

“… letting go, losing control, being ugly, bloody, gaping, awkward, driven, limp-wristed, ineffectual, but whole, alive, washed
raw or something. But still I don’t cry … I sweat instead of crying. After a session with Greg I’m drenched … Pressure about
my eyes, sweat pouring out my armpits. I go through 2 or 3 shirts a day, my brow is furrowed a lot, and I look at the ground
as I walk.”

My ability to see myself clearly, and my ability to fool myself.

“Unraveling. That is what I want. Let it all unravel.”

The campus teemed with slender young men and women in shorts and T-shirts, yet sometimes in my memory the place seems stark
and empty—blank, sunny expanses of white stucco or concrete or open fields, as schematic as the island of retired spies in
The Prisoner
.

“Sweat, sleep, eat, shit.”

Voices outside my door, in the hall: “Gnarly … Killer …”

In my room, Fred called: “Destination: Moon.”

Saturday night I danced “wildly” with E. in the quad, to “Rock Lobster”; saw Marya watching from the stoop of her dorm, in
her big owl-ly glasses; felt elation turn to regret.

The Rock Lobster—life of the party, or angry outsider?

“Everybody dancin’. Everybody frugin’”—the perfect party, or outcast’s nightmare?

Seeing the tragic in a B-52’s song might be an aberrant reading, but so what.

I continued rereading the books on my list for my final oral exam, a requirement in my major.

“But that complexity and completeness that is holiness rests on the achievement of a level of human insight that is finally
revealed by the poet to be a virtual impossibility,” I wrote, of
The Faerie Queene
.

Possibility of sharing a place in San Francisco that summer with my high school friend Wayne, as we had done the previous
summer in Berkeley.

Letter to another pal: “My friend E. has been telling me a lot about herself lately, and I’m always afraid that I will reject
her.”

I dreamed I compared cocks with the tall, sexy preppy who lived upstairs.

I reread the
Iliad
.

I forced myself to get involved with Liz, a girl in my dorm.

It was a drought year; “If it’s yellow, let it mellow …”

“I have been getting closer to Liz … Mostly I like her because she listens to me so raptly … When, when, when will I simply
like someone and pursue them?”

No one could sound more milquetoast than Fred growling that his love is “erupting.”

I was attempting a new kind of Houdini trick—letting only half of myself out of my shell.

I reread Plato’s
Apology
.

Day after day of sunshine and dry air; the hillsides were brown again by early May.

I wrote short stories about: the gay man who had been my boss at a summer job; an argument I had with E.; my mother’s resentment
toward my father; a sheriff whose brother loses his arm; my being chased by a bull, which I had dreamed.

The guy down the hall said to me, “Let’s make a Liz sandwich,” and I pretended to laugh.

The clear sky, the open horizon of the sea, and my amorphous inner blob of unhappiness, shame, frustration, rage, confusion.

The fiction teacher suggested my protagonist might be attracted to the character named Mike. I disagreed.

The odd nature of the closet, the open secret, not only to others but to oneself.

Periods of denial and periods of self-awareness.

“There’s a moon in the sky. It’s called the moon.”

And yet by starting to write fiction that year, I had, in a way, already left Santa Cruz.

In the co-ed bathroom, after I had peed, E. said, in faux Southern accent, “I love a man with a strong urethra!”

In New York she would become my girlfriend, off and on, for three years—but that’s another story.

I’m not describing a straight path toward anything.

“We’re blessed, we’re blessed, we’re blessed, we’re blessed,” Chris sang one morning at breakfast, aping Tammy Faye Bakker.

As kids my brother Ken and I had often entertained each other with parody cartoons of bad TV dramas.

As far as I can tell, I barely spoke to Ken that year.

Letter from my high school friend Wayne telling me he was gay.

He was involved with a guy in Cambridge, so he wouldn’t be moving to San Francisco for the summer after all.

Reply to Wayne, admitting, “I, too, have had feelings toward men.”

I heard Liz’s voice out in the hall, but didn’t go out to talk to her.

Music as relief from continually having to choose and choose and choose.

The cymbal rolls like a gong as Fred calls, “Down, down!”—submarine, fellator, dreamer.

I tried to decide where to move after graduation, if not San Francisco.

I wondered what it would be like to have sex with Wayne.

I flipped to the black page in
Tristram Shandy
.

Every twenty-two-year-old is lost in the effort of formation, but some more than others—more secretive, more fumbling, more
“from scratch,” more thwarted, more hopeless, more undaunted, more against-all-odds.

Chris broke out giggling at the slightest sign of humor, so he was constantly saying, “Sorry. Sorry. Go on.”

Chris also turned out to be gay, but that was later.

I reread
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
.

Liz told me she had never met anyone so sensitive.

The fear of exposure, the self-ridicule, the inward no-no-no, the ickiness, the closed loop, the hope that somehow I
could
be different, the forced blooms of hetero desire, the sheer effort of it all, the constant expenditure of mental and emotional
energy.

“Can you name, name, name, name them today?” sang Kate and Cindy on the morning of my exam.

In the book-lined office I took my seat before the three professors—and froze.

I couldn’t seem to answer any of their questions.

At one point I said, “Am I getting warmer?”

“He was, however, clearly nervous,” said the evaluation, “and this led to a self-consciousness in his answers that produced
a rather blocked exam. There was a disappointing tentativeness to his performance—though he knew his texts, he had
trouble deploying them in the exam context … When encouraged to develop a perspective he had thought through, he tended to
lose the edge of his argument and become distracted and diffuse … He managed to convey an ability he did not fully demonstrate.”

Afterwards, Mike comforted me over a beer.

Of Liz I wrote: “There is something missing—what is it?”

Whenever I told my therapist I might be gay, he threatened to send me to the gay counselor on staff.

Description of Liz: “She is Chinese. She has long hair, a face like a Gauguin. She is very insecure. But when we are just
alone and talking, none of the negative matters.”

Invitation from a friend in Texas to come live in Austin, where a guy she knew was making a movie that I could work on.

Describing a single B-52’s song from start to finish would be like climbing inside a dream of my frustrated, secretive youth.

Regarding Liz: “I want to kiss her, I want to touch her. But there are blocks, blocks, BLOCKS. Obstacles.”

“Can I ever stop pressuring myself to feel certain things?”

Tinny sixties organ, like some forgotten Morse code. “Remember,” Cindy breathily confides, “when you held my hand.” A succession
of girl-group fragments. She’s stuck in a world of clichés, seeking glamorous wisdom. I feel for Cindy—she’s lost her man.
The faint toy piano: generic scary-movie
“insanity.” At last the stock phrases give way to screams: “Why don’t you dance with me? I’m not no limburger!” Comic but
also kind of heartbreaking. She’s only screaming like I wish I could. Fred chimes in now, the circus ringleader: “Dance this
mess around!” Whipping up the animals, egging on the dream. The guitar insists, and now Kate tells of parties at which she,
also a “mess,” is danced around in various styles—“shy tuna … camel walk … hippy shake.” I, too, knew the hippy shake—it could
still be seen at parties in Santa Cruz, circa 1980. I, too, a mess—though never so artfully described as by Kate’s trumpet-y
soprano, slightly raspy, almost screechy—singing the title sentence over and over, in ever wilder melodies, as if in madness
or abandon, while the others sing their “yeahs”—affirmation at last?

A cute guy from the dorm told me he freaked out on acid and saw a giant grasshopper up in a field.

Chris ran as a convention delegate for Ted Kennedy, who opposed Carter in the Democratic primary, but I voted for Chris out
of personal loyalty rather than political zeal.

“All afternoon I was lying here trying to have a nap and feeling like I am breaking apart emotionally. Pressure on all sides:
parents, school, myself, Liz, and finally my psychologist. For a moment I fell asleep, and a British voice said, ‘Everyone
accusing you. It’s too much. Don’t you think you need a pardon?’”

Fred’s falsetto “British” accent: “Rock lobster?”

The phrase repeated over and over, as if it could mean anything—and does.

Another brief dream in which I wanted to saw my way across a bridge—destroying, going to a lot of trouble and turmoil for
nothing, just to clear the way that was already clear.

“I wish my life would stop, so much happens … I have been getting closer to Liz sexually … I just looked out the window. It
is a beautiful day—rainy, cloudy, some sun, and the grass is all brown … I love rain and cold in summertime.”

I considered staying in Santa Cruz for the summer; I wondered if Liz being there was a plus or a minus.

Regarding Liz: “So we got to the shirt-taking-off point, and then she wanted to take my pants off and I just didn’t want to
… I’m beginning to feel like such a freak—cold, gay, whatever.”

Despite the oral exam, I graduated with honors.

At the graduation ceremony, which was outdoors, a crazy woman from town named Cosmic Lady yelled from the back, “All right,
all you mother-fuckers and father-fuckers!”