The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (7 page)

In the sunny courtyard I stood and smiled with my parents as an acquaintance took our photo.

Ken hadn’t come up for the ceremony.

Evaluation for my fiction workshop: “His stories ‘The Neptune Visitor’ and ‘The Mother’ both tried to capture the tragedy
of human alienation and the results were provocative. The language Cliff employed in most of his stories allowed for the narrative
to take place on two levels, and even though this may not have been his intention, it worked well.”

I
MOVED MY
stuff out of the dorm and back to my parents’ house in San Jose.

At breakfast, the rubber-banded box of frozen sausages and the plastic bag of frozen diminutive corn muffins.

I rubbed our dog’s floppy tan ears, which were whitish with age.

My father had retired two years earlier but my mother still worked part-time, as a bookkeeper for a music and arts center
up in the hills.

“He just sits in his chair all day,” she whispered.

During an argument over Christmas break, she had said to me, “Why are you shutting me out?”

I continued trying to decide what to do about Liz.

I went for a run—lawn, street, lawn, street, lawn, street, and scarcely a person to be seen.

All the houses made of stucco.

I considered visiting old teachers but decided against it.

I mowed while my father carefully trimmed along the sidewalk.

I napped on my old bed, feeling the perfect breeze that always blew through that house.

A summer dinner from childhood: corn on the cob, sliced ham, sliced tomatoes, and watermelon for dessert.

“Oh, that’s good!” said my father.

Presumably he made cracks about nuking Iran, and presumably I ignored him.

The jasmine blooming along the fence under the window of the dining room.

The speckled whitish slightly bumpy linoleum under my feet.

“You knocked the heating register out of place,” said my father, so I bent to fix it.

My parents sat watching TV, which I disdained.

I drove my mother’s white boxy Dodge to the house of an old high school friend, and we went to see
The Shining
.

“Heeeere’s Johnnie!”

In the darkened theater I began to shake uncontrollably.

When I got home, my parents had gone to bed and the house was dark.

“Tonight I saw the most frightening movie that I have ever seen in my life … I’m very upset. I’m even crying a little … I
feel like I’m on LSD … When I came into the house—suddenly
I understood paranoia. Literally everything is potentially frightening, harmful. I just looked at the [blank] TV screen and
the reflection in it and a chill went down my back … Mirrors or open doorways seem horrifying—what is to be seen in them?
… The most frightening image: a hallucination he has. God, I almost can’t say it … The man sees a beautiful woman get out
of the bathtub. This is hurting me to talk about it. He embraces her, but when he looks in the mirror, he sees she is old,
wrinkled, scabby. There. I’m through it … And I’m paranoid again; my heart is beating … I really feel like I’m going crazy.
Or I see how people go crazy … God, it is awful to see these things in yourself … The world seems scabby, wrinkled. I’m afraid
I’ll start hallucinating. I keep telling myself that a movie can’t hurt me. Actors, sets, film only …”

I woke my mother and we sat up talking at the dining room table; I told her how I felt pressured to be with Liz; my mother
looked uneasy.

Still, she was a comfort to me that night.

A few days later I returned to Santa Cruz, where I found a share in a house not far from Mike’s.

“I am feeling almost normal again but I’m still a little scared; and all the pressures that led up to that night are still
there.”

A dream in which my parents are unkind to me: “I just remembered the end … I ran into my room. Ken was there, and he was extremely
understanding; his face was like a kindly Buddha or something. Of course that scares me … Yet I want to think about that face
of Ken’s … a refuge from all the accusation, irritation, lack of compassion, and frustration. I’m not sure what Ken symbolized.”

How at any given moment you never quite know what life you’re in the midst of hatching.

Whenever I moved anywhere, I always set up my stereo first.

There might have been a confrontation with Liz, or maybe I simply hoped not to run into her in town.

The ones Kate doesn’t want, the ones who dance her around.

I would someday claim Fred’s faggy voice as my own: record album as prophecy.

In listening again now, I pay homage to the sacred blind task of destroying and remaking myself.

The odd miracle of the needle in the groove.

The knitting quality of any music with a beat.

The knitting quality of the crackle of vinyl.

I’ve always loved songs that go through phases, such as when the guitar riff changes in “Rock Lobster” and an insect begins
to croak.

I was becoming in some ways exactly what I wanted to be, and in other ways, exactly what I didn’t want to be.

My room was at the front of the house, and instead of coming through the front door, Mike simply climbed in my window.

I got a temporary job working graveyard shift for Intel, testing chips.

Cathy wrote suggesting I move to New York, where she was working for the Strand bookstore.

Exhausted from my shift, I walked home along the water, under the early morning clouds.

Cindy singing “rock lobster” again and again, “operatically”—child imitating a diva, or mouse singing in an old cartoon.

The year I didn’t lose my virginity; the year I learned to read—that is, ironically; the year I began writing fiction; the
year I traded Joni Mitchell for the B-52’s; the year I met Cathy, befriended Chris and E., and grew close to Mike; the year
I nearly flunked; the year I lost my mind.

“But the future pops in my mind again,” I wrote. “What do I want? I don’t seem to know in the least.”

O
UR FIRST NIGHT
together, after a party in the East Village, E. and I undressed and simply lay side by side for a while, out there on the
hide-a-bed in the living room.

The sound of the pita joint below, pots and pans banging.

“Touching is permitted,” she said at last, with just the right amount of irony.

And so a key was turned.

“In a moment, our hands touched,” I wrote the next day (October 30, 1981), “—at first, perhaps only a gesture before sleep,
a gesture of great affection, as if we might have just gone to sleep holding hands.”

Because of my inexperience and my indecision, I was too afraid to fuck.

The creaky brown sofa bed where we kissed, the orangey dark of the streetlight, and E.’s sighs.

My roommate Owen asleep behind the heavy curtain of his doorless room.

I had had a boyfriend the previous spring, and when I walked the streets alone, I glanced at guys.

Call her E., to spare her privacy, or because she’s elemental, or because the initial alone sounds less charged, more objective,
than what her name came to mean.

Even now, some combination of dread, embarrassment, and longing stops me after each sentence, and I have to take a breath.

We were together, off and on, for more than three years.

Her name is also a man’s name.

But this isn’t merely a story of sexual confusion, rather of self-doubt, which is bigger.

The auburn highlights in her hair, which she kept neck- or shoulder-length.

The way she flipped it around, comically but also sexily, her manner of flirting being mainly to parody coquetry.

For the next several weeks, E. and I continued our heavy petting.

Her slender torso and round bottom, the utter softness of her small conelike breasts.

At twenty-three my shyness about intercourse was a point of shame.

At twenty-three I was somehow both utterly vulnerable, and utterly closed.

Discovery of my finger on her wet button, and how it made her cry out.

We went to see an avant-garde play called
Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free
, which contained a rap song about fucking.

We walked arm in arm from the East Village to the West.

E. was not a virgin but she reassured me that our necking made her feel pleasantly like a teenager again.

She had moved to New York to find a job in publishing and now worked at
Rubber World
, a trade magazine. I had thought it unwise for her to take the position.

I wrote of not being “in love” with her, of “gaps” between us that were “hard to define.”

E.’s department at work was called Fulfillment. Her many jokes about this.

My weariness of my own job, as the typist for a group of elderly journalists.

My gigantic blue IBM, an early word processor, with its dial of fifty memory slots like a kitchen timer.

I glanced through the
Times
each morning, but very little of the news penetrated.

I do recall reading the article titled “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”

Example of the homophobia that was simply normal in 1981: my roommate Owen had not allowed me to kiss my boyfriend in front
of him.

I kept gay themes out of the fiction I was writing.

My letters home in which I tried to explain myself, without explaining myself.

My many letters to friends, some sent, others not, some honest, some not.

My mother’s curiously detailed letters from California that revealed nothing of her interior life.

My tenement street full of fire escapes.

One night I heard Owen arguing with his father on the phone; he hung up and screamed; I hesitated to go ask what had happened.

He was writing a movie script in which the protagonist has twenty-four hours to screw as many girls as possible before he
gets married.

Janet, the other editorial assistant where I worked, openly disliked me, and my pal Leslie, the intern, had left.

Cathy, too, had left New York, and I now had virtually no friends there besides E.

She arrived an hour late for a movie. “I was so pissed waiting for her,” I wrote, “but then when I saw her face, she looked
so sheepish and beautiful [that] I melted.”

It was chilly and she was wearing a white wool shawl—it’s one of my fondest memories of her—but we didn’t screw that night
either.

My fear that intercourse with E. would be a “lie,” either because I wasn’t in love with her, or because I was “actually” queer.

“My poor oppressed little homosexual self,” I wrote. “I keep ‘realizing’ it and ‘realizing’ it.”

I developed a rash on my hand, where the pen rested.

At work I had to apologize to my boss for walking away, in anger, while he was still speaking to me.

Thus began the many years of asking myself how the hell I should support myself.

“My tongue in her mouth—I can’t explain it, honestly, the feeling of—unity? Union? Closeness?” I wrote in my journal. “Union,
I guess.”

Even now, not knowing just where to put her in my mind.

The particular music of her voice, the wry arch of her eyebrows, like a prettier Imogene Coca.

“I felt my skin to be so at home against hers, my face against her neck,” I wrote. “I feel self-forgiven and whole.”

Meanwhile, I finished a short story that I was proud of.

The laundromat ladies squawking at me in their Monty Python voices to arrange my sheets around the agitator: “Circle! CIRCLE!”

The view up my street: Washington Square’s arch; down my street: shimmery rectangles of the World Trade Center.

“I am a homosexual. I dream about men, I look at men, I fantasize about them,” I wrote.

Of course it’s only in retrospect that such statements look like clarity.

Other times I thought of my ex-boyfriend as merely an “experiment.”

It’s as if I wanted to make the choice as difficult for myself as possible.

Thanksgiving Day: E. on top of me, her breasts just brushing across my chest.

The sensation of first entering her.

I
N MY JOURNAL
I described fucking as a “roller coaster.”

I wish I could look back on that period with “wry wisdom,” with a twinkly smile at myself—which wasn’t even myself, because
I was so different then, and that was so long ago.

I still dream about E., periodically.

Recently she slipped over the edge of a terrace. I grabbed her pink hood, but she dropped out of the jacket and into the ice-cold
sea below. Fortunately John dove in after her, pulling her to a small pebbly beach.

This sounds possibly redemptive, though it was unclear whether E. was still alive.

Her boyfriend before me had once slept with a guy too, she informed me—“Most intelligent men have.”

She often made authoritative statements such as this.

“Brick House” came on; her whoop of pleasure; she ground down to the floor and back up again, hands clasped high above her
head.

Her dance moves wild and mysterious to me.

Her bravado wild and mysterious to me.

“Too weird!” she liked to say, in delight.

Like Pigpen, I was creating my own cloud of obfuscating dust that traveled with me everywhere.

“Every choice seems to stamp out so many options, sides of me,” I wrote. “… A hollowness in my stomach, a longing or a riddle.”

My chest gradually sprouting light brown hairs.

On my turntable, Talking Heads’ keyboard arpeggios: overlapping ripples in a shallow pool.

Satisfying whoosh of the old water tank above my toilet, and the weird porcelain shelf in the bowl, as if for inspecting one’s
stool before flushing.

That Christmas, in California, my mother lifted the pink nightgown from its splashy department store box, a gift from my father.
“Ah,” she said, pleased, and Ken took a picture.

The reason this tale is bigger than sexual preference is my mother.

The ways that being with E. resembled being the particular child of this particular mother.

My running argument with her over her complaints about my father.

The difficulty of even getting to her through the fog of her grudges.

Her stories about him went back years and years, and from childhood I’d been required to listen to them, or she’d withdraw.

And so it felt natural to put myself aside to get love.

Indeed my father could be selfish and impractical and the family had suffered certain misfortunes because of this.

My mother apparently believed that she had not only to tolerate resentment but actually to cultivate large fields of it, with
the help of fertilizers and pesticides.

Over dinner she told of the mistakes and stupidity she had encountered at her bookkeeping job.

In turn Ken and I exchanged conspiratorial glances across the dish drainer, just as we’d done as kids, then ran to the back
bedrooms as soon as possible.

Somehow Ken’s coming out to me had only muddied my own sexual picture.

After my parents had gone to bed, he spoke to me of bars and “tricks” and the gym.

As opposed to my own nerd bohemia.

It took me a moment to realize that by “girlfriends” he meant male pals with whom he did not have sex.

My inability to imagine what my own gay life could be like.

Just the same, at a college friend’s New Year’s Eve party, in San Francisco, I danced with another guy, whom I described in
my journal as “loose as a puppet.”

“If there is such a thing as being ‘true to yourself,’” I wrote on January 1, 1982, “sometimes it seems I must be brave and
become gay.”