The Tooth Fairy Page 5

  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 alon
e 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.

  2

  FOR 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 p
arty, 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.