The Tooth Fairy Read online

  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!”

  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.”

  3

  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, str
eet, 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.”

  AS IF

  1

  OUR 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.”