The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  I wasn’t thinking about my own lost traditions just then, or about my own mother; I didn’t have to, because I was thinking about Fari.

  *

  We tried sending the e-mail but it wouldn’t go through. Fari agreed to send a letter for me instead, enclosing printouts of the photographs. I doubted we would hear back (and we never did).

  Meanwhile, my sympathy for the shopping bag’s rightful owners, already transposed from my grief over my mother, had, in turn, been transposed to Fari.

  In a way. But it had all been in a way, anyway.

  Whatever the reason, I had connected with this young woman and her story, and whether or not this was momentary or the beginning of a friendship, I felt obscurely satisfied.

  As if you could find success entirely by analogy.

  The various consolations life hands you, from unexpected quarters.

  My mother’s pastor had said it was as if my mother wanted to spare me the pain of actually seeing her die.

  “It’s okay to touch her,” the pastor added, and for the last time I took my mother’s hand.

  As Fari prepared to go meet Brian, I impulsively gave her a copy of my novel about Winkie.

  In it, I thank my mother for giving me her childhood teddy bear.

  Fari said she didn’t know the bus system in New York City and was afraid of getting lost, so I walked her down to the stop and carefully explained which route to take.

  As we looked up Eighth Avenue I felt motherly, wanting Fari to succeed in America.

  Rain had begun to fall, so I also gave her my umbrella.

  KEN

  1

  MY BROTHER’S MERCURY Zephyr handled so poorly that whenever he rounded a tight corner he used to say, “Here comes the Queen Mary.”

  Once he and his good friend Jeff were having lunch outdoors and a sparrow began aggressively fluttering around Ken’s head, so from then on Jeff started calling him Tippi.

  Jeff recalls that the two of them also laughed that day in San Diego about the image of Tippi Hedren out in a rowboat on Bodega Bay, in heels and a full-length mink.

  Ken died of AIDS in 1989. A few years later I published a book about it, titled The Hurry-Up Song.

  I say “about it” instead of about “about him” because the book is a portrait of the author losing his brother, rather than a portrait of the brother himself. Whatever the reader sees of Ken is exclusively from my point of view.

  Almost as if reflected in my glasses.

  I didn’t interview any of his friends for the book, and though I knew my mother had kept his journal, I didn’t ask to read it.

  I felt I couldn’t take into account the grief of his friends in addition to my own, nor could I absorb any more of his suffering than I had already witnessed.

  Thus not only was the published portrait of Ken lacking, but my own idea of him remained incomplete, and perhaps by extension, so was my grief.

  I was also afraid of finding out he was angry with me when he died, which wasn’t a wild guess, since he was very angry toward the end.

  In my Waspy way I thought it was better not to know.

  The avoidance accounts for much of the twelve-year gap in this narrative, between E. and John.

  But now, more than twenty years after Ken’s death, I find myself willing to read his diary and to ask for the recollections of his friends.

  That willingness is somehow related to having cared for my parents, and lost them. Hence for me Ken’s diary takes place now as much as in the 1980s.

  His journal entries are fragmentary, as are memories, but I hope this portrait will be fuller than the earlier attempt.

  2

  “DREAM,” HE WRITES, in February 1984: “Surrealistic acid-like feeling of stumbling through my bedroom, trying to get somewhere and not being able to.” He offers no interpretation.

  He hadn’t yet tested positive, but my first thought is that the dream foreshadows his futile struggle with HIV.

  In fact, it simply expresses frustration with his love life at that moment.

  When I refer to Ken’s journal, I actually mean a series of small black vinyl notebooks running from early 1984 to mid-1987, continuing with a sheaf of larger, unlined pages in which dates quickly disappear altogether.

  His handwriting: a slightly more extravagant version of my own.

  He records nothing in the way of physical setting, music he liked, or current events, though regarding the news, I recall that he read the paper every day.

  As for weather, there was little for him to report, since the climate in San Diego is so mild. Palms and yuccas punctuate the streets. Year-round, the air smells of flowers.

  My perusal of the San Diego Union during the eighties reveals a parade of homophobia, not only in the news itself (an anti-gay protestor carrying a sign that reads “Got AIDS Yet?”), but in how gays and lesbians are covered (phrases like “admitted homosexual” and “the militant homosexual community”).

  Ken’s likely reaction: sarcasm. “Chahhh-ming,” he used to say, like Katharine Hepburn opening a lovely gift.

  His sense of humor is another thing excluded from his notebooks.

  In 1984 he had recently begun psychotherapy (both individual and group), which I assume was his reason for starting the diary.

  He met Jeff in the group, whose members were all gay men. Jeff says they were encouraged to see each other outside of therapy and even to have sex if they liked. (I don’t ask if he and Ken did.)

  Ken was a mathematician and computer analyst, and much of the journal is comprised of numbered lists of feelings, such as this entry from that April:

  1) Extreme agitation over psychotherapy bills. Feeling cry-ish all day. Lack of appetite. Anger, sadness, sulky, butterflies in stomach

  2) Anger at group—lack of support from all but Phil [the group therapist]. Negative reactions to comment that I was bored (e.g. ‘You distance yourself from the group” …)

  Highly negative criticisms of my mannerisms

  I want to reach back and protect him from the other members of his group, from his tears and his butterflies.

  He was always worried about money (especially after he got sick), so that same month he decided to quit individual therapy and continue only with group, presumably because it was cheaper and despite continued complaints in his journal such as “They won’t listen to me.”

  My own therapist during the eighties wouldn’t allow me to call him by his first name, and we had virtually no rapport—which, as I recall, felt weirdly safe.

  My own trying to get somewhere and not being able to. My own feeling that no one would listen to me.

  This line, also from April 1984, could have been written by me: “When I have ‘gut’ (affective) stuff going on inside I don’t have good access to it (or none at all!), so I have trouble expressing myself.”

  A “Dear Abby” column Ken taped to the page: “DEAR CONFUSED: You have been using sex to fill an unmet emotional need that’s been gnawing at you since you were very young.”

  Like me Ken had a lot of bad childhood memories. One Wednesday when he was little, our older brother Paul and his friend Billy told Ken that it was Saturday, not Wednesday, and as he tried to object, they sang “Saturday! Saturday! Saturday!” over and over until he started to scream.

  In turn Ken sometimes tortured me—the “invisible” episode and countless socks on the arm—but he and I also had a lot in common and often played together—I owe my sense of humor to him—so my memories of him are profoundly mixed.

  On the same page as “Dear Abby,” Ken considers asking out a guy named Art.

  “Need for an emotionally fulfilling relationship,” he writes on April 21. “Anger and hurt regarding past sexual experiences … The emotional fulfillment was lacking and I felt very cheated since I was looking for something that was not part of the implicit social contract.”

  I remember Ken once bragging that he took home only the “prettiest” guys at the bar, but evidently he wanted somet
hing different now.

  In 1984 I was still vacillating over E.

  Front-page news, April 24: discovery of the AIDS virus, development of a blood test, prediction of a vaccine within two years. I wonder if this false optimism affected Ken positively.

  In early May he reports that he “fucked with Arthur for first time. First he did me then I did him.”

  The threshold for writing down good things appears to be very high—the diary is concerned almost entirely with problems—so I conclude that fucking with Arthur must have been not simply a good experience but an extraordinary one.

  Or was it, in fact, a problem? That same night he dreams: “Intruder in the house, I overpower him and throw him out; return to bedroom to find Art gone; realize ejected one was Art; return to front door, call him back and he returns to me …”

  Wanting love, and fearing love.

  Later that month Ken dreams that “Arthur left a message on answering machine saying that he loved me and wanted to live with me.”

  Regarding an unspecified quarrel: “Called Arthur and told him of my ‘distress’ after our talk Sunday. Also told him I romanticize and like being in love … Phrase he used: ‘stages going through while developing a closer relationship.’”

  The hopefulness of this. Arthur’s apparent sensibleness. The possibility that their romance might endure.

  3

  IN MY PHONE conversation with him, Arthur recalls: “There were definitely some difficult things that happened while we were dating, as though we were kind of working out the connection. It was a little rough. That wasn’t the part that was important to me, that there were problems.”

  Arthur’s reply to the letter I had sent said he was glad to hear from me because he still had “unresolved feelings” toward Ken.

  He had owned a copy of The Hurry-Up Song for a number of years but coincidentally had only read it a couple of months earlier.

  “Twenty Years After Ken’s Death” appeared to be a mathematical function at work in others besides myself.

  “I have these pictures of him in my mind,” Arthur tells me. “I can see him in certain places.”

  I wonder if Ken somehow spawned unresolved feelings more than most people do.

  I ask Arthur how they met. “Well, you know, this is another one of those moments I can remember absolutely. We were going to a gym in Mission Valley. I think it was the Holiday Spa at the time. I was standing at the desk looking over my exercise card to get started that day, and here comes Ken. This cute blond guy comes up, and it was like, hi.” He laughs. “We started chatting, and he wanted to get together and he wanted to exchange phone numbers. That was the beginning.”

  Both Jeff and another friend of Ken’s, Jim, similarly refer to Ken as a “hunk.”

  Arthur himself had thick dark hair and a dark mustache. He was about Ken’s height, five-seven.

  “I don’t remember our first date,” says Arthur. “We did end up back over at his apartment [in Ocean Beach, where Arthur also lived]. There was the surfboard. It was just—it was kind of basic. I didn’t know too much about him at that point. We spent the night together … I was looking for at least a solid dating relationship, to see where it would go. We did an awful lot together. I’m remembering some parties we went to. Various things.”

  Are there other pictures in his mind? “Oh,” he laughs. “One night he came over to my apartment. I was standing in the kitchen and my roommate Ray was there. Ken comes in and he’s got this bouquet of flowers. I was nonplussed—some guy is bringing me flowers. It kind of startled me. He said, ‘Oh, I guess this is a little too much for you.’ No one had ever done that for me.”

  “Ken and I would be out, we’d stop for coffee, encountering friends [of mine], and they’d say, ‘Wow, your boyfriend is really cute.’ I hadn’t thought of him as some trophy husband. He was a nice guy, down to earth, very bright. His vocabulary was, you know, impressive. We could talk intelligently about things.”

  Jim also remarked on how easy it was to talk to my brother. Since Jim was on the board of a major AIDS organization, they used to discuss the rancorous gay politics in San Diego.

  “There were these expressions he had that were distinctly his,” says Arthur. I don’t need to ask for examples because I know Ken’s distinct expressions so well—such as “Nards!” when he was mildly annoyed; or “Oh, Mitch” for a slow driver who got in his way (after an incompetent super he once had); or “Cheap-cheap-cheap,” high-pitched like a bird, when he didn’t want to spend money.

  “Ken definitely had a different perspective,” Arthur continues. “It was one of the things I really liked about him.”

  In June of that year Ken moved into the house in San Diego where he would die—a one-bedroom Spanish bungalow, built in the twenties, with a crenulated façade. The matching one-car garage resembled a little stucco castle.

  “He wanted us to live together,” Arthur says. “And I was, like, right on the edge of that. And it was just like, please, don’t push too much right now. Just give me some—I felt like I needed a little more time to get accustomed to the idea. Because he was the last of three really significant guys that I dated.” I assume Arthur means he was still getting over the previous two relationships. Immediately he goes on to say, “After him, I only dated somebody again in the mid-nineties, almost ten years later.”

  4

  AN INDEX CARD in the envelope containing Ken’s diary notes, “June ’84—1st tested positive,” but there’s no mention of this event in the diary itself.

  The general atmosphere back then of panic, stigma, fury, and denial regarding HIV, which wasn’t even yet called HIV.

  Rev. Jerry Falwell famously called it the “gay plague.”

  Possibly Ken feared someone finding his journal and learning of his HIV status. He worked in the defense industry and had a security clearance, so he remained closeted at work.

  Each weekday evening, the pink neon sign for his neighborhood—Normal Heights—appeared in his windshield, signaling his arrival in a less secretive zone.

  He did talk about his test result with Arthur, soon after he learned of it. “Oh, oh, oh, here’s the critical event,” Arthur recalls. “We were in the water bed one evening and he said, ‘You know I was at the doctor’s and I found out that I’m positive.’ And we’d been not exclusively top or bottom—I guess it would be like people who really do get into a relationship—it was very mutual, not role playing. And we weren’t using any condoms.” So Arthur figured he must have been positive too (which indeed he is, though I don’t ask when he found out for sure). “The thing was, the two guys I’d dated prior to this also became positive, and I can’t remember if I knew that before I was dating Ken. I don’t think so.”

  Ken had received his HIV test as part of a scientific study. In addition to the index card, there’s a letter from UCSD Medical Center, which cautions, “… we are not yet sure of the significance of these test results.”

  I don’t know how many other people Ken told. There’s no hint in the journal that he talked about it in group therapy. He didn’t tell me until sometime in 1986, and my parents did not find out until he actually landed in the hospital, in the fall of 1987.

  In the entry dated June 18/19, 1984, Ken writes:

  depression

  ambivalence

  feelings of being overwhelmed by house

  feeling trapped

  …

  Focusing on memory of helping Dad paint living room in house in Conn. And getting in trouble for getting paint on floor while trying to paint the quarter round.

  My parents’ tirades over such minor infractions were so common that Ken and I drew cartoons about them.

  By “June 18/19” he must mean it’s about midnight, and he can’t sleep. I imagine him writing at the pale, rectangular dining table from the forties that had belonged to my parents. The windows were probably open to the balmy air, since according to the almanac, the low that night was sixty-six.

  It was
cloudy every morning that week—a San Diego weather pattern known as “June Gloom.”

  June 22: “Issue for next private session: difficulty in cumming while having sex with other guys. Difficulty fucking. Ambivalence re getting fucked.”

  The following month he records a timetable of the men he’s been with—perhaps trying to determine when he sero-converted, perhaps simply taking stock of his love life.

  At San Diego’s Gay Pride parade earlier that month, a plane had towed an anti-gay banner above Balboa Park. In mid-July, demonstrators near the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco demanded more federal funding for AIDS research. I assume Ken couldn’t participate in such events, since that would have risked his security clearance. On the other hand, I don’t recall his ever saying he’d like to attend gay parades or protests.

  July 20: “… very depressed; cried for no reason; unable to concentrate; disinterest in work/Art/house; lack of appetite …”

  I don’t know how much of this he shared with Arthur. Ken’s friend Jim tells me he never talked about his darker feelings, but Jim could sense they were there.

  July 20, continued: “Becoming more and more angry at anything and everything … culminating in Thursday—felt ‘compulsion’ to get stoned. However, decided consciously not to.”

  This is the first time the journal brings up pot. Eventually Ken would come to see it as a serious addiction, and he would become very active in both Narcotics Anonymous and AA.

  Arthur tells me that he himself had been sober for several years when he met Ken. I’m surprised because Ken never mentions this fact in his journal.

  Arthur doesn’t recall ever seeing him get high, nor even smelling it on him: “I don’t know when he was doing it.” Evidently Ken was making an effort to hide it. Sometime later, after they had broken up, Arthur was quite surprised to see him at an AA meeting. (This is one of the vivid pictures in Arthur’s mind.) If my brother’s addiction was as powerful and pernicious as he eventually concluded, then not smoking in front of Arthur—presumably because Arthur was in AA—must have made spending time with him difficult. Yet the journal never mentions this as a factor in their relations.