The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  July 23: “Still some sores in mouth”—first mention of possible HIV-related symptoms, though Ken remained healthy for another year and a half.

  August 6: “Saw Arthur today. He told me I had forced emotional growth in him, which was hard for him. We will continue seeing each other, see what happens.”

  But on August 10 Ken writes: “Arthur called. … I felt like I was forcing my affections on him.”

  Regardless of Arthur’s probable HIV status, the virus may have made Ken feel tainted. This would have been hard to admit, let alone discuss.

  August 12: “Dragged someone home from the bar; finally decided I was comfortable with him here; slept cuddled up; very nice.”

  Not that I want to deny Ken this nice evening, but it does appear to have been a distraction from Arthur.

  Presumably Ken didn’t reveal his HIV status to this anonymous someone.

  “Saturday … told Art I didn’t want to go to dinner … woke up feeling alone and lonely and missing Art.”

  Later in August, he writes of “seeing Art stringing me along indefinitely in his ambivalence and then suddenly dumping me. Fear of abandonment?”

  Ken had had tantrums as a kid, and my mother sometimes left him alone for long periods—as he shrieked and cried. My sister Helen has a similar story. I did not have tantrums, but my childhood was marked in its own way by my mother’s particular brand of moody, sporadic attention.

  August 15: “… feel like getting stoned and escaping everything … realizing that I wanted to get stoned to escape feeling. Recall the implicit message of childhood—‘don’t feel.’”

  5

  PONDERING THAT STATEMENT makes me emotional.

  Anger on his behalf. Also a sense of confirmation—as I often felt when Ken and I talked about the family. Hence renewed sadness that we can no longer have such conversations.

  To be clear, “don’t feel” wasn’t always the message. Sometimes we got sympathy, sometimes derision, sometimes indifference, depending on the feelings we expressed, depending on our parents’ moods.

  What Ken confirms is the uncertainty, the constant self-doubt.

  My mother liked to tell a story of how my sister Helen once fell down and skinned her knee but did not start crying until she saw my mother. To her, this meant Helen didn’t actually feel significant pain but was merely “trying to get attention.”

  Wanting attention was the feeling my mother considered most suspect.

  With similar myopia, I had difficulty accepting Ken’s decision to pursue abstinence. I considered pot the least of his troubles and wrote derisively of Narcotics Anonymous in The Hurry-Up Song, calling the program an extreme solution to a minor problem.

  But now, as I read the words “don’t feel,” suddenly I understand. Pot was sopping up his unwanted emotions, and he decided he didn’t want to live that way anymore.

  The journal itself is a forum for those unwanted emotions.

  As if to reward himself for this new insight, that same day, August 15, 1984, Ken goes on to recount a moment of ordinary happiness: “Jeff Wynne called at 8 p.m.—joked with him and felt better.”

  In five years of journal entries, this is one of only three mentions of Jeff, which I assume indicates, paradoxically, just how important Jeff’s friendship was to him as a source of unfreighted everyday cheerfulness.

  August 19:

  … irrational fear Arthur was going to stand me up.

  … but enjoyed movie; also sex was very good, and worked without working at it. Sunday morning felt in very strange mood, talked about [it] to Arthur and felt better.

  … Also went to [a restaurant] for a snack … Art revealed that he felt uncomfortable there, like someone was making comments about us. Then he got mad at me and that made me feel hurt, but I didn’t tell him that (why not?) …

  Cf. my secrets in Egypt.

  Still, on August 21 Ken acknowledges that Arthur has “opened up” to him (though he doesn’t note how) and that such disclosures are “the building blocks of intimacy and a serious relationship.”

  August 23:

  Thinking about last night’s dinner with Arthur—

  …

  Our brief talk about our feelings about the events of the day

  The feeling of peace and contentment after dinner

  Six days later he writes: “Payoff of my anger is withdrawal. Withdrawal is ‘safe’; because it puts me into an ‘invincible’ and ‘invulnerable’ position.”

  Again, the psychic flavor is very close to my own, like red raspberries vs. yellow. (For example: a late childhood memory of hiding in my bedroom closet after an argument with Ken himself.)

  That month Ken also writes of “a fear that if people see the real me they won’t like what they see and/or they will then know what openings to use in order to ‘get’ to me.”

  My own persistent belief that whenever I feel good, someone is bound to come along and deflate me.

  On August 31 Ken writes: “Making love to Arthur was wonderful Thursday. I was holding his cock and he was holding mine, but it was feeling so good, it was as if I was not sure if I was holding him or myself.”

  Then once again a nightmare: “Outside, a backyard with a solid fence & a gate. Satan is behind gate. [I’m] pounding on the gate, tempting Satan to come get me. He starts to come for me, I barely escape. I wake up scared.”

  The deeply destabilizing influence of HIV; the deeply destabilizing influence of childhood.

  I picture the high redwood slats surrounding Ken’s concrete backyard, or the fence around the yard in San Jose.

  In early September the San Diego Union reported that a member of the county board of supervisors had expressed concern that improved services “for homosexuals with AIDS might attract other victims of the deadly disorder to the region.”

  However Ken reacted to such stories, as I read through them I feel like I’m watching him get kicked.

  September 20: “… Not feeling good about myself … Wondering why I am not enough for Arthur …”

  October 10: “… fear of a world full of ogres …”

  Later in October he recounts various small tiffs with Arthur. To me, the disagreements don’t appear insurmountable—but I say this with many more years of life experience than Ken had as of 1984. He was thirty-two. I’m now fifty-two. I’ve been with John seventeen years, with all their ups and downs.

  And then there’s the fact that I’m not facing a life-threatening disease.

  Later that fall, Ken mentions wanting to talk to his therapist about someone named Bill, so he must have been seeing him on the side.

  Knowing what I now know about Arthur, I can’t help but view this, again, as an evasion. Ken dated both Bill and Arthur for the next several months, seeming to grow more and more convinced that he preferred Bill.

  Jeff describes Bill as “very cute” but “not the brightest bulb.”

  January 8, 1985:

  1) Bill loves me

  2) I must reach completion with Arthur

  3) Bill hates to be the other woman

  4) Bill hates it when Ken holds back

  5) Bill wants to suck Ken’s cock with a rubber on because he’s scared to death of the unknown.

  “Bill loves me”—and by implication Arthur doesn’t? But unless Arthur is now wildly romanticizing the past, Ken couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Possibly at some point he told me about these two men, and if so, he would have couched things in just this way, so that I would have advised him to go with Bill.

  January 19: “Why is Arthur never happy when he’s with me? Why do I make him crazy?”

  Arthur tells me that when he met Ken, he had only recently moved into his own apartment, after years of living with roommates. He had also recently gone back to college and then dropped out again. “So I felt like I was still getting my bearings,” he recalls. “I felt like his house would be good for a couple, and even so it felt a bit small. He even said, ‘We can find a bigger house to
rent and I can rent my house out.’ He was thinking how to work this out. I was like, OK, good—and suddenly it was ‘I can’t do this anymore, I have to stop dating you.’”

  No mention of this conversation in Ken’s journal. Was he trying not to think about it?

  “I can’t say it was devastating, that sounds so dramatic,” Arthur continues. “It was just so unsettling. I said, ‘Can’t we just continue on a bit? I’m close but I’m not quite there yet.’ He went back to seeing someone I knew very casually [Bill], who I think he’d been dating before. I couldn’t understand it other than he felt he needed to break the connection with me because I wasn’t ready to move as quickly as he was. He had just bought this house. It was a really cute little house.”

  Possibly I hear Arthur sniffle. I’m afraid if I speak my voice will crack.

  He was so surprised by Ken’s decision that he briefly resorted to stalking him: “Because I was so upset about this and couldn’t believe this was happening … I can laugh about [the stalking] now because it’s like a movie of the week. One day I drove over to 35th Street [where Ken lived]. I saw Ken’s car, so I was like following him. There was someone else in the car, and I could tell it was Bill. Then I realized they knew I was following them. They turned [a corner], and I thought, ‘I’ve got to stop doing this.’”

  Even in this story of questionable behavior, I see Arthur’s self-awareness in stark contrast to the picture of Bill that soon emerges in Ken’s journal—and from the bitter things Ken said to me about Bill later.

  Late in February, “a sticky white rain fell across Southern California,” reports the National Weather Service, which attributes the unusual phenomenon to desert dust blown by high winds into rainclouds. Characteristically, Ken’s diary makes no reference to this event. I picture him hosing the storm’s white, gritty residue from his driveway.

  As it turned out, Bill was Ken’s final boyfriend.

  Arthur: “That night that he said, ‘I’m positive, I knew I had to tell you this’—it was kind of one of those moments you get very thoughtful and real about life. And when I was reading your book, it really hit, because I thought—I got the feeling that here’s this person who wanted me to live with him and I couldn’t quite do it fast enough. And when I was reading about his [negative] attitude about taking medicine, I wished I could have been there… But it’s always what might have happened.”

  6

  ON MARCH 11, 1985, a dream: “Judge is talking to me about trust. He says to trust and extends his hand, when I reach for it he pulls it back, he then talks about trust again, extends his hand and says trust me, take my hand; I refuse to reach for his hand.”

  The entry continues:

  Very difficult to read Bill and what he wanted/wants. Sometimes he says he wishes I were more forceful but when I am he refuses to submit …

  Bill is selfish, inconsiderate, thoughtless, rude. His insecurity manifests itself as insensitivity …

  1) “Don’t take my Valium!”

  “I’m only taking one.”

  2) Turning off TV without asking (twice), turned off light.

  3) Sunday night I wanted reciprocal cuddling and he wouldn’t do it.

  4) He will not stop teasing me, will not stop saying I look “reptilian.”

  5) He is CHEAP.

  Ken records these scenes with a specificity rare in his journal. Maybe he hopes to convince himself that Bill really is that awful. Indeed, entries of this sort continue for several more months.

  My theory is that Bill enjoyed stealing Ken away from Arthur but, once he got him, didn’t want him anymore.

  Again I feel protective of Ken, angry with him, embarrassed for him. Embarrassed because of the resemblance to my own love life back then, starting with the creep I was seeing that same year (my boyfriend before G.)—the impossibility of getting more than the tiniest amounts of affection from him, and how that impossibility mesmerized me for months. (After we broke up I had my own dream about a judge, in this case explicitly my father, before whom I made an impassioned argument that the dog didn’t have to be left home all day alone.)

  On April 10 Ken writes, “Tonight he hung up on me.”

  April 25: “… the lack of sympathy when I tell him about something that’s bothering me. He either gets mad at me, criticizes me or makes fun of me …”

  In May, a list of Bill’s good and bad traits.

  In late June a fire erupted in a canyon next to Normal Heights and destroyed seventy-six homes. Ken doesn’t mention this, though I recall he had to evacuate. Did he take refuge with Bill?

  In August AIDS appeared on the covers of both Time and the magazine I worked for. “No one has ever recovered from the disease,” reads the latter, under a photo of actor Rock Hudson’s ravaged face. I, for one, was now officially terrified.

  In September, Bill’s “consistent refusal to hold me when I want to be held.”

  Later in September: “The feeling that I will never experience the closeness that I want.”

  It’s precisely this despair that tempts me to hold back with John: a damning certainty that he can’t give me what I want.

  The day after Christmas: “Bill is completely incapable of dealing with feelings … However, he doesn’t think it’s a problem.”

  G. was similarly uncomfortable with emotion. Not that he lacked good qualities, but for four years I was always trying to figure him out, doubting myself, hoping to stretch his brief moments of tenderness into something more.

  In late December Ken decided once and for all to stop smoking pot. In January he asks, “Why am I so drawn to this relationship where I constantly have excuses to be angry all the time? Answer: alcoholic behavior! When I collect enough anger points, then I get stoned. And when I am so angry, and then I smoke pot, it gets me really high. When I smoke it when I am not angry like this, I can’t get stoned enough.”

  My own penchant for squirreling away indignation, reserving it for imaginary arguments. Similarly, Ken refers (elsewhere in his journal) to “vignettes” in which “I am the ‘triumphant’ orator brutally crushing the ‘fool’ who didn’t do what I wanted him to do, regardless of the fact that my desires were not well articulated. I then stomp out the door in disgust …”

  In an undated entry from the spring of 1986, he writes, “What do I really want from life, the universe and everything?” It’s around this time that he finally breaks up with Bill.

  He also starts recording various symptoms—a sore throat, a rash, “continuous mental fog all afternoon,” “sore gums,” “fatigue: mild.”

  Another undated entry:

  How you feel about death:

  … locked in a white room with no windows and no door.

  But on June 23 he writes: “Getting some insight over the anger I still feel toward Bill. It’s OK to feel that anger … to experience its exact texture; but it’s not good to be paralyzed by it.”

  He has traveled all the way from “don’t feel” to “experience its exact texture.”

  7

  AS KEN GREW sicker, his personality became increasingly distorted by terror, rage, and self-hatred.

  His illness also warped my memories of him, overshadowing all that came before.

  The diary becomes increasingly difficult to read, and I have to tell myself over and over that it isn’t the whole story.

  The collective white space here represents several months in 2009 and 2010 of trying to absorb and understand his suffering.

  July 30, 1986:

  Just feeling so crummy about myself …

  Getting very depressed over my health problems.

  Getting very depressed over the red splotchy spots on my face.

  Front page news: the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s anti-sodomy law, five to four.

  Local news: after a gay man bit two San Diego policemen during an altercation, prosecutors sought to test his blood for HIV without his consent, in case the charge could be upgraded from simple battery to attempted murder.

/>   August 12: “My self-esteem is fragile—[Bill’s] constant criticism … left me feeling just like I did as a child when Paul would pick at me.”

  Every night Ken went to a meeting of either NA or AA.

  He grew increasingly unhappy at work.

  November 14: “… my need to never make a mistake and thus avoid criticism …”

  December 15: “Situation: car in shop for repairs … Why does it upset me so much?”

  I found his irritability over such things hard to take. It felt like we were never talking about the real problem, his health.

  His irritability also resembled my mother’s from when I was a kid.

  I imagine my own reaction to a terminal illness would be similar.

  February 14, 1987: “1) My fear of people. When someone looks at me, a stab of fear goes through my heart/stomach. Why? How to overcome? …”

  On April 1 Ronald Reagan advised abstinence and monogamy to combat AIDS, adding, “… don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?”

  That spring Ken lost his job, for which he blamed himself.

  Months passed. He accepted a position up in San Jose and found a buyer for his house in San Diego.

  Then, after much agonizing—I had several phone conversations with him about it—he changed his mind and took a job in San Diego instead.

  On some level he must have realized he wasn’t physically able to make such a big change. But he had to pay a penalty to the buyer of his house, and the episode left him feeling humiliated and defeated.

  My mother had very much wanted him to move to San Jose.

  He considered going on an antidepressant but decided against it, possibly influenced by the sternest faction of Narcotics Anonymous.