The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  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.

  2

  IN 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.”

  3

  DURING THE FLIGHT back to New York I observed beyond the wing a curious rainbow that formed a complete circle.

  Wintry air smelling of rubber leaked into the jetway as I exited the plane.

  The A train arrived covered in half-scrubbed-off bubble-letters.

  Owen with his bushy black eyebrows threw aside the heavy curtain in the doorway to his room, like Dracula and his cape. “Hey.”

  He ate as usual with the TV on, accompanied by the pratfall music of The Brady Bunch.

  Yet another set of rooms I wanted to escape; I called E. and went to her place.

  Her eyes closed in laughter.

  Small pert mouth, turned-up nose, brown eyes alight with amusement.

  Her capacity for multiple orgasms.

  Afterwards, she half moaned and half laughed, throatily, earthily.

  “Oh, man,” she said, playfully imitating a soul singer, but also meaning it.

  I enjoyed the slightly sore feeling in my cock.

  Her fixations on certain comic phrases, which matched precisely my own sense of humor.

  Something dripped on me in the hallway of my building. “I felt wetness,” I said to E. “Then, I smelled something.” Pleasure of her raucous laughter. Pleasure of her repeating it over and over, for weeks.

  “When she takes my cock in her hand,” I wrote, “it makes me feel as if my soul fills all the crevices of my body.”

  I showed her how deep my navel is. “Too real!” she squawked.

  Her black pumps, ruffled white socks, short flared black skirt.

  Oddly sensual smell of the diaphragm cream, E. squatting on the floor to insert, thrill of knowing I’d soon follow—

  Nostalgia, now, for that feeling.

  The ways we meshed and the ways we did not, and how that combination enthralled me.

  Her bubble of private jokes.

  Her weird inability to listen, or was it my weird inability to speak my mind.

  In my apartment I lay on my tiny bed with yet another cold.

  I sat at my desk, typing on my Smith Corona.

  I had made the desk from a door I found on the street, and it still smelled of urine whenever I cleaned it.

  I asked my journal if I had any right to think of myself as a writer.

  White roach powder all along the baseboards of the apartment—completely ineffective.

  The layers and layers of shiny paint on the woodwork.

  Owen’s odd Egyptian-statue body, pale skin, patches of black hair at the navel and the middle of his chest, and deep-set almost black eyes behind dark horn-rims.

  Marilyn Monroe appeared on his TV in a low-cut blouse as he ate; he gasped; I wondered if his sexuality was in any way like mine.

  Settled into the orange shag I decoded gay-themed lyrics such as Chrissie Hynde’s mournful reference to “things you never outgrow.”

  I walked the deserted streets of Soho past darkened ornate buildings.

  In the darkness in my room, roach-legs lightly skittering across the walls.

  E. declared that in college she had once “hallucinated wolves” in the darkness outside her third-floor window.

  My fear of being sucked down into my own craziness by such tales.

  Sometimes in the middle of a conversation she would start making bird noises.

  Against my advice, she had taken a room in an apartment in Midtown with a French jazz musician in his forties. He leered at her and never laundered his towels.

  We went to see Night of the Iguana. Afterwards she exclaimed, “Come on, have a nice rum
coco!”, in perfect imitation of Ava Gardner.

  She also aped Gardner struggling with a screen door, then charging through, “in distress.”

  I rolled on her bed laughing. She did it again. I laughed and laughed.

  Though our humor was in some ways evasive, it was also a genuine thing we had together.

  The particular feeling of that dark room of hers in the East 60s, in winter.

  A story E. told me: A mutual acquaintance from college said to her, regarding our romance, “But Cliff is gay.” “Not with me, he isn’t,” she replied.

  After five colds in less than two months, I was diagnosed with mononucleosis.

  Already thin, I grew even thinner, which E. said was “sexy.”

  I lay day after day staring at the striped African cloth above my bed, trying to recover.

  The swollen sore lumps under my jawline.

  Regarding what it was like to hold my tall ex-boyfriend in my arms: “It was just too much,” I confided in my journal, “—his size, his firmness, the hair on his face and body … a feeling of lushness… What a fine line I walk then as long as I stay with [E.]. And perhaps I feel I want to walk such a fine line all my life.”

  Constant hiss of the flesh-colored “DeVilbiss” humidifier, which E. and I called the Devil Bliss.

  With velvet chords Steely Dan warned, “Soon you’ll throw down your disguise.”

  Gradually the dull but stabbing pain in my right side—my spleen—began to pass.

  “This morning when I woke up,” I wrote, “I was joking with E. and I said, ‘Where am I? When did I leave Anchorage?’”

  4

  TANGLED UP IN knots and trying to love.

  E. grew dissatisfied with New York and moved back to California that spring. I stayed behind to attend graduate school, visiting her over the next year and a half in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Then she moved to Boston to attend library school, and we began seeing each other regularly again. We broke up again. We considered getting back together again. It was now 1984.

  Regarding my possibly being gay: “Her voice broke when she spoke of it—she said she would feel like she had ‘failed’ … she didn’t know if her attachment to gay men was self-undermining.”

  Possibly she experienced the obscure satisfaction of winning me over, again and again.

  I dreamed I got a job as a mathematician—the field that (in real life) Ken had chosen and I had rejected.

  I often went out intending to go to a gay bar but ended up just walking the cold streets of the Village.

  The homeless woman on Bleecker, naked from the waist up, holding one breast in each hand and loudly singing, “Sweet dreams are made of this.”

  Ronald Reagan had famously blamed homelessness on the homeless, but I wasn’t thinking in political terms just then.

  Of my dilemma, the secretary at work said, “Cliffy just doesn’t know where to put it.”

  In my playwriting workshop, the actors read my scene in which we hear the protagonist’s thoughts, but there’s no one on stage.

  The instructor stopped the reading. “Wait a minute. Am I misreading this? The stage is empty?” “Yes,” I said. The class laughed. I blushed.

  Afterwards a tall dark-haired guy in the class named Gerson consoled me.

  Dream: “… Then, for the sort of vague reason that means it’s time for the show to end, they go and look under the monster’s rock (from where he grabbed victims) and he wasn’t there.”

  I wondered in my journal if breaking up with E. had been “like breaking up with myself.”

  I closed my eyes as Prince proposed harpsichord-like synthesizer as the sound of doves crying.

  I told my friend Mike, “I have the sensation of a hold button for her blinking in my head.”

  I wrote, “Did I push her away for any good reason?”

  At the time, each turn in my labyrinth seemed significant.

  Light-filled rain, finches chirping, bundles of daffodils at the corner market.

  “Intense eye contact” with a blond man on the subway, aborted by the man running into a friend.

  Up at school I averted my eyes from my teacher, Grace Paley, “not from dislike or pride, but from fear.”

  Grace had correctly identified my new short story about Mike as “an unconsummated love story.”

  I went to playwriting class and there was no one there, and no sign that class had been canceled.

  The nonprofit organization I worked for went under.

  A “cylindrical pain” in my throat.

  My friend Gabby remarked that I never got angry.

  Thoughts on my play: “[The protagonist] appears, but cannot speak; he is spoken to as if present, but is not; only parts of his body can be seen; he speaks in sync to recorded voice-over (in the ‘love scene’); he floats suspended over those scenes he doesn’t participate in.”

  I cleaned out my desk at work.

  Grace smiled at me at a party at school, and I wondered if she knew what a mess I was.

  I went to her apartment for a conference, and when she said, “Do you want an egg? I’ll make you an egg,” I mainly wondered when the other shoe would drop.

  I still dream about Grace from time to time, which seems to be the same as dreaming about my mother.

  More abortive cruising on the streets of the Village.

  A dream that my father died but no one wanted me to cry, because I’d never liked him.

  Description of a boss at a temp job: “She smiles as she asks you to please wipe her ass for her. Then she asks you to please double check and make sure it’s clean.”

  Of a short story of mine, a magazine editor wrote: “We don’t understand it.”

  I dreamed that I watched my college friend Chris and his father dance the rumba.

  “Only moments,” I wrote, “never a sense of whole days lived.”

  5

  IN JULY I went to see E. in Boston: “[We] fucked four or five times in two days, and I didn’t come once. At one point she thought I had, and she burst into tears. I felt like everything is lost as soon as it’s found.”

  Her fits of panic, raucous laughter, difficult tales of childhood, professions of love.

  As she tried to draw my attention to a squirrel flicking its tail in the park, I thought, “How am I going to get through the weekend?”

  She often told of meeting crazy people who told her horrific stories.

  Extracting love from me must have been like pulling teeth, and I, too, was trying to extract it from myself.

  How special it was when my mother’s sun shined on me.

  “I opened the living room window and this rush of cool, scented air greeted me,” I wrote. “The birds are singing. I can hear the stereo downstairs. There’s a laziness to the street sounds; it’s early: a few voices, an occasional car, squeaking brakes; faint roar of traffic in the distance.”

  Gerson, from playwriting class, took off his glasses as we talked over lunch, and I hoped this meant he was attracted to me.

  I dreamed my father was a heroin addict.

  E. visited me in New York. Insert difficult scenes here.

  Fucking her—that indescribable hand-in-glove feeling, that is, when I wasn’t dreading impotence.

  She called to say she wanted to quit library school and move back to New York.

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  I went to the beach, ostensibly to think but actually to look at men.

  My therapist at the time was no help whatsoever, yet I continued seeing him twice a week.

  In a short story I referred to him as “Bela Lugosi.”

  I began to hate E.’s perfume.

  My friend Gabby said I was “warm on three sides, ice on one.”

  I dreamed that a cute guy from school said, “I brought a present for you,” and gave me a hotdog from his freezer.

  On the phone with E. I pointed out that she hated New York.

  I added that I didn’t know how I felt about her, w
hich predictably made her angry.

  I complained in my journal about constantly having to “nursemaid” her, about her many tales of stomach upsets on the bus, nerves on the subway, at work …

  “I just glanced at the floor: a roach going by a dustball.”

  Michael Stipe rasped-crooned, “What is dreaming?”

  Morrissey crooned-shrieked “Ah!” as if goosed.

  I walked all over the Village again and the next morning my right heel really hurt.

  I removed my sock to reveal a red spot the size of a quarter, on the left side near the instep.

  I broke a molar.

  From a short story I was writing: “While the Jamaican assistant vacuumed [his mouth], the dentist chipped and drilled away at his [broken] tooth. It didn’t seem like much, but at home a look in the mirror, open wide—half a molar gone. ‘Frightening,’ he said out loud. ‘Jesus.’ He called his parents in California. ‘It’s a very common bad dream, universal in fact,’ he said, ‘—loosing your teeth, that is.’ But then, they don’t have any teeth at all, so what am I doing complaining to them? The temporary filling a bad medicine taste in the mouth for days and days.”

  The root canal I had had the year before was unsuccessful and I would need oral surgery.

  I received my first acceptance of a short story, by a small journal.

  I found $200 hidden in my thesaurus.

  “I told [E.] that her dramatic life was too much for me sometimes … She said, crying, that she’s been in love with me for three years … I don’t know how much I believe that.”

  I got a temporary job as a secretary at the magazine where I would work for the next twenty-four years.

  A handsome man in the building made eyes at me.

  D train barreling down the tunnel from 34th to 4th, bouncing and clacking, lights a-flicker.

  Regarding my writing: “All my stories scare me. I write one paragraph and put it away. Every one of them is about homosexuality, except one, which is about E. and therefore probably about homosexuality.”

  My oral surgeon was also named Cliff.

  “He put the gas on me, oxygen at first, which made me laugh a little, then laughing gas, which made me feel as though I couldn’t breathe and yet I was powerless, adrenaline pumping and my heart pounding, and I was afraid I wouldn’t calm down for the operation, nor could I move; then the injection and blacking out, sounds echoing—literally reverberating, and me saying to myself a prayer I feared I’d be unable to finish, and I feared being unable to think again, so I told myself a joke, ‘I’m … falling … asleep … and … I … will … wake … up … someday … and … be … a … better … person … for … it.’ From the sludgy blackness I heard the doctor calling, ‘Cliff … Cliff … Cliff … Cliff? Howyadoin’?’”