The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  He decided to try AZT, which had been approved by the FDA earlier that year.

  October 29: “I am well and healthy,” written eleven times.

  That weekend my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, in San Jose, but Ken was unable to come because he had the flu.

  Undated entry: A drawing of a drip with stick legs, its stick arms manipulating some dark spots in a circle. Then the same figure again, smiling, with thought balloon, “Zippity dooda zippity-ay …”

  Undated: “I am frustrated and angry about being sick for so long. Powerless.”

  November 10: “… 3) I am healthy and well,” written seven times.

  November 13: “I am so fucking lazy and so fucking cheap.”

  November 15:

  99.4 [evidently his temperature]

  …

  I feel very frustrated over this current episode and very frightened. [wild handwriting]

  … I am bored. By getting sick I create excitement and attention.

  Evidently he had been reading Louise Hay, whose books prescribe “positive ideas” to fight any disease.

  Three days later he went into the hospital with what turned out to be pneumocystis. Thus he was formally diagnosed with “full-blown” AIDS.

  He received this news in a brusque phone call from his internist.

  On Jeff’s advice, he telephoned my parents, and they headed down to San Diego to take care of him when he got home. This was heroic of them, though they didn’t tell me or my siblings that Ken had been hospitalized. I didn’t find out until I tried calling him, wondering why I hadn’t heard from him lately, and my mother answered his phone. “Mom?” I said.

  November 24: He plans to talk to his sponsor about having taken a single sleeping pill.

  November 28: “5) Must completely turn life around; fill it with love and health and wonderful people …”

  In a letter to me, he writes of stirring conversations with my parents about being gay and his addiction to pot. At the time, his confessional mood struck me as abject, and I wished he hadn’t shared with Mom and Dad the part about NA.

  I myself wasn’t yet out to my parents.

  Given their right-wing views, I had never expected a good reaction. Now I wondered if they had accepted Ken only because he was sick.

  We had Christmas that year in San Diego. It was unusually cold, with snow flurries Christmas Eve. That day he writes: “1) Why do I get depressed after being around Mom and Dad for a while? I think it is because of my expectations that something wonderful is going to happen, but it never does. Mom and Dad have their roles and they always play them.”

  At meals he swallowed vitamin after vitamin.

  His ice cube trays filled with a yellowish substance called AL-721, which at that moment held some sort of promise.

  The new books on his shelf: You Can Heal Your Life. Love, Medicine and Miracles.

  He recovered from the pneumonia and returned to work, but his health remained tenuous.

  As with his previous job, this one required a security clearance, so he remained closeted at the office; I assume he didn’t specify to coworkers which kind of pneumonia he’d suffered from, though they must have suspected.

  His face had taken on that particular AIDS gauntness, common before treatment improved.

  At some point the side effects of AZT got to be too much, and he had to stop taking it.

  February 2, 1988:

  Random Thoughts

  …

  4) Did I create my illness?

  The eerie kinship between such notions and “don’t feel.”

  More than once he lists “reasons why I hate myself.”

  More than once he writes that he’s a “slut” who deserved to get AIDS.

  I don’t remember him actually saying that to me, but I had many difficult conversations with him that year about various things that worried him, such as a lawsuit stemming from a car accident he had had while on vacation with Bill in Hawaii.

  That summer I visited him in San Diego. At some point he tried to make amends with me over childhood, and I brushed him aside, saying it wasn’t important.

  I tried to get him to go back into therapy, but he said he already saw too many doctors.

  He was also surrounded by the epidemic: as the Union reported later that year, “San Diego County has seen a higher rate of increase in AIDS cases in 1988 than any other metropolitan area …”

  Undated: “fear fear fear”

  Undated:

  anger

  being nagged from 6 angles about using antidepressants

  …

  memory problems

  Undated: “I need to forgive myself”

  Undated: “feeling suicidal—afraid to live and afraid to die”

  Undated:

  feeling really beaten down—I want to walk around with my head down and my shoulders hunched over

  …

  Insanity: getting an adrenalin rush by getting irrationally angry about something, usually something that happened years ago

  The helplessness I felt that year whenever I saw him or spoke to him—leaden and pervasive.

  Of my last visit with him, the week of Christmas 1988, I wrote in The Hurry-Up Song:

  On the way home [from Balboa Park], he told me he had begun to forget things more and more. He couldn’t balance his checkbook. He fell asleep at work all the time. Or he went blank and couldn’t remember technical things he’d known for years.

  I didn’t understand just how serious this was. The old highway curved between lush embankments. I watched the oleanders swaying along the shoulder.

  My turning away, and my guilt at turning away.

  8

  IN JANUARY KEN was hospitalized again, following a car accident. The dementia had reached a point where he was too disoriented to drive, and he hit a palm tree. At Jeff’s urging, my parents went down again to take care of him.

  I didn’t manage to visit him again before he died.

  When I e-mailed Jeff, not having spoken to him for twenty years, he revealed for the first time his anger at me over my absence during Ken’s final days: “I felt you needed to be by his bedside,” Jeff wrote. “He needed you. He didn’t know how to reach out to you and neither did I.”

  After Ken’s death, my failure to reach San Diego had served as the focal point for all my regrets, and Jeff’s e-mail reactivated both my guilt and the accompanying defensiveness.

  Twenty years ago I had sensed a certain coolness emanating from Jeff and had wondered why, but I had never had the courage to ask him about it.

  I call Jeff from the weekend house that John and I now share, so I’ll have John there in case the conversation doesn’t go well.

  Surrounded by knotty pine, I reconstruct what happened in February 1989. It’s in The Hurry-Up Song, but Jeff must not have read it. He’s startled to learn that my mother actually discouraged us from visiting Ken. She said we would only tire him out and delay his recovery. My sister Carol, who is the oldest, overrode her objections and went to San Diego anyway. When Carol got there she called to say the situation was very bad and I had better get on a plane too. She gave the phone to Ken and he managed to croak out, “Come soon.” Indeed it was the only coherent thing he said to me that day, so I booked a flight immediately. But when I spoke to my mother again, I let slip that the fare would be $900, which in my parsimonious family virtually shouted the gravity of the situation and thus threw her into a panic. Paul had also been there that week, and my mother said that if I came too, “Ken might think he was dying.” I didn’t quite put it together that she herself didn’t want to think he was dying, but I did see that there was no reasoning with her. “Mom—he said, ‘Come soon,’” I tried, but she declared he didn’t know what he was saying. Indeed she begged me not to come, and because she was Ken’s main caregiver and now seemed on the verge of collapse—I could hear her panting into the receiver—I decided I had to respect her wishes, and I canceled my trip.

&
nbsp; At this point in the story I sigh, and Jeff says something like, “Oh God.” Evidently my mother didn’t tell him I had tried to come. “I guess she was just trying to control the situation any way she could,” I offer, trying to be philosophical. But Jeff and I are both crying. A couple of weeks after my attempted visit, my parents drove back up to San Jose to attend to their affairs, leaving Ken alone with the home-care workers. Jeff tells me he was astonished that one of them didn’t stay behind in San Diego. Even then my mother told me not to come—there was nothing I could do, he wouldn’t even know I was there. I myself was scared of what I’d find in San Diego if I did go. Jeff had a full-time job but tried to look in on him at least once a day. As Ken began quickly to decline, Jeff pleaded with my parents to fly down immediately, but they said it would take them a few days to get there. By this point everyone was acting on instinct, and my parents’ instinct was denial. On morphine now, Ken was having trouble breathing. I did then persuade my mother that I should go ahead and fly out to San Diego, in the hope that something could be done for him, but he died before I arrived.

  Is it merely coincidence that I also failed to reach my mother before she died?

  As Jeff and I continue talking, my helplessness and despair seem as present as they were in February 1989. Jeff seems equally plunged into the past.

  I take some comfort in the sound of John out in the kitchen, making a soup.

  I had never actually spoken to Jeff before Ken died, so I’m surprised to learn just how much he did for my brother, such as setting up home care and visits from a social worker, for which I’m grateful.

  I try to move the conversation to Jeff’s other memories of Ken—how they met, what kinds of things they liked to do together, how he would describe Ken’s personality.

  I ask him to tell me again about the Tippi incident, which he once shared with me during a visit to New York, and he tries, but neither of us has much heart to speak of happier times.

  This is what the story of Ken’s death has always done to me.

  Though Jeff says he understands now my absence during those last fateful weeks, still I feel culpable. I may always feel so. Certainly I’ll always wish Ken hadn’t died alone.

  9

  ALL THOSE YEARS, Jeff’s unspoken disapproval had contributed to my perception that Ken himself had been angry with me.

  To my surprise, I appear only once in his diary:

  Resentments today

  Cliff broke toy car (1961?) where am I at fault?

  Reliving the past …

  It’s possible he simply didn’t record the times I let him down, but the journal otherwise contains lists and lists of resentments.

  My fear of finding more to regret: another reason I hadn’t wanted to read the diary. But now I feel almost blank—as if I’ve been deprived of some final argument with him.

  And then there’s my own disappointment in Ken, such as the childish wish that my big brother could always have been brave and full of love as he faced down death.

  I had also worried that his diary would show me more of what I didn’t like about him. It has, but it has also given me much more to admire.

  In those notes to himself I see a man simply trying to understand his own life and, despite his mistakes, undergoing profound change. Later, as the virus took hold, I see him trying to face in himself whatever he could, against the onslaught.

  Not far into assembling this essay, I began to perceive Ken’s story simply rolling out on the page, not only in his own words but of its own accord, governed by the neutral laws of plot and characterization rather than by the vagaries of my own mind—which for twenty-one years had been attempting to control and contain what I saw as an irredeemably tragic narrative.

  All that time I had hoped to limit the horror of what happened to him and to preserve the only thing I felt I had left: my own, albeit partial, view of him.

  But Ken’s own account has relieved me of that, as have my conversations with Arthur, Jeff, and Jim.

  From this standpoint, AIDS becomes simply one aspect of his life.

  I never thought I’d say that.

  I remind myself that I may also circle back to my mother someday, and see her life differently too.

  A future coin in the glass of water beside my pillow.

  One more story from Arthur: He and Ken didn’t get back together, but Arthur recalls a time the two of them went to the San Diego County Fair. This must have been about a year and a half before Ken died. “We [each] rode on an elephant,” Arthur tells me. “So we got these little stickers or a pin that said, ‘I rode on an elephant.’ It was maybe a baby elephant—probably about a good five or almost six feet high. It wasn’t that big an elephant. But we were having fun. There were times he would just say, ‘I have this fantasy of doing this.’ So we would go and do something in particular.”

  “A Memoir of Losing My Brother” is the subtitle of The Hurry-Up Song.

  Ken on a baby elephant—jostled awkwardly, laughing, holding on—

  In such particularities, I find my brother again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For advice and encouragement from the start of this project, I’m indebted to Lisa Cohen, Gabrielle Glancy, Wayne Koestenbaum, Catherine Kudlick, John Kureck, Robert Marshall, Maria Massie, Michelle Memran, and Ralph Sassone.

  Crucial guidance and assistance were also provided by Mark Krotov, Peter Mayer, Liese Mayer, Michael Goldsmith, and Bernie Schleifer at The Overlook Press, and by Kevin Bentley, Carol Chase Conte, Helen Chase, Chantal Clarke, Adly Elewa, Noelle Hannon, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Westbeth Artists Community, and Lauren Wein.

  I’m grateful to Peter Terzian for commissioning “Am I Getting Warmer?” for his anthology Heavy Rotation, Liz Brown for soliciting “The Condition of Leftover Baggage” for LIT, Raphael Kadushin for choosing “Egypt, in One Sense” for Big Trips, and Wesley Gibson and Charles Flowers for publishing “The Tooth Fairy” in Bloom.

  For additional support and advice, thanks to Jo Ann Beard, Paul Chase, Bernard Cooper, David Gates, Erin Hayes, Brian Kiteley, Mike and Jean Kudlick, Douglas Martin, David Rakoff, Kit and Joe Reed, Richard Rodriguez, Rakesh Satyal, Matthew Sharpe, Bruce Shenitz, Diane Simmons, Frederic Tuten, Deb Olin Unferth, Elizabeth Willis, Kent Wolf, and Michael Woods.

  Finally, I owe special gratitude to Arthur Henderson, James Stoddart, and Jeffrey Wynne for agreeing to be interviewed about my brother Ken.

  Clifford Chase is the author of Winkie, a novel, and The Hurry-Up Song, a memoir. He edited the anthology Queer 13: Lesbian & Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade, and his writing has appeared in publications ranging from Newsday to Yale Review to McSweeney’s. He lives in New York City.

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  AUTHOR PHOTO © KOITZ

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