The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) by Clifford Chase Read Free Book Online Page A

courtyard and the dining hall, which also overlooked the ocean; by the steps was a white stucco
     wall covered in bougainvillea, which bloomed year-round.
    As the brand-new record strummed its cockeyed beat, Istared at the five of them on the cover: angular cut-outs on a flat, horizonless yellow—three boys, two girls—defiant in their
     thrift-shop clothes and poofy wigs.
    Journal entry: “Legitimate (I think) fears and desires concerning my sexuality are taking the form of guilt.”
    Remembering that time requires extra kindness toward myself.
    I spooned fuchsia-colored yogurt from the plastic tub.
    Under a vaulted timber ceiling, I pulled the heavy blue
Canterbury Tales
from the shelf marked with the course number.
    For now, let the white space between these sentences stand for what couldn’t be seen then; or what can’t be remembered now;
     or my open fate; or the open, bare-bones arrangement of a B-52’s song (drum kit, guitar, cheesy keyboard, toy piano)—my soundtrack
     that winter and spring.
    “The person who is writing this journal is perhaps on his way out,” I wrote.
    I walked toward some dark trees in the dry yellow light under a pale turquoise cloudless sky.
    Particular tension of standing with my tray on the edge of the dining hall, deciding whom to sit with.
    My friends: 1. Every night at about nine, Cathy came up to my room with the backgammon board and I pulled our favorite record
     from its bright yellow jacket. 2. Like me, Chris had sandy blond hair, a light brown beard, and glasses, andhe covered his mouth and looked sideways when he laughed, as if, also like me, he dwelt perpetually in high school study hall.
     3. E. (a girl)—peripheral then; central later—was “intensely neurotic,” I wrote to a friend. 4. I’ve known Mike since I was
     twelve, so describing him is like describing the air.
    “And also, now that Ken is gay,” my journal continues, “I have lost one more person to identify with. I used to imitate him
     quite a bit, I think. But now that is impossible, unless I want to be gay.”
    Though I wrote “now that”—as if the event were recent—Ken had come out to me almost a year earlier.
    The beeping at the start of “Planet Claire”: signal from some distant part of myself.
    Cathy’s short, blond hair, thick glasses and slightly crossed brown eyes; her husky-fluty Peppermint Patty laughter.
    I sat alone in the sunshine on last year’s tall dry grass, below which new grass had sprouted with the rain and was already
     a few inches tall.
    I made a pen and ink drawing of a cluster of trees.
    Mike and I ran side by side down the rocky path—pleasure of my feet hitting the earth, in rhythm with his.
    The campus was spread across hills and ravines of redwoods, bay trees, the occasional maple, live oaks, ferns, and vast stretches
     of tall waving grass—emerald in winter, golden the rest of the year.
    In the professor’s office I recited the opening of
The Canterbury Tales
, in Middle English, enjoying the odd-sounding yet familiar words on my tongue and in my throat.
    We received narrative evaluations instead of grades (a grand 1960s experiment, later abandoned), and stringy-haired guys sold
     pot out of gigantic black garbage bags in their dorm rooms.
    I was attending the stoner school of all time and I didn’t even like pot.
    When Chris encountered any sort of falseness or stupidity, he said “Ew” in a quick, guttural way that reminded me I had found
     a fellow traveler in disgust.
    The year before, I had decided the people in the campus Christian group I belonged to were creeps, and I left the group.
    I began saying “Ew” exactly as Chris did, and soon Cathy did, too.
    I was in the process of forming myself, as if from nothing, from what was available—my classes, my records, my second-hand
     clothes, my new friends and our running jokes, my letters to and from old friends—as if from popsicle sticks, tin foil, and
     yarn.
    To explain Middle English