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

pronunciation to E., I recast a Michael Jackson song as “Ee lavah the way ye shakah yourrr thingah.”
    The closet as a kind of innocence.
    In Chaucer I was learning to distinguish the teller and his limitations from the tale itself.
    “The sturdy and flamboyant Wife of Bath finds herself at a transitional time of life,” I wrote.
    Though I wasn’t a Christian anymore, I still believed viscerally in things like demon possession and the notion that certain
     actions inevitably bring punishment.
    Piercing retro sci-fi organ of “There’s a Moon in the Sky.”
    I have little memory of those evenings with Cathy, as if our study breaks took place beyond the long arm of self-consciousness.
    My grandmother’s crazy quilt beneath the backgammon board.
    The click of dice and checkers, the crackle of the record player.
    Cathy and I were barely more than acquaintances then and couldn’t have known we were also knitting a lifelong friendship.
    We never danced, instead playing quietly like good children, occasionally bouncing a foot to the quirky tunes.
    Screechy guitar. Fred Schneider shouting, “HELLO?” We laughed. More screechy guitar. “HELLO?”
    Outside my dorm room window—moonlight, redwoods, the open dry fields descending to the ocean.
    In the cool morning air I crossed a ravine on the footbridge, shaded by tangled bay trees.
    The Iranian hostage crisis was in full swing, but I didn’t own a TV.
    In the clothing store in Monterey, the clerk asked if I was in a fraternity, I said no, we didn’t have fraternities at Santa
     Cruz, he seemed disappointed, I tried on a sport coat, he stood behind me grazing my butt with his fingers, explaining that
     that was exactly where the jacket should fall.
    Slashing guitar sets up pleasure in my throat, a sensation identified by Wayne Koestenbaum with regard to the opera fan, but
     I think it applies to all musical enjoyment—a silent, sympathetic hum in the vocal cords.
    “I’m afraid again tonight that there is so much keeping me from ever having a sexual relationship,” I wrote in my journal.
     “… I keep allowing myself to … laugh at a certain moment, turn my head at a certain moment, etc.—to defuse sexuality.”
    Cathy liked to imitate the way the girls sang “Jackie O,” the percussive
k
, the long
o
.
    I tried to think about women when I masturbated and often succeeded.
    “But the Wife of Bath has expressed earlier an almost despairing awareness of the intractability of her own spirit,which is unwilling to restrain its ‘immoral’ impulses.”
    Were my professors perhaps moved by how lost I was?
    The guy with washboard abs playing Ping-Pong; the hairy-chested guy riding his skateboard in and out of the quad; the poet-mathematician
     who lingered in my dorm room one night and I didn’t know why; the guy who wore shorts all winter, who invited me into his
     dorm room, shut the door, and lay there grinning at me through his sparse but attractive beard, and I didn’t know why.
    “Dance this mess around.”
    The paved path skirted a dry, sunny hillside.
    I’m trying to grasp the nature of dreaming and living despite myself.
    Wet Speedo of a professor hanging to dry on the casement window of his office.
    Periodically Cathy and I tried to parse this odd, ironic kind of music that was totally new to us—playful, nostalgic, assembled
     from junk and nonsense.
    We misidentified the opening “Peter Gunn” riff as James Bond, though this correctly located the sound in childhood memories
     of sexiness, swank, and intrigue, as seen on TV.
    We decided that the planet where people had no heads was San Jose, the endless suburb where Cathy, too, had grown up.
    The one openly gay student I knew seemed to dwell on the outside of everything—I always saw him sitting alone in the same
     spot, on bare concrete, his back against the rough concrete wall, rolling a cigarette.
    I lay in bed with a cold, my fourth that year.
    Dream: “A vague sex scene of great passion. I am