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

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
    D URING 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