Read Online The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) by Clifford Chase - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Clifford Chase
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almost can’t say it … The man sees a beautiful woman get out
of the bathtub. This is hurting me to talk about it. He embraces her, but when he looks in the mirror, he sees she is old,
wrinkled, scabby. There. I’m through it … And I’m paranoid again; my heart is beating … I really feel like I’m going crazy.
Or I see how people go crazy … God, it is awful to see these things in yourself … The world seems scabby, wrinkled. I’m afraid
I’ll start hallucinating. I keep telling myself that a movie can’t hurt me. Actors, sets, film only …”
I woke my mother and we sat up talking at the dining room table; I told her how I felt pressured to be with Liz; my mother
looked uneasy.
Still, she was a comfort to me that night.
A few days later I returned to Santa Cruz, where I found a share in a house not far from Mike’s.
“I am feeling almost normal again but I’m still a little scared; and all the pressures that led up to that night are still
there.”
A dream in which my parents are unkind to me: “I just remembered the end … I ran into my room. Ken was there, and he was extremely
understanding; his face was like a kindly Buddha or something. Of course that scares me … Yet I want to think about that face
of Ken’s … a refuge from all the accusation, irritation, lack of compassion, and frustration. I’m not sure what Ken symbolized.”
How at any given moment you never quite know what life you’re in the midst of hatching.
Whenever I moved anywhere, I always set up my stereo first.
There might have been a confrontation with Liz, or maybe I simply hoped not to run into her in town.
The ones Kate doesn’t want, the ones who dance her around.
I would someday claim Fred’s faggy voice as my own: record album as prophecy.
In listening again now, I pay homage to the sacred blind task of destroying and remaking myself.
The odd miracle of the needle in the groove.
The knitting quality of any music with a beat.
The knitting quality of the crackle of vinyl.
I’ve always loved songs that go through phases, such as when the guitar riff changes in “Rock Lobster” and an insect begins
to croak.
I was becoming in some ways exactly what I wanted to be, and in other ways, exactly what I didn’t want to be.
My room was at the front of the house, and instead of coming through the front door, Mike simply climbed in my window.
I got a temporary job working graveyard shift for Intel, testing chips.
Cathy wrote suggesting I move to New York, where she was working for the Strand bookstore.
Exhausted from my shift, I walked home along the water, under the early morning clouds.
Cindy singing “rock lobster” again and again, “operatically”—child imitating a diva, or mouse singing in an old cartoon.
The year I didn’t lose my virginity; the year I learned to read—that is, ironically; the year I began writing fiction; the
year I traded Joni Mitchell for the B-52’s; the year I met Cathy, befriended Chris and E., and grew close to Mike; the year
I nearly flunked; the year I lost my mind.
“But the future pops in my mind again,” I wrote. “What do I want? I don’t seem to know in the least.”
1
O UR FIRST NIGHT together, after a party in the East Village, E. and I undressed and simply lay side by side for a while, out there on the
hide-a-bed in the living room.
The sound of the pita joint below, pots and pans banging.
“Touching is permitted,” she said at last, with just the right amount of irony.
And so a key was turned.
“In a moment, our hands touched,” I wrote the next day (October 30, 1981), “—at first, perhaps only a gesture before sleep,
a gesture of great affection, as if we might have just gone to sleep holding hands.”
Because of my inexperience and my indecision, I was too afraid to fuck.
The creaky brown sofa bed where we kissed, the orangey dark of the streetlight, and E.’s sighs.
My roommate Owen asleep behind the heavy
of the bathtub. This is hurting me to talk about it. He embraces her, but when he looks in the mirror, he sees she is old,
wrinkled, scabby. There. I’m through it … And I’m paranoid again; my heart is beating … I really feel like I’m going crazy.
Or I see how people go crazy … God, it is awful to see these things in yourself … The world seems scabby, wrinkled. I’m afraid
I’ll start hallucinating. I keep telling myself that a movie can’t hurt me. Actors, sets, film only …”
I woke my mother and we sat up talking at the dining room table; I told her how I felt pressured to be with Liz; my mother
looked uneasy.
Still, she was a comfort to me that night.
A few days later I returned to Santa Cruz, where I found a share in a house not far from Mike’s.
“I am feeling almost normal again but I’m still a little scared; and all the pressures that led up to that night are still
there.”
A dream in which my parents are unkind to me: “I just remembered the end … I ran into my room. Ken was there, and he was extremely
understanding; his face was like a kindly Buddha or something. Of course that scares me … Yet I want to think about that face
of Ken’s … a refuge from all the accusation, irritation, lack of compassion, and frustration. I’m not sure what Ken symbolized.”
How at any given moment you never quite know what life you’re in the midst of hatching.
Whenever I moved anywhere, I always set up my stereo first.
There might have been a confrontation with Liz, or maybe I simply hoped not to run into her in town.
The ones Kate doesn’t want, the ones who dance her around.
I would someday claim Fred’s faggy voice as my own: record album as prophecy.
In listening again now, I pay homage to the sacred blind task of destroying and remaking myself.
The odd miracle of the needle in the groove.
The knitting quality of any music with a beat.
The knitting quality of the crackle of vinyl.
I’ve always loved songs that go through phases, such as when the guitar riff changes in “Rock Lobster” and an insect begins
to croak.
I was becoming in some ways exactly what I wanted to be, and in other ways, exactly what I didn’t want to be.
My room was at the front of the house, and instead of coming through the front door, Mike simply climbed in my window.
I got a temporary job working graveyard shift for Intel, testing chips.
Cathy wrote suggesting I move to New York, where she was working for the Strand bookstore.
Exhausted from my shift, I walked home along the water, under the early morning clouds.
Cindy singing “rock lobster” again and again, “operatically”—child imitating a diva, or mouse singing in an old cartoon.
The year I didn’t lose my virginity; the year I learned to read—that is, ironically; the year I began writing fiction; the
year I traded Joni Mitchell for the B-52’s; the year I met Cathy, befriended Chris and E., and grew close to Mike; the year
I nearly flunked; the year I lost my mind.
“But the future pops in my mind again,” I wrote. “What do I want? I don’t seem to know in the least.”
1
O UR FIRST NIGHT together, after a party in the East Village, E. and I undressed and simply lay side by side for a while, out there on the
hide-a-bed in the living room.
The sound of the pita joint below, pots and pans banging.
“Touching is permitted,” she said at last, with just the right amount of irony.
And so a key was turned.
“In a moment, our hands touched,” I wrote the next day (October 30, 1981), “—at first, perhaps only a gesture before sleep,
a gesture of great affection, as if we might have just gone to sleep holding hands.”
Because of my inexperience and my indecision, I was too afraid to fuck.
The creaky brown sofa bed where we kissed, the orangey dark of the streetlight, and E.’s sighs.
My roommate Owen asleep behind the heavy
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