The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (16 page)

M
Y BROTHER
’
S
M
ERCURY
Zephyr handled so poorly that whenever he rounded a tight corner he used to say, “Here comes the Queen Mary.”

Once he and his good friend Jeff were having lunch outdoors and a sparrow began aggressively fluttering around Ken’s head,
so from then on Jeff started calling him Tippi.

Jeff recalls that the two of them also laughed that day in San Diego about the image of Tippi Hedren out in a rowboat on Bodega
Bay, in heels and a full-length mink.

Ken died of AIDS in 1989. A few years later I published a book about it, titled
The Hurry-Up Song
.

I say “about
it
” instead of about “about
him
” because the book is a portrait of the author losing his brother, rather than a portrait of the brother himself. Whatever
the reader sees of Ken is exclusively from my point of view.

Almost as if reflected in my glasses.

I didn’t interview any of his friends for the book, and
though I knew my mother had kept his journal, I didn’t ask to read it.

I felt I couldn’t take into account the grief of his friends in addition to my own, nor could I absorb any more of his suffering
than I had already witnessed.

Thus not only was the published portrait of Ken lacking, but my own idea of him remained incomplete, and perhaps by extension,
so was my grief.

I was also afraid of finding out he was angry with me when he died, which wasn’t a wild guess, since he was very angry toward
the end.

In my Waspy way I thought it was better not to know.

The avoidance accounts for much of the twelve-year gap in this narrative, between E. and John.

But now, more than twenty years after Ken’s death, I find myself willing to read his diary and to ask for the recollections
of his friends.

That willingness is somehow related to having cared for my parents, and lost them. Hence for me Ken’s diary takes place now
as much as in the 1980s.

His journal entries are fragmentary, as are memories, but I hope this portrait will be fuller than the earlier attempt.

“D
REAM
,”
HE WRITES
, in February 1984: “Surrealistic acid-like feeling of stumbling through my bedroom, trying to get somewhere and not being
able to.” He offers no interpretation.

He hadn’t yet tested positive, but my first thought is that the dream foreshadows his futile struggle with HIV.

In fact, it simply expresses frustration with his love life at that moment.

When I refer to Ken’s journal, I actually mean a series of small black vinyl notebooks running from early 1984 to mid-1987,
continuing with a sheaf of larger, unlined pages in which dates quickly disappear altogether.

His handwriting: a slightly more extravagant version of my own.

He records nothing in the way of physical setting, music he liked, or current events, though regarding the news, I recall
that he read the paper every day.

As for weather, there was little for him to report, since the climate in San Diego is so mild. Palms and yuccas punctuate
the streets. Year-round, the air smells of flowers.

My perusal of the
San Diego Union
during the eighties reveals a parade of homophobia, not only in the news itself (an anti-gay protestor carrying a sign that
reads “Got AIDS
Yet?”), but in how gays and lesbians are covered (phrases like “admitted homosexual” and “the militant homosexual community”).

Ken’s likely reaction: sarcasm. “Chahhh-ming,” he used to say, like Katharine Hepburn opening a lovely gift.

His sense of humor is another thing excluded from his notebooks.

In 1984 he had recently begun psychotherapy (both individual and group), which I assume was his reason for starting the diary.

He met Jeff in the group, whose members were all gay men. Jeff says they were encouraged to see each other outside of therapy
and even to have sex if they liked. (I don’t ask if he and Ken did.)

Ken was a mathematician and computer analyst, and much of the journal is comprised of numbered lists of feelings, such as
this entry from that April:

I want to reach back and protect him from the other members of his group, from his tears and his butterflies.

He was always worried about money (especially after he got sick), so that same month he decided to quit individual therapy
and continue only with group, presumably because it was cheaper and despite continued complaints in his journal such as “They
won’t
listen
to me.”

My own therapist during the eighties wouldn’t allow me to call him by his first name, and we had virtually no rapport—which,
as I recall, felt weirdly safe.

My own trying to get somewhere and not being able to. My own feeling that no one would listen to me.

This line, also from April 1984, could have been written by me: “When I have ‘gut’ (affective) stuff going on inside I don’t
have good access to it (or none at all!), so I have trouble expressing myself.”

A “Dear Abby” column Ken taped to the page: “DEAR CONFUSED: You have been using sex to fill an unmet emotional need that’s
been gnawing at you since you were very young.”

Like me Ken had a lot of bad childhood memories. One Wednesday when he was little, our older brother Paul and his friend Billy
told Ken that it was Saturday, not Wednesday, and as he tried to object, they sang “Saturday! Saturday! Saturday!” over and
over until he started to scream.

In turn Ken sometimes tortured me—the “invisible” episode and countless socks on the arm—but he and I also had a lot in common
and often played together—I owe my sense of humor to him—so my memories of him are profoundly mixed.

On the same page as “Dear Abby,” Ken considers asking out a guy named Art.

“Need for an emotionally fulfilling relationship,” he writes on April 21. “Anger and hurt regarding past sexual experiences
… The emotional fulfillment was lacking and I felt very cheated since I was looking for something that was not part of the
implicit social contract.”

I remember Ken once bragging that he took home only the “prettiest” guys at the bar, but evidently he wanted something different
now.

In 1984 I was still vacillating over E.

Front-page news, April 24: discovery of the AIDS virus, development of a blood test, prediction of a vaccine within two years.
I wonder if this false optimism affected Ken positively.

In early May he reports that he “fucked with Arthur for first time. First he did me then I did him.”

The threshold for writing down good things appears to be very high—the diary is concerned almost entirely with problems—so
I conclude that fucking with Arthur must have been not simply a good experience but an extraordinary one.

Or was it, in fact, a problem? That same night he dreams: “Intruder in the house, I overpower him and throw him out; return
to bedroom to find Art gone; realize ejected one was Art; return to front door, call him back and he returns to me …”

Wanting love, and fearing love.

Later that month Ken dreams that “Arthur left a message on answering machine saying that he loved me and wanted to live with
me.”

Regarding an unspecified quarrel: “Called Arthur and told him of my ‘distress’ after our talk Sunday. Also told him I romanticize
and like being in love … Phrase he used: ‘stages going through while developing a closer relationship.’”

The hopefulness of this. Arthur’s apparent sensibleness. The possibility that their romance might endure.

I
N MY PHONE
conversation with him, Arthur recalls: “There were definitely some difficult things that happened while we were dating, as
though we were kind of working out the connection. It was a little rough. That wasn’t the part that was important to me, that
there were problems.”

Arthur’s reply to the letter I had sent said he was glad to hear from me because he still had “unresolved feelings” toward
Ken.

He had owned a copy of
The Hurry-Up Song
for a number of years but coincidentally had only read it a couple of months earlier.

“Twenty Years After Ken’s Death” appeared to be a mathematical function at work in others besides myself.

“I have these pictures of him in my mind,” Arthur tells me. “I can see him in certain places.”

I wonder if Ken somehow spawned unresolved feelings more than most people do.

I ask Arthur how they met. “Well, you know, this is another one of those moments I can remember absolutely. We were going
to a gym in Mission Valley. I think it was the Holiday Spa at the time. I was standing at the desk looking over my exercise
card to get started that day, and here comes Ken. This cute blond guy comes up, and it was like, hi.” He laughs. “We started
chatting, and he wanted to get together and he wanted to exchange phone numbers. That was the beginning.”

Both Jeff and another friend of Ken’s, Jim, similarly refer to Ken as a “hunk.”

Arthur himself had thick dark hair and a dark mustache. He was about Ken’s height, five-seven.

“I don’t remember our first date,” says Arthur. “We did end up back over at his apartment [in Ocean Beach, where Arthur also
lived]. There was the surfboard. It was just—it was kind of basic. I didn’t know too much about him at that point. We spent
the night together … I was looking for at least a solid dating relationship, to see where it would go. We did an awful lot
together. I’m remembering some parties we went to. Various things.”

Are there other pictures in his mind? “Oh,” he laughs. “One night he came over to my apartment. I was standing in the kitchen
and my roommate Ray was there. Ken comes in and he’s got this bouquet of flowers. I was nonplussed—some guy is bringing me
flowers. It kind of startled me. He said, ‘Oh,
I guess this is a little too much for you.’ No one had ever done that for me.”

“Ken and I would be out, we’d stop for coffee, encountering friends [of mine], and they’d say, ‘Wow, your boyfriend is really
cute.’ I hadn’t thought of him as some trophy husband. He was a nice guy, down to earth, very bright. His vocabulary was,
you know, impressive. We could talk intelligently about things.”

Jim also remarked on how easy it was to talk to my brother. Since Jim was on the board of a major AIDS organization, they
used to discuss the rancorous gay politics in San Diego.

“There were these expressions he had that were distinctly his,” says Arthur. I don’t need to ask for examples because I know
Ken’s distinct expressions so well—such as “Nards!” when he was mildly annoyed; or “Oh, Mitch” for a slow driver who got in
his way (after an incompetent super he once had); or “Cheap-cheap-cheap,” high-pitched like a bird, when he didn’t want to
spend money.

“Ken definitely had a different perspective,” Arthur continues. “It was one of the things I really liked about him.”

In June of that year Ken moved into the house in San Diego where he would die—a one-bedroom Spanish bungalow, built in the
twenties, with a crenulated façade. The matching one-car garage resembled a little stucco castle.

“He wanted us to live together,” Arthur says. “And I was, like, right on the edge of that. And it was just like, please, don’t
push too much right now. Just give me some—I felt like I needed a little more time to get accustomed to the idea.
Because he was the last of three really significant guys that I dated.” I assume Arthur means he was still getting over the
previous two relationships. Immediately he goes on to say, “After him, I only dated somebody again in the mid-nineties, almost
ten years later.”

A
N INDEX CARD
in the envelope containing Ken’s diary notes, “June ’84—1
^st
tested positive,” but there’s no mention of this event in the diary itself.

The general atmosphere back then of panic, stigma, fury, and denial regarding HIV, which wasn’t even yet called HIV.

Rev. Jerry Falwell famously called it the “gay plague.”

Possibly Ken feared someone finding his journal and learning of his HIV status. He worked in the defense industry and had
a security clearance, so he remained closeted at work.

Each weekday evening, the pink neon sign for his neighborhood—Normal Heights—appeared in his windshield, signaling his arrival
in a less secretive zone.

He did talk about his test result with Arthur, soon after he learned of it. “Oh, oh, oh, here’s the critical event,” Arthur
recalls. “We were in the water bed one evening and he said, ‘You know I was at the doctor’s and I found out that I’m positive.’
And we’d been not exclusively top or bottom—I guess it would be like people who really do get into a relationship—it was very
mutual, not role playing. And we weren’t using any condoms.” So Arthur figured he
must have been positive too (which indeed he is, though I don’t ask when he found out for sure). “The thing was, the two guys
I’d dated prior to this also became positive, and I can’t remember if I knew that before I was dating Ken. I don’t think so.”

Ken had received his HIV test as part of a scientific study. In addition to the index card, there’s a letter from UCSD Medical
Center, which cautions, “… we are not yet sure of the significance of these test results.”

I don’t know how many other people Ken told. There’s no hint in the journal that he talked about it in group therapy. He didn’t
tell me until sometime in 1986, and my parents did not find out until he actually landed in the hospital, in the fall of 1987.

In the entry dated June 18/19, 1984, Ken writes:

My parents’ tirades over such minor infractions were so common that Ken and I drew cartoons about them.

By “June 18/19” he must mean it’s about midnight, and he can’t sleep. I imagine him writing at the pale, rectangular dining
table
from the forties that had belonged to my parents. The windows were probably open to the balmy air, since according to the
almanac, the low that night was sixty-six.

It was cloudy every morning that week—a San Diego weather pattern known as “June Gloom.”

June 22: “Issue for next private session: difficulty in cumming while having sex with other guys. Difficulty fucking. Ambivalence
re getting fucked.”

The following month he records a timetable of the men he’s been with—perhaps trying to determine when he sero-converted, perhaps
simply taking stock of his love life.

At San Diego’s Gay Pride parade earlier that month, a plane had towed an anti-gay banner above Balboa Park. In mid-July, demonstrators
near the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco demanded more federal funding for AIDS research. I assume Ken couldn’t
participate in such events, since that would have risked his security clearance. On the other hand, I don’t recall his ever
saying he’d like to attend gay parades or protests.

July 20: “… very depressed; cried for no reason; unable to concentrate; disinterest in work/Art/house; lack of appetite …”

I don’t know how much of this he shared with Arthur. Ken’s friend Jim tells me he never talked about his darker feelings,
but Jim could sense they were there.

July 20, continued: “Becoming more and more angry at anything and everything … culminating in Thursday—felt ‘compulsion’ to
get stoned. However, decided consciously not to.”

This is the first time the journal brings up pot. Eventually Ken would come to see it as a serious addiction, and he would
become very active in both Narcotics Anonymous and AA.

Arthur tells me that he himself had been sober for several years when he met Ken. I’m surprised because Ken never mentions
this fact in his journal.

Arthur doesn’t recall ever seeing him get high, nor even smelling it on him: “I don’t know when he was doing it.” Evidently
Ken was making an effort to hide it. Sometime later, after they had broken up, Arthur was quite surprised to see him at an
AA meeting. (This is one of the vivid pictures in Arthur’s mind.) If my brother’s addiction was as powerful and pernicious
as he eventually concluded, then not smoking in front of Arthur—presumably because Arthur was in AA—must have made spending
time with him difficult. Yet the journal never mentions this as a factor in their relations.

July 23: “Still some sores in mouth”—first mention of possible HIV-related symptoms, though Ken remained healthy for another
year and a half.

August 6: “Saw Arthur today. He told me I had forced emotional growth in him, which was hard for him. We will continue seeing
each other, see what happens.”

But on August 10 Ken writes: “Arthur called. … I felt like I was forcing my affections on him.”

Regardless of Arthur’s probable HIV status, the virus may have made Ken feel tainted. This would have been hard to admit,
let alone discuss.

August 12: “Dragged someone home from the bar; finally decided I was comfortable with him here; slept cuddled up; very nice.”

Not that I want to deny Ken this nice evening, but it does appear to have been a distraction from Arthur.

Presumably Ken didn’t reveal his HIV status to this anonymous someone.

“Saturday … told Art I didn’t want to go to dinner … woke up feeling alone and lonely and missing Art.”

Later in August, he writes of “seeing Art stringing me along indefinitely in his ambivalence and then suddenly dumping me.
Fear of abandonment?”

Ken had had tantrums as a kid, and my mother sometimes left him alone for long periods—as he shrieked and cried. My sister
Helen has a similar story. I did not have tantrums, but my childhood was marked in its own way by my mother’s particular brand
of moody, sporadic attention.

August 15: “… feel like getting stoned and escaping everything … realizing that I wanted to get stoned to escape
feeling
. Recall the implicit message of childhood—‘don’t feel.’”