Read The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) for Free Online Page A

whether Dad could see well enough to drive me to the airport. Fortunately
     Mom won.
    Mom patted my shoulder and smiled as I sat down to breakfast.
    In the car Dad said, “We will miss you.”
    At the airport gate a stewardess walked by and sat with the other stewardesses but said nothing to them, not even hello, and
     I thought, “What if you’re a stewardess and the other stewardesses don’t like you?”

14
    O F MY BROTHER ’ S homosexuality, Christine said, “I think it was a phase, and he got stuck in it.” As far as I knew, Ken had slept only with
     men for the last eight years of his life. Moreover, he had told me unequivocally that he was gay. “Huh—really?” I asked. “Ken
     went through phases,” Christinereplied. “He did everything in extremes.” This was an interesting and possibly true statement, which I would have liked to
     evaluate apart from her views on his sexuality. She said there had been a period when he dropped acid twice a week and went
     surfing both morning and night, and in college they had had sex two or three times a day. “Our friends called us the rabbits,”
     she said. I had known this to be their mutual endearment but had never known why. “You have to understand,” she declared,
     “Ken was
not
like other people.” In Christine’s telling he began to take on a scary-alluring aura not unlike the scary-alluring aura that
     drugs, surfing, and sex had held for me when I was thirteen and looked up to my presumably straight brother who was in college.
     Christine’s stories: All their friends would come over at two every day to get high and watch
Highway Patrol
, and they used to have nude swimming parties in the apartment complex pool. Throwing trash out the car window at Jack in
     the Box, Ken said, very stoned, “I’m contributing to the gross national product!” In his living room he apologized to a potential
     roommate for the mess, offered him a beer, then realized there was a cigarette floating in the bottle—“Oh, I guess you don’t
     want that,” Ken said. After my father refused to pay for graduate school in math, Ken tried to work his way through, flunked
     out his first semester, and grew dangerously depressed. Strolling on the beach one evening, on acid, Ken said, “Why don’t
     we go walk along the moonbeam?” Sometimes he used to risk surfing between the pilings of the pier, at night. He asked Christine
     if she wanted to do a three-way, and she said no. In the Sierras he tried skiing down the most difficult slope and wiped out
     spectacularly. Later, after he and Christine had broken up and he had begun sleeping with men, he scandalized his old college
     friends by arriving at a party in white satin shorts. So much new information, from so long ago, confused me, and my brother’s
     image grew unsteady in my mind. I wished Ihadn’t called Christine so late, my first night back in Brooklyn. I remembered once finding in Ken’s desk drawer, not long
     after he came out to me—this would have been about 1979—a slip of paper on which he had written over and over the name Keith
     Cody—same initials as Ken Chase. Had he ever used the name with a trick? Maybe Christine was right: my brother was a chameleon,
     simply trying on different identities to see how each of them felt. Maybe he never knew who he was. “Two or three years after
     we broke up,” she was telling me now, “he called me, out of the blue, and asked me to marry him.” She saw this as proof that
     Ken was never really gay. “I said no,” she continued, explaining that she had already met her current husband. I wondered
     why, in that case, she objected so much to the idea that Ken was gay, since apparently she didn’t want him anyway. The conversation
     exhausted me—constantly sifting everything Christine said, trying to decide what was true and to what degree. And conversely
     wondering what were my own myths about my brother, what had I never understood about him? “I’m