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I never was a good negotiator. For forty-plus years I’ve been fumbling away everything from elementary-school lunch swaps to haggling efforts involving cars. No one ever taught me the tricks of bargaining, and maybe they wouldn’t have done any good anyways: Great negotiators, like rock-and-roll front men, are born, not made.
Maybe my son, Vaughn, 7, is different than me in this way. When one of his teeth came loose for the first time, Ann and I without thinking much about it told him about the tooth fairy, and he received this information in his typical fashion. A faraway look came over him. He stared dreamily out the living-room window at the back yard for a few beats, and then started machine-gunning us with questions. How does she know the tooth is there? Why do you leave it under the pillow? And so on.
The tooth popped free a couple of weeks later when he and I were standing in Joe’s Pizza II, and he immediately ran outside to show Ann. We all passed it around excitedly, and when we got home I put it in a zipper-lock bag for him. Vaughn took it into his room, to put on his desk along with his T-ball trophy, some expired credit cards he’d asked to keep, his pencil sharpener, his football-shaped piggy bank.
When he came out, he announced that he wasn’t sure he was interested in a visit from some unseen and supposedly beneficent entity. Specifically, he wanted to know what he was going to get in exchange for the tooth.
He explained: One of his first-grade friends, Mina, had gotten some unusual coins—“special ones”—for her tooth. But another buddy, Rowan, just landed some run-of-the-mill change.
“Just guessing here,” I said, “but I would think you’d get a dollar. Or so.”
“Well,” he replied. “In that case, I just wanna keep the tooth.”
The implication was clear: Some lame pile of coins just wasn’t going to cut it.
Thus began the Tooth Fairy Lockout of 2011.
This isn’t just about him being cutthroat. He is, in fact, a sentimental type. When the tooth first started to wiggle around he cried a bit, which he rarely does. This was not because it hurt but because, I believe, of an innate awareness of life’s impermanence. Vaughn liked his body exactly the way it was, thank you very much—and what was this? Something falling out, with him having no say in the matter?
And the least he could do, once it was gone, was hold onto it.
I subsequently asked a bunch of people what the going rate was, and heard everything from one dollar to five. I averaged it out and presented my research to him: Three bucks was a safe bet.
He seemed to have thought this through. Or maybe he just decided no amount would be acceptable. In any case, he seemed resolute. “I’ve already got a lot of money in my football bank,” he said. “I’ve got more money in there than the tooth fairy’s got.”
We are now a week into the lockout. Stay tuned.
Bottom row, middle: It was a keeper
