Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Wednesday, July 23, 1997

10 PM. Leaving the house early last evening, I first went to Hotaling’s Out-of-Town Newsstand at Times Square, where they told me they were all out of last Sunday’s Palm Beach Post.

So this morning I ordered by mail a back issue with the article on E-zines by Betsy Willeford in which she praised my “Spaghetti Language” in The Blue Moon Review.

Then I headed over to Alice’s. Going up to her co-op to use the bathroom, I noticed that she hadn’t yet installed her new computer printer, so I offered to help her do it, and she was thrilled I would. So I’ll go over there Sunday morning.

We took the IRT uptown and got to Caffé Taci on 110th Street before Renee did, sitting at a table half-outside and half-inside. I spotted Renee right away; as Alice had said, with her red hair and open expression, Renee looks exactly the same as she did in junior high and college.

We had a very pleasant meal: good Italian food, nice live piano music, and interesting conversation. Renee has been married to a neurosurgeon for ten years; she’s a physical therapist who’s doing graduate work in statistics at Teachers College, where she’s a TA.

That’s what brings her to Morningside Heights from her home on Kappock Street in Riverdale. Renee just came from spending a month at a nutrition-and-exercise-oriented “fat farm” in southern Utah, where she’d gone for her fifth extended stay.

She’s still witty, friendly and intelligent: someone I enjoyed spending time with. She’s all caught up on our lives, too, but we also had other things to discuss, and I took Renee’s address and phone and kissed her goodbye when we parted, with her driving home and Alice and I heading for the subway.

I got home at 10 PM, and after a good night’s sleep, I was up at 6 AM. There was no flood this morning, as I checked downstairs at 7:30 AM after I finished exercising.

When I got done using AOL and Lexis, I went out for the newspaper and a few grocery items.

New Yorkers may have a reputation for rushing and impatience, but nowhere else in the country have I ever seen such languorous supermarket checkout clerks.

The cashiers at the Key Food on Grand Street take time off in the middle of ringing up an order to chat with a colleague, scratch themselves, or stare off idly into space. There’s invariably an item that needs a price check, and the clerks can never find the item on the shelves.

After lunch, I took the G train to Greenpoint Avenue, two stops away, and once I explored the neighborhood (an ethnic mix, but predominately Polish and Italian), I went to Enterprise Car Rental on McGuinness Boulevard, where I got my Ford Escort (an upgrade) with little trouble.

After a trip on the LIE, I made it to Locust Valley by 2:15 PM. Teresa’s car was in the driveway but she wasn’t home. I let myself in, and the dogs went crazy over me, Hattie drooling and barking, Ollie licking me and wanting to be petted.

Both of their tails were wagging wildly as I took them outside while I looked at the stuff that came from Financial Aid from Purchase College and I signed my $500 unemployment check and put it in a bank deposit-by-mail envelope.

Teresa returned – she’d been visiting a nearby friend – and she took me to a baby clothing store, where she picked out an outfit from me and one from her for Ronna’s baby as well as an outfit for her goddaughter, Susan and Moshe’s kid.

She told me about a letter – by snail mail – from Paul’s ex-wife, responding to Teresa’s last email. Carolyn told her to leave her kids alone and to have her own kids with Paul if she wants to be a mother. She also said other ugly things. This stemmed from Carolyn wanting to be the one to take Jade to college.

Back at the house, Teresa showed me on AOL the angry reply she’d sent to Carolyn’s statement, “How would you like it if I were in Oyster Bay and constantly in your face?”

Teresa told her that she would have loved it had Carolyn never abandoned her kids, especially Jade, who was 16, sick and vulnerable.

It’s not the kind of thing that can do anyone any good, especially Jade. But I can understand that Teresa feels she lives with Jade day in and day out and has done a great deal over the last few years to make her ready for college.

As far as financial aid, Jade got a $435 Pell grant, will probably get a Stafford, and SUNY tuition is still reasonable enough for Teresa to be pleasantly surprised at the cost.

In the last couple of days Teresa got four new catering jobs, so she had to write up some letters and memos.

She had me take the air conditioner back to Brooklyn again, so when I returned here an hour ago, I left it in the hall in case of another really bad heat wave.

Today was so cool that I wore jeans, as I did last evening, rather than shorts.

After Paul came home and took Hattie out to the lumber yard and returned with some Italian bread, we had dinner outside at 7:30 PM.

I’m sorry I missed last night’s dinner with Teresa’s cousins, and I guess I’ll have to come back next week if I want to see them again. Suddenly it seems I won’t have time left in New York to see everyone or do everything I had wanted to.

Tomorrow I’ll go to Philadelphia, but I won’t rush to get there.

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Friday, July 25, 1997

11 AM. I’ve got to return the rental car right away, but I wanted to get some thoughts down on paper.

I couldn’t have picked a worse day than yesterday to drive to and from Philadelphia. Heavy rain fell all over the Northeast (2½ inches in New York City), and I had to navigate through the worst possible weather on roads that were flooded.

At 8:45 AM I left, trying to avoid the tie-ups on the BQE I’d heard about, but I ended up going the wrong way on the streets and getting lost around the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

When I did finally get on the BQE, it wasn’t all that bad. Still, it took 45 minutes just to get to the Verrazano Bridge, and then at least another half-hour to Outerbridge Crossing.

By the time I stopped at a rest area on the Jersey Turnpike, the wind was howling, the rain was coming down swiftly, and it was about 55° – and all I had on was a short-sleeved shirt. Crazy, especially since the week before it had been 97°.

It took three hours to get to Ronna’s, but Matthew’s directions were excellent.

I was startled by the hugeness of her house in Jenkintown. It was very imposing, and inside, quite impressive: a five-bedroom (and 4½ bath) colonial with an incredible amount of space.

I was also surprised to see Ronna with thick gray hair; she hadn’t dyed it all during her pregnancy although she was planning to go to the hair stylist and have it done this weekend.

Abigail was asleep in the cavernous kitchen, where we ended up hanging out all day. I oohed and aahed at Abigail all day – and the baby is fairly cute. She looked so intelligent when she was asleep, and she had a thick head of black hair that was starting to go away. I couldn’t figure out if she looks like Ronna or Matthew or both.

Anyway, we – that is, Ronna and I – talked all afternoon, a lot about her life as a wife and mother and her experiences during pregnancy and since Abigail’s birth, about Matthew and Chelsea, and her family.

(Billy is getting married again, at a small church in Davie in December, to that Brazilian woman who had started out as his patient.)

We also talked about my recent experiences, my plans, and what’s going on with the friends from college whom I’d seen recently.

Ronna said the outfits that Teresa and I got for Abigail were adorable – the dress I’d bought was really beautiful – and she wrapped up the Spotty book by Margret Rey that I’d gotten for Chelsea, because Chelsea would value it more gift-wrapped.

I also brought a copy of I Survived Caracas Traffic and hope that it doesn’t upset Ronna, as there’s a story in it that features a badly-disguised version of her.

Ronna is limiting her breast feeding to twice a day and giving Abigail a bottle of Similac for her other feedings. Abigail’s checkups have been okay and everything seems far so far; Ronna said she’s not read the developmental books too closely to avoid going crazy.

I was really kind of antsy about getting back to Brooklyn, but I felt I had to remain there to finally meet Matthew, so I did stay for dinner.

In my honor, Matthew came home early – at about 6:30 PM – with Chelsea, who goes to pre-school near Matthew’s hospital, the same one that’s also a nursery school that she’s gone to since Matthew adopted her as a single parent before he met Ronna.

I can see that Chelsea is always going to be, as Ronna said, Daddy’s girl, and she doesn’t mind at all when Ronna takes care of the baby but she seemed jealous when Matthew began feeding Abigail; then she said she wanted a bottle, too. I like Chelsea a lot.

As we were eating our bowtie pasta, she shouted out to me: “Where’s your wife?” Startled, I replied that I didn’t have one.

“Where’s your husband?” I asked her, and Chelsea said she didn’t have one, and then she turned and asked, “Ronna, where’s your husband?”

“He’s sitting right here,” Ronna said, nodding towards Matthew, who was feeding the baby.

I’m not sure what Matthew thought of me, but I feel sure he’s a good man, an excellent father and husband, and ultra-competent as a physician and administrator. I always feel a bit in awe of people who have what I think of as really difficult and important professions.

At 8 PM I left, shaking hands with Matthew, who had asked me to stay overnight, and with Chelsea and kissing Ronna on the cheek. I guess at this point I don’t relate to Ronna as an old girlfriend because we’ve known each other as friends for so many years.

I’m incredibly happy that Ronna has gotten the kind of life she’s long wanted, so I felt warm and fuzzy for her, not about her.

I got home at 10:30 PM after a horrendous ride up Old York Road/PA 611 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the New Jersey Turnpike and across Staten Island, all in a driving rain.

Upset that the cellar carpeting isn’t drying out from the washing machine burst pipe flood and that the smell of mildew is getting worse, I made a frantic call to Teresa this morning. She said there’s nothing I can do except keep the windows open once it stops raining.

She said there’s no way to open the boarded-up cellar doors, but I did manage to take out some damp clothing that had been hanging in garment bags in the inner cellar and hung them up on the clothes line.

Staying in this house on Conselyea Street is something I won’t do again. I feel responsible for the flood even if Teresa’s father seemed sanguine, saying it’s a hundred-year-old house and the pipes are old.

I worry that I’ll be blamed for anything that went wrong. As Alice said, there’s no such thing as a free apartment.

Probably my own weird views are why I don’t envy Ronna and Matthew their large, comfortable home.

If I had money, I’d live in a hotel room where I was responsible for nothing and could call the management to deal with any problems regarding accommodations. The thought of owning a house turns my stomach.

Last night I left a message with Michele Shih to call me if the Times editors will need me today, but I feel certain my piece will not be in tomorrow’s paper.

Speaking of that, I bought yesterday’s Times at the Barnes & Noble near Ronna’s house on Old York Road, but I haven’t glanced at it yet.

*

6 PM. I didn’t expect the Times to call but I still feel disappointed. I’m getting sick of waiting for this damn article to come out. When I wrote it in February and mailed it off on Thursday and got a call from the Newark Star-Ledger days later, I never dreamed that the wait for publication would be this torturous.

Come to think of it, my story “Cough!” never appeared in The Echo Ink Review in May as promised.

All the events of the past week that I’m powerless to control – the flood, the mildew smell, yesterday’s torrential rains, the AOL screw-ups, my acne, the Times Op-Ed article disappointment – are beginning to get to me.

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Tuesday, July 29, 1997

9:30 PM. It turned cooler during the night. Signing onto AOL this morning after a good night’s sleep, I got bad news from Bob Karp, who yesterday had told me he was testifying before Jon Mills’ Constitutional Revision Commission about the privacy amendment.

I had sent Bob a July 1 ruling from the Montana Supreme Court, which overturned the state’s sodomy law based on the Montana constitution’s privacy clause, and Bob said that would be helpful to him.

But Bob also forwarded today’s Sun-Sentinel story on Judge Frusciante’s ruling against June Amer. He found the legislature had a rational basis for excluding gays from adopting, and said that if the state chooses to let kids “languish in foster care” rather than go to gay parents, they can do so because studies on gay households are inconclusive.

It was as if the judge totally ignored all the evidence. I completely misread him. The paper said June was with her biological son yesterday – I know she has Mondays off – and wouldn’t comment but isn’t sure that she’ll appeal.

I was so disgusted by the ruling that later in the day I signed a motor-voter registration card and changed my voting residence to this address in Brooklyn. (The cards were placed by gay activists in the Brooklyn Heights/Business Library.)

I also asked for an absentee ballot, and at the same time I sent in a temporary change of address form from Conselyea Street to Fort Lauderdale.

Later, reading an appreciation of Justice Brennan, whose funeral was today, I came across a quote from him saying that bad rulings eventually get overturned and we must be patient, that in the long run, the law will expand, not contract, people’s rights.

But I still have a sour feeling about Frusciante ruling – and if I do, I can only imagine how June and Gail and their lawyers must feel.

After my usual morning routine, I went to the laundromat on Metropolitan Avenue and did not only my clothes but the linens I’ve been using. Reading the Times helped pass the time.

Following an early lunch, I took the subway to Grand Central to meet Elihu. The renovations of the original zodiac and gold-leaf ceiling and of the corridors of shops are in the next phase of redevelopment.

Elihu, in a white shirt and tie, looked the same (like me, he is again clean-shaven): almost painfully thin and charmingly homely. We went to Timothy’s, where we spent an hour nursing coffee (him) and iced tea (me), and where I pocketed a bunch of Equal packets rather than going out to buy more for the rest of my stay here.

Rather than talk about anything really personal, we reminisced about high school and college and discussed such stuff as the high stock market (the Dow hit 8175 today), Elihu’s equity in his co-op, the rise of queer theory as mainstream academic discourse, and other interesting topics.

Before we knew it, Elihu was already late, having taken more than his allotted hour for lunch (which he never eats). After he let me into the men’s room on his floor – the 28th – of the Graybar Building, I took the IRT to Borough Hall.

I’d just missed a public hearing on the proposed new area codes. They have to split or overlay Manhattan with 646, but by 2001 the other boroughs will need a new area code, 347, because there aren’t enough 718 numbers.

After checking out Borough Hall and the Municipal Building, I walked over, via Court Street, to the library. And after I left there, it was such a gorgeous afternoon that I walked down Montague Street to the Promenade.

So many memories came calling, and I couldn’t help thinking about that summer 28 years ago and how at almost exactly this same time, I began writing my diary entries.

I was 18, had just taken my first course in college, met Brad – the first gay guy I came out to – and rediscovered the world after being in the house because of agoraphobia.

And what a weird world it was in 1969: Brooklyn Heights, the Village, and the rest of the city seemed on the brink of a new era. It was the first year of Nixon’s tumultuous presidency.

(In retrospect, he seems like a more dedicated liberal than Clinton, who today announced full agreement with GOP congressional leaders to balance the budget, reduce taxes and restore some benefits to immigrants and the poor.)

I stood leaning on the rail of the Promenade, my head resting on my arm, taking in the view: the Verrazano Bridge and the hills of Staten Island; Governor’s Island and the Statue of Liberty facing the other way; the arch of the Bayonne Bridge, barely visible; the looming skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan.

Like the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center, the twin towers of the World Trade Center do not appear to be as tall as they actually are when the viewer is close up. That made me think of the clear, dry, cloudless days I’d spent in Chicago last month.

I checked out the view of South Street Seaport, the incomparable Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, the BQE traffic below, the deserted Brooklyn piers in front of me.

Later I sat in a Starbucks by the window, looking out at Montague Street, as I finished the Times and read the free Brooklyn Heights papers, and then I walked over to the Fulton Mall.

At The Wiz (Nobody Beats The Wiz, that is), I bought a copy of Netscape because I’m so frustrated with not getting the Web on AOL. Downtown Brooklyn shopping seems to be vibrant, and only later did it occur to me that there were few other white people on the street.

I flatter myself that I’m street-smart, but I overshot the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station. However, at least that gave me a chance to see more of downtown before I got the G train back to Williamsburg.

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Thursday, July 31, 1997

8 PM. This afternoon I went to the Morgan Library for the first time, mostly because while passing it on the Madison Avenue bus, I noticed a banner for an exhibit, Private Histories: Four Centuries of Journal Keeping, and thought it would be nice to see it as I close out my 28th year of journal-keeping.

I discovered that many of the diarists wrote in the nearly illegible, tiny handwriting that I’ve adopted. The diaries and journals exhibited included those of the obsessive Adele Hugo (Truffaut’s Story of Adele H), Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel and Sophie Hawthorne (together), Whitman, Pepys, Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau, the Brontës – some in early published editions, some in the original.

Also featured were a host of ordinary people who undertook diaries as soldiers in the American Revolutionary or Civil War, as civilians under siege in Baghdad during the Gulf War, as unrequited lovers (one nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrant pining away for a woman who lived near him in Bay Ridge) or observers of the weather. Teresa’s mother keeps her journals by her bedside, though of course I would never touch them.

Aside from the exhibit, J.P. Morgan’s library was worth the $5 admission to see the architecture of the building, the designs of the rooms, and wonderful objects such as the Gutenberg Bible, drawings by Gauguin and Cezanne, and music written in the hand of Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin.

In the gift shop, I spent $57 on a present for Teresa’s parents: a silver picture frame in the design of the grill work on the Morgan Library. Just purchasing such an item made me feel very elegant.

Teresa’s father was here today, rather than yesterday, which is why I wanted to clear out. I made sure the house looked neat, that all the windows were closed, and that my stuff was put away as much as possible.

When I returned to Williamsburg at 4 PM, her father had left a note saying that he’d been here at 2 PM and he took his mail and did some other chores, leaving the door to the back hallway open. Hopefully he wasn’t upset with anything I’d done.

The little boxes I bought last evening at the Flushing Woolworth’s going-out-of-business sale proved too small to handle the big box of my manuscripts. (Today I saw another Woolworth on Broadway and 8th Street having the same sale as all their stores, relics in the age of Walmart and other superstores, close for good.) Instead, I put them in the carton that Martin Hester set my books in.

Unable to find a Mail Boxes Etc. or similar store in the neighborhood, I lugged the 17-pound carton (I filled the rest of it with a sweater and long sleeve shirts) on the subway and then about half a mile in Manhattan before I found a place that would take it – and even they didn’t want to, given tonight’s threatened UPS strike. But I assured them there was no hurry in getting the stuff to Florida.

Today was warmer and cloudless but not too humid. I wandered around Manhattan. When I found that the Whitney wouldn’t open till 1 PM, I went over to the Morgan.

I stopped at Au Bon Pair at Union Square for soda and a fruit cup, at a Midtown deli for salad bar veggies, and at Lenox Hill Hospital and the Astor Place Barnes & Noble to use the men’s rooms. And I walked and rode on lots of buses and trains.

I do feel I really know New York City well now. But even before I spent the last three weeks here, I probably knew the city better than Alice (who got off at the 116th Street stop on the Seventh Avenue express, mistakenly thinking she’d be on Broadway) or Josh or Pete or Elihu or Justin. None of them know Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island or even New Jersey as well as I do.

Speaking of New Jersey, the Times Op-Ed people didn’t call, so my piece definitely won’t be in the paper on Saturday.

But it’s been a busy news week: the budget/tax cut agreement, Jerusalem suicide bombing, New York State budget, and this morning’s arrest of presumed Middle Eastern suicide bombers in Park Slope.

With Congress in recess, the dog days of August may be a better time to run my piece in the Times – but I’ll send it out to other places anyway.

Last night I installed Netscape with access via SpryNet. Tomorrow, when I go to visit Justin in Park Slope, I’ll ask him how he uses it for e-mail – though somehow I was able to get on AOL today.

There were free concerts all over Brooklyn today: Lesley Gore at the MetroTech Center downtown at lunch hour and tonight the New York Philharmonic at Prospect Park and another concert at Asser Levy Park in Brighton Beach.

But I’ve got reading to do and I’m somewhat tired now, so I’ll stay close to home in Williamsburg and nearby Greenpoint.