Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Sunday, January 11, 1998

5 PM on a beautiful Sunday.

I called Gianni at 10 AM, after I’d read half the Sunday New York Times and exercised, and he said he wanted to see a movie, preferably Jackie Brown.

Gianni is very indecisive and probably I’m a bad person to make plans with because I’m not directive, but finally we decided to meet at Loehmann’s Fashion Island in North Miami Beach (where I was with Craig a week ago) for the 12:30 PM show.

By the time we decided, it was 10:45 AM, so I rushed to eat, shower and dress, and I got to the theater at noon, just as they were opening the box office.

It didn’t surprise me that Gianni was late although I hadn’t expected him to be nearly an hour late. However, I didn’t want to get annoyed and partly it was my fault for not giving clear enough driving directions.

We decided to go instead to the 2 PM show of Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. Maureen Dowd had a savage column on the movie this morning, criticizing Woody Allen’s life more than anything else.

Gianni and I sat outside an ice cream cafe, where he had a root beer float and I had nonfat chocolate yogurt. He looked nice with his hair twisted; he said he really got on well with the woman who did his hair, an East African native who recently moved here after years in Scandinavia.

But he seemed a weird mood, and it got worse as we went into the theater, surrounded by old Jewish people – the very types who would soon be caricatured on screen.

Gianni said it was nothing I’d done, just “I’m having trouble accepting life on its own terms today.” Since the trailers were about to come on, we had no time to talk about it, though he did warn me that he’s always been extremely moody.

Deconstructing Harry was a lot funnier than I expected, and very clever; Gianni and I were hysterical with laughter at parts.

For me, the story raised issues close to home: Harry Black is a fiction writer who uses everyone in his life badly and then turns them into thinly-disguise characters in his fiction.

As in Bullets Over Broadway, Allen is questioning whether to be a good artist, one must sacrifice the possibility of being a good person.

They made us leave the theater through a back exit, and after following old ladies with canes and walkers into an emergency exit, we found the right way out, and the storefront I saw in front of me caused me to go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it,” about a dozen times.

Gianni must have thought I was crazy.

The storefront was the Little Theatre School, with Joanie Edwards. That was the drama and dancing school where I took lessons one summer when I was about 13 or so, though maybe as old as 15.

I looked inside and saw this old lady, very theatrical-looking, white hair in bun, and I recognized her as Miss Joanie’s mother, Annette Edwards. To me, she’d been an old lady in the early 1960s, and I couldn’t believe she was still alive.

I went in and stood there as she talked to a Mexican woman wanting to enroll her daughter in modern dance class until she asked me what I wanted, and I asked if she used to be in Brooklyn at the corner of Flatbush and Caton Avenues.

“For about a hundred years,” she said. (Actually since 1928, the sign said.) I told her about my taking lessons over thirty years ago and then saw Joanie, who must be in her mid-50s or near 60 now, in the practice room next door.

It was so bizarre and dreamlike to come across that kind of fragment of the long-ago past. I still can’t get over it.

Gianni had to go see his friend Kelly but said he’d dropped by later. We drove across Miami Gardens Drive and up I-95 together until he pulled away with a wave before I exited.

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Monday, January 12, 1998

2 PM. Gianni came here at 5:30 PM yesterday and left at 9 AM today. He just called, wanting to know if I’d see him tonight, and I said I’d call him back.

I’m tired, and I guess the intensity of our relationship is beginning to scare me – or else I need time to be alone. It’s weird, becoming so close to another guy after being celibate for so long.

Gianni and I are “not sleeping together,” according to him, but that means only that I’m not fucking him. We had this long discussion for hours last evening, and I know a lot more about him.

He sees now that he didn’t really accomplish anything with the switch from one Nissan to another. Jack, the wealthy Jewish doctor he used to live with, signed both the original purchase and the new lease.

In Maryland, Gianni told his mother for the first time that he hasn’t been working in his profession all these months.

He says he has a problem handling money – no news to me – but that he wants to preserve his independence. However, he’s in a relationship with Alejandro, a wealthy man, and still leaning on Jack financially and emotionally.

When I told him how different he now appeared from the self-confident, intimidating guy I met that first night at Borders, he told me that I was warmer and less abrupt than the way I originally presented myself.

One reason he feels awkward with me is that unlike most guys, I don’t totally adore him. When I said I was “moderately attracted” to him that first night, that bothered him.

And he said that before the movie started yesterday and he, in talking about his moodiness, asked, “Could you imagine living with me?” that my blunt answer, “No,” was not what he’s used to hearing.

So when he asked me yesterday if we are going to “sleep together” and I said no, I don’t want to, because he’s in a relationship and “for other reasons,” he felt rejected.

But as his friend Kelly said, we’ve “already crossed the line,” and we did again on the couch last night.

Gianni is very sexually experienced. He had dozens of men before he turned 18 – which is why he’s so adamant that it’s wrong to have sex with 17-year-olds and disapproved of my relationship with Sean.

When he asked me to tell him about “what I like to do,” I felt embarrassed and then said stuff just to mollify him. But I don’t know about things like “light bondage” and I’m not going to call Gianni stuff like “slutboy.”

I think he knows this, for he said, almost dismissively, that I was one of those guys that “treat one-night stands as lovemaking.”

He’d never believe the truth, that I haven’t really ever had a one-night stand.

Gianni and I did some things I hadn’t done before, and he’s stronger than expected, able to hold my arms down above my head and push me down when I tried to get up.

He didn’t realize when I’d come because I don’t make any noise; I never did. Our orgasms came from masturbating one on top of the other, and then we lay together, holding tight to one another, for a long time.

I’m not used to exploring another person’s body and I don’t think Gianni can imagine how intense this was for me.

Then we had these long, intellectual discussions on the notion of race, Reform versus Orthodox Jewry, and cloning before he asked me to make him dinner.

Eventually he drifted off on the couch, but I didn’t go to bed until 2 AM.

I asked him to join me in the bed, but he didn’t until he awakened an hour later. I slept okay, but not enough, even though I feel squished to one side of the bed.

At 7:30 AM, while he was more or less still asleep, I got breakfast and listened to the news, then I crawled back into bed and we messed around for an hour.

Funny, when he asked me if I were seeing anyone, and I mentioned only my meeting with Craig, he became a little jealous – and I’m embarrassed to admit that that made me feel good.

*

4 PM. I just called Gianni back and said, “If you were asking me to go to the Sunrise drive-in tomorrow night, I’d say yes in a second, but I’m too wiped out tonight and have too much I need to do” – which is true.

“That’s fine,” he said, but I felt I needed to add, “It’s not because I don’t want to see you, because I do.”

I haven’t even begun to read half of yesterday’s paper, but alone today’s.

Laura C left a message last night, and I need call her back.

Anyway, after Gianni left at 9 AM this morning, I exercised and went out. I went to Office Depot and Walmart and Publix and wanted to do laundry, but I needed to get laundry tokettes at the manager’s office.

I was shocked when Richard said, “You’re aware that Marie passed away?”

“No!”

I couldn’t believe it. He’s going through the worst time in his life, and when he said, “I lost my right hand,” I hugged that older man, a straight guy I hardly knew.

I felt so bad for him, though Marie was a heavy smoker and looked unhealthily-thin to me.

Later I asked the elderly woman who walks with a lamp, and she said she was told not to say anything. Marie had trouble breathing, and a few days after Christmas was in the hospital, but returned home feeling better until she had a relapse and died in the hospital.

It’s so bizarre because it seems like yesterday that I last saw her. Just a few days before she got sick and died, Gianni was at their apartment, asking how to get to mine. Weird.

Elihu e-mailed, and once again I gave him the Monday morning dope on Gianni.

Elihu’s facing a performance review at work this week, and typically, he expects he won’t be recognized for the work he does.

The guy has such a self-image problem that he can’t leave a terrible job even when there’s an incredible labor shortage and I imagine it would be easy for someone like Elihu to find another one.

He was bummed out because his therapist date never called him back. I told him that most of the time people don’t “click” or that the guy is just a jerk.

Poor Elihu: he needs a lot more self-confidence.

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Thursday, January 15, 1998

2 PM. My relationship with Gianni has been so . . . I don’t know what word to use. I’m lying on my bed and I just got a faint whiff of the cologne he wears.

He’s taught me a lot. I wish I could be better to him. By far, he’s a more admirable person than I am. I guess I’d characterize our relationship as a “romantic friendship,” like the kind English schoolboys had in Brideshead Revisited.

Last evening we went to the drive-in and then he came back here, we watched Ellen and cuddled, had a spirited discussion that lasted till 2 AM, and then we got into bed, and . . . well, I’d call it making love but I don’t know what Gianni would call it since he seems to reserve that term and “sleeping together” just for anal intercourse.

He’s been having sex with men since he was a pre-teen and was quite promiscuous as a teenager. But he said he’d never – “not even if I were drunk, not even if I were on drugs” – do anything without a condom.

I’m so embarrassed writing about sex, and Gianni doesn’t like to talk about it. In saying that he finds it “distasteful” for the gay guys who worked with him at the Miami Beach store to discuss sex graphically, Gianni said, “But I’m not a prude.” Well, I am.

I was very mean to him at the drive-in and I feel bad about it. He was getting so much junk food at the snack bar, I was afraid we were going to miss the movie, and like the asshole I am, I yelled, “What the fuck are you doing? We’re going to miss the fucking movie.”

Gianni said, with great dignity, “Please don’t ever talk to me like that again.”

We were pretty silent during the first half-hour of Wag the Dog until we laughed at something and Gianni took my hand. Later, he said that what I’d done is what he and Kelly call “bringing out the nigger,” but he was totally right and I was totally wrong.

I don’t think I can forgive myself as easily as he did me. I’m glad he came home with me and glad he stayed the night, although neither of us ever seem to count on what seems to happen naturally ever happening.

I had to buy an air freshener to deal with the cigarette smoke, but I suppose a few hours a week of exposure to second-hand smoke won’t kill me.

What I like about Gianni is his sense of responsibility: taking it for his smoking, his mistakes, his moods.

The flip side of that is that we had this long discussion in which, once again, I felt he was blaming the victims: women who get pregnant, guys his age who get HIV, homeless people, etc.

But he says he comes from a family of drug addicts and alcoholics, and that if his relatives in Baltimore City “haven’t ever gotten above North Street,” it’s their own fault.

It’s hard for me to be so judgmental, even if my background – except for being white, of course – was no more privileged than Gianni’s.

But he’s stronger than I am, or at least much stronger than I was at 23, maybe because he spent his childhood and adolescence being called a “faggot.”

It saddened me a little that after talking so much about race, Gianni said that if he has another relationship after Alejandro, it will only be with other African-American men who can totally understand him.

Alejandro is okay because he’s Hispanic, but Gianni said even Alejandro is an elitist with his Castilian pronunciation (“thinko” for cinco) and his feeling that Spaniards are superior to other Hispanics.

We also talked about how our relationship affects his partnership with Alejandro and what the consequences would be for their relationship. Gianni said he’d be very upset if Alejandro were having a similar “friendship with sexual overtones,” but he said he just wouldn’t want to know about it.

He said he thinks we’re always going to be in touch, but I know this closeness won’t last, and it’s probably good that I’m leaving South Florida in six weeks. It makes everything we do precious, sort of the way it was with Sean back in the late spring of 1982: incredibly intense and sweet.

(Gianni’s trying to stop saying “That’s sweet” after I say something mushy.)

Even though I didn’t fall asleep until very late and even though I was sort of squooshed up against the wall in bed, I slept soundly and had interesting dreams, including one in which I visited a mausoleum where practically everyone I knew was buried.

At 8 AM, I quietly left Gianni to his sleep and went into the kitchen, had breakfast, listened to NPR, and got on AOL and Lexis. Gianni doesn’t like to be looked at in the morning when he awakens and doesn’t like to kiss then, either.

Around 9 AM, he finally got up and put on his jeans, boots and usual black shirt. (He hates his feet. I’ve never seen him without socks.)

Gianni felt his meeting at the modeling agency yesterday went well, and it sounds as if he knows the difference between rip-off artists and reputable model scouts. The guy told him he needed to gain twenty pounds.

After he left, I exercised, showered and dressed. Then I dropped by the department office at Nova to ask Maria if she could pick up my paycheck today.

When I went to see my parents, Dad was leaving for the store, Marc was out getting bagels, and Jonathan was in his bathrobe.

Mom mentioned the flea market, and when I said I’d been near there last night, that I’d been at the drive-in, she asked, “Who goes to that drive-in? Were a lot of black people there?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I said, “I did notice that there was one in the car sitting pretty close to me,” and that ended that.

Later, I thought a great deal about Mom’s question, but I handled it well. Ranting about her being racist wouldn’t do any good, and by answering her good-humoredly and honestly, I’ve probably given Mom stuff to think about.

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Tuesday, January 20, 1998

10 PM, and I’m feeling very sleepy.

My interview at Unemployment seemed to go all right; dressing in a suit and tie probably didn’t hurt although clearly it wasn’t necessary.

The woman I spoke to took my filled-out forms and gave me back the pages of job listings I’d printed out because they couldn’t be sent to Tallahassee.

Then she introduced me to the guy who handles professional placement, but I ducked out the back door before I got through the line of people waiting to see him because I knew my paperwork had already gotten done.

Earlier, I’d called in to file for the $250 in benefits for last week. Hopefully, Tallahassee won’t check on my job search, and I can get the next six weeks of benefits.

Back in Davie, I read the paper, went online, did a load of laundry, got a haircut and filled my gas tank before going to my parents’ house to pick up my mail: my America West E-ticket for the flight to San Jose.

I also walked for forty minutes while listening to NPR’s All Things Considered.

When I spoke to Gianni for an hour tonight, we made up that I’ll see him Thursday after he has the photographer take his pictures for the modeling agency.

He was “stressed out” over several things, including learning from Jack that the Nissan dealer lied about the amount they were allowed for the trade-in. Gianni now feels he would like to get rid of the car.

He was also upset that he got a call that his Caller ID listed as “Unknown,” which had to be from Alejandro in Argentina – only Alejandro didn’t leave a message.

Also, Alejandro had two voice mail messages from guys he’d slept with. Although he said that it was from before Gianni moved in with him, Gianni feels upset about the calls.

He was also upset that a phone number Alejandro left him turned out not to be a hotel.

I pointed out that if Alejandro didn’t want Gianni to know where he’d be in Argentina, he wouldn’t have provided the phone number in the first place.

Tonight I learned that Kelly had advised Gianni not to move in with Alejandro because she felt Alejandro was too closeted; Kelly was worried about business and family situations where Gianni would have to disappear.

I don’t know if all his anxiety over Alejandro is Gianni projecting his guilt over seeing me.

Tonight he asked me why I wasn’t dating anyone, and I told him, honestly if a bit sheepishly, that it was mostly because of how I felt about him, though also because I won’t be in South Florida much longer.

I couldn’t possibly deal with another relationship, which is why it’s good that neither Will nor Craig called me back.