Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, February 2, 1998

9 AM. My inner thigh hurt so much on Saturday night that I needed to apply a heating pad and take two Tylenol for the pain. But it felt better on Sunday, and I hope it’s begun to heal.

I went on AOL on Sunday morning, and Mark Savage IM’ed me, so we chatted for a bit. His big news was that he’s found a co-op on Avenue H between East 9th and East 10th Streets in Brooklyn.

It will be hard to leave New Jersey and strange to be going back to live in Brooklyn, but he can drive to the  school where he teaches via Ocean Avenue and Flatbush Avenue. And he can transfer for his master’s program to Brooklyn College, right down Avenue H.

When I got off AOL, Gianni called from New York, and that meant a lot to me, because it was the first Sunday since early December that we weren’t together.

Gianni said it was chilly and that he’d gone to a so-so Italian restaurant in the West Village the night before and was about to go out to brunch near where he was staying on the Upper West Side.

He confessed that he’s “glad I live in South Florida because I’d need $100,000 income to live here.”

Gianni said there would be no problem taking me to the airport on Wednesday because his second interview at the salon is at 11 AM.

After lunch, I got a call from Igor, and I agreed to meet him at the Plantation Barnes & Noble at 3 PM.

We sat at the bookstore’s cafe for a couple of hours. Igor was energized by his stay in New York, and his wife is trying to transfer to SUNY Optometry school for the next year.

Igor showed me a poster (in Russian) of the reading he and some other Russian writers did at a West Village bar while he was there.

I also read some of his latest poems and saw a Russian translation of E.E. Cummings that he published in a magazine in Israel that’s funded by the Mossad.

Israel has the most vibrant Russian publishing now that the end of communism has decimated Russian literary publishers; magazines like Novy Mir now have a tiny fraction of the circulation they once had, and most have just disappeared.

Émigré  Jews who were intellectuals tended to go to Israel while those who were motivated by money moved to the U.S., so the Russian scene in New York isn’t as vibrant as that in Israel.

Two weeks ago Igor started working as a computer designer for the in-house agency of one of Broward’s huge auto dealers, and he says the job is okay. It’s also in Fort Lauderdale, much closer to home than the other jobs he might have gotten in Boca or Delray. (He couldn’t get jobs in Miami because he can’t speak Spanish.)

His wife is due to give birth at the end of March, so it’s good that he’s got a steady income now. When we left, I told Igor to call me the next time he plans to read at an open mic at Borders or B&N.

When I got home, Mom called, saying she’d been suspicious when she got a call from Mark Bernstein and didn’t want to give him my number, fearing that he might be from CGR or UF.

I told her it was okay and she relayed the message that Mark was taking care of his sick 92-year-old mother in Miami Beach.

When I phoned Mark, he said he’d been here for a week. His mother broke her pelvis in a bad fall and was bedridden, and he needed to deal with nursing care, Medicare, etc. He was planning to leave today, so I agreed to meet him last evening.

Since he offered to drive with his rental car and I didn’t feel like schlepping all the way down to South Beach, we arranged to meet at the Barnes & Noble at Loehman Fashion Island in North Miami Beach at 7 PM.

Mark told me he’d be wearing something outrageous, and I recognized him by his garish yellow-and-red t-shirt and mustard shorts.

He said he wouldn’t have recognized me at all because he remembered me as bearded, heavier and younger.

We sat outside at a table and talked for hours, and then when it got too cold, we sat in my car. I guess being with his mother all week gave Mark the need to talk about his situation. He’s grateful that neither his mother nor his in-laws knew about his arrest even though it was in USA Today.

Clearly, it was a life-changing experience, one that nearly destroyed his life, and one he’s still dealing with. It now seems to be settled.

At first, the provost, a vicious woman, and the college attorney (“both dykes, I’m sure”) demanded his resignation.

The other professor arrested in the men’s room had an endowed chair in accounting and left right away, but Mark hired a Cincinnati lawyer to help him keep his job – as well as two local lesbian attorneys to deal with the criminal charges.

After months of threats, negotiations, sleepless nights, therapy, an unsuccessful try at taking antidepressants (which made him worse), he pleaded no contest to a fourth-degree misdemeanor in mid-December.

The university is making him go without pay for the spring semester (in the fall he was suspended with pay), so in addition to the huge attorneys’ fees, he’s giving up a lot in income.

Mark was given only an hour to decide whether to take this offer or risk a college hearing. Fellow faculty have been supportive, but the provost could have overruled a faculty committee decision not to kick him out, so he decided to gamble.

His wife has long known that he was gay, but she wanted to keep it from their daughters. The older daughter just finished her first semester at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she’s a poet and a TA but hates it. The younger one is a sophomore at Miami.

The girls were devastated and angry that their parents didn’t trust them enough to tell them about Mark’s sexuality.

Mark feels he let himself get into the whole situation to punish himself. The reason? Last summer in Europe he fell in love with a French painter but ultimately decided not to leave his wife and kids – “even though I felt he was the person I was waiting for my whole life.”

Oxford is a tiny town, much smaller than Gainesville, and his arrest was on TV and in the papers, so everyone knows. Mark says he goes from feeling ashamed, that he should abjectly apologize and beg forgiveness, to feeling rage over how he was treated because part of him believes he did nothing wrong.

Over and over, he expressed his hatred of the “two vicious bitches” – the provost and the general counsel – who have destroyed his life. He can’t get another job, and they made sure that the offer of the no-pay spring suspension came too late for him to get work elsewhere for the semester.

Mark has never done anything but teach, and because he’s been to Europe so frequently, his salary is lower than those of “all the young lesbians the English Department has hired recently” whose scholarship and radical politics he disdains.

Mark’s wife has never worked, and he can’t ask her to get a job now. (That must be what she’s gotten out of a twenty-year marriage: she didn’t have to go out in the world and make a life for herself.)

Mark has always wanted to “have a family,” and he was the one who pressured her to get married and have kids that she didn’t want. Even with guys, Mark was always the one in the relationship who wanted to “settle down.”

“If you’re a confirmed bachelor, I’m a born husband,” he said.

When we parted at 11 PM, I said I wished him better things and that I’d stay in touch.

I guess what astonished me most was Mark’s late revelation that he goes into his departmental office every day!

I mean, if I were in his position, I would use this time to rent my house and get away from that horrible small Midwestern town he so hates.

Looking for lessons in the problems in others’ lives, I probably see what I want to, things that justify my own life. But it seems to me that Mark opted for security and respectability through his marriage and a safe academic job, and that he never took risks.

As one man supporting four adults, he’s had many responsibilities and obligations – now including the responsibility of caring for his elderly mother as she becomes more infirm.

Right now on this dark blustery morning, I’m feeling anxiety about my New Orleans trip – and a taste of the fear I will feel as February drags on and I prepare to leave for California and a very uncertain future.

I don’t really like traveling at all. I crave stability even more than most people, which is why the last couple of months here in Davie have been so easy for me.

Even all last fall, with my busy schedule of teaching at Nova and FAU, I never felt the knot of anxiety in my stomach telling me I was about to do something I was afraid to do.

I feel that anxiety now, but I’ve got to get out of bed and start my day.

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Wednesday, February 4, 1998

9 AM. The power came on late last evening, and after fixing the clocks, I went back to bed. Gianni called again and said that earlier he’d been “unable to talk freely.” He’ll be over here after his 11 AM interview.

I told him he wouldn’t be seeing me at my best. Leaving him is one reason I’ve got a feeling of dread, not so much about the New Orleans trip, but about the traveling I’ll be doing later. He said that we’ll still see each other once I get settled in the summer, especially if I end up moving to Maryland.

I called Tom last night; as I’d figured, he had emailed me – actually Annette did – and said I should take a cab when I got in, which is of course what I’d planned to do. I did sleep okay, thanks to two Triavils, although I’ve got that nervousness-tiredness I get when I’m anxious.

This morning I went out at 7:30 AM, but the first Publix I went to had no dairy products or frozen food because of the power outage from the storm, and the ATM at NationsBank was still broken, so I went to – –

My neighbor just rang my bell, telling me to move my car because there is a huge piece of aluminum stuck in the tree by it and the metal would likely fall down on the car in today’s heavy wind. I was grateful, as I was planning to leave the car in that parking spot while I was out of town.

Mom just called and she said maybe Marc could pick me up on Sunday. Gianni offered to pick me up, and he said Alejandro is leaving on Sunday, so maybe we could spend the day together, but I’d rather see him later and do stuff and rest Sunday afternoon.

On AOL, I had long messages from Teresa and Elihu, and a question from Josh about James Atlas’s address. When I answered it, Josh IM’ed me and wanted to chat, but I told him I had to leave for New Orleans.

Elihu complains about his job, as usual, and he’s had no luck meeting guys for dates, as usual.

I also replied to an old email from Patrick.

Well, I actually don’t have that much left to do, but I’d like to speed-read the New York Times and exercise and get my last-minute shit together. Naturally, I’m way over-packed, but I have a big suitcase anyway.

I’m obviously not going to be able to get everything in my two suitcases when I go to California next month. Like Florida, California is experiencing horrendous El Niño storms and power outages.

Why do I still get so anxious? These travel days are like days out of my life. I don’t deal with disruptions well, yet it seems I’m constantly disrupting my life. Wouldn’t it be easier if I lived like Elihu or Josh?

*

10 PM. I’m in Tom’s study, the second room in the shotgun house, and despite the gas heater, I’m chilly and don’t expect to sleep much tonight. Maybe I’ll have time to read the students’ stories for Friday’s workshop.

I’ve read three stories for tomorrow afternoon, and in the morning class, I’ll just talk and let them talk and have them read or whatever.

Gianni came over at 1:30 PM; I’d missed him a lot even though I’d seen him on Friday. Still, with his being in New York – he also made a quick trip to Maryland – it seemed quite a while.

He said the interview with the salon owner was odd, and he was distressed that she didn’t seem to know technical stuff; apparently she’s a colorist by instinct, but since the position would be as her assistant, Gianni had wanted to be able to learn something from her.

They have the same attitude about customers, but she didn’t tell Gianni what the salary was and wanted him to begin part-time. “Right now I’m this close to buying a ticket to Europe,” Gianni said.

He drove me to the airport and I kissed him goodbye at the Southwest terminal. The flight was all right; I keep forgetting when I don’t fly regularly that I’m not afraid to fly anymore.

Southwest’s “seat yourself” policy of no assigned seats seems to give them a quick turnaround, good on flights like these, where we stopped at Tampa before New Orleans and then the plane was going on to Birmingham and Chicago.

I got in a little after 5 PM CST, and I arrived here an hour later. I’d seen Tom on TV lately, but he seemed to look me over since he hasn’t seen me in three years. I’m now beardless and wearing glasses, not my contacts.

Annette arrived from work soon after, and she’s very nice. As you’d expect from a companion of Tom’s, she’s very smart and very articulate. I was interested in hearing about German universities and Tom and Annette’s experiences in Stuttgart.

At dinner, I declined the salad because Annette, who has a bad cold, was handling it, but with Tom sick, too, I expect it’s inevitable I’ll catch a cold here, as I did on my last visit.

Afterwards, Tom began discussing the nightmare he’d been through during the hearings about his behavior as program director. He said Brad had made all these mistakes last year which led to the disaster with the students.

He told me about stuff like parents taking kids out of school to go fox hunting, the kind of thing I never hear anywhere else but in New Orleans.

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Thursday, February 5, 1998

10 PM. I’m tired after a very long, atypical day. Tom and Annette just retired to the bedroom, leaving me here as they did this time last night. Then, I was cold at first, but eventually the room became warm. I did sleep, if only from 12:30 AM to 5 AM, but that’s not bad for an insomniac like me.

Of course, my usual routine of eating, exercising and reading the newspaper was disrupted, but if I can’t deal with that for one day, then I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything in this life.

Besides, there’s enough going on at NOCCA that’s interesting. The morning class, a group of six, was pretty unreceptive, although Tom says they’re often dead-headed. Perhaps they didn’t know what to make of me.

I did meet Anne Gisleson before class, although I’m sure I met her from when she was a student in the years around 1983-85. Tom gave me a very flattering introduction in both classes, saying my experiments in reflexivity were unique and comparable with Queneau’s, etc.

I asked the students about their interests, talked about my work, my writing career and media stunts, and I had them do the “Once I was. . . . Now I am. . . .” exercise (and I did it myself).

After the morning class, Anne, Tom and I came back here to have lunch with Brad. The tensions among them weren’t evident, and we had a pleasant meal.

In the afternoon class, I began with a workshop of three stories of the six students. (We’ll do the other three tomorrow.)

I don’t think I would have done as well as I did without Tom’s perceptive comments, but over the years I guess I’ve managed to learn a few things about creative writing workshops.

In the final fifteen minutes of class, I discussed my media stuff, mostly so I could get out in the open Tom’s experience on the Sally Jessy Raphael show, which has been the subject of gossip and speculation, but which the students have never brought up with Tom.

At NOCCA, Tom’s appearance on Sally was being treated as if it were a scandal. We learned from one student that Tom made the show Talk Soup as their Quote of the Week, when he said of the dead, “It’s a terrible thing to forget one’s name.”

Class began at 1 PM and ended at 3:45 PM, and then Tom and I came home and walked around the Audubon Park Zoo for an hour or so. I took special pleasure in seeing the tree-kangaroo family, the sea lions, the tapirs and the gigantic rodents called capybaras.

Annette came home after 6 PM and we had dinner, then Tom and I read the stories for tomorrow’s workshops, and we talked – as we had the entire day.

By now I’ve heard Tom talk about his NOCCA problems so much that it seems as if he’s repeating himself.

I understand how traumatic it was for him to return from Germany to what seemed like a world that had changed, one in which he lost power to students and parents who wouldn’t let him teach the way he always had before.

It must be a shock, and I understand he’s trying to undo damage, but I’m not a dedicated teacher like Tom is and I would just as easily let everything go.

Of course, I’ve never created a program like NOCCA’s Writing Program, nor have I ever felt, as Tom does, that he is the most qualified person in the world for his position.

He created a miracle program, but today’s parents and students are a different breed than they were seventeen years ago, when Tom first brought me to teach at NOCCA.

Back then, the students were, or seemed to be, better writers. But more importantly, they weren’t so “empowered” and Tom could be tougher on them without worrying about their parents’ opposition – not to mention their destructiveness.

As it was quite chilly here for a South Floridian, I’m glad I kept on my sweater over my long-sleeved dress shirt and t-shirt all day.

I’m so tired now, I know this diary entry is neither coherent nor cohesive (like many of the NOCCA students’ stories) – but this day will remain more vivid in my memory than my writing here would make it appear.

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Saturday, February 7, 1998

10 PM. After Tom and Annette got up and had breakfast, I walked with them to the bank and a store. In mid-morning, I accompanied Tom as he drove Annette to the bookstore and then to his tax preparer’s office.

He told me to meet him back at the bookstore in 45 minutes, and at first I thought I’d walk, but then I saw the streetcar stopping, and since I hadn’t been on it since my first time in New Orleans in 1981, I hopped aboard and rode it the dozen blocks back to the bookstore.

In the intervening time, I sipped iced tea at a café, looking out at the passing scene – the strollers and the streetcars – and read the New York Times and chatted with an old black man about today’s New Orleans mayoral election.

At the bookstore, a great place with first editions and good used books, Tom introduced me to the owner, Professor Cohen, who set up the store after he retired from Tulane.

Cohen said he’s gotten a lot of good libraries lately because some local book collectors had recently died. It’s usually death that puts large personal libraries on the market.

Back home, Tom and I had lunch and then walked through the park, spotting coots with the ducks and geese in the pond, and then over to the dead Uptown Square center to visit the Uptown Book Store.

Mark, the owner, is dying of AIDS and is rarely in the store. Tom picked up the books he had ordered, and when Annette got home this evening, Tom got even more books from her.

Tom’s life is in books, and he estimates that if he does move to Germany, it will cost $7,000 to ship his enormous library over there from New Orleans.

Compared to Tom, I’ve barely owned a single volume, as I’m not really a bibliophile – though perhaps that’s because of my prejudice against possessions.

But in any case, I’m not even one-tenth as literary as Tom and Annette are. With Tom, I can be walking in the park and suddenly he’ll talk about some novelist or novel, often one I’ve never heard of or knew about but haven’t read.

Back home, I read some chapters of Tom’s The President in Her Towers novel, which he can’t even get publishers or agents to look at.

It’s brilliant, I can tell, but too literary for today’s market, and unfortunately, today publishing has become only a market.

If Tom had born twenty years earlier, today he’d be the revered, if not widely read, retired professor whose books have been admired, praised and critiqued by the literary establishment.

Tom showed me all his rejections over the past few years, and of course they make him bitter. How can they not?

Rejections wouldn’t make me bitter, but that’s because I would have stopped writing long ago if I’d had Tom’s experiences. Hell, I barely keep writing now even though I’ve been far luckier in getting my books published.

When I went on AOL with Annette’s PowerBook, I discovered I got an email from Alice on Thursday. Alice said that an editor at Rob Weisbach/Morrow would like to see six more stories. I’m sure nothing will come of it, but it’s nice to get at least one person interested.

I spoke to Gianni, who said he didn’t mind picking me up at the airport tomorrow even if he didn’t come back to Davie to hang out until later in the day.

Tom and I picked up Annette at 6:30 PM and hung around until she closed the store. Then we enjoyed a good dinner at that Thai restaurant I liked the last time I was in town.

Back home in this room, we talked and talked for hours. They said I was a good guest, but they are better hosts.