Tuesday, March 3, 1998
8 PM Pacific Time. What I said last night about not wanting to know the unexpected difficulties I’d have traveling today: I’m glad I didn’t.
The bottom line is that my flight out of Miami this morning was so delayed that I missed my Phoenix-San Jose connection, and so I had to take a later flight to California, missing the 5 PM gate closing at Villa Montalvo.
Which is why I’m now in a crummy smokers’ room (the last one I could get: either it’s not as bad as the one I once had in Tampa or I’ve gotten used to the smell of tobacco because of Gianni) at a creepy Motel 6 on El Camino Real in Santa Clara.
Still, I survived. Last night I barely slept, and when I did, it was so lightly that when Dad appeared in my kitchen, it occurred to me that I was dreaming and I abruptly “awakened” from the hallucination.
I picked Marc up – he was already at the door – and I drove to Miami International Airport, getting stuck in traffic, and finally getting off the Palmetto Expressway and frantically making my way through the streets.
Marc helped me get to the America West counter in the crazy airport, and that’s when I saw that my 7:45 AM flight was now leaving at 8:30 AM. So I wouldn’t make my later flight at 11:50 AM Phoenix time and had to be put on one nearly three hours after that.
I did have the time to call Unemployment and file for a $500 benefit check – my last one except for a $445 check in two weeks – and to call Gianni, who’d gotten home too late last night to call me. He said when he called this morning, my number had already been changed.
It was good to talk to Gianni. He said on Friday he’d seen a car that looked like mine and that I was silly not to come into the salon to say hi. I closed by saying thanks and “I love you” and that I’d page him from California.
I had lots of food I’d brought along for the flight, along with the juices and some snacks the flight attendants served. I also listened to the start of the four-cassette Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.
At Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport at noon, I had over two hours to kill. I called Sat Darshan at work – I’d gotten her number when I’d phoned from Miami – and we chatted, and I got an invitation to stay with her and Ravinder in April. That would be great!
Startled by seeing the mountains outside the airport, I went out of the terminal for 
Avoiding caffeine at Starbucks, I got TCBY yogurt and walked around the airport shops and restaurants. I called Mom to wish her a happy birthday, and I picked up some Valley of the Sun home buyers’ guides to send to her. So my stayover in Phoenix proved to be interesting.
On the two-hour flight to San Jose, I sat with two young Silicon Valley types – a woman who’d gone from a sales rep to director of sales at a four-year-old firm that tested silicon wafers for semiconductor makers (she wants to get “a chunk of cash” when they go public so she’ll have a million or so to open a children’s camp) and a guy at some other high-tech start-up who also hopes they’ll be so successful that he can make tons of money from an IPO in a few years and then do something fun.
My luggage came out right away, and I got a cart with a credit card (one of my suitcases’ pull straps broke in Miami, but I improvised) and rented a car at Budget relatively easily.
Not knowing where to go, I picked up one of those coupon booklets and figured I’d go to a Howard Johnson’s in Santa Clara.
Unfortunately, the Sikhs who ran the Howard Johnson’s told me they were all booked up, and they assured me that it would be the same at all the nearby motels (“It’s always like this on Monday or Tuesday”) and they suggested I try the skeevy Motel 6 down the road.
Still, it’s not such a bad place. Cops are here, but one assured me, “Santa Clara is a sleepy little town,” and after I got settled, I went to a supermarket, my favorite place to go when I first get to a new city, and then I drove up this road to Sunnyvale, in a higher-rent, more techie area.
I began to get tired a little while ago, but of course it’s 11 PM for me. I’m reminded of the first night I spent in California, in a Best Western near LAX in April 1991, although (because?) I had jet lag, I couldn’t sleep.
Wednesday, March 4, 1998
7 PM. I’m in my apartment in Villa Montalvo. I’ve got one of the two suites that are in the mansion itself as opposed to the three small apartments in a cottage off to the side. It’s going to take me a while to adjust, but given all that was thrown at me today, I’ve done fine.
In the motel, I slept surprisingly well (no dizziness from the plane) but I awoke at 3:30 AM, my body thinking it was three hours later. I lay in bed and listened to NPR’s Morning Edition, and at 6 AM, I improvised exercises for half an hour, then went out to get some hot water to make oatmeal and grits and for some yogurt and a navel orange (one of the few items that are cheaper here).
Kathryn Funk didn’t get here till 9:30 AM, but Catherine at the front desk gave me the initial tour and led me to my room. Because workers are renovating the kitchen, I can’t get into the house the usual way, and I’ve had trouble with the “panic” doors from the courtyard and the solarium.
I haven’t met the other “ARs” (artist residents) yet, though I’ll see them tomorrow at 9:30 AM when we meet with the staff.
On Sunday we’re having an open house for the public, and Paige, the playwright, and I will be giving a reading while the artists and composer will open their studios.
Unlike other artists’ colonies, here tourists are constantly walking all over the grounds and there’ll be a wedding here this weekend. Villa Montalvo is a fabulous 
But it’s quite far from the town of Saratoga, and it looks as if I’ll probably need to rent a car for my entire stay here.
I left for two long trips today, first to buy groceries and supplies at Safeway on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, and then into the town of Los Gatos and from there to more suburban Campbell, where I discovered The Pruneyard, a giant outdoor mall with a Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, the California trendy yuppie supermarket Trader Joe’s, and other stores.
Luckily, yesterday and today were sunny days – though it’s quite cool for me, and my hands are chapped, first from the planes’ dry air and now from the 45°-60° temperatures.
At least I didn’t become completely messed up by jet lag. At the Safeway around noon, I started to feel faint, but I ate three slices of sourdough Wonder Bread from my shopping cart while on line for the cashier, and they brought my blood sugar level back up.
I had enough energy to do all my unpacking, make my bed, and put away all the groceries and household supplies I bought.
The view from my rooms is incredible. My desk is in front of a window that looks out to the front of the house, so I can see trails, trees, and the Santa Cruz Mountains that we’re at the foothills of. My side windows also have great views, starting with the just-blooming cherry blossoms.
El Niño has more rain in store tomorrow and for most of the weekend, so I’m glad I got a dry day to get acclimated to the area. I bought the Times at Barnes & Noble but probably won’t have time to read it. This morning I read the San Jose Mercury News, and at the motel I watched local TV news to get a sense of the Bay Area.
Friday, March 6, 1998
2:30 PM. It looks as if I’m going to be here at Villa Montalvo a month longer than I’d planned.
When I got back at noon today there was voicemail from Kathryn telling me that an artist had canceled and I could stay the month of April if I liked. Of course, I jumped at the chance.
After eating breakfast at 5:30 AM, I waited an hour and did a variety of Body Electric routines for various body parts, trying to remember the different exercise patterns.
I left the house at 8:30 AM. My apartment had been warm, but it was cold outside – about 45° – although it was a rare sunny day in this El Niño winter.
I did what millions of Californians do in the morning: I got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Route 85 is a new freeway, but except for the left carpool lane, 
Getting off at Mountain View, I found what I was looking for, the Mountain View City Cybercafe, where I was able to log on to AOL.
There weren’t many messages. One from this morning was from Alice, who got her CompuServe running. I told her there’ll be a delay in getting my story collection manuscript to Little, Brown and I gave her my phone number at Montalvo.
Igor IM’d me from Florida, and even though I barely know him, it was nice to have a brief conversation with a familiar person.
My other emails were either Camille’s forwards of stupid stuff or the responses to my personals ad. I gave two guys my phone number and ignored the others.
Then it occurred to me I could print out “Spaghetti Language” from the Blue Moon Review webzine so I’d have it to read on Sunday.
It cost only $8 to get an hour’s online access, six hardcopy pages and an iced tea. I figure I can go to the cafe once a week to retrieve my email.
Walking up and down Mountain View’s Castro Street, I explored the city’s downtown, which featured lots of ethnic restaurants, nearly all Asian, including two places that serve Vietnamese noodles; one pho place, Pho Hoa, is apparently a national franchise.
There was also a new performing arts center and several bookstores (including the 
I assume that all the restaurants, cafes and bars are to feed the huge population of tech workers at nearby companies like Digital, Netscape, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft’s California headquarters.
Following my brisk walk, I was glad to get back to my warm car. I drove up El Camino Real, which seems to be was the old road linking San Jose to San Francisco.
Driving past the town of Los Altos and into Palo Alto, I turned off at Stanford and drove around the campus. Of course, the Hoover Tower or whatever they call it was familiar to me from seeing it in pictures.
Tired and hungry, I got back home at noon. My key to the Spanish Courtyard entrance finally works.
When I called Florida to tell my parents that I’m staying longer here, Dad said my unemployment check for $500 had arrived and that Mom was mailing it out.
Joelle’s concert is tonight. The Mercury News gave her a nice write-up.
Saturday, March 7, 1998
6 PM. This time yesterday I went out, dressed in a white shirt and tie, sweater, dress pants and shoes, to meet the other ARs and go to the San Jose Symphony.
They’ve all known each other for one or two months, but I felt comfortable all evening – though not so comfortable squeezed into the back seat with Paige and Liz as Michael drove. Someone asked, in all seriousness, “Do you know the way to San Jose?” and of course the question cracked us up and started us singing.
Liz abandoned a middle-class life as a wife and lawyer after she took a life-changing art course when she lived in Alaska. It’s been very hard for her financially, and like me, she has no real home to get back to and no means of support.
“I freed myself from my old life” was the way she put it, and despite the difficulties of being an artist, she wouldn’t go back.
Joelle grew up in New York and Morocco. She became a composer after repetitive stress injuries made her unable to play the piano and her other instruments and she had to find another way to give voice to her musical expression.
The first woman to get a doctorate in composition from the Manhattan School of Music, Joelle suffered a devastating blow when her husband died suddenly, and some of her recent work is about grief and mourning.
I’m a musical ignoramus, and I didn’t understand the pre-concert talk by the two guys from the San Jose Symphony. Joelle, by contrast, was warm, plain-spoken and dynamic when she spoke.
I talked a little before the concert with Paige, whom I gather has family money: her parents live in Bal Harbour, and her father is a trustee at Teachers College. But I don’t really yet know her or Michael, who, like most visual artists I’ve met, isn’t a big talker.
We had comp seats in the Grand Tier, in the center of the concert hall, and I really 
In the car going home, Joelle said the conductor, Leonid Grin, did a poor job, and the orchestra had sounded better in rehearsal. But she was satisfied. Perhaps they’ll do better at tonight’s performance.
We assured Joelle that her bow onstage was not too fast. It must be wonderful to get that kind of applause from a big audience like that for something she created.
Liz and I let ourselves into the house and she said she was going right to bed. She’s been ill, first with a cold – Paige has one, too – and then allergies from all the construction work being done around here.
I read for an hour before I went to bed, and finally I slept till 6 AM.
After picking up the New York Times at Barnes & Noble (I finally caught up with all this week’s papers), I drove into San Jose: first downtown again, and then to different neighborhoods – old faded elegant ones, poor Chicano and Vietnamese ones – and past the arena where the Sharks play hockey.
It’s really frustrating to use my computer. It’s so slow and poky now, I’m constantly reminded what a bad job Notebook City did on it and how they screwed me. The desk here is too high for me to write comfortably; I’m used to writing on the floor.
I made a quarter-hearted attempt to begin a new story, but finally I started at work to put together the manuscript of a new book. It’s just ones like the samples Alice sent out: relationship stories, no jokey celebrity pieces or conceptual ones, no real meta-fiction.
I’d like this collection to be more coherent than my other books, which are hodgepodges. Besides, I’m probably going to have this book done by a gay or gay-friendly small press. The problem is, I don’t have enough material for a regular-sized book unless I include older stories which may be dated and which don’t have much gay content.
Let’s face the truth: for years I’ve been living off the hard work I did from 1974 to 1980, when I wrote the vast majority of my published stories. Since then I’ve produced some good work, but I’ve written only when struck by inspiration, and I never developed discipline as a fiction writer.
Still, this is no revelation. If I feel like a fraud here, it’s because I know I won’t get all that much done amid the distractions. I’m lazy and prefer to read rather than to write.
I’ve always said I’m accumulating “experiences” I can use someday, but mostly they’ve been used here in my diaries, where they’re presented in a raw and unpolished manner.
I know I’m taking advantage of artists’ colonies on the basis of past work, and basically I’m relaxing while I’m here, the way I did last June at Ragdale – though, yeah, I did write a few stories there.
I always say that if I really had an outlet – people who readily publish my fiction – I’d write more. Newspapers have published me more easily, and that’s why I want to do journalism.
On Monday she goes to London, and she’s worried because Camille is already not happy about their staying with Teresa’s cousins in the suburbs.
“She’d rather stay at a fleabag hotel – and she could afford a good one,” Teresa said. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a big fight in England.
Tomorrow’s the big open studios thing.
Sunday, March 8, 1998
I’m finally adjusted to the time change. Despite the noise from the wedding reception – the buzz of talk and music ranging from “The Bunny Hop” to “Do the Hustle” – I fell asleep around this time last night and didn’t get up till 6:30 AM, after a dream in which Alice and Peter visited me in California and I told them how glad I was to get out of my apartment in Florida.
After breakfast and exercises, I went out and bought the Sunday papers and read the Mercury News and started on the New York Times while I was the lone patron 
I’ve tried to wean myself from newspapers, but the habit is part of me, and right now I’m not ready to give them up. Reading the San Jose paper tells me a lot about life in Silicon Valley. God, the want ads are bulging with companies recruiting for these hard-to-fill high-tech jobs.
I bet I could make a go of it here, despite the very high cost of living. Hell, I probably could move anywhere.
The Times had a feature spotlighting a day in the life of an overworked adjunct teaching English at New York City Community College and Pace. Her life is familiar to me and the majority of part-time college instructors.
As the adjunct situation worsens, I’m glad to see the press paying attention to it, though I’m pessimistic that anything will be done.
If I’m a total musical ignoramus, I’m also not well-informed about conceptual art, but I liked this piece: a floating ear in a desk whose open drawer stretched out for ten feet, bisected by a chair; the drawer contained a projection of a headless naked body that appeared to be just the surface of the water.
I told Daniel it gave me a feeling of vertigo. He apparently viewed the piece as a 
Next, I went over to Liz’s studio and was impressed with her work, which are skin figures based on her own body, in different materials (lace, skin-diving suit fabric, luggage-like weaved material).
Liz works so meticulously, and her latest piece is a body made up of needlepoint patterns that will require 70,000 stitches.
We met Michael’s mother, brother and cousin, and of course chatted with other people – including Judy Moran, who was Kathryn’s predecessor, the one who signed my acceptance letter.
At 3 PM, our reading began, and after Kathryn introduced all of us resident artists, I went first. I was a bit scared to read “Spaghetti Language,” but ultimately I decided against being safe with a familiar crowd-pleaser like “But in a Thousand Other Worlds” or “Twelve-Step Barbie.”
This story was riskier, and I didn’t get a great reaction, it seemed, but afterwards many people came over and said they enjoyed it and said it was funny.
Joelle, who had me into her studio for tea before the reading, played tapes of a choral piece based on a St. Teresa poem and her String Quartet, a beautiful piece that was triggered by the sudden death of her husband.
(She came home from a dress rehearsal of her first opera to get an answering machine message saying he’d dropped dead, and even in that moment of shock and horror she realized that she would one day use it in her music.)
But during the last half-hour, I got trapped by a 72-year-old naturopathic physician who told me a long story of how he discovered his healing abilities – which everyone has – and related all these anecdotes of his helping sick people.
Hearing him talk about “aura” and orangutans telling people how to get in touch with their chakras, I definitely knew I was in Northern California. We were the last ones at the reception, but finally his wife, on the volunteer committee, took him away and I could go upstairs to my room.
Work is good, Gianni said, and then there were two big parties he went to that were work-related. He said he’s getting off AOL and his home phone is changing to a number he’ll share with Alejandro. (I’m smart enough so that he really didn’t need to tell me to avoid endearments on voice messages.)
The truth is, my life and Gianni’s are so divergent now, I don’t expect we’ll be in touch often. I felt pleased when he called me “babe” twice, and I’m glad we’re friends, but like Gianni, I realized our relationship was meant to be transitional: we got each other through unsettled times in our lives.
Monday, March 9, 1998
8:30 PM. Last night I slept less than five hours, from 2 AM till 6:30 AM, but it was merely my usual insomnia, not any time zone problem. Obviously, I’m now adjusted to Pacific Time, so much so that only a couple of times a day do I think that it’s three hours later back East.
I was fairly productive today. My plan is to gather up all my “realistic” stories – i.e., avoiding pure satire and comedy and the experimental stuff that doesn’t deal with autobiography or credible characters – into one book manuscript and tightly edit each story.
I plan to type up stories from the old collections if I think they’re usable. A publisher can look at everything, or I can send some of the stories (the gayer ones, the more ’90s ones, the older ones) as smaller collections.
Then I read most of the paper over iced tea at Peet’s Coffee & Tea, a nearby café with interesting Silicon Valley types and the cutest young gay counter boys.
I love the idea that I’m in California; today I even wrote a little about Stacy and how back in the early 1970s, when we were in college, she had such an obsession with the Golden State.
In the afternoon, I went out again, to the Saratoga Library, where I read some of 
Just as I exercise my muscles every day – though without a TV and VCR, it’s a lot harder to think up varied routines for half an hour in the morning than I thought it would be – I need to exercise my case-reading skills or they’ll atrophy.
The last time I was out today was after an early dinner, at 5:30 PM, when I took a walk along the 1½-mile nature trail. According to the Montalvo map, it may not be steep, but it did cause me to huff and puff slightly.
It was incredible, though: the view of the Valley from its highest point, and all those tall trees and gurgling brooks and stuff.
It was quite brisk out. I wore my hood and was grateful that even the Walkman headset playing NPR’s All Things Considered on KQED helped keep my ears warm.
I got Mom’s first letter, containing two checks (from Unemployment and FPL), two credit card bills, and a couple of other items.
Wednesday, March 11, 1998
7 PM. Starting at 3:30 PM today, I did light editing and proofreading of the new collection for a few hours: cleaning up copies of the stories, trying to make characters in one story consistent with characters in another, etc.
It’s supposed to be rainy for the next few days, so after doing laundry in the basement of the cottage, I thought I’d take advantage of today’s sunshine and record warmth (it hit 71°) to drive to the beach.
Santa Cruz was warm enough that people were wearing shorts and some guys were shirtless.
I’d seen pictures of the boardwalk and beach, so I wasn’t surprised by the tackiness of the place. Still, the people at the beach did seem skeevier and more gruesome than anyone I’ve seen in Silicon Valley, and I felt a little concerned about my safety.
The beach was thoroughly littered with debris – mostly tree limbs – that had washed up 
I entered the mammoth Cocoanut Grove arcade – filled with the latest video games and the oldest carnival machines (Skee-ball, the mechanical shovel that picks up little trinkets, the old lady fortuneteller) – only to use the bathroom.
Driving through downtown Santa Cruz, I saw hipper, cleaner young people – probably some students at the University – and some decent stores and restaurants, but I decided not to stay in town for more than an hour.
The drive between Santa Cruz and Los Gatos on Route 17 is only 23 miles, so as scary as the road can be, it’s not a long ride, but nothing makes me want to return. I’d rather spend time in San Francisco.