Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Tuesday, March 24, 1998

11 AM. Yesterday I got a call at 2:30 PM from a guy whose ad in Metro (Silicon Valley’s alternative weekly) I’d answered – mostly because it had more than a voicemail 900 number and listed a Campbell P.O. box.

The ad had said he was Asian, but I didn’t realize his English would be so poor. Still, it would have been rude to hang up on him (which he later told me people do when they hear him talk: “It hurt my feelings”), and he sounded pleasant.

So despite the heavy rain, I agreed to meet him at 4 PM at the Bank of America near Barnes & Noble at the Pruneyard.

The first thing he said when he saw me was, “You Vietnamese size.” It clearly pleased him that he was just a couple of inches shorter than me.

He’s not terrific-looking, but he’s not unattractive – though I don’t like his mustache, which grows in like a 14-year-old’s.

And as I sat down at the Barnes & Noble café with my iced tea and watched him at the counter while he poured sugar in his coffee, I noticed he has a terrific little body. He told me he weighs 130 pounds.

His name is Thien Ngoc Nguyen, “all very common in my country.” He came here three years ago from his home outside Da Nang, and he lives with his 69-year-old parents.

Thien’s father must be one of those who worked with the CIA during the war and who were finally brought over here in belated recognition of their sacrifices. His father was imprisoned seven years by the communists for aiding the Americans and the South Vietnamese.

He’s the ninth of ten children, all of whom are married and have children except his younger sister, “who have a boyfriend who call all the time and spend weekends.”

He said he had a girlfriend in Vietnam who loved him, but he knew he was gay since he was 14 and wouldn’t marry her. After he left, she married someone else but she named her son after him and sent him photos every month “of your son Thien” – “even though I never have sex with her.”

I often find Vietnamese immigrants hard to understand, and I sometimes had to ask what he meant or tried to figure it out by myself – like I eventually realized that when he talked about what sounded like “dress people,” he meant straight people.

The same thing happened when I thought he said the plane taking him and his family to the U.S. had stopped in Spain, which made no sense until it occurred to me that he was saying Japan.

He had been working while he went to San Jose City College to learn English, but now he just goes to school.

He’s frustrated him because he’s 25 and has been here three years and can’t speak better. The problem is that all his friends speak Vietnamese and he doesn’t have American friends who will practice talking English with him.

Actually, he’s very chatty (as Gianni would say). It was as if he’d been waiting so long to express himself in English that a dam was bursting forth, and he told me a lot about Vietnam and how poor everyone was.

Later, when we looked at travel books and photos of the country, he talked even more. In answer to my question, Thien said that they did used to eat dog there, but mostly because there was no food. His family actually had a pet dog, whom he described lovingly. (“The dog speak Vietnamese and understand us.”)

Thien’s parents know he’s gay – they found out somehow – and are very upset and hope he’ll “get over it.” At night he can hear them talking together to God (they’re Catholic) about their lives.

He’s lonely and he talked about how close and loving his parents are, as are all of his brothers and sisters and their spouses and kids. Some are in Vietnam, like his oldest sister, who’s 45 and a grandmother.

His mother waited all those years for his father to return from prison, and when he did, she greeted him with so much love and adoration, “I think they like Romeo and Juliet.” And it bothers him that he can never have that “because I am gay.”

“You can have that,” I said. “Romeo and Romeo.”

“I no think so.”

When I told Thien I was Jewish, he said he’d never heard of the religion. He asked me to explain it, and it took me surprisingly long to come up with a coherent answer.

I told him I was 35. I’m pretty sure he didn’t understand what I’m doing here in California. Anyway, I think he’ll probably call again, and if he does, I’d probably see him.

He’s so sweet that I wouldn’t want to hurt him, even if we can’t really communicate on a level necessary for a relationship – though sometimes I wonder if people can communicate in a different, more profound way when they are from completely different worlds.

If I said I had little in common with Gianni, with Thien, there’s maybe 1% of that. I think he wanted to hug me a little when we left the bookstore, and although I was attracted to him, I don’t want to take advantage of him.

Driving back to Saratoga, I got stuck in rush hour traffic and didn’t arrive here till 6:30 PM, but in the rain I managed to unlock the gate and drive my car through and then lock the gate behind me. That was my first time, so the next time will be easier.

My little TV played the Oscars (bad sound, no picture) while I ate and read. I fell asleep at 11 PM and woke up around 4 AM.

Surprisingly, it’s been sunny and warm so far today; the heavy rains haven’t yet materialized. Leaving the villa at 8 AM, I drove to Los Gatos, got the papers and read them over iced tea at Le Boulanger.

Later, at the office, I picked up the mail Mom sent out. I got both checks, totaling $825, and I’ll deposit them by mail at NationsBank. I also got a certified letter from Bala Gardens notifying me they were keeping my deposit because I broke the lease.

I got a Macy’s credit card and was turned down by Nordstrom, and when I called Mom, she said a Mervyn’s card came for me today.

Nova sent the student evaluations for the Business, Government and Society course, and they were very good. The funniest comment: “The professor did an excellent job of making this course semi-interesting.”

ASU said I’m eligible for only $5,600 in student aid for their graduate program in journalism; they expect me to get the other $11,000 estimated for expenses from my own resources. But that’s need-based aid, and perhaps I will be given an assistantship if I’m admitted.

I called Enterprise and made a reservation for a rental car with them in a week, but they’re only $5 cheaper than Budget, and if I can keep this car more weeks, I probably will.

I have to call Libby and Grant, and I should call Kevin, too. I left a message for Gianni on the machine that has Alejandro ‘s voice on the message: just a quick breezy hi from California.

In the car last evening, as Thien led me to the entrance to Route 17, I heard that the California Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts are a private organization exempt from the state civil rights laws, so they can exclude gay people and atheists.

Too bad. But eventually the Boy Scouts will open their membership, I believe – if only because some state high courts take a different view than California’s. (The judges who were up for reelection this fall were probably afraid of a recall.)

After three weeks here, I feel like a Californian.

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Wednesday, March 25, 1998

2 PM. It’s a chilly, rainy afternoon. We’re going out to dinner tonight, Kathryn and the artist residents. Till then, I plan to stay in.

Yesterday, as I’d hoped he would, Thien called, and we spoke for about an hour. He’s so lonely, and he knows I won’t be around for that long. (I haven’t given him an exact date.)

Thien was telling me that in a competition for singers, he was one of five picked out of 500 contestants. Apparently the Vietnamese recording industry is located in Southern California – probably Orange County, where Westminster is the seat of the Vietnamese exile community – and they arrange these contests to pick people they train to be pop stars.

But Thien said he didn’t want to go to because – of course I’m not relating this as he said it – he was afraid being a singer is too risky: either he could become very rich and successful, or like most singers, not get anywhere.

He understands how risky the arts are as a career, but he envies my happiness in pursuing writing and he said, “Maybe someday you write book that very popular and you make lots of money.” For him, though, security and stability are more important.

I can’t provide Thien with either of those things. If I had a relationship with him, he’d end up getting really hurt when I left, so it’s not fair of me to lead him on.

Look at how attached I got to Gianni – though I now feel I acted terribly that last week when I felt our entire relationship had been a lie.

After three weeks in California, my perspective has changed and I see that what Gianni and I had was real but temporary, and it went about as well as it could have.

Even if I wasn’t going to leave Florida, even if there was no Alejandro – Gianni and I couldn’t ever have been a permanent couple. I want to write a story about our relationship, but I can’t quite figure out how to do it yet.

I expect I’ll see Thien again, though I’m concerned he might mistake my interest in him for the kind of love he craves: his parents’ kind of love, which kept his mother going through the many years when his father was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese.

Funny, when I answered Thien’s ad, I was expecting some sophisticated Bay Area gay guy; I guess I pictured someone who was Asian but born here, as so many younger people around here were.

Sue called yesterday and I joked with her about my not having the right kind of blood (HIV-positive) to her to phone me from VirX.

VirX’s ads are prominently displayed in the back page of The Bay Guardian; the recruitment for the blood tests say, “Call Sue at 1-800-960-VIRX.”

Anyway, we chatted about her work and family and made a lunch date for next Wednesday, when she has to stay late because they’ll be getting blood samples all day; at 6 PM, she has to put them in the refrigerator and then at 8 PM put them in the freezer.

Today I spoke to Libby. She’s fine, and so is the family. She knows this area and had planned to come up to Santa Cruz for Easter to stay with friends, but she volunteered to do the Easter egg hunt at church and can’t come up now.

Lindsay’s finding it hard at her new gymnastics gym because most of the girls are older – 14 or 15 – while at only 10, she’s a relative baby. Plus, they all have been together awhile.

Wyatt has a piano recital this weekend, and he’s doing well in school except for his behavior; it’s hard for him to sit still. I asked Libby about her brother and she said that he and his wife are fine – no kids yet – and still living in Brooklyn while he works at LIU.

I told her I’d be staying here till the end of April but left open the possibility of visiting. Last night I slept soundly from 9:30 PM till 6:30 AM, so I caught up on my rest.

This morning I drove to Mountain View and got on the cybercafé computer for an hour. There were only two messages on AOL.

One, from Alice, wanted to know when I’d sent the book manuscript out to Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown; I guess I have to find a way to print it out in the next day or two.

The other was an acceptance of “Anything But Sympathy” – yay, finally! – by 12-Gauge Review, a Park Slope-based hard-copy literary magazine as well as a webzine.

I feel gratified that the long story – the last one in my book manuscript – was finally accepted. The webzine version should be out in April.

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Thursday, March 26, 1998

8 PM on a chilly night. I’ve just come in from spending an hour in the public library. I’m now familiar with unlocking and relocking the gates when I come in at night, and my flashlight helped me navigate the dark once I left the car.

The downstairs of the villa is filled with tables at which antiquarian booksellers will set up their wares tomorrow for Saturday’s all-day book fair.

Today I saved my book manuscript, the table of contents, and the title page on a floppy disk as word files and sent it off to Alice with a letter and a check for $50, which is what it should cost her to print out the book if she wants to send it to Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown.

The e-mail Alice wrote today said the book “is a tougher sell than I expected.” In my letter, I told her I knew it was hopeless from the beginning and it was fine with me if she stopped wasting her time.

Paul Fericano dislikes my negative attitude, but of course he has to be on Alice’s side because he’s putting all his time and energy on a novel that he’s got to believe is publishable.

It’s like Pete Cherches having to believe he’d get an academic job in order for him to complete his dissertation. My own attitude – call it realism, call it pessimism – is why I consider writing fiction a hobby, not my life’s work.

Perhaps my attitude is self-defeating, but everything I’ve experienced in the past 20 years as a published writer and everything I know about publishing tells me that my books and stories will never be popular, not even on the level of the literary writers of the 1970s.

Last evening we all met at the office at 6:30 PM, and Michael brought his cousin Matthew, a pleasant companion.

I drove Paige and Joelle into downtown Los Gatos and we had a 30-minute wait for a table at the Willow Street Wood-Fired Pizza restaurant, but the food was good and I enjoyed the conversation.

It was probably the last chance I’ll talk to the other artist residents, who will be leaving this weekend. In April, only I and the San Francisco poet Melissa Stein will be here.

Our dinner out was also the last time Kathryn would see Michael, Joelle, Liz and Paige because she flew to Tucson today to deal with her elderly mother.

I’m going to miss everyone even if I didn’t see as much of them as I would have liked – especially Liz and Joelle, who will be coming back here when I leave at the end of April.

I collected over $100 in cash when I paid the restaurant bill with my new FCNB MasterCard, thus saving me some ATM fees.

Back in my apartment at 9 PM, I returned a call from Paul, spoke to his wife Kathy, and chatted for half an hour with him about this and that. Paul and Don Skiles will be coming down here on Monday.

This morning I figured I’d do laundry, but someone else’s clothes were in the washer, so I didn’t get started until after 11 AM. In the meantime, I went out for the papers and bought some groceries at the Los Gatos Safeway.

Christy Sanford phoned when I returned; she got my number from Mom.

Christy has been attending the sentencing retrial of Stephen Todd Booker, who was sentenced to death for a 1977 rape and murder of a 94-year-old Gainesville woman.

Booker, who, like his victim, is black, became a poet in prison, and he’s had poems in Seneca Review, Kenyon Review and other little magazines and has been published by small presses. Christy said, “He has better credentials than most of my friends!”

Christy seemed aghast that Rod Smith was treating the little magazine editors and poets who testified in Booker’s behalf, either in person or on videotape, as nonentities. (Dottie Dreyer is on the three-person defense team.)

Christy then asked me a bunch of questions: what the jury’s options are, if the jury verdict has to be unanimous, etc. I answered her as best as I could. As far as I know, the jury can sentence someone to death by at least an 8-4 majority.

Christy is pretty naïve about the world, and I expect she’ll be shocked if they resentence Booker to death.

She said most of the spectators are UF law students who are very conservative and who seem to be rooting for the electric chair. That sounds typical of UF law students, and it makes me thrilled to have left that law school a year ago.

While doing the laundry and reading the papers, I came up with what I thought was a clever letter to the editor, and I e-mailed it to the New York Times. If they don’t take it, I bet the Mercury News will.

Although Thien didn’t call, as I’d hoped he would, the two calls I did get made me happy.

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Sunday, March 29, 1998

9 AM. Friday night seemed a long, lonely one.

Unable to sleep, I read in bed and then listened to a talk show on KGO, with liberal callers and host decrying the lack of gun control which led to this week’s massacre of fifth-graders by two boys, aged 11 and 13 in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

When I finally did get to sleep, I had a bad dream in which Mom accused me of using a saw incorrectly; I got so mad, I said, “Fuck you!” and wanted to use the saw on her.

After reading more of The Artist’s Way, it occurred to me that this dream was really about my inner censor, my shitbird, my chatterbox, telling me I’m not good, or not good enough.

It’s hard for me to acknowledge that as an artist, I’m blocked. I fill up my days with newspapers and radio news, but I also avoid writing fiction.

I’m very cynical and resistant to the ideas in The Artist’s Way program, especially “the morning pages”: filling up three pages every morning.

In the morning I want to exercise and listen to the news. Besides, I tell myself, I write in my diary every day. But I know it’s not the same.

I tried writing the affirmation “I am a prolific and successful writer” a dozen times, and each time I noticed the “blurts”: “Sez who?” and “No, you’re not,” etc., which softened to “Maybe, relatively” and “Okay already.”

I need to do more of this, but I am very resistant and I find excuses everywhere. Still, I did finally open my printer box and plug it in, though I haven’t tried to attach it to the laptop.

Yesterday morning, after I exercised, I went to Le Boulanger in Los Gatos and read the Times.

The café, and all downtown, was filled with rich people from their twenties to their fifties, most of them dressed like me in jeans, sneakers and flannel shirt (though some wore shorts while I was bundled up against the unseasonable cold).

Getting back here, I saw Liz loading up her car with a friend, and we talked and I hugged her goodbye. Apparently the others have left by now, and I never got to say goodbye.

When I beeped Thien, he wanted to meet at the Pruneyard Barnes & Noble at 5 PM, so I had the afternoon to think about my work. I also called Budget and renewed my car for two weeks, till April 14.

And I finally phoned Kevin. He’s been okay since he left Warner Bros. Records. He’s signed up with an agency to get work as an extra on TV shows.

It’s very tedious since he’s got to call in every half-hour every day and call a casting director when a part for his type is available. Then the casting director calls up Kevin’s photo on the computer, and if he’s right for the role, they tell him to come down.

Often he has to take a two-hour bus ride, though most of the work is in the Valley. So far he’s been a man reading a newspaper in a café on Frasier, a patient in a wheelchair being attended by a nurse (whose nametag read that she was a gynecologist) on E.R. – the show will be on May 7 – and in the background of public scenes in Melrose Place and 90210.

On Monday he’s going to be a geek on a pilot for a new sitcom about Silicon Valley. The pay is minimal, but he got a credit card just before he left his job, and Unemployment should kick in with about $185 a week to add to his meager $80-a-week pay as an extra.

Talking to Kevin made me want to go to Los Angeles. I know I feel less and less like going to Wyoming, but a lot of that is fear that it will be so isolated, fear that I’ll go crazy without my usual routines.

Maybe I should leave here in two weeks and spend a week in L.A. before I go to Wyoming, especially since Libby and Grant seem to want me to visit.

I got to the Pruneyard Barnes & Noble around 4:50 PM and Thien arrived soon after. Right away, I realized that I’m not really attracted to him.

After looking at books for a while, we went to the café for coffee and tea, and I bought him carrot cake.

We talked for ninety minutes. I don’t understand everything he says, but I also know that he’s brighter than his limited English proficiency makes him appear.

Almost casually, he told me that he wrote a book in Vietnam, stories about people in his community (he used the word), things he observed, and stuff neighbors would tell him.

Just from our meetings, I can see that he’s got an acute sense of observation about other people, so Thien must be a great storyteller in Vietnamese. It’s no wonder he’s got a lot of friends.

I probably would have said goodbye at 7 PM, but he asked if I wanted to go to the movies, and I thought I needed to break out of a pattern, so I drove to the only movies I know, the AMC 14 at Paseo de Saratoga, and I selected As Good As It Gets, which won acting Oscars for Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt.

Thien wanted to see a Jackie Chan action comedy, but I was paying the $15 (with my Visa). Later he told me he’d never been to anything but action pictures.

We sat up in the balcony, and it was one of these new cineplexes with “stadium seats” with high backs and lots of room, sort of like individual living room chairs.

The movie was a bit long, and I was worried Thien was bored and confused, but I liked it and so did he. I could relate to the Nicholson character’s obsessive-compulsive behavior and how he needed to get out of his patterns.

I could also relate Greg Kinnear’s gay artist, who suffers a terrible beating, poverty, insults, hostile parents, and a despair that prevents him from doing his art. As I said to Thien after the film ended, it was about three lonely people who break down barriers to reach one another.

Thien wore only a sweater, and it was so cold when we got out of the theater and we were parked so far away that we decided to race to the car to get warm.

People looked at us as if we were weird, and we got out of breath and it was fun, and when we got to the car and I started up the heater on high, we couldn’t help exploding in laughter.

On the classical radio station they were playing Joelle’s The Tiger’s Tail from the San Jose Symphony concert of three weeks before.

I dropped off Thien at his car back at The Pruneyard and said I’d page him soon but not today. Then I drove back home.

Home: it’s odd to say that about Villa Montalvo. I handled the dark roads and unlocking and relocking the gate as I returned to this huge empty villa with my flashlight, a clear canopy of white stars above me, making my way to the rear Spanish courtyard door when the front solarium door wouldn’t open.

And I felt very secure and content as I got into bed.