Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Friday, March 5, 1999

9 PM. Last night I slept well, dreaming that I visited Grandpa Nat and Grandma Sylvia.

Deciding that today was a good day to get that infusion of karma I need, I took off as early as I could to go to Miami Beach.

It was about 9 AM when I parked at a metered lock off Lincoln Road. God. It made me wonder why I don’t come to South Beach more often. Everything seems so much brighter at the beach; here in West Broward, I never notice the brightness.

Life seems more vibrant at South Beach, even the skanky lowlifes on Washington Avenue and the old Jewish nearly-deads in their walkers.

There are also a lot of nice gay people around, like the two baristas at Joffrey’s Coffee. I got an iced tea and sat outside in front of the store, reading the New York Times and watching the crowds pass by.

I was reminded of an issue of Detective Comics with the “new look” Batman of the mid-1960s with the yellow oval around the bat on his chest and the more sophisticated artwork. The comics also featured the Elongated Man (Ralph Dibny), the stretchy superhero who traveled with his wife to solve mysteries.

In one issue’s story, Ralph and Sue were in Miami Beach and the comic had them sipping cocktails outdoors at a Lincoln Road. Carmine Infantino’s drawings looked so glamorous to me that when I finally got to see Lincoln Road for the first time – over Christmas in 1969 with Uncle Marty – I was kind of disappointed at how pedestrian everything looked.

But the place felt glamorous again today. After things got crowded, a cute 25-ish white guy came out with a bagel, and he was looking around but there was nowhere to sit, so I told him to sit with me at the little table with two seats.

Curly-haired and obviously gay, he was wearing sandals and he had a nice tattoo (the bottom of it was visible) on his leg. But I figured he didn’t come there to have some old fart bother him, so I hid behind the full-page obituary of Justice Blackman in the paper.

As I was getting up to leave, he dropped a piece of his bagel and said, “Whoops!” – which I thought was so adorable.

Without thinking, I said, “Don’t eat it, the ground’s dirty,” as if he were a total moron – but of course I was the one acting like a moron just because he was so cute.

Anyway, I walked around Lincoln Road, Collins Avenue, Española Way and Washington Avenue, and got another iced tea, this time at Starbucks on Ocean Drive, where I sat thinking and reading more of the paper.

It was after 1 PM when I left South Beach, and as I drove up via A1A and then through Dania Beach (formerly just Dania) and across Griffin Road, I was writing a story in my head.

As soon as I finished lunch, I began actually writing, and I wrote some more this evening, and I now have ten pages of my Wyoming story, “Mysteries of Range Management.”

It’s the best thing I’ve written since my chocolate story last May. Okay, so it’s probably the only fiction I’ve written since then.

I still have six “scenes” to write between the italicized bits about leafy spurge, so the story could end up around 16 pages. How did I ever write stories that were so much shorter?

Stopping at Nova tonight to check my email, I found the editor of the webzine Savoy had rejected “Salugi at Starbucks” only because of its length – 9,000 words – saying otherwise he would have taken it.

Perhaps knowing that I’m teaching fiction writing has spurred me to be a fiction writer again. Perhaps it was the Dictionary of Literary Biography piece on me that Prof. Meanor assigned.

Tom wrote that he got Meanor’s letter (“He spelled my name wrong and wrote in barely recognizable English”) and asked to be sent the contract for the article.

Later, I did more research for the Wyoming story – first on the Web and then at Barnes & Noble, where I looked through travel books on Wyoming.

Today was wonderful, just the opposite of yesterday, when I felt dead inside. Today I feel young, strong, attractive, creative. I’d forgotten the feelings that I got from both South Beach and the act of writing fiction. It’s more than worth any cost.

I’ve got to shake up my routines more. Otherwise I’ll become my parents, sitting on the couch every night, guffawing at Seinfeld episodes I’ve seen three times before.

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Sunday, March 7, 1999

7 PM. Reading the first chapter of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction inspired me enough – or made me feel guilty enough – to go back to “Mysteries of Range Management” last night after mostly giving up during the day.

I worked on the story again this morning and finished it when I returned home at noon after spending the time in between at the Barnes & Noble at Oakwood Plaza in Hollywood, which I didn’t know existed until Patrick told me about it. At Nova’s MicroLab, I printed out the 15-page manuscript after making some changes.

Though I’m always anxious to send a story out once I complete it, I probably need to put the story away for a while. That’s because I’m afraid I’ll have less confidence in it when I am, to use Lucy McCormick Calkins’s phrases, “critic-cool” instead of “passion-hot.”

But I did send the story to a webzine I found mentioned in the new issue of Poets & Writers (which I now read at the bookstore rather than subscribe to).

I do think “Mysteries of Range Management” is publishable, and it’s going to go into my “gay book”: the stories dealing with gay relationships from the manuscript that Alice sent out and that Hanging Loose Press rejected.

These stories, about three-fifths of the larger book, were written in the 1990s. It would be wonderful if I could continue to write fiction again, but after finishing my chocolate story in Wyoming last May, I wasn’t able to produce anything.

One reason I’m having so much trouble with my “Silicon Valley Diet” story is because I want, as Burroway says, to produce “capital-L literature.” I don’t seem to be able to give myself permission just to fool around the way I used to, and I need to work at that.

One writer that Burroway quotes says that if guilt is what motivates you to write, then it’s not worth it and probably a sign that you need psychological counseling.

China threw up and began choking just before a couple were about to come over to see the house at 5:30 PM. Jonathan and Mom started panicking, but finally the dog stopped gasping for air and calmed down.

The couple were these eccentric retirees – the man called himself “an old fart” – who just sold their ranch with lots of cattle and horses and two houses with a dozen bedrooms and are now looking for “someplace small.”

This couple were a hoot. Mom said they were the first people to sit down and chat for half an hour.

Later, after they left, China cadged pieces of my Healthy Choice turkey divan dinner, and I was so glad she felt better that I was delighted to share it with her.

In the Herald, I read a long article about the political implications of the changing demographics of the once heavily Jewish, heavily Democratic retirement communities of western Broward and northeastern Miami-Dade.

Half-time French-Canadian retirees and young Latino couples with kids are taking the place of the elderly Jews who moved here in the 1970s from New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.

At the older sections of Sunrise Lakes – places where Aunt Arlyne’s mother and my parents’ aunts and uncles (Claire and Sidney, Daniel and Anne) once lived – two-bedroom condos are going for $22,000.

If my parents bought one of those, they could live like kings in a familiar setting not fifteen minutes from here. But Mom ridiculed me for even suggesting that she could live in “a dump like that.”

This is a woman who is 67 years old and has no savings and whose husband and son have minimal incomes from retail stores.

Well, pride goeth before a fall. As Teresa once said, she has no patience with people who need to downsize and refuse to do so. Perhaps if my parents and Jonathan had more friends, they wouldn’t be so concerned with living in luxury beyond their means.

Wouldn’t Mom rather live in a “dump” if the savings made her able to afford to fix her teeth? But I guess that’s not a priority if you’re a recluse.

After a week of spring break, I still have a lot of grading and preparation to do for this week’s classes. But being able to write a story was a gift, and that alone shows that I made good use of my vacation.

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Monday, March 8, 1999

6 PM. I woke up at 5:45 AM from a dream in which I’d bumped into Elihu in a Brooklyn bank where I gone to replace my shredded ATM card. (Elihu stopped responding to my email a while ago, and I’m not sure why. But it makes me less gun-shy about sending out the “Salugi at Starbucks” story.)

This morning I was so tired that I couldn’t bring myself to work out at 6 AM. I needed to lie in bed for a while, so I exercised when I got home from Nova.

At school at 7 AM, I got on the computer. Teresa, her sister and mother all lost weight at the spa, but only Teresa attended nearly all the classes. Teresa said that her mom was a trouper, even managing to ditch her modesty in the very open locker room.

The spa sounded like a wonderful retreat from the world. They met a 65-year-old man who’s been living there for five months – and though he hadn’t lost as much weight as expected, Teresa said she thinks he stays there just because he likes meeting women.

Teresa is teaching her class in spa cuisine in the Locust Valley Adult Education Division, so she went to the kitchen and asked questions and took notes.

Gianni emailed that he’s decided – “You know me, on the spur of the moment” – to visit his parents now, so he took his midterms early and is flying into Maryland today. His mother and stepfather will surely be surprised. Although Gianni wrote, “I can’t wait to see you,” I don’t know how I can get to see him in the next couple of weeks.

This morning, I went into my classroom early to write “Welcome Back!” on the board over this week’s assignment schedule. My students groggily straggled in from spring break, and we first went over an article on how to make sure you’re getting reliable information on the Web.

In our textbook’s chapter on explanatory writing, when we came to a student’s essay in the text, I was surprised to find my students disdain punk rock as “old people’s music.”

Old people’s music? We’re talking the late 1970s and early 1980s here. But my Gen Y students were babies then, and they’d never heard of the Dead Kennedys, much less of Jello Biafra. I could see their eyes rolling when I started talking about the Sex Pistols and the Clash, “God Save the Queen” and “London Calling.”

Before dismissing the class, I collected the essays that were due today; we’ll workshop them on Wednesday.

Although I wish I could say I was productive today, I managed only to work on my fiction writing syllabus and to grade the ten remaining American Lit papers. I still have to grade the midterm essays and do the reading.

In the Davie library’s catalog this afternoon, I found that a lot of videos on Eliot, Frost, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway are at the Main and Regional libraries, so I should have something to show the class this weekend.

Right now I’m about to go to a poetry reading at the South Campus of Broward Community College.

*

11 PM. The BCC-South reading was in the faculty dining room of the gorgeous new Student Services Building. It was good to see Patrick. He’s lost some weight, probably due to diabetes.

His P’an Ku editors put out a lot of refreshments, including pastries neither Patrick nor I could eat.

After nine years of being the literary magazine’s faculty advisor, Patrick feels that this is the most talented staff he’s ever had, and they do seem like a great bunch. The poetry they read ranged from clever and imaginative to the amateurish stuff you’d expect from community college students. But the reading was certainly superior to the open mic readings I’ve gone to at the mega-bookstores. At least one or two of the young women had enough style that they possibly could become real writers.

When the student portion of the evening ended, Magi Schwartz came up to say that the featured poet, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, had been delayed by a Boston snowstorm. But ten minutes later, Barbra – who just won a poetry prize that will result in a published book – brought her in to start reading.

Bosselaar was excellent. Although she said she was 55, she looked much younger. (Later, Magi told me that without my beard, I look 12 years old.)

The poet had a bizarre childhood in Belgium. Her parents virtually abandoned her to a convent in Brussels, where she and the other “orphan” girls were cruelly mistreated by psychotic, anti-Semitic, sex-obsessed nuns who stuck crucifixes up the girls’ vaginas if they confessed to masturbating.

The poet’s mother was abusive and her father was a Nazi collaborator who made a fortune from the war and who celebrated the extermination of every Jew.

Bosselaar read, very expressively (no monotone), poems about her childhood. The one I liked best was about a Jewish boy she loved when as a nine-year-old. He’d been in the victim of a medical experiment by Dr. Mengele, who made a hole in the boy’s tongue just to see if he’d have a speech defect and would be able to eat.

It was impressive to listen to her talk about the Flemish language, teaching, and her need to expiate her father’s sins by fighting racism and anti-Semitism.

Although she went on until nearly 10 PM and a lot of us were quite tired, it was a treat to hear her poetry. Bosselaar has a book from BOA Editions, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, which is probably worth getting.

After chatting with Gary Kay (who told me that Larry Brandt does indeed have Alzheimer’s) and thanking Patrick for inviting me, I said goodbye to Barbara, Magi and the campus’s newest English professor, a Chinese-born woman who taught last year at ASU in Tempe.

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Wednesday, March 10, 1999

8 PM. One thing I’m proud of as I’ve gotten older is how I bounce back from depressions like yesterday’s so quickly.

I did lie down for about 45 minutes, and then I exercised to a Body Electric video. Usually I don’t listen to the corny “Food for Thought” segment, but today it was about how ridiculous it is to compare yourself to anyone else.

Margaret Richard quoted the New Age writer, Rusty Berkus: “When the rose and the lotus are side by side, is one more beautiful than the other?”

That made me realize that the flaw in my “realistic” appraisal of my talents as a writer yesterday: it was based entirely on comparing myself to others instead of to my own previous experiences. So I started to feel better about my Wyoming story and myself.

I finished grading the rest of the American Lit class’s midterms. One student didn’t like Emily Dickinson because “I feel it is unacceptable to use language in startling ways,” and another had this comment: “In order to sell her product, she should have had more interaction with the public.”

After dinner, I walked for 45 minutes, as I have every night this week: my inner thigh seems back to normal.

Then I reread some of the material for the weekend’s classes: the poems of Frost, Langston Hughes, and Eliot – I still love “Prufrock” – and Fitzgerald’s story “Winter Dreams,” which I first taught over 20 years ago at LIU. I still need to reread “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “A Rose for Emily.”

I also finished the Fiction Writing syllabus, which I needed to hand in today. So I accomplished a lot and felt better when I got into bed at 10 PM.

Soon after, Jonathan knocked on my door and said Dad was feeling sick. He’d been to his primary care physician in the morning and had taken the pneumonia shot.

Dad’s hands were ice-cold and he had the chills. I did some research on Lexis and was certain he was having a typical reaction to the vaccine.

As it turned out, Dad’s fever broke during the night and he returned to work this morning.

I was up at 5:15 AM, exercised, had breakfast and got to Nova early so I could arrange the chairs into a circle for the writing workshop.

I saw in an email from Santa that Maria had a boy, Joshua, 7 lbs., 6 oz., on Monday; Maria is tired but all is well, Santa later told me.

The tentative fall schedules were out, and I noticed that Lester Lindley is the professor who won’t be back. Classes like Constitutional History I and Political and Civil Liberties had the instructor listed as TBA.

I figured that they had decided to hire adjuncts, but after my morning class, while I was printing out my syllabus, Ben asked if I was still interested in the visiting professor position and we talked about it.

At Nova, they have Constitutional Law as a history course because they teach it in its cultural and historical setting; I told Ben that my own orientation to the subject is social science-related.

I also said I could teach the other classes that Les usually teaches, such as Private Law and American Thought. Ben said he thinks the job will be mine and we should talk soon about salary and courses and other specifics.

My gut instinct tells me that this job is going to happen, and of course I’d be thrilled if it does. But being at the University of Maryland this fall would be wonderful, too.

At Albertsons, I bought $90 worth of groceries, and after putting them away, I went to Starbucks for an hour and then to the West Regional Library.

On email, I found that G.K. Nelson, editor of the webzine Savoy Magazine, liked “Anita Hill at the Roller Derby” and wants to run it in April. I gave him the explicit permission he wanted and told him I was thrilled – which I am.

Even if I’d recovered from yesterday’s bout of despair about my writing, this acceptance is a nice ego boost. I was beginning to think that story would get published.

After my afternoon walk and eating a bean burrito and pineapple for dinner, I drove downtown at 5:30 PM and got four videos for my American Lit class. Then I finished reading the Times at the sidewalk cafe of the Coffee Beanery on Las Olas Boulevard.

It was wonderful to be wearing shorts in the evening – thirteen inches of snow fell in D.C today – and to watch a lot of foreign tourists and gay people pass by. I really need to spend more time in places like Las Olas and South Beach.

But right now I’m going to veg out with Dawson’s Creek.