Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Tuesday, July 13, 1999

7 PM. Tonight I read some Nexis articles on blurbing, and the most apt quote I found on the subject was Jonathan Yardley’s calling it “lazy publishing.” I also read that the odds are 5-10% that anyone an author or editor asks for a blurb will actually put out.

Maybe I’ll send one or two more packets – today I got them off to April Sinclair and Jane Hamilton – and then I’ll wait and try to rely on friends like Miriam or Rick (whose book I blurbed, after all).

I can always use other writers’ reviews of my work, and I think I’m much better off with the descriptions of stories I wrote one night last week.

I’m convinced that Red Hen Press is so uninterested in my book, except for the money I’ve given them toward publication, that they’ll put whatever copy I give them on the back cover. But I guess I’m using them as much as they are using me.

I just hope I don’t ever have to see any of the people I begged for blurbs for the rest of my life.

I woke up at 6 AM after a good night’s sleep. After exercising and showering, I finally got to chat with Teresa, but our call was interrupted by an appraiser, who told Dad he wanted to come over at 10:30 AM.

Mom became frantic because she’d have to clean like mad. She so crazed that I tried not to say, “Yeah, I’m sure a hair on the bathroom tile will bring down the value of the house by $10,000.”

Mom’s newest obsession is to have a garage sale this weekend, so she wants me to get all my stuff out of the garage. When it’s dark, I’ll put everything in the car and take it over to my office at Nova or just ride around with it till I move into my apartment.

At least I know that I’ll be out of this house a month before my parents move, when Mom is bound to get even more frantic. I remember her on the day she tried to move out of the townhouse to here. If I can keep in mind that Mom is a nut, I can humor her without feeling angry.

When I went over to Nova at 9 AM, Maria and Santa gave me the keys to the Liberal Arts Division office. I’m now able to retrieve my messages on the phone although I still can’t seem to get anything other than a ringing when I call from outside.

I spent too much time on the computer, accomplishing very little. Sat Darshan said that after Gurujot had seen the Son of Sam movie, she related to her what it was like when she visited New York from Germany in the summer of 1977.

She told Gurujot that one night I dropped her off at her parents’ co-op in Sheepshead Bay and we were talking in the car until suddenly I said, “You know, we’re sitting ducks for Son of Sam: a white couple in a parked car, with you having long black hair.”

And she said after that, for the rest of her visit I always had her leave the car immediately as I escorted her to the door of her parents’ building.

I also emailed Kevin, who complimented me on my looks, and said he called his mother and told him to stop sending him “homosexual repression” books. Another nutty woman. Thank God that’s one thing I never had to put up with from my parents.

Carolyn wrote a brief email saying everything is fine: “The new guy is terrific and the old guy wants me back.”

I wrote to Francine Raggi at the College of Staten Island Alumni Association and sent her a copy of I Survived Caracas Traffic for an exhibit of alumni publications.

After lunch at home, I went to Barnes & Noble to read the Times and look at books to get ideas for blurbs. But I need to stop expending time and energy on that because my priorities now are finishing the Dictionary of Literary Biography article, preparing for my fall term classes and moving into my apartment at Cameron Cove.

Larry Brandt called. He’s desperate for someone to teach a Business Strategies class that begins next weekend. But I can’t do it because it’s a senior seminar involving finance, marketing and other business subjects I know little about.

Poor Larry. He seems so out of it most of the time. Maybe he really does have Alzheimer’s disease after all.

I’m tired, but I need to humor Mom and load up my car with my stuff from the garage. Doing that probably means I can’t get the car air conditioner fixed tomorrow.

The closing on the house has now been rescheduled for Monday, and since Dad will be out of town, he’ll have to give power of attorney to Mom or to me. Since I have to take Mom to the closing, he might as well give power of attorney to me.

But I’d have to make sure it was limited power of attorney so that I wouldn’t be tempted to have Mom and Jonathan committed.

Late this afternoon when an inspector came to the house, they both became terribly agitated – as, of course, was China, who had to be locked up)

I can’t understand why it bothered them at all. I mean, the guy didn’t seem all that intrusive, and having workmen in a house doesn’t bother me. But then I realized that not only are my mother and brother semi-reclusive; they get extremely weird whenever “strangers” come into their house.

When the man left, Mom said to me, “Did you ever see anything like it? That guy was here for two hours today, looking into everything,”

“What do you care?” I said. “It’s not going to be your house anymore.”

That shut her up. It also may have made her anxious because she immediately began rearranging things in the refrigerator.

Sunday, July 18, 1999

4:30 PM. An hour after waking up before 5 AM, I drove Dad to the airport. It’s been years since he’s flown – not since his heart attack – and he may have been a bit concerned about the cross-country trip.

Back at home, I had breakfast, got back into bed for an hour, exercised, and then went out after I showered and dressed.

There was no email except a reply to my ad from Bill, a 46-year-old video producer in Davie who loves skiing, tennis, golf, hiking, etc. He sent his photo, and he’s classically well-built and handsome, with a shock of white hair. But I can tell he would bore me.

Also, he’s 6’2”. It’s weird that I can reject a guy who’s probably the ideal type of so many gay men, but I don’t like what I consider “white bread” types. A dead giveaway in personal ads is when guys don’t say they’re white because they expect you’ll just assume they are.

Anyway, he sounds like the opposite of what I’m looking for – though I guess there are many kinds of “opposites.”

I spent the morning reading the Sunday Times at Barnes & Noble. An article about Aspen, Colorado, having to pay for Clinton security quoted Teresa’s cousin Joseph, the police department’s director of security. It’s odd that I read an article about Aspen mentioning one of the two people I know in that city (the other being Joseph sister).

Mom was very upset when I got home. She got a call from “Mr. Buchwald,” who’s supposedly the husband of Trudy Buchwald, who’s buying the house. (Trudy is listed as a “single woman” in the papers and Mom thinks he’s actually just her boyfriend and doesn’t share her last name.)

He said that the inspector who came the other day says there’s $1,200 worth of necessary repairs to the house that needs to be done and that the inspector could do all the repairs himself. Because of that, he and Trudy were unilaterally reducing the price they’re paying by that amount.

Mom said she’d have to see the inspector’s report and would need to get her own inspector. He asked if she had a fax machine and when Mom said yes, he said his was broken. (What was the point in asking then? Mom said he didn’t expect her to have one.)

She told him to drop off the inspector’s report in the mailbox and then thought about it and told me she wanted to put in a note for them postponing tomorrow’s closing. I revised the note to make it sound more lawyerly.

A little while ago, after seeing a car pull up and a woman take the note out of the mailbox and put in the report, I retrieved the document.

Looking at it, I see the inspector found two leaks and twelve to fifteen broken or cracked tiles – but the tiles are an aesthetic problem, not a structural one.

And as I told Mom, it’s a conflict of interest for the guy who inspects a house to recommend himself as the person who fixes the faults he uncovered.

I suspect that because my parents come across as people who don’t know any better – and often they don’t: looking at the document, Mom didn’t know which lawyer was hers and which was the buyer’s, and she didn’t realize that the paralegal she talked to on the phone wasn’t the attorney – the couple buying the house figured Mom and Dad would agree to anything under pressure.

I called Ellen, my parents’ attorney at home, and she told me that in the morning she’d call the buyers’ attorney and postpone the closing.

Also, we have the right to get our own inspector, and if the two inspectors disagree, we negotiate or get a third inspector to settle the disparities.

Looking at the agreement to sell the house, I noticed that all inspections should have been done and reports shown to the seller ten days before closing. Obviously, the buyers never did that.

Mom was very upset, and of course she doesn’t want to tell Dad right away – nor do I think she should. If what the buyers told my parents is true, they’ve sold their condo and have to be out of there by September 1, so they’re the ones under time pressure, not my parents.

Mom and Dad had planned to stay in the house until then and have already paid the mortgage for August. So if anything, it’s in their interest to postpone the closing. If they need to, they can always pay the mortgage for September.

It’s possible that these people are trying to get out of the deal, but both Jonathan and I suspect that they’re just hoping to squeeze my parents for money using a classic last-minute bluff.

Mom worries that if they don’t go to contract, Dad’s trip to Phoenix is “a waste,” but I said that someone in the family needed to go there eventually. Besides, Dad hasn’t seen Marc in over 14 months.

Later, Dad called and said it was cloudy and only in the 80°s when he arrived at Sky Harbor.

Patrick emailed, saying that he was very busy today and asked if Tuesday would be a good day for him to take my publicity photos for the new book.

I said fine. But if we don’t do it then, I’m going to go to a nearby photo studio and get it over with.

Monday, July 19, 1999

7 PM. When we first got to today’s closing at 2 PM, my mother’s lawyer must have thought I was joking when I told her that if Mom were my client, I’d charge her ten times as much as she was charging her.

But by the time we left the closing a few hours later, I’m sure Ellen realized I’d been serious, as she told me that I should probably go have a drink after dropping Mom off. Ellen pegged my mother right.

It had been many years since I’ve seen Mom in public. Looking at her through the eyes of Ellen and the other lawyer – Barry Webber, the Davie town attorney – I saw a woman who appeared psychotic: a massive ticks and odd grimaces, saying the oddest things.

Basically, I refused to deal with Mom all day. Just before we left the house, she gave me a long handwritten document she wanted the buyer to sign. I refused to look at it and just let Ellen deal with her and explain to Mom that her demands were unreasonable.

This morning Mom had offered the buyer $500 toward the roof leak repairs and the buyer accepted. But this grated on Mom, and at the closing, she continued to balk.

She had to be told (by someone other than her son) that if she thought she “had a lot of aggravation” now, a breach of specific performance of the contract would have severe consequences, including protracted litigation during the course of which she would be unable to sell the house.

Ellen was more patient with Mom than I was, but she’s a professional and probably has had other annoying old people as clients before.

I took care of what I needed to for the closing, of course: I had the limited power of attorney Dad signed over to me, and I knew it was air-tight.

But Mom didn’t even bring her driver’s license to the office, so I had to sign an affidavit attesting to her identity. (Luckily for her, I did not have to attest to her sanity.)

During the moments when we were waiting for stuff to happen, we sat around chatting. Ellen told me that she adjuncts at Nova, teaching the paralegal courses.

When Ellen said that her 18-year-old son was going to Johnson & Wales University to be a chef and mentioned taking him up to Providence, I said that Johnson & Wales has a branch in North Miami as well.

“Yes, but that’s far too close to mom at home,” Ellen said, smiling. “We both want him to be on his own.”

My mom, of course, is moving to Arizona because of the 38-year-old son who’s never been “on his own.”

It turned out that Dad forgot to take his medicines to Phoenix – how stupid can you get? – and I had to FedEx his pills to him this morning. He called a couple of hours ago, but I deliberately avoided hearing anything from his conversation with Mom.

Earlier, I’d heard that he and Marc had gone to Apache Junction. Dad reported that it was very far away in the middle of nowhere, basically an area filled with a few trailer parks, with shopping half an hour away. But if you’re a recluse, what does it matter where you live?

Adding to the day’s stress for me was a call from Santa just before we left for the closing: Nova doesn’t yet have my official law school transcript and nothing can proceed without it.

So, after taking Mom to the bank, where I deposited the $70,000 plus check – Mom thinks the account is still active – I went to my office on campus and faxed a transcript request form to the University of Florida registrar as well as mailed out a letter to them.

Also adding to my frustration were letters I got on three Capital One credit card accounts from the fraud department. The lady I needed to talk to was on vacation, but they wanted me to send my Social Security number, driver’s license and proof of address – so I xeroxed all that to them.

Another frustration is that it’s been weeks and I still don’t have a Geico insurance card for my car. I called the company and they said the material was sent to the correct address ten days ago, but they said they will resend it today.

All this paper frustration! I need to get out tonight.

Teresa got my emails and said she and Paul were going to the beach today, so I left her a message there.

Patrick said he’d come to Davie tomorrow to take my photo. I guess we’re better off doing it here at the house than on the Nova campus.

After today, all I can hope for is that my parents move to Arizona really soon so I don’t have to deal with them this much anymore.