Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, July 5, 1999

7 PM. Tonight I’m going to the movies with M.J., Scott and Scott’s mother. They wanted to see Analyze This, and I agreed although I’d at least heard it on the plane. Scott left his glasses in my car when I saw him this afternoon, so I needed to give them back to him anyway.

Last night I went to the movies by myself. In the theater I ran into a student I didn’t recognize at first, a young black woman who was in my giant American Literature class at American Express.

I saw Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which was even more puerile and even funnier than the original movie, which I’d watched with Agymah Kamau over satellite TV in Wyoming last May.

Yes, sometimes junior high school-level bathroom and body humor is funny – and Mike Myers is so silly that I couldn’t help laughing a lot.

Scott had called while I was out last evening to ask I I’d wanted to watch the fireworks with his family. (I saw some of them in car as I drove home at 10 PM.) This morning we agreed that I’d come over tonight at 8 PM.

When I was at Nova this morning to check email, I found that Rob had sent a note saying that he’d be fine if I called him and he gave me his number, and I left a message.

On his voice mail, he’s Bobby, not Rob, and I like either name – it’s Bob that dulls me out. He returned my message this afternoon while his four-year-old, Kevin, was playing Star Wars in the background.

At the Nova Iibrary, I looked at the last volume of American Short Story Writers Since World War II of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. None of the entries used a lot of outside criticism. It’s more plot summary and an essay on themes and style, so I need to go back and rework the material I’ve already written. As I told Tom in an email, I’ll manage this somehow.

I also wrote to Sat Darshan and Justin, who’d emailed me on Saturday.

Leaving Nova, I stopped at Cameron Cove, the apartment complex where I’d lived several times before when it was Sun Pointe Cove in the 1980s.

To make a long story short, I filled out an application, paid the $40 fee, and pending a credit report, it looks like I’m going to have a second-floor apartment in the E building, the one where I’d lived the longest there.

The rent will be $715 for a ten-month lease, which sounds expensive – but hopefully I can afford it. My lease would start August 1. Anyway, I’ll wait until I hear from them after they process the credit report.

At worst, the manager said, I’ll just have to give a larger security deposit.

From the building, I’ll be able to walk to Wendy’s and Walgreens and other stores, though Publix is too far for me to walk to.

If my foot ever heals, I will be able to walk to the Nova campus, but presumably, I’ll almost always have my car or a newer one to get around.

It turns out that the same developer owns Cameron Palms, the same apartment complex my parents are looking at in case they have to move out and can’t get a house in Arizona right away.

Well, we’ll see what happens – though I already ordered phone service for the new apartment.

I arrived in Tamarac at 3 PM. Scott’s parents of course look older than they did last time I saw them. Scott was busy fooling around with a $499 E-computer he’d got them at Best Buy. (It cost $1199 with all the extras he bought.)

Scott and I went out for coffee (actually iced tea and iced latte) at the Borders on University Drive, where we sat outside so that he could smoke. Three weeks ago Scott had given up cigarettes, but he bought a pack today and was so disgusted with himself that before we left, he gave it to a Borders employee on a break.

At the Wedgewood complex’s pool, I saw M.J. and Brianna, who was swimming like a fish and greeted me by yelling out, “Hi, Richie!”

Scott and I continued our chat about the law, academia and SUVs. I showed him Sat Darshan’s photo and he thought she looked fine. “I hope you’ve told her I haven’t changed a bit either,” he said.

Well, I just called Bobby and finally got through to him but since he was in the middle of having dinner with his kids, I said I’d call him tomorrow night.

I hope to get to the Unemployment office early tomorrow, but I suppose there’s no rush. Any time that I apply during this week, my benefit year will begin on July 4 and I won’t get my benefits any sooner.

I really felt hot in the car today while the sun was shining. But I’d feel worse in New York, where it hit 100° compared to 85° here.

Well, I’d better get moving now if I’m going to be in Tamarac by 8 PM.

Tuesday, July 6, 1999

8 PM. Last evening I arrived early at the Koestners’ and got to talk with the family.

Brianna, so incredibly bright for a six-year-old, was engrossed in reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Her grandfather was going to be baby-sitting her, but she looked so much more alert that I figured he might be the one to fall asleep first.

Scott’s parents have more typical and conventional interests than my own parents. Scott’s father is active on the condo board, and his mother plays cards and goes to luncheons and plays. When they wondered how my parents could leave all their Florida friends and go to a place where they knew no one, I explained that except for the Littmans, my parents had no friends.

They wanted to know who Mom talked to all day while Dad was at work. “Her pets,” I said, thinking that China, the cats and the rabbit might be more interesting company than any condo board of directors members.

We went to the $2 Tamarac multiplex on McNab Road. The very elderly crowd was leaving the theater as we approached the box office, and the 9:20 PM show of Analyze This was sparsely attended.

Before the film started, I talked with M.J. about architecture and got her opinion of Richard Meier, Gwathney/Siegel and the current projects at Penn Station and the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn waterfront.

M.J. designed the Rolling Stone offices at 1230 Avenue of the Americas (Pete’s building, where I’ve met him for lunch) and she gossiped about Jann Wenner, Bianca Jagger and other celebrities she met at the party for the opening of the new offices.

I like M.J. and Brianna and am glad I kept up my friendship with Scott. It was after 11 PM when I said goodbye to everyone, but I enjoyed my late-night drive down Pine Island Road.

Unfortunately, I forced myself to get up at 6:30 AM today, so I didn’t get enough sleep although I had interesting dreams.

Today was cloudless, but even the 87° heat was oppressive in the absence of air conditioning in the car. Still, New York and the whole Northeast would probably trade their record-breaking heat for our relatively cool temperatures.

Although I arrived at the Unemployment office by 8:20 AM, there was still a crowd of people on line ahead of me, and it took over an hour before I got to the lone man at the information desk, who punched my Social Security number into the computer, gave me application forms and told me to come back for tomorrow’s group filing at 11 AM.

It’s been years since I applied for benefits in-state and I’d forgotten how tedious the process can be. But if I’m approved for benefits, I should get $275 a week.

The big problem is that I’m returning to Nova in seven weeks. That was clear when I stopped by the Liberal Arts office and was fussed over by Maria, Santa and Ben, who gave me the key to Les’s old office and declared it mine.

I have my own computer (which disappeared during the course of the day – perhaps mistakenly taken out by someone in IT who left the bare CPU lying on the floor; Santa said she’d call to see what happened), my own phone (but I don’t yet know how to use the system to put my own message over Les’s old one on the voice mail), and lots of space.

Tonight I went back to campus and put a lot of the books Les left behind in boxes to be taken out; he had collected a lot of junk on subjects I have no interest in. Besides, I’m a minimalist.

Ben and Santa stressed that the office was totally mine for my year as a visiting professor and I could rearrange the furniture or doing anything I wanted.

It makes me uncomfortable when I am treated so well; it reminded me of my first day on the job at CGR. The inferiority complex I have about my worth probably stems from having parents who tell me – as Mom did today – “You’re an idiot, you don’t know nothing.”

It’s only because I’m intelligent and talented that I’ve managed to do anything with my life, given that my brothers and I grew up with parents who seemed determined to make certain that their children would never be more successful than they were.

Dad got a flight to Phoenix for July 18 – which means that Marc had to cancel his own vacation in Florida to take Dad around Arizona while he looks for a house.

I don’t know if Marc is upset about that, but the way I see it, my parents’ vaunted concern for their sons has masked the reality that Marilyn and Danny’s needs always come first and that Richard, Marc and Jonathan are expected to subordinate their less important needs.

I don’t know when, if ever, my parents will be settling down in Arizona, but I am sure that I will be settled into Apartment 208 at 2601 S.W. 79th Avenue, Davie, FL 33328 on August 1. At 5 PM I called Cameron Cove and learned that my application had been approved.

Shortly after that, on my way back to Nova, I stopped by the apartment complex and gave them a $99 security deposit check. So I’ll have my own apartment and my own office and my own life in just a few weeks.

This evening I ran into Jhoyse, one of my Language 1500 students from last spring, who was quite friendly.

Earlier in the day I was upset that my teacher evaluation “grades” from that class were relatively low: few students gave me A’s and most graded me a B – but of course that’s pretty much the way I graded them. On the other hand, my evaluations in the Fiction Writing class were just about perfection.

My name is listed on my classes in the Fall 1999 schedule and the dean sent me my full-timer’s teaching assignments for the entire academic year.

But I still feel like an impostor, and I’m afraid I’ll completely screw up teaching Legal Studies classes, something I’ve never done before.

All my textbooks have arrived, and I’ll be able to get to work on them soon, I hope.

This afternoon I added about 800 words to the Dictionary of Literary Biography article, riffing on the stories in The Silicon Valley Diet. I need to make sure that I get the final draft to Tom by August 15.

Friday, July 9, 1999

8 PM. I’ve just been doing five minutes of stretches on my Achilles tendon and calf.

Ordinarily I’d be shoeless now, but tonight I’ve got on the New Balance running shoes that I got last night at the Davie Shopping Center, just before I got groceries at Publix and gas at Amoco and after stops at Whole Foods Market and Kmart, where I bought another pair of those neat tiny checked long shorts that I’m also wearing now.

So I got a lot accomplished last night – and I didn’t do too badly today, either. After dinner this evening, I forced myself to add to the Dictionary of Literary Biography article and covered stories in Narcissism and Me.

I’ve got one chapbook and Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz and I Survived Caracas Traffic to go, and I’m up to 6,600 words so I should get beyond 10,000 soon.

Then comes the hard work in trying to figure out what to do with the material. But I feel confident that I can get something to Tom by my self-imposed deadline of August 1.

This morning I arrived at the West Regional Library when it opened at 9 AM and checked email. On Monday, Manley, the Jamaican guy, thanked me for my honesty and said it didn’t seem like we were a match.

Surprisingly, Bob the Chiropractor wrote, apologizing for the delay and telling me he didn’t want to pursue the relationship. To my discredit, I felt annoyed at the overt rejection after our meeting.

But unlike last fall, when I got annoyed at that kid Jason for saying he’d call me and then never doing so, at least Bob was polite and got back to me.

I thanked him for that, but I couldn’t help saying that I hadn’t wanted to get together again either. Hey, even getting rejected by someone you’re not interested in isn’t a delightful experience.

Alice thanked me for sending her some leads on rabbis who might be interested in working on her book project.

This kid I met in XY Chat on AOL and had directed to “Boys Club” after he said he was in a punk band wrote me back. He assumed that the story was true and that I’d played bass in a band called Boys Club. He said, referencing a character in the story, that “your ex-boyfriend Kyle sounds like a real asshole.”

I wrote to Patrick, who said that Erin is getting ready to start FAU while he’s going to Clearwater to see his second granddaughter this coming weekend. One of his former students, a P’an Ku editor who moved to New York to attend NYU, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. How awful.

At the library, I also wrote to Justin, Kevin and others.

Then, at Barnes & Noble, I spent a couple of hours sipping iced tea and reading the Times and looking at books and magazines: Newsweek on the Generation Ñ boom and how young Latinos are changing the country; New York’s articles on Bill Bradley’s surprisingly successful challenge to Al Gore and Michael Signorile’s piece on verging-on-trendy Staten Island; and The Advocate, which had a guest column by a guy my age who said that we gay boomers should stop wearing 501s and start giving in to our chronological ages.

On the Web, I’d gotten the names of some local gay photographers, but now I think I’ll just go with a simple publicity shot like the ones I got in Plantation in 1981 and Gainesville in 1993. I need to suppress my exhibitionist streak.

Even if it weren’t delusional to think that I could get away with showing a little skin or trying to look sexy, it isn’t appropriate and I’d just embarrass myself. After all, Brad Gooch, who’s handsome enough to have worked as a fashion model, posed modestly for his author photo for Finding Your Inner Boyfriend.

Lots of gay writers aren’t lookers, and it’s not like they’re actors or even musicians like Bobby, who I think is relying too much on his looks rather than his songs.

After lunch and a glance at the mail – I got approved for an Amtrak Visa from Capital One with a $500 credit line – I went to my office at Nova, where I spent three hours.

Now that “Silicon Valley Diet” is on the Web, I could print out two copies of the story and am ready to make up packets of xeroxed stories from litmags and webzines in order to ask people for blurbs. Rereading “Diet,” I still like the story, which is either a good or a bad sign.

Kevin told me that he’s still seeing that married guy and that he got a part in a play, Even the Wise Can Err, a nineteenth-century Russian farce being presented by the Armenian Theatre Company. He’s only in the English language production, not the one in Armenian, at a theater in North Hollywood.

I searched the Web for various syllabi from courses similar to my Political and Civil Liberties class and downloaded the ones I thought I could borrow from. I also did other research and got myself a 212 area code voice mailbox from Onebox.com.

Home at 4 PM, I listened to NPR, made dinner and went out to Target, where I looked around a lot but bought nothing.