Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Saturday, June 10, 2000

10:30 PM. I just came back from an evening with Kevin. Earlier he had told me that he would come out here, but tonight he said he had bad neck pain from sleeping on flat pillows on his waterbed. I could tell he was depressed, so I offered to come over to North Hollywood.

Leaving at 6:30 PM, I found him lying in a darkened apartment watching The Weather Channel with the mute button on. He had a bad fight with his friend in Florida who had wired him $40 after Kevin specifically told him not to.

Kevin didn’t even have the money for gas to come to Woodland Hills, but he said he’d rather “starve in the streets” than take money from friends or family.

He’s very proud or very foolish or both, and since I’d sent him a $30 check last month – a subject we didn’t mention – I naturally argued against Kevin’s statement that his friend was on some power trip.

While I can understand Kevin not wanting to take money from his religious-nutcase family because he feels – as apparently they do – that it gives them the right to tell him that gay people will go to hell, but his friend (or I) certainly don’t feel that way.

I also told Kevin that he’s not always going to be starving and poor and in debt, and that “giving up acting” doesn’t have to be permanent: in military campaigns there are strategic retreats.

He has to realize his decision to be an actor is a choice; he’s still convinced nobody would hire him for an ordinary job, but that clearly is not true. Of course, I have a little of Kevin’s distorted thinking myself.

As we drove down Lankershim to Universal City and over the hill into Hollywood, I learned that Kevin can’t get to sleep at night without smoking pot – although he’s so poor that he’s down to the resin now.

He told me how money – or the lack of it – has created all sorts of problems in relationships with wealthy guys in Los Angeles.

Kevin probably needs some therapy or an antidepressant, but all he says is, “If they find out I’m manic depressive, they’ll put me away.” As if HMOs or the government still did that.

We stopped at the Wendy’s on Hollywood Boulevard in the heart of sleepy downtown Hollywood. At least he let me buy him a Coke. I know he’s literally starved for food, going down to 118 pounds at times. Hey, my own neck problems were worse when I was depressed, so I understand where he’s at.

We drove back to the Valley via the winding, exciting Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and I hugged him when I dropped him off at his house.

I feel bad for Kevin, and I can’t judge whether his talent is large enough for him to earn even a marginal living in the entertainment industry.

He’d be better off, I guess, to think of show business as a hobby the way I think of my fiction writing or Grant thinks of his music.

Driving home just now, I got off the 101 freeway at White Oak and took Ventura Boulevard for several miles, buying the Sunday New York Times at an Encino newsstand and looking at the stores along the way in Encino and Tarzana.

Today has been a pleasant, lowkey day. Libby’s Mexican cleaning woman was here this morning, and Libby and Grant spent the day planning their summer trips, taking naps, and generally just hanging out.

Emma and Mary came back late last night after seeing Venice Beach, which underwhelmed them, and also Hollywood and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

But they no longer wanted to leave early today; instead, they hung out at the pool with the kids, who adored them, and took a long bicycle ride and did other stuff, not leaving for San Francisco till 2:30 PM.

That meant our museum trip with the kids was canceled, so I left the house at 9 AM and spent the morning reading Saturday’s New York Times and Sunday’s Los Angeles Times over blackberry-sage iced tea at the Calabasas Barnes & Noble.

After that, I went to the Ralphs at the Commons and bought flowers and toilet paper for the house, candy bars for the kids, and frozen veggies and couscous wraps for myself.

In the afternoon, I chatted with Emma and Mary as they sunbathed and the kids swam, and I caught up on all my email, even sending out some stuff about the book.

Last evening, Libby called Mason in the Catskills, and I got on the line with her. Mason’s barn and house are being renovated, so he’s living across the road.

Mason enjoyed teaching at the high school, but he will most likely be laid off due to budget cuts. He still sounds the same, with his self-deprecating sense of humor and his slightly nebbishy ways.

His family is fine, including his little brother and his wife in Tahoe, and his still-divorced parents, whose nearby lodge is sold out for the summer.

Actors like Aidan Quinn, Willem Dafoe and Uma Thurman live nearby, and Mason runs into them at the town dump in Accord.

It was good to hear his voice again after so many years.

This whole trip to L.A. has been pure magic, as good as I could have hoped for, thanks to Libby and Grant, Lindsay (who’s at a sleepover tonight) and Wyatt.

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Sunday, June 11, 2000

9 PM. This morning I got up at 7 AM, had breakfast, and after Libby took Wyatt and his best friend Artie Chavez, who slept over last night, to church (stopping on the way to pick up Lindsay at her sleepover birthday party), I exercised to two Body Electric tapes for an hour (so I can skip tomorrow) before showering and dressing.

Grant told me to be ready by 10:30 AM, so I made myself a sandwich, a sweet potato and got the plastic bag with some salad veggies and put them in my little cooler from the backpack.

It was Pentecost, and everyone at the Prince of Peace Church had to wear red. I was wearing red briefs and a red belt (okay, burgundy), but Libby had called to say I didn’t have to go to Target or Mervyn’s to get a red shirt, that she had a t-shirt for me.

So when Alden and I got to churched, I changed when we got there into a red t-shirt with a discreet Prince of Peace Episcopalian logo on the front right breast. On the back, however, there was this big notice: SEEK THE LORD JESUS WHERE YOU CAN, with Jesus in reverse trompe l’oeil lettering so that you don’t see the word at first.

But the shirt fits well, so I’ll keep it even if I does make me look like a dork. Hey, I don’t believe in Calvin Klein, either. Episcopalians are about as mainstream as Christians get, so I felt only a little uncomfortable wearing it.

Grant doesn’t go to church even though his family helped found the American Baptist Association (also the denomination that Teresa’s family belongs to) and Grant’s father, who died when he was 3, and his stepfather were both ministers.

But as he told me, “We’re just showing up for the picnic.”

We sat by ourselves and discussed how MP3, Napster and the Web in general would change the recording and publishing industries. Unlike Grant, I believe that the new technology means that artists will have to give stuff away.

After reading an Andrew Sullivan piece on “dot-communism,” I would give some people – say, the intelligent guys I’ve met in Salon’s Table Talk group on Gay Lit – the raw text of The Silicon Valley Diet so they can read it like that if that’s what they want.

A writer like myself or a musician like Grant has never made any real money from our work anyway.

I suspect that my next book will probably be an E-book. (Since the Publishers Weekly and Sun-Sentinel reviews came out, I’m getting ideas for stories all the time.)

Anyway, the church picnic was lowkey, and I chatted with a few of Libby’s friends. One of the great things about this week is experiencing suburban parenthood in the Valley. I live a life far removed from Boy Scout meetings, class trips and church picnics, and it’s good to see what that’s like.

When we all got home, I took off for a couple of hours to Barnes & Noble for mango Ceylon iced tea, a fat-free biscotti and the Sunday Times news, business and Week in Review sections.

Later, I walked along as Wyatt went on his scooter. At one point, he must have run over a twig, for he fell over and scraped his elbow, palm and knees. So, crying, the little boy got taken home by Uncle Richie to Mama’s Bacitracin, colorful kids’ Band-aids and soothing comfort.

Later we watched Zorro after I made us burritos. (Libby ordered Chinese takeout, but the restaurant ignored her instructions to make the tofu non-spicy; Grant phoned the place and put them through the wringer with his loud complaints.)

I called Kevin, who was out, and left a message saying I hoped he felt better and thanking for seeing me; I said I’d try to visit again in the fall. Libby basically said her casa es mi casa, but next time I’ll come for a long weekend instead of eight days.

Today was perfect weather, and unless I have a mishap on the way to the airport, it’s been a perfect trip.

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Thursday, June 15, 2000

10:30 PM. I came home a little over an hour ago, but Jonathan gets home even later from the house of the 17-year-old boy with M.S. that he looks after.

Jonathan only just finished eating, and now he’s putting the rabbit – or “the bunny,” as she’s called around here – into the bathroom (I almost wrote “her bathroom”) for the night.

Late this afternoon I got a call from the English Department writing coordinator at ASU, who offered me from one to four courses for the fall semester. I think we settled on three, but I can’t recall.

I remember only that I have at least one section of English 101 and one of English 105, the advanced version of comp for better students, and both classes are on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

They pay about $3,000 for a course, which is very much better than any adjunct work I’ve ever done. The coordinator said she’s going to send me a letter of confirmation that I have to sign to accept the courses.

If it is three courses, then I’ll probably be doing okay financially between my salary and the leftover student loan money. That should mean at least $10,000 for the fall.

Of course, I’d also be very busy: taking three classes and teaching three classes is about my limit, though I have taught and taken various combinations of six classes before.

But ASU will probably expect a lot from their freshman comp teachers, and I am very much a dinosaur in the face of current composition and rhetoric pedagogy, research and methods.

Well, I’ll try it for one semester, and if I don’t like it or they don’t like me, that will be fine.

My parents were surprised I’d be hired over the phone without an interview, but of course I had good references and an impressive CV – on paper – so I am not shocked.

ASU calls their adjuncts “faculty associates,” by the way.

This morning I found out that Marc got the promotion to assistant manager, a change that on paper means $6,000 more. But since he will no longer get overtime or a commission, practically speaking, it doesn’t mean any more money.

However, as Dad told him, it will look better on his résumé, as when he was assistant manager of the pager store in downtown Mesa.

This morning I took the car in for a quick oil change, but the “service” light still goes on for the first few minutes when I start up the car. Then I went to Starbucks, where I read the main section of the Times outside, and before coming home, I bought groceries at Fry’s.

Spending time on the computer, I answered email from Patrick, Kendall, Teresa, Sat Darshan and others. In her latest message, Teresa reported that her grandmother is in the hospital. It sounds as if she’s falling into that pattern that’s common to people in their 90s: recurring pneumonia.

Her grandmother doesn’t know where she is, so it’s very difficult for her and for Teresa’s parents, aunt and uncle, who as Teresa says, are themselves old folks.

This weekend Teresa is going to Fire Island to cook for a party on Saturday, but that will be her last job for a while.

For the next month she’ll have a full house, with Deirdre and her kids arriving soon. Stephanie will stay on till July 7, mostly because she wants to see more of New York City.

Paul’s English cousins will also overlap with my visit, though Teresa said I could have Jade’s space in the basement as well as her car while Jade is in Italy.

Teresa said it was 101° in San Francisco yesterday while New York is having the climate of San Francisco: chilly and rainy.

I got my Amazon.com advantage order for two copies of I Survived Caracas Traffic, which I sent out bulk rate just before the post office closed at 5 PM. (There was no crowd there today.)

After dinner I went to the new Red Mountain branch of the Mesa Public Library, off Power Road and University, where I read and got a Mesa library card.

Driving back towards Superstition Mountain via University Drive, I thought about the difference between lush, semitropical Florida and the very different kind of beauty – spare, almost ascetic – you find here in the Sonoran Desert.

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Saturday, June 17, 2000

10 PM. Yesterday afternoon the mail brought my $550 Florida unemployment check; my penultimate Nova paycheck had already been directly deposited. I should get the same combined $1,735 or so in two weeks.

While I’ve spent lots of money on travel and moving expenses in recent months, right now I don’t have that $765 rent payment I had in Florida.

My credit card payments are high, but I can manage that for now, and I still have thousands of dollars in unused credit lines.

Yesterday afternoon I also got another order of two copies of Disjointed Fictions from Amazon, so I sent that out right away.

Last evening I went out to Superstition Springs, as I did tonight, when I got Marc a new color cartridge at Staples, had dinner at Wendy’s, and bought two better-grade t-shirts and a pair of shorts at Targe.

It horrifies me to see my body and face in the harsh light of the dressing room mirror: I look so old, and my hair looks terrible.

Even the boy at the checkout counter at Target said when he saw me, “So you like that puffy hair, huh?”

“Not really,” I told the boy at the counter. “Right now I look like the president of North Korea.” The kid hadn’t seen Kim Jong Il’s photo in the news of the Korean summit, though the lady in front of me did and smiled.

When I said something about being an old man, the kid said, “Like, what are you, 25?”

I laughed and showed him my driver’s license. “I’ll be 50 on my next birthday,” I said.

“Do you dye your hair?”

“No,” I sputtered – though Marc now colors his.

“Wow, you could pass for 25.”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

When I told this to Dad, he thought I was an asshole for revealing my age, but I don’t want to be like my father. I want to rise to the challenge of accepting my chronological age even though I don’t intend to slow down.

What’s hard is being gay and single and attracted to younger guys. That guy Will in Tempe is really anxious for us to get together; he gave me his phone number and wants to meet me on Monday on Mill Avenue.

But after looking at his personal webpage, I’m more convinced than ever that we wouldn’t even click as friends, much less anything more.

He’s handsome, I guess, with a good body, and he’s intelligent – but I just can’t relate to a guy who uses the word “emale,” whose passions are scuba diving, mountain climbing and kayaking, and who posed for a photograph with several giant rubber phalluses attached to his body.

Not to mention that he’s a real estate agent and has a beard. I shouldn’t have responded to his reply.

Kendall told me he’s going to be in New York for the July 4th weekend and he gave me his number in the city. I doubt that we’ll click, either, but at least I can relate to him better.

This afternoon I went to Phoenix for a visit with Sat Darshan. I parked in front of the house where Nirankar and Trevor live just as Gurudaya and Kiran were just going across the street,

Kiran, who will be 2 in September, was a bit apprehensive with me at first. She’s gotten a lot bigger and she seems to have regained most of the use of her left arm.

Set Darshan looked okay. I never know how I should greet a religious Sikh woman, so I suppressed the normal desire to give her a hug or a peck on the cheek, but that just makes me feel more awkward.

I petted the dog, who just returned from the vet, as we sat in the living room.

When Gurudaya took the baby, Sat Darshan and I could talk, but after we went across the street, 4-year-old Trevor pounced on me with the kind of boyish energy that Wyatt has.

We read his Dinosaurs book, and on every page he asked me to tell him what kind of dinosaurs were pictured. They did have the names listed, but I could hardly pronounce several of them.

A delivery of pizza arrived, and Sat Darshan and Nirankar kept monitoring the kids, who wanted to get up or not finish their food.

Then Trevor wanted to play catch with me, so we went outside. Trevor and I passed around a football and then a frisbee, which we tried to get Kiran to catch, too.

When Ravinder came home, I waved to him from across the street. Kiran was excited to see her Papaji, but Ravinder just went into a neighbor’s house without paying much attention to her.

Tired and hot and a little headachy, I left 9th Street at 3:30 PM before Ravinder returned to Sat Darshan’s house.

Trevor, who has a crewcut, refers to Kiran as his sister; she wears the bracelet and the other case of a Sikh, but Trevor doesn’t.

Sat Darshan seems to somewhat resent Trevor. She thinks he’s too rambunctious, though my experience with Wyatt and other third grade kids in Los Angeles tells me that most boys are a lot wilder than most girls.

I tend to think that males are wired differently – whether it’s their brains or testosterone or whatever.

I’m sure there’s tension between Sat Darshan and Nirankar, who has what I call a Southern working class mentality; she mentioned to me the possibility of sending Trevor to military boarding school if he misbehaves as a teenager.

Even if Sat Darshan were not a Sikh, she comes from a more upper middle class head. But they are friends and will always be linked because of the kids. Nirankar is even taking a math class at Phoenix College with Gurudaya.

Gurudaya told me she likes the small classes at Phoenix College, and she intends to transfer to ASU after getting her associate’s degree.

Set Darshan seems unhappy with aspects of her life. She said Ravinder has attention deficit disorder, and she’s mentioned how neither of her husbands were “financially successful.”

Well, I hope her life gets happier. Maybe, just like me, she’s a complainer no matter how good things are.

When I left, Sat Darshan said, “Sorry that we’re so boring,” and I had to assure her they weren’t.

I actually wasn’t feeling that great. Although it was “only” about 103°, I wasn’t used to being active outside at that temperature.

When I got back to Apache Junction, it was eerily windy for the next few hours, almost as if a thunderstorm were coming.

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Sunday, June 18, 2000

9 PM. I’d heard the forecast for precipitation, and all day had been watching the cumulus clouds cast shadows on the Superstition Mountains.

Then, a couple of hours ago, Dad shouted, “It’s raining!” alerting everyone in the house to the arrival of this rare phenomenon.

I went out to the front, where children were bicycling in the street, excited by the rare and freakish precipitation.

“I wish it would rain harder!” one boy shouted.

Actually, the sun was setting and the rain was light, but the clouds were incredibly beautiful, especially when occasional lightning flashed in the distance.

It had cooled off – it never topped 100° today – and even I could detect the rise in humidity in the air.

Standing in front of the house, I looked to the right, with the mountain looming as it always does, at our neighbor’s $1,000 saguaro cactus. Despite the rain, the sky was pastel blue and rose and gray and fluffy white.

I’m not a good enough writer to describe the scene, but I will say that as I head home via the Superstition Freeway several times each day, I find the scenery is growing on me.

Looking at the picture-postcard view tonight, my first thought was typical for a city boy in 2000: that everything looked like computer-generated virtual reality.

Yesterday’s mail brought the Silicon Valley Diet postcards, as inept as everything else Valentine Publishing Group/Red Hen Press has done.

They again used quotations from blurbs of my old books rather than those for Diet, and while they made sure to give “Mark E. Cull/Los Angeles” credit for the cover, the ordering info began “Main orders to:” instead of “Mail orders to” and it said that it would take 3-4 weeks to get the copy you were shelling out $14.95 plus $3 shipping and handling for.

If I were a more accomplished and important writer, someone could do a case study on how badly I’ve been published throughout my laughingstock of a career.

At 2 PM today, I found myself in the Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, straining to see and hear a real writer, David Sedaris, who charmed the crowd – and me – as he does public radio listeners, with his wit and offbeat charm.

Sedaris has not only the style and grace that I can only dream about, but he took time out to push two books of his fellow radio essayists: Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli and Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, a novel about a New England creative writing teacher’s seduction of a student.

I admire Sedaris’s sense of humor and of the absurd and how he so smoothly integrates being gay into his life and his work. I know I’m not on his level, and I guess after 25 years, I need to recognize that if I’m published by incompetents, it’s probably due to water reaching its own level.

Although I sound like I’m beating myself up, I don’t feel that way. What I would have liked to learn is how one of my books would have been done if it had been published by Putnam, Viking or Morrow.

My book got no new newspaper reviews today, and it looks as if the best of them is behind me. I might get some other mentions here and there, but for all “intense purposes” – as a student of mine once wrote – Diet is DOA.

If a New York Times “Books in Brief” mention couldn’t do a thing for I Survived Caracas Traffic – that is, get it distributed – nothing more will happen with Diet except the occasional Amazon sale.

Today was Father’s Day, and Dad received two of the exact same card – from Marc and myself, though we purchased them in different stores and in different cities.

The card read: “Dad, I could never repay you for all you’ve done, so I’ll do the next best thing . . . go deeper into debt. Happy Father’s Day!”

Either Marc and I are more alike than I suspected or else we have a similar relationship with our father. Spooky but comforting.