Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, August 14, 2000

3 PM. When I left for ASU at 7:30 AM, the traffic was heavier than when I’ve driven in an hour later or even half an hour earlier, and there were lots more students on campus.

I still couldn’t figure out exactly where Lot 44 began and ended, so I parked in one of the parking structures as a visitor.

Gina at the English Department didn’t come in today, so Myrna couldn’t find my office key. Instead, she gave me the master keys, with which I opened 308C.

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s books all seem to be there, along with an ancient Mac untouched for so long that the monitor was filthy with grime. The office has a phone and a printer, but the computer had an early version of Netscape didn’t work.

At the Cronkite School, I asked if I needed to see an advisor, and the secretary had John Craft – a professor, I presume – call me later in the day.

He said I’d made good choices for classes and that there would be a meeting for new grad students in a few weeks and I should watch the bulletin boards.

I walked over to the bookstore to buy my texts, which cost $229, mostly because of six books for Research Methods, including one $85 text.

Research Methods is the course I dread. Like Jonathan, I don’t really want to take required courses that don’t interest me. I’m intimidated by the statistics and quantitative stuff and bored by the scholarly stuff.

Hopefully, I won’t be alone. I assume that journalism, like law, attracts students who are mathematically challenged.

I’ve read five chapters of the Newswriting text, co-written by someone at ASU, and since it’s also used in undergraduate courses, it’s fairly basic and unsophisticated. The only other book for that class was the AP style manual.

I expect Arizona Media Law will be mostly caselaw reprints from the professor because the only thing I had to buy was a short booklet, a guide to Arizona media law for journalists, which I’ve already finished reading.

I’m kind of intimidated by ASU: It seems so big. (UF was big, but the law school wasn’t.) I also have no idea if I’m going to succeed or fail in each of the three parts of my new life: teaching English at ASU, teaching at Mesa Community College, and being a journalism grad student.

At the Memorial Union, I set up my computer account and then left the campus at 9:30 AM, stopping off to check email at the public library because my ASU account wouldn’t give me computer access for several hours.

I got an encouraging email from Suellen and a notice about Kevin appearing in The Misanthrope at the Culver City Public Theatre. Otherwise there was the usual junk, and I wrote to Teresa.

After reading the paper for an hour at Starbucks, I came home and spent the rest of the day inside, out of the 108° heat.

I called Ragdale and told them I’d be unable to come on September 8. They said not to worry, that I’m welcome to apply again, and I will do so for next summer. I’d like to be in Chicago for another June.

Last night I phoned Thien, but I woke him and felt bad, so I told him to go back to sleep and that I’d call again.

I still feel overwhelmed at times, but I don’t mind being alone in my new home because it gives me a chance to center myself a bit.

I watched a little of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, but I can always get the recap on NPR and in the Times.

It turns out that the MCC adjunct orientation meeting isn’t this Wednesday night but next week – when I have a class at ASU and won’t be able to attend.

Tomorrow night I’ve got the orientation meeting for new graduate students and all day Thursday I’ve got the English Department composition faculty meetings. On Wednesday I’m having lunch with Matt.

Reading a piece by the novelist Alice Hoffman about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment made me ashamed of how I’ve been complaining so much and feeling lost. Really, my problems are nothing compared to having a life-threatening disease.

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Wednesday, August 16, 2000

2:30 PM. I could begin the way I ended yesterday: by saying what a mess I am. Not only my back but my right foot has been giving me trouble: not tendinitis but the plantar fasciitis/heel spur pain I’ve had intermittently.

No doubt both conditions are stress-related, but they make walking painful, and last night I had to walk a lot, as I will all semester at ASU.

When I arrived at the graduate student orientation, I felt like a total wreck who could barely move. In a ballroom of maybe 400 people, I spotted only one person who looked older than I, and I wondered what the hell I was doing at ASU. I may never know.

The presentations – on everything from financial aid and career services to health insurance and recreation – were plentiful but brief, and I did get the idea that ASU has resources for grad students that I should take advantage of. I can even see a counselor for depression and anxiety.

God knows when I’ll have time to take advantage of any of ASU’s services, of course. I left at 8:45 PM, hobbling along, going to the wrong parking lot at first. Parking is the nightmare at ASU, but there’s nothing I or anyone else can do about it at the fourth biggest university in the country.

At home, there was a message from Andrew, on his way to meet a client in Beverly Hills. After I watched the Democratic Convention’s sop to liberals in the form of speeches by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, I called Andrew back.

He said he’s coming into Phoenix on Sunday and staying till Wednesday morning at the hotel by Superstition Springs, and I told him the only night I’d be free was Monday. (My early-morning MCC classes don’t begin till the following week.)

I’m certain this will be a one-time meeting and that once he sees me and we talk a little, Andrew will probably make an excuse to leave early. But I should try to keep myself occupied the way I did when I met Matt for lunch in Tempe at 11:30 AM today.

I’d thought of canceling because of my back and foot troubles, but it’s too embarrassing to do that to a guy in a wheelchair. We met at the fountain by the bunny statues; then he took me across the street to the Crocodile Cafe, where he insisted on paying.

Matt looks like his photos: skinny, a bit askew, with glasses. I’m sure I came off as a complete schmuck who doesn’t have a clue even though I’m older than his parents.

He grew up in a suburb in Kansas and came to ASU because “it felt right”; once here, he got active in the gay group, and his four years as an undergraduate were an incredibly rich, rewarding experience.

It sounds like Matt found himself in college, the way I did at Brooklyn in the early 1970s. He has a good relationship with his family, who support him, and I’m sure he’ll love his two-year MFA program.

I told him about starting out as a writer in New York in the 1970s, cheering myself up with memories of submitting my stories to litmags, working at the Fiction Collective, adjuncting at LIU and CUNY, and With Hitler in New York getting published.

I would not give up those times for anything – or later ones, even.

I guess it was in the mid-1980s when my literary “career” crashed – but by then I had other stuff going, like my publicity stunts and political campaigns and occasional articles in newspapers and magazines. There was always just enough to keep me going.

Matt is a sweet kid, and it’s especially nice that a romance with him is out of the question because I could use a gay friend at ASU, and Matt would be a great resource. I hope I follow through with him.

My tendency to be a workaholic and recluse isn’t good for me. The more connected I am, the better I’ll feel about ASU. I need to fight my worst instincts.

I signed onto Yahoo Mail at the library, but they had server problems, so I could only read my mail but not reply.

Alice sent out a mass email looking for a home for Andreas’s large whimsical sculptures, the ones I remember fondly from his Soho gallery. I hope they find a proper venue.

Teresa said that the Arizona heat must have affected my mind if I am thinking of voting for Nader instead of Gore. Of course, I could vote for Gore four times and Bush would still carry Arizona and the election.

(By the way, Matt is very political, trying to arrange a takeover of the old guard at the local Stonewall Democratic Club.)

In other emails, Miriam said she’s finally made it home to Santa Fe, and Tom said New Orleans Public Schools still haven’t approved his retirement request.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography told Tom the article and proofs will be sent to him next month for a 48-hour turnaround and they needed a working email address for him.

I just assumed that the DLB thing was never going to happen, and I still won’t count on it, but seeing my entry in their “American Short-Story Writers since World War II, Third Series” volume will be at least some kind of validation that I didn’t waste my life.

In addition to my physical and mental infirmities, here’s another sign I’m getting old: At the Crocodile Cafe, when I said we were ready to order lunch, the young waiter said, “Sweet,” and I said, “What?”

Unlike people in their twenties, I was unfamiliar with the word being used to mean “That’s great.”

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Thursday, August 17, 2000

7 PM. I’m too exhausted to write very much about my long day.

I was at ASU from 8 AM till 2 PM, and as I have lately, I would use the word “overwhelmed” to describe the events and my feelings.

I met so many new people and had to take in so much information that I’m sure I won’t remember most of those I spoke to or listened to or much of what I learned. Still, I feel a little better.

I was unprepared for the enormous size of ASU’s composition program. There were 150 to 170 people at our meeting, during which we were presented with tons of information from various speakers.

ASU has its largest freshman class this year: 6,100 students, most of whom are in first-year writing classes. Greg Glau said that was twice the size of the class when he first came to ASU in 1994.

They were still hiring FAs (faculty associates, like me – in other words, adjuncts – to distinguish us from the many full-time instructors and lecturers and the TAs) as late as mid-morning.

The Department does seem to offer lots of support for new FAs, as I learned at the meeting just for us at 1 PM.

But the truth is that I would rather just be left alone and hope that I could fly under everyone’s radar. My guess is that that at a school this big, I probably can.

I was told by various people who adjunct at MCC that the community colleges are far less stressful; even a full-time instructor of four classes at ASU told me that she takes a class at MCC just to get some perspective.

The ASU English Department seems to expect a lot from the faculty associates – including four office hours a week, which seems ridiculous to me.

I did get my key to the room which I share with two other FAs while Jewell Parker Rhodes is on sabbatical.

I had lunch with two guys who are TAs just starting the M.F.A. poetry program and Katie, a new faculty associate who, like many of the teachers, got their M.A., M.F.A. or Ph.D. at ASU in the last decade. Unsurprisingly, most of the FAs are women.

You can tell immediately tell the difference between the faculty assistants and the teaching assistants: the TAs are younger and were more informally dressed, most of them in shorts and T-shirts.

The four of us ate at Schlotzsky’s in the Memorial Union, and afterward I went to the Computing Commons to check my Yahoo email. (I got stuff from Teresa, Patrick, Kevin and lots of others.)

After getting home at 2:30 PM and speed-reading today’s Times, I worked on the syllabi for my classes. It did make me feel better that a lot of the faculty associates, like me, said that they hadn’t finished writing their syllabi yet, either.

I put in most of the information about the class. Now I need to make up a phony-baloney schedule of each day’s work. Hopefully, I can get the syllabi done by tomorrow night and go to the Comp office on Saturday morning to run it off. (Demetria said the office would be open then.)

Anyway, I’m now going to listen to Al Gore’s acceptance speech, skim the rest of the paper, and doze off.

Last night I dreamed that Ben Mulvey asked me to teach full-time at Nova for $48,000 a year. Ha!

I wish I weren’t so jaded and cynical about academia. To me, teaching comp is just a job, and a very boring one at that. Teaching much more interesting undergrad classes in legal studies, literature and business has spoiled me.

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Friday, August 18, 2000

8 PM. I’ve felt relaxed this evening. This has been one of the better days I’ve had since returning from New York. I just realized I’ve now been here four weeks.

Last night I watched Gore’s speech, which was good, although I still can’t imagine him beating Bush in November.

After the rain last night, it cooled down considerably so that it was only 80° when I went out with a load of laundry at 6:30 AM and not much warmer when I went shopping at Albertsons an hour later. I didn’t even need to put on the car’s A/C.

It was my first hint of how beautiful it can be here in Phoenix once the awful summer heat passes.

My back hurt during the night, and I thought about Teresa’s comment that my problem may be adjusting to a new bed.

I’ve been on very soft mattresses, and this one is extremely firm. My back pain did start in the morning after sleeping; I had no real injury caused by a movement.

Hopefully, it will all work itself out. I did feel better as the day wore on: both my back and my foot.

I decided to work on my syllabi before I showered and dressed, and I managed to get them both done by 10 AM.

It was worth the 50¢ a page to print them from the diskette at Kinko’s. The day-by-day activities are bullshit, of course; I’ll probably be as spontaneous as ever in each class.

I also answered email from Teresa, who’s on Fire Island this week, as well as from Miriam and Tom.

NOPS has totally screwed up Tom’s medical leave and retirement, and he says, “My mental health is not good – I’ve been shaking.” (I could say the same thing.)

I also wrote a thank-you note to Matt while I was at Kinko’s. Then, across the street at Borders, I found the new issue of Echo magazine – and Ken Furtado’s kind review of The Silicon Valley Diet in his “Booked” column. They printed a copy of my cover in color.

Ken began the review with this: “Arizona author Richard Grayson’s ninth’s short story collection contains a dozen works of fiction, having in common humor as dry as the desert and an assortment of nerdy-but-likeable Seinfeldian characters.”

While I wondered why he speculated on my narrators’ dissatisfaction with being short (I like being short) and I have a few minor quibbles, the review was perceptive and positive, with lots of good quotes I could use (“excels at sort of Valley-speak mixed with stream of consciousness … his bullshit detector is dead-on”).

I had figured that the review would appear this week, and I also thought it would be pretty good. It’s just enough to raise my spirits and tell myself for another few days that I haven’t totally wasted my life.

After coming home for lunch, I drove to ASU and managed to run off 35 copies of each syllabus on the photocopy machine in the Composition office. I left the syllabi in my office because there’s no reason to for me to walk so far carrying around that heavy load.

Hopefully when it’s cool, the long walk to and from the Language and Literature building won’t be so bad, even with a full backpack. I tried to deliver some stuff to Gina and the Writing Center, but nobody I needed to see was around, so I returned home, where I still felt organized enough to begin work on my MCC class’s syllabus.

After speaking to Sat Darshan, I’m going to take her advice and buy a laptop instead of a desktop computer; Maybe I’ll get one at CompUSA tomorrow. She was busy feeding Kiran, so we didn’t stay on the phone for very long.

 – – Hey, Jen Long just called and invited me over to her apartment, where people are hanging out. While I’m sure I won’t fit in and I’ll feel weird, I think I’m going to go over there now, so I’ll continue writing this later.

*

11:30 PM. It was nice to get out for an evening, though I probably don’t fit in well with three arty 20-something lesbians with their tattoos, piercings, cigarettes and weird hair.

They laughed at the parts of Eating at Arby’s that Jen asked me to read. I learned that “tweakers” are uses of meth, and they’re apparently all over the place here, especially in the Art Department.

I see the rebellion in Jen and her friends as kind of unsophisticated, as if they don’t know it’s all been done before. But so what? These girls are still trying to get their bachelor’s or first master’s degree: I’m not sure which.

I’m a lot older than they are and smarter and more experienced – not that that makes me superior, but it does give me more perspective. I doubt that Jen expected someone so old and “different” and I’m not sure she’ll ever call me again, but I’d certainly be happy to see more of her and her friends. They give me a new perspective.

Of course, I do have to guard my tendency to take center stage with younger people, something I’m used to as a teacher.

I briefly saw Jen’s husband, who was going out while I was coming in. A cute black guy who’s also in the Art Department, I wonder if he’s gay like Jen. Of course, he didn’t give me a second glance. Why would he?

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Saturday, August 19, 2000

3 PM. I’m feeling under the weather today, almost literally.

Dad called and said my Unemployment check had arrived, but while I had planned on going to Apache Junction today, I didn’t feel up to it. Since last night I’ve had mild but annoying heartburn/acid reflux, and my tendinitis hurts – I put ice on it – and I slept only five hours last night (though I don’t ever seem to get more sleep than that).

I’m sure all this is stress-related and that I’m only going to have more problems. Is it worth it to make myself ill? Of course not. The worst thing that could happen in the remaining months of 2000 is that I fail as a journalism student and a teacher at ASU and MCC.

But so what? I lasted in the Ph.D. program at the University of Miami for about a week and I never got the degrees in the FAU and Teachers College programs I was enrolled in.

Yet I got some good things out of all those experiences, and hey, they say that failure is the best teacher.

Isn’t the important thing to have fun? So I don’t get A’s in my classes and I turn out to be an unpopular and incompetent teacher: that wouldn’t take away from my past achievements. Nobody can unpublish my books and stories and articles, and there will always be students like those at Nova who remember what a good teacher I was.

This is a tough time. But I’m open to new experiences like being with Jen and her friends last night.

I bought that Compaq Internet Presario laptop at CompUSA today, though I’ve had the usual pain-in-the-ass problems with it.

I won’t go into everything that’s wrong, and I dread thinking about how much money I’ve spent, but for eight years I’ve kept my CompUSA credit card with $2,600 available, and I’m finally using it.

I was able to go online – though not with Prodigy, which I got the $400 rebate from – and so now I don’t have to go to libraries or computers labs or Kinko’s.

I’m trying to convince myself that I deserve a first-class Internet computer. I don’t have cable TV, my own cell phone, a stereo, a real VCR, or a nice car.

Okay, I’m rationalizing. Well, I’ll just finish today’s Times, which I didn’t get to at Borders in the hour before CompUSA next door opened.

At Borders, there’s a very cute young Hispanic guy with a killer smile working at the café, and though I’m an ugly old man, I can still take pleasure in looking.

As I’ve been saying repeatedly all these months, I need to deal with becoming 50 next June. It’s hard, not just because I’m gay and alone, but because of where I am in terms of my career and my goals.

Heck, I don’t even know what my short-term and long-term goals are anymore – other than survival.

But in despair, as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man said, there are extreme pleasures, and I’m interested in sticking around until the movie is over. How will it end?