Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, January 22, 2001

7:30 PM. I’m still as shaky and shivery and sweaty-palmed as I was last night, when I did not sleep at all.

I called Susan and left a message. She phoned when I got back from work today. Her colleague, whom I spoke to on Thursday night had talked to her about me, and Susan had talked to Dr. Brubaker, but they thought I still had Ativan at home.

Susan said she’d call her husband and ask him to call in a prescription for Ativan (lorazepam) at Osco.

I picked it up at 3 PM, but the 0.5 milligrams hasn’t really done much, even combined with the Serzone and Klonopin I took an hour ago.

I feel like I’m slipping back to last fall’s pattern, except now the insomnia is worse than before I had trazodone.

Susan said I should write about the incident and talk about it and it will lose its power. But I really don’t think about it all that much.

After doing aerobics yesterday, I put on boxing gloves and punched the hell out of the wall, trying to imagine myself fighting back the muggers. Every time I open my front door, I think back to them approaching and grabbing me.

Why didn’t I try to run? Why didn’t I think to grab the fire alarm? Why didn’t I chase after them when they were leaving? I feel I was weak.

I know all of this is irrational and I will have to accept that given the swift way it happened, I reacted as best I could.

But lying on the ground, with one guy holding a rifle or stick to my groin, the other smashing off my glasses and going through the pockets of my tight jeans, I felt as if I were being raped.

The guy on top of me, from what I could see from the bottom half of his face, looked like a kid: a handsome, baby-faced one.

That also brings up a lot of discomfort. Did I want to be raped? Or beaten? I’ve had masochistic fantasies, but in reality the idea makes me sick.

When, after it happened, I kept screaming and nobody came to my aid until my neighbor, who did so only grudgingly at the behest of his stepson, I thought about Kitty Genovese and how nobody lifted a finger as she screamed while being murdered.

I’ve always had the fear that the world was a scary, hostile place where, as Josh would say all the time, “Most people would just as soon kill you as look at you.”

The cops weren’t very sympathetic, but this was routine to them. As soon as I got into the apartment and took my Serzone, I got the feeling the cops thought they were dealing with a nut. When they saw that I had laid out the next day’s clothes on my bed, one of them gave the other a look.

I feel more and more angry that the outside lights were off that night. If they hadn’t been, I would have safely gotten inside my apartment because I wouldn’t have had to struggle to find my key.

Today I mailed off a letter to Stan Harrelson, the CEO and president of Pinnacle Realty Management Company, which owns Quail Creek. I got the address of his $500K home in Seattle from Lexis.

Well, there’s a lot more I guess I could say, but I want to write about going back to ASU this morning.

In the Writing Program office, I thanked Demetria for being nice, and in my mailbox was a get well soon card that my 7:40 AM students had signed. I also got the spring semester office key from Gina and left the door open all day.

I told both classes the story of my mugging. Unfortunately, in my upset, I told the substitute that my second class began at 10:40 AM instead of 9:40 AM, and the students just sat there and I didn’t show up.

Today I had them write about themselves and how they feel about writing and their English 101 class, and we went around the room talking. The only bad symptom I had during class were sweaty palms.

During the break between classes, I got a replacement ASU Sun ID card for $10.

Getting home at 11 AM, I worked out to Body Electric and then tried to watch Do the Right Thing, but nearly every scene had me in tears because it all seemed so poignant. Why does there have to be violence and conflict in the world? Or fucked-up kids who did with me what they did?

In my two classes, I have Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans and a black woman – but no black men.

These guys have no future unless someone intervenes. If I could talk to them, I’d try to tell them that they need to go to school or do something with their lives.

I’m a stupid liberal, huh? Having now been mugged, I guess I’m supposed to become a conservative. I know people might say the kids who robbed me are too far gone – that they’re just criminals.

But whatever optimism that hasn’t been shaken out of me still makes me believe that they aren’t really bad human beings. I wish I could have talked to them, just given them my cash if they let me keep everything else.

But I do feel betrayed by the world after what happened – as irrational a belief as Dr. Albert Ellis could come up with as an example. It’s a rotten society where drugs and crime are all kids have to do and people like me get caught in the crossfire.

Hey, what if today’s anxiety isn’t caused by the mugging but by going back to ASU? Well, there’s no way of doing a “but for”/control test after the fact. But I guess I would not have had all this stress.

Sat Darshan and others I’ve spoken to about it tell me – as Mark Savage said in an email – that time will heal this and the incident will fade into the background and ultimately become a story to write or tell.

I guess so. But it’s so fresh now.

Teaching at ASU is actually better than not working. It’s good for me to function in the world.

If I don’t sleep again tonight, I’ll still get through my first 7:30 AM Mesa Community College class (which is the only English Department section at that hour which has filled).

I just flashed on the guy holding the rifle or stick to my groin. That was totally emasculating and probably brings up my own homophobia and self-hatred. God, there’s a lot in there to write, talk and think about.

I got a card from Wade, who loved The Silicon Valley Diet and sent a photo of him and the boys in Seville over Christmas.

The older son, with a beard, looks a lot like Sat Darshan; in real life, I saw him only when he was a baby in Charlottesville and then again when he was 5 or 6 back in Brooklyn at Sat Darshan’s apartment.

I got a note from Susan Ludvigson, who was grateful after seeing the review of her new book that I put up on Amazon.com. She’s a nice person.

FAU sent the stuff for the Public Intellectual Ph.D. program, but the fellowship deadline is next week and I couldn’t possibly get everything done in time. A blessing, probably: I can become a public intellectual without taking any more grad courses.

The Arizona Republic phoned and said they might print my last letter about the bronzes. It will really be provocative if they do publish it. God, I can be so bold in print.

In my non-writing life, as I told one class, I’m so meek that the only law firm that would hire me is the one from Ally McBeal, except I can’t sing.

I’m going to watch Ally McBeal now and try not to get too much performance anxiety about sleeping. Although my palms are sweaty, I didn’t need a towel under my hands to write this.

No matter how much I’m plagued with insomnia, eventually the sleep deficit will get to me and I’ll sleep soundly, if only for one night– as happened even at my worst in the fall.

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Tuesday, January 23, 2001

5 PM. I just took a Klonopin. Last night I took another Ativan in addition to the usual everything, and I did sleep well enough, from about 10:30 PM to 5:30 AM. Maybe I was asleep a little earlier than that.

Although I took an Ativan at 10:30 AM, I’m going to try to avoid taking another today. I’ve got to learn to deal with the anxiety.

What’s got me now is the car. It’s making a ringing noise on the bottom, and also the brakes don’t work as well as they had been before I brought the car in last week.

I should never have spent the $860 on the car. I called Glenn at the mechanics to tell him about the noise but said I couldn’t afford the time or money to take it in now.

If it’s too expensive to fix, I’ll just get another car – which is what I should have done long ago. I really should have sold the car in Florida last May and not spent more than it’s worth transporting it to Arizona and fixing it.

Well, that’s one mistake that I can learn from, as Beverly Reinhart said when she saw me.

She seemed to think that I’ve been handling things as well as possible and said that I would feel vulnerable for a while, and since I’ve already gotten over the worst of my anxiety, I will get over these feelings, too.

During the Christmas vacation, as I told Bev, I had almost no stress: My car problems were minor, I didn’t have teeth problems, I didn’t have the stresses of getting up early or dealing with students or professors.

Bev said that I seemed to be able to make decisions about my future. For instance, I’m sure I won’t be back in the Master of Mass Communication program next fall, and I won’t teach be teaching adjunct English classes.

And I’ve firmly decided that I’m going to ask the realty company to let me out of the lease without the full penalty for leaving early. If they agree, I’ll leave Arizona at the end of May, just four months from now.

While I’m concerned about not having health insurance when I’m no longer a grad student, I’ll see what I can find through various organizations.

Maybe, since I’ll be 50 on June 4, AARP has something I can get. Even a prescription discount plan would help. Perhaps PEN or the Authors Guild or the Writers Union has something.

Still, I don’t know how I’ll get through the next four months. I do worry that I won’t be able to travel and live elsewhere if I’m still anxious and depressed – but at worst, I guess I can always end up becoming agoraphobic again and move into my parents’ living room.

Eventually I will get stronger and want to deal with the world again. I remember how, when I was 17 and at my worst, I asked Dr. Littman if I could go to a mental hospital. Right now, that sounds like a good deal. I can’t imagine how many more stresses I’ll have to face during the spring semester in Arizona.

There’s always the problem of money.

Today, while exercising at 9 AM after I got home from MCC, I heard Diane Rehm interview the author of Credit Card America, who takes the view that the credit card companies have added to the boom of the 1990s by putting credit in the hands of people who can’t afford to pay it back but can use the money to consume and add to GDP.

I suppose I’ll have to declare bankruptcy by fall. But meanwhile, my cards are still set sending me cash advance checks that I can use like regular money.

The author said that one college graduate killed himself over $10,000 in debts that he got out of the cards they get college kids hooked on – and he’s not the only one to commit suicide over owing so much money.

Well, I won’t end up that way. It seems absurd. I’ve paid a fortune in interest, so I don’t care about screwing the credit card banks again.

After bankruptcy, I may not be able to rent an apartment, but I could be the roommate of some homeowner or renter, and I can take multiple jobs to get money. It’s irrational to think I’ll end up homeless unless I somehow decide that life will be less stressful that way.

In his presidency, Bush is proving to be much more conservative than he let on during the campaign, but it will be the bad economy that undoes him. The bigger the boom, the bigger the bust.

Even Manhattan rents, though still at idiotically high rates, are coming down in price. Cities and suburbs are choking on growth. There’s still an energy crise.

All these factors could make 2001 a really bad year even though most experts are currently telling us to expect an upturn in the second half.

My MCC class is in a classroom with a computer and video panel that I don’t know how to work.

I’m dismayed that my students were charged a $10 fee for something we probably won’t use, but only one student – an older black man – left, apparently disgusted, in the middle of class.

My section has about 11 or 12 of my students from last term, making up nearly half of the class. I was surprised at how many students said English 101 was easy for them, but I guess I’m not the only easygoing teacher at MCC.

I saw Debra Black and some other familiar adjuncts in the office. Of course, like the Ancient Mariner, I felt compelled to tell my story of the mugging, as I’ve also done to several neighbors I know by sight at Quail Creek.

Talking to Beverly about it also helped. She reminded me that I could always arrange my keys into a weapon in my hand, the way I did on my first date with Toby in Gainesville, when I thought we might be jumped by some homophobic teenagers in the Applebee’s parking lot.

So reliving the experience does help, as Susan told me yesterday morning. However, I’m beginning to wonder if, absent the trauma I experienced, I’d still be this anxious anyway.

Still, I like the time I’m teaching because it takes my mind off anxiety. As Sat Darshan said, staying home most of the day would not be good for me.

I got an email from Justin, who said he was not going to try to cheer me up and told me I should allow myself to feel bad and not worry about what other people think.

Justin wrote that he got really upset when people became impatient with him during his clinical depression after Brooklyn College rebuffed him for a full-time permanent position. He says I’ll recover from the trauma in my own good time.

Justin has been very active with shows and stuff despite a very difficult knee operation two weeks ago. The surgery to repair his torn meniscus turned out to be so complicated that he’s spending six weeks on crutches rather than the expected three weeks with a cane.

Luckily, he has Larry to take care of him, and Justin’s boss drives him to work, and it sounds as if he has decent health insurance. I’m so glad I took health insurance as an ASU student; it’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

In other email, Sheila Alu sent me a kind note thanking me for my contribution to her campaign.

To save money, I decided to cancel my Florida-South AAA membership – even though I may again be a Floridian by the end of the year.

I brought Do the Right Thing back to Hollywood Video without finishing it.

I guess I have to expect the car will die before the week is over. I would have been better off if it had died last summer and I’d bought a more reliable car for the academic year.

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Monday, January 29, 2001

7 PM. In the last couple of hours I took my usual Klonopin and Serzone, and I also needed an Ativan. At our appointment today, Susan said I should not try to get through bad anxiety without it, that I’ll get better quicker if I take the Ativan when I need it – like now, when I’ve been shivering.

Of course, even though the temperatures are creeping up a little, January in Phoenix feels chilly to me. After so many warm winters in Florida, I’m not used to the chill of the desert.

Last night I fell asleep at 8:30 PM during the Super Bowl post-game show and woke up right after my first dream, but in the end I probably slept over nine hours, so I can’t complain.

Although I don’t like being out in the cold darkness, I left for ASU very early because I was worried about the car not starting. It did, but on the way to campus, I had a lot of trouble with the headlights: the brights kept going on and off.

I had my students read the article on adjunct teachers and write a reaction paper to it because I wanted to see another example of how they write.

I’m letting them write their first assignment about any problem in higher education that they can think of, so I figured I was modeled choosing a topic that genuinely interests them the way the plight of part-time college teachers does me. Right now I can’t deal with too much stress.

The Pre-Columbian Theater in the Americas online class isn’t fun. It seems like everyone else already posted stuff about The Origin of the Sun, which to me isn’t really early theater. It seems like narrative myth, but on the page you can’t really grasp the communal nature of the way the text was used.

Frankly, I think this course sucks, and I’ll probably end up dropping it. I did try to comment (something like what I said above), but I couldn’t access the class discussion board at my home computer.

On the other hand, I don’t mind doing the journal entries for the American Multicultural Film class, and the only thing I have to do now is simply comment on Malcolm X and take the exam at the end of our first unit.

Anyway, I did feel quite a bit of anxiety today. When I got up, my palms and the soles of my feet were sweaty and I felt shaky. They soon went away but recurred several times during the day.

When I saw Susan in her office, I told her my stories – the mugging in detail, my symptoms of anxiety and depression, all the bad dreams of Friday night – plus the problems with the car, my teeth, my computer, and the money problems behind everything.

She told me that on the night of being attacked, I suffered a trauma that might lead anyone to take medication. Susan says I need to be patient and give myself time to recover.

I know I’m doing stuff, like yoga and aerobics, that’s good for me. The same goes for listening to my relaxation tapes and reading the self-help books. But as much as I try to distract myself from anxious and depressing thoughts, eventually I get tired of the distractions.

Of course, I’m also very tired of feeling anxiety all the time.

I know that I need to follow AA’s “one day at a time,” but for me, focusing only on the present – the current 24 hours – is very hard to do, as it seems to go against my nature and the way I’ve always functioned.

Planning ahead has served me well in the past, and I feel I really need to deal with everything that could happen in the future and everything I want to happen then.

Susan has booked me for appointments every Tuesday in February. When she asked if I wanted her to try to call the insurance company for twice-weekly sessions, I told her no, that I sort of feel the way I do with the Ativan: I’d like to try to feel better on my own. However, I told Susan I will call if I change my mind.

Later in the afternoon I did yoga despite having the usual gas and slight diarrhea.

Teresa said that today she, her sister, mother and aunt went over to Pam and Norton’s house in New Jersey to get Pam’s things while Pam was seeing Norton at a restaurant in New Jersey.

I don’t understand why they simply didn’t get a court order making Norton give Pam all her own possessions.

I wrote to Patrick and Mark Bernstein, two of the last people I told about the mugging, though I’m sure my friends are sick of hearing about my woes.

Marc is going to Florida on Thursday, so maybe I can spend a night in Apache Junction in his room while he’s away.

Oh, I just noticed that for a little while, I stopped myself from worrying about the future.