A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late February, 2002
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
7:30 PM. I was walking along SW 30th Street a couple of hours ago while my laundry was in the dryer. Listening to NPR on my Walkman, I heard Walter Cronkite reminiscing about covering John Glenn’s space flight on CBS, which was forty years ago today.
I’m pretty sure I remember watching the launch on TV in Mrs. Zweig’s sixth-grade class. It’s possible I’m confusing this memory with one of Glenn’s many scrubbed launches, but I think not.
Our class was paired with another teacher’s class, and just before liftoff, Mrs. D’Atri told us to pray for the astronaut. (This was before prayer in schools was outlawed. At P.S. 203, we used to read selected psalms at school assemblies.)
Reading today’s New York Times at lunch, I saw a letter from Karl Bernstein, our science teacher from Meyer Levin Junior High School. Dr. Bernstein wrote about school orchestras and mentioned that he was a retired New York City assistant principal. His address was Woodmere.
I recall that Dr. Bernstein and his wife, who taught art at Meyer Levin, used to drive down Ralph Avenue and pass me and Steve Handelman waiting for the bus; occasionally they would pick us up and drive us to school.
–– It’s now 9 PM. Josh called just after I wrote that last sentence. Earlier I’d called him to find out how his Mohs surgery for the squamous cell carcinoma on his cheek went.
Overall, Josh said, it went okay, although he was at the doctor’s office on the Upper East Side from 9 AM until 3 PM.
Mohs surgery is where they keep taking off little pieces and doing biopsies on them until they don’t need to cut any more, and they had to cut Josh three times.
After each time, he had to sit in the waiting room for an hour until they got the results. Josh’s doctor, a Chinese man, is a famous dermatological surgeon, and Josh has confidence in him.
His face was so shot up with lidocaine that he felt nothing even though it took nine stitches to close him up.
Josh was told that tomorrow, when he changes the bandage, it will look raised, but that’s so it will heal normally; there’s no indentation, although there will be a scar.
Anyway, I’m glad it turned out okay. I’ll need to see a doctor myself because this pimple on the edge of my lips isn’t healing, and I think it also could be skin cancer.
After listening to me go on about my job, Josh said, “The way you talk, it sounds like you’ve been there for years, like you’ve really settled in.”
Today I saw nine students in total. It’s all the same story: good students getting bad grades for the first time in their lives.
There’s the guy who had to leave his wife in Sangrey, California, with a house they couldn’t sell; the Haitian student whose wife has bipolar disorder and had to be hospitalized during finals; and the girl who panics while taking tests and forgets what she knows, like she says she did on the LSAT.
Then there’s Sheryl Shapiro, who says she has “more street smarts than anyone at this crazy school.” She seems to hate everything and everybody at Nova, telling me the law school curriculum “has no relevance.”
Sheryl’s vehemence upset me a little, but I could tell that deep down, she’s really scared.
Just before she left my office I said to her, “Maybe you should stop torturing yourself.” She sort of nodded.
You know, counseling other people makes me realize that I’d be a better person if I took my own advice.
My job, the bar exam, my debts, even my anxiety itself: they’re just stuff I’m going through now, and they won’t be important later in my life. I need to take things more lightly.
Barry Matthews, the guest editor of Blithe House Quarterly’s summer issue, said he’ll take “Life with Linda” if I make some changes.
He was definitely right about some awkward spots in the story. I told him I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to make the changes or if he wanted to make them himself.
If everything is okay, they’ll run it this summer. It makes me feel good to know I’m still taken seriously as a writer by such a good webzine. Then I can feel that I’m not just a law school administrator.
Twenty years or so ago, I told Susan Mernit that I didn’t want to be just a community college English teacher. Susan replied, “Richard, you could never be just a community college English instructor.”
Last night I listened to the first tape of seven cassettes in Elizabeth Peters’s Crocodile on the Sandbar, which Pat Jason told me her book group is reading.
I picked it up at the Davie public library on Monday evening. It’s actually better than I expected.
I know that Sat Darshan was having a chest x-ray today. She’s had her cough for so long that the doctor wanted to see if it’s walking pneumonia.
Gosh, friends my age have had a lot of health problems lately.
Elihu and Roger had walking pneumonia, and Roger needs to have an angioplasty. Josh has had squamous cell carcinoma, and Alice’s wrist isn’t healing as well as her doctor would have liked it to.
I will be glad when my NSU medical insurance kicks in after ninety days on the job.
I left work at 4:30 PM after my last appointment. Pat and everyone were at the faculty meeting in the new library. Thelma said their meeting wouldn’t be over till 5:30 PM, so I figured that nobody would miss me.
At noon, I didn’t go to the meetings of either Lambda Law or the Hispanic Law Students Association. After five student appointments in a row, I needed to go home for lunch and relax before returning to my office for a 1:30 PM appointment.
I did manage to unwind at home before dinner: I paid more bills, did laundry, took a walk, and stopped at Walgreens to buy Arizona Diet Iced Tea for work.
At the drugstore, I saw the tiny red-haired girl in a wheelchair who’s an undergraduate at Nova. When I said hi to her, the girl who was wheeling her around said, “It’s absolutely incredible. She knows everyone. Everywhere I go with her, someone who knows her comes up and says hello.”
Similarly, at the law school, I like seeing and saying hi all day to students, faculty, and staff. I’m beginning to feel like I’m someone there, part of a community.
Thursday, February 21, 2002
7 PM. I called Sat Darshan last night and spoke to her as Kiran was loudly playing with her toys in the bathtub.
Sat Darshan hadn’t heard back from her doctor about the chest x-ray, but I could hear her coughing. They’re still understaffed at work, and the other women in her office are scared of catching Sat Darshan’s cough – just as I probably would be.
I saw only about five or six students on probation today, so things weren’t so bad. But, boy, do they complain about professors.
I’ve heard really bad things about Joe Smith (cruel and arrogant); Ron Brown (humiliates and degrades students); Florence Shu-Acquaye (can’t understand her African accent); Mark Padin (“He’s not teaching Property”); Mike McIntyre (“talks in a monotone”); Randolph Braccalarghi (“You have to learn it on your own”); and others.
Yet some students tell me they really like most of those teachers.
I’ve heard the most complaints about Paul Joseph, whose Torts class seems to despise him, and the feeling is apparently mutual.
Late yesterday, Lorene quit as an ARP teaching assistant for Grohman’s Property class because she’s overwhelmed at work.
I had my doubts about her, as Grohman had chosen her and I never even got to meet her. But I don’t know if I can find a replacement in the middle of the term.
One guy came into my room just to get some chocolate, and he told me he got two A’s in his first semester. (His demeanor and hand gestures definitely turned on my gaydar – not that I was attracted to him – but he mentioned having a wife.)
In speaking with Pat Jason today, I realized she’s got a weakness for gossiping about faculty. I guess that’s natural.
I have also had some repeat business from students: nervous George Adelman and everyone’s earth mother, Joanne. There was also this Haitian-American guy who has a 1.27 GPA; he seemed very nice, but I don’t think he’s going to make it.
Pat and Tracy told me that about eight to a dozen students get dismissed for academic reasons every year, though this year they said they have more 1Ls on probation than usual.
I got sent the page and cover proofs for the trade paperback of I Survived Caracas Traffic. The cover is awesome. It’s green, so it won’t repeat either the yellow of Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog or the blue of With Hitler in New York. The artwork, a blocky colorful drawing of an up-ended car, is terrific.
I found only one correction: the cover quote from Publishers Weekly misspelled weird as “wierd.” So many people misspell that word that they must have thought my correct spelling looked wrong.
It will be nice to have three uniform books in trade paperback. The price for Caracas Traffic is $11.95, but it’s a shorter book than either Hitler or Dog. The back cover lists my other books and prints the nice Kirkus mini-review in its entirety.
Friday, February 22, 2002
9 PM. Before I went to bed last night, I watched Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade, an excellent movie. I seem to have missed a lot of good movies when I lived in Gainesville from 1991 to 1997.
I brought back the two videos to the library this morning and took out two more for the next week.
Just now I’ve been watching the first hour of Gong Li, an excellent actress whom I’ve always found attractive, in Raise the Red Lantern.
It’s Friday night, so I feel relaxed. I left the office at 4:30 PM and got a few items (bananas, bread, yams, and onion) at Publix before coming home.
After having some tofu franks, I took a walk along my usual route on SW 30th Street to Pine Island Road as I listened to All Things Considered and Marketplace on WLRN-FM. It was supposed to rain, so I feel lucky I got to walk.
Back here in the apartment, I had some fruit and kasha. Aunt Sydelle called. After Dr. Reichbach heard her palpitations, he prescribed a beta blocker to lower her blood pressure, and it seems to have helped calm down her heartbeats.
Because of her vivacity, I forget that Sydelle’s 81 years old. She said she’d be out at some big social event on Sunday; otherwise, I’d visit her then.
Mom called a little while ago. Her news was that Jonathan had sold the van. Presumably, he’s now driving the red Geo Prizm that I had.
This morning I exercised lightly and read the main news section of the Times before I left for work.
I didn’t have that many office emails first thing, but my TA Megan’s subject line was “ARP Trouble.”
She said she wants to quit after the students in her section were extremely rude to her yesterday following a practice final.
I know Megan went to a lot of trouble with her lesson and told her that I would see her at her convenience to talk about it.
First Lorena quit, and now Megan wants to – and I was the one who hired Megan. That makes me feel that I’m not doing a good job as an administrator of the ARP sessions, but I’ve been concentrating on seeing 1Ls on probation.
I saw a few more of them today, and the students I’ve already seen have been dropping by as well. I also saw a 2L on probation, Tamara, and I had my first no-show. Ten of the 47 students on probation still haven’t seen me yet.
One of the students not on probation I spoke to was Yvette, who has a 2.1 GPA.
She told me she came here with her parents from Cuba only a decade ago when she was 16. After getting through MDCC and FIU with a nursing degree, she’s now an ER nurse, but she still has some ESL problems. I think Yvette will be fine.
Looking at more material about taking law school exams, I’m questioning if the conventional advice actually works. At least I’m thinking about this subject a lot.
I’ve let my bar application go for two weeks, but next week I have to face things and get it in. I’ll have to go to the bank and get a cashier’s check for $875, the filing fee. I also have to inquire about taking BarBri and the MPRE and see if NSU will pay for any part of it.
Teresa said I shouldn’t worry that it will be cool when she gets here. She and Diane are looking for a break from their respective moving plans to relax. Still, I need to clean up for Teresa after all the hospitality she’s shown me. I don’t want to fail her.
Alice is seeing another doctor on Tuesday to get a second opinion as to whether she needs another operation on her wrist. She’s unhappy about it, but at least she’s no longer in pain and can mostly use it.
Alice made her first six-figure deal on Tuesday, though it’s for three books.
The first book was her idea – How To Get More Money Than God Without Losing Your Soul or something like that – and it will be by the rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, who’s been on Politically Incorrect twice.
Alice’s brother spent eight nights sleeping on her living room floor, which he finds more comfortable than sharing a room with his wife.
He’s in New York trying to sell their co-op downtown, and he’s renovating the house in Brooklyn on Westminster Road, near where Dr. Littman used to live: all those Victorian houses are so nice.
It’s been a month or so since I last heard from Vincent. I don’t think he’s mad at me and hope he’s just been busy, but I’ve been worrying that he’s having some sort of crisis – like his agent dropping him or a serious problem with Bill.
The time “away” from Vincent has been good for me in that I’m over my infatuation with him and now realize how silly it was.
Yet the infatuation helped get me through months when my life was very unstable. I’m pretty sure he’ll never visit, and I don’t know if I’ll see him again.
I still very much want to be his friend, but I guess it will become an occasional email friendship, like the kind of relationship I have now with Sean or Kevin or Gianni.
In today’s mail, I got my new Abercrombie and Fitch credit card, and I made out a check to pay it before buying anything. I do that to get credit balances on all my store and gas credit cards in order to keep them active.
This afternoon I also sent out applications for Federated’s Bon Marché, Rich’s, and Lazarus department stores.
Monday, February 25, 2002
7 PM. Although I took Ambien to get to sleep and Klonopin on early awakening, I still slept only from 11:30 PM to 4 AM last night. Nerves, of course.
It was the bar application. And this morning, once I’d confirmed that my total student loans are just shy of $80,000, I fell into obsessive worrying that exceeded what I experienced over the weekend.
I began to feel everything is hopeless, given my huge credit card debt and the student loans – which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
I sent self-pitying emails to Teresa, Mark B, and Sat Darshan, though Sat Darshan said she didn’t find my email self-pitying and said I was just sharing my feelings: “I wish I could do that more often.”
But as the day wore on, I realized how unrealistic the feelings were: a product of my generalized anxiety disorder.
I’ve cut down so much on the Triavil – and even today, I forgot to take my first pill until a few minutes ago. I need to remember that generalized anxiety disorder causes me to worry excessively.
Even if during these periods I am seeing my life more realistically than most people do, it’s better to repress and deny the hard truths.
I went out to Bank of America and had someone there notarize my Florida Bar and bar exam applications because I didn’t want to have anyone at the law school knowing my business.
Of course, being judged by the Bar Examiners regarding my financial fooling around raises all sorts of issues. And I know they’ll have serious problems with my sketchy application.
Tough. At least it’s in by now.
At 5:30 PM, I came home today to find a passel of mail, and in there were two more credit cards: an Eddie Bauer MasterCard with a $2,500 credit limit and a Lazarus WeddingChannel.com Visa with a $1,000 credit limit.
After I’d eaten a burrito and dropped the pair of pants off at the cleaner, during my usual walk to Pine Island Road at 5:30 PM, I realized the situation is not so bleak.
What I need to do is transfer my balances from the cards where I use the false Social Security number (with the last digit changed) to the ones where my real Social Security number is used so that when I do go bankrupt, I won’t be accused of fraud.
I even realized that with about $38,000 in credit lines available, I could possibly one day buy a cheap condo, and then, if Florida’s bankruptcy laws don’t change, keep my homestead and have some security when I declare bankruptcy.
Although I berate myself for the choices I’ve made, I’ve actually been a master of time management and efficiency. After all, I juggle all these credit cards – just as I did from 1984 to 1990 – and always make sure the minimum payment gets made.
Yes, it’s time-consuming to manage all these cards, but I look upon it as a hobby. And I have the creditaholic’s thrill when new credit lines arrive the way they did today.
During my lunch hour, I bought $65 worth of groceries and a new pillow at Albertsons.
Today at work, I met with only one student, Tatiana, a 2L who’s got a 2.5 GPA but who failed Torts. She asked for help with her writing, but from what I’ve seen, she’s doing fine with B’s and C+’s on her LSV assignments.
As I told Patrick, I know I’m good at the counseling and advising part of my job, but I’m shaky as a supervisor and manager. He said maybe the job will develop into what I want to do with it.
Patrick also suggested I use the approach of George Costanza on Seinfeld: when people pass by my office, I should frown a lot so people think that I’m working hard.
They don’t have to know my rapid-fire typing is writing emails to my friends – and if I read the New York Times online instead of in the dead trees version, nobody who passes will know I’m goofing off with the newspaper.
Teresa said she and Diana are coming in on Thursday at 2 PM on American Airlines, and they’ll go straight to see Diane’s father. Teresa will call me that afternoon.
Yesterday she was in Brooklyn to say goodbye to her aunt and uncle, who are moving to Colorado today.
At this point, she’s really wishing she could stop her and Paul’s move to the new house in Bayville. I’ve got a feeling that if she tries to halt the move, Paul will flip his lid, and it will have severe repercussions.
I wrote Vincent, saying that I missed him and hoped he was okay. Right away he wrote back. He said my ears must have been burning, or his were, because he woke up this morning thinking, “I’ve got to write Richard.”
Vincent got back from New York only a few days ago. He stayed much longer than he had intended to, and he didn’t want to come back to Memphis. He loved New York so much that he felt bad upon leaving the city because he felt that he’d never go back there again.
He considered delaying his trip back home once again, but he needed to go back to Memphis, mainly because of finances but also because of Bill.
There’s been a lot of tension with Bill, who put up all these fire alarms and devices in the house, even in the “sanctity of my attic office,” blocking the view of Vincent’s “favorite tree in the world.”
What Vincent liked about New York City is that “nobody held me to their preconceived grid. The minute I got back here, I could feel the pull again and I resented it. It was in the way Bill automatically interacted with me. I realized what a rut my life has become here – which is okay to a degree, that’s what security is – but you outgrow things, meaning you grow, and it starts to feel like a trap.”
Now Vincent’s got to work on his novel, but he’s distracted by his guitar, which he was thrilled to get back to.
“I still want to come to Florida, though like I said, finances are tight,” Vincent wrote.
I think I’ll call him so we can talk on the phone for a change. It sounds like he won’t be able to come until late April, when there are cheaper fares on AirTran. It’s always good to hear from Vincent.
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
9 PM. It’s the coldest night of the winter. Felix, the maintenance guy, just called to check on my hot water because he put in a new regulator for the building.
It was working better than ever, I told him. I don’t feel cold the way I did during those cold spells in late December.
I’ve just finished watching the Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate. Tomorrow I’ll take it and Raise the Red Lantern back to the NSU library. It’s been really good going to work and just walking over to the next building to get videos of foreign films.
Last night I finished listening to the tapes of Elizabeth Peters’s Crocodile on the Sandbar, which wasn’t a bad divertissement. Somehow, because I’ve got a job at a law school, I feel it’s important that I have books and films and art in my life.
Last night Linda Mannheim called. She’s in South Beach, but she’s leaving in a few months to go to an artist colony in Germany and then to live in South Africa, where the novel she’s writing is set.
Linda got an NEA fellowship and a Florida fellowship, and she’s been not only at Dairy Hollow but also, like me, at VCCA and Millay. I told her about my artists’ colony and grant experiences, and of course I talked too much.
Reminiscing about working for the Fiction Collective and submitting my stories to litmags in the 1970s, I said how there was such little competition back then before every college had an MFA program in creative writing.
Sometimes I think I have interesting stories to tell about what it was like trying to be a young writer in the 1970s and 1980s. I need to recall how much fun it was.
I definitely did have a lot of fun when I was younger. Twenty years ago, I was running for the Davie town council; Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog had just been published; and Eating at Arby’s would come out in the fall. I was teaching a class in which Sean was a student. God, 1982 was a golden time in my life.
Well, back to the present. Last night I slept all right, though at 1 AM, when I was awake, I heard lots of noise and shaking from next door.
My first thought, idiotically, was that my neighbors were jogging, but I soon realized they were having sex and that their bed, on the other side of the wall, was the source of the noise and vibration.
This morning I felt anxious enough that I took a Triavil.
Lately I’ve been taking them only at night to help me sleep, but my anxiety is always worst in the mornings. By late afternoon, when I get home, I feel okay, and by evening, a feeling of peacefulness settles over me.
At work, I saw three students on probation.
Two of them were older, married CPAs: a Hispanic guy and a 55-year-old Finnish woman whose husband and home are still in Maryland.
Another student, Shannon, who’s got a 1.8 GPA, isn’t sure he wants to continue with law school.
Jennifer Dalldorf asked me for a list of the students I’ve seen and those I haven’t so she can block their full registration.
There’s still one student who has an appointment for Monday, one student who didn’t show up for her appointment, and seven students who haven’t contacted me.
Pat Jason isn’t off from work these two days; instead, she’s at the bar exam in Tampa to support our test-takers.
With her not around, I cut out for two hours in the middle of the day to go eat lunch and then get x-rays and a cleaning at the dentist. I’ve got to go back next week for a filling that broke, and I’m sure they’ll be more work on my teeth that I need to take care of.
When I returned to school, it seemed that nobody had noticed my absence, and I had no phone calls or emails while I was out.
Linda Manheim had told me that she was going to a reading at Hollywood’s Warehouse 57 on Saturday, but Patrick said that the place had closed down months ago.
Today I got nice emails from Mark B and Tom, and I wrote to Alice.
Tonight I cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed, but I’m afraid Teresa will find the apartment a dump.