Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Sunday, August 1, 1999

4:30 PM. Thirty years ago today I made the first entry in my 1969 diary. I wrote it from memory seven days later when I bought the first of my diaries at a midyear sale at Barchas Bookstore on Hillel Place by Brooklyn College.

Last night I slept deeply and greedily, knowing how stressful today would be. It turned out to be even worse than I expected because my bad tooth decided to crumble today.

There’s only a crater there, and I think that once the shock wears off, I’ll be in severe pain from an exposed nerve. It’s hard to tell. Obviously I’ll have to find a dentist tomorrow.

So I expect what would have been an uncomfortable first night in my apartment to be much worse than that.

My parents, who stopped talking to me, are unsympathetic. They think I’m mean, but what kind of love is it that’s conditional on them running my life and telling me how best to do things? At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I moved into the apartment by myself.

I actually managed to get the TV and VCR to work with the antenna I bought in target this morning, and I also was able to use the air pump to inflate the air mattress, though I may just prefer to sleep on the floor tonight.

It’s been difficult and sweaty, and I still have no food in the house, but I’ll go out later. Right now we’re having a bad thunderstorm and I had to leave a few things in the car.

As hard as today has been and as hard as I expect tonight in the next few days to be, I know I will grow from this experience and become that much stronger and wiser and more resilient. As for my parents, I’m sure they’ll soften eventually, but if not, I will live without them.

I woke up at 7 AM, had breakfast and then lay in bed for as long as I could to delay the start of my day. After exercising, I brought some stuff to the car and then showered and dressed.

While I was at my office, I saw that Josh had emailed me last night from Brooklyn at 11 PM. He had just come back from taking his mother to the hospital emergency room. She was bleeding vaginally, but the doctor said it wasn’t serious.

Josh said his Bell’s palsy is getting worse: he keeps biting his cheek and “my eye is going to meet my ear.” If I think having a hard time, imagine what stress Josh must be under.

I know I should count myself as fortunate. Indeed, if I hadn’t broken my tooth, today wouldn’t have been that bad.

I left Nova after reading my email. There was no response from Gio, but surprisingly Jaime wrote me back, saying he’d like to go with me to the next meeting of the GLB book discussion group at Barnes & Noble.

Barnes & Noble is where I headed next, actually. Drinking one big cup of iced tea, I finished the Sunday Times Arts & Leisure section.

Then, for some reason, all of a sudden a feeling of well-being swept over me as I sat in the café.

It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t quite a Maslovian peak experience or an epiphany, just a sense that life was proceeding according to the way things were supposed to be happening. I felt in the flow of things.

From the bookstore, I went to Target, where I used a 10% discount card I’d received in the mail to buy a TV antenna, a shower curtain and other stuff.

After I had a baked potato at Wendy’s, it was noon, and I went to the Cameron Cove leasing office to get my keys and sign my lease.

Well, I’ve still got a lot to do. I’m thrilled with this apartment: it’s clean and fresh and pretty.

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Monday, August 2, 1999

6:30 PM. Yesterday I assumed my broken tooth would be my problem today. It hurts, but only sporadically, and the earliest appointment I could get with this one dentist I got through my Signature Dental Plan can’t see me until a week from tomorrow. If it hurts more, I’ll try another dentist.

However, my real problem is my foot. In a repeat of my problems in mid-May and late June, I can barely walk again. I guess I aggravated my chronic problem with all the moving I did yesterday.

Also, I’d slacked off on my exercises to stretch and strengthen my heel cord. I tried to do them today, and iced the foot with bags of frozen fruits and veggies for twenty minutes at a time, the way the podiatrist suggested.

But I feel depressed, like my body is falling apart and decaying. I feel old and sick and ugly. That’s probably why I went to Supercuts and on impulse got a buzz cut.

It’s the style of a lot of teens and young guys these days. I don’t look bad, though I made sure the stylist used a #5 clipper on top and #3 on the sides so it doesn’t look too radical. I can still put gel on it.

Basically it’s the same cut I had from when I was 5 until I was about 10, when I began parting my hair on the side like JFK.

Mom still refused to talk to me when I went back to her house to get more stuff yesterday, though Dad did ask me about my tooth.

Mom had that psychotic look I’ve seen lately. I shouldn’t get angry with her because she probably does have some kind of mental illness that sometimes happens when people get old.

It’s also probable that her mood will swing wildly again and she’ll suddenly become friendly to the point of being talkative.

Of course, if she stops talking to me the way she did with her brother, that could last a long time. Come to think of it, aside from me, Mom pretty much speaks only to three other people.

Also yesterday, I went to Publix to get food and to Kmart for kitchen towels and other stuff.

When I returned home for the last time and put away all of the stuff, I took a shower, which felt heavenly.

Then I put the while Martha Stewart 200-thread-count sheets I got at Kmart on the air mattress and lay down – though I didn’t get to sleep until well after midnight.

I slept only about five hours, but that was better than I had expected, and I had a pleasant dream in which I visited Tom and Annette in New Orleans.

Because of my immobility, I stayed in most of the day, listening to the radio, watching a couple of soap operas, putting my silverware and other stuff into drawers, and setting up my phones, answering machine and radio.

While I wish these apartments were still furnished – mostly I’ve been lying on the floor – at least I’ve got my own place now.

Aside from going to Supercuts and making another trip to Publix, I went out at noon to the library to check my email: Josh updating me on his Bell’s palsy (a little better in his eye, “but the left side of my face is dead, dead, dead”) and Patrick praising The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and dismissing Leslie Marmon Silko’s work.

Patrick expressed ambivalence about his own Indian heritage as he wondered what would have happened if his great-grandfather had never left the reservation and met his great-grandmother.

I also got a note from Sean letting me know which of his email addresses he wants me to use: GTE, the one that Doug will never look at.

God, my handwriting is getting really bad. Now when I step away from the page for a minute, I can barely make out what I just wrote.

When I called my parents’ house today, Dad answered, and I gave him my phone number. He said we should take the bed over later this week, but I told him about my foot.

Dad also said that someone from Nova had called: “George Alan Leonard.” I called the number he left and got George Alexis’s voice mail, but I didn’t leave a message because I know I’m not going to teach a class in Miami or Panama for the BPM program. George may not know I’m full-time in the Legal Studies Program this year.

At 5:30 PM, I limped from the Nova parking lot to my office to check email.

FAU said they’d send material on their Ph.D. program for public intellectuals (“comparative studies”) that I’d read about in yesterday’s Times; it was started by one of those distinguished scholars they hired instead of Richard Kostelanetz.

Sat Darshan said she was hoping to relax last night when Kiran Kaur got to sleep early – but then Gurujot and her boyfriend called, saying their car had broken down and they were stranded in the desert between Española and the Albuquerque airport.

She stayed on the phone with them on and off for three hours until Gurujot’s boyfriend’s older married stepbrother took them into his house. (They’d long since missed their flight.)

“At least that was a lot better than them staying in their car or the airport or a motel,” Sat Darshan said. “The things a mother worries about.”

The only email I sent out was to Jaime.

My foot hurts a lot, so I’m going to ice it again.

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Tuesday, August 3, 1999

3 PM. If anything, my foot is worse today although I should have expected that, given the experience of my last two “attacks.” The area is red and swollen, and until the ligaments and muscles heal, there’s not much to do but rest, apply ice and wait.

The pain got so bad that when I lay down in bed last night, I had to take a Tylenol, but eventually I fell into a fairly deep sleep.

In one dream, I was bicycling on Avenue M in our old neighborhood Brooklyn when I came across a beautiful new series of houses that perfectly mimicked the ideal city development today’s “new urbanists” worship. I asked a fat man if he knew who designed these buildings, and he said, “I did,” and took me to explore them close up.

In another dream, I was living in this beautiful great apartment house in San Francisco, and Sat Darshan had an apartment in the same building.

Now I see that both these dreams were about perfect homes, so they’re probably related to my own move to this apartment.

I also suspect that the sale of my parents’ house has affected me a lot more than I thought it would. I’ve had at least ten other apartments in Florida – three alone in this very complex – but this time seems different.

Probably I’m echoing the trauma of twenty years ago when I went out on my own in Rockaway just as my parents and Jonathan left the New York City area and the house I grew up in.

The same thing is happening again, and there’s a part of my brain that forgets I’m 48, not 28, and have had lots of experiences on my own.

And they say dreams don’t provide insight. Just writing this has been me acting as my own therapist. Suddenly I see that it’s no wonder I have so much anger at my parents.

Dad came over last evening, bringing my mail and some food from the house, and this morning he brought over some clothes on hangers.

I went out only to the library at noon to check email, and Yahoo wasn’t working properly, so I couldn’t compose messages.

Josh gave me his new office phone number, and Teresa wrote a long note. Paul’s tenant is moving out of the lumber yard next week, so he’ll lose the income that pays a lot of bills.

At the same time he’s received an offer for the land from a group of businessmen who want to start a ferry service from Oyster Bay to Connecticut that would eventually get people to the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun tribal casinos.

Paul wants more money than they’re currently offering him, but Teresa says he forgets about the $42,000 in taxes that the lumber yard costs him every year. Of course, Paul’s father started the lumber yard, so I’m sure it’s all tied up in emotional baggage for him.

Florida A&M University sent me information and applications forms for their M.S. in journalism. I’m sure I could get accepted and have interesting experiences if I enrolled the program.

Of course, it wouldn’t be like going to the University of Maryland, but it would be a lot cheaper, both for tuition and living expenses.

Even though I haven’t begun this academic year yet, I have to have a fallback plan for 2000-2001, just as I had Maryland for the past two years before I knew about the Florida creative writing fellowship or the Nova visiting professorship.

It’s starting to thunder now. Yesterday’s massive storms cooled things off, and I’m hoping the same thing happens today.

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Sunday, August 8, 1999

7 PM. My foot felt better today. But more than that, I ended up having a wonderful weekend.

It was kind of Igor to invite me to a Rush-Ins Poetry Collective meeting last evening and smart of me not to make excuses.

Before I left, I filled out and mailed an application to FAMU’s M.S. program in journalism for the fall 2000 semester. I want to make sure I have options for next year after my Nova visiting professorship in Legal Studies ends.

At Igor’s apartment in The Atriums of Plantation – a development on Pine Island Road just south of Broward Boulevard – I met his wife Violetta, who looked frazzled from studying; little Michelle, who’s very cute; and Ola, the woman who cares for the baby.

Then Igor and I drove about a mile north on Pine Island Road to another apartment complex, the home of Nate Levine, one of the Rush-Ins.

Nate spent much of this year in Barcelona and brought back his Spanish girlfriend with him.

The other Rush-Ins are James (Janus) Henderson, the likable Caribbean-American guy I’d already met, and Stanley, an excitable frizzy-haired guy bursting with energy who worked on P’an Ku at Broward Community College.

There was also Matt, whose sister is Nate’s roommate and who works in Oklahoma City but commutes back to Florida for weekends.

Matt, who seems to be kind of a “junior member” of the Rush-Ins, got them the connection with the Ohio literary magazine Urban Spaghetti, which is publishing their work in print. (Igor’s manifesto, however, will appear only the magazine’s website.)

Igor told them I was in Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant Gardes, and when they got the book out and passed it around, I could tell they were impressed with the entry on me.

To start, Nate read some of his fiction, which was obviously influenced by Gertrude Stein and perhaps even by Ionesco, although I’m not even sure Nate has read him.

When everyone was there, they began their presentation on Walt Whitman, starting with an introduction by Nate and moving to a discussion of Whitman’s life and a reading of some of his poems.

Although these guys occasionally mispronounce words – and it’s clear that James and Igor are the most well-read of the group – I was impressed with their energy, dedication, seriousness of purpose and intelligence.

It was exhilarating to be in the presence of twentysomething writers who have the same ambition and sense of possibilities that I once had. What a pleasure it would be to teach such students, as I’m sure I could learn from them.

I contributed what I could, but mostly I just enjoyed Walt Whitman and the excitement he created among Igor, James, Stanley and Nate.

At 10:30 PM, I excused myself when they began discussing Rush-Ins business. Back at home, I fell asleep almost immediately.

This afternoon I decided to go to an event I saw advertised in New Times: a memorial to local poets who have died, celebrated outdoors at an art gallery on Flagler Avenue in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

Lenny Della Rocca was emceeing along with another guy, and I was glad to see him, Barbara (who turned 50 on Friday and showed photos of her birthday party), Eileen and her young son (she’d just spent a sabbatical year in the mountains of north Georgia), Betty, Vicki (I told her about the good review she got it in The Guardian, which she hadn’t seen yet), John Childrey, Elisa Albo, Magi Schwartz, Michael O’Mara – and people I haven’t seen in fifteen or more years, like Debbie Grayson and Monica Carleton, who’s the head of the Society of Poets and didn’t recognize me.

When I introduced myself, Monica said I still looked young and she’d first thought I was “some 19-year-old kid.”

Monica told me that Blake, her son, whom I’ve always thought was cute, is practicing law in downtown Fort Lauderdale but dislikes it.

People took photos and asked me to be included, especially in one for all the poets who read back “on the boat”: the floating restaurant on the New River back in 1981 and 1982.

I actually remember the first time Lenny showed up at Poetry in a Pub. I used to go with that woman who’d had a stroke. What was her name? Oh yeah – Elaine.

That was over eighteen years ago, so I go back a long way. I can remember Kirt’s Florida Arts Gazette monthly newspaper and many of the dead poets being honored today: Greg, of course; Denis O’Donovan (his widow and Lenny read his stuff today); Cynthia Cahn; Hannah Kahn; and so many others.

Although people like Betty were active back in the late 1970s, when BCC-Central was the only game in town, I appeared on the South Florida scene just a few years later, so I’m kind of an old-timer by now.

It was very hot out, and to be honest, I don’t enjoy poetry readings. My feeling is that most of these poets are very nice people, and I love the idea that they get together to share and read and publish their work, but for the most part their poetry is not very interesting.

Perhaps the Rush-Ins are better – certainly they’ve got more of a sense of the tradition they’re working in – but I can’t really judge their work, either.

I left early, but only after Barbara, Betty, Lenny and three others had read the works of their late friends. I don’t know if anyone thought my leaving early was rude, but let’s face it: I always have been a bit aloof. But at least I showed up and paid my respects, right?

Tonight I did email Monica, who had told me to call her. She’s got this Chinese hairless dog, Harris, with whom she just returned from a three-month European trip.

This morning I got up early and went to Publix when it opened at 7 AM. I read the Sunday Times, exercised, listened to NPR and twice went to my office.

In an email, Aldo Alvarez wrote that “‘Silicon Valley Diet’ is long but AWESOME.” He wants it in Blithe House Quarterly’s winter issue, due out just before Christmas.

That meant I had to get Storymania to take it down from their website – by this evening they had removed it – so I could feel comfortable about giving Aldo first serial rights.

He also wanted a bio note and sites to link to, so hopefully I can get the readers of Blithe House Quarterly to click on the Red Hen Press website and order the book.

After writing Aldo back, I got a reply from him almost immediately. I feel very good about his comments about my work.

Also, Storymania did print “Rules of Civil Procedure,” and a woman in British Columbia, Lois P, said wonderful things about that story and the others I had posted on the site.

Teresa wrote from Camille’s computer on Fire Island. She’s exhausted from overwork, and the strain is probably what’s behind her upper back and neck problems.

She has two more very hectic weekends coming up and is actually looking forward to going to San Francisco to take care of Nathaniel for Deirdre because after all that catering, it will be a vacation.

It’s the “physical” work that drains Teresa – but as I told her, it stresses me out just to watch her prepare for a party.

I emailed Tom about the pieces he’d sent me (I passed them on to Igor, who I thought would appreciate Tom’s European sensibility), and I told Jaime I’d send him my copy of Men on Men through interoffice mail, as he’ll be busy all this coming week.