A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late May, 1999

Saturday, May 22, 1999

3 PM. Jade had a bad night, unable to sleep because of the intense pain of shingles. I learned this only when I returned from Syosset at 12:30 PM. She told me she called the doctor to see if she could get a stronger pain reliever.

After she talked to her parents, they phoned the doctor to explain that Jade had been on heroin. When the doctor told Jade about Teresa and Paul’s call, she – rightfully, I think – felt embarrassed and angered.

Paul is ending the weekend early and coming home from Fire Island tonight, possibly with Teresa, probably after 10 PM. Not that they can do much more than I can, which is just to have somebody around.

Jade’s got a friend with her now, and both her brother and sister visited, and she went off for a while this afternoon.

I fell asleep early last night after spending way too many hours online. Now I understand I’ve been lucky not to have a working modem and Internet connection at home in Davie so that I didn’t waste hours on the Web during the school year.

Mark Savage emailed that he’s glad I contacted him because he’d lost my address when his hard disk crashed and he didn’t know how to contact me.

I woke up at 7:30 AM, had breakfast, got back into bed and then exercised. Around 9:30 AM, I drove to Syosset and spent several hours drinking very strong iced tea at Borders. (Like the Barnes & Noble stores here, they don’t give free refills.)

I read the Times, engaging in mental dialogue with the articles I’m reading and letting my thoughts wander the way they often do when I sit in a café. Maybe that’s being a writer? I feel like my mental peregrinations are me sort of getting into prewriting mode.

I realized that I’m getting excited about the publication of The Silicon Valley Diet in a way I never did with I Survived Caracas Traffic.

Martin Hester chose the stories in that book, including some I thought were second-rate and dated, and my interest waned when he dropped the publication of a trade paperback in favor of a hardcover edition so expensive I wouldn’t buy it myself.

I can feel better about asking people to buy the Red Hen Press book, which should cost a lot less than the $21 price of Caracas Traffic. I have all sorts of ideas about how to market the book. There’s the gay angle, the computer angle, the Silicon Valley setting, maybe tie-ins with Starbucks in the “Salugi at Starbucks” story and with Barnes & Noble in the title story.

Of course, it’s not Star Wars tie-ins by any means. Half the items on sale at Borders today seemed related to The Phantom Menace.

Maybe Kate Gale and Red Hen Press have very different ideas for the book. Certainly I’m willing to make compromises, but I’m certain my marketing savvy is greater than theirs.

From Borders, I went to Kmart, where I bought socks, briefs and a short-sleeved shirt. (My right arch hurt again today, so it will be a while before I try to buy shoes again.)

This afternoon I did my laundry, went to the Edwards in Oyster Bay to buy some groceries I can’t get at Farmers Bazaar, and read a lot more.

Several times today I took wrong turns on the winding, heavily canopied two-lane roads that serve as the arteries of this stretch of the North Shore – but I didn’t run into any trouble with the minivan.

My cold is still lingering after a week.

Wednesday, May 26, 1999

7 PM. I just walked back from Birch Hill Road, where I bought bananas, oatmeal, raisins and paper towels at Gristedes.

It’s perfect weather to be wearing a sweatshirt over a short-sleeved shirt. After I fed Ollie, he joined me upstairs on my bed. Paul isn’t home yet and Teresa is in Jersey with Barbara.

I awoke at 5 AM and put on NPR’s Morning Edition but mostly drifted in and out of sleep for the next two hours until I managed to rouse myself for Body Electric.

After I had breakfast and showered and dressed, I went online. Tom advised me not to pay Red Hen Press any money for a book, but he’s basing that on his own bad experience subsidizing the Encyclopedia Mouse books, which aren’t comparable to my collection. Besides, I just want to have the work in print as my last (as in final) book-length story collection.

Getting the 9:37 AM train to the city, I arrived at Penn Station at 10:45 AM and went across Seventh Avenue to have a baked potato at Wendy’s. Madison Square Garden was hosting Yeshiva University’s graduation ceremony, and I’ve never seen so many yarmulkes at one time as I did on the street.

Since my appointment with Scott wasn’t until noon, I took the bus down Seventh Avenue as a kind of tour of Manhattan. After nearly four weeks here, I feel like a New Yorker again.

Nothing on the bus ride unfamiliar although I’m not sure I noticed before that Christopher Street at Seventh Avenue – Sheridan Square – had been designated Stonewall Place. (Tonight I heard on NPR that the ACLU has filed suit in federal court to overturn Florida’s gay adoption ban.)

The bus turned right at the World Trade Center and I didn’t get off till Battery Park City. Then I walked through the Financial District, passing the New York Stock Exchange, Federal Hall, Trinity Church and other landmarks before I realized that I wasn’t quite sure where Beaver and Broad Streets met.

So I asked someone and felt reassured that I’d been walking in the right direction and was just one block from Scott’s building, where he was waiting for me outside.

Scott said he planned to take me to “one of Wall Street’s hidden treasures”: a cigar emporium/museum/bar and restaurant, which was ventilated enough so that I didn’t get sick.

He smoked cigarettes throughout the meal and had a pastrami sandwich and half the pizzette I left over even though he’s not supposed to eat cheese. He says he’s got an addictive personality, so he’s hooked on tobacco despite his heart attack.

Sitting across from Scott in his dark green suit, I noticed that he’s beginning to resemble Wall Street Week’s Louis Rukeyser.

He showed me a Westlaw list of his cases (some were blacked out) and pointed out his most recent victory: an SDNY ruling that the ADA covers an overweight applicant for a court officer’s job.

Scott seems to assume that I have a lot more money than I do – unlike Josh or Alice, he never offers to pay for my meals – and I don’t tell him how poor I really am.

M.J.’s business is booming. She billed $300,000 last year and they’ve put everything, like their leased cars, in the business’s name. But they also have high expenses; for example, Brianna’s tuition at Horace Mann is $20,000 a year.

“My daughter is disobedient in school and has no respect for authority,” Scott said. “I wonder where she gets that from.” But then he said it’s probably because Brianna is so smart that she’s bored in class. She’s only in first grade but has already read The Time Machine, Robinson Crusoe and other adult books.

Scott’s father had triple bypass surgery, and they’ve going to Tamarac for July Fourth weekend; Scott said he plans to buy his parents a computer.

By now Scott has achieved computer literacy and surfs the Web, gets email and does online legal research. He was interested in the Legal Studies courses I’ll be teaching and we talked about everything from his email correspondence with the comedian Margaret Cho to his friends’ stock market mania. (He doesn’t own stock.)

Scott marveled that I don’t have any gray hair and asked about Teresa (“How much does her catering business bill a year?”) and Sat Darshan, whom he still calls Avis. (Josh does the same thing.) And he invited me to a weekend barbecue in June.

After we parted, I took the IRT to Penn Station and got the 2:14 PM back to Locust Valley. In order to have lunch in Manhattan, I had to spend about three and a half hours on trains.

Rick emailed me back, saying he was glad nothing bad happened to me on Friday to make me miss his reading, which he said had gone marvelously. (I’d explained that I didn’t want to leave Jade alone while she was in such pain from shingles, which was partially true.)

I gave Rick Tom’s email because the one-semester NOCCA position is still open and Rick would like to apply.

Thursday, May 27, 1999

10 PM. I’ve got the dogs in my room. Teresa, Paul and his visibly nervous mother just left to pick up Paul’s relatives from England at Kennedy Airport. Ollie and especially Hattie don’t know what’s going on, so they’re a little freaked out.

They just now walked out of my room and I hope they don’t wreck the house while I’m writing this.

Last night I watched the season finale of Dawson’s Creek and then read until I dozed off.

Once again, I woke up early this morning and fell back to sleep while listening to NPR; otherwise I wouldn’t have dreamed of California Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl.

When I came down for breakfast, Teresa wasn’t here, so I assumed that she stayed over at Barbara’s last night. Paul confirmed this when he came home for a minute around 9:30 AM.

I’d planned to go to the city, but Ollie followed me out and I didn’t want to leave him alone, so I ended up reading the Times and drinking Diet Coke outside on the deck.

Josh emailed in response to my asking when he and Gabrielle were free to see me. It turned out that she didn’t come this week after all.

Patrick emailed to say that the air in Broward has been filled with smoke from fires, and Mom said the same thing when I called her. They’ve warned old people, little kids and people with breathing difficulties to stay indoors.

Mom thanked me for the anniversary card, and I told her not to send any more mail here for a while as I was going to Ronna’s in Philadelphia. She said that although Dad was feeling a little better, he went to the doctor again to see when he could get an appointment with an orthopedist.

Mom also told me that Marc was offered another $2,000 to take the job of store manager in Phoenix – but he wants an extra $6,000 to make leaving the Mesa store worthwhile.

I was listening to a great Leonard Lopate interview with David Foster Wallace on WNYC-AM when Teresa came home around 1 PM. She was in a tizzy because she said Paul and I don’t take phone messages properly. But I knew I’d done everything perfectly, that the problem was that she apparently didn’t return her client’s call yesterday even though I’d given her the woman’s cell phone and office voice mail numbers.

Annoyed at being berated for nothing, I told her I had a dinner date in the city and abruptly left the house. At the LIRR station, I helped a well-dressed older man buy a ticket on the machine, and we rode to Mineola together.

He was a patrician, old-school WASP who lives in the retirement golf haven of Pinehurst, North Carolina. He’s going to Italy with fellow members of the Yale Glee Club and then to the house near the Swiss border that his wife inherited from her parents.

What I found most interesting were his stories about how when he was younger, he made ludicrous investments when he was younger despite being a certified financial planner. He said he was swayed by persuasive friends and the promise of easy money.

Arriving at Penn Station at 3 PM, I decided to see the Upper West Side, so I took the IRT to 72nd Street and Broadway. Taking a very familiar walk uptown, I passed Fairway, Citarella, H&H Bagels and Zabar’s, stopping at the Barnes & Noble at 82nd. I found the copy of I Survived Caracas Traffic I’d placed there two years ago, but I Brake for Delmore Schwartz wasn’t there, so I guess it’s out of print.

At the café, I had iced tea (no refills, no Equal, and extra for a larger cup) and read the Spirit and the Blade, the gay weekly.

Then I walked up to West 85th Street, remembering how lucky I was l live on such a beautiful block in that wonderful Red House at 350.

On Riverside, I caught the M5 bus, which was filled with black and Hispanic nannies with white and Eurasian little kids, and took it uptown. It no longer turns onto Broadway at 120th Street by Teachers College but goes across 135th Street.

That neighborhood – West Harlem, I guess – is a bit dicey, so I got off and took the M4 downtown. That bus goes across 110th Street past the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the northern end of Central Park and then down Fifth Avenue.

Although the M4 goes to Penn Station, I didn’t have the time for a slow ride, so I changed for the crosstown bus at 86th Street and took it to Central Park West and the subway stop where I used to go home from Franklin School when I was in tenth grade 33 years ago. The Eighth Avenue IND stops at Penn Station.

After getting some yogurt and grapefruit juice, I took the 7:33 PM train to Jamaica. Once aboard, I took out my Walkman and began listening to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, which I haven’t heard in ages.

I was lucky enough to change for one of the shiny new high-tech double-decker trains that Teresa told me they’ve been putting on the Oyster Bay line. My car had digital displays of the destination and stops, announced by an automated voice.

The ride was so much more pleasant than the usual trip back to Locust Valley on those filthy, hot old diesel cars. As I got off the train and walked home, the summer evening air smelled sweet.

Saturday, May 29, 1999

9 PM. I’ve just finished reading tomorrow’s Times Book Review, the last of the sections delivered today. It’s the first night since I’ve been here that I won’t need one quilt, let alone the two I’ve been using.

Today it got up to 90°, and while it didn’t feel very hot to me – it seems like South Florida in early March – Alice kept complaining during the three hours we spent together. I do have the windows open now, of course.

Last night I exercised so I could get out early today. I spoke to Mom, who agreed that when my Red Hen Press book contract arrives, she’ll mail it to Ronna and Matthew’s house so I can see it while I’m in Pennsylvania.

My inclination is to treat the $5,000 I sent Kate Gale as money I could take into a casino or the stock market and afford to lose. Everyone makes bad investments, and maybe this is mine – and I’m prepared to learn a very expensive lesson.

Well, we’ll see how it shakes out.

This morning I left the house at 8:30 AM with a vague idea that I’d put the car at an LIRR station somewhere along the Port Washington line. But then I discovered that the Douglaston station had no parking lot, just parking meters in the street.

So I drove west on Northern Boulevard, unable to figure out what to do, and eventually, desperate for a bathroom, I backtracked, stopping at a gas station I’d passed – which, of course, didn’t have a “working” bathroom. That’s so New York.

Eventually I got relief at a Burger King, but I had to buy a Diet Coke, which was sort of self-defeating. Then I got on the Grand Central to the BQE and took the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, half-terrified with the bulk of the minivan on the city’s narrow side streets.

To my surprise and relief, I found parking on 17th Street just west of Fifth Avenue, just two blocks north of Alice’s building.

Alice prevailed on me to install CompuServe 2000 from a CD-ROM, but after half an hour and several calls to help lines, I gave up when the screen kept freezing.

We went to brunch somewhere on Fifth Avenue – around 18th Street, I think. I had oatmeal with fruit, an easy choice for me.

As usual, Alice tried to get me excited about my coming birthday – she’s already planning a big bash for her 50th birthday in February 2001 – and couldn’t believe that my parents didn’t celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.

I guess she had a point about that, but one of my parents’ peculiarities that I’ve come to appreciate is not making a big deal out of birthdays.

Unlike Dad, I’m not depressed about getting older, but to me, birthdays, like Halloween, are for kids. Apparently that’s a sentiment not shared by many of my fellow baby boomers with their perpetually adolescent mindsets.

Alice is a wonderful, generous friend – she paid for lunch – but I don’t know why she’s so focused on making money. That’s the only reason she became a writer in the first place, and she seems to view her success as a literary agent solely by the size of her authors’ advances.

She showed off the covers of her clients’ forthcoming books, and they’re all mostly diet and self-help books, along with her one trashy novel. (Alice was the one who called it “trashy,” not me.)

If I told Alice I was paying to subsidize my book, she would assume I had gone insane. But Alice never understood that literary fiction and poetry are not really related to publishing and they haven’t been for some time.

Hell, a quarter-century ago, I worked for the Fiction Collective, so I knew that from the start of my writing “career.”

Calling up Alice’s name on Lexis/Nexis or Hotbot interested Alice not at all: “I couldn’t care less what anyone writes about me unless it affects me financially” is her attitude.

So there’s no point in my sending Alice any of her press clips. She obviously feels my interest in such things is pointless.

I know I’m peculiar, but Alice is very odd in other ways. She doesn’t like to “waste time” (meaning doing something when she could be making money – except she has always made certain never to work on weekends no matter what). I’ve learned not to send Alice chatty emails because she just gets impatient with them.

We drank iced tea and chatted, and she asked me to stay until Andreas arrived. Since I hadn’t seen him in ears, I was happy to oblige.

For someone dying of cancer, Andreas looked great. He’s 60 years old, but his long hair is thick and black, and even the chartreuse Day-Glo Band-Aid on his cheek (to cover up a skin cancer) made him look even more jaunty.

We walked downstairs together, and I told them to enjoy their visit to the Impressionists in Winter exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that opened yesterday; Alice hoped the winter scenes in the paintings would make her feel cooler.

Although I dreaded the drive back, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the LIE weren’t as bad as I feared. With only a pit stop at the Manhasset Macy’s men’s room, I made it back to Locust Valley in 70 minutes.

But when I go in to see Josh tomorrow, I’m not going to push my luck and will take the railroad.

Tom sent me xeroxes of his latest stories, published mostly in the first issues of new little magazines. I’m amazed at how prolific Tom is – though would I be sounding too much like Alice if I expressed my doubts as to the point of publishing more and more stories in litmags?

Although I’m not sleepy, I’m going to bed now.

Sunday, May 30, 1999

8 PM. I woke up at 5:30 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I exercised and was ready to rock and roll by 8 AM.

My foot hurt a little, so I decided to risk driving into the city one more time. Taking the LIE all the way – the view approaching the tunnel is about the best Manhattan cityscape available – I was parked on Josh’s block just 45 minutes after leaving Locust Valley.

Josh hadn’t yet showered when I got there, so I waited for him, using his computer to access Westlaw, Lexis and my email.

We went out to Veselka a little before 10 AM and sat at a table on the Ninth Street side.

Josh said that just a few years ago we couldn’t have dined at an outdoor table without constantly being harassed by panhandlers. “But now they’ve all disappeared and I suspect Giuliani had them murdered,” he told me.

Five minutes after he said that, a disheveled, toothless white woman started bothering us and nearby diners with a request for a handout.

“You’re not supposed to be here, my friend says,” I told her.

“Why? Because you don’t like to look at me?” she replied.

Touché. The lady wins a dollar.

Over breakfast, Josh gave me scoop why Gabrielle didn’t make her planned visit, and unbelievably, it’s a rerun from last year.

On her most recent visit, Gabrielle tells Josh she’s bleeding, that he doesn’t need a condom, and chump that he is, he agrees. So now Gabrielle is back in Germany and she’s pregnant again. You’d think a nurse would know how to avoid pregnancy, but this was obviously a deliberate act.

Before Gabrielle told him over the phone, she prefaced her news by saying, “You know I love you, don’t you?”

As of now, they’ve broken up – because just like last year, she’s determined to have the child and Josh can’t deal with it. He has a tiny apartment with no room for her, much less a kid, and he’s got the burden (financially and otherwise) of his mother.

Besides, now I think she really deceived him.

Well, it’s two sick people in a sick relationship. This time Josh says he isn’t as upset because he’d already gone through this once before. He’s told Gabrielle to ask her millionaire stepfather, with whom she’s quite close, to contribute money to take care of the child.

The German government, which encourages births, will give Gabrielle some financial support, as she’s had to quit work because she’s expecting another difficult pregnancy and doesn’t want to lose the baby the way she did the last one in her fourth month.

Josh said, “Maybe she’ll lose this one, too.”

I’d say that was a terrible attitude to have about one’s child, but Josh and Gabrielle are so bizarre, they’re beyond rational criticism.

Of course I didn’t say this to Josh. He’s angry with himself, but I bet that if Gabrielle does have another miscarriage, he’ll get back together with her.

Josh’s other worry is that he can no longer wear blue jeans to work – and definitely not at his hoped-for new job at the Department of Corrections – and he doesn’t have any pants except jeans. (“I wore jeans to a funeral last week.”)

This all sounds unbelievable, but I took Josh to Kmart and the Gap to look at khakis and pleated casual pants. When it comes to clothes, Josh is like a child; he kept asking me what kinds of shirts and belts and shoes he should wear.

I wonder if it’s a poor self-image that makes him not care about his appearance. I may not know much about men’s fashion, but at least I have a basic sense of style. But then I grew up around people in the schmatte business.

After shopping, we sat for 90 minutes in the Starbucks near where I parked before calling it a day. The LIE was slow going east, but I got off at Francis Lewis Boulevard and took Northern Boulevard back, again making a men’s room pit stop at Macy’s.

Stopping at the Glen Street Wendy’s for a baked potato and Diet Coke, I began reading the rest of the Sunday Times.

It’s hot today and will be hotter tomorrow, but now that it’s becoming dark outside, there’s a decent breeze.

I was impressed with the prose poems, stories and translations of Walser that Tom sent; he’s at the peak of his form. I emailed him, Rick, Patrick and Justin Clouse tonight.