A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late January, 1999

Monday, January 25, 1999

3 PM. I just turned off the constitutional farce going on in the U.S. Senate. I put it on while I lay down and shut my eyes in an attempt to shake off the tiredness I’ve been feeling.

The way the impeachment trial has gone since Friday, when Senator Byrd announced he was going to introduce today’s resolution to dismiss the charges, has been absolutely ludicrous.

As the House managers and Clinton’s lawyers answered the same old questions in a quasi-debate for two days, the Republicans went to Ken Starr, who got a judge to issue an order for Monica Lewinsky to be dragged to D.C. to talk to the House managers.

The media frenzy attendant on all her appearances in public returned and today, only God knows what is going on. At one point today, Chief Justice Rehnquist asked the parliamentarian, “What do we do now?” Indeed.

Tonight I’m going to teach Go Tell It on the Mountain. I read some criticism I got from Contemporary Literary Criticism, but even before doing that, I was already well-prepared to discuss Baldwin’s novel.

Last night I slept all right, but I woke up before 5 AM, and I guess I didn’t get enough sleep.

Today’s Language 1500 class went okay, but most of the students didn’t do the assigned reading. I told them, with weary resignation rather than anger, to make sure they read the chapter by Wednesday.

Maybe they need to see there are consequences to not reading. Already I don’t imagine I’m going to give a single A in this class – both on the basis of their writing and certainly on their (lack of) class participation.

Home at 9:30 AM, I found my room being cleaned – Mom had left the bed with just the mattress pads on – and since Jonathan and Dad were both home today, I had no privacy.

Maybe this schedule wasn’t such a good idea because I’m free during the day. A year ago last fall, when I had to be up for 8 AM classes and also had night classes, I used to try to rest during the day by relaxing in my underwear, getting into bed in the afternoon, lying quietly and preparing for classes. It’s harder to do that now that I’m not living by myself.

Taking the Friday/Saturday American lit survey class has made everything harder, and papers will start coming in to be graded with increasing frequency.

But somehow I’ll get through the next five weeks, and after that I’ll have just two weekends of the American Lit survey course, the Thursday night fiction writing class, and my 8 AM Language 1500.

I agreed to meet the Sun-Sentinel reporter Lourdes Rodriguez-Florido at Einstein Library at 11 AM on Wednesday even though I’ve got to get ready for teaching that night.

Lourdes said she’s “at BCC,” and I just hope that means she’s an adjunct, though I suspect, given how she sounds on the phone, that she’s still a community college student. I never do well when unintelligent people interview me.

This afternoon I went to the West Regional Library to use one of their public typewriters to fill out a barely adequate application for an NEA grant.

I’m not really sure why I’m bothering when I know I’ll never get a creative writing fellowship and that I probably don’t deserve it any more than I deserve the Florida grant I’ve currently got.

God, I’m in a bad mood today.

*

10 PM. I’m exhausted. My wrists and ankles ache the way they do when I’m bone-tired. My Literature of the 1950s and 1960s class went well, and the discussion and lecture on Baldwin’s novel was, if not lively, then unflagging.

I showed about half an hour of the TV film, which sanitized the character of the father, Gabriel, and to some extent, of the mother and aunt as well. Even PBS tends to make characters more likable than a book can portray them.

The class has a number of black students, so that probably helped even if they’re mostly Guyanese or Nigerian or other immigrants rather than African Americans who grew up in this country in places like New York.

The students handed in about a dozen papers, but I don’t know when I’m going to mark them and also have time to read Seize the Day by next Monday night.

Have I taken on too much? Probably. But I want to be grossing more than $660 a week, which is at least close to the equivalent of what I made at CGR for my full-time job.

Of course, my part-time job at Nova is really full-time since I’m teaching six courses in one semester. Still, I’m not a freeway flyer, driving all around South Florida.

I’m working at only one university, and all my classes except the one in Boca Raton are at the same campus location, only a five-minute drive from where I’m living.

Tuesday, January 26, 1999

8 PM. Last night I couldn’t sleep right away, I felt certain, so I spent half an hour going over my credit card accounts. I pay them before the bills arrive, trying to time my payments so that they come just after the billing cycle ends.

What I do when I “go over my accounts” is to call the banks’ automated response centers and check to see my balance, available credit and status of my last payment. Last night I could tell that one credit limit, with Orchard Bank, has been raised $200.

It was well after midnight when I finally fell asleep, and this morning I was so tired that I forced myself to sleep till nearly 8 AM.

In my last dream, I was the attorney in a lawsuit and the judge had just called upon me to begin arguing my case, but I panicked because I had no idea what the litigation was about.

This is a new, more professional version of the kind of anxiety dream I’ve had all my life: when I have to take an exam in a subject I haven’t studied for or a course whose classes I’ve never attended.

I stayed in nearly all day. Jonathan and Dad went to work in the afternoon and still aren’t home, and Mom kept to herself, so it was quiet.

I read all of Seize the Day for next Monday night’s class. I guess I first read the novel in Professor Kitch’s Contemporary American Literature class in the spring of 1972, and then again in Professor Fuchs’s course in Mailer and Bellow at Richmond College a couple of years later.

I first taught Seize the Day as part of my course in The Novel in my last semester at Long Island University in late summer 1978.

Have I taught it since then? Yes, at Broward Community College in American Lit in the spring of 1991, my last term at BCC before I moved to Gainesville for law school.

Now I’m older than Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm, and I feel closer to his situation.

The turgid introduction to this volume by Cynthia Ozick nevertheless had me nostalgic for the Upper West Side and Broadway and the Ansonia and the city crowds.

Of all the places I’ve lived, the two most wrenching to leave were my childhood home of over twenty years on East 56th Street in Brooklyn and Teresa’s apartment, #44, at 350 West 85th Street. I felt so at home on the Upper West Side. Well, I’ll go back someday.

At the Davie post office, I mailed off my completed application for the National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship for the ’00/’01 (how strange that looks!) fiscal year.

That’s done and over with until I get my rejection – if it ever finds me – sometime in 2000. Although I pride myself in being efficient in getting that out of the way, I also wish I’d gotten more schoolwork done today.

But between reading the Times as usual, listening to the news on NPR – at least I combined the 4 PM hour of All Things Considered with a walk – and eating and exercising and going to the bank to deposit the $71 travel expenses check from Nova and to the Davie library to check my email at Yahoo, there wasn’t time.

Josh emailed me, but this time I’m not going to respond so quickly. He said Gabrielle is taking the U.S. nursing exam this month, and if she fails, they’ll have problems. But he also said that if she passes, they’ll probably have problems anyway – though I guess that means she’ll be able to stay in the country.

It sounds as if she and Josh have a stormy, dysfunctional relationship. Both of them should have known after last summer’s pregnancy that they were not good for each other, but as Bellow’s Dr. Tamkin might say, the pretender soul in all of us seek out the love we’re able to get.

Most people settle for a lot less than half a loaf – more like a slice of Wonder Bread, the white kind I guess that stuff can seem filling while you’re eating it.

Hey, in San Jose and Phoenix I sometimes bought sourdough Wonder Bread.

Wednesday, January 27, 1999

2 PM. I came home an hour ago and saw the letter from Hanging Loose Press, knowing it was the rejection I’ve been waiting for.

Bob Hershon felt, as did his co-editors, that although some of the stories are strong, others are weak imitations of those, and that I should tighten up the manuscript and link the stories before I submit it somewhere else.

The rejection is painful, but they’re probably right. What I’ll try to do next is to cut the manuscript to only the recent gay-themed stories. But for now I won’t submit it, and I’m not sure I ever will.

Perhaps one day in the 21st century I’ll self-publish it as a perfect-bound chapbook, but I’m going to forget about it for now.

Maybe I’d feel worse if I hadn’t just come from a 90-minute interview by Lourdes Rodriguez-Florido, who turned out to be brighter than I expected. As someone who’s just finished first novel, she understands how hard being a writer is.

We sat by the Jamaican Me Crazy Cafe while some of my former and current students kept passing by. I was on good behavior, and as Huckleberry Finn said about Twain’s writing in Tom Sawyer, I told the truth, mostly, but I put some stretchers in there – only to give the narrative more coherence, of course.

I gave Lourdes a few of my recent stories and other stuff, but not all that much. Anyway, right now I don’t really care about the article although I’ll probably feel differently later on.

Of course, in some ways I feel as if I’m a fraud since I know that my fiction writing career is over. I may continue to write an occasional story, but I know I need to move into journalism if I’m going to continue getting published.

Last night I read some of the readings from the American Literature text, but I haven’t finished by any means. Once again I couldn’t sleep past 5 AM, so I’m probably going to get really tired while teaching this evening.

My Language 1500 class went all right, I guess, and I came home for a while to rest. Jonathan had a cyst on his elbow and the infection traveled up his arm, so now he’s on antibiotics to stop it from spreading – but he’s in pain and the arm looks awful.

I’ve got to review the material for tonight’s class, but I don’t know how much good it will do since I’m so out of my element when I teach Organizational Communications.

If I had more time or got paid more . . . well, there’s no point in rationalizing my performance. Given the circumstances right now, I’m doing the best I can.

That Hanging Loose Press rejection hurts, but as I said, it’s not unexpected. Maybe what hurts more is that I know the book doesn’t deserve to be published.

I’m not sure I Survived Caracas Traffic deserve to be published, either, but on the other hand, the few reviews the book got weren’t all that bad.

Anyway, I’m fighting the temptation to bathe in the waters of self-pity. What have I got to pity myself for, after all? If, at 48, I can’t accept disappointment with more equanimity, then I’ve learned nothing.

*

9 PM. Although this is a busy week, I’m handling it well. I’ve just had a good Organizational Communications class, and I feel good about my abilities as a teacher, and I am looking forward to sleeping well tonight and not having to get up early tomorrow.

As for my fiction writing, I’m over the Hanging Loose Press rejection. It isn’t as if I haven’t accepted the fact that I’m a writer of modest talents who has achieved, if anything, more success than his work deserved.

The good thing is that I’ve got a lot of other stuff going on in my life: teaching, law, journalism, travel, friendships, whatever. I don’t need to have another book published.

Yet I suspect very strongly that I’ll have more than one more book published before I die. But if not, it’s no big deal. Certainly the world isn’t being deprived of a work of genius.

In a best case scenario, publication by Hanging Loose Press would not change my life any more than the publication of the Avisson Press book in 1996 did.

I always figured I’d need to get to the next decade before my next book, and then I could say I published books in four decades: the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties, and whatever we’re going to call the next decade.

Saturday, January 30, 1999

9 PM. The American Lit class last night and this afternoon took a lot out of me. It was probably more stressful on the 33 members of the cluster, all of whom work at American Express.

The problem was not only that they were jumping into a program that required a very difficult time frame – two 2-hour classes back-to-back one night, then a couple of 4-hour classes taking up the entire next day – but that the course outline that Larry Brandt was so proud of confused them terribly.

It was vague, unclear and often erroneous. Add to that the confusion of the different pagination of the latest edition of the Norton Anthology and I’ve never students more stressed out about class requirements. It was all so unnecessary, too.

If I had gone with my own instincts, I would have made a syllabus that would have allayed their anxieties. Now I know to just rework the course outline for the next class and give them my own syllabus.

Nobody told their Interpersonal Communications instructor that the class had been moved to the main campus from the American Express headquarters in Plantation, so when I arrived at the classroom door at 7:45 PM, he had gotten there only twenty minutes before me and was still telling them about the course.

Dr. Ron Melnick was his name, and he greeted me by pointing out to the class that my big muscles were probably the result of carrying around the thick Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Most of the students hadn’t had time to do the reading, let alone the writing assignment, so I was pretty much left on my own.

Last night I spent so much time on housekeeping, I only briefly went over the text on American literature before 1620 and the Native American creation stories.

Today at 1 PM, I lectured for an hour on 1620-1820, had us look through the various authors in that section, and then talked about 1820-1865. It’s just too much for that little time.

I went over “Rip Van Winkle” and “Young Goodman Brown” the best I could, and think I did a decent job. I also played the only video version of Rip Van Winkle I could find, a Claymation short I got at the South Regional Public Library this morning.

Last night I let them go at 9:20 PM and today I couldn’t stand to go past 4:15 PM although I should have stopped at least fifteen minutes earlier.

I was stressed out myself this morning because I hadn’t yet reread the Irving and Hawthorne tales nor the other material for the afternoon, and I needed to go to the library and the supermarket as well.

When I got in last night, Marc called. He’d actually intended to phone a friend and dialed this number by hitting the wrong key on his mobile telephone.

He said that he’s figured out that he’s not making any more money as a manager, and now he’s got all the responsibility for the store.

For example, he had to work today without getting paid for it because his employees called in sick with excuses. As a manager, Marc gets no overtime or the kind of sales bonuses he used to get.

On the other hand, he now works mostly alone in the back office all day and doesn’t have to be up front dealing with irate customers.

To some degree, however, dealing with his employees is just as bad, but if he needs or wants to take a two-hour lunch or leave to go on a job interview (he’s sending out résumés), he can.

Marc said he took the job just to get “store manager” on his résumé. There’s nowhere he can go at AirTouch, but “this is a good position to have in order to look for another job.” His car is being fixed for $800.

In today’s mail, I got something from the Florida State Comptroller saying my $2500 grant for 1998 is being reported as taxable income to the IRS, so my tax liability is even worse than I thought.

But I can’t deal with my taxes until after the first eight weeks of classes are over. The next four weeks (February) are just going to be too hectic.

I feel as if I’m never going to catch up with my schoolwork: grading, preparation, reading and rereading, devising essays and test questions, dealing with students.

The first four months of 1999 are the opposite of the same time period in 1998 when, living in Florida and California without having to work, I had nothing but free time.