Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Saturday, December 12, 1998

9:30 PM. I entered my final grades for the day Language 2000 class after reading the students’ research papers at Barnes & Noble – this morning in at the Plantation store, this afternoon at the one in Coral Springs.

I didn’t do much more than read the papers. After carefully marking up their first drafts, I think this was enough. In a way, I agonize on the side of being generous. But of course I need to make sure I don’t give somebody an A- instead of a B+ as a final grade and not do the same for someone situated similarly.

But what does “situated similarly” mean when a skillful, grammatical writer shows little effort or has poor attendance and a struggling writer comes to class and participates every day, revises his papers and works her heart out?

I hate judging others, and to me, the nightmare career would be trial judge. Perhaps that’s why I found today’s House Judiciary Committee hearings so depressing: entirely on a party-line votes, they voted down a censure resolution and passed a fourth article of impeachment – for abuse of power.

When Mom, who was watching CNN as the committee was debating and Clinton was being welcomed at the Tel Aviv airport by Netanyahu, called out to tell me the shocking bulletin that Governor Chiles had died suddenly, I started sobbing.

Chiles was one of the few politicians that I would call “beloved,” and his death – from an apparent heart attack while exercising in the governor’s mansion – has upset me a great deal.

Just yesterday, when, Chiles and Governor-elect Bush co-appointed – to avoid any dispute – a black woman to the state Supreme Court, Chiles looked fine.

He was less than three weeks away from finishing his second term as governor after 18 years in the U.S. Senate. Chiles was the last of an old breed.

Anyway, I guess the full House will vote to impeach Clinton this coming week, with a trial in the Senate taking place next year. God knows what that will mean. We’re in uncharted territory, and it makes me feel queasy.

The Republicans may end up hurting themselves politically; To me, it seems as if they just joined the moralistic Ken Starr in a Religious Right campaign to not only remove Clinton from office but to repeal the 1960s and all the changes in mores since then.

Despite Monica Lewinsky and the Asian economic depression and everything else, 1998 turned out to be an extension of the American economic boom and feelings of contentment and complacency among the public.

I think impeachment is the beginning of the end of that, and that 1999 will bring a sea-change in people’s attitudes – though I don’t know where that will lead.

In a way, I guess I’m glad I won’t be studying journalism in Washington, D.C. until June, which, God willing, will be after the Senate impeachment trial ends.

Today I went to Target to buy some items for my trip to Phoenix in two days. I’ve already read most of the early edition of the Sunday Times– but there’ll be a lot more news by tomorrow morning.

Tonight in Miami, to protest the passage of the new anti-discrimination ordinance, they’re trying to fill the Orange Bowl with an anti-gay rally, so it seems like a good time to leave South Florida.

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Thursday, December 17, 1998

8:30 PM. Today was a perfect day.

Forty-five minutes ago, when I came out of the movies in the little strip shopping center near the Fiesta Mall, the night seemed so beautiful.

Walking around, I saw lots of people in the stores and found myself thinking, “It’s nice to be living someone else’s life.”

As I got into my rented aqua-colored Mercury Tracer with the tangerine smell, put on the local NPR station, KJZZ, and listened to “Salt Peanuts,” I had to think about what I meant by “living someone else’s life.”

I think I meant what I once found myself thinking while pumping gas in Long Beach, California, in April 1991: “I feel more like myself in California.” Away from my “everyday” life – whether in Brooklyn, South Florida or Gainesville – I get to know myself differently.

Last evening I couldn’t fall asleep, so I got out of my sleeping bag and read the first chapter of Organizational Communications. Like the Business Communications text, it’s by Jane Whitney Gibson,our Business Division director – so some of the theory in the book sounds familiar.

A lot of it seems like bullshit, and I’m sure I can teach this stuff. The second edition of the book is from 1991 and so contains anachronistic honkers about the booming Japanese economy, IBM dominating the computer industry with AT&T fast on its heels, and banks like Chase Manhattan expanding to Florida and Texas.

Falling asleep around 11:30 PM, I woke up at 5:30 AM. An hour later, I exercised to Body Electric as Marc was taping the show for me. Then I had breakfast and lay down in my sleeping bag for a little while.

Before he showered and dressed, Marc went out walking, and after he left for work, I got ready to go out myself. It was just 9 AM, and I again headed for Borders, where I read most of the New York Times for two hours over iced tea served by the same pretty girl around 20 who had served me yesterday.

At 11 AM, I got on U.S. 60 going east to Rural Road and went to the Tempe Public Library, where I used the Internet on one of their computers to check my email. All I had was junk and my front pages from the San Jose Mercury News.

But while I was online, a message from Paul Fericano popped up, so we ended up having a conversation in real time.

Paul ran out of money so he went back to work – but at Kathy’s office rather than go back to being a waiter. “I even had to learn Windows,” Paul, a Mac user complained. He’ll do this until he has enough money so that he can go back to writing his novel full-time again.

After sending emails to Teresa and Gianni, I stopped at the Trader Joe’s on McClintock to get three 99¢ bags of frozen mango chunks. (So far I haven’t been able to find frozen mango chunks anywhere in Florida. They must be a thing only out West.)

After I returned to Marc’s apartment and ate some of the mango chunks and the rest of my lunch, I drove up to Scottsdale to check out an optical store I saw an ad for in New Times. The ad said they charge $29 for every pair of glasses.

But they didn’t take credit cards, and they told me that it would cost me twice as much or more for them to make the lens thinner than the bottom of Coke bottles.

I drove back to Mesa and got Christmas stamps at the post office; the line was incredibly long, but the machine dispensed stamps quickly.

Then I walked over to the main Mesa Public Library and read the Mesa Tribune, which probably would have called by now if they were going to use my column about adjunct work. Too bad, but at least I gave it the good old college try. Now I’ll try submitting the op-ed to a Florida newspaper.

Back at the apartment, I found Marc finishing his lunch break. At 3 PM, I went out again in my t-shirt (it was 78°) and with my Walkman so I could listen to All Things Considered as I took a walk.

First, though, I stopped at Mesa Lutheran Hospital and checked out their newspaper racks, cafeteria and gift shop: all nice things to have right across the street from where I’m staying.

Then I walked up to Brown Road and turned right on Country Club Drive and went into the Mesa city cemetery, a great place to stroll.

On the Country Club side, there are empty spaces and newer footstones, but as I walked toward the other end of the cemetery, there were older graves and headstones.

On the way back, I was surprised to see Hebrew letters on a headstone, so I stopped and found a surprisingly sizable Jewish section, which contained the final resting place of a former mayor of Mesa.

Walking back the way I’d come – plus a little further south – I returned exactly an hour after I’d begun walking.

After eating a frozen dinner and a golden yellow sweet potato, I addressed some Christmas card envelopes and then went out to the movies.

Planning to see Celebrity in Tempe, I was unprepared for the heavy traffic. Stuck on Alma School Road, I realized I could never get to Tempe on time.

Then I remembered the theaters across from the Fiesta Mall, and I managed to walk in just as the 5:30 PM showing of Pleasantville was starting. For three dollars, the movie was a bargain: a clever riff on the stultifying world depicted in 1950s family sitcoms.

It got a little heavy when it tried to make analogies to segregation and Nazi book-burning, but generally it was well-executed, especially the sequences when color appears in the Pleasantville black-and-white world.

The film was also a good response to the Christian Right’s attempt to turn the clock back to the supposed perfect world of the 1950s nuclear family.

Maybe it’s a good thing the House will impeach Clinton (despite the Iraqi bombings): Let’s get this Kulturkampf out in the open in the Senate trial.

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Friday, December 18, 1998

9:30 PM. I just got into the apartment; Marc is out at the AirTouch Christmas party at a Tempe hotel. He didn’t mind that I preferred not to go and said he didn’t really feel like going, either, but he had to make an appearance.

Tonight I went out to another three-dollar movie, You’ve Got Mail, Nora Ephron’s remake of the classic Little Shop Around the Corner, updated to an email romance between a mega-bookstore mogul and the independent bookstore owner who he puts out of business.

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were cute, and the Upper West Side – from Zabar’s to the 79th Street boat Basin to Riverside Park and H&H Bagels – never looked more beautiful. I feel privileged to have once lived in that neighborhood.

Afterwards, I walked over to another store in the strip center, Atomic Comics, where I looked at 12¢ issues of Aquaman and Lois Lane and The Mighty Thor that I could remember owning back in the early 1960s.

When I went back into the car, the 13-hour House impeachment debate was still raging on the radio, with some Democratic congresswoman making a fiery but futile denunciation of the process.

After exercising this morning, I watched the first half-hour of the House debate on TV at 7 AM.

Then I just tuned in from time to time because what was happening on the House floor wasn’t really a debate but just politicians making statements on a resolution whose outcome is partisan and certain.

The only thing in doubt is whether all four articles of impeachment pass tomorrow. Two or three of them will pass for sure.

At 8 AM, after Marc left to open the store, I called Sat Darshan, who said it would be better if I came over tomorrow so we could go see her father. Ravinder’s nephew Tandeep came in from Montreal late last night, and they wanted to spend today with him.

Tandeep is 23, and he cut his hair, which has caused “kind of a scandal” in his fairly religious Sikh family. Sat Darshan said that Ravinder couldn’t get his nephew to understand why everyone was so upset.

She also offhandedly mentioned that Ravinder is opening an “everything for a dollar” store on 16th and Thomas and that we should go there so I could take a look at it.

Again today, I got to Borders when it opened at 9 AM for iced tea and the New York Times. It’s a pleasant ritual. Today was about 10° cooler than yesterday, but it’s supposed to get wintry in the in a few days.

Walking across Alma School to the Fiesta Mall, I checked out the sales in the men’s department in Robinson-May because I want to use my store credit card so it doesn’t go stale.

I think I may buy a pair of these drawstring cargo pants with wide legs, but first I need to decide whether or not I’m too old for “young men’s” clothing.

This afternoon at Mervyn’s, I spent $7.99 on a black short-sleeved polo shirt, so I used that store’s card again.

When I called Mom, I found out that my Nova check was for only three courses – one BPM class was missing – but then she found an additional check Nova had sent by priority mail.

One check was for about $2,600, the other for $1,400, so I netted a little over $4,000 – which is still less than I expected.

Mom will try to endorse the checks for me and send Dad or Jonathan over on Monday to deposit them in NationsBank.

All I got otherwise were bills and a notice that my Union Planters credit card is being taken over by MBNA, a credit card company that always rejected me in the past, even back in the 1980s.

At Mom’s suggestion, I took the Superstition Freeway east to Apache Junction, where there are some cheaper homes that she and Dad could probably afford.

The place seemed very far away, out past the Maricopa County line into Pinal County – and it also seemed pretty rural and redneck.

But then Davie was certainly rural and redneck and seemed far away from Miami and Fort Lauderdale twenty years ago when my parents moved there.

On my way home, I made a stop at Albertsons to buy some groceries.

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Saturday, December 19, 1998

3 PM. Last night was chilly, but the heat worked fine and I slept amazingly well, considering I did it in a sleeping bag.

I do remember waking up briefly when Marc came home from the AirTouch Christmas party. He said he enjoyed it.

John, his supervisor, said he was glad that Marc sent in his application for the manager’s position and was impressed by Marc’s thoughts on why the store’s pager business was off (they are making it up in cell phones).

When they “big boss” appeared, John told him, “Marc knows exactly how to fix our problems” or something like that.

I listened to the early morning House debate, and like everyone, I was stunned when Speaker-designate Livingston, after calling on President Clinton to resign, announced that he himself would not serve as speaker and would resign from the next Congress in six months.

To me, that made no sense; just because Livingston was an adulterer didn’t make him unfit to be Speaker.

Anyway, after exercising I went to Borders and read the Times, and when I came out, I turned on my Walkman radio to hear the final vote on the first article of impeachment, on grand jury perjury, which passed basically along party lines.

I continued listening to NPR as I walked into Robinson-May, where I bought a little Elmo doll for Kiran Kaur and tried on those cargo drawstring pants (which I still might buy).

The only one of the other four impeachment articles to pass was on obstruction of justice; the articles on perjury in the Paula Jones case and on “abuse of power” failed.

So Clinton has become only the second U.S. President to be impeached. But I was probably the only Christmas shopper in the Fiesta Mall to be interested.

My hope is that Clinton will stand firm and not resign in the face of certain calls for him to “spare the country the trauma of a Senate trial.”

Let’s have the process work. The right-wingers wanted this impeachment as a symbol of their contempt for the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, feminism, abortion rights, gay rights, liberalism, the welfare state, anti-war protesters – whatever.

It’s interesting that no issue since Vietnam and civil rights has stirred the Intellectual Left the way impeachment has. Finally they’re getting over the differences caused by identity politics.

Of course, Bill Clinton is now essentially like a mainstream 1960s/1970s Republican, but the Right has demonized him, and as LBJ used to say, he’s the only president we’ve got.

Whether there will be a short or prolonged Senate trial, no trial but a quick censure resolution, or a presidential resignation, nobody can tell now.

But the Republicans have lost five seats in the House and two speakers, and polls say the party’s approval rate is sinking.

At 1:30 PM, I went to Sat Darshan’s house in Phoenix. Forgetting to write down her address, I remembered the direction and what the front of the house looked like.

Tandeep answered the door, as Sat Darshan was feeding the baby her formula. She’s an adorable infant, and by the end of the day she was holding the little Elmo doll I brought her. Sat Darshan said she was being a very fussy baby today, but she seemed to have a very pleasant disposition.

Tandeep seemed very hip-looking, with his short black hair, goatee and fashionable glasses. We all sat talking for a while. Ravinder was at his new “everything for a dollar” store.

Just before Sat Darshan and I were going to leave for the nursing home, Poppy, the dog, had an epileptic seizure, and Sat Darshan held her for ten minutes while I distracted the baby in her little vibrating seat/stand. (I don’t know what those things are called.)

On the way to the Kivel home, Sat Darshan asked me about Cami, and I told her how he never called after our one date.

She said that her sister has all these problems meeting men in Seattle; Ellen’s best friend is a gay man and she’s become active in a “meditative” synagogue and the Seattle arts community.

I’d saved today’s New York Times for Sat Darshan’s father, and she brought him other old papers and a gift Christmas box of M&M’s candy.

Mr. P was pretty quiet, and I think maybe he knew me, but I’m not sure. It’s so odd that by now I know my friends’ parents since they were the same age I am now.

At the house, Sat Darshan said to the baby, “Mamaji knows Richie since before your cousin here [Tandeep] was born.”

Like her father, Sat Darshan has aged very well; she doesn’t have the lines in her face that I do. I know I’ve aged a lot in the past three or four years.

We went to the nursing home cafeteria to sit and watch CNN, with Sat Darshan wheeling her father’s wheelchair and me in charge of Kiran’s stroller. We reversed the process when we brought Mr. P back to the room so the nurse could change his pants, which he had wet.

On our way home, Sat Darshan stopped at the new store on Thomas Road and 16th Street. But Ravinder had gone back to the house for lunch, so that’s where I finally met him.

Ravinder is about six feet tall, with a turban and bushy black beard (obviously). His English is heavily accented, and I didn’t always understand him, but he seems like a kind, thoughtful, if somewhat distracted man.

I can’t tell if this store thing will work out, but Ravinder hasn’t yet signed the lease, so I guess he can back out at this point.

Before, at the nursing home, Sat Darshan explained what a family scandal Tandeep’s haircut was.

His younger brother, like other Sikh young men his age in India, had already cut his hair, but Tandeep had promised his parents he wouldn’t.

But in Montreal he found out that his turban and beard led other Sikhs in the badly split community to view him as a conservative fundamentalist, something he surely is not.

“I thought about cutting my hair two hours a day every day until I finally did it,” he explained to me, “so it wasn’t an impulse.”

Now he sort of regrets it and feels bad that his parents are disappointed in him. But he’s homesick now and will grow it back, he says, when he returns to India.

He was watching, on cable TV, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a movie he already seen many times; Sat Darshan kept making him mute the commercials.

We sat around and talked, and since Ravinder had to go back to the store, I volunteered to go to Walgreens on Central Avenue and Osborn and pick up the dog’s epilepsy medication, phenobarbital. I had to ask for the prescription for “Canine Khalsa.”

Sat Darshan let me check my email on her computer: I had a short note from Teresa, and Gianni replied to my last message, saying he’d done well in his language course and was looking to his first full term of classes in Spain.

He said that when he visited Geneva and Lucerne, he was impressed with the friendliness of the Swiss; he finds people in Madrid somewhat less friendly.

Gianni wanted to know if I’m excited yet about moving to Maryland and starting journalism school. Actually, it doesn’t seem real yet.

After saying goodbye to Sat Darshan – I’ll call her on Monday – I came home via Loop 202 as night fell.