Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Tuesday, April 13, 1999

6 PM. Last evening I read the next couple of chapters in Burroway’s Writing Fiction, which gave me some ideas for my own story.

I slept okay though I had obsessive thoughts about my story and at one point I had pains in my testicles. (They went away after I masturbated, so they were probably the result of the buildup of semen and too long a time with an erection.)

Up at 6:30 AM, I exercised and dressed by 9 AM and started grading the Language 1500 essays. By 10:30 AM, I was finished, and it was a relief because I had most of the day in front of me.

At the West Regional Library, I checked my email and then went to Wendy’s, where I had a baked potato that made me queasy for the next couple of hours.

I don’t know why that happened, but I didn’t let it stop me from the pleasures of reading the Times (though I couldn’t bear to fully read an account of Serbian animals mutilated by NATO bombs) or later writing a whimsical (and hopefully not leaden) column for the Boca Raton News on compiling a list of the Top 100 Lists of the twentieth century (i.e., Schindler’s List, Nixon’s enemies list, Joe McCarthy’s list of Communists, The List of Adrian Messenger).

The farewell party for Elizabeth Frazier, the student advisor, was at 3 PM, and after I printed out my column and revised story-in-progress, I went up to the Liberal Arts office. But I barely knew Elizabeth (even so, I gave money toward her going-away gift), and I felt awkward there.

Not knowing many people, I gravitated to Ed Steve, who was unaware of my visiting professorship for next year. Stephen joined us and confirmed my position, and then he said a curious thing:

“I just hope . . . as I was telling Santa this morning, it’s bad when C students get C’s, but it’s even worse when C students get A’s.”

I just stared at him and Ed and didn’t say anything. Only as I walked away did it occur to me that he was warning me not to give easy grades in my Legal Studies classes.

My limbic brain responded with an angry defensive feeling. Evidently, people have discussed my “easy” grades.

I felt like telling that twerpy little faggot that he could take his job and shove it – but I also let reason take over. Still, I do somehow want to make it clear to all of them that I still have what they think is my fellowship at Maryland.

As a lawyer, I know that they’re under no obligation until there’s a contract – but then neither am I, and they need someone to teach the damn classes. I would like to tell Stephen that maybe it would be better if he to get someone else to teach the classes, someone more like Les.

Stephen strikes me as a guy who has no life except the Legal Studies Program and also as someone who can’t deal with change. But that would be his problem, not mine.

If I’m hired, Ben is my supervisor, not Stephen or Steve Alford. Although they’re experienced professors, they’re my colleagues, not my superiors. The truth is that nobody they could hire is going to be like Les.

I understand that I don’t have his knowledge, experience or strengths – but I’m confident enough to believe that I can do at least some things better than Les.

Anyway, if this position doesn’t work out, I probably still can take one course in the second summer session at Maryland, so I could start the program since my admission date is for both summer sessions.

Or I could do something else altogether: stay in New York or go to Phoenix or California and find work there.

In the adjunct office, I spoke with Diane Marcello for a long time. She was a grad student at NYU until recently, and she’s done all her work for her Ph.D. except her dissertation on computers and writing.

Her husband was a med student at Mount Sinai, and he took a position at a local hospital here but didn’t like it, so they suddenly moved to Tampa and now she’s commuting every week for her Tuesday/Thursday classes.

We talked for an hour about New York, academia and Florida. Diane is someone I could really be friends with. Chatting with her took my mind off the annoyance I felt at Stephen’s remark.

But I long ago decided that he’s kind of an asshole so I have to take his comments with that in mind. Still, if I ever thought I’d apply for the permanent position, that idea is now completely gone.

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Wednesday, April 14, 1999

4:30 PM. Last evening I read ahead in Writing Fiction and then read the coursepack for Scott Stoddart’s current Other Voices, Other Visions class that includes Jonathan Larsen’s Broadway show Rent.

Obviously, reading the book of a musical is hardly experiencing the play, so although I got the flavor of it, Rent lies pretty dead on the page. God knows why Scott includes it in Other Voices, Other Visions, though perhaps it works better with the cast album.

But Scott also uses Bonfire of the Vanities and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in the same course – which to me is like making it a class in Middlebrow Entertainment.

I think my plan to teach Other Voices, Other Visions as a class in immigrant and Native American fiction hews closer to the intent of the Core Studies course: giving students multicultural perspectives.

I find I’m still irritated by Stephen’s remark about “C students” getting A’s, presumably from yours truly.  It strikes me that classifying students by their perceived deserved grade is pretty idiotic – and I guess some people would call that a “tragedy,” too.

Of course, one person’s tragedy is another’s comedy.

I may appear to be very self-effacing and even deferential, but I’m not the “wishy-washy liberal” that my fellow Brooklyn College students called me back in the 1970s when I didn’t like to take public stands. Over the years, I’ve become extremely opinionated and fairly confident.

Maybe if I were going to teach Constitutional history and civil and political liberties at an Ivy League school, I’d feel more diffident now – but my God, this is only a Legal Studies Program at Nova, after all.

Although I was up at 5:15 AM, I haven’t been totally exhausted today – at least not yet. I wore my long-sleeved Nautica polo shirt to teach this morning, and I had a good class.

By the time I left campus at 9:30 AM, it was so hot that I wanted to change to a t-shirt and shorts  when I got home.

When I walked in the door, Dad said, “Your friend Gianni from Spain called half an hour ago.”

Using my prepaid long distance card, I called the number Gianni gave me and left a voicemail message in response to an operator’s recording (in Spanish, of course).

I suspect that Gianni never did get to the U.S. to visit his family as he’d planned to. Or maybe something happened while he was in Maryland. In any case, I suppose things are kind of fucked-up in his life.

A long time ago, I realized that Gianni was a bit unstable and somewhat unreliable. Although I cared for him a great deal, I know that in many ways I’m really fortunate that he was with Alejandro when I met him.

This morning my email consisted of the following: forwarded jokes from Marc and Celeste; Rick asking me for a bio note, as he is readying the Sex & Chocolate anthology for his agent (Rick said the vote against his going for a Ph.D. was 47-3); and Patrick asking for an exercise that he could use in a one-shot creative writing workshop he’s doing for high school students.

I read some of my Fiction Writing students assignments, and they’re uniformly weak. I wouldn’t mind even if they’re doing the minimum possible, but it’s insulting when they hand in scribbled stuff torn from spiral notebooks.

Lila, whose mother said it changed her life, has yet to hand in anything this term.

Everyone in the class who does all the work will get an A or an A-, but I’m not going to reward shoddy dreck. I expect their assignments – like the passing essays on the Pennsylvania Bar Exam – to at least be “good-faith efforts.”

That most of these people are going to be elementary school or high school teachers is no longer surprising to me, but it is dismaying.

Anyway, dealing with education majors is one reason I don’t want to teach creative writing again in Florida.

I spent part of the afternoon at Nova, reading San Jose Mercury News articles as I tried to recapture the feel of Silicon Valley for my story.

In the mail, I got a $250 refund after I complained about the secured credit card application I sent a South Dakota bank.

Not knowing that Mom was already at the Pine Island Publix, I also went there to get some groceries. Then I got gas and a new phone card. Back at the house, I left two more messages on Teresa’s machine.

I still have to grade four Language 1500 papers and look over half a dozen Fiction Writing assignments, but I can leave them for tomorrow – or in the case of the late papers, until the weekend.

I am really looking forward to not teaching this summer. Ten courses is probably the most I’ve taught in an academic year since I was an overworked full-timer at Broward Community College fifteen years ago.

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Friday, April 16, 1999

8 PM. Last evening’s Fiction Writing class went all right. I used the Burroway text to discuss atmosphere, setting and time-sequencing and then had them write a diary entry for the day in the third person.

After workshopping a few of their pieces for the rest of the class period, I wrapped things up around 9:30 PM.

Unable to get to sleep, I didn’t drift off till 1 AM or so – but I got up at 6:40 AM, so at least I had five and a half hours of sleep. (I put off exercising until late afternoon.)

This morning’s class went fine as I tried to give the students common-sense rules for doing research.

Back in the Liberal Arts office, Santa said, “So you’re going to be with us for another year.”

“So they tell me,” I said.

I found that my name is already preprinted on the book order forms for the first eight-week semester in the fall. I decided to use a 1997 edition of a book from Foundation Press on civil liberties and individual rights that seems like it’s aimed at undergraduates.

After leaving campus at 9:15 AM, I drove through Davie to the Oakwood Plaza Barnes & Noble, where I sipped blackberry-sage iced tea and read TWN, the gay weekly, and the front section of the Times.

Back at the house at noon, I was thrilled to see a letter from Thien. He enclosed a photo of him in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, looking very cute.

He and his family moved to a new place in Campbell, and everyone is fine. His sisters have boyfriends but are too busy with school to get married. He told me to call him.

I decided to wait until 7 PM our time, which I figured was the best time to get him in. I was right.

It was great to talk with Thien again – I really like him in many ways – but our conversation somewhat disillusioned me. I’d forgotten how hard it was to talk with him; we did not always understand one another.

This afternoon before our phone call, I was at the Nova computer lab working on my “Silicon Valley Diet” story and came up with an ending indicating that the narrator and the Vietnamese guy will be longtime lovers.

However, after talking with Thien, I realize that’s just a fantasy. I’m not writing a romance novel. Given the way I’ve written the characters, the communications barrier between the two of them would be too great for them to end up together.

Thien still very much wants to go back to what he calls “my country – best country in the world, I think.” He doesn’t have a boyfriend.

There was a Vietnamese man in Canada who visited, and they “cared for each other,” but Thien didn’t want to move to Canada and the guy was so upset by that that he refused to talk to Thien again. Still, he said he’s happy “even without a boyfriend.”

He’s tired from getting up at 3 AM every day to deliver newspapers, then going to work at 8 or 9 AM, and then going to school in the evenings.

But he hopes he can eventually get a decent full-time job and return to Vietnam for three months to “hand out money to friends and family, get motorcycle and see whole country.”

Recently I was reading some Mercury News articles on the diversity of Silicon Valley, and I came across a 27-year-old lawyer named Thien Duc Nguyen. I guess I wish Thien Ngoc Nguyen were as American as that guy.

But I’ll definitely call him more now that he said not to worry about his parents.

While a couple were looking at the house this evening, I spoke to Marc on the phone.

He said he went out to the sports bar at the Arizona Center last night and had a nice time, but  he was tired this morning because he had to get up early to bring the car in to be fixed and then at work his boss unexpectedly showed up. But everything turned out okay.

Today’s St. Pete Times said that President Lombardi forced Rick Matasar to resign as law school dean over the name change controversy, and many people at UF are angry that Matasar has been made the fall guy.

Quite a few of the law school’s tenured faculty wrote to Lombardi protesting the premature ending of Matasar’s deanship.

I noticed the old farts like Little, Probert and Quarles didn’t sign, although DT Smith and Betty Taylor did, along with Jon Mills, Mashburn, Nunn, Slobogin, Baldwin, Collier, Peters, Nagan . . . 34 in all.

It’s a shame that Rick Matasar was forced out. Hopefully they’ll get another forward-looking dean to replace him.

Although I haven’t finished today’s paper, I think I’m going to try to go to sleep now.

Life seems so much more exciting and so connected today than it did yesterday. It isn’t all because of Thien, but he’s definitely a part of it. Like me, he wants to stay friends.

(And now my story will end with the two main characters in a platonic relationship.)

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Monday, April 19, 1999

3:30 PM. I should be grading the dozen papers I got this morning, but I’ve been prodigiously procrastinating. If I leave it all till tomorrow, it will get done, I suppose, but I’ll feel harried and under pressure.

(And I’m not going to even think about trying to rationalize postponing the return of papers until Friday.)

It was 7:20 AM when I arrived on campus today. I had a terribly boring class, but I don’t know how to go over MLA citation forms without enduring and engendering boredom.

After class, I photocopied all the “works cited” papers and three of the papers I received for use in a workshop.

In the office, I chatted with Joe Creasy and answered email from Patrick and Alice, who was concerned that we were affected by the fires in the Everglades. But they haven’t really been noticeable from here.

Lynn Wolf stopped by and congratulated me on my “appointment.” She said she “read about it,” which came as news to me. Maybe Ben sent the full-time faculty a memo?

Later in the day, I caught Micki outside taking a cigarette break. As I expected, she’s been too busy to write a letter of recommendation to Ben.

She’s teaching in Boca now, and said, “That class really loves you.” Micki told them she took credit for being the first person at Nova to hire me. She said I shouldn’t doubt my ability to teach Legal Studies “because you can teach anything.”

Back in the Liberal Arts office, I complimented Stephen on his sport jacket, a Tyrolean collarless monstrosity. He reminds me of Russ at CGR in his love of Austria, his fussiness, and his odd manner – but I expect I can manage to get along with Stephen the same way I got along with Russ.

I saved an article I later sent to Marc about a consortium of pager companies, including AirTouch, trying to save the pager business by moving to a device that has Web access and other communications devices.

The mail brought six or seven bill statements, none of which required payment since I already paid them or have credit balances on the cards.

I tried to call Libby, but the number I’ve got doesn’t work very well; while it may have been Libby’s voice on the machine, the sound was so garbled that I couldn’t tell.

I thought about working on my story, but once again, I couldn’t bear to face it. I’m afraid to see how the tentative new ending looks on the page.

Perhaps I’ll get some more energy or desire to work before the day is over.

*

8 PM. A couple of hours ago I went to Borders, and in an hour and a half I marked six of the ten Language 1500 papers, so at least I feel I didn’t totally waste the day.

I’m not sleepy right now – probably the caffeine and the iced tea perked me up – but I don’t feel like looking at the remaining essays.

After Wednesday’s workshop with the morning class, I think I’ll have conferences on Friday so I can tell people individually how to improve their papers. Actually, I feel quite good that I accomplished something today.

I may not have marked up the papers as much as I usually do, but there’s still plenty in the comments for my students to look at and work on.

Anyway, I should be able to finish the four remaining papers in less than 90 minutes tomorrow. Actually, an hour would be giving each paper fifteen minutes, which is certainly enough time.

In my mailbox today were the teacher evaluation forms, which I’ll give out on Thursday evening and either Friday or Monday morning.

Mom said that Graduate Halls from Maryland called and said they have an efficiency for me; I should call and tell them I’m not coming in May.

Actually, if I could have gotten a furnished place for only a couple of months, it might have been worth it to start the University of Maryland journalism program. Oh well.

I guess I’ll chill the rest of the evening. At least now I won’t feel that guilty.