A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-February, 2000

Friday, February 11, 2000

8 PM. I finally caught up with my sleep last night when I got into bed early and had a long enough rest. So I was able to get through a long day today with lots of energy and no moments of weariness.

By 8:30 AM, I was in the office, making staple-sort copies of the four objective memos I want to use in Tuesday’s class, as a writing workshop.

Louis Arthur, the candidate for the permanent Legal Studies position from NYU, came in for an interview. He seemed like a nice young man, though whether he was gay or Jewish – Steven seems to think he’s both – I couldn’t tell.

An Indiana native, he lives in Park Slope and is currently working with a group who are planning a museum of justice on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. He’s taught, but only as a TA.

Charles obviously likes him, and I think Steven did, too. Jim Doan is head of the search committee, but I don’t know who else is on it.

I went to Lou’s 4 PM lecture, which was based on his dissertation relating to the social networks of Brooklyn’s Jewish and Italian immigrant lawyers (“ambulance chasers”) in the 1920s.

He had a chart showing the relationships among these lawyers, the runners who got them clients, and the doctors at Kings County and other hospitals who referred patients to them.

While the subject was interesting, Lou’s lecture didn’t tell me how he’d deal with Nova students, who are not that bright and on whom all this might be wasted.

Although I believe scholarship is important, I have the biases of a journeyman teacher and generalist. They’ll always need people like me for the scut work of academia; WT, for example, told me today that he needs to hire 22 adjuncts for writing classes.

From 9:30 AM to 11 AM, and then between the time my class ended and Lou’s lecture, I made up the exam for Monday. I hope the students do better on it, and I’m glad that’s now out of the way.

While I didn’t get as far into the Criminal Law and Procedure chapter as I’d hoped, I tried to make the material as interesting as possible to my students.

Mustafa told me that his car hydroplaned on Tuesday night and rolled over five times. But he wasn’t hurt and the police didn’t write up an accident report – luckily for him since his driver’s license is suspended.

Another student asked my advice for a friend who is charged with DUI. The friend guy is not a citizen, and knowing the harshness of INS policies, I told him to urge his friend to get an attorney.

I guess I could be handling all these cases if I were in practice, though of course I’d hardly ever get paid.

Anyway, I was at school all day except for a 40-minute lunch break, and I didn’t even glance at today’s paper until I got home at 4:15 PM.

After dinner, I went to Barnes & Noble and finished reading the Times over one cup of iced tea; I didn’t want a refill because I was concerned about insomnia.

Two people answered the Planet Out ad I put in their Fort Lauderdale section. One is a German guy with a flight crew coming into town on Sunday who’d like to hook up with someone. Forget that.

The other was Eric, this incredibly cute guy in Miami with classic tall, dark and handsome Jewish looks. While I can’t imagine someone like that being interested in me, I was bowled over by his photo and lowkey statements to the point where I started daydreaming and indulging in adolescent fantasies about “settling down” with him.

On the radio yesterday, I heard a physician talk about love being when there’s a strong, almost immediate connection between two brains.

Notice I’ve avoided writing about the galleys. It’s actually going to be hard for me to look at them. I find it almost impossible to read my own work once I know that other people may see it.

I wish I could just tell Kate that the page proofs are flawless and avoid glancing at the book, much less reading it carefully.

*

11 PM. After proofreading my book, I feel a sense of despair. The book’s stories are awful, I have little talent, my prose is graceless, and I couldn’t even bring myself to read all of “Salugi at Starbucks.”

If anything, my writing doesn’t deserve the beautiful design Kate and Mark gave it. The stories have one dull, repetitive, annoying voice. I can’t imagine the book will appeal to either a gay audience or a literary one. I don’t know who will like it.

Well, this will be my last book of fiction, I’m sure. While there’s probably some decent stuff buried within the mounds of shit, I have no illusions about my abilities as a writer after reading this book. God, I feel foolish for spending weeks compiling names and addresses for my mailing list.

Still, even bad books and movies get hyped, and there are movie critics who’ll give a good review to the worst garbage.

But I don’t expect anything will happen with The Silicon Valley Diet except public humiliation. Why am I bothering to expose my inadequacies?

Like the editor at Rob Weisbach Books, I have no idea how to market this. It’s not as funny or lively as my early stories in With Hitler in New York and Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.

I wish I were one of those people who are fortunate enough to be ignorantly unaware of their own incompetence.

Saturday, February 12, 2000

8 PM. The mortification I felt after proofreading the book has faded somewhat. I slept for a couple of hours and then went back over parts of the manuscript, and this morning I went to the post office and Express Mailed it back to Valentine Publishing Group’s Palmdale post office box so it will be there by Monday.

If I’ve missed any errors, too bad. Perhaps the whole book is one big error. I’m embarrassed not only by the bad writing but how much of me gets revealed.

The Silicon Valley Diet does seem like an honest book, though. I was surprised at how much the book struck me as that of a Jewish middle-aged New Yorker. But I don’t seem to have what they call a gay sensibility.

At least the book doesn’t resemble anyone else’s. Nobody will accuse me of ripping off another author’s voice. I’m an original, and if there’s any strength in the book, it’s that.

The downside, of course, is that my writing is graceless, uneven, inartful and that I can’t write dialogue that sounds natural or description that is memorable.

As Sally Eckhoff said of I Survived Caracas Traffic, soon after reading my stories, they almost immediately vanish from memory – to the point where you can’t recall exactly what they’re about.

I noticed on the acknowledgements page that the cover is “David” by Mark E. Cull, so I assume it’s a picture of a young man. I’m sure it will be fine. As I told Kate in an email, their elegant design is better than my prose deserves.

I wish I could say that I was merely self-deprecating or insecure or modest, but the flaws in the book stand out like – well, I’m terrible at similes so why bother saying something like “a huge pimple so distracting, I can’t see the rest of the face”?

Up at 8 AM, I’ve avoided grading the Legal Writing and Research papers, but I’m running out of excuses.

On Monday I have a hundred minutes of free time during my exam to grade perhaps nine or ten papers, and of course I have all day on Tuesday. But I need to just grit my teeth and dig into the first few papers now.

After mailing the galleys to California, I went to the office. I had no email except for a new reply to my ad from a 49-year-old guy in Wilton Manors who’s my height and 180 pounds and balding.

I’m such a body fascist who readily rejects guys because of their looks. I wish I were less shallow. Shouldn’t I empathize with plain middle-aged guys with average bodies instead of wanting to date beautiful younger men?

When I went downstairs to the mailbox this afternoon, I passed this muscular blond kid, maybe 24 at most, barechested and in shorts, with bicep tattoos and a gold chain around his neck, who was washing his car. Even if he were gay, he certainly wouldn’t look at me twice.

I’d be happier if I could get into dumpy-looking guys.

It’s a beautiful day. I read the paper outside Starbucks.

Maybe I should go out on the terrace now and start grading papers?

Nah. I guess I’ll procrastinate for as long as I can get away with it.

I’m exactly like my students, aren’t I?

Wednesday, February 16, 2000

10:30 PM. It’s been a long day, and I’m just starting to wind down, probably because I had an iced tea at the Borders near Sawgrass Mills at 7 PM.

Nate was working at the café, and he Insisted on comping me instead of letting me pay for it with the gift card I’d just bought at the cashier when I also got Sunday’s Tallahassee Democrat.

In addition to his job at the bookstore (“Working sucks”), Nate is taking English classes at FIU’s Tamiami campus and has just self-published a book of 22 poems titled 22 (his age) with his own Giovanni Press.

He said he hasn’t seen much of Igor lately and that the Rush-Ins seem to have fallen apart due to inertia.

I was delighted to see in the Tallahassee paper the low rental prices for apartments. Reading the physical paper also gave me some insights, both good and bad, about Tallahassee that looking at online sources can’t match.

After getting home and watching Dawson’s Creek, I’ve been reading the paper as well as City Link and the new Broward gay paper, Norm Kent’s The Express.

Last night I had a decent class, keeping the students the full time. In a workshop format, we went over four of the memos they submitted.

Hopefully, everyone learned a little something about legal writing and the revised memos I get next week will be better than their first drafts.

Just before class, I came upon the grey cat and fed him, though I don’t like people watching me when I do it. It’s pretty bizarre to be constantly carrying cans of Friskies in my backpack.

This morning I lurched in and out of sleep for hours until about 7AM, when I got up for breakfast.

At the office at 10 AM, I found I had no important (read: personal) new email, and I spent most of the time preparing for my noon class, which I taught after a short trek home for lunch.

It looks as if I’m not going to finish the Criminal Law and Procedure chapter, but today I went over some interesting material with the class.

Afterwards, I came back to my office with two students who missed the test: Maria, who had jury duty on Monday, and Nathaniel, who had an unspecified emergency that day.

I set up student chairs so they could take the test, and while they did, I graded the exams of their classmates.

This test, the first I hadn’t taken from the book or from Charles Zelden, got more normal results, ranging from highs of 98 and 96 to the two lowest scores, predictably earned by the two who took the test today: 66 and 60.

The mean score was 80 with the median at 83, but the students tended to do either really well or quite badly.

Actually, the scores probably would plot out to something that’s almost a bell curve, with the same people doing well on all my tests.

I know some of the poorer scorers do the reading, but they just don’t have a brain for this stuff. I’ve seen that in all the classes in Legal Studies: some of the students just can’t – to use the cliché of law school – think like a lawyer.

Leaving school at 3:30 PM, I was glad I’d gotten the grading done because that frees up tomorrow for other stuff.

So once I finished today’s Times while listening to NPR and had a veggie burger and some fruit, I went out to Sawgrass Mills. For some reason, I’d assumed they’d have an Eddie Bauer store, as my new Spiegel charge card is good there.

But arriving at the Green Toad Entrance, I discovered no Eddie Bauer in the directory of stores, and that’s when I headed to Borders.

Anyway, I feel as if I’ve taken a mini-vacation this evening, but now I’m fading out and can’t write more than a few more words.

Friday, February 18, 2000

9 PM. I had two memorable dreams last night. In one, I was alone with Jaime in a room, and trying to get close to him, I asked him to sit with me on a couch, but he said he preferred a chair.

What I told this to Jaime today, saying I don’t need an analyst to figure out its meaning, his reply was, “LOL. Actually, I prefer the floor.”

(Jaime also said, in response to my comments about Les Lindley: “His classes were SOOO boring. And I love history.” That makes me believe that the day students next term may be inclined to view me as a great relief.)

My other dream had me waking up, turning on NPR as I usually do, and hearing Susan Stamberg interview Kevin about his career as an actor; he was obviously someone very famous and talented.

Of course, I also told Kevin about this dream, figuring it might give him an extra boost of confidence for tonight’s premiere of Oliver! at that theater in Studio City. “From your mouth to God’s ear,” was Kevin’s response.

In the office this morning, I read a couple of other emails and collected some email addresses for my mailing list, which is approaching 1400 names, though I suspect a number of them are duplicates I need to weed out.

Back at Nova after an early lunch, I gave my class an easy quiz, returned their exams and finished the chapter on Criminal Law and Procedure. Next Monday and Wednesday, I’ll try to get through the chapter on Family Law.

Tonight at Barnes & Noble, over iced tea to keep me awake, I started to read that chapter, which has great cases like Wisconsin v. Yoder, Moore v. City of East Cleveland, Zablocki v. Redhail, and a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case approving the adoption of a child by two lesbians.

Teaching the introductory Legal Studies class has been a pleasure, and I bet anything I do it better than Zelden, who, as Les said yesterday, “never spent a day in law school in his life.”

I hung around the office only long enough to mark the quizzes and check out a few things on the Internet.

Getting out of my car in the parking lot downstairs, I was stopped by my student Lou Trauschein, who lives in the next building. He wanted to explain about being absent Wednesday due to food poisoning.

But Lou got a 98 on the test as well as the same score on the last exam and the last quiz, and I’m obviously going to give him an A in the course.

It’s funny how used to being called “Professor Grayson” I’ve become.

Whenever I walk on or off campus, invariably I hear four or five people calling “Hi, Prof. Grayson!” or “How are you, Prof. Grayson?”

At school, I always call myself Richard, but no one else does except other teachers and the people who work in the office.

This academic year has really been a wonderful experience for me. I like teaching most of the Legal Studies courses, and if I had to teach them again, I know I’d do a better job.

I’m starting to realize I need to enjoy the remaining time I’ve got as a visiting professor at Nova.

Until Kevin mentioned that his office at Warner Bros. Records was closed on Monday for the holiday, I’d completely forgotten about Presidents Day.

The remainder of the afternoon I read the paper and did my credit card bills and listened to NPR before heading to the bookstore at 6:30 PM.

Back here at 8 PM, I watched Washington Week and Wall Street Week on PBS.

Tomorrow’s GOP primary South Carolina should be fascinating. If I lived there, I’d probably vote for McCain (there’s no Democratic primary), though he would likely be harder for Al Gore to defeat than George W. Bush would be.