Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Friday, September 4, 1998

7 PM. I think the zinc lozenges have aided me in keeping this a rather mild cold. On the other hand, there’s no way of knowing if it would have been worse sans zinc. But I slept well last night, and today I had only moments when I felt really bad or when my energy sagged.

Yesterday I got a little antsy after being cooped up all day, and I went to Nova to get on the Internet at 6 PM. Today I went out to teach and then back to Nova for a little while, and I also had a baked potato at Wendy’s.

Class went okay today. I think I’ve got the reputation as an interesting and probably an easy teacher – if you can put up with my many eccentricities.

I’m getting to like the students more, even though they’re not very responsive. On the other hand, perhaps I only think I’m asking them to speak when I’m mostly in love with my own opinions and they can see that, so I intimidate them.

Before I left for work, Gianni called from Madrid. I was very flattered that he thought of me. He’s fine, but he said it’s a difficult adjustment, and a measure of that is that he misses Miami, a city he always thought he hated.

I hadn’t engaged his anxiety about the flight to Europe properly, but he said that last Sunday I made him feel a lot better about flying. Of course, the Swissair crash upset him, but by the time he had heard about it, he was safely in Madrid, having arrived via train from Lisbon.

He was excited to see Alejandro after such a long time, and he’s been enjoying himself, but the time changes have still got him out of whack.

I tried to assure him that if he gave Madrid a chance – he complained about its “dirtiness, worse than New York” – he would adjust day by day.

Gianni said he’ll write me with his address and get set up on email. I told him I missed him – I was surprised that I honestly do – and said I was thrilled that he phoned. He must really like me more than I thought; if he just wanted someone to speak English with, he could have called any of his friends.

Yesterday I got a call from Randall Murray, who said he’d print my gender-neutral state constitution column in tomorrow’s Boca Raton News; he told me I always make good points.

Late today I called Unemployment and found that in addition to the $275 check issued Wednesday, today a $121 check was issued for last week. I don’t know how they calculated that amount, but if I can get that every week, I’ll be better off than I expected.

I finally emailed Justin after thinking about how, and whether, to respond to Monday’s message. I tried to be as matter-of-fact as I could: I didn’t contact him again in New York because of his negativity (“about the fellowship, Florida, Los Angeles, etc.”) during our phone call made me feel bad and “I didn’t want to schlep to Brooklyn to be made to be feel bad in person.”

But I accepted his apology and wished him well. I did say I wished that he’d written before I left New York, but I didn’t say I regretted my decision to avoid seeing him – which I don’t. I doubt if I’ll get a response from Justin, but at least our relationship isn’t totally severed.

A guy responded to my ad on Match.com – it was free for a week – but he sounds exactly like the physical type I like least: 6’4”, 230 pounds, stocky and hairy. He said he’s met mostly “phoneys” (phonies? phonys?), which made me wonder where he’s been looking.

I’ve begun thinking about going to bars or gay organizations to meet a guy, but I’m not very good at that – not that I’ve really tried very hard. Even though I’m a youthful, relatively in-shape 47, most guys would never look at me twice. On the other hand, if I don’t get out more, the only cute guys I’ll ever see are my straight young students.

There are lots of personal ads in the papers, but now they’re the 900-number kind and I wouldn’t spend the money on them even if I currently had my own phone number.

Dad went to the ophthalmologist today, and he has cataracts, which did not come as a surprise. He has to go back on Wednesday, but I don’t think they’re doing the procedure then.

Today is exactly three months since my birthday in Phoenix, six months since the day I moved into Villa Montalvo. An article on Sagamore Hill in today’s New York Times made me realize how much I love Oyster Bay, even if Mimi Sheraton said the town was “surprisingly shabby.” I’m surprised at how much I miss Long Island.

Monday, September 7, 1998

7 PM. Today is Labor Day, the symbolic and psychological end of summer. On Memorial Day, the start of summer, I was in Wyoming. On July 4th, I was in New York.

It’s highly likely that if I hadn’t gotten the creative writing fellowship, I’d be happier now because I’d be in journalism school in Maryland.

But despite my frustrations, I’m hardly suffering being here in South Florida, and I know that living in Maryland and being a student again wouldn’t have been an easy adjustment.

The truth is that life is very easy for me here. The house is right near Nova, I’m familiar with the neighborhood, I live in a clean and pleasant environment, and I don’t have to worry about stuff like doing my own laundry because Mom does it an incredible two or three times a day.

On the other hand, I like doing laundry.

When I first came here four weeks ago, I thought my parents would be moving to Arizona by the end of the year, but now I’m all but certain they will be here when I leave for Maryland at the end of April or in early May.

Can I live here with them all that time? Last fall I earned about $8,800, and if you count my grant money, I should have about the same income this semester. The difference is that last year I owed hardly any money, and now I’ve got high balances on many credit cards.

Of course, I also have put maybe another $4,000 in several secured savings accounts, and I still have lots of unused credit lines.

If I lived on a credit card chassis from 1984 to 1990, why do I feel worse about it now? A second bankruptcy would be no worse than the first one, especially if it came during a recession. (After seven years of a recovery, bankruptcy filings are still quite high.)

On the other hand – I use this phrase so much you’d think I was Shiva – I could use the money I’d otherwise spend on rent and utilities to pay for airfare to and a car rental in Phoenix after classes end this semester.

Over the weekend I began reading The Gay Metropolis: 1940- 1996, Charles Kaiser’s book about gay life in New York. The opening chapter, on the 1940s, made me wonder what it would have been like to live in the city during World War II.

As horrible as it was, it was one generation’s “rendezvous with destiny,” and New York City, at least, sounds as if it were very glamorous and sexy back then.

I asked Dad about the sensational Lonergan murder case that Kaiser dwells on for its bringing “homosexuals” on to the newspaper pages, and Dad could recall the details very well.

He also said that World War II was a good time in New York “because suddenly, after years of the Depression, people were making money again.”

After listening to NPR’s coverage about Saturday’s Million Youth March in Harlem, I got the idea for one of my press release performance art things, and I made up a release announcing a “Millionaires March on Washington” in October to protest falling stock prices.

At the computer lab, I printed out copies, and at home I faxed the press release to AP, UPI and Bloomberg News. I got their fax numbers from a Lexis file called PR News, but the fax numbers for the New York Times, Washington Post and NPR didn’t work.

I also came up with some clever lines I can use in case I’m interviewed. But I probably need to try more media outlets. Last weekend I mailed all that stuff about my grant, but no paper picked up on it. I miss the spotlight. Okay, I admit it: I’m horribly shallow.

This morning I knew I needed to go to Miami Beach, just to get away from my family – though perhaps it was no different from excursions to San Francisco when I was living in Villa Montalvo and my trips to Manhattan when I lived in Locust Valley.

Because it was Labor Day, traffic going south on I-95 was light. When I’d last gone to Beach, shortly before I left Florida last winter, I remember wondering why I hadn’t spent more time there, especially in the previous two and a half months when I hadn’t been working.

At 10:45 AM, I parked near Lincoln Road and walked along its shops and restaurants. The mall wasn’t crowded although there was the usual eclectic mix of tourists, buff gay guys, elderly people and trendy SoBe types.

I had only a quarter for the meter, so I just walked back and forth for a bit, got iced tea (and change) at Joffrey’s, and then returned to my car.

I found another parking space for an hour a few blocks south, and then I started walking, trying to be like the tourist I was in California, Arizona and other places.

On Washington Avenue, I bought some cheap phone cards – I need to start calling some long-distance friends more regularly – and then cut down Collins Avenue before heading to Ocean Drive. I walked on the beach side so I could look across the street and people-watch everyone in the Art Deco hotel cafes, restaurants and other shops.

My mistake was going all the way down to 5th Street. It was 90° and humid, and by the time I still had ten blocks to go on my walk back to the car, I felt a little woozy and dehydrated.

But buoyed by some Diet Sprite, I made it back to the car 50 minutes after I’d left. The car’s air conditioning revived me further as I drove north, first on a road across Indian Creek I’d never taken before, Pine Tree Drive.

Then, at 63rd Street I went back across the creek to Collins Avenue. With little traffic, I drove past the 1950s-era hotels, Bal Harbour, Surfside, Haulover Beach, Sunny Isles and Golden Beach, and after crossing the county line, into Hallandale, Hollywood and Dania.

But I’m either ill or haven’t yet recovered from my long walk because I’ve been queasy, dizzy and a bit agitated off and on all afternoon and evening.

Mark McGwire of the Cards hit his 61st home run this afternoon, tying Roger Maris’s record, which he (as well as the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa) will undoubtedly break, as the baseball season still has three weeks to go.

God, I’ve got no energy tonight. There’s so much I want and need to do right now, but I feel like I need to lie down for a few hours.

Wednesday, September 9, 1998

8 PM. I stayed up till 11 PM so I could call Kevin last night, and we spoke for an hour. He’s got free e-mail from Yahoo, so now I can contact him without using the phone; we already exchanged messages today.

Kevin said that the day I drove him to that studio was one of the last jobs as an extra that he got. The TV season ended, and that work, never remunerative, completely dried up.

Kevin said he got so poor that he “almost ended up living in a box on Sunset Boulevard.” He lost 35 pounds because he literally couldn’t afford food.

So when Warner Bros. Records offered him the job as a “floater,” he was grateful – although the record company still sounds as if it’s filled with contentious executives who drive him crazy.

But the job enabled him to afford improvisation lessons with The Groundlings, a group who’ve appeared on TV and who run workshops at their building on Melrose Avenue.

Kevin is still trying to get an acting/directing/writing career off the ground, and while I admire his persistence, I know that, at least as a writer, he’s not that talented. On the other hand, in Hollywood one can probably succeed with a minimum of talent. (Actually, it may be an advantage.)

Kevin’s last grandparent is dying, and although his grandfather is 98, he’s been completely healthy and coherent until recently. Earlier yesterday, his mother had called and he couldn’t deal with her, so he let his housemate answer the phone because her incessant Pentecostal evangelism drives him crazy.

He’s still in the same house in Panorama City, and it’s nice that now I can picture where he was when he went out with the phone to smoke a cigarette.

At midnight, when he got off the phone, I found myself unable to sleep for hours. So I finished reading my back issues of American Book Review.

Their noncommercial, postmodern, Avant-Pop sensibility is rather fey for me these days, though I did like some of the writing by Kostelanetz, Sukenick, Federman and a few others. But I feel alienated from them because as much as I agree with their criticism of mainstream culture, politics and the current state of book publishing, I don’t see the point in whining about it.

Also, all that lit-crit jargon: either I’m too dumb to understand the stuff about Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, et al. or it’s all bullshit. I live in the world more than these people in that I accept political and cultural reality. After all, I’m a guy who went to law school, writes newspaper op-ed pieces and has run for public office.

I finally fell asleep despite the constant croaking of frogs outside my window. Jonathan says it’s the rains we’ve been getting that causes them to be so loud, but I think it must be the sound of mating.

I spent the morning trying to avoid the three nutjobs. (The other night, watching Seinfeld, when George, in describing his parents, called them “the two nutjobs,” Dad said to Mom, “That must be how Richard talks about us.”)

I read the paper after exercising . . . Hey, why do I write about things I do every day? I bring that up because yesterday, Edward Robb Ellis, author of Diary of the Century, died in New York City. Ellis wrote a daily diary from the age of 17, and it totaled over 22 million words.

He must have been a lot more eloquent than I could ever manage to be – and since he typed his diary, his material was undoubtedly a lot more legible.

But I think I’m going to write to the curator at the Yale special collections library where Ellis’s papers are stored, if only because I’ve got to figure out what to do with my 30 volumes of diaries.

Class went quickly today, though I’m concerned that my teaching is so idiosyncratic and eccentric that I’m doing my students more harm than good. Somehow over the years I went from being this bland guy to a forceful personality so self-involved that I fear I overpower my subject matter.

After class, I went to the administration building to see if I could get my paychecks directly deposited, but they told me they don’t let adjuncts do that.

I was asked to revise my syllabus to conform to the department’s adjunct syllabus format. Most of the changes were niggling little alterations, but I made them when I returned to school this evening.

Some total fuck-up student left me a voicemail message apologizing for not showing up to class for the past three weeks, but of course he had “all these problems.” He asked if he could still get in the class because he’s dropped it three times already and must pass it this semester because he’s on academic probation.

I went to ask Ben Mulvey if I can keep him out of class – and he said, “Certainly, and I’ll back you up.” Ben is a great department chair.

Back in the computer lab, I also printed out a query letter to FC2, as I saw from reading American Book Review that they are still publishing. However I doubt I’m groovy enough to swing with the likes of Cris Mazza and Mark Amerika. Just writing “groovy enough to swing with the likes of…” must eliminate me right there.

Dad’s second appointment with the ophthalmologist ended with their telling him they could get his vision corrected to 20/30 with glasses. Mom is concerned that the HMO is avoiding cataract surgery just to save money. Apparently Dad has some obstruction in his line of vision, at least in sunlight; however, he says the dark glasses they gave him eliminates the problem.

Ken Starr sent his report on Clinton to the House just as more and more Democrats outdo themselves to say how immoral the president is.

Today was the day I changed my mind: I now believe that Clinton won’t finish out his term. Facing impeachment, he’ll either resign or be convicted by the Senate – though for exactly what, I don’t know.

Mom is so incensed by this that she vows never to vote again. Maybe Clinton should get out while the getting is good, before the economic depression takes hold.

Myself, I’m optimistic that Russia and Japan will sink into political and economic chaos and that a year from now, on the eve of 2000, America will be as different from the 1990s as the 1960s were different from the 1950s.

Hey, today I read a column saying that people might start paying attention to John Maynard Keynes again. So let the right-wing Republicans sweep this year’s elections; their time has passed.