Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, August 1, 2001

9:30 PM. I must be feeling okay because I’d forgotten to take my 1/8 mg. of Klonopin until now.

Last night I slept pretty well although I had a little anxiety. But Louise Hay is right about thoughts being words, and I know I can change the words I gave my mind.

This afternoon I spoke to Sandy Wright, the executive director at Dairy Hollow, and she said I could arrive as early as Friday, August 24, so I made a couple of flights out that day.

I’ll have 3½-hour layover at Dallas-Fort Worth because I want the second flight to be on a regional jet, not a prop jet. Even that scares me a little, but I’m sure I’ll be fine, and once I survive that, I’ll be over that particular fear. My return flight is on October 1, a Monday, so I’ll be in Eureka Springs for over five weeks.

This morning I left around 8:30 AM after exercising. My stomach felt a little weird, but it was just nerves, which I managed to conquer. I took the Superstition Freeway into the 101 into the 202 and up the Squaw Peak Parkway to Highland on my way to the Borders at the Biltmore Fashion Park on Camelback and 24th Street.

At Borders, I read most of the New York Times over two cups of cinnamon-cardamom tea until about 10:30 AM, when I called Sat Darshan at work.

She needed to take her car to be washed, so I went to NYPD Pizza at Camelback Colonnade and brought an 18-inch pie to her office. After we had two slices each, she said she’d take the rest home.

They are really swamped with work at the real estate company, and it’s not going to let up for a while. Sat Darshan’s got so much to juggle that it’s hard to keep track of all her projects.

Ravinder is still in New York City, driving a cab and staying at that apartment on 60th Street near the N train in Brooklyn. (Speaking of Brooklyn, today I was wearing my Cyclones t-shirt, which fits me just fine.)

Sat Darshan said I should come over to the house to see how big Kiran has become, and maybe I’ll stop by over the weekend. I want to keep myself busy while I’ll be in Arizona for another three weeks.

After getting back to Apache Junction, I spent a couple of hours online, making my flight arrangements on Delta (the fare was $282) and then emailing a bunch of people: Theresa Knight McFadden, Nick, Jen and her friend Justin, and Liz at Red Hen Press, whom I told when I’d be away and when and where the April 2002 Arizona Book Festival will be held.

I was glad that Nick wants to be friends and nothing more. Although I could use a friend, Nick is almost desperate to date and find a boyfriend. Maybe we’ll meet again sometime next week.

I also wrote to Teresa and a few others, and it was nearly 4 PM when I got off the computer in Marc’s room.

This evening I read Dershowitz’s Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 after Dad finished with it. The book is a real indictment of the five-person majority in Bush v. Gore.

Remembering the Constitutional History classes I taught at Nova, I thought about how this case would change so much. Dershowitz views it as the end of liberals’ reliance on the Court, and perhaps that’s a good thing because it will bring more liberal lawyers into the electoral process.

I think O’Connor and Rehnquist might have retired this year, but because of the fallout from the election case, they would look very bad doing so.

Psychologically, I was pretty much a mess during the 36 days between the election and the Court’s settling the Florida vote and the presidency in Bush’s favor, but I did try to keep up with the news back then.

As Dershowitz says, the opinion fails “the shoe on the other foot test,” and it’s made it very hard to teach constitutional law without going beyond legal realism into cynicism.

I’m going to stop writing here because I want to watch the ending of Six Feet Under. Last evening I fell asleep during its first showing on HBO.

*

11 PM. My palms are sweaty enough that I’ve got a washcloth under my hands as I write this, but I don’t feel particularly anxious right now, and I’m not going to worry about diaphoresis. I’ll take a third Triavil if it takes me a long time to fall asleep.

So today’s been the start of my 33rd year of diary-keeping. I’ve gone from an 18-year-old college freshman just coming to life after a year of agoraphobia to a 50-year-old unemployed writer and former college instructor, lawyer and computer education trainer recovering from a year of anxiety and depression.

I’d like to go back to 1969 and New York City, but it’s 2001 and my odyssey has brought me to Phoenix.

Clichés come to mind: “What a long, strange trip it’s been,” from the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’”; Soames Forsyte asking his sister Winifred at the end of A Modern Comedy; “What have we lost? What have we gained?”; Billy Pilgrim’s mother in the nursing home asking, “How did I get so old?” in Slaughterhouse-Five.

My whole early adulthood has gone, page by page, day by day, year by year.

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Saturday, August 4, 2001

7 PM. Yesterday’s boredom eventually dissipated.

After eating Weight Watchers Spicy Szechuan Chicken – a dinner Gianni liked me to make for him (and now I think I should have given him that $100 two months ago, for I know I’ll never hear from him again) – I watched the C-SPAN American Authors series on Edith Wharton, broadcast from The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, where I attended a chamber music concert with Teresa and Amira on Columbus Day weekend in 1984.

I’m a sucker for stuff that blends American history and literature. The scholars on the show were about my age or younger, but they were department chairs or prize-winning biographers, not someone like me.

As I wrote Patrick today, even if I wanted a Ph.D., it would not help me get a full time academic job. I think I’ve just about had this student thing, so I’ll take only six credits this semester and see my financial aid cutoff for the spring.

That will keep me from being a student at ASU next term and force me to finally leave academia. It’s a little scary what’s facing me, but I’ll manage, and once I’ve got a job that I like, I’ll be fine and I won’t look back.

The monsoon came up again last evening, and the wind blew fiercely; I sat in the backyard for an hour, and the cool breezes and gorgeous sunset and the lightning in the distance as the sky faded to black gave me both energy and a sense of peace.

I read another chapter of You Can Heal Your Life and I felt peaceful and almost ecstatic. No, I’m not cycling from depression to mania, but I believe I have a very low-grade case of bipolar disorder, and during those highs is when I become creative.

Mostly I’ve just got titles: “The Best Barnes & Noble in America,” “I Love a Monsoon,” “Victory Boulevard,” “Superstition Freeway,” “Anxiety and the Elongated Man,” etc. In Arkansas I’ll try to write these pieces, though I don’t know if they’re stories or essays.

I sat down at the kitchen table and made out checks to pay department store and oil credit cards that I don’t use so my accounts will stay active. (Today I again got turned down for a Nordstrom card.)

Then I watched more of the more of the Edith Wharton discussion I’d missed earlier and some ABC soaps reposted on Soap.net till I dropped off to sleep at 11 PM.

This morning I was up a little after 5 AM, but I slept well enough. I delayed taking 1/8 mg. Klonopin until very late, and I’m doing fine on 3/8 mg. a day: 1/4 mg. in the morning and 1/8 mg. in the evening.

At this rate, I’m using only two pills a week. And like yesterday, today I didn’t feel the need for an afternoon Triavil. Yeah, I get a little antsy in the early morning, but today’s anxiety level was almost zero.

I left here at 8:20 AM and got to Sat Darshan’s house in Phoenix at 9 AM. Kiran got so big – and she’s incredibly talkative now, much more so than other two-year-olds I’ve been around. I can understand almost everything she says.

We worked on a Teletubbies puzzle together and she showed me her new room, which is Gurudaya’s old one.

Sat Darshan was still tired from her long days at work, and she asked me to go to the Burton Barr Central Library for her to return some books and pick up others that she had on hold (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Jane Hamilton’s latest novel).

Outside the library, girls were demonstrating against the jailing of this Russian software engineer who devised a way to break the encryption on Adobe Systems e-book system.

As I said to one of the demonstrators, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s provisions for criminal penalties for devices that circumvent electronic watermarks are a violation of fair use.

I should have found out if these people were with the Electronic Frontier Foundation or what.

This experience made me realize that if I lived in downtown Phoenix, I would find people more like me. Even on Sat Darshan’s block, I feel more at home than I do Apache Junction.

It hit 111° today, so we went out only for a little while, as Kiran showed me how she could peddle her little plastic tricycle. When Sat Darshan called over to a boy at the gurudwara, I realized there’s a real community on the block, both among Sikhs and the other neighbors.

I left around 10:45 AM when one of Sat Darshan’s friends popped in to babysit so that Sat Darshan could go shopping at the Southwest Desert Market that replaced the ABCO on McDowell and 7th Street.

On my way home, I stopped off at the Wendy’s on Power Road to get a baked potato and read today’s Times. I finished the paper later this afternoon at McDonald’s on Apache Trail over iced tea.

Tom emailed from Germany that Annette has recovered from her surgery and is going back to work. He’s got an assignment from the Los Angeles Times Book Review that’s going to require a quick turnaround time, and now that Annette won’t be home, he’ll have no excuses not to be working.

Mark Bernstein said the sweetest things to me. He’s still in a lot of pain from his mother’s death, and he’s been sick with a bad cold he got from the students in Florence, where the temperatures have been in the high 90°s without air conditioning.

Mark agreed that I couldn’t take the low-paying paralegal teaching job that Lamson College offered me, and he said he’s glad that I’m going to Dairy Hollow, though he thought the names of the artists’ colonies I’ve gone to are quite bizarre. (I have yet to tell Mark about Crescent Dragonwagon.)

At the Apache Junction library, I wrote to Ronna, Patrick and others, and I read some of the stories from tomorrow’s New York Times.

Back here, I’ve been watching some of MTV’s 20th anniversary programming, seeing videos of recording artists I’ve only read about and getting a feel for what Gen Y are into.

At the A.J. library, sitting next to me was this little boy, four years old at most, telling his Hell Angels-looking dad to log into this dot.com and that dot.com.

For this little boy, the Web is something he takes for granted, the way I took TV for granted when it was a new medium in the early 1950s.

Jonathan will be coming home soon, so I need to vacate his room, but I’m grateful for the temporary solitude with the door closed behind me. I’m looking forward to being at Dairy Hollow, where I’ll have a room of my own.

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Tuesday, August 7, 2001

8 PM. I’m greatly enjoying Rosemary Daniell’s book although it makes me feel guilty of self-sabotage in my own writing career.

The book has given me ideas for writing, and I’m sure that I’ll write in Eureka Springs. I need to acquire discipline and break habits that have kept me from writing.

It’s fooling myself to think that my daily diary entries make me a writer. I recommended Rosemary’s book to Sat Darshan, who says she wants to write but is “not creative.”

Sat Darshan has so little confidence in herself. I’m sure that if she was serious about writing, she would be more successful than I’ve been. In fact, I would not be surprised to see Sat Darshan published a novel or memoir that would actually sell.

Besides Rosemary, another woman who should be at Dairy Hollow while I’m there is Anne Webster, who’s a student in Rosemary’s Zona Rosa workshop in Atlanta.

Doing more research on Eureka Springs, I see that it seems gay-friendly and that I should know have no problem being there.

Rosemary is doing the Poetluck dinner a week from Thursday, and I’ll be doing it the third Thursday of September on the 20th.

Marc just came in now. After I said, “Long day, huh?,” he told me that with the store opening on Thursday, he’ll be working long hours seven days a week.

I didn’t sleep enough last night, but today I had plenty of Diet Coke and iced tea to keep me from drifting off the way I did yesterday, when, after writing in my diary. I fell into a long alpha state from 3 PM to 5 PM.

This morning at 10:30 AM, I met Nick at the Biltmore Fashion Park Borders. His upper back and neck were inflamed due to tension, and he didn’t just want to sit in the café. He went through the gay sections of the bookstore, seemingly aware of every single author. But of course, Nick was the manager of a gay bookstore himself.

To me, he seems a bit parochial, but I suppose it’s a function of his coming out so late in life. Nick moved to Phoenix in 1984, and when I asked him if he had any long-term relationships here, he said, “Not with a guy.”

I like Nick, but I feel he’s really reacting against his long repression of homosexuality and is in “gay separatist” mode.

After we had lunch at NYPD, I dropped Nick off back at the Biltmore Fashion Park to talk to this guy Rip, another unemployed gay man who recently moved here and is very depressed.

On the drive back to Apache Junction, I stopped at the familiar Wendy’s near ASU on Rural Road, where I often went for lunch after teaching at ASU on my way home to Mesa.

I even got off the freeway at Dobson so I could pick up the Klonopin prescription I renewed by phone at the Osco on Baseline. Given that I don’t seem to need more than two tablets of each of the dosages (1 mg. and .5 mg.) a week, I should have plenty to get me through my stay in Arkansas.

Back here, I was on the computer a lot this afternoon. Justin, Jen’s friend, wrote me from Arcosanti. He seems like a cool guy, though know nothing about him other than that he writes and is artistic.

Kevin answered my email and said that in the two months since we saw each other in Los Angeles, he’s been busy at his job and has recently done two plays, and next weekend he’ll be acting in the Culver City Public Theatre’s production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. So things are fine, but Kevin says he has no time for a social life.

I wrote to several friends and looked up more stuff about Dairy Hollow and Rosemary Daniell.

Last night I read the three children’s books written by Crescent that I took from the Mesa library; they were for kids around Abigail’s or Chelsea’s age and were quite sweet.

This afternoon I went to the bank to deposit my unemployment check, a Mervyn’s $10 refund check, and the check for a penny I got as part of the Providian class action settlement.

Last night we all watched the making of the cast album of The Producers, which was on the local PBS station as part of their pledge drive. (Tonight my parents and Jonathan are watching the nauseating Andrea Bocelli in concert.)

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Friday, August 10, 2001

4 PM. I just came back from seeing American Pie 2 at the megaplex. Like most sequels, it was inferior to the original, which combined lewdness and innocence, but the characters were still nicely delineated, and it’s a cut above the usual teen sex comedy.

Driving home along the Superstition Freeway, I began thinking about 32 years ago, when I was 18 and had just begun keeping a diary. So much of the world seemed new then, as I was still recovering from my breakdown.

I feel so much the same way at this time of my life – except that when I was 18, I had no real responsibilities.

Of course, I’m irresponsible now, especially regarding money and my lack of employment, and as Susan said, what was appropriate for an 18-year-old isn’t for a man of 50.

So here I am, 32 years later, still coming home to a house where I’m staying with my brothers and my parents. How did my life work out this way?

On the other hand, I tell myself this is temporary, that in two weeks I’ll be just arriving in Eureka Springs and whatever awaits me there.

It won’t be my mother, constantly cleaning and talking to the dog because she has no humans to speak with. Of course, Arkansas is also temporary, as were my stops in Woodland Hills, Lake Forest, Locust Valley and Jenkintown.

If I flash forward 32 years, I see – well, I don’t see anything because I don’t picture myself living to 82. Heck, I don’t even know if I’m going to make it to 60.

And yet, if I knew that one day I’d be an 82-year-old man, would I worry about the things that bother me now? No, of course not.

So I retort: Well, suppose you’re going to die in the next decade. Why should you be worried in that case, either? So there’s no reason to worry about bankruptcy or my back pain.

Last night I slept well despite my back pain making changing position difficult. And I did okay today, halving my usual dose of Klonopin this morning.

At 7:30 AM, I went to McDonald’s, where I read most of today’s Times. then I drove east for a change. Just outside of Apache Junction, things turn very rural, filled with dirt roads and undulating hills and old desert scrub.

I see I am just as gushy as I was in 1969, when I related everything to what I then referred to as my nervous breakdown.

What happened to me between last October and last April still haunts me, and so much of my current life is a reaction to it, whether I call it a nervous breakdown or not.

Just as I was afraid my whole freshman year in college that my agoraphobia and panic attacks would return, I’m similarly scared now, even months after the worst times ended.

Back then, I don’t think I really came out of myself until the spring strike of 1970 during the Kent State killings an invasion of Cambodia, when I got involved in student government and working with Mark Savage on The Ol’ Spigot, and when I met new friends in LaGuardia Hall.

Those times, from the summer of 1970 until the fall of 1971, were magical.

It was when Shelli broke up with me in October 1971 that I felt like I might be having another nervous breakdown – but finally I realized that wasn’t going to happen, and I knew that I had really come far. While the loss of my first love was painful, it was also a wonderful time in my life, when I took new chances and discovered new things.

Will I ever love anyone again? Will someone love me? (Note the order of those questions.) Hey, I’m not a cute 20-year-old or a young 30-year-old or even a nice-looking 40.

So I go to teen movies like American Pie 2.

Back when I was in college, there were no teen movies, and I wanted to see only the wonderfully grown-up ones they made before blockbusters and weekend grosses.

Oh God, this diary entry must win the prize for pretentiousness. I’m writing in generalities, not concrete images.

That article on the new bankruptcy law that’s coming – I read Consumer Reports last night – scared me.

But I still will have my mind and my choice of attitude towards whatever happens to me.

I’m not as fragile as I think. The payoff to thinking I’m fragile is just what it was 33 years ago: I can avoid engaging in life.