A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early October, 1998

Thursday, October 1, 1998

1 PM. I caught up on sleep last night although my wrists and ankles ache a bit today. Perhaps it’s all the exercise I did yesterday.

This morning I had a great class. We were doing definition, and I began by putting “SEXUAL RELATIONS” on the board and asked students to define the term, as in Clinton’s testimony.

Then we discussed obscenity, insanity, addiction, sexual harassment and other terms, and though only a few students participated, we still had a lovely class – mostly thanks to me.

Unable to get online with the office computer, I went to the lab to fetch my e-mail.

Alice wrote that her brother is making noises about leaving Tanzania before his scheduled retirement in June. The destruction of his house in the terrorist attack must have been quite a blow to him.

Alice has TMJ and has to wear a bite plate every night, reminding her of her teenage braces. “I told Peter I hope to make it to 50,” she said.

Alice’s cousin Larry, the screenwriter, is leaving Los Angeles for Bucks County, but he’s got a British journalist girlfriend, Zoë, in Brooklyn Heights, so Alice hopes to see more of him. Although Larry’s 50 and has two grown kids and a wife in a nursing home after a stroke and M.S., Larry and Zoë are trying to have a baby.

Also on the baby front, Sat Darshan says Arizona Child Protective Services is trying to get the adoption paperwork done.

But she’s fallen out with Nirankar, who criticizes her handling of the baby – “as if I were some totally inexperienced and neglectful parent. Besides, she’s raising Tyler in some ways that I think are negligent.”

Sat Darshan hates driving Nirankar to and from the office because of the latter’s DUI conviction, but in January Nirankar will get her license back.

“I have to avoid any estrangement with her until Kiran’s adoption is finalized,” Sat Darshan wrote, “but after that, I plan to tell her to kiss off.”

This morning Teresa was off to Fire Island for the big weekend with the firefighters. She’s got seven workers for Saturday night’s banquet staying with her, and the temperatures have dropped a lot, so they’re going to be freezing at night.

Teresa reported that she and Paul are using mileage to get a free trip to San Francisco in October.

Kevin wrote that his friend Phil is visiting L.A. from Florida, and they’re trying to write together but not having much success. He said he’s thinking of going for an M.F.A. to help his writing.

Regarding my meeting with Jason, Kevin said that sometimes it’s fun to go out with “no-brainers.” (Kevin’s word choices are not those of a real writer.)

He said he goes out with older guys to learn something from them and suggested Jason “might have been looking for a smart guide to learn off of.”

The problem with older guys, Kevin says, is that they’re often “set in their ways” and that they like to be dominant and don’t never want the younger guy to ever be in control.

He’s stopped dating after that bad experience with the TV producer and is instead concentrating on “work.”

In the odd moment when I’m not occupied, thoughts about Jason do pop up, but I know that in a couple of weeks I’ll barely remember him.

Friday, October 2, 1998

7 PM. After I finished my grading yesterday, I went out in the evening to the Borders in Plantation, where I heard a talk by the idiotic futurist and SF writer Ben Bova, touting his new book, Immortality. He claims that in the next ten years, some gene-based treatment will enable people to live hundreds of years.

When he asked, “Who wants to die?” I was the only one in the audience who raised his hand. Getting stares, I said, “Eventually.”

Most people’s questions were about the ethical and social implications of people living forever. Behind me, I heard a familiar voice and realized that Mary Jo Carl Henderson had brought her Broward Community College honor students to the reading.

Then I remembered she’s really into the World Future Society and is friendly with Bova. It figures.

I put my hand up and was called on. I noted that life expectancy has been falling in Russia and Africa, and I asked if this kind of life extension is just for affluent Westerners.

Then I said, “A lot of people even in this country would be happy just to have health insurance in the next ten years – never mind immortality.” I got a couple of dirty looks. Most people are so dumb.

Up at 5 AM, I exercised and read part of the Times, where, in an article about David Krakauer, an innovative klezmer clarinetist, it said his new album is all original except for a medley by Uncle Dave, whom it called “a klezmer clarinetist who wedded klezmer to swing in the 1920s.”

At the San Jose Mercury News website, I found headlines about high tech companies laying off workers that I’d like to use as section headings in my “Silicon Valley Diet” story. That’s one of the three new pieces I want to add to my story collection. The other two will be about Wyoming and Phoenix.

In today’s mail, Alyson Publications sent back my query and sample stories with a form letter saying they were booked up and I should resubmit it a year from now.

Now I’ve got a query out at Gay Sunshine/Leyland, which I expect to say no, and the manuscript at Hanging Loose Press, which probably won’t get back to me until next spring.

I honestly don’t know where to send the manuscript or a query letter next. I haven’t heard from Kate Gale at Red Hen Press.

At Nova, I found the first copy of the Winter 1999 schedule, and I asked Ben if I could teach Fiction Writing, which is being offered on Thursday evenings starting in March for the second eight-week semester.

He said fine, though after he put my name down next to it, he said he would probably not finalize the TBA adjunct courses till next week.

I guess also asking Ben for a lit class or a legal studies class would be being too pushy, but this point, I feel very much at home at Nova.

After lunch, I went back to get on the Web in the lab, as we still couldn’t log in from our offices.

In an email, Patrick asked if I could do him a favor when I start teaching in Boca. He wants me to pick up material  about FAU’s film and communication program.

His daughter may not be able to get into the program at FSU, and he and his wife would like to keep her close to home for now.

This weekend Patrick is off to the Florida college literary magazine state convention in Daytona Beach.

Monday, October 5, 1998

8 PM. I went off to Nova at only 9:30 AM today because I had nothing else to do.

I found an email from this guy Jeff, who read my story “Boys Club” online at the Blithe House Quarterly website. He liked it enough so that he asked where he could find more of my work.

I wrote back, thinking that his email name, LeDuke18@aol.com, meant that he was 18 years old. Jeff has said that he wrote as well, so I asked what kind of stuff he wrote, hoping to encourage some gay kid.

Within ten minutes I got an unexpected reply: Jeff said that he’d written some screenplays and a play, currently in production in New York, Visiting Mr. Green.

Of course I’d heard of Jeff Baron and his play, and I wrote back, feeling both embarrassed and flattered. My reply was probably too fulsome, and I don’t expect him to write back.

Visiting Mr. Green sounds like a formulaic crowd pleaser: a gay yuppie American Express executive is ordered by a judge to visit the elderly Jewish widower he sideswiped with his Mercedes. The play has been a showcase for Eli Wallach and now Hal Linden.

Anyway, it’s nice that someone that successful thought I was a good writer, especially because of a story that I myself thought weak.

I don’t know what Jeff Baron looks like or how old he is, but just the fact that he wrote me makes me have a little bit of a crush on him.

Speaking of crushes, I’m embarrassed to admit that I still have a slight foolish hope that Jason will call one night when he’s lonely.

Late this afternoon, I was at the Barnes & Noble cafe when I saw and chatted with another Jason, who’s also 24 and obviously gay. He’s one of my Nova writing students and seems like a perfectly nice guy – but not someone I’d ever be attracted to.

A transfer student and a pre-med senior, he’s very tense and feels a lot of pressure. He’s missed classes because of a stomach ulcer, he said.

This morning at work, I called Alison Smith, the Nova coordinator at Rexall Sundown in Boca, and she gave me directions to their building.

My evening class in Argumentative Writing will have about 23 students next Tuesday evening, and Alison said it meets in a large auditorium without a blackboard.

In class this morning, I tried to get the students to talk about the essays on affirmative action we were going over.

But because the usual reticence on such a heated topic – I tried very hard not to let my own passionate views on the subject bias the discussion – and the fact did a lot of the students probably didn’t do the reading, I felt a bit frustrated.

Perhaps I talk over the students’ heads. I hope not. But in a way, I’d rather do that and treat them like intellectuals than talk down to them.

Back home during lunch, I couldn’t stand listening to the invective at the House Judiciary Committee hearings on whether to begin an inquiry into impeachment. Mom had been watching the whole thing on CNN, and the criticism of Clinton infuriates her.

This impeachment is totally partisan, unlike the more measured and even intellectual inquiry of the same committee in 1975, when Peter Rodino, Barbara Jordan, Bill Cohen and members of both parties seem to make the process a majestic, solemn proceeding rather than a party-line battle.

When I got back from the bookstore, I ate dinner and then took an hourlong walk starting at 5:30 PM as I listened to NPR news on my headphones.

Tonight I read from the text chapter I teach tomorrow.

Tuesday, October 6, 1998

4 PM. Today two FBI agents came to the house to interview me about my postcard to Alice Starr. I thought I might hear from someone because what I said could have been perceived as a threat.

I wrote the card when was very angry after reports that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested.

I’d written: “Your husband is out of control. Unless you stop him, people are going to be seriously hurt – including those close to you.”

I deliberately worded it vaguely, but of course my intent was that Starr himself and his family would get hurt in all the fallout from his vendetta against the Clintons.

While I understood that it could have been seen as a threat of physical violence, I’d worded it so that I could explain to the authorities what I had meant. Which is what I did.

I’m sure the FBI agents left thinking I was a harmless nut – or maybe not. The real problem was Dad, who happened to be home today. He became very upset and frightened, which only made me less intimidated than otherwise.

The fact is, if I weren’t living with my parents, I would have called the media afterwards. Even if I sounded like a nut, the publicity probably could not hurt.

The agents asked me if I had a job and where I worked and took down my date of birth, my full name, and driver’s license number. I volunteered that I sometimes used the middle name Sarrett as my “alias.”

When one agent asked, “Have you ever been arrested before?” I shot back: “Am I being arrested now?”

Dad flipped out – but my point was that words can be misinterpreted just like mine were.

These white FBI special agents were no Scully and Mulder. They just didn’t do a very good job. Shouldn’t they have asked me for my social security number? And why did they have to ask what my phone number was? Don’t they have phone books at FBI headquarters?

Maybe the FBI doesn’t have maps, either. These guys said it took them a long time to find the house, and I said, “Well, it’s a pretty good hideout.”

One agent told me he needed my statement “for prosperity’s sake” while the other one took Dad aside and asked what mental problems I’d been treated for.

The whole exercise was absurd, and the only thing that I regret was Dad’s being here. After the agents left, telling me to “choose my words more carefully,” Dad wouldn’t stop going on and on about how I can’t miss around with the government.

“If they could do what they did to Clinton, imagine what they could do to you!” he screamed. “They could take you away and nobody would have heard from you in months.”

The funniest thing Dad said was, “Now you’ll lose your job!” Right, my adjunct job that pays peanuts and lasts eight to sixteen weeks at a time.

Just then, Mom came in from shopping and the phone rang. She picked it up and said, “It’s a detective from the university.” Dad started moaning, thinking I was being investigated further.

But it was Detective Frank Gross of the Coral Springs Police Department, the Nova cluster coordinator for the Monday night course I’ll be teaching at Coral Springs City Hall. Since it begins on October 19, he wanted to touch base.

Anyway, maybe I am a little crazy, but I think I’m crazy like a fox. I know all about the indeterminacy of language, and isn’t that what Starr is after Clinton for? What does “sexual relations” mean and all that?

Even if I were thrown in jail, at least I’d have done something that expresses how I feel about this witch hunt. When I have to live in fear of what I say – well, then it’s all over.

Granted, the postcard wasn’t a very effective means of expressing myself – though it did get Alice Starr’s attention and that of the FBI.

I know that Dad is an old man who lived through the McCarthy era and he doesn’t understand due process, freedom of speech and all the safeguards in the system that protect me those accused of criminal acts. But I hate Dad’s victim mentality.

I mailed the FBI agents, who gave me their cards, a selection of my published pieces (funny ones) with a note saying I’d learned my lesson, that it wasn’t my intent to threaten anyone, and I’ll stop writing government officials and their families.

They were just doing their jobs. And they were quite polite – because they knew, as I did, that I have a constitutional right to criticize public officials.

This will all seem very funny in a few years. I’m sorry if I upset Mrs. Starr.

Anyway, this morning I had an okay class and afterwards went to Barnes & Noble to read the Times, where I saw that Ivan’s mother had died – there was a paid obituary from the Sutton Place Synagogue – and also that Charles Collier will be teaching a seminar on impeachment at UF next semester.

I’m too tired to do any grading now.

Wednesday, October 7, 1998

7 PM. I feel a lot more sane today. Last evening as I took my walk and ate and graded papers and especially as I lay awake in bed, I wondered if I am mentally ill.

It’s possible, of course, but I now think what I was doing with the FBI agents was getting a fictional voice in my head, “playing” a character that I’ll write about – maybe the narrator of a story called “Dear Mrs. Starr.”

I now know what it’s like to be interviewed by two FBI agents. It’s good that I didn’t contact the press.

I only regret what I said to Dad. He’s having cataract surgery on Election Day, and I feel really guilty about upsetting him.

Up early today, I went out to get a haircut, do some shopping and other errands before school. I also read and commented on all the papers I got on Monday, so I could give them back in class today.

Jeff Baron emailed that he’ll be in Boca visiting his mother this weekend and would I like to play tennis or have coffee? After I said okay, he wrote back, saying he wanted me to know that this wasn’t “a sex thing,” that he and his partner are “completely committed to one another.”

Incensed, I felt like writing back, “You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve, asshole, assuming I’d thought it was ‘a sex thing’ – whatever that is.” But of course I tempered my reply.

Jeff sounds totally preppy and yuppie, not someone I’d be interested in. Hey, I don’t even know people who play tennis.

While I’d wondered if he was nice-looking, I didn’t even think of sex. Who has sex when they meet a guy for the first time who’s just going to be around for the weekend?

(Well, I guess a lot of people might. And Jeff doesn’t know me at all.)

At this point I don’t really care to see him now, but if I said that to him, he would have thought maybe all I had wanted was sex.

I wrote to Kevin and we exchanged semi-depressed letters to each other. What else are friends for?

I created syllabi for my evening classes that begin next week. Tomorrow and Friday I’m going to take my day classes to the computer lab.