Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, October 1, 2001

10:45 AM at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. I’ve been here about 90 minutes, thanks to a swift taxi ride by Fuzzy, who said Eureka isn’t as hip as it appears and that like the rest of Northwest Arkansas, it tends to be ruled by the moneyed interests.

The only heightened security I noticed here was that they asked me to empty my pockets at the security station before I went through the x-ray machine.

I put my sweater and jacket in my luggage, and I got USA Today, which I’ve finished, and iced tea. Either my nerves or the iced tea has me trembling. Well, I’ll take an Ativan if I need to, or another Triavil.

To my surprise, last night I slept fairly soundly, waking only intermittently between 9 PM and 5 AM. This morning was a little hectic, but I had plenty of time. Cedric had already left, so I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.

We’re boarding now.

*

2:45 PM at DFW. I’m in the Terminal E interfaith chapel, which has a nondenominational stained glass triptych up front, along with Bibles in different languages (Spanish, Vietnamese), Korans, and Siddurs. I’m alone here.

The airport seems as crowded as usual, but perhaps I can’t judge properly. The flight from XNA was short and smooth, and I had my sandwich aboard.

Here at DFW, I’ve had a plain baked potato and frozen yogurt, and I got my hair cut at the barber shop in Terminal C. I’ve been walking around a lot.

My flight to Phoenix is scheduled to depart on time at 3:40 PM, and so I called Dad, who said he’ll meet me at the Delta baggage claim after I land, about 4:15 PM; they won’t let anyone but ticketed passengers go through security to the gates anymore.

I picked up a weekday New York Times five weeks after I last saw one, and I must say I can no longer read every article the way I used to, especially the daily section, “A Nation Challenged,” dealing with the aftermath of 9/11.

It’s a long day for me, and of course when I finally get home, it will feel like it’s evening, not late afternoon.

I’ve been shaking a lot because I’m cold – or maybe it’s from nerves, though I had no anxiety on the first flight. Still, I just took a second Triavil.

I have mixed feelings about returning to Arizona. I’ll miss the Ozarks; this morning’s taxi ride had me really notice the full colors of the trees and the haunting fog.

But as crazy as my family’s house is, in a way it is home.

*

8 PM. I’m home – I guess. It is odd to be in this house with my parents and brothers after more than five weeks in my own space.

The flight here was smooth and we got in half an hour early. Dad and Marc were at the baggage claim to pick me up, and with Sky Harbor half-empty, we had my luggage and were out of the airport in no time.

It was cloudy and only 87° after a month of hot weather – Saturday it hit a record-breaking 107° –  and I guess I felt less alienated from Phoenix than I usually do as Marc drove us on Loop 202, taking the streets (Brown Road and Val Vista) through Mesa till we got on the freeway and back to Apache Junction.

I had emptied only the smaller piece of luggage and my backpack. I went through a ton of mail: mostly credit card bills, but also other stuff I’ve got to read that I wish Mom had sent to me.

I did get Vincent’s book from Amazon.com and copies of Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog from iUniverse.com.

I spoke with my parents and Jonathan about Eureka Springs, the Ozarks and Dairy Hollow, and Jonathan talked about his trip to the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff and across Northern Arizona to the Hopi reservation.

After a little dinner, I felt sleepy at 7 PM, but now I’m up, and I feel a little like I’m coming down with something. My throat hurts, and my left ear has been slightly stopped up since the first flight.

For me, it’s really 10 PM, and I’ve been up since 5 AM. Given the two-hour time difference and the change in locale, how I feel is understandable.

No letter from Yaddo yet, but even if I don’t get in, I think I may wait to go to New York in early November. I don’t want to wait around to hear that Nova Law hasn’t offered me the job.

Anyway, going to New York City would give me something to look forward to. But right now I’m too tired and too stressed out to think about anything. I feel overwhelmed, and my circuits are overloaded.

Even if I don’t sleep, I need to lie down and rest on my little pallet on the floor of the family room.

---

Friday, October 5, 2001

4 PM. Last night I slept only five hours, and I’m beginning to feel quite sleep-deprived.

Last evening I wanted to go to Phoenix College for Virginia Chase Sutton’s reading, but I felt I had to work on my book and also finish the New York Times.

I think I may have kicked the New York Times habit in Arkansas; there’s just too much to read, and I’m not even working yet.

I know I’ll give up a lot if I stop reading the paper, but I still have to get through today’s Business section and the two Weekend sections. Maybe it’s just with all the “A Nation Challenged” sections, there’s too much.

I did a lot of “A Junior’s Diary 1971” last evening and finished it today at the East Mesa Regional Public Library after I got iced tea at Starbucks.

And I went through my stories and realized I could add more than the ones I thought of to the college-age book, the way I inputted “Mark the Public Notices” at the computer here in Marc’s room this afternoon.

But now I’m putting the Mark character, the boy who is missing, into the diary story. I can see these stories bouncing off each other.

The bad part is that most of these pieces are really twenty years old or more. Still I am, to use Vincent’s term, recontextualizing them.

I didn’t hear from Vincent today, and I’m glad. We exchanged another set of emails late yesterday, and the relationship is getting too intense for me. I need to step back from him, as he excites me too much, both intellectually and emotionally.

Of course, I could have been doing all this work on the book anytime over the past year. I just didn’t feel like it. Of course, when I was feeling so ill, I had completely lost confidence in myself.

Even now, I don’t see this book being taken by a mainstream publisher. It’s odd, because I feel right now that I’d like to be a full-time writer for a while. That’s probably Vincent’s doing.

I read Tom Whalen’s OP books, The Baby and Report from the Dump, and was impressed, and afterwards I emailed Tom telling him how I felt.

But these are saddle-stitched pamphlets printed in 50-copy editions, not even as nice as my chapbooks. I told Tom that they really should all be in one big trade paperback volume. Of course, I guess if Tom had been able to do it that way, he would have.

It’s possible I could get a small press to publish my book, but like The Silicon Valley Diet, I might have to subsidize it, and of course I don’t see myself having another $5000 anytime soon.

Even if I got another fellowship, I’d have to pay down my debt first. Basically the credit card banks have subsidized my life as a writer. Not that I’ve been very prolific since 1981 or so.

But all the stories in Diet were written in the 1990s, and I had other stories published that decade as well. Considering that I went to law school for three years and worked as a lawyer for another three, I didn’t do all that badly.

Sean answered the email I sent him last week. He had been in Australia for work for more than a month.

I saw the photos of his trip that he took; there were pics of Doug, but I guess either Sean was the only one who took photographs or else he’s still monumentally shy.

“Life is good,” Sean wrote. “But today I’m 37 and can’t remember being young. Do you remember me when I was young?”

In my reply, I wished him a happy birthday and said I only remember him as a 17- and 18-year-old.

Funny, I’m writing about myself at 20 in the fall of 1971, thirty years ago, but I remember everything and even added details I can recall that were not in the original diary.

This morning I again woke up a little after 4 AM. I also had serious diaphoresis, though not for too long. I’d been waiting for that symptom to show up again.

Of course, I stopped taking Klonopin at night, which may account for the sweaty palms as well as for my lack of sleep.

But if I can get off Klonopin, it will be a good thing. It’s addictive, so it’s not going to be easy, and Susan warned me that my anxiety symptoms might return.

If I could just take Klonopin PRN (as needed) for my worst moments of anxiety, I’d be better off.

Tonight there’s a gay political coffeehouse at 7 PM in Tempe, sponsored by the Arizona Human Rights Fund I’d like to go, but I’m not sure I’m up to it.

---

Tuesday, October 9, 2001

5:30 PM. Jonathan came back from the vet’s yesterday and sobbed at the death of the bunny. He got the two bunnies on Columbus Day 1982, and somehow, he felt, Cecily knew that she wanted to hang on till Columbus Day.

Mom and Jonathan were crying, and I told him he’d done the right thing in not taking the rabbit home. Dad, typically, left as soon as Jonathan started crying; our father has never been able to stand genuine displays of emotion.

Granted, grief isn’t fun to watch, but it is real, and I felt my eyes misting up as Jonathan and Mom wailed. I noticed that someone took the cage out of its space in the family room.

The rabbit must have lived nine and a half years, extraordinarily long for a dwarf rabbit, especially one from a pet store, who Jonathan said usually live only five years.

In another month or two, he’ll get a new rabbit, which is probably a good idea.

Last night I watched the start of The Merchant of Venice with the Royal Shakespeare Company on PBS, but I soon grew tired and drifted in and out of sleep – mostly out, though.

I was up at 4:30 AM. Although I didn’t sleep much, I wasn’t tired today, but I do have a headache.

I slammed my left forearm on the glass table when I was shaking out my bed sheet, and it’s been sore all day; it will probably be badly bruised by tomorrow.

Leaving the house around 8 AM, I drove to Gilbert Road, where I read a few pages of the Times at Starbucks.

Michiko Kakutani was surely right when her column pooh-poohed the widely-announced post-911 “death of irony.”

It’s true that the culture has changed with the “war” that President Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer kept talking about on the radio today.

But it hasn’t changed all that much, and like World War II and Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, undoubtedly this “war” will lead to ironic, experimental, postmodern works of art.

What can be more absurd than thousands of people being incinerated at their workplace for absolutely no logical reason?

And as this “war” drags on and we see that we can’t “win” against terrorists, people will feel dislocated and disillusioned.

Susan wrote back a short note, saying that probably a lot of people will have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for months. It’s a new age of anxiety, so I should fit in perfectly.

If someone as normally fearless as Teresa can now be afraid to fly when she’s more likely to be killed driving on the Long Island Expressway, it’s a strange, nervous time indeed.

I drove into Phoenix and turned up on Sat Darshan’s door at 9:30 AM. She let me in, saying she was glad for the company.

Sat Darshan was worried about her master’s program at the University of Phoenix. She showed me her digital textbook, which she printed out at her old office – all 300 pages of it.

I looked at it while she was on the phone, and it seemed to me a mixture of typical ed-course bullshit, common sense and platitudes.

She’ll have to do nine weeks of student teaching, presumably at the end of her other courses, starting in January 2003.

Like me, Sat Darshan can remember her public school days at P.S. 135 very well.

Later, we talked about Timmy and Stacy and other people from college that we’ve lost touch with.

Jonny, Sat Darshan’s old pal from Denmark – she, Stacy and Cyntha visited him when they went to Europe – managed to track her down on the Internet and emailed her.

But oddly, he didn’t want to tell her much about his current life other than that he was some kind of computer nerd, was married and had two daughters in their late teens.

I enjoyed my visit with Sat Darshan; it was good to sit with an old friend for a couple of hours.

On my way back to Apache Junction, I stopped at a Wendy’s for a baked potato.

This afternoon I called Virginia, who sounded perfectly rational although she says she’s not getting any better. She said her poetry reading last week wasn’t very good, but just getting through it was enough.

Virginia’s on a regimen of seven different drugs from Ambien and benzodiazepines to Wellbutrin and Buspar, and of course she can’t drive or do much of anything. Writing and reading are impossible for her right now, she said.

She’s on disability, which gives her about $500 a week, and she’s afraid she won’t be well enough to return to teaching five classes at Phoenix College in January.

Virginia described being in the locked mental ward of that snake pit, St. Luke’s, in a Phoenix slum with horrendous roommates. Most people there get ECT-shock treatments, but she’s already lost so much memory from childhood trauma that they felt she wasn’t a good candidate.

Obviously, Virginia is a lot sicker than I ever was, and of course she hoarded Xanax and would have committed suicide had her therapist not called her that day when she told him what she was planning.

I liked talking to Virginia since we could discuss mental illness, and I started to tell my parents about our friendship, but they interrupted me, condemning my talking to people about my mental problems, saying I was stupid to do that. I told them that they were the stupid ones.

I see so clearly how much I’ve taken to heart those lifelong signals to me from my parents that I was incompetent and foolish. It’s like Vincent constantly being told he’d never amount to anything.

Given my school grades and my unshakable belief that I was smart, my parents couldn’t disabuse me of that notion, but they made me feel I had no “smarts.”

---

Thursday, October 11, 2001

4 PM. Last night I took an Ambien and slept from 9 PM to 4 AM, a good seven hours.

I felt fine today, but this morning I did feel some anxiety as I thought about bankruptcy and all the other hassles I’ll have to start facing soon.

Somehow I managed to shake off the overt anxiety. Right now my palms are a little sweaty, but that’s a mild symptom.

I spoke to Dean Pat Jason of Nova Law School when I returned home half an hour ago.

She’d called to ask me to fax her my itinerary so that they can schedule meetings with various faculty members and administrators. When she asked if I could meet them on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, I told her that would be no problem.

Earlier, when she spoke to Mom, who told her how much she missed Florida, Dean Jason said, “Maybe if Richard gets the job here, you can move back.”

I decided I wanted to see the movie L.I.E. today. Like most art films in the Valley, it was playing only at the Harkins Camelview, just outside the Scottsdale Fashion Square, so it was a long trip from here.

Leaving the house at 8:30 AM, I drove to the Barnes & Noble just east of Loop 101 on Shea Boulevard in North Scottsdale.

The first time I went there was last October 9, Columbus Day and Yom Kippur, and even then I felt slightly anxious.

It had been so long since I’d been to a Barnes & Noble that I see their menu has changed, and they now have three sizes of iced tea.

I ordered the tea and a biscotti and read some of the Times for a while, leaving around 10:30 AM for the mall.

The Fashion Square grounds are so big that I had to walk a lot – especially after the film, when I got totally lost trying to find my car in the Brown Parking Garage.

This was a problem because since yesterday, I’ve had plantar fasciitis and more than a hint of posterior tibialis tendinitis.

I did enjoy seeing L.I.E., if I can say I enjoyed something that had me in tears for a lot of the film. It was the story of this 15-year-old boy – poetic, skinny and gay – who has lost his mother and whose father is shtupping a bimbo and is guilty of shady contracting that’s led to a fatal fire.

The kid gets involved with other guys who rob houses, and eventually it seems like the only person he can really turn to is Big John, a pedophile who’s so scary precisely because Brian Cox plays him as sympathetically as imaginable.

The film was powerful although it went on a little too long and had an ending that was too pat for me: the pedophile is shot by the aging twentysomething boyfriend he’s planning to replace, and the kid decides the deadly LIE “isn’t going to get me.”

While I have some attraction to teenage boys, I’d never act on it.

Vincent said he thinks Dennis Cooper shouldn’t act on his impulses, which, according to Vincent, tend to go toward prepubescent boys or of 12 or 13. That’s a little sickening to me.

No, the age I start to notice some young guys is around 17 or 18, like the freshmen in college that I’ve taught. I guess that’s how I got hooked up with Sean.

But at this point, I can’t imagine having a relationship with anyone younger than 30 or possibly 25 – not that even that is likely to happen.

Still, I like writing about young people. I think that’s why I’ve gone back to my late teens and early twenties in this new manuscript.

I don’t really know Vincent’s feelings about Dennis or how reliable his claims are. Vincent dedicated his novel to Dennis and has had him contribute to his webzine.

I wonder if my own discussion of Dennis’s work and my mentioning my relationship with Sean hasn’t revolted Vincent the same way that his finding that stuff in Dennis’s L.A. apartment did.

Of course, I think child porn is disgusting, and I would never want to look at it; I don’t really like porn altogether. The photos mentioned in Dennis’s novel Closer sound nauseating to me.

Anyway, all this sounds weird coming from someone who’s being considered for an administrative job at a law school.

As they said on Seinfeld, not that there’s anything wrong with my feelings or expressing them: it’s just that I’m thinking like a writer or artist and not a law school administrator.

That makes me wonder if, given my temperament, I’d be the right person for the Nova job. I feel I’m so fucked-up sometimes.