Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Friday, April 23, 1999

7 PM. When I got to school last evening, I collected phone excuses from a few Fiction Writing students who just couldn’t make it to class: a business trip, two unspecified illnesses, and a baby with chicken pox (and a husband who can’t possibly miss his softball night).

Only three students were in class by 6:15 PM, and another three walked in 20 minutes later as we were in the middle of workshopping a story handed in early by Amy, who will be out next week due to her daughter’s graduation.

We broke at 7:15 PM and I had them fill out the teacher evaluations, and then we walked over to Rosenthal, the student center, where I’ve never been before. The cafeteria was closed, but upstairs was the Flight Deck, a lounge and bar.

I went over to the table where Barbara, Magi and John Childrey were sitting to say hello.

Dawn Maddison pointed out Mick Cleary, whom I didn’t recognize at first because his beard had become grey and he gained weight. But of course I’ve gotten older, too, and it took Mick a minute to remember me.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” said Lenny Della Rocca, and I had to admit that at first I had not. Lenny was the night’s MC; he apparently runs this reading series for Writers Bloc, the NSU writers’ organization.

The one person I never would have recognized is Michael O’Mara, who was so young and handsome the last time I saw him read his poetry – probably in 1981 or 1982 – that I remember peppering Lisa, his friend, with questions about him.

Michael had aged and now wore glasses and was no longer slim, though he wasn’t fat. But he looked so much older that I did not see it all the guy I’d had a passing crush on 18 years ago.

Igor was there with his poet friend James that he talked about, a cute black guy in a dress shirt and tie with a laptop computer at his side.

Igor said that Richard Kostelanetz will be visiting Florida in mid-May and that he was helping Richard write new entries for a revised Dictionary of the Avant-Garde. (Maybe in this one he won’t equate my going to law school with being dead.)

According to Igor, the really interesting local poetry scene is in this place in downtown Miami where Cuban poets do a lot of Spanglish performance stuff.

Naturally, I mostly hung out with my students as well as with Tosha and Lila, two young students from Language 2000 last term.

Barbara was the first poet up. First she talked with Lenny, John and Michael about the Poetry in a Pub readings that I used to attend when I first moved down here in the early 1980s.

Lenny was just a kid then, a friend of Kirt Dressler’s (whom no one knows what happened to). Only recently did Lenny run into Michael, who’d assumed all the people from the old days had died.

It was good to expose my creative writing students to a poetry reading, but as I told Igor in an email Igor this morning, the mediocrity of last night’s material is why I don’t go to many readings.

The poets all went on too long, and there were ten-minute intermissions between each poet, so I encouraged my students to leave at 9:30 PM before the last poet went on if they needed to.

I stayed only because I thought the fourth poet would be Magi and I didn’t want to be rude to her. But instead it was this young lesbian whom I didn’t know. Her work wasn’t really bad, but it was basically unchallenging.

That was true of all the poets. Barbara recited a poem that she wouldn’t have written, Igor said, if she’d been familiar with Anne Waldman’s “Screaming Woman.”

Oh well: Mick once thought that Delmore Schwartz was a name that I made up.

Mick did know about my grant, as did everyone else – probably from the Sun-Sentinel article. It felt good to be able to tell people that I’m going to be teaching Legal Studies full-time at Nova next year.

It was 10:30 when I arrived home, and of course I was a bit too wired to go to bed right away, so I got less than six hours of sleep last night.

But I forced myself to exercise at 6 AM, and I was at school early, checking email (no new messages), voicemail (same), and my Lexis clips.

My 8 AM students were dopey with end-of-semester fever and kept throwing me off-track, though I admit I cooperated by also rambling.

Leaving the classroom early so they could evaluate me, I told them that if they wanted to say mean things, they should remember that “mean people suck.”

“Yeah, but nice people swallow,” one of the guys said.

Janelle Olson, probably my most conscientious student, asked for help with her thesis, so I went downstairs to the library with her and we got online. A librarian showed us how to retrieve articles via ProQuest on the school’s library website. (You just need a Polaris account password.)

I hung out in the office till 11:30 AM, reading, chatting with students who passed by to shoot the breeze, and just hang out.

At home, I discovered that Miriam had sent me her latest book, The Widow’s Coat; she said my last postcard made her laugh. It’s nice that we’re still in touch.

This afternoon I lay down for an hour and read the Times and went to Barnes & Noble, where I edited my hard copy of the in-progress “Silicon Valley Diet.” I also worked on it some more after dinner.

I’ve got a lot of material to look over from the Fiction Writing class but only one Language 1500 paper to grade by Monday.

A week from tonight I’ll be all packed and ready to go to New York in the morning. I guess I need to start preparing for my trip, but I don’t know where to start.

I guess I should be tired, but it hasn’t hit me yet.

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Sunday, April 25, 1999

8 PM. Last evening I started reading the Constitutional Law: Civil and Political Liberties text, and before I knew it, I was caught up in various First Amendment cases: old friends like Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, Cohen v. California, all the way through to R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, the hate speech case that came out at the end of June 1992 just as Professor Collier was teaching us Con Law II. I think I’m really going to enjoy teaching this course.

I got up at 5:30 AM, but the newspaper didn’t arrive for a couple of hours, so I began going through papers in my closet – mostly essays and tests from students – and getting together garbage bags full of junk to throw out. I also had breakfast, shaved, showered and dressed.

Leaving the house at 8:20 AM, I stopped off at Walmart to buy some vitamins and food supplements. I took my blood pressure on their machine and it surprised me by being a low 118/68 even though I felt a bit antsy.

At the Pembroke Pines Barnes & Noble, I read through most of the Sunday paper, saving Arts & Leisure and the Book Review for later in the afternoon.

I worked on my story for over an hour today, mostly tinkering, adding a few new things. Later, at the Nova MicroLab, I printed out a new version, along with the title page and the essay question for my final Language 1500 in-class paper.

Upstairs, I xeroxed copies of the Fiction Writing stories so we can devote all of our final Thursday night class to a workshop.

Igor emailed that he thought the poetry reading on Thursday was a sad spectacle. He and his friend James (Janus) Henderson are part of a four-man group called the Rush-Ins; I visited their website and was impressed with the vitality of their work.

Tonight they’re performing with musical accompaniment in Miami. In the fall I hope to check out one of their readings; Igor said the scene in Miami is much more vital than it is in Broward.

This afternoon I exercised and got some groceries and skin lotion for Mom at the health food supermarket. I also graded the one paper, Mauricio’s, to give back tomorrow, and I read the section of the text I’ll be going over, on “Writing Under Pressure.”

Riding around in brutally hot and humid weather without air conditioning is no fun. If I was staying here, I’d fix the car’s air conditioner now. But it can wait till August, and by then it may be time to get a (used) car. In New York I’ll undoubtedly feel cold, but I’m taking some warm clothing, and God, all I need to do is remember how uncomfortably hot South Florida has been in the past couple of weeks.

A year ago I was spending this weekend in Los Angeles. In fact, on this evening – April 25, a Saturday in 1998 – I was at Dodger Stadium with Libby’s family and Wyatt’s fellow Little Leaguers. That Monday I flew from LAX to Billings and drove myself the 120 miles to the Ucross Foundation.

Well, certainly New York can’t be colder than Wyoming was last May – or can it? It will be good to get away. The fall term at Nova starts Monday, August 23, and while I will miss teaching, I’m sure I’ll get used to being on vacation.

It will also be nice not to have to put my bedside clock radio on at the low end of the dial to have the buzz of white noise drown out the voices of my family members and their constant companion, the television. Of course, Teresa and Paul watch TV as well, but they’re not my parents.

Hopefully, this year I will really get to Brooklyn and be able to live on my own as I did in 1997.

But if not, I’m already excited about getting my own apartment down here next fall. I can do anything I want in it – and I can have guys over! Not that I expect to be doing a lot of dating, but I’ve got to have some kind of a social life.

I’ve looked through a lot of Yahoo ads in New York City, but most of the guys are creeps or are looking for someone whose description I don’t match.

Well, who knows what could happen? Writing that, I also get neurotic and imagine some disaster.

I don’t know why this is, but last night I had this premonition as I drove on I-95 to Fort Lauderdale about being in a bad car accident. Well, I guess if I’m in a car wreck, I’ll just have to handle it.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve been living with my parents for too long.

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Wednesday, April 28, 1999

9 PM. Last night I dreamed that I was teaching a night class at Nova and one student, a young man, was smoking a cigar. When I asked him to put it out, he just mocked me and the other students backed him up. I called the students “idiots,” then felt horrified at what I’d said.

In what seemed like another dream, I told this girl how upset I was about what happened in class and she assured me that everyone thought I was a good teacher anyway.

This morning at 8 AM I had all fifteen of my Language 1500 students for the first time in weeks. I gave back some papers and collected some late ones, then had the students write informal essays, either evaluating their freshman year or discussing their plans for the summer.

After class, I did some xeroxing and talked to Jennifer, who just taken her mother to Bascom Palmer and had to go back to pick her up after giving her final.

It was 9:30 AM when I left campus. At the Pembroke Pines Barnes & Noble, I read my students’ essays. Basically I’ve already worked out most of their grades. I also read and graded the Fiction Writing class assignments, though I couldn’t yet bring myself to read their latest short stories.

But I know their grades will be mostly A’s – with A-’s only for poor attendance. At least in Language 1500, I didn’t give any A’s at all, the five or six students got an A-.

I worked on my story this afternoon and evening, and I guess I still have a few more sections to go. They’ll be very rough, though, and I don’t expect to be able to have them revised before I leave Florida.

Still, if the manuscript is in decent shape, I might send it out to Kate Gale. But I’m also thinking it might be a blessing if Red Hen Press doesn’t want to publish my book.

If I self-published it, I have complete control. I’d make sure it wasn’t a cheap-looking book and I bet I could come up with a better cover then the palette artworks on most of the red hen press covers I’ve seen.

Actually, I’d go for a photo of a shirtless young white guy added notebook computer. It’s exploitative, but why not try to be sexy? Better a picture of a thin 25-year-old model than a 48-year-old author any day in the millennium.

This afternoon we had serious thunderstorms as temperatures drastically lowered; we got a few tornadoes, too. Rainy season is finally here. I didn’t write for a while because I was afraid to keep the computer on in case of power failure.

This afternoon I wasted an hour at Sawgrass Mills. At Neiman Marcus’s outlet store, even the discounted prices were too rich for my white blood cells, and for some reason I felt weak and shaky in the mall.

But I didn’t have a panic attack as I thought I might, and once at home, lying down for half an hour made all the difference.

I’ve been up since 5:30 AM, so I’m kind of exhausted by now.

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Friday, April 30, 1999

7:30 PM. I’m all packed, and I guess I’m ready to go to New York tomorrow. Actually, I’m just now starting to relax a bit. Hopefully, I’ll get at least five hours sleep tonight.

My flight is early, at 8 AM, but I got up at 5:30 AM today, so I shouldn’t have to get up any earlier than I have been.

Perhaps once I’m in New York and don’t have to go anywhere in the morning, I can sleep a little bit later, but Body Electric comes on at 7 AM on weekdays there and I want to be up to exercise.

It’s going to be quite strange being at Teresa and Paul’s after living here at my parents for eight months – I subtract the two and a half weeks I spent in Phoenix at Christmas – and I have to give myself time to adjust.

This morning all the stuff I had on my mind got me up early, and by 6 AM I was sealing up and mailing the packages of books I was sending to myself in Locust Valley – which I did at the post office as soon as it opened.

I also sent off the manuscript of The Silicon Valley Diet and a proposed sketch of the cover to Red Hen Press.

At Nova’s MicroLab, I printed out another copy of the 180-page manuscript because that seems simpler than risking using the copier.

My Yahoo email account opened, and I’d already gotten a dozen messages. Most were not very important:

Igor wished me a good summer in New York City.

Patrick forwarded a discussion thread on the Columbine High School shootings. (I heard a right-wing caller to NPR’s Diane Rehm Show say the media is downplaying the fact that the killers were gay, an assertion seemingly substantiated by reports that athletes taunted them as “faggots.”) The post-shooting hysteria seems to have created a witch hunt of “outsider” students, the kids who act or dress differently or are nerds or geeks.

Ellen McAllister emailed a group discussion asking which condiments people like: apparently market research she’s doing for a new webzine for men.

Rick Peabody sent a mass email to his fellow “lean and hungry” creative writer/adjunct friends to get their reaction to an online creative writing program he’s thinking about creating. (I said I assumed that regular colleges were already doing that.) At this point Rick says he doesn’t know what else to do but “apply for a job at a Giant supermarket.”

Finally, Kevin wrote that he’s finally joined the ranks of Los Angeles car owners. He’s just ending a three-month replacement job for someone on maternity leave at Warner Brothers Records. Kevin also reports that he’s coping with rejection better these days.

I unsubscribed to the Mercury News so my mailbox doesn’t get clogged up when I can’t access it every day while I’m in New York. And I deleted most of my Eclipse searches on Lexis/Nexis so there won’t be hundreds of articles there when I manage to do log on.

I also sent a copy of the “Silicon Valley Diet” story to the Gen-X webzine Brest. Even though it’s a long shot, it seems worth a try.

After resting for half an hour, I bought some stuff at Walgreens and went back to Nova to say goodbye to Ben and the others and to give Santa my final grade rosters, my keys to the office, my phone number in New York, and my book list for the October term (which she won’t need until August).

It feels good to have a “home” in a workplace again, just as I did at CGR. I’m glad to be coming back in the fall.

After lunch, I went to Sears, where for $85, I got a new piece of luggage, the modern kind with an upright handle and wheels. It came with a garment bag, carry-on bag and a couple of other things – but I’m just going to take the backpack and my usual computer bag.

From 2:30 PM to 5 PM, I packed. Of course, I’m probably taking too much stuff but not quite the right stuff.

All of a sudden I feel a bit anxious. The past few days I’ve been stressed and I hope I don’t get ill. But I’ll be all right once I settle in when I get to New York.

I exercised for half an hour twice today – at 7 AM and then at 5 PM – so I can skip tomorrow when I’ll be too tired from traveling.