Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, October 4, 1999

6:30 PM. My week got off to a better start than any day I had last week.

Last night Jonathan called, wondering about the $200 check I sent him. He said I could have the car if I sent him four more checks for $200. I told him I’d think about it and today I sent him another $200 check.

I might as well take the damn car; I can always sell it myself – or sell the other car. I’m so badly in debt, I’ll never get out of it, but I do have a steady income for the next eight months, and I can manage to pay Jonathan $600, which he probably needs desperately.

Up at 5:30 AM, I was at my office two hours later. I pulled off a lot of little hairs on my thighs when I changed my bandages, but I was glad to see there was no infection.

My class went well, as I finished up the Establishment Clause by playing the County of Allegheny v. ACLU crèche/menorah display arguments, went over two more cases, and began privacy.

I’d listened to Nina Totenberg’s report on the new Supreme Court session starting today at 7:10 AM, so I stopped at 9:10 AM and let the class listen to her for ten minutes – and I gave out yesterday’s roundup of this term’s cases by Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times, as well as my column on student drug testing after we briefly did search and seizure. In my office, I helped several students with ideas for papers.

Matt Shelby, who’d emailed us professors that he was sick last week, was indeed ill, having had pneumonia. He looked pale and generally terrible, so Alford’s mass emailing to faculty saying that other students had told him Matt had gone to Vegas on vacation was lie.

When I saw Steven and told him Matt obviously had been ill, Steven said it was an outrage that students who are “envious of Matt because he’s very bright, rich good-looking” (he’s just okay-looking to me) did such a nasty thing as spread a false rumor, but even more horrible that we have a faculty member who believed and spread the rumor.

“It’s just another example of how Nova treats bright students badly,” Steven said, “as we gear our entire curriculum on this campus toward the mediocrities.”

I left the office at 12:30 PM after working more on my final exam. I’ve decided to give the morning class a take-home final, too. It will make my life easier and I’ll get better answers.

All the questions are law-school-type hypos, though several are based on real cases like the California Supreme Court challenge by a landlord whose religious beliefs wouldn’t allow her to rent to unmarried couples and the Alabama statute banning college organizations of gay students who might countenance breaking sodomy laws.

Back at school at 3:45 PM, I stayed for another two hours, printing out my final, chatting about politics and the courts with Suellen and Charles, and talking to Maria and Santa.

I feel very much at home at Nova, and I almost didn’t want to go home for dinner. It’s become like LaGuardia Hall or CGR or other places where I felt so comfortable because I was part of a community.

My appointment with Dr. Chusad was at 2:15 PM and he basically agreed with the diagnosis of tendonitis tibialis posterior and plantar fasciitis. His x-ray found a heel spur but the strength in my tendon was normal.

He said that the only thing that would help was orthotics, and since 98% of health insurance doesn’t pay for it anyway, I decided to go ahead and not wait for my Nova policy to take effect.

They were able to take a cast of my foot right then and there, using strips of plaster that hardened fairly quickly. It was not unpleasant to have the associate pat down my foot with the plaster as I lay down. After all, it’s been a long time since I’d been touched.

(Nova has a Touch Research Institute, and I should probably sign up for some massage therapy.)

They said they’d call me when the cast comes back from wherever, and I gave a $200 deposit in addition to the $115 office visit fee. (The doctor gave me a discount because Eileen had recommended me.)

At least I know that orthotics offers me the best chance of relief. It’s good, Dr. Chusad said, that I wear sneakers to work because orthotics work best in them and not tight dress shoes.

Later I spoke to Vish, the guy in New York – he gave me his address in Jamaica – who answered my personals ad. In Guyana, he said, everyone called him Vishnu, but since he’s been here, he goes by Vish “because it sounds more American.”

He said he loved talking to me and was glad I understood when he asked if I was straight-acting; I said that straight-acting guys don’t answer ads on Planet Out but I knew he meant something like “Can I pass Vish’s Mom and Dad test?” – which I assume I can.

He flirted with me. When I had said I needed someone to kiss my leg wounds from yesterday, he said, “My kisses are deadly – but they make all wounds better.”

Vish described himself: nice shy smile, short black hair, mustache, dark brown eyes. He said he dreamed about blond, blue-eyed boys – and that, well, I came close.

Vish had only one relationship with a guy (“best thing that ever happen to me”) but it ended a year ago, and he asked me to promise never to bring it up.

All he told me about it was that it lasted for six years: “As far as I am concerned, that relationship never happen. When it ended, I learned that this is a cruel world and you have to make it to your liking.” He said I was the only person he ever told about it.

Jokingly, I’d asked him if he were a heartbreaker, and he said only if it counted when he didn’t return stares from people on the subway. He’s very sweet.

He sounds a little like Thien. I guess there’s a reason I’m attracted to foreign, closeted guys – not because they’re exotic, as Sat Darshan suggested, but because I feel very unsure of myself and need someone whom I feel won’t hurt or ridicule me.

I also got a letter from Jim, who read my stories in Piedmont Park yesterday. He said I was a writer’s writer, whatever that means, and he told me about the suicide of a married uncle, who was secretly gay and a three-week affair he had with a black sailor at the San Diego Naval Hospital: “Then he was shipped out and I never saw him again.”

What a world.

Tuesday, October 5, 1999

9 PM. I’ve just finished reading the controversial cases from the “Privacy as Autonomy” chapter of our text that I’ll be going over tomorrow: Griswold, Bowers, Romer, Roe and Casey.

Today at school I xeroxed excerpts from the right-to-die case Washington v. Glucksburg, which came out after the textbook was printed. It’s all juicy stuff, and I hope I can handle it well, especially because the cases involving homosexuality are so personal to me.

I can remember where I was when I heard or read about the decisions in Bowers (the lobby of Teresa’s building on West 85th Street, where someone had posted a bulletin board notice about a Battery Park City protest of the decision for the weekend of the Statute of Liberty centennial before Oscar took it down), Casey (listening to the car radio in the parking lot of the public library in downtown Gainesville towards the end of the summer session of the first year of law school) and Romer (in the office at CGR, going on the WIRES database of Westlaw after 10 AM to check out the Court’s decisions and seeing a bulletin that Colorado’s Amendment 2 had been struck down).

I told Vish I’d try to call him tonight. Last night, when I finished the Times, I was just too tired. But I wonder, really, what do I have in common with this guy? Could I talk to him about the cases I’d just read? And does it matter if I could not?

I got up at 5 AM but then fell back to sleep after breakfast. This morning I did two loads of laundry and went to Publix to buy their diet caffeine-free cola on sale (ten big bottles for 59₵ each) and a few other things and to get some cash from the ATM.

At school for a couple of hours, I mostly dealt with personal email. Alice said hi and told me that Peter was fired from his column at Playbill Online, but he got picked up four days later by another website. She also said that Andreas is doing as well as can be expected.

As a literary agent, Alice went through September without selling a single book and said that at times like this she worries that she’ll never sell another book again. Clearly, the book business is changing, and Alice said, “I had to get into it just as it may be dying.”

The Internet has changed everything about our lives in some way. Whether E-books will eventually become popular, I have no idea, but to me, it’s been obvious for decades that the way books are published is really out of the nineteenth century.

Part of that is good, of course. I’ll have a lot more satisfaction when I see the physical object of my next book than I get from seeing my stories published on websites.

Everyone at Nova seems so friendly to me. The big surprise is Mark Cavanaugh, who’s not as gruff as he appears to be. Jaime thinks he’s gay and once tried to touch his stomach when Jaime was in his class. I wonder if Jaime is back from Europe yet; I’ll email him tomorrow.

Dad called this afternoon and I told him about my foot and my leg wounds (they hurt when I lay on my side last night, but they are not infected) and he told me about his horrible leg infections and his dissatisfaction with the doctors at his HMO.

I sent Jonathan another $200 check and said I’d pay the remaining $600 over the next few weeks or months. So I used the Mercury today. This will make my family happy, and for the first time in my life, I own two cars. At least I always have a spare one.

Wednesday, October 6, 1999

3 PM. I just finished reading today’s Times. After I write this, I’m going to lie down until I have something to eat around 5 PM and then go to teach my class. I have a limited number of cases to do tonight, and I need to hand out the take-home final and give them time to do their teacher evaluations.

This morning’s class was interesting, especially the students’ reaction to Bowers v. Hardwick. Their immediate outcry over the homophobia in the majority opinion surprised me with its vehemence. Even the jocks, whom I’d expect to be the most homophobic, were puzzled by the case. One baseball player, Chris, said, “Well, this was in 1986, when I guess people didn’t understand. Today someone is gay, and like, who cares?”

We did Griswold before that, and they seemed astounded that a state could once ban birth control. My students might be conservative, but they’re certainly libertarian.

Last night I spoke to Vish for 45 minutes, and we didn’t seem to have trouble finding stuff to talk about whether it was cremation or sleeping naked (which he urged me to try “Just turn down the A/C.”)

Unlike Thien, Vish has been in the U.S. long enough and is skilled, if not perfect, in English conversation. He’s also well-traveled, telling me about his trips to Mexico City, Cuzco and Machu Pichu in Peru, and other places.

Of course, he’s 37 and more experienced than Thien was at 25; I’m dealing with someone who holds down a responsible white collar job, who surely out-earns me and who is working on his second college degree.

Teresa emailed that the firehouse party in Fair Harbor went extremely well, but that after that triumph, she needs to remind herself how horrible it was to lug all the stuff by herself on and off the freight boat in a pouring rain.

Clearly, she wants to keep her resolve to give up catering. Several of Teresa’s former servers were at the firehouse party, and some of them are doing a lot better in the food world than she is.

The problem is that she doesn’t know what to do next. She and Paul had hoped to have the closing over before going to St. Maarten a week from today, but it’s been delayed by a finding of benzene in the soil – a remnant of that 45-year-old gas pipe.

The buyer – the Jewish guy who is fronting for Charles Wang, the co-founder and head of Computer Associates – will make the next move.

Teresa says that “all the old farts” in Oyster Bay are up in arms about the development plans for the village by Wang, who’s derided as a newcomer even though he’s lived in Oyster Bay Cove for more than a decade – before Teresa moved there in 1990.

Various students came in to see me during my office hours, and I enjoyed answering their questions and just talking to them about the course and stuff in general.

Suellen told me that my night class next semester has been moved from just across the hall from my office to what I expect is a horrible room in the temporary building next to the Testing Center where I taught last year.

In the winter, my night classes are also not in Parker but in the Sonken Building, where the university’s middle and upper school students have their classes.

Santa was really annoyed with Charmaine, who had been diagnosed with pinkeye – which is highly contagious – yet insisted on staying to work in the Liberal Arts office rather than going home.

Thursday, October 7, 1999

7 PM. When I went to get the mail yesterday there was a note from Susan Fromberg Schaffer. Although she didn’t read my stories, she wrote a wonderful paragraph-long blurb, the best I’ve got. I sent it out to Kate Gale via email and snail mail.

Susan also said that I should write to Herb Perluck at Brooklyn College because there was an opening in the department for a fiction writer. However, when I checked Brooklyn College website, it said they were looking for a playwright. Today I emailed Susan (who has an amazing web page) to thank her anyway.

Last night’s class was another good one, although I was discombobulated when that black woman who so far had attended only once showed up in the middle of the class – even though Steven and some students had warned me that was her modus operandi.

She’ll probably be the one to give me a bad evaluation, though she’s got nothing to base it on. During the break, she gave me a long cock-and-bull story about losing her job and the recent deaths of two people in her family. She’s either psychotic or an excellent actress or both.

The students were so PC in their reactions to the cases that I had to play devil’s advocate and argue the anti-gay positions of Justices White, Burger and Scalia. I’m not sure if they just want to get on my good side or if they are all genuinely non-homophobic. I gave out the midterms and other handouts on the Supreme Court.

Before leaving school at 9:30 PM, I wrote to Vish. We’re basically flirting online, which is fun as long as it’s harmless. When I did it with Kevin or Jaime, it made me feel good. I just hope Vish doesn’t get too obsessed with me; after all, it’s unlikely that we’re going to see each other for the foreseeable future.

Of course I like the affection and playfulness and the sexy innuendo, and it’s certainly non-threatening. But I hope Vish doesn’t use me as a substitute for trying to find a boyfriend in New York, because I myself am definitely still looking.

When I got home at 10 PM, I turned on the TV for a little while to unwind, then read New Times, which gets delivered to the Parker Building lobby on Wednesday evening.

Up at 6 AM, I was out of the house by 9 AM, heading for iced tea at Barnes & Noble, where I read most of today’s New York Times.

As usual, there was an incredibly long line and an entirely new person working at the café. It must be impossible to find help these days.

In Macy’s afterwards, I waited in vain for fifteen minutes trying to get someone to locate an Interplak advertised on sale before I just gave up when nobody approached me.

From there I went to the Davie Public Library, where I found last Sunday’s Sun-Sentinel, which mentioned my Center for the Book workshop in the column on the book pages. I xeroxed a copy, of course, and I spent half an hour on email. Lately Yahoo has taken forever to load.

Following lunch at home, I was back on the computer again, this time at my office. I wrote to Patrick, Satnam, Christy, Jaime and others, and I got notes from Vish, Kevin and Igor.

Igor surprised me by saying that he’s going to a reading in downtown Miami on Monday by Elisa Albo and Vicki Hendricks. He knows they were my colleagues at BCC-South and asked if I wanted to come.

It’s sad that I’ve been living in South Florida for over three months and have yet to go to Miami or Miami Beach. I really should try to go the reading because being in Miami makes me feel as if I’m on vacation. But I expect I’ll be too tired or too busy by Monday night.

I have to remember my reluctance to go to other people’s readings when I start giving them next year for the publication of my own book. Given my own predisposition to avoid readings, I definitely can’t fault any friends for failing to show up.

Today’s mail brought the Lambda Report with gay-oriented legal news and case summaries, and surprisingly, a notice of what seems like a genuinely pre-approved Shell credit card.