Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Saturday, February 13, 1999

4 PM. Over the last four nights I’ve built up a tremendous sleep deficit, and I feel bleary-eyed and foggy-brained.

When I arrived on the third floor of the Mailman Hollywood Building last night, I heard the BPM cluster’s first teacher, Dr. Melnick, explaining that due to a presentation he had to give today at 10 AM, he needed to dismiss today’s class at 9:30 AM.

That meant the class wanted me to come in at that hour rather than at 1 PM so they could get out early. I oblige them, though it made things rougher for me.

I gave out the new, clearer syllabus with fewer reading and writing requirements, but this group still had lots of questions about assignments.

Finally, I managed to go over Poe, “Self-Reliance,” and “Bartleby the Scrivener,” with a lively discussion on the latter.

The tables were arranged for a conference, so I had to squeeze in to get a place, but I managed to keep the class going until 9:40 PM.

Home at 10 PM, I fell into bed exhausted, but of course I couldn’t fall asleep till around midnight.

I woke up at 4:30 AM, worried about not having reread today’s assignments: Dickinson’s poems, Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (which I usually call “On Civil Disobedience”), excerpts from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and plus the biographical material on these authors.

So I started reading and never got back to sleep. Consequently, I was a mess by the time I arrived at Nova this morning, less than twelve hours after I’d left.

The auditorium we were moved to was freezing cold and the thermostat was nowhere to be found, so after spending 75 minutes going over Thoreau and Dickinson, during the break I found a cramped but warmer room upstairs, where I lectured till noon on the slave narratives.

Boy, my students couldn’t have been any happier than I was to get out of class early today. I came home, though, with more energy, and I read the paper and did some paperwork.

But after going to make an ATM deposit of another credit card refund check and to buy bananas and yams at the Bread of Life Whole Foods Market, I’ve run out of gas now.

I’ll feel better after I take a nice long nap. It’s getting a bit chilly.

*

9 PM. After lying down for an hour, I got my second wind just as I was expecting to get into bed early tonight. I’ve just come from buying $43 worth of groceries at Publix and filling up my gas tank at Amoco.

Before that, I read a book of Pynchon criticism and began to make up the essay questions for the Monday night class’s third assignment, on Slaughterhouse-Five and The Crying of Lot 49.

Reading literary criticism of Vonnegut as well as Pynchon got me excited. Really, teaching both American Lit classes has been good for me, but particularly the 1950s/1960s class where I’ve been able to explore Flannery O’Connor, Baldwin, Bellow, Vonnegut and Pynchon.

If only I’d had time to do other writers of the period whom I love: Roth, Malamud, Mailer, Barthelme, Ellison, Salinger, Cheever, Updike, Mary McCarthy, Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, and maybe even Richard Brautigan.

All that shit is what made me want to be a fiction writer. I learned so much from those guys, but over the past twenty years – ever since With Hitler in New York was published – I seem to have forgotten it all. God.

I weighed 152 at Publix tonight, the fattest I’ve been in about nine years. Of course I was wearing a jacket because of the cold, but I can see that I’ve gained weight.

Last spring, in California and Wyoming and Arizona and then at Teresa’s in the summer, I lost weight. Part of the reason I eat more here is that there’s so much food at my parents’ house, but my crazy schedule also is a problem.

Well, I’ll continue to watch myself. Maybe, like Teresa, I need a spa stay (or going to an artists’ colony) to jump-start me.

Eleven weeks from tonight I’ll be up North, going first to Locust Valley. I miss Long Island and New York City.

And now that it’s coming up to the anniversary of going to Villa Montalvo, I feel very nostalgic about San Jose. In my mind I’m driving around Saratoga, Los Gatos, Campbell, Cupertino, Milpitas . . . and I miss San Francisco and Los Angeles, too.

I also think a lot about Ucross and how wonderful it was to be in Wyoming and how much I loved being out there and hanging out with Liz and Margot and the others.

I recall how much I liked myself when I was riding my bike on U.S. 14-16, looking out at the Big Horn Mountains, smelling that weird lanolin smell (sagebrush? the sheep?), watching the cattle, getting mud on my shoes, being taken for someone from Montana.

Phoenix doesn’t seem so far away since I was there again just six or seven weeks ago.

I have the feeling I’ll love Maryland and Washington, D.C., as well. I’ll be coming there in June, and when I was last in the area – on my brief trip to Baltimore four years ago – it was also June and very beautiful.

Monday, February 15, 1999

9:30 PM. I don’t know if I’m coming down with something or if I’m just tired, but I have a sore throat and my wrists and forearms ache. But I can sleep tonight without having to worry about getting up early. Not that I ever really sleep late, but it’s nice to know I’m off tomorrow.

Tonight’s Lit class went pretty badly: they hated Pynchon, and I fumbled trying to discuss his novel. But I did manage to bring up some connections, I think, and with the help of some of the criticism I read, I tried to convey what I thought The Crying of Lot 49 meant.

In two weeks, this course will be over and I’ll be off for the rest of the first week of March for spring break. Tonight I already got the teacher evaluation forms for this class in my mailbox. The second half of the spring semester will be easier on me.

At the beginning of class tonight, I returned the students’ papers and handed out the topics for the final exam.

This morning I finished grading of the last set of papers, and most were very good.

Last night I slept nicely. Toward morning I dreamed about already being in Maryland with this woman who was asking me where in the area I planned to live.

It was 6 AM when I awoke, so I immediately went into my exercise routine, and I was at Nova by 7:15 AM.

My 8 AM Language 1500 class went okay. I had them write “authority lists” of the subjects they know a lot about (and thus can write about knowledgeably).

The items in their lists were pretty funny, ranging from Melrose Place and Jewel (the singer) to Indian religions and Palestinian history; various sports and “sleeping” were well-represented.

On email, I discovered I’d just gotten a message from Alice, so I phoned her once I got home.

She said she was worried about not saying anything to the Sun-Sentinel’s Lourdes Rodriguez-Florido about my fiction. Alice is afraid she’ll sound stupid because she really doesn’t know how to talk about my fiction.

I told her to say whatever she wanted to or to say nothing at all, I was sure that whatever she says won’t make either of us look bad.

Even if it does, who cares?

Alice said that she and Peter were very happy with how their 21st anniversary party went. I’d assumed they had a party every year, but this was the first one in five years. Tomorrow’s her birthday, but Alice just plans to go out to dinner with a girlfriend.

When I get to New York in early May, Alice will probably be in Los Angeles at the ABA convention, but I’m sure I’ll get to see her soon after that in New York and then in Washington, since she’s there a lot because of her brother.

Aside from grading, reading the Times and following Jonathan to Sam’s garage so I could take him home after he brought in his van for repairs, I was pretty much a layabout today.

I did write a proposed column for the Boca Raton News. The conceit was that I was revealing this terrible secret from a politician’s past and exposing him as a hypocrite.

Dan Quayle has ridiculed Texas Governor George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and has warned his own campaign staff never to utter the phrase, which he apparently considers too wimpy.

But on Lexis, I found a newspaper article from 1982 in which Quayle called for the country to be “compassionate” and another in which his wife used the word to describe him.

As satire, this is very mild stuff. On the other hand, nobody is going to come up with this idea except me, and the paper has printed lamer columns of mine.

The New York Times is running a series of long articles on how the global financial crisis – now quiescent but still threatening – began with the collapse of Thailand’s currency, the baht, in July 1977.

The more I read about the world economy, the more certain I feel that our current global bubble has to burst someday.

Wednesday, February 17, 1999

10 PM. I feel as if my body is falling apart. My inner thigh/groin injury feels worse, and every time I put pressure on my left leg – like when I walk – it’s quite painful.

Then, this afternoon I was exercising lightly – or so I thought – and I hurt my neck and right shoulder, enough so that my mobility is limited and my students in Organizational Communications noticed it tonight.

“What’s the matter with your neck?” one asked during the break.

Well, at least I finished all the material in our text. Instead of doing what I said I was going to do last night and get into bed, I spent a couple of hours putting together their final exam.

When I got up at 6 AM, I decided to wait till later to exercise, but I probably shouldn’t have worked out at all today, given the pain level I have now.

Well, last November I thought my back would never heal, and then last April, at Villa Montalvo, I had that knee trouble. And on July 4 weekend in Locust Valley I had the neck and shoulder pain. This is partly a function of being 48 years old.

Before this morning’s class, I xeroxed the Organizational Communication final, along with copies of Mom’s ridiculous sheets about the house for the “take one” cylinder by our mailbox.

My 8 AM class went okay, but I felt off my stride.

Today’s New York Times had a special section on Men’s Health, complete with an ad of Bob Dole discussing how he solved his erectile dysfunction (the PC term for impotence) problem with Viagra.

But after reading all the articles – I tried to time my reading of the paper today and I think it took me just a bit over three hours – I’ve decided that I don’t know what I can do to maintain good health other than the things I already do: eat lots of fruits and vegetables and avoid smoking.

I take aspirin every day, although doing that can cause strokes as well as prevent heart attacks.

Lately I’ve begun to question both the safety and efficacy of the herbal supplements I’ve been taking. I’ve read that ginkgo biloba can cause profuse bleeding during surgery, for example, and that other herbal capsules have such low potency that they are probably doing nothing.

I can’t afford health insurance, let alone the regular checkups and expensive tests that can show that I have a disease or some concerning condition. But then, if a test like PSA showed I had prostate cancer, the treatment might be worse and would kill me faster than the illness itself.

People who do everything right – who exercise aerobically, eat better than I do (because of my very low-fat diet, I probably don’t get enough “good” fat) and watch their blood pressure and cholesterol – nevertheless can somehow end up with plaque-filled arteries that cause them to have heart attacks.

Both my father and grandfather had heart attacks, albeit after 70, so I’ll probably have one, too – eventually. Let’s just hope I’m on Medicare (assuming it still exists) when it’s my turn to have an M.I.

This afternoon I spent some time online at the Nova computer lab.

Tom emailed a day after Mardi Gras. He’s decided not to go back to NOCCA next fall, and he’s accepted a $4,000 fiction writing course at Tulane if nothing better comes along.

There’s only a slight chance he’ll be asked back to Stuttgart. But I guess he and Annette can survive financially. She likes her job at Tulane, but it pays nothing. Tom says he’s also reading Vonnegut these days.

Teresa emailed and said that Paul’s aunt offered to take P.J. in, “but he wants to be subsidized, and I will make sure that doesn’t happen.” Meanwhile, Jade went 3.0 last semester, got her first A – in Photography class – and seems to be doing well in college after her bumpy fall semester.

Teresa says Paul is home today “with some kind of bug” and that he must feel really bad because he never stays home sick. It sounds as if he has the flu.

I wrote back to Teresa, Gianni and Mark Bernstein before leaving the computer lab.