Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Tuesday, November 23, 1999

8 PM. My foot hurts more this evening than it did all day, but I don’t know what else to do except take aspirin, apply ice for 20 minutes at a time, wear the Camwalker, and stay off the foot as much as I can.

The worst part about traipsing around in the Camwalker is to listen to everyone at school ask me what happened – or if they know my history of posterior tibial tendonitis, to express sympathy and dismay.

Last night I slept shockingly well, and this morning I couldn’t rouse myself until 7 AM. But by 9:30 AM, I was at my desk in the office, reading email.

Alice chatted with Wesley Strick on the phone yesterday, and to my surprise, Wes agreed to do The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Screenwriting. Alice said he’s not doing it for the money: Wes has agreed to let his yet-to-be-determined co-writer/interviewer –  he wants someone based in L.A, – to get the entire advance. Anyway, Alice was really happy and grateful that I gave her Wes’s address.

In a P.S. email, Alice said she couldn’t believe it when Wesley said this weekend was his son’s bar mitzvah: “I thought he was about 28 years old.” In reply, I pointed out that that would have made him seven years old when he edited With Hitler in New York.

In a short email, Patrick expressed his pent up frustration with the P’an Ku editor and staff.

Vish thanked me for my Thanksgiving wishes, and Lynn wrote a long note. He said he doesn’t know what to make of me – which makes total sense; coming from his point of view I wouldn’t know what to make of me, either.

He can’t imagine what I mean when I say I “work” all weekend. That’s because my work is played to me: reading, writing, doing the ridiculous stuff I’ve been doing, collecting the home addresses of media types from Lexis and the email addresses of reviewers of gay books on Amazon.com.

I wrote to Jennifer Shafer at Red Hen Press and to Denise Duhamel and a few others, but I spent most of my time on the computer doing “work” that will help me publicize the Silicon Valley Diet. Imagine if I had the Internet to publicize Hitler 20 years ago.

Now that Nova has no classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, some students just skip Tuesday classes to get out of town even earlier. But most of my class showed up.

After discussing Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat’s op-ed piece, I showed El Super. As usual, the students didn’t want to talk much, but I know that today they just wanted to get out and start their Thanksgiving vacation. Still, the class giggled at the right times.

Duan, the Vietnamese girl, ask me to fill out a recommendation letter for pharmacy school. I went straight to my office to do it right away. Then I walked downstairs and handed it in to the advisors in the Math, Science and Technology Division.

Although Santa assured me that I don’t have to hold office hours tomorrow, I’m still missing several Constitutional History papers, including the ones from students who promised to fax the papers in today. I assume some of the papers will come in tonight, so I’ll go to school tomorrow if only to pick them up.

Except for the front page and editorial and op-ed pages, I didn’t read the Times until I arrived home late in the day, and I have yet to get to last Sunday’s Book Review.

Anyway, this weekend I’ll have to grade a few late or revised papers from Core Studies and between 12 and 15 Constitutional History midterms to grade this weekend. I also need to read the remaining chapters of the Con History text, make outlines for them, and read the corresponding documents.

So far I’ve only gotten a couple of chapters into Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, which we will discuss during the last day class two weeks from Thursday.

I hope to get everything done over the next five or six days, though I know I’ll probably put at least some of it off in favor of stuff that’s more fun, like finding the home address of Yahoo’s Jerry Yang or Talk editor Tina Brown.

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Wednesday, November 24, 1999

9 PM. My foot improved enough so that I didn’t have to wear the Camwalker today. Although getting around was rough at first, I actually feel better after having walked a good deal today.

After a good night’s sleep, I felt refreshed enough at 5 AM to get the newspaper, have an early breakfast, put in a load of laundry, and go grocery shopping at Publix when it opened at 7 AM. Then I exercised, showered, shaved, and dressed.

Unfortunately, I had some mishaps along the way: Diverted by a leaky milk container, I actually forgot to put the dryer button on after putting in the four quarters and closing the door. So when I showed up to retrieve my clothes, they were wet.

They were still wet when I returned from Nova an hour later; I had chosen a broken dryer. Switching to another machine, I went back to my office and came home an hour later to fetch the finally-dry clothing.

At the office I picked up a few late papers, and Dave Merrikan came in to hand-deliver his. I let him know I didn’t have to be at school today and told Dave I had come in just to see him. That at least ought to count in my favor with this University board trustee. Not that I should care since I’m leaving Nova – presumably for good – in the spring.

I spent the rest of my time in the office this morning on the Web and Lexis, hunting down people’s addresses. I later returned for a couple of hours in the late afternoon. I bought a new address book so I don’t have to have celebrities in my regular address book.

While at Barnes & Noble in between my office visits this afternoon, I scoured magazines like Time, Content, Out and The New Yorker and wrote down more names of writers or media people.

This can definitely get out of hand, I know. But being obsessed is not necessarily a bad thing if it helps me with publicizing this book. In 1979, I did everything I could to push With Hitler in New York, and while that didn’t help sales, I did get a lot of reviews and publicity I probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Obviously, I know that David Letterman, NPR’s Bob Edwards and various writers on the New York Times aren’t going to buy my book and probably most of them will throw away the postcard. But some people will read it, and I’ve got to believe that something will happen with the book that otherwise would not.

In some ways I feel that the Silicon Valley Diet is my last chance, and I may as well give it everything I’ve got. But of course, I also have classes to teach.

I sent Lynn an email saying I was in New York City for the holidays just so I wouldn’t have to send him a long letter. I finally got back his photo, one a friend had scanned for him. He’s almost totally bald and not really my type.

Except for Travis, who stopped writing weeks ago, and Bobby, the singer in South Beach, none of the guys I’ve met online have been the kind of really cute, somewhat boyish guys I’m attracted to. (Yes, I realize that those guys are probably not going to be attracted to me, even if I look really young for my age. Hey, I can’t help it if I’m shallow.

Rick wrote that the obstetrician told him and Margaret should have a healthy girl who’s due on May 2.

Alice wrote that she didn’t really think that Wes was 28; it’s just hard for her to deal with contemporaries and those younger than us having older kids.

Alice is making Thanksgiving for herself and Andreas while Peter goes to see his 90-year-old mother in the Boston nursing home. She ended her email: “I hope you don’t miss your family on Thanksgiving. (I’m not kidding.)”

Well I don’t think I will. Besides, three weeks from tonight I’ll be in their midst in Apache junction.

This morning at Eckerd Drugs, I bought $60 worth of all sorts of products, breaking in my new J.C. Penney credit card.

With this economic boom built on consumer debt, there’s bound to be a reckoning when the expansion turns to recession. Despite the talk of “soft landings,” recessions always happen, and they usually inescapable.

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Monday, November 29, 1999

3 PM. I just walked to the mailbox – no mail yet – and noticed what a beautiful day it is. The temperature feels about 73° and the sky is pale blue and there’s just a hint of a breeze.

I’ve never really enjoyed days when I teach at night, but I’ll continue to make do until two weeks from now when the term ends. Doing the detailed notes for the chapter on slavery and the Constitution served as an excellent review for me, so I feel I have a grasp of the material I’m covering tonight.

I didn’t grade Anna’s research paper, but I xeroxed the chapter notes and take-home final exam so I can distribute them tonight.

Actually, in the two and a half hours I was at my office this morning, that was the only no vote work I did. The rest was “Richie work” (or play).

Teresa emailed that they had a big Thanksgiving in Mattituck with everyone from her side of the family plus her brother-in-law’s parents and John and Camille, whom Teresa is friends with again.

Jade and Cat were in Vermont, P.J. was with his girlfriend, and Paul’s mother was with his sister, who is recuperating from surgery. Teresa said Paul was more relaxed without the presence of his side of the family there.

She’s taken on four smallish catering jobs to make money and “fill time.” It now looks as if the real estate deal for the lumber yard is not going to happen immediately, though Teresa and Paul expect it to go through eventually.

After writing her back, I needed to clean up my bulging email inbox, so I sent off quick notes to Vish, Lynn, Jaime, Denise, and Patrick, who enjoyed his weekend visit to see his granddaughters. He said this is probably the last trip his mother will take with him to the Gulf Coast, as it’s getting too hard for her to travel.

I asked Chauncey if we could postpone our lunch until January, and I asked Igor if he was interested in going to either Wednesday’s reading by David Lehman at FIU or to Nick Carbo’s reading on Saturday.

I also used Lexis to find some addresses of people, Yahoo to find others, and looked at Slate magazines website to get some ideas for book publicity.

If I had electronic resources 20 years ago, imagine what I could have done with publicity for With Hitler in New York.

Why didn’t I try this in 1996 with I Survived Caracas Traffic? I guess it didn’t occur to me, or else there weren’t all these Internet resources back then. I can no longer remember what the Web was like four years ago.

I think I did send out some emails in 1996, but there may not have been an Amazon.com back then – though it now seems as if Amazon.com has been around for years.

Anyway, as long as I don’t get obsessed with collecting people’s addresses, I doubt if I’m doing much harm. If I can get some opinion-makers or taste-makers to notice the title, that alone would help.

Denise told me she thought the title was brilliant. Maybe a writer could even do a story on how it’s not really a diet book after all. (Well, not really.)

Last night I conked out early, and in a deep sleep I had several vibrant dreams.

Towards morning I dreamed about visiting my parents in Apache Junction – but this suburb looked like an idyllic New Urbanism development, with attached row houses close to the sidewalk, people all around, lots of stores nearby on the street rather than in distant strip malls, and above the house was a newly-constructed light rail system.

If only Apache Junction actually looked like that Eden.

In an earlier dream, I was feeling blue, sitting dejectedly on the grass in a public park when a woman on a bicycle stopped to chat. We flirted, and it turned out she knew who I was, so we talked more, kissed and made out pleasantly.

I’ve been home since noon reading the Times and the Contemporary Literary Criticism essays on Edwidge Danticat’s work.

It’s funny that she and Junot Diaz came to this country as kids when I was already around 30 and living in Florida after my first book was published, with other books about to come out. Now I’m teaching these writers. That makes me feel so old.

But in another way, I feel I wasn’t quite a grownup in 1981. In a lot of ways my adolescence was so prolonged that I was still a kid at 30.

When I look back on my relationship with Sean, I think of both of us being kids – even though he was an 18-year-old high school senior and I was a 31-year-old community college teacher.

When I woke up this morning, my back felt really tight, and it remained so most of the day. I had to use the ice pack on my foot as well.

It’s like my body keeps telling me, “Hey, you ain’t no kid no more!”

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Tuesday, November 30, 1999

7 PM. Tomorrow is December, and the first chilly weather of the season is scheduled to arrive with a cold front this evening. Temperatures will drop into the 50°s.

Last evening’s class went all right, though I was dealing with the usual attendance problem with my students. There were absences due to a difficult pregnancy, a wedding (a woman in the class is marrying one of the Boca firefighters that I taught last fall), a business trip, kids needing to be picked up at the airport, etc.

A teacher of adult students has to be flexible in the way that a teacher of teenagers does not.

I did my lecture on slavery and the Constitution, ending with the Dred Scott decision and Lincoln’s election. Next week the research papers are due, and I’ll go over the effects of the Civil War on the Constitution, and not just in the form of the Reconstruction Amendments.

But I’ve already given out the take-home final exam, and the term will effectively be over except for the grading that I’ll do the next day.

Chauncey said that he was disappointed I couldn’t meet him for lunch and suggested I call him after the Key West Literary Festival ends in late January.

Denise told me that David Lehman’s reading and talk is actually on Thursday night and sent me the info on Nick Carbo’s reading at Nova on Saturday.

After class last night, I spent some time in my office before deciding to call it a night. Then, as I was walking across the campus to my car, I noticed a cat ahead of me.

As I got closer, I was stunned because it looked like Baby, the cat Mom fed at the old house. She ran away when I approached her. Of course, there are a ton of what Mom taught me are called “tuxedo” cats, but somehow I felt certain that it was the same cat.

Could it be possible that she made her way to the Nova campus? The last time I saw Baby was three months ago, and our house is less than three miles away, so I guess it could have been her. There are several feral cats on campus that tend to come out only at night.

Despite the trouble I had getting to sleep, I woke up for good at 5 AM. So I had breakfast at 6 AM, exercised at 7:15 AM, and was in my office at 8:30 AM, feeling kind of foggy.

After grading the late and revised papers quickly, I turned to email.

Sat Darshan said they had a nice Thanksgiving at the ashram. Kiran Kaur is still walking with an unsteady Frankenstein gait, and Gurudaya is exhausted by all her school work as the Phoenix College semester enters its final two weeks.

Sat Darshan has tentatively planned to be in India for much of January, and it seems as if Child Protective Services will let Kiran go with her. (“It was weird filling out the form and saying she had no mother and father.” Technically the baby is a ward of the state of Arizona.)

Tonight’s reading by Tom at Tulane clashes with another event on campus, a talk by Spike Lee. Tom was pissed because his event didn’t make the paper. But I told him that my Lexis/Nexis clipping service caught a Times-Picayune listing for it.

Salisbury State had to cancel Tom’s beloved Short Novels class in the spring semester because of under-registration. But 122 (!) students registered for his Horror Film class, and the dean said she’ll consider it two classes if he lets 80 of them in and will pay him an extra $2500 if he allows all 122 students to stay.

So this spring Tom will be teaching The Horror Film on Monday nights and Poetry Writing on Wednesday night for $17,500 – about what I made for teaching ten classes all last academic year as an adjunct at Nova.

Magazines are continuing to take Tom’s writing, including his recent essay on Run, Lola Run.

In the office, I could hear Charles Zeldin talking on the phone next door. It sounded as if he’s trying to manipulate things so that the protégé of one of his buddies will get the permanent Legal Studies position to replace Lester. That’s fine with me, as I know they want someone with a Ph.D. in History, so I’d never get the job beyond this year.

My afternoon class went fine, although our discussion of Breath, Eyes, Memory seemed a bit dull. It was probably my fault, though I don’t have that many talkers in the class; some of the best writers never say anything. I also showed a bit of the video, A Haitian Pilgrimage, and now I’m not certain what to do in Thursday’s class although I have a few ideas.

After I collected the late papers and I dismissed the class at 3:15 PM, Tim, the Thai kid, chatted with me for about 20 minutes.

Tim said that he and his Chinese roommate went to Boston and New York City for the first time over the long weekend. They stayed in Chinatown in each city, and Tim saw lots of stuff and caught cold in the rain at the Macy’s Day Parade. (You can tell I’m a New Yorker: “Macy’s Day Parade.”)

Tim told me he came here three years ago as a high school exchange student, and stayed in Dallas (“too dry and cold in the winter”) with an American couple. The husband was Vietnamese and the wife was Cambodian, so Tim ate lots of “traditional Asian food.”

He’s now working in a local Thai restaurant (“not traditional food”). Things are still very bad in Bangkok, and he’s thinking about staying here. As a computer science major, he might have an easier chance getting a visa.

I can’t tell if Tim is gay or not, but of course I’ve got a crush on him that I’ll have to suppress.

Although I’m tired now, I think I’m gonna go back to school and hang out at my office for a while.