Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Tuesday, November 16, 1999

9 PM. Last evening’s class went okay.

I let the students talk me into giving them a take-home final as well as a take-home midterm. That means that having done Chapter 6 on Judicial Review and State Sovereignty last evening, I can do a chapter a week over the next four Mondays and not rush, though I’ll have to teach on the final evening.

Two of my students already took the course with Lester last fall, but they want a better grade so they can bring up their GPA for law school. I’d forgotten that these days students commonly retake classes they’ve already passed with grades that were too low for them.

During the break, I spoke with Dave Merrikan. He was a merchant seaman for 30 years and went all over the world. Only after he retired did his union call him back to Davie to take over the position of executive director.

His job sounds interesting, and he’s going to college only now because this is the first time in his life he’s been in one place long enough.

Several students didn’t show up last evening, and like today, I got the usual excuses, which are probably true: sick baby, no transportation, play rehearsal, “swamped with work,” etc.

Still, my lecture and discussion went fairly well, and I felt good when I got home at 9:45 PM after I went to my office to email Sat Darshan and that guy Lynn.

I finally stopped hearing from Travis in Charlotte and I don’t know what to write back to Vish yet. But that’s all right with me. I haven’t met a guy online that I really clicked with – except Jaime, and now that we know he’s not interested, I’ll give him breathing room.

Last night’s sleep wasn’t all that restful but I felt alert enough to get through the day with no trouble.

At my office for a couple of hours this morning, I read all the articles on Junot Diaz I got from Westlaw newspapers, and I felt prepared enough in class this afternoon. Although only about a third of the kids talk, we managed to have a decent class.

A few of my students seemed to relate to Diaz’s raw scenes of barrio life, and we had side discussions on the Latin “boom” in American pop culture. I was surprised, though, that they hadn’t heard the terms Generation Ñ or even Generation X and weren’t familiar with right-wing resentment of Spanish speakers and moves to make English the “official language.”

Well, I can’t speak for my students, but at least I’m getting something out of the class.

I finally got to iUniverse.com today and the Authors Guild’s Backinprint.com program; until now, I’d avoided paying attention to the notices I’d received for authors with out-of-print books.

If I register With Hitler in New York with Backinprint.com by the end of the year, I can avoid paying an upfront fee to have the book reprinted on demand as a trade paperback.

It’s complicated, and I have to send them two books, a letter from Taplinger or its successor stating that the book’s rights have reverted back to me, and other stuff before they will do the work in printing up copies as needed and selling them online.

Is it worth it? Right now I don’t think I have anything to lose, but I’ll see what I get from having submitted the initial form to the Authors Guild.

Sat Darshan wrote that Kiran Kaur is better but that she caught the baby’s cold and feels awful. She also emailed a nice photo of Ravinder (“Papaji”) and Kiran that a friend took at the gurdwara.

Mom sent me Arizona Republic articles she thinks I’ll be interested in – like an East Valley section, “News From Home,” which is obviously for snowbirds from Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Alberta, Manitoba, etc. (and also from some state in Mexico).

On the other side of the page were the obituaries. Mom had underlined the birth places of all the dead and wrote across the top: “Hardly anyone was born in Arizona.” Now there’s a title.

Since Chauncey is not going to meet me for lunch downtown tomorrow, I decided to stop at the BCC-South Regional Library after dinner.

I picked out four Latino anthologies and four videos, and I’ll try to figure out what to use for class on Thursday.

Although I’m tired now, it’s a nice feeling to know that except for my office hours, I don’t really have to do anything tomorrow.

Next week at this time, the week will be over because of Thanksgiving. Even better.

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Wednesday, November 17, 1999

7 PM. Last night I watched El Super, a 1979 film in Spanish about a winter in the life of a Cuban exile who works as a super in Manhattan.

It’s worth showing the class, but tomorrow I’ve got a couple of ethnic videos on Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, and I’ve xeroxed copies of prose by Judy Ortiz Cofer and Nash Candelaria from the Growing Up Latino anthology I got at the library.

So I’ll return El Super to the South Regional Library and hope it’s still there for next Tuesday’s class.

This morning I woke up earlier than I should have, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. An hour after breakfast at 7 AM, I did a Tae Bo workout, which is more aerobic than what I’m used to but still not really challenging enough. I can tell because I wasn’t huffing and puffing or drenched in sweat afterwards.

Just before 10 AM, I got my car out of the parking lot just before they were going to begin blacktopping – apparently I was the only person who didn’t get a notice – and went to school.

On campus they’d set up booths to give away free stuff, so I got seven little boxes of Kellogg’s new Raisin Bran Crunch cereal, a message board and some coupons for other products.

Maria came into my office to complain about WT and how he has been driving them crazy trying to change the mail system and so many other things since he came here.

It’s interesting how I seem to be totally oblivious to all the tensions within the Liberal Arts Division. But that’s the great advantage of being a temporary employee as a visiting professor.

I was flattered when one of my evening students from last term came by to tell me he’s taking me again in the winter. He expressed disappointment that I’m not going to stay on beyond this academic year.

Lynn in Minneapolis sent a short email. While he seems sweet, I don’t think our emails will lead anywhere. I’ve discovered that online “relationships” can’t sustain the original intensity of the getting-to-know-you phase. Also, Lynn hasn’t sent me a photo, which is definitely a red flag.

For the first time in months, I checked on Justin Clouse’s online diary, which he’s moved to a new site, justinslife.com. I’m more impressed with his writing than ever, even (or specially) when he describes cleaning up his and Larry’s baby son’s vomit.

Justin really would like to have a book published, and I wrote him an encouraging letter which of course ended up with my going on in too much detail about the state of book publishing and our literary culture. (“It’s prof’s disease,” I told him.)

Sean Wilentz had a Times op-ed piece On the swing of the pendulum back to liberalism, but I wonder if he’s not just engaging in wishful thinking.

Perhaps it’s the flush economic times, but the turn away from the extremes of the Reaganite Right may be nothing more than a momentary blip. I’d like to see more signs than are currently evident to believe that American politics are moving leftward.

I called Libby, who was sick with a virus – she has respiratory and digestive symptoms – that she probably picked up while being a volunteer at Wyatt’s elementary school, though the kids haven’t caught it yet.

The garage-to-room renovation is going well, Libby reported, and she urged me to think more about moving to Los Angeles. I’m tempted.

In today’s mail, I got something I’d sent away for in response to a query about a teaching position in the DeAnza-Foothill Community College District, schools I know from my stay in Silicon Valley. (I had stories in their literary magazine Foothill Quarterly back in the ‘70s.)

But I’m not going to get hired as a composition teacher, and I don’t really want to teach freshman English anymore.

By now I’m not really qualified to teach comp because I have no theory classes beyond what I learned from Lucy Calkins at Teachers College, and last year at Nova, I still taught writing the old-fashioned way.

Now I when I pass writing classrooms on campus, all I see are teachers having small group workshops and individual conferences with students.

At this point I almost think that if I’m going to move to California or Arizona, I should just do it and then try to find a job once I’m there.

I told Libby that I would like to visit Los Angeles sometime in 2000 using my frequent flyer mileage.

If I can get into Villa Montalvo again – and I should know by the end of the year – I’ll definitely go to L.A., of course.

Not only are Libby and Grant and their kids there, but so is Kevin. Red Hen Press is located there, too – not that Kate Gale has been anything but distant.

At Barnes & Noble this afternoon, I began taking down the email addresses of contributors to City Link, and later, back in the office, I got about 40 names of reviewers of Amazon.com books of gay anthologies and works of authors like David Leavitt and James Earl Hardy.

I got an email from Denise Duhamel, who was surprised that I was living in South Florida. She asked if I’ll be at the book fair this weekend, but also said that David Lehman is reading at FIU on December 1 and her husband Nick is reading in Fort Lauderdale on December 4. I’d like to go to those readings.

Igor emailed that the Rush-Ins will be doing their own reading at Tobacco Road, the Miami bar where Vicki and Elisa read – but I have the excuse that I teach on Monday nights.

Denise mentioned that Rick and Margaret are expecting “a bambino.” Good for them.

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Friday, November 19, 1999

6 PM. In a little while I’m going over to Fred Searcy’s house in Fort Lauderdale. I’d much prefer to be staying home and getting some grading or school reading done, but there it is.

Last night I didn’t sleep all that well, considering that I should have been relaxed. However, when I was awake, I didn’t feel like reading Breath, Eyes, Memory, which I’d like to complete this weekend so that I can go on to Mukherjee’s Jasmine and the remaining chapters in the Constitutional History text.

My dental appointment was at 9:45 AM and I didn’t get out for over an hour. The dentist filled a deep cavity in an upper tooth, and of course with Novocain I felt no pain except when I got the $95 bill.

Now that my cavities are done, I can get the crown on the broken tooth that caused me to go to the dentist in the first place. But because next week is out, and the procedure requires two appointments two weeks apart, I won’t be going back until January 6, 2000.

Which reminds me: On the radio today, I heard that today’s date, 11/19/1999, is the last day in that format to be expressed solely in odd digits until New Year’s Day in the year 3111 (1/1/3111).

As Y2K approaches, we’re starting to hear more about it; I think NBC has a what-if disaster movie coming up this weekend.

I’m always glad when we get past New Year’s Eve, and I just want it to be January already.

My lunch date with Jesse Monteagudo was at 12:30 PM at the Nova cafeteria. He looked just like his TWN column photo: a portly but youthful guy of about 50, I guess.

I had only a Diet Pepsi and frozen nonfat yogurt because I’d already eaten. Unfortunately, there was a loud DJ for the benefit of the students, so we had to talk loudly – but after 15 minutes, we walked over to the law school and chatted most of the time there.

I tried not to speak too much about myself and asked him questions. Jesse got started writing for TWN when the gay weekly began “during the Anita Bryant debacle in 1977” – and when the referendum furor died down, the paper needed more copy and he began writing on books and other issues.

Jesse hasn’t had a book published, though he’s in over 20 anthologies, and an agent told him his erotic fiction is better than his other fiction.

He dismissed his legal secretary position at Nova as “just a day job,” but in answer to my question, said he’d worked at Nova for 18 years.

It’s kind of hard for me to understand someone could work so long at something they consider “just a day job,” although I realized I’m weird enough in the gay community so the guys I meet online like Travis and Lynn say, “Oh, you’re so ambitious,” when I’m anything but.

Jesse told me that my being seen as a gay writer will have advantages and disadvantages, but he didn’t say anything I’m not already aware of.

Already – just when I’m barely beginning to think about marketing The Silicon Valley Diet as a gay book – I’m rebelling against being pigeonholed. But my whole life has been a struggle between writing to be recognized and not wishing to be categorized.

My talk with Jesse depressed me because he made me see that I’m still deluding myself that my book is unique when all it is, is just another commodity.

Rick sent me a piece on the death of Paul Bowles in Tangier, and when I read the long Times obituary later, I realized that I relate to Bowles’s doing different things (composing music, writing fiction) and his restlessness and rootlessness.

Of course, he had Jane Bowles as his wife (even if they were both gay) and his home in Morocco to give him stability.

Still, Bowles’s idea that life’s purpose is enjoyment, his varieties of experience and his reticence seemed to indicate he knew what he was doing.

When I see guys like Jesse who are basically professional homosexuals – every time we discussed literature, he could only see the gay angle (I talked about Manuel Puig’s narrative technique; he talked how he related to Betrayed by Rita Hayworth as a gay man growing up in the fantasy world of film) – I have trouble relating.

Back in my office after I leaving Jesse, I chatted with Suellen and Denise, an older woman in my evening class, who explained why she’s a Legal Assistant Studies major and not a Legal Studies major: she can get a job much more easily as a paralegal and start making money as soon as she graduates.

I guess that’s just common sense for someone who isn’t as delusional as I’ve always been.

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Saturday, November 20, 1999

7 PM. I had a nice time at Fred’s last evening. He has a pleasant little house in a neighborhood near the New River. I just hope that, like Jesse, he didn’t take offense that I didn’t join him in his meal. But even if he wasn’t eating pork chops, I wouldn’t have eaten anything.

We chatted about Broward Community College, Nova, his experiences in Montana working for the Bureau of Land Management, his impressions of San Francisco, his Mississippi upbringing, gay politics and other stuff.

Although Fred seems to like teaching science classes at BCC, he says he will retire in 11 years at his first opportunity. It surprised me that he gets students in his biology classes for whom his teaching of evolution is offensive; they come out of the Christian academies, Fred says.

He told me that the librarians on the board of directors at the Stonewall Library and Archives don’t want to get rid of the kiddie porn, so they’ll probably just put it in a “restricted” box. Fred said what they’ve seen so far is not horrendous: mostly kids who look 13 or 14 and may actually be older.

Leaving Fred’s around 10 PM, I drove back home via Davie Boulevard/Peters Road and stopped to get groceries at Albertsons, where I saw two different Nova students of mine.

Back home, I fell asleep fairly quickly and had a good rest. My last dream of the night was about Sean, and although it wasn’t erotic – he was walking around Philadelphia with me – it made me feel all warm and fuzzy. I will always have good feelings about Sean.

At 9 AM, I left the house after exercising and looking at the Times. Just as I’m moving from Juno Diaz’s book to Edwidge Danticat’s, the two authors had a joint op-ed today, decrying Dominican expulsions of Haitian sugar cane workers. Naturally I made copies of the article from the Web and will hand them out to my Core Studies students.

At Barnes & Noble, I graded only about ten papers; I have a dozen to go, but I just couldn’t get myself to do any more. Instead, I got out copies of The Advocate, Out, and Paper from the magazine rack and combed through them for email addresses and names of writers and critics.

At the office, I went on Yahoo’s people search and Lexis’s Assets property files to find either house or email addresses for my mailing lists. Perhaps it is foolish to spend so much time on this, but it’s fun. I guess it’s market research and promotion for dummies.

Richard Kostelanetz finally got online and emailed me, asking if I thought he could find a garage or loft with 2500 square feet in the Rockaways.

“The time has come for me to leave SoHo,” he said, though I’m not sure why he has to sell his Wooster Street place. In any case, I suggested Carl Karpoff or his mother Marilyn as a good Rockaway real estate agent.

I also got a brief note from Lynn, and a guy in Puerto Rico, a Buddhist professor, answered my Planet Out ad.

I wrote Tom but otherwise let my old email sit in the mailbox.

Home at 1:30 PM, I had lunch and read the paper. Then, a couple of hours later, I drove down downtown and got El Super at the main library and thought I could find the Sunday Times at Borders on Sunrise Boulevard, but it wasn’t in.

I guess it’s just as well, as I have to grade a dozen papers and prepare for Monday night’s Constitutional History I class.

There’s a lot of media coverage (NPR, New York Times, etc.) given to the ABC mega-hit Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (no question mark), a rather simplistic formula quiz show. Even after all these years of economic boom, people apparently still love the idea of getting richer.

I keep thinking the wretched excess of our Millennium Gilded Age can’t get any worse, yet it keeps doing so.

Some people think our current turn away from the hard right to George W, Bush’s “compassionate conservativism” and even some stirrings of the L-word are only a result of our current economic prosperity.

It’s scary to think that people could get even meaner to poor people if the economy goes into a downturn. I guess it’s wishful thinking on my part to hope that a new economic depression would bring back New Deal-style politics.