Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Tuesday, July 11, 2000

10 PM. Today was a perfect day. It turned drier and cooler, with a high of about 83°, and it was delightfully sunny and mild.

After I finished exercising at 7:30 AM, I had breakfast with Teresa and was ready to leave the house by 9:15 AM.

Earlier, I’d called Florida Unemployment and applied for my weekly benefits, and by the end of the day a check for $275 was issued in Tallahassee, so I assume last week was my waiting week on the new claim because the old benefit year expired and the new one began on July 4.

We’ll see what happens, but at least I’m getting something. The last check, for $450, got deposited in my checking account, and I have enough funds to get me through the month.

I decided to risk driving into Brooklyn instead of taking the train, and I’m glad I did, even though I feared having a breakdown or getting into an accident.

Duplicating last week’s drive into the borough, I took Glen Cove Road down to the Meadowbrook and then to the Southern State and Belt Parkway, but then I remembered that I could get off at Conduit Avenue and drive via Atlantic Avenue to downtown Brooklyn – the way Grandpa Herb used to go from Rockaway to the Slack Bar on Fulton Street.

Taking Flatbush Avenue down to Seventh Avenue, I sat in my car until 11 AM, when alternate parking ended.

Justin was glad to see me. He’s looking good, with a trimmed goatee, even though he’s gotten fatter and is beginning to resemble that type: the big-bellied, bearded Jewish guy who could be anything from a successful screenwriter to a schlump.

Justin and Larry’s apartment is even more cluttered with tchotchkes, but hey, I don’t have to live there. It’s rent-stabilized, and even though they are getting a big increase this year, it’s still a good deal and the only way they can stay in New York on their earnings.

We sat in the apartment and went out to that Italian restaurant on Seventh off Garfield whose name keeps changing and then took a walk down Seventh Avenue to Ninth Street before returning to sit in Justin’s place till 2 PM.

So I got to talk with him a lot. He’s in a much better frame of mind than he was last year, and his life seems okay in every way except financially.

But for Justin, with his upbringing and his wealthy siblings, financial success was always important in a way it never has been for me.

Aside from his money problems, Justin shares some of my frustrations: he knows his plays are just as good, if not better, than the plays that get hyped and make money. But despite many little successes in getting his plays produced – and in being a director – Justin has not had that big break, and the younger people who run New York’s current hole-in-the-wall theaters look at his résumé and draw blanks when they see he worked for theater world giants like Alexander H. Cohen and Flora Roberts, who both died this year.

Like me, Justin now has twenty years of experience, and he feels he writes and directs better than ever – “but it’s like a well-guarded secret.” People would like his stuff if only they could see it. Sound familiar?

Justin criticized me for viewing what he called my “career” as a hobby, and says I’m too cynical and pessimistic, that my accumulated publishing credits over two decades really mean something now.

Who knows? As I told Justin, I don’t believe that my “big break” or “breakout” will ever happen and I’ll just keep accumulating a publication or a review or a grant here and there, enough to keep me going but not enough to do me any practical good.

I don’t see either of us breaking out into the mainstream. For one thing, we’re older in a youth-oriented, winner-take-all world. But by the time I hugged Justin goodbye, I was glad I saw him today.

I went on to check out parts of Brooklyn and Rockaway, driving across Eastern Parkway, down Utica Avenue and over the Marine Parkway Bridge – under heavy-duty renovation, so much so that the speed limit on one narrow lane is 20 mph.

I felt the ocean breezes as I drove along Beach Channel Drive past Neponsit, Belle Harbor, Beach 116th Street and Dayton Towers West and East, through the gritty portions of Arverne, Edgemere and Far Rock and heading, via Sheridan Boulevard and Burnside Avenues, into the Five Towns.

I stopped on Central Avenue in Cedarhurst for Zen iced tea at Starbucks among the Orthodox Jews and West Indians, then went home through Woodmere, Lynbrook and Hempstead past Hofstra University and the Nassau Coliseum.

Getting back on and off the Meadowbrook, I ended up in heavy construction and bumper-to-bumper traffic on Glen Cove Road. At the Wendy’s on Glen Street, I had my usual baked potato and Diet Coke as I finished the main section of the New York Times.

Back home, I had a family evening with Paul and Teresa. I do feel very much a part of their family now that they’re both home and nobody else is here. I’m included in the discussions and stay out of their bickering, and after Paul goes to bed, I hang out with Teresa as she goes online or does chores.

And I can make myself useful here, going out for shopping items they want and watching Ollie and Phoebe, feeding and walking them.

On Thursday Teresa and Paul are going to Barbara’s Jersey Shore beach house on Long Beach Island. She shares it not just with her son but with John, the same guy she started seeing a month or so after Stewart died.

He’s a blue-collar guy and very nice and good to her, and she needs a man – unlike Teresa, who said, “if I were in Barbara’s place, I’d be happy just being a rich widow. I have no desire ever to get married again.”

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Saturday, July 15, 2000

10 PM. Teresa and Paul came home late last night, after I’d spent the evening reading old issues of New York magazine and watching Big Brother (getting more interesting now that two people are nominated for “banishment”; the audience will vote on who gets the boot), and patting Ollie and especially Phoebe, who is as affectionate as she is difficult.

Once I didn’t have to worry about the dogs, I came down to the damp basement and slept comfortably in the new Martha Stewart everyday twin sheet set I bought at Kmart yesterday to make up for the mismatched sheets I accidentally ink-stained in the washing machine.

It was raining very hard this morning and cool enough so that I wore long pants and my sweatshirt today. Teresa and Paul were going out to Mattituck despite the creepy weather, but I left earlier, at 10 AM, on the train to Manhattan.

While I told Teresa I was going to meet Josh when she asked who I was seeing, of course I knew that I’d be alone today – but Teresa probably couldn’t relate to that.

It actually was a good day to be in Manhattan, and better than sitting in the house. The train was delayed, but at Penn Station, I took the IRT local up to 116th Street and surfaced outside Columbia.

Stupidly, I went into a new place called Tealuxe across the street, and instead of just ordering my iced tea at the counter, I wasted money by blowing it on a mesclun salad too drenched in oil for me to eat. I’m getting fat enough from all the dining out here.

Yesterday, for the second time this week, I paid 25¢ at Genovese Drugs to weigh myself and found the scale had me at 151 pounds. Today when I thought I might be late for the train, I got out of breath when I ran for it.

So I’m going to have to be stricter about my diet, and more importantly, increase my aerobic capacity by exercising more. The simple body-strengthening I do isn’t enough. Well, I’ve got a lot of plans once I get back to Arizona and settle in.

I got on the M104 bus and took it all the way to Fifth and 42nd, a slow journey down 75 blocks of Broadway in the rain that let me experience the changes in Manhattan since I last lived on the Upper West Side and since my more recent visits.

These changes are big – like the new building taking up the Symphony Space block (all around the theater) or the usual new stores replacing old ones, like the organic food store taking over the old Burger King’s space at 82nd (“Goodbye, flame broiled; Hello, free range”).

The Upper West Side still has the magic that made living there so exciting, but if anything, the affluence of the late Reagan years has given way to an unbelievable atmosphere of reckless spending.

I’m glad to see that the Coliseum is finally being torn down, and the plan for the building at Columbus Circle looks like a good one.

But the Times Square area (now extending to maybe 53rd Street) is so much like Tokyo’s shiny Ginza with all the neon signs and video displays, theme restaurants, tourist traps, MTV, Conde Nast, etc., that I missed the anonymous scuzziness of the area in the mid-1980s.

To me, it’s sort of like South Beach being nicer during the early, Barbara Capitman stages of its revival when walking around the area was still a bit dicey.

The average price for a Manhattan co-op is edging up to $1 million, and I’m sure that Scott and M.J. paid more than that for their East 87th Street apartment.

In front of the main library, I got the Fifth Avenue bus down to the Empire State Building and then I transferred to the Q32 for the two blocks to its terminus at Penn Station. Having wasted $10 at Tealuxe, I didn’t want to spend any money except what I already had stored on my MetroCard.

It finally stopped raining by the time I got back to Locust Valley at 3:40 PM, and after a light dinner, I went out again, to the Glen Cove Starbucks for the iced tea I should have gotten in Manhattan, where there’s now a Starbucks every few blocks.

I read tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine issue with the final installment of the paper’s amazing series on Race in America. I regret that with Gianni in Spain, I really don’t have a single black friend in the United states anymore. I know ASU won’t be as diverse as Nova, but I hope it isn’t all white.

Time and time again the Times race series brought tears to my eyes as I read about horrible but subtle discrimination or people managing to bridge the racial chasm.

Looking out from the window of Starbucks on School Street, I saw a table of Gen Y kids, two white and three black, and an Asian boy waiting for his Latino friend in front of the movies, and that made me feel good.

I know I haven’t shaken my racial prejudices, but I am conscious of the privileges I have as a white male in the U.S. – the most important privilege being not having to think about race because I am the majority and the norm among people in power in a country where white guys are the CEOs, presidential candidates and most professionals.

So today turned out to be a good day: I treated myself well and was rewarded.

If I am to age successfully, then I have to develop patterns that will get me through the next ten, twenty or thirty years.

My personal goal (God, this sounds so how-to-ish) is to deal with accepting myself as a man of 50 by next June. I need to avoid despair, depression, self-pity and excessive nostalgia.

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Monday, July 17, 2000

10 PM. Up at 6:30 AM, I exercised at 7 AM but missed the 8:26 AM train to the city by a few minutes.

I should have simply returned home and gone back for the next train, but instead I spent the next hour driving to Port Washington and back, unable to find parking at the train station there.

The 9:37 AM got me into Penn Station at 10:50 AM, and I took the IRT to Times Square, where I transferred to the 7 train to Fifth Avenue.

Buying some Poland Spring Water, I sat on the steps of the library between the lions and near one of the fiberglass cows that are adding whimsy all over the city. There I had my English muffin, cheese and onion sandwich from home.

The Mid-Manhattan Library didn’t have the July 2 Chicago Tribune; I’d wanted to see my book listed in “New in Paperback,” but it’s no biggie, and I took the Fifth Avenue bus down to Alice’s.

She wanted me to help her with some tasks in CompuServe email, and once again I realized how dumb Alice is about computers; she’s almost defiant about refusing to learn more than she needs to.

We again ate at the outdoor café in Union Square Park – I think its actual name is The Pavilion – and this time I ordered only a green salad.

Alice’s one prestige new book, Deborah Rudacille’s The Scalpel and the Butterfly, on animal research, from Farrar, Straus, got a good review in Kirkus. But Alice had to ask me about Kirkus’s predilections as her other books, like the just-released What to Do When You’re Dating a Jew, don’t ever get reviewed there.

Alice thought D.T. Max’s piece on E-books and print-on-demand publishers was depressing because so many people want to be authors. But she can see that every day when she gets a huge batch of mail from would-be authors looking for an agent.

Alice feels that some of her clients would be happy just to be published and don’t care that much about the money. I raised myself as a case in point but noted that I consider writing a kind of hobby.

She said that Peter said the same thing years ago about the plays he wrote. I purposely misquoted Dr. Johnson as saying, “Only a blockhead ever wrote for money.”

Back in the apartment, Alice gave me all the rejection letters for the Spaghetti Language manuscript, which were about what I expected, from the typical “I didn’t fall in love with this” (in three separate letters) to nice comments about my work with doubts about the number of copies I could sell.

Others said that my work pales next to that of David Foster Wallace or Mark Leyner. I guess my books really belong in the small presses – but that’s because publishing economics have changed, and it’s not the 1920s or the 1950s and now it’s all winner-take-all, with no midlist writers or “minor talents” anymore.

While Alice expressed regret that we didn’t see much of each other while I was here, I said that it was all quality time and that I know how her life has been constrained by her devotion to Andreas, who, after all, is dying.

Alice said that Andreas is now down to 117 pounds. She has to make plans and then cancel them, but I can see that she knows in her heart that Andreas won’t be around that much longer.

While she loves the time she spends with him, it’s also a nightmare for her, and I hope for her sake and for Andreas’s that it will all be over by fall.

After giving Alice a big hug and telling her to come to Phoenix this winter, I took the Sixth Avenue bus to Penn Station, passing the big box stores in the teens and early 20s and also some new construction of luxury buildings on Sixth.

Back in Locust Valley at 3:45 PM, I did laundry, dealt with the mail forwarded from Arizona, and after dinner chatted for an hour with Paul, who tells good stories about the local superrich, whether it’s CA’s Charles Wang (and I got Paul’s inside story of the lumber yard sale to Wang) or Charles Dolan of Cablevision.

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Tuesday, July 18, 2000

10 PM. Today was a wonderful day.

Although it’s been humid and warm – I’ve been emptying out the dehumidifier water every day – it hasn’t been oppressive, and it’s supposed to get cooler and drier tomorrow.

Mark came over at noon and left after 8 PM, and I greatly enjoyed his company; He said he had a good time as well.

I may not have been able to see friends as much as I would have liked, but the time spent with them have been excellent adventures.

Alice is still on Fire Island. Tonight is the fire chiefs’ dinner she was counting on as a favor to the all-volunteer Fair Harbor Fire Department, which is hosting the event for all the Suffolk County fire chiefs.

Anyway, Mark and I hung around the house for a while and then I drove us to say acid for lunch at Empire Szechuan in Syosset, where I knew I could get steamed mixed vegetables on their gargantuan Chinese/Japanese/Thai menu.

Afterwards, forgetting that I was on Jericho Turnpike rather than Northern Boulevard, I kept getting lost – though I enjoyed the adventure as I discovered that I could go from Roslyn to Port Washington by hugging the shore.

Back on Northern Boulevard, I took Mark to the Nassau County Museum of Art, which is on the estate owned in succession by William Cullen Bryant and Henry Clay Frick.

I had always been curious about the place and it turned out to be a nice little museum, with sculptures all over the grounds and some neat exhibits inside.

The larger one, “Dance, Dance, Dance” featured mostly nineteenth and twentieth century artworks dealing with dance. There were Toulouse-Lautrec posters and of course drawings, paintings and sculptures by Degas – but also Mapplethorpe photos, Cubist work by Picasso, some Surrealist work, and a couple of videos.

The contemporary gallery featured an artist whose Boris & Natasha and Pink Panther installations and text-based drawings made me laugh out loud.

And there was also a jewelry exhibit of work from Cartier, Tiffany, etc., sponsored by Fortunoff’s that left me and Mark – not jewelry guys – bored.

Around 5 PM, we went to the Glen Cove Starbucks – Mark had never seen such a rambunctious staff as the crew there – and then we came back here, where we had bean burritos that I made as Paul grilled his dinner chicken.

Most of all, of course, we talked. Mark has a hard time understanding why I’m not interested in settling down with someone.

He enjoyed his freedom soon after his divorce because he had never before lived alone. But it soon grew tiresome, and he’d be much happier if he were married to share “the little events of the day” with someone else.

He’s had two dates with Janet, the woman from the Sierra Club hike, and he hopes that something will come of it, though she herself is not legally divorced yet.

As we were relating our Internet dating experiences, it hit me that this fall I’ll be so busy with teaching and being a graduate student that it will probably be like the fall of 1997, when I was teaching at FAU and Nova. At the end of that term, I did meet Gianni, but before that, I was always too occupied.

One thing Mark’s visit did for me was to keep anxiety about Arizona at bay, but I just this moment fretted when I recalled FAU in 1997 and how badly my teaching there went. What if ASU turns out to be a similar experience?

Well, I guess I will decide never to teach there again and I’ll find something else to do – maybe something I’ll enjoy more. But I need to give myself and ASU a chance.

Just as I felt safe at UF Law School and was nervous about leaving my job at CGR three years ago, I’ve now had three years where I’d gotten quite comfortable at Nova. It would have been great if I could have stayed on as a Visiting Professor of Legal Studies for another year, but as always, I’ll make lemonade out of the lemons I’ve been given.

The Friday forecast is for thunderstorms, so I could have another nightmare return trip. But it will be quite a while before I travel again; I expect to remain in Phoenix for close to a year.