Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Sunday, April 23, 2000

7 PM. I slept like a drugged man, probably because my sinuses are so clogged up.

Barnes & Noble didn’t open up until 11 AM because it was Easter – I’ve been exchanging “Happy Easter!” with my neighbors all day – so after I ate breakfast, read a little of the Sunday paper, and went to my office for 45 minutes, I got to the bookstore soon after it opened.

I stayed there for two hours, nursing hot tea and a cup of ice (because the iced tea wasn’t ready). I got through the news, Business and Week in Review sections of the Times. In the afternoon, I hung around the apartment reading, and I got in another light workout.

I’m still figuring out whom to send my Silicon Valley Diet copies to. I want to be stingy with them, as I’d like my friends to buy copies.

Anyway, I ended up sending a copy to Susan Mernit (maybe she can do something for me at Netscape), and other copies went to Alan Cheuse, who reviews books for All Things Considered on NPR, and to Tina Brown, editor of Talk.

I don’t know if I can break the media barrier with my little book. There was no review in today’s Sun-Sentinel, but of course it’s much too soon. It frightens and dismays me that I have this need to have myself validated by reviews.

On the other hand, does my book really exist if nobody can ever find out that it’s been (or is about to be) published?

At 4 PM, I went to Nova for an hour and saw a lot of my present and former students studying for finals – though of course not for mine.

Matt Shelby told me he didn’t get into the law school at University of Florida for the fall, and he intends to try for the spring, when they told him he’ll have a better chance. He had a 3.84 GPA, but his LSAT score was only 154, about the 64th percentile.

In a way, I’m glad to see that my alma mater UF is still difficult to get into. It was the only law school that rejected Matt, but he doesn’t want to go to the University of Tennessee, the University of Georgia or Emory.

I got the first quote on my car transport and it was about $900, less than I expected. This company said I may get lower quotes, but unlike other companies, they are bonded, licensed by the Department of Transportation, and have a good reputation after 14 years in business. I’ll see what the other quotes I get and try to arrange something by the end of this week.

While listening to On the Media on NPR after dinner, I went through my drawers and closets and threw out two garbage bags’ worth of stuff. Once again I’m throwing away everything I have that I don’t really need, and of course, this is only the first cut.

Lots of things seem irreplaceable, but there isn’t much that really is. After all, people have to flee countries with a single suitcase, and they manage.

It’s not as if I’m going to have any biographers who’ll be upset that I’ve thrown away all my letters. And with stuff stored digitally, I don’t need lots of papers.

Monday, April 24, 2000

2 PM. Today I gave my final lecture in Constitutional History II, going over the major trends in constitutional jurisprudence in the past 25 years. It had to be a mere summary, but they’ll get a lot more when they take Political and Civil Liberties.

At least I got past 1937, which is where Lester ends the course. I’ll make up their essay questions tomorrow.

During the day at work, I had several calls and emails and visits from students struggling with even the small research projects I gave them.

Alice answered the email I sent her last week. She’s got bacterial pneumonia and has been too ill to get to the computer until today. The antibiotics she’s on cost a whopping $144. Although her temperature went down, she’s still very tired and achy and she was coughing a lot.

Alice thinks she got the infection either at the New Orleans airport or on the plane coming home because the next day she came down with a fever and body aches and a cough and general malaise.

Unfortunately, Alice says that running her own business means she must get some things done and was forcing herself to work a little today.

She said that Andreas had to go to the hospital. His tumor is growing, and although he is in good spirits, it seems clear to me that he’s dying – and of course Alice is devastated. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some connection between Andreas’s illness and Alice’s, though I didn’t want to ask her about it.

She said I should be okay in Arizona “as long as you don’t go to Apache Junction too much” – and while I know she’s dubious about my plans, Alice is upbeat enough to say that she’s always wanted to visit Phoenix and now she will have a friend there.

Colleen Dougher from City Link called. She’d been out of the office last week and asked me to send her a copy of Diet – which I did this afternoon, along with a lot of my old clippings. Because I haven’t been in the South Florida papers much since the mid-1980s, lots of local media people here either don’t remember me or weren’t living here back then.

Tom emailed, saying that it sounds like I’ve done all the publicity I could in Florida, so maybe it’s time for me to move on to Arizona.

Tom would like to move out of New Orleans, but Motorola hasn’t called Annette about the job in Texas. She doesn’t finish her program until mid-August. Although Tom would prefer to go to Germany, he suspects he will go wherever Annette finds a job.

He did have some good news: Patrick Meanor called to say he sent out the disc of my Dictionary of Literary Biography entry that Tom had sent him and that Tom should be hearing from the DLB editors within the next four months.

I had assumed they dropped my entry, but Meanor told Annette that it’s the best one in the book. So maybe I’ll have that to look forward to. That’s the kind of validation I was speaking of yesterday. I should not need it, but God, it’s nice to be recognized.

Thursday, April 27, 2000

7 PM. Today I arrange to have the Mercury shipped to Phoenix. I’ll drive it to their terminal in Oakland Park on Wednesday, May 17, and pick it up at their terminal on Indian School and 39th Street in Phoenix whenever it gets there.

This company didn’t give me the cheapest quote, but the woman seemed trustworthy and I liked her when I went to see the place this afternoon. I put the $870 on a MasterCard so I don’t have to shell out cash in Arizona. By using a credit card, I also get more protection than I would with cash or a check.

Although I had thought about just selling the car, Marc convinced me that I couldn’t get a comparable car for less than $3,000. While there are no guarantees how long the car will last, it now rides okay and I’ll take my chances.

After all, when Marc and I bought the Chrysler New Yorker for $2200 nearly six years ago, I never imagined that the car would still be running in 2000.

I can drive the Chrysler for the rest of the month and then, just before I go, bring it to one of those places where car dealers give you cash. Whatever I get for it is fine.

When I called to wish Teresa happy birthday, she asked me to come up to New York from May 5-14. Teresa and Paul are taking a week at their St. Martin timeshare on May 6-13 and she needs someone to look after the dogs: Ollie and his new fellow Yorkie. (Hattie would be put in a kennel.)

I’m sorely tempted, but I finally decided I just can’t do it, that it would be too stressful. Any other time this summer, it would be ideal for me to be in Locust Valley.

But there’s too much going on in my life right now and I’d rather not stress myself out any more than I otherwise will. This will be my last time in South Florida while I can always get back to Locust Valley.

Kerry Dolan called and we ended up talking for an hour. She’s going to Ucross a week from Monday and wanted to be briefed on all aspects of the colony from living, working and eating arrangements to the kind of weather she needs to dress for.

Although Kerry is much younger than I am, she’s probably been to more colonies than I have. She continues to publish in literary magazines.

Of all the writers I was at Ragdale with, I don’t know if any of them – Kerry, David, Matt Iribarne and the others – have published new books, though I guess I would know only if I read about them in the Times Book Review or another big periodical.

At least I give the colonies a credit in my new book, just as I did my Florida fellowships in Eating at Arby’s (and Diet) – and both the Florida fellowship and the NYSCA grant got thanks in my chapbooks The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was and Narcissism and Me. I don’t get guys like Pete Cherches or George Myers, who use their grant money to invest in stocks or renovate the kitchen.

Kerry naively asked how I could be leaving Florida when I’m so “known in the literary community there.”

Yeah, right. Even in Gainesville, nobody knew I was a writer except Christy Sheffield Sanford.

Friday, April 28, 2000

9 PM. Last night I went to my office and discovered that Red Hen Press has its own website apart from the one for Valentine Publishing Group. I used the page about my book as the basis of a draft of an email, adding biographical info and other stuff.

I do feel somewhat like Red Hen Press’s stepchild since new and forthcoming books by Stephen Dixon, Deena Metzger and others more famous than I are all illustrated with covers or photos or have biographical information.

Anyway, I spent several hours trying to figure out the best way to do a mass emailing. Yahoo makes it difficult because it wants to avoid spamming, so I had to place checkmarks under “blind carbon copy” to each sheet of 25 email addresses, and I could never mail it out to more than 25 addresses at one time.

There were other logistical problems, but I got out 200 last night, and all day today I was a mouse potato, doing another 1700 names. For reasons too complicated to go into, the easiest thing to do was delete the names from the address book soon after I’d done the mailings.

Imagine if I hadn’t lost so many names. And of course even a lot of the ones I did send out came back “failed delivery,” “unknown user,” or with some other problem.

Some people asked to be removed from the list or wondered how I got their names, but two people wanted to see a review copy.

I did so much emailing that I found myself dreaming about the procedure during the five hours I slept last night.

At Nova, I handed in my grades to Ben. I’m sure the Liberal Arts Division will be glad to get rid of me, but I plan on using my office for as long as I can, if only to use their computer and Internet access.

Sally at iUniverse told me that my office computer has the Melissa virus. Apparently Rick Peabody passed it along to everyone he mass-emailed. But since I didn’t send out my attachments to anyone except to iUniverse, I’m not in danger of infecting anyone else.

Mom called to say that Marc was back at the doctor taking more tests. Everything before came up negative and the doctor suspects it may be a serious virus that’s causing the pain.

Teresa was upset that I can’t come in early May and says she’s now not sure what she’ll do with the dogs. But there was no way I could take that time to be in New York right now. I guess I need to make a reservation for a flight to Phoenix in the next week.

Sunday, April 30, 2000

8 PM. It’s a gorgeous evening. I’ve just come in from shopping at Publix, so I got to experience dusk and its mild breezes. The lakes here at Cameron Cove and the waterfowl are daily sights I will definitely miss. I’ve got four weeks left in South Florida, and if I ever return, it will be as a tourist, so I guess I should try to remember everything.

I didn’t sleep much last night and didn’t get far into the Sunday Times, but I finished my mass mailing of Diet flyers. Last evening I collected the sheets and stuffed them into the #10 envelopes I bought yesterday. Once I could see that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep easily, I resumed my mailing work, addressing envelopes until I ran out of the flyer.

Asleep from 4 AM to 7:30 AM, I felt pretty groggy this morning, but I drove to my office and printed out the redhen.org website. Surprise: they’ve now put the book’s cover on my page.

With a little cutting and pasting, I had a very attractive new flyer. (Here’s another time being more patient would have benefited me, but who knew?) I used the department photocopier to make 350 copies.

After exercising and showering, I dressed in my royal blue Nova t-shirt and my checked shorts and went to Barnes & Noble, where Michelle got me my usual iced tea and I sat down to read the newspaper.

Robert Lipsyte’s front page story of a high school quarterbacks coming out and the support he got from his teammates and family brought tears to my eyes. (Where else? To my feet? Sometimes I realize what a horrible writer I can be.)

I hadn’t been paying attention to news about today’s Millennium March, but I heard there were about 750,000 people on the Mall in D.C.

One thing that bothers me about my book is that I don’t mean to be cashing in on gay lit now that it’s, if not lucrative, well, it’s a recognized market.

I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a gay writer, either, but I also don’t want to be seen as exploiting a community which, except in Gainesville with No on One and the Human Rights Council (the last time I spent so much time folding, collating and addressing and licking in preparation for a mailing), that I haven’t really been an active part of.

But then, I’m not really a part of any community, am I?

At the bookstore I caught the new issue of Poets & Writers and read Melvin Jules Bukiet’s tale of how he and Denis, with a lot of help and sometimes to their surprise, turn KGB into the hottest literary venue in New York.

Home at 1 PM, I had lunch in between my mailing chores. Finally I decided I simply had to limit the number of people I could send stuff to, and I threw out the hard copy of my mailing list once I passed about 450.

I read a little more, but mostly I worked until 4:30 PM, when I made my second mailbox run of the day. (The last one was this evening in the Publix shopping center.)

At the office for a little while, I wrote short notes to Tom, Mark, Kevin, Sat Darshan and Teresa. I think I’m going to send in my $75 deposit to Ragdale so I can keep the option of going to Chicago for September.

At this point I don’t feel my coming move is that momentous, for I’m just making Phoenix what Patrick calls my “base of operations” and will be elsewhere for much of the next few months, just as I often left South Florida for New York City or writers’ colonies.

Speaking of colonies, I saw in the Times that Matthew Harris has an opera of Tess of the D’Urbervilles ready for production. Good for him.

My energy level has been high all day and I actually feel relaxed and healthy, though I hesitate to write that without a kinahora.