Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  I was away at college that fall and didn’t know exactly what was going on. No one told me and I never asked. When I came home on weekends or holidays Mom acted fine. And she would be my date. I’d usually take her to the latest Bergman film and then we’d stay up late talking all of this real serious talk about loss of faith and wild creeping doubt, and God, and religion. We’d talk about how all of Bergman’s characters had lost touch with God.

  I had brought my own date home from college just once, the year before, and never did it again. I could feel it sort of disturbed Mom. It was difficult for Mom to feel right about having Kathy in the house. Oh, she was polite to her, but she was also uneasy about having her there, and after Kathy left Mom sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a long talk about how important it was to abstain from sexual intercourse before marriage. I can’t remember the reasons she gave. I don’t think there were any, or maybe I didn’t give her a chance to say them. I just said, “But, Mom, what if I never get married?” This response just seemed to confuse her.

  What I couldn’t tell Mom, or anyone for that matter, was that I hadn’t really fucked a woman yet. I’d come in them, but I hadn’t fucked them. “Fuck” was still only a word for me, not an experience. The experience of coming was still like a lame, stifled sneeze.

  I had lost my virginity, not to Kathy but to Pam, and it had been so traumatic that I’d sworn off all sex for a year except for elaborate masturbation, where I could have myself safely. I’d never allowed the animal in me to come up in the presence of a woman. Besides, the only animal in me I’d ever known was the monkey boy spinning on that beach in Mom’s eyes so long ago.

  I had met Pam at a party and picked her up there. We never went home together. We just did it in an empty bedroom at the apartment where the party was. It was all so strange. I remember finding a big damp open place between her legs and then trying to fill it up with my almost numb erection. I was licking her breasts, not because I really wanted to but because for some reason I thought I should do it. And out of the clear blue she said, “What do you think I am, your mother?” and that’s when I came, just like that. I hadn’t been in her two minutes and I shot off and it didn’t feel any different than a sneeze, from my crotch instead of my nose. After it was all over I had no idea what I had lost or what I had gained. I just wanted to get out of there, and I did.

  As the days went by this incredible guilt took over. I had not used any birth control and was sure that I had made Pam pregnant. There was no one for me to talk to about it then, except God. I guess I still believed in God at age twenty. I would roll and roll on my floor in my dormitory room and promise to God that I would never have sex again if only He would stop Pam from getting pregnant.

  It was almost a year after I lost my virginity that I met Kathy, and I have to say that I think a good part of my attraction to her was her name. She had the same first name as Mom—Katherine—only I called Mom Kit. For as long as I could remember I called Mom by her first name. Both my brothers called Kit Mom, but I called her Kit and I was never really aware or self-conscious about that until I was almost eleven or twelve and my friends would remark, “What did you just call your mom?” Those were the old days when no one, at least in our town, ever called their parents by first names, and I’d just sort of blush and get embarrassed and say, “Kit—I called her Kit.”

  So I don’t know. Maybe I couldn’t really fuck Kathy because of her name being so close to Mom’s name. I wanted to fuck her but I couldn’t. Sometimes I’d even come before entering her, and once I shot a good twelve feet from the bed and I was so overwhelmed by the power of that seminal discharge that I made Kathy trace it with me all the way from the bed to the wall. She may have been impressed, but she sure wasn’t satisfied.

  We broke up on New Year’s Eve, 1963. I invited her home to spend New Year’s Eve with Mom and Dad and me. We watched the Times Square ball drop on TV and drank cheap champagne. But after Mom and Dad went to bed Kathy told me that she’d found someone else—someone who could give her more. I didn’t ask her, “More of what?” I had an idea what she was talking about.

  She left the following day. I kissed her on the cheek and waved goodbye as she drove off in a light snow. I remember how her old green Chevy looked so beautiful cutting tracks in that new snow. Then I went inside, got out a bottle of Dad’s vodka, and began to drink.

  I drank almost the whole fifth. I was sitting there alone in Dad’s easy chair by the window that looked over Narragansett Bay. As I drank I could hear Mom and Dad arranging furniture in the guest bedroom upstairs. After I got very drunk I got it in my head that I needed to drive to Providence to see a production of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull. I thought that if I could just focus on a staged drama of someone else’s dilemma I could somehow be saved from the sad drama of my life.

  When I got up from Dad’s easy chair I was staggering and I went upstairs to where Mom and Dad were frantically pushing around furniture and I asked Dad for the car keys so I could go see The Sea Gull. I was very drunk, and quite amazed that I could even talk.

  Mom and Dad both stopped and looked at me. Mom said, “Well, Brewster, what’s wrong with you?” It was as if she was annoyed, and I assumed she was annoyed about how she and Dad couldn’t agree upon that new arrangement of beds and dressers and chairs. I couldn’t hold back anymore and I burst into tears and cried, “I’ve lost Kathy and I’ll never meet anyone like her again.” Instead of hugging me, which I sort of expected, Mom pulled back and in a callous and distant tone she said, “Oh, that’s what you said about the last one.” This completely threw me. What “last one,” I wondered. Then I turned away from Mom and asked Dad for the car keys again. To my amazement he let me have them.

  Driving into Providence was like riding on a washboard. The whole road was like a liquid river in my eyes and every so often I would have to stop the car and open the door and throw up.

  It was a miracle that I made it to the theater and that I was able to focus on the play. For the first act the whole stage was moving as if it was being performed aboard a ship in high seas. By the second act I had sobered up enough to get into it and that’s when I began to think that maybe I would like to be an actor. It was not then a need for artistic expression as much as a discovery of a safe place to hide out in a state of controlled drama, knowing what the drama was going to be before stepping into it. The stage that night looked like a very safe place, and the actors seemed protected by the gaze of the audience.

  It took me three days to recuperate from that hangover, and while I was recuperating I began to realize that Mom and Dad had been rearranging the guest bedroom so that Mom could use it. The time for their big move was getting closer and closer, and Mom needed that guest room as a place to collect her thoughts and prepare for the move. She used it as sort of a retreat.

  Gram North said that she used to come over for dinner on Sundays and was surprised to find that Mom wasn’t there. She thought that was odd but she really didn’t want to pry, so she didn’t say anything about it, if you can imagine that. She didn’t even ask Dad where Mom was.

  Then at last, Gram said, she figured out that Mom was not away but upstairs. I don’t think anyone had any idea what Mom was doing up there at first. They only knew that she needed her privacy and she wanted to be left alone. She was tearing her hair out and talking to herself. She was picking at the inside of her ears until they bled.

  Dad was very upset by all this, because they had just sold the house on the bay and were about to move. How could he move when Mom was so crazy? But he did; he did the whole move himself while she was away at a sanitarium, where he finally had to have her committed.

  That was a wild day, which I thank God I wasn’t there for. It took two doctors to legally commit her; two doctors to agree on the fact that she was crazy. She didn’t want to go and the more they tried to make her go, the crazier she got. In the end she was pulling her skirt up over her head and beating off the doctors with her Bible and Science
and Health.

  THIS AND ONE OTHER event that happened two summers earlier began to make me wonder if Christian Science might not be the right religion for some people. That was the summer that Mom had gone away for two weeks to take a Christian Science intensive class that was supposed to prepare her to become a practitioner. Mom thought she would be able to be a real healer through Christ. It was while Mom was away that Mrs. Bowdin came to visit. Sally Bowdin was Mom’s Christian Science friend who lived nearby. We used to pick Sally up at her house on the way to church on Sundays. Sometimes she’d bring her two little boys with her and take them to Sunday school. Sally Bowdin always seemed normal to us. She was tall, thin, and graceful and really quite beautiful. In fact, I remember Sally Bowdin looking a little like Katharine Hepburn. But over the years Sally got, as they say in the Christian Science church, “a little troubled.” We could tell she was getting more than a little troubled because of the letters she one day started sending to Mom. They were like the end of an Uncle Wiggily story, when Nurse Jane Fuzzy-Wuzzy says things like, “If the old tomcat doesn’t slip on a banana peel and trip over the lobster pot and hit the broom and knock the po-po-potty down”—some wacky things like that—“we’ll tell you another story about Uncle Wiggily.” Well, that’s the only time I’d heard crazy language like that until we got these letters from Mrs. Sally Bowdin and they read something like this: “If the piano doesn’t stop hiding my driver’s license we’ll be able to put a new toilet on the front lawn under the willow tree my husband just cut down to turn into soldiers”—and on and on they would go. When Coleman read these letters, he got real upset. He said, “Mom, this woman needs psychiatric help!” Mom just ignored him because she didn’t believe in psychiatrists and she was upset that Coleman did. As time went by and we got more and more letters from Mrs. Bowdin, Mom told us that Mrs. Bowdin was so disturbed they had to ask her to sit in the back of the balcony at church because she couldn’t keep from shouting out loud during the service, and everyone wanted the service to be calm. After all, that’s why a lot of people came to church on Sunday in the first place: they came to get calm.

  Well, anyway, that summer when Mom was away at Christian Science class, that season when madness seemed to come often, I woke up real early one morning, and at first I thought I was dreaming. Then I realized there were indeed many people having some sort of row down in our living room.

  I looked out the window and saw two police cars right in front of our house, and that gave me a real scare. Then I recognized Mrs. Bowdin’s voice. I got up and stood in my underwear at the top of the stairs to try to hear it better. It was her voice but not her words, or it was more like her words in the letters she had sent us. She was talking real wild. Her husband was down there along with the police and Dad. She was talking wild and dirty to her husband, who she was calling Jack, even though he kept correcting her and reminding her that his name was Fred. Sally Bowdin was talking like a crazy drunk, saying things like “Hey, Jack, you old poop—Jack, you old chip off the Texas block—don’t you remember those wild outhouse underwear times we had? Oh, remember how we used to run all bare-assed across the whole state of Texas? Oh, those were the days and don’t you deny it, Jack, you big hunk, you big chip off the old you-know-what! You big stinker, you! Jack! You toidy-woidy!” And you could hear her husband calmly say, real calm and quiet, “Now calm down, Sally. I’m not Jack, you know that. I’m Fred. Try to pull yourself together.”

  Then I heard this big wrestling sound but no words, like everyone was gagged and playing musical chairs only without music. This was followed by little moans like sex sounds. Then I heard Sally screaming “No! No! No!” and I ran to the window to see her being taken away, dressed only in a black negligee, all wrapped up in a straitjacket. After they had taken her away and the police cars had gone, I went downstairs to find Dad straightening up the living room as if nothing big had really happened. That’s when he told me that Mrs. Bowdin had come to the house at dawn and gotten into bed with him. She had called him Jack and began to strip his pajamas off. She was a very beautiful woman even though she was crazy, and I figured she could probably be very sexy as well. But Dad said he just jumped out of bed and called the police and they came in ten minutes. I couldn’t keep from wondering what went on in those ten minutes. But I didn’t ask him. I think I was afraid to know too much. Or maybe we both had the secret sense that madness was not far from our door and that Mom might be the next to go.

  I CAME HOME FROM my last year of college to a home that was now inland, or “relatively inland,” as Dad would say. I would not have said “inland” so much as “in the woods.” The new house was surrounded by trees at the end of a dead-end road that stopped at the woods. The name of the dead-end road was Shady Lane, a very apt description.

  I don’t know if Dad and Mom picked out that house together, but I assume they did, and with its view of nothing but woods it struck me as a very odd location to move to after living all those years on Narragansett Bay. But at the same time it was a sort of cute and very manageable house, something they could easily retire in, with two baths, a master bedroom downstairs for the coming of old age, two bedrooms upstairs for when we were at home, and a two-car garage attached so no one had to walk out of the house to get into their car during foul weather.

  By the time I arrived at the new house Dad had pretty much moved in all by himself and was slowly beginning to unpack and start a new life in spite of the fact that Mom was away at the sanitarium. I had just graduated and had brought my sensuous college girlfriend Melissa home with me, but it wasn’t working out very well. I think Dad was jealous. He made us sleep in separate rooms and kept a constant ear out for any odd sounds, which made me feel very inhibited. I kept trying to drag Melissa into the woods to make love but she would have none of it. She was not the outdoor type. I did manage to eat her once while she lay on a moss-covered rock, but the mosquitoes and Dad calling us in for a rare steak dinner cut it short before either of us could really complete ourselves. At college we had been sexually voracious together, but now all I was getting was Melissa’s annoyance at how I was treating her like a sex object. She said, “You only pay attention to me when you want to get laid.” I knew she was right. Now that I was home, or rather at Dad’s new home, about to be Mom’s new home as well, I began to realize that I didn’t need Melissa as a friend because I still had Mom. I was just waiting for Mom to get out of that rest home so I could talk with her. I wanted Melissa for my physical needs and Mom for my emotional needs. And although Melissa didn’t openly talk about that split in me, I think she intuited it and reacted accordingly by withholding her sweet body favors.

  We said goodbye with no real plans to reconnect. We were just living our lives as if we’d go on forever, and ever be young. I drove Melissa to the Block Island ferry and she was off for a summer of fun and waitressing on Block Island.

  The next week I was called up for my army physical. I made up my mind right away that I was simply going to act crazy, or because I had the perfect role model, I was just going to act like Mom. I had to start convincing myself that I was crazy, which was a tricky little game because if you’re not careful, pretty soon you don’t know if you are crazy or if you’re just playing at it. I would actually go off into the woods and rehearse my madness like I was getting ready to play King Lear. As a kid I used to go off into the woods to hunt or masturbate, or on calmer days just to walk and enjoy and try to teach myself how to hang out. But now I was going off into the woods to shout and roll on the ground and act crazy. Besides preparing me to beat the draft, this became a wonderful sort of organic release, as though I was creating my own therapy. Sometimes I’d even bring a tambourine along with me and end up dancing in my underwear or naked like some demented shaman. That was only when I was deep in the woods and felt really alone. Most of the time I had the feeling someone was watching me. Maybe God was there watching me.

  I beat the draft the morning Mom came home from the sanitarium. I almost
didn’t beat it, because someone who had a beard like mine went a little crazy right in front of me. I must say his act wasn’t as good. He probably hadn’t rehearsed it. I didn’t know who was crazier, us naked guys with our cheeks spread or the men who had to walk up and down looking at our assholes, which at the time made me realize all I should have done was not wipe myself that morning and I’d be out of America’s fight against communism forever. But that didn’t occur to me until I was bent over and spread. So there I was in the line just after we’d had our holes checked and we had just reached the head sergeant and the guy in front of me started barking like a dog. This immediately triggered my wild-Indian act and we both started doing this naked dance together. We were immediately led away to a little room where we were told with great disdain to get dressed and go home. While we were dressing, we both recognized that we had created a great male bonding. We had beat the draft by dancing naked together, and we laughed a lot about this. He told me his name was Joe McCreedy and he was off to New Paltz, New York, to try to open a bookstore. It was going to be a fantastic “alternative bookstore,” as he called it, and if ever there was a place for me he would give me a job. I wished him good luck and gave him a fond farewell and headed out to hitchhike home, but ended up walking most of the six miles, which was fine with me because I was in no hurry to do anything anymore.

  That same day Gram and Gramp brought Mom down from the sanitarium in their car. Dad had spent the whole weekend fixing up the house so that it would be all nice and orderly for her. But I could tell as soon as Mom stepped out of the backseat of that black four-door Ford that something was never going to work again. It was as though she was trying to be happy, or acting happy, in the way I had acted crazy that very morning. It was as though she had sat there in that backseat all the way home from the sanitarium saying over and over to herself, “I’m going to be happy in this new house. I’m going to be happy in this new house.” But there was a certain way she looked through me to the other side of nothing that made me feel I wasn’t there. It was a certain frantic flicker in her eyes. It was as though a bird was in her head—a bird that wanted to get out. It was as though a bird had stolen my mother’s soul or that her soul was a bird and I was only seeing it for the first time.