Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  Good God, what was I doing? I wondered. Maybe I was trying to punish myself for something. It seemed like I had run away from Mom’s insanity to come to an even more insane world. The whole situation was producing great anger and rage in me, but for some reason I could not express it. Instead I judged it as being bad and tried to purge it by going on what I thought would be a purifying diet of soybeans. Trying to escape Dad’s corrupting legacy of meat, I was eating soybeans morning, noon, and night, and those soybeans were causing enormous intestinal gas. Wherever I walked I was leaving those silent but deadly slow hot burners. But I was not taking responsibility for them. I just kept moving and wafting and letting them drift in, reeking hot invisible waves behind me. You see, I’d not learned how to express my anger through the proper orifice yet.

  The only time I held back, and with great pain, was when I was conducting the backstage sound effects. I was afraid I would be discovered as the volcanic source of those perverse stinkers, so there in the wings while conducting Russian party sounds I would squeeze my sphincter tight against those hot winds.

  For the entire four-week run of The Sea Gull my rage grew. Then at last on closing night I had a chance to vent it fully. The closing-night party was held in Galveston, a short drive to the gulf from Houston, at an authentic Greek restaurant where all the Greek merchant marines came and danced when their ships were in port. We drove down in three fully packed cars and I ended up with Brian, the New York actress who played Madame Arkadina, the actress who played Nina, and Thelma, the director. The woman driving the car was a Houston native who ran the theater box office and often went dancing that old Greek grapevine dance with the sailors who had just come into port. It was her idea to have the party at the Greek restaurant, and everyone else followed.

  As she drove, she gave us all a preparatory lecture for the upcoming event, how to act or not act around a bunch of horny Greek sailors who had been out to sea for months. And somewhere in the middle of her precautionary notes she said, “Oh, by the way, just before we get to Galveston we’re going to pass through some very sloppy lowlands, and I have to warn you that the smell is quite intense. In fact, it’s almost overwhelming. So just before we get there I’m going to warn you all to roll up your windows.”

  I felt the car seat burning under me. I couldn’t hold out any longer and let out the longest, hottest, most silent slow burner ever. As soon as that cloud reached the sweet little turned-up nose of our lady driver, she cried, “Oh my God! There it is! I didn’t know we were there yet. Roll up your windows! Everybody, roll up your windows!” And up all the windows went tight, real tight, while everyone wept and gasped and cried, “Oh my God! Oh, help! Step on it, let’s get out of here!” I sat still, weeping with the silent angry laughter that was buried so deep. There I sat, tears rolling down my cheeks, with no idea that this was a fun version of Mom’s soon-to-come exit from this world.

  AFTER THAT closing-night Sea Gull party, I knew my relationship with the Alamo Theatre, or maybe all theater, was over, but I felt too inadequate to walk away from it all. I was determined to finish the season out so that I could save enough money to spend the summer in Mexico with Meg. That was my big celebration plan. I had been writing her about it, and she planned to join me as soon as she graduated from college.

  I’d decided to relocate in San Miguel Allende, an American art colony high in the central plains of Mexico. I made arrangements to ride down there with two Houston locals, Axel and Odele. In my deepest fantasy mind it was a sort of trial run for Bali, just to see what it would be like to vacation in a foreign country.

  The trip down was like a hallucinogenic dream. I rode and sometimes drove in Odele’s VW bus while Axel rolled joints and took photos with his little Leica. I don’t think we had one normal slice of conversation the whole way down. It was just driving, looking, smoking, peeing, and eating trashy hot Mexican food at roadside stands. I don’t know how Axel and Odele drove stoned. I was incapacitated by the grass most of the time and lay on the back floor of that VW bus vibrating all over. When I was able to pull myself up to look out the windows, all I could see was endless armies of cactus that looked like they were fighting each other.

  We got to San Miguel forty-eight hours later with very little rest or sleep. I was spent and very ready to be alone. Then Odele and Axel went their own ways, Axel off to the Michigan area to deal in pre-Columbian art and Odele hitchhiking on to Mexico City to visit a Dutch sculptor.

  I walked into my little hotel room and stood in front of the tin-framed mirror and just stared at my gaunt bearded face. I didn’t dare move. I just stood there watching my face dissolve and then re-form in the mirror. I felt out of touch and really away from home for the first time. And as I stood there, barely having arrived, I had that fantasy again of coming through the driveway gate with a duffel bag full of dirty laundry and presents, and Mom rushing out to greet me. I could see myself standing there, a brave independent hero, like one of those Greek sailors dropping in with gifts and stories just long enough to get his laundry done before heading out to the next port. Coming from Mexico would not be as great, perhaps, as returning from Bali, but it would still be triumphant.

  The following day I found my own apartment up at the top of a hill overlooking the entire town and the wild purple central plains beyond. Far below I could hear church bells chiming and the sound of slow-rolling wooden wheels on cobblestones. It was old, it was beautiful, it was slow. It felt just right, and I immediately sent off a postcard to Meg with a little map to “our” new place in Mexico.

  She arrived, and we settled into a comfortable routine of working, shopping for food, and just walking around looking at it all: going down to the zócalo, the public square, at dusk, with the long-tailed black birds cruising in at sundown to fill the trees, and fill the entire square with their mad cackling.

  We discovered an art school for Americans there, and Meg signed up for a rug-weaving course while I did live modeling for food money. While Meg worked on her rug I’d go shopping at the open market to buy goat chops and vegetables.

  The weather was always ideal, warm and dry, and there was no apparent reason for depressions, yet I kept falling into them. I began to figure out that some of them were connected to tequila and marijuana. Between the two of them I was not doing very well. I craved altered states of consciousness. I liked feeling good all day but was not able to take too much of it. Too much feeling good became flat and boring, and I’d want to push it a little. So at sunset I would sit on our little balcony and sip tequila and go into quiet raptures, waves of minor beatitudes. Meg didn’t drink. She read, or sat beside me looking out. The marijuana was strong stuff, and I’d just take a few tokes and that would be it.

  I stopped altogether after I had a very disturbing hallucination, or vision. I was alone in our apartment. Meg had gone down to the art institute to do some photo printing in the darkroom and I was alone and anxious. I was pacing a lot and trying to resist getting drunk when I heard this party going on in the apartment below. They were playing a cut from a Stones album over and over. It was “Ruby Tuesday,” and the music pulled me out on the balcony and at last pulled me all the way down to their door. The apartment was rented by some Norwegian guy named Olaf who looked like a Viking god. Olaf drove a new white VW bus. Meg and I would often see him driving around town in search of a girlfriend. He was always checking out all the new single women who passed through town, and he had recently scored with a real blond beauty. They made a great couple to look at: a blond goddess and a blond god.

  Olaf had a large apartment, which he had opened up to another extraordinary couple, who had been driving around Mexico in an old Chevy panel truck with California plates. He looked like one of those California free spirits, with shoulder-length blond hair and a full red beard. She, his traveling companion, was a slender Welsh beauty. She had long black hair and very beautiful pale skin, translucent and untouched by the Mexican sun. You could see the blue veins just below the surface. The
man had contracted viral hepatitis on their travels and she was nursing him in the back room. By “nursing him” I mean she was pretty much keeping him stoned day and night on strong Mexican grass.

  Olaf was having a wild get-well party down there and I was drawn to it. I came in and saw another couple from New York City who were down traveling around Mexico in a pickup truck camper. He was shy and she was real outspoken. She was in the middle of relating an acid trip she had taken in the Mexican mountains where she had split from her boyfriend to go off alone in the hills to masturbate with a green banana. I was both shocked and drawn to her brazen openness. She was talking loudly in order to be heard over the Rolling Stones and was telling, just as I came in, how the banana seemed to have a life and mind of its own and how it came alive and softened “like the flesh of the gods” as soon as it entered her. Her story set me off, and right in the middle of it her boyfriend passed me a lit joint and without thinking I took three deep, greedy drags as though I was sucking on that green banana and whammo, it hit me—I got instantly stoned. Everything was suddenly too much for me. Her story, the fire in the fireplace, the red-bearded man with hepatitis, it all closed in and beat on me. I felt wide open and devastated. I went out to the hall and began to pace.

  The Welsh woman, who must have had a kind of built-in nurse in her, immediately noticed my anxiety and left her hepatitis-stricken lover to come out and try to comfort me. When I saw her standing there in that dim amber light I saw for the first time how beautiful she was, which made me even more anxious. I wanted her right there and then. I tried to ground myself by talking to her, but her spare black-and-white beauty distracted me so that I couldn’t even finish my sentence.

  But she talked me down by telling me about her hometown in Wales. It had the strangest, longest name and the way she spoke it was like pure music. I think it was the longest name of any town or city in the world. It was more like an entire song, or a Druidic spell, than a name, and each time she spoke it I got calmer.

  Lulled by the sound of that Welsh woman’s hometown I was able to re-enter Olaf’s apartment. I went right to an empty chair by the fire and that’s where I saw it, staring into that roaring fire. I saw it and, horrible as it was, I could not stop looking. In the middle of the flames was a woman sitting up in bed, and the flames were raging all about her, going in her ears and burning out of her screaming mouth. The flames enveloped the entire bed and the woman seemed unable to move and she screamed out my name and I thought, It’s Mom—Mom is burning up somewhere.

  IT WAS AUGUST by the time Meg and I took a train to the border and a bus from there to Houston, where we caught a flight to New York. From New York City Meg went to New Jersey to visit her parents and I took a flight to Providence. I gave Dad a call at work and asked him to pick me up. He sounded fine on the phone and was not at all surprised to hear I was back. He assumed a businesslike tone, which is what he always did when you phoned him at work. I would have phoned Mom at home but I assumed she was still at Fuller.

  It was a hot, humid August day. I opened the bottle of tequila I had been carrying with me and sat on the lawn of the airport brown-bagging until Dad pulled up in his Ford LTD. He had the air conditioner on and all of the windows rolled up and as soon as I got in he said, “Tying one on, I see.” Then he asked if Coleman had caught up with me and told me how Coleman, not being able to deal with Mom anymore, had finagled a drive-away car to El Paso and was going to take a bus down to Mexico from there. I suddenly had a deep, sad pain of regret. I was so sad to have missed Coleman.

  We rode in silence for a while until I finally asked, “So how is Mom doing—how’s Mom?” and Dad turned to me and said, “She’s gone.” He broke into convulsive crying as he drove. I just sat there across from him while he cried. I sat there with my open bottle of tequila in my lap staring out the window at that flat, hot Rhode Island landscape and all of the other air-conditioned cars with their windows closed. I just sat there and didn’t reach out to Dad or say a word. I just sat there with the phrase going over and over in my head. “She’s gone.” She’s gone. And over and over that phrase continued, like the end of a story in a Grimm fairy tale, like when the princess or the queen dies of a broken heart. And it played over and over again, that phrase “She’s gone.” She’s gone—died of a broken heart. She’s gone. She’s gone. She died of a broken heart.

  When we got home Dad led me through the house like he was some sort of official tour guide in a museum. First, in the living room, he showed me all the sympathy cards on the mantel. I was amazed to see how many there were, all lined up like Christmas cards, but not quite as colorful. Dad was angry that Mom’s Christian Science practitioner never sent a card, after all the bills he’d paid for all those prayers. Next he led me into their bedroom and opened Mom’s closet to show me all her clothes and a neat little row of all her empty shoes. Then he told me about all the dental work Mom had done just before she died. While Dad was telling me this I noticed a picture of myself on the night table by Mom’s bed. It had been taken at my old girlfriend Kathy’s wedding to the guy who gave her more. Then Dad showed me the cardboard box that contained Mom’s ashes, which sat on his bedside table exactly where the partridge had landed and died. At last we went out into the living room, where Dad made drinks at the bar. As he mixed the drinks he told me what happened.

  Dad did wake up the night Mom got up to kill herself, but he went right back to sleep. He didn’t pay attention to her absence because she would often get up in the night when she couldn’t sleep and go out to the living room to read. Only this particular night she didn’t get up to read. She went out to the garage instead, and got into his car and started it up. After some time Dad woke up to a sound which he thought was the refrigerator at first. When he sat up in bed and realized it was the car, he raced out to try to save Mom. He called an ambulance and woke Topher, who was asleep in his room just above the garage. The rescue unit came right away. Dad said he had to give them credit for that. It made him feel like his taxes were doing some good. They were fast, but not fast enough. They tried to revive Mom in the driveway, but it was too late. I pictured Dad and Topher standing over Mom, looking down on her. It must have taken its wicked toll on both of them forever.

  After we had finished our first round of scotches, Dad got up and went to his desk and brought back a bill from Pete’s Gulf station to show me exactly how much gasoline it had taken Mom to do herself in. Then Dad told me about his plan to asphalt the driveway. He and Mom had always fought over this issue. She wanted to keep it gravel and he wanted asphalt.

  We got quite drunk together and in the middle of it all Coleman called from Mexico City to say that he had just received the news of Mom’s death through a Mexican business associate of Dad’s. Dad didn’t want to talk to Coleman. I didn’t know why; he seemed angry with him for something. So I got on the phone. Coleman asked me what was going on and I told him, “Mom’s gone, and we’re drinking a lot, but otherwise I guess we’re okay.” “Well, I’m sorry about all of this,” Cole said. “I’ll be home in a few days. I’m taking a bus up from Mexico City.” When I told Dad what Cole said about taking a bus up instead of flying, he went into a rage. He couldn’t understand it and carried on for an hour about it, as though everything else that had happened was nothing compared to Cole taking a bus instead of a plane.

  By nightfall Dad was so drunk he couldn’t stand up, so I put two TV turkey dinners on and we ate in front of the television watching the latest episode of the war, live from Vietnam. After dinner I got a very bad chill and went up to bed. Perhaps it was something I picked up in Mexico.

  I turned out the lights and the chill became a fever and further into the night the fever led to a sort of delirium and I didn’t know where I was. The blankets I’d piled up on myself felt like they were moving and shaping themselves around me into a hammock that turned into a straw Vietcong body bag. The bag wrapped itself tighter around me like a cocoon or straitjacket. I began to see on the wall what lo
oked like black-and-white movies of all these Amish men all dressed in black coming out of a farmhouse door. They would come out and beckon to me like automatic windup toys. Back and forth they would go like hysterical cuckoos, beckoning to me with giant white blown-up index fingers that leaped out from the wall and beckoned me to come into their farmhouse. They kept opening and closing the farmhouse door. Open, close, beckon, beckon, open, close, beckon. There was another door on the other side of the farmhouse and there I could see Amish men carrying coffins outside. It was a macabre assembly line of death: open, beckon, close, coffins. The rhythm started to go in my head like some crazy out-of-control train. And as I watched this I could feel the blankets bind my arms even tighter until I couldn’t move. The whole bed began to rise slowly up like a giant gun on a battleship with me inside the barrel. The gun turned into a long, deep, dark, endless well. And I was falling backwards, full-speed down this tunnel in an extreme state of panic, but in the center of that panic was an absolutely clear place where the simple fact occurred to me that I was dying, and that if I kept falling, I would never, ever come back. And it wouldn’t matter, because there would be no one waiting to come back to. Then at the top of the well, I saw an overwhelmingly dazzling white light. I knew it was brighter than the star that the shepherds followed to Jesus. It was like that star, only brighter and closer, pulsing like a big fluid diamond, and the sight of that light reversed my fall and pulled me right up, as fast as I was falling, right up out of the dark. I flew to it like a moth and stuck, and the next thing I knew I was back in my bed and what had been that diamond light was only the reflection of the streetlight at the end of Shady Lane playing through the shadows of blowing leaves across my bedroom wall. Soaked with sweat, I fell asleep to the sound of that summer wind in the trees around Dad’s house.