Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  It wasn’t bad. It was only new, or maybe not so much new as it was tapping some deep recollection of how everything must have first smelled when I was squeezing out of Mom, that one and only time, and then just for a moment I had a flash of how incredible my birth had been, how I had been right down in it all. Dad had only put his cock in there, and maybe his tongue, but I and my brothers had actually lived inside that place, and we had swum out of it, squeezed out of it. We had the whole experience. And that, I thought, was where I remembered this smell from.

  Then I was back again being tugged from weird sex chamber to weirder. This strange young man I was with kept yanking the rubber curtains back in search of an empty chamber, and as he did, I caught glimpses of great hurly-burly men in the wildest positions. Still, I couldn’t say I was sexually turned on by them. It was feeling like a wide-eyed, innocent child that turned me on. I was more turned on by what I couldn’t see than what I could. A large spotlight would have taken all the mystery right out of that place in a flash; but now, in this dark strangeness, it was hardly different from a dream.

  I moved with the motion of this man who guided me with a willful roughness that was irresistible because it was like nothing I had ever remembered feeling before. At last, finding an unoccupied chamber, he pulled me in and threw me down on an empty bed, like a hospital bed with rubber sheets on it. The little room was deliciously repulsive. It was filled with the leftover smell of perpetual sex to the point that the room itself seemed exhausted and very close to death. But I never wondered what I was doing there. I know it sounds crazy to say, but that room felt like the right spot. I knew I was about to be initiated into something very, very old. I was about to have another innocent layer peeled off of me, and peel me he did. He made love to me like I was a ripe banana. He started with the skin, my largest organ, and worked his way down.

  At first he knelt over me like some sort of hungry, drooling beast. Then he pressed his wet mouth flat against my left hip and began to gobble in the most intensely hungry way. The sensation of his tongue and his rough sandpaper beard against my tender skin made my entire body shudder and shiver, as I cried out with little sighs, then held my breath against all sound, in fear that I would sound like everyone else, but deep inside there was what we all have—a sigh, a moan, the sound that comes with surrender. I stretched long and held the metal bed, feeling like I was on some pleasure rack as this nameless beast-man now began to suck on all my lower parts with so much desire that I felt I’d just pop right there, just go off in his face.

  Then he began to move up with his mouth defining and bringing every part of my body to life. I lay there thinking, how could anything that felt so good be bad? He was giving me a complete tongue bath; he began lapping my belly and then up along my ribs, sucking on my left breast, then my right, like a wild baby trying to draw milk. I could feel the waves of sensation go through my whole body with each awful foul touch of his mouth and sandpaper beard until at last his body was fully extended over mine. He was over me in push-up position like a wild animal about to go for the jugular. And all the time he was doing this, other older, grosser men were constantly parting the rubber curtains and coming into the room to stand over us and watch while they played with themselves. They stood there, these gray-haired, beer-bellied, obscene satyrs, with their inflamed cocks arching up, almost glowing in the semidark. I opened my eyes wider to try to see them as they moved around the bed like hungry ghosts of lust. It was like some fevered orgiastic nightmare. Five or six of them, all naked and erect, were stroking themselves or stroking each other as they watched us getting it on below them. I was sure that they would spurt all over us if someone didn’t drive them out of there, but I didn’t care. There wasn’t an ounce of refusal left in my body or my mind.

  In between all these various suckings on my body, my German lover—I guess you could call him that—suddenly leapt up and in an erect, athletic bound dashed at those old voyeurs, driving them out of our sex chamber. They scrambled through that rubber curtain like a big white hairless pack of jackals driven away by this hungry German lion who wanted to devour his prey in peace. When the chamber was empty, back he came to devour me. By this time we were face to face and mouth to mouth, and that was the most difficult part for me to take because it meant I had to see his face and maybe even look him in the eyes and see him for the man he was, and I wanted so much to keep him as this faceless devouring creature. I wanted him to be both all men and myself; I wanted the fantasy of having myself as well as the feeling of being desired so much.

  Now to avoid his face and eyes I closed my eyes as he kissed me and then rose up over me like some mighty lizard. At the same time he did this he entered me, and that was one of the most spectacularly confusing body sensations I’d ever experienced in my life. It was a strange combination of pleasure and pain and I quickly realized that the pleasure came when I let go and opened up and didn’t try to hold on, and the pain of course came when I resisted and held on. I was amazed how we fit together, like man and woman. Up until then I assumed that the positions of sodomy had to be or feel somehow unnatural, but this felt completely natural. I felt my whole spine come alive under his thrusts. His prodding cock felt somehow connected to the base of my spine and was manipulating it. Then his cock and my spine became one and my entire body turned into a cock.

  As I felt freer I began to feel like I could not open enough for him. I felt wide open as I wrapped my legs around his hot sweaty back, and then, grabbing my toes with both my hands, stretched my legs in a great V to the ceiling, and let him go at it, let him in all the way as I at last forgot myself, forgot myself completely, and we came together by some unspoken chance, or by some agreement that our bodies made together, all far beyond my understanding. He came into me and I shot off, feeling the space between our bellies. It was as though his cock had entered me and gone to the base of my cock and shot up through it.

  He collapsed in a sweaty heap on me, but didn’t linger. He didn’t want to remain in any sort of languid, intimate contact. He just jumped up like the big athletic guy he was. “Well, I’m off. It’s time for a shower and a sauna,” he said in his German accent, leaving me feeling like a used sack of shit. I lay there thinking, how could something that felt so good now feel so bad? Now I know what a woman feels like when there is no tenderness after. I had a sense of that feeling of desertion, how it felt to be deserted by the man.

  ONE DAY, SHORTLY after the bathhouse incident, Meg arrived in Amsterdam. Meg arrived to stay a few nights with Hans and Sonia. She showed up without even having been paged at the airport. She just decided to stop in Amsterdam as I did, to break her flight up between India and New York. At first I was as surprised to see her as she was to see me. Then I was sort of happy and relieved, and then, just as quickly as all that occurred, I didn’t want her to be there, because I saw clearly how over the years I had made Meg into my conscience, my guide to a controlled and meaningful life. As I said before, things seemed to matter to Meg.

  Meg arrived in a bustle of purpose and direction, with all her customs papers for her Kashmir rugs in order, and all her energy focused on getting back to New York to sell her rugs and get on with her life. The yoga retreat she stayed at in Delhi had not been a very successful event, but she didn’t dwell on it, and more importantly, didn’t have any regrets.

  Over a much-appreciated steak dinner, Meg told me how the essence of the yoga program was forced vomiting. Each morning everyone was required to drink as much water as they could, until they were so full they felt they were about to burst, and then they all had to go throw up in a large communal vomit fountain in the main courtyard of the ashram. The thought of this great vomit fountain made me laugh out loud for the first time in months, and then Meg started to laugh and just for a moment we were laughing together. I suddenly felt this wonderful comic reunion and a fondness for our insane and chaotic shared history. We had survived India, almost. We had escaped the giant collective madness of that subcontinent an
d were safe and reunited in a cozy restaurant in Amsterdam. Everything felt warm and good and right. Meg and my history with Meg felt like the only thing there was, the only real thing in the world, and as I sat there that line from Matthew Arnold’s poem sprang up in my mind, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” And laughter turned into tears that welled up in my eyes but didn’t flow. The whole room shimmered as though I was seeing through Jell-O. And then the dam broke and the tears came down, drenching my rare steak, and Meg, like a magnet, leaped up from her chair, flew at me, and stuck. She didn’t ask me what I was crying about, and I was glad, because I wasn’t entirely sure. Meg just clung to me with her unconditional, passionate love.

  We had a brief, cozy evening visit with Hans and Sonia. Meg, the radiant one in the center of it all, was telling about the vomit fountain and her rugs and at the same time playing and laughing with Baby Willie. We at last retired to the attic room. We had friendly, satisfying, comfortable sex and slept, Meg with her arm across my chest. I had forgotten that was what I had been missing even more than sex: Meg’s arm at night across my heart.

  In the morning Meg was torn between flying home and taking a day to go to the Van Gogh museum. My God, I thought, going into a mild panic of regret, how could I have been foolish enough to have forgotten about the Van Gogh museum? And now I had a new regret to dwell on: how I had wasted my life in negative indulgence.

  Meg was perceiving that something had gone wrong in me, that I was more troubled than usual; and perhaps she made a mistake when she said, “I think you better come home with me to New York.” That little statement put me in a mild panic, because I began to assume that she perceived there was something wrong with me, and that if she did, then there must be. After all, she knew me so well and she seemed to think it was important for me to go home with her. At the same time I kept ranting and raving to her about how I should really take the time to go Bali.

  When I’d spin out too far in too many directions, Meg would always rein me in, pull me back with questions like “Do you think you’ll find yourself in Bali, Brewster? Come back with me to New York, come back and find your roots there. We’ll celebrate the Fourth of July in America.”

  So there I was in Amsterdam, packing my bags like some sort of lost robot. I didn’t have any joy about the return trip. I was without joy and without satisfaction. I couldn’t find the real world I was supposed to live in. It just didn’t seem to exist out there for me, and I seemed unable to make it up inside myself. I was in limbo.

  I felt like a little boy standing next to Meg with my bags in my hands saying goodbye to Hans and Sonia and Baby Willie, suddenly feeling remorse because I’d not really spent any quality time with them. God, I hadn’t even gone to the Van Gogh museum. I had just run all around Amsterdam like a crazy, obsessed chicken. I knew it was because I had read the wrong book when I was sick, because I didn’t have my copy of Zen Mind with me. Well, we said goodbye and I apologized and Hans and Sonia acted like I had nothing to apologize for. They said they were sorry that I didn’t want to use their place for July. Oh God, that made me even more depressed, and I told them the thought of being alone at this point was just too much; it was out of the question. And we left and headed for the airport.

  It was at the airport that it happened. That’s where I think I finally snapped altogether.

  Meg and I had checked our bags and her rugs in for the KLM Royal Dutch flight for New York, and we were wandering around the duty-free shops, or rather Meg was wandering in her purposeful way and I was like this robot dog-boy behind her. I couldn’t help noticing that I didn’t have the usual feeling I had in airports. I didn’t feel nervous or anxious about the flight, and I didn’t want to buy any duty-free booze, which is really weird. I didn’t feel anything until we got close to the boarding gate, and then I had one very strong feeling, kind of an impulse: I didn’t want to go. I did not want to get on that plane. I did not want to go back to New York. This feeling turned into a kind of nervous, neurotic twitch. As we stood there in the boarding line I began to groan, and when Meg asked me what was wrong, I simply told her I needed to get my bags off the plane. Worst of all, she didn’t disagree with me. She didn’t try to talk me out of it or stop me.

  By now the flight attendant had noticed my distress and came over to ask what was wrong, and I said, “Please, please, I can’t fly today. Get my bags off the plane.”

  Then, to my surprise, the flight attendant paid attention to what I was saying. She stopped and picked up her walkie-talkie and began acting like she was really going to do something about my demand, and I began to think that maybe she was the same lady I had been calling on the phone each morning to reserve and cancel my reservations to New York.

  I said again, “Yes, please, please, get my bags off. Get my bags off the plane!” And then as quickly as I said that, I changed my mind. “No, no, I’m on, leave them on—I mean yes—I mean no—yes—no—I mean no.” And then I just fell into a short circuit, “Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no,” and I groaned, almost barking like a dog, between nos and yeses and nos, and Meg, who was in front of me, slowly turned and looked at me as though I were going completely mad. Then she began to move forward toward the plane without me, and when I saw that, I just said to the flight attendant, “No, leave the bags on the plane. Let my bags go back to New York. I’m staying here. For better or for worse, I’m staying here.”

  And she said, still very politely, as though she were dealing with a completely sane and responsible adult male, “But, Mr. North, I’m afraid that you can’t do that. You must accompany your bags to New York. That’s policy.” By this time Meg had already boarded without me, and I stood there sweating and shaking in my self-created hell of confusion, then took one giant step and I was on. I got on the plane to accompany my bags to New York.

  I took an empty seat by a window in the rear, in what I felt was the safest part of the plane. I didn’t even try to find my proper seat next to Meg. And then, for the second time in my life, I took off in a plane without holding Meg’s hand and this time Meg was on the same plane. I was surprised to find that I was not afraid. I was without fear. In fact I was without almost any feeling at all.

  Not only was there no emotion, there was no sense of time passing. That seven-hour flight could have been seven minutes. I remember only seeing what I took to be the tip of Greenland and then descending toward New York. I also remember watching Meg from what felt like a great distance. I wondered if she was reading or sewing or crying or doing a crossword puzzle or crying on her crossword puzzle. At some point in what seemed like a seven-minute flight, I walked up and said hello to her, like a stranger. She seemed surprised to see me, and at first I thought she was acting, because I thought she knew me well enough to know that I couldn’t stay in Amsterdam without her. I sat beside her and told her that I was scared because I’d never been on a plane before without being worried the whole time, and now I didn’t care one way or the other about the plane crashing. And that made me think I didn’t care if I lived or died. Meg just listened. She didn’t try to make sense of it or throw any interpretation on it. She just listened as we came down into crazy, hot New York in that completely mad bicentennial summer of 1976, the year of the tall ships, the strangest year of my life.

  GOD, MEG WAS organized. If I was chaos, she was all order and meaning. She got me through customs and had even made plans ahead of time for our friend Barney to pick us up at the airport.

  A blast of hot, humid air slammed us as we walked out of the airport and onto the sidewalk. I don’t know why I call it air. It was more like the fumes of summer. It was as though we were back in India, but without the exotic, pastoral vistas. There were no cows in the streets for taxis to weave around, no barefoot men running rickshaws. Only cars and more cars, buildings roaring with air conditioners and countless machines. There was nothing feminine or soft or inviting about New York City. My whole body and mind felt as if they had been thrown into the hellish jaws of a giant robot a
nd were being chewed up by metal teeth. I felt like a robot being chewed by a robot. I wanted to go right back to India. If I could have just jumped on the back of a giant bird … and flown there it would have been fine, but I couldn’t face another plane trip, another giant mechanical coffin with wings.

  Barney rushed over to greet us. I tried in vain to hug him and get close, as though I were there, but my body had not caught up with me yet, and it all felt like the ridiculous abstract motions of a robot. Parts of me were scattered in the long wake of our travels. Pieces were still in India, The Tubs, and in that attic room in Amsterdam. New York City was too real.

  Meg was so happy to see Barney. I watched it all like a crazy play going on at a great distance. It was as though I had died and was watching life go on without me. There was no homecoming feeling, no feeling of home, only absence. I listened to Barney’s enthusiastic babble about the tall ships that had sailed into the New York harbor and about how someone was filming a remake of King Kong at the World Trade Center, and wouldn’t we just love to drive by and see that giant ape wedged in between those twin towers? “No, please,” I said. “I need a drink. We need to get home.” Then, even worse, I realized we had no home.

  Not thinking we would return this early, we had sublet our apartment until September, and we were going to have to stay at Barney’s loft. I shuddered, beginning now to realize I had touched paradise and I had not taken it. It had slipped through my fingers. I couldn’t be there or here or anywhere. I couldn’t relax. That would be to let in more pain than I could bear. There was no way out, I thought, as I downed my beers in Barney’s kitchen and tried to drown myself.