Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  So it was July 1976 and summer in New York City and I would start my days in the most agitated of states, just rolling on the floor and groaning. When I wasn’t rolling on the floor and moaning, I was calling travel agents to get them to talk to me about their discount summer tours; and for just a little while their responsible voices on the phone would lull me into a calm state. She or he would give such a complete description of Greece or Bali that I felt I didn’t have to go because I could see it so vividly, too vividly perhaps. It would become like a loop of Kodachrome film in my mind. After I got through all of that, I would go out and buy Back Stage and Show Business and look for film casting calls. I knew there was no way I could land a modeling job, because I couldn’t stand still long enough. Barney thought I was nuts, although he didn’t use the word “nuts,” to be looking for film work in trade papers. Barney made his own art films. He made beautiful films for hardly any money at all with his little sixteen-millimeter camera and eventually showed them to a small but enthusiastic audience. When he was out of money he would go to work as a cameraman for the big guys. He told me that there was no way I would find work through the trade papers. I had to go out and get an agent and come at it all very slowly and professionally. I had to learn how to be patient and wait and hang out. I also had to learn how to become a part of the scene. Talent was at the bottom of the list. Looks helped. But my little book of traveler’s checks was getting thinner and thinner and I needed a job right away. I couldn’t imagine what I could do. All that occurred to me was that I could try to call my morning groanings and rollings some sort of experimental dance and sell tickets. I could have people come and see me roll on the floor of Barney’s loft. When I told Meg and Barney that, they laughed, and I was happy that I made them laugh, but also sad that I was not laughing with them.

  Some time during all of this I began to make plans to drive to Provincetown alone. It occurred to me that all my problems were the result of the fact that I had never made it to Provincetown that summer of 1963, when I’d made so many aborted attempts to escape from Mom.

  But Meg and Barney and Barney’s girlfriend, Sylvia, thought I’d better get to a psychiatrist real quick, before August, when they all went on vacation. Sylvia gave me the name of someone she said was a really good shrink on Central Park West. Not only was he good, she said, but he was smart and healthy. He was healthy in the head, which is a rarity, she said. He was in the business because he liked helping people. Sylvia had called him and prepared him for my visit.

  I was nervous going up to Central Park West and could hardly sit still on the subway. I kept yelling out like a nervous bag lady, not words so much as crazy shouts, but no one paid any attention to me. Maybe if they had I would have calmed down, like when a camera was aimed on me. But it didn’t happen. Maybe I was living in the wrong city, I thought. Maybe I had to move to San Francisco or Seattle, where people would notice me when I acted out and then I’d have to calm down and act like them.

  This psychiatrist’s office was not at all big or ostentatious for a Central Park West location, and I thought he seemed to be a nice, smart guy when I was able to sit still long enough to get a fix on him. But most of the time I was bouncing off the walls, bouncing from chair to chair, and pacing around his office. I figured he could see that I was pretty crazy, but he must be used to that. He stayed calm while I moved around, and I liked the fact that he was able to stay calm in the middle of all my agitation. He just sat there with his hands folded under his chin and spoke to me in a real calm, adult voice. It was one of the few groups of words that I remember clearly from that summer. I remembered a lot of other things, but not people’s phrases and sentences. He treated me like a responsible adult. He said it in a kind of gentle, professorial tone, with only a hint of drama in his voice. He said, “Brewster, you are going through a severe manic-depressive episode, and right now you are locked into the manic mode. I understand that it’s a painful state, but still it’s sensational and very dramatic and therefore in a perverse way almost enjoyable, or at least something to hold on to. In that mode at least it feels like something is going on all the time. But I have to tell you, Brewster, that this manic state you are in now will pass in due course. It will turn into a depressive episode, and that, I can tell you, will not be fun. I have to be very frank with you. That episode will be very, very depressing.”

  “What are you—what are you saying?” I asked him without looking at him, as I paced the floor in front of him. “All this ‘episode’ stuff makes me feel like I’m the star in my own soap opera. I just want to know how much it will cost to get fixed.”

  All the time I was saying this to him, I was in fact afraid, deep-down afraid, that I had inherited Mom’s illness, that it had been there all the time and now it was surfacing at last.

  He was as frank and straight with me about his price as he was about his diagnosis. He said, “I cost eighty dollars a session with no sliding scale, and I’m going to want you to come see me three times a week.”

  I was thunderstruck. I was so shocked that I was almost instantly cured. In fact, for a moment I thought it was some new form of shock therapy that he was using, like some sort of weird monetary Zen slap. I got even more nervous and told him it was impossible. There was no way I could afford to pay that kind of money. I told him it was simply out of the question, and then he said something that scared me even more. He told me that I had to look at this as major surgery. He told me that what I had was like a cancer that needed to be operated on immediately. He told me to ask my father for the money if I didn’t have it. “After all,” he said, “if you had cancer and needed an operation and didn’t have the money, wouldn’t you ask your father for it?” Well, he had me there, and I didn’t argue. I didn’t even ask him how he knew my father had the money to pay for therapy. I guess in spite of my madness I still had the look of a Boston Brahmin. I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t ask my father for the money because my father didn’t believe in psychiatrists, because they’d done nothing to help Mom. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t ask for the money because Dad had spent thousands on Mom, and I didn’t want to put him through that again. I didn’t tell him that what I needed was a long sabbatical, a break from life. I needed someone to take me on as a special patient. I so badly wanted to be special, and not simply that person he had already labeled in his head as your basic manic-depressive. I didn’t tell him any of this. I just walked out of the office, and when I got outside on that hot-as-India Central Park West sidewalk, I got so afraid that I almost disappeared, like the way people faint when they’re in pain. I thought of Meg’s sister, who when she was giving birth to her first child in a farmhouse upstate was in so much pain she cried out “I’m leaving!” as though she could jump up and leave her body there in bed to have the baby on its own, while some other part of her took a long walk in the woods.

  After that visit I began to plead with Barney and Meg to please get me to a white room, a white room with solid ceilings and white right angles in some nice air-conditioned mental ward where I’d have a sabbatical to do nothing. I didn’t want anything coming in anymore—no more input, please. I wanted to swing way out into the restful void for a bit, and then be able to swing back when I was ready and rested. So one hot day, perhaps toward the end of July, I don’t know (I had lost all track of days), I asked them—no, pleaded with them—“Please take me to Bellevue.” (What a crazy choice, looking back on it now. That must have been one of the signs that I’d gone mad, that I chose Bellevue.) And they did it. Barney and Meg drove me there in the van. I think they were at their wits’ end and just didn’t know how to deal with me anymore. They weren’t getting any sleep because I couldn’t calm down ever since that damn shrink told me I could expect to be that way for a while. I wanted to go to Bellevue and they took me there. The big hurly-burly doctor at the admissions desk told me I could have a room, a scholarship room. “All you have to do, Mr. North, is to sign this paper and you’ll be in and we’ll take care of you. Y
ou’ll have a room of your own and everything will be taken care of, but you must commit yourself by signing this paper.” Well, I can tell you, that’s when I realized I had a real commitment problem.

  I didn’t like the sound or thought of “commitment” at all, and I began to pace around the room groaning, while Meg cried in Barney’s arms in the corner. When I looked over and saw how much I was hurting Meg I thought I’d better sign my name. So I went over to the desk and looked at that big official form with the small print. It bounced around in my eyes as I tried to read it. I got all freaked out again and began to pace and groan. Seeing how disturbed I was and how upset my friends were, the admitting doctor, this hurly-burly, bearded man, tried to calm me down by asking me some personal questions like “What do you do for a living, Mr. North?” I thought he meant “Who are you?” I knew that in New York City you are what you do first, and a person after that. I had a feeling this guy was trying to find out what I did for money, not who I was, and I got all confused because I was not a job. I was unemployed, but I didn’t want to say that, so I got all confused and said, “I’m a model.… No, I mean … an actor.… No, not that.… I’m a … mmm …” I hesitated slightly and then spit it out: “I’m an artist.” I wanted to tell him that I was a poet, only I hadn’t written any poetry yet, but that was too confusing, so I told him I was an artist, which somehow felt right at the time. Without so much as a pause, he just smiled back at me and said, “Well, I can tell you, Mr. North, I understand you sensitive artist types, because I play the clarinet myself.” And as soon as he said that, I knew I was not going to sign that admissions form. If he had said he played the oboe, well, maybe I might have signed; but when he said he played the clarinet, that was it. I just asked Barney and Meg to please take me home.

  AT BARNEY’S something happened that I read as a sort of sign, a synchronicity, the kind of thing I was on the lookout for all the time—a sign to guide me through that dark night of the soul. Barney got a call offering him a job as a cameraman on a porn movie. Soon he was coming back to the loft at night with all these stories about how he had to film women doing all sorts of crazy things with cucumbers and squashes. I could tell he was not happy in this new work, that it was just a job; but at the same time he seemed to be fascinated by all of it and couldn’t stop telling stories. The more he talked about the movie, the more I wanted to be in it.

  Now I was just operating on impulse, grabbing at anything that took my fancy as I rolled down and down in that constant motion that hadn’t stopped since Ladakh. My plan was that I would act in one or two porn films and use the money to take a long bus trip to San Francisco, where I would stay with friends and be away from Meg to give her a rest and a chance to deal with her rugs. Then I’d come back all cooled out and we’d start out fresh again. I equated the West Coast with health and thought I could get better there. I thought San Francisco would be healthier than Bellevue.

  Barney said it was a crazy idea, and Meg had pretty much given up trying to advise me. Her sister, Diane—the one who owned the bookstore with Joe and who tried to get out of bed when she was having a baby—said it all; she said, “Brewster, why do you want to turn everything into shit? Where’s your self-esteem?”

  I convinced Barney to give me the address of the porn film casting office and I was off. I got all dressed up in my white cotton pants and raw silk Nehru jacket I’d had made in India and went up to an office on West Fifty-seventh Street. I even took along one of the photos Meg had taken of me. I was a little embarrassed to find a woman was doing the central casting, but she put me at ease with her totally professional attitude.

  “So, Mr. North, you want to act in X-rated films?” she asked. “That’s all well and good, but do you have a partner?” Oh no, I thought, it’s going to be like the live show in Amsterdam: they won’t take me without a partner. And just as I was thinking that the jig was up, one of the porn film directors came into her office hoping to pick up some new talent. He had come in to go through her file of photos, and it took him no time at all to see he had a live one right there. His name was Bernie and he was a balding, sleazy guy who wore silver reflecting sunglasses. He was a big, fat, sweaty man who wore a leather coat, even though it was summer, and a lot of gold sex chains around his neck. He started right in asking me about my credentials—you know, my career—where I’d worked in porn films before and stuff like that. So I just started making up a history, and the more I did that the better I felt. My whole body took on a kind of confident, cocky attitude. I told him I’d been working in Amsterdam in live shows and doing porn films in Copenhagen for the past few years. I told them how I liked it in Europe because the women had “super bods,” and the directors were more artistic, more sensitive in their approach. Then I told him a death in the family had brought me back to the States, and now I wanted to pick up a little work before heading back to continue my career in Europe. Bernie seemed to listen, responding with appropriate grunts here and there at the mention of the women’s “bods” in Copenhagen. As for the stuff about the sensitive directors and the death in the family, that just reflected off his glasses and came back at me.

  Bernie didn’t ask me any embarrassing questions about cock size and stuff like that, or how long I could hold out without coming, things I had expected him to ask. He just told me to show up the following day at a penthouse on East Eighty-sixth Street, and we’d take it from there.

  When I got back to the loft, Meg and Barney were amazed to see how focused and excited I was. At last I was going to be on camera. At last, for a moment at least, my life was going to mean something.

  I slept the night through and woke up without groaning. Meg was so relieved. Now she could begin to sort out her rugs and try to get her business going. I was amazed that she didn’t seem to judge what I was doing. She seemed happy just to have me out of the house and off the streets, like I was a child she had finally been able to get into day care. I was so excited that I arrived early, before the crew had set up. I felt like a new man as I strolled out on that penthouse terrace and chatted with the camera crew.

  After Bernie and everyone else arrived, the shot was set up, and all the actors were herded back into a small bedroom which served as a waiting room.

  We were all piled up in this little side bedroom, a mixture of men and women, just waiting to be called in to do whatever we were asked, in whatever combinations. I don’t think anyone even knew what the film was about. It wasn’t as though anyone was reading scripts or studying lines in there. We were just hanging out. No one was even reading a book. There was a strange and somewhat perverse quality of privacy among us. The actors and actresses didn’t talk dirty, as you might imagine. They were all very discreet and proper, at least when it came to talking about what they did when they left the room and went on camera. In a regular, nonpornographic film you might expect an actor or actress to come off camera all bubbly, talking about how the scene went; but here, the actors and actresses just came back with discreet little smirks on their faces and then lay around in states of semidress, hanging out until they were called again. It was weird.

  But they were not at all private in the way they displayed themselves, particularly the women. There was this one actress who drove me to distraction. She’d come back into our waiting room after she did whatever she did and roll what she called a “spliff,” a little marijuana mixed in with cigarette tobacco rolled into a cigarette, and then she’d just lounge back in that peach-colored satin robe, cross her legs, and bounce one foot until the robe slowly fell away to reveal a fantastic thigh and a nicely pruned bush. Then she’d let her robe fall open at the chest while she talked about her boyfriend and how he was a total grump when he didn’t have his marijuana. “Just a big old grump,” she said. She talked about some trip they’d taken to Hawaii together and how she thought it was going to be so spectacular, but her boyfriend was a total grump because he couldn’t score any grass until their last day there. I just sat there like a dumbstruck ten-year-old i
n a candy store. The sight of that woman made me crazy. I wanted to touch her all over. I wanted to be her slave. I kept hoping that I’d somehow get paired up with her, but I figured that the chances were slim, real slim, because every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my face looked so sad, so mad. I looked like Antonin Artaud in his last days. But I couldn’t help making up my own porn film in my head about how this slinky lady would have me down on all fours with a dog collar around my neck, how she’d have me on a leash and command me to eat her all over. I was sure that to have her would be total satisfaction. But any attempt at conversation with her just fell between the beds, so I ended up talking to this guy named Gary.

  Gary was about my age and was nice enough. He had a female partner. That’s the only reason, he said, that he was getting so much work in porn films. He was surprised to find that I had gotten work without a partner. Unless you’re a porn star, it was difficult to get work without a partner. Gary’s partner was named Janine, and she looked like the star-struck starlet type, only she was just slightly off. She didn’t have the pretty commercial look that makes it big in the movies. There was too much going on in her face. You could see the doubt and the anger. She couldn’t hide it well. She couldn’t plastic it over, and I figured that sort of turned off the casting people in legitimate films. Janine and Gary were old friends and they trusted each other enough to have functional sex on camera. Gary said they even had a good time sometimes, but he didn’t want to dwell on the good times too much because he didn’t want to get too attached. He wanted to be able to leave the city when the time came.

  I was curious about Janine’s story, but before we could get to it, Bernie came in, still wearing those damned reflective sunglasses, and called me out to the living room. I was very nervous, not having any idea what I would be called upon to do; but both to my relief and to my disappointment, the task turned out to be absurdly simple. All I had to do was walk by a bare-breasted woman who was being whipped with a little leather cat-o’-nine-tails by a man dressed as a pirate. It wasn’t a violent scene. He was barely hitting her. I had to stand there and watch him whip her three times, look down at my watch, which Props had just put on my wrist, then look up at the camera and say, “Oh, shiver my timbers. I do declare, three o’clock. Right on the old nose,” then just stroll on through the room like some absentminded professor. By now they had me dressed in a very nice Palm Beach suit. Anyway, there was no discussion of character or plot or who I was supposed to be or anything like that. So I just decided to do my line reading as Woody Allen would have, and everyone laughed when I did it, and that made me feel real good. I felt like I’d accomplished something, like I was potent. I had brought a little more laughter into the world, and I liked the feeling of that.