MY MOTHER—gone
“Your mother would always complain about the butter”
but the gasoline bill was the bloody end
the end!
but didn’t you hear her tossing and turning at night upset enough to walk out and do what she did…. how many days or years, will pass before I realize what has happened….
Chan standing in his pajamas in the drive…. dead
dead
and I thought
her heart
had broken
Dear Liz,
I want to see into you and touch you while we still can or else all, all is fucked
up…. done
lost
The thing which I cannot get over is that everything is in order from the green jello to her paints
I MUST keep the outside me alive!
to LIZ
In the old days she smelled like lemons
lemons in her hair
and her flesh flushed
clean like the backside
of a fall day October (my new
hope) our lady of the leaves
The following passage, a continuation of the undated entry about his mother’s breakdown quoted in the epigraph, has a more formal, lyrical quality to it than Gray’s typical journal entries. Though the story is a seemingly true account of how Gray found out about his fifty-two-year-old mother’s suicide, there are a couple of minor discrepancies between this version and the one in Gray’s journals. Here, for example, his father presents an urn with his mother’s ashes in it, whereas in the entry above Gray describes his father asking him to pick up her ashes at the post office. This indicates he took some of the liberties of fiction in the passage below. Gray also included a slightly altered version of this story in his 1992 novel, Impossible Vacation.
I hadn’t given much conscious thought to my mother’s condition. In fact, while in Mexico I never wrote to my parents and because of that I don’t think my father knew where to write me. I phoned him from the La Guardia airport and asked him to pick me up at Hillsgrove, the Providence airport.
It was a hot August day and I sat outside the airport on the parched lawn. I drank some leftover tequila out of a brown paper bag while I waited.
Dad pulled up in his air-conditioned LTD and gave me one of his wiry greetings, a kind of uptight embrace without really touching. Our bodies on the verge of coming together. Me getting the vague impression of his body as being held together by bailing wire … He smelled the booze on my breath and said, “What, have you been tying one on?” He put my bags in the trunk and we got in the car together. The air-conditioning was a relief. We rode for a few miles in a sort of uncomfortable silence and then I popped the question, “How’s Mom?”
“She’s gone” was all he said and he began to cry a horrid, wheezy, sad, dried up, crackle of a cry. I just sat there frozen like a statue. I didn’t reach out to him. I suddenly saw that dry August landscape go flat. The other cars passed with all their windows closed and all I could think was, she’s gone, she’s gone; died of a broken heart like in fairy tales, she died of a broken heart … Died of a broken heart. We rode in silence, Dad weeping over the sound of the air-conditioner. The broken, hopeless landscape passed and went flat suddenly without color.
When we got home to Shady Hill, Dad fixed us drinks and then opened up and told me all about it. Mom’s condition had grown worse and he was running out of money. He couldn’t afford those fancy private homes that gave all the shock treatments. He was getting ready to send her to a state institution. Perhaps she had picked up on that and decided to end it all. In the middle of the night, one night in July, Dad woke to what he thought was the sound of the refrigerator but then realized it was the car running in the garage. He got up to find her slumped in his LTD. He called the rescue squad and they came quickly but it was too late.
We drank some more and then he went on for the leftover proof that it had all happened. First he showed me the gasoline bill from Al’s Gulf. He had replaced the gasoline she had used to kill herself and he showed me how much. He also showed me a bill from the dentist. Mom had had a lot of dental work done a week before she killed herself. A strange hopeful sign. Then he showed me all the sympathy cards set up on the mantle of the fireplace where the Christmas cards usually go. He pointed out that her Christian licensed practitioner had not sent a card. He was furious that her practitioner refused to recognize her death after all the prayers he had paid for. And, at last, he showed me a plain, brown cardboard box that contained the urn that contained her ashes. The box sat close to his bed on a little night table. Closer now to his bed than my mother had been in years. (They always had single beds close together but towards the end he had gotten further and further away and now sat as empty testimony at the far end of the room but her ashes rested close to my father’s head.) They would stay there for a few weeks until my father could go out with my Uncle John in his powerboat and scatter the ashes over Narragansett Bay. Over the water she loved.
We went back to the living room to have more drinks. Dad began to talk about the future. How now that Mom was gone he was going to have the driveway asphalted. She had wanted to keep it gravel but the spring rains always turned it to mud and Dad’s car always got stuck. Now it would be asphalt.
As the evening went on Dad got drunker and drunker until he fell down on his knees and then helped himself up using a chair or chest of drawers as support. I never got up to help him. I drank as much as he did but it didn’t seem to affect me. I sat there like a statue. I sat and watched it all go by.
After returning home from Mexico, Gray moved to New York with LeCompte. They lived, along with LeCompte’s sister, Ellen, and another friend, in an apartment on Sixth Street and Avenue D, on the Lower East Side. Gray took the occasional odd job—as a stock boy, for example—and collected thirty-two dollars a week in Texas unemployment while LeCompte sold postcards at the front desk of the Guggenheim Museum in order to make ends meet. The following journal entries are written shortly after his mother’s suicide, and yet there is little mention of it. Later, however, the tragedy would become the centerpiece of one of his first works of theater—a collaboration with LeCompte in the early seventies—and be explored in many of the monologues he performed afterward.
SEPTEMBER 28, 1967
I’ve not written for a long while….
So now, living here these evenings, I do feel somewhat at peace with Liz and her friends, taking the days as they come but outside me now (as my mscels muscles turn to water) I feel the sweeping steaming hiss of competition! And I think how easy it is to live in the country and not be tempted by money and things but here in NYC it is ALL, seems wherever you look to be all…. but there’s something missing here. It’s like a boat sinking.
OCTOBER 16, 1967
I believe with Liz in time.
—Liz gives me a FUTURE! she GIVES
I take!
JANUARY 6, 1968
It was sometime in my 8 or 9th year at 66 Rumstick [address of Gray’s childhood home in Rhode Island] when I realized that the swing in the back yard made me think of a set—a stage or perhaps a TV set but we didn’t get a TV until I was 11 years old—anyway, I wanted to put on a show. I didn’t know what kind of show but I knew the area needed it. For some reason it was not complete in itself. I needed to comment on it. It has something to do with time and death—the swing being there then was not enough. I now have mind photos of it. And most of all—if someone were to ask me, “Would you take one complete and happy pump me up to the sky swing on that swing—or would you rather have a life long photograph memory—correct artistic interpretation of the swing—
goddamn it I’d take the art
Art is not life but the living’s realization and creative reaction to the termination of life.
I’ll take art and try to stop the clock.
In 1968, Gray was given his first acting role in New York City. In March, he was cast in a production of Tom Paine—an expe
rimental play by Paul Foster recounting the life of the political pamphleteer and one of America’s Founding Fathers. Gray danced throughout the production—directed by Tom O’Horgan, at La MaMa, a well-known avant-garde off-Broadway theater. In May, he performed in Robert Lowell’s adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Endicott and the Red Cross at the American Place Theatre. By this time, he and LeCompte had moved to a new apartment—a railroad flat with a shared bathroom in the hallway and a bathtub in the kitchen—at Ninety-third Street and Third Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The rent was low enough for the two of them to afford it while working only part-time. For a period, Ken Kobland, a friend of LeCompte’s from college, lived with them as well.
“Spald would come home, and he would tell us the story of his day,” Kobland said of this time. “Those were the most extraordinary performances. The way he would put together a story of his day and his characterization of it and his ability to tell the tale where one thing here wound up connecting to something else later. He literally would torture you with pleasure.” Kobland remained one of Gray’s closest friends throughout life.
JUNE 10, 1968
The world is like a growing party to which I was invited late by my parents.
It’s crowded now and needs much more sorting out. In time it will grow mad like any party and fall apart and purify itself.
in time TIME is the great purifier
I believe in time—long exhausting time is my god.
JULY 10, 1968
to be a good actor is to be good…. to love to be whole—not sick and selfishly out of it
none of that shit about saving it for (saving life) fore for the stage.
in the most complete actor (not always the best) his stage art is only an extension of his life art.
LIFE ART
a graceful and poetic
extension of self
OCTOBER 9, 1968
The big come down after “TOM PAINE” … it’s hard I’ve been thinking about Fryeburg and what kept me going there and no doubt, a big part of it, outside of the security-escape aspect of it, was my “religious” conviction…. my faith in nature and man … the last long stretch of naïve boyhood and now things are really difficult (great fears about alchhol alcha drinking I keep wanting to drink).
It’s difficult to me BE with myself.
Perhaps “theatre” is taking the place of my, no longer in existence, religious belief.
THE GREAT NEED for a life form
I’m coming more and more to the enslaving realization that my “life” and “theatre” are so strongly integrated that I could never have one without the other.
I must…. I am a very religious person.
In 1969, Gray met Richard Schechner, an iconoclastic director in the downtown New York theater world. Schechner directed Dionysus in 69, a play loosely based on Euripides’ Bacchae, in which a live orgy took place onstage with actors inviting audience members to join, and which received critical (if astonished) praise, as well as an Obie Award—an off-Broadway theater award bestowed by The Village Voice—for Outstanding Play. Gray and LeCompte had seen the show together at the Performing Garage, Schechner’s theater on Wooster Street, and were electrified.
Later that year, Schechner put together an interpretive piece based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth called Makbeth. The actor meant to play Macduff quit only four days before performances were to begin. (He’d gotten a job traveling cross-country as Mr. Peanut.) Panicked, Schechner flipped through a stack of head shots on his desk in search of a replacement. He chose a photograph of a young man “staring out with eyes so far apart,” he recalled, “he wasn’t trying to look pretty, he wasn’t trying to do anything. It was unlike any other résumé shot I’d seen.”
The eyes were Gray’s; Schechner called him. Soon after, Gray attended a rehearsal where, as Gray later described it in A Personal History of American Theater, Schechner, filling in for the role of King Duncan, lay on a banquet table and asked all of the actors to feed on his stomach. “[Schechner] had a belly like an orangutan and it was as hairy,” Gray said. “I was on all fours. I was sucking, pulling out the hairs between my teeth, and he was going ‘Suck harder! Harder!’ ”
Schechner didn’t remember it was his own stomach Gray was devouring but described the audition this way: “I had to do that scene because I knew [Gray] could probably act but that was one of those Schechner signature scenes—kind of sexy, kind of fun, kind of tyrannical and unusual. The actor had to really eat out somebody’s stomach—it wasn’t genitals, but it was on their stomach. He did it and I cast him.”
Gray debuted as Macduff three days later. The play closed shortly thereafter—critics panned it, and it lacked the audience support of Dionysus in 69—but Gray had made an impression. Afterward, when Schechner was in the process of re-forming his theater company—telling some actors he no longer wanted to work with them and seeking out others to come on board—he asked Gray to join. Gray became a member along with, among others, Stephen Borst, who’d also performed in Makbeth,Jerry Rojo, a set designer, and Schechner’s wife, Joan MacIntosh.
JANUARY 7, 1969
Have discovered two positive points about the “the workshop” (and that took some doing):
1) the yoga
2) that in order to relate to fellow actors one must find something in each one of them that you can love, accept and relate to. This is also true with a play.
It’s one of the most difficult tasks in an honest approach to acting.
It’s really difficult to do with many of these “ensemble” people.
JANUARY 9, 1969
I feel so calm tonight so calm….. so at peace that I feel I must be missing something.
I am beginning to feel stagnant yes, in one place too long it’s the three month change that brings out the poet in me. (you may laugh but….)
forced change is easier because it creates the change without me having to be active (an easy way out).
I feel like moving now but am a little afraid (a lot sometimes) of losing Liz.
I wish Liz could be her…. absolute … no change just the way she is forever “my goddess” (HA-HA) and I could come and go…. go and come.
The hardest and most bothersome thing for me is attempted recollections of childhood. I thought a lot about that today. I was trying to remember what it was like to wake up on Saturday mornings…. I’m thinking now that my upbringing was honest in relation with the world I was brought up in and that was a very dishonest world oh shit! but there were certain things that were allowed, without awareness, to happen in the child’s world…. the smell of leaves burning….. the sound of the Austins’ great maple when all but me were asleep……
JANUARY 12, 1969
new experiences are good just for the sake of putting one on new tracks of thought and reflective realization. Habit is a great deadener and so people make their way through an entire life on habit rolling like dumb snow balls.
(Good-god looking back at my writings. It’s strange I didn’t write much last year. I think I was too busy just doing…. which is alright I guess) more easily contented…. not really thinking about my relations with Liz or theatre, or N.Y.C. just looking for any acting work … which I got).
JANUARY 12, 1969
The only way I can judge the world is to live a lifetime in it as honestly as I know how. The theatre world can only be dishonest in retrospect.
I will do my best.
JANUARY 14, 1969
I’m sure the major reason for not being able to sleep last night is the fact and condition of opening up more to people, LIZ, experiences and I have this great fear of a nervous breakdown coming from having to “deal”….. you see I feel that I must deal with these things.
Shit! how forced I still am. My whole mind is a running commentary on all that I do. I can’t turn off the comments….. walking through Central Park the wind…. the not too cold wind and the distinct shadows remind me of early spring (early spring and late fal
l are two of my favorites or should I say—late winter…. where the season is just ready to give itself over) I feel the wind in my face and I think I’ll cry and I do and see….. am aware of the way in which the first tear of out of my left eye has caught and rainbowed the reflections of the afternoon sun.
JANUARY 15, 1969
to be able to separate the object from its source. for a brief minute the light from the 23rd street subway was part of the tracks, the tracks were full of flowing light and for a wonderful few seconds I had forgotten about the subway (almost) the always being aware of not being aware.
such a beautuful beautiful day
sea-gulls like on a string in central park
sea-gulls: the freest most fantastic thing in the city, just that one cry of a gull could take me back to the sea because I do feel more open & free today. It has much to do with the weather I’m sure.
THEATRE SHOULD BE THEATRE—a “poetic” extension and enhancement of life…. an abstraction ABSTRACTION
let the actor and the script come closer…. let the script bend to the actor.
MARCH 15, 1969
I could end my life right now and also end the waiting
LOVE
dear Liz, you have now sense of my other side
I need Liz and I muss must make her realize that I need her and in all honesty I don’t know whether I love her more than I need her ore ore or need her more than I love her.
Liz seems the only way and I sometimes hate her for it.
could everything be blown out the window in one night?
WHEN I GO TO SLEEP I’LL CHANGE
MARCH 27, 1969
I sometimes see so clearly why people make films…. they are so gassed by life that all they feel they can do (perhaps to keep from going mad) is to record it. I want something else…. poetry I guess…. “life” and then something more. I guess one reaches a point where they accept all and sit back and watch whatever comes into their scope but one can go farther just at that point one begins to sing or dance or, I mean…. yes! expression…. individual, and even group, expression. to make a film is to record expression … Theatre is so great because it is temporal and thus one gets closer to the immediacy of the action without the reflection on the action.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 4