The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  Liz took care of me. She brought me through. I don’t know what I would have done without her. She stuck with me and was always there for me. I got into therapy once a week with a psychiatrist and he had me on tranquilizers. The hyper manic activity soon changed to deep depression and I slept about 18 hours a day. I could not stay awake. Liz told me to sleep as long as I wanted to and not worry.

  Some friends, suspecting that I had hypoglycemia sent me to a clinic for a glucose tolerance test. I was diagnosed as hyperkalemic and was put on a special diet and given megavitamin therapy. That, combined with my seeing the psychiatrist, brought me back to a condition where I was able to work. It was then that I began to make Rumstick Road. I also began to have an affair with a young woman. Looking back on it I see myself as being totally destructive to Liz. It seems like she brought me through all that so I could run off with another woman. It’s beyond me how I could have done this but I did it. And this is where it gets all confusing for me; this is where I stop being able to write about this experience. I feel guilty about this betrayal. I feel I used Liz. I feel I punished her for caring for me. I punished her for loving me. I resented her for helping me.

  This is the part that’s hard to write about. I have no distance on it. I’m in it now.

  I am seeking treatment at this time because I am looking for some clarity in my life. I am torn between being an ARTIST and being “in the world.” I feel I have to resolve this question now before I get any older, so that I can commit myself more fully. I feel I withhold. I sometimes want to get inside of it all. Even if it’s only for a little while.

  India

  Lighthouse

  India

  Lighthouse

  Cut out pages of To the Lighthouse and make a script where you read in between Indian stories.

  JUNE 19, 1976

  [From the journal Gray kept in Amsterdam (en route to New York from India)]

  For days have had no energy, have just laid in bed and fantasized where to go next. The crazy compulsive sexual thing has got me in the pit of the stomach. I can’t taste my food, can’t feel my body, thinking about “love” narcissism—me as a sex object

  feelings that the whole idea of doing a solo piece is just a compulsive escape from ??

  I woke up panicked and terrified again. I can’t make any decisions because the action is all based on fantasy and I’ve let Richard and Liz lead my way for so many years that now I’m seeping and weeping the karma of being a baby. The little boy in me is sick.

  Want to say how I view Liz even after these few days away. The memory most strong is of Daksum [a forested walking area in Kashmir]. After Liz had confessed to me all her fears about making it on our/her own in N.Y.C.—under a tree. It was raining and I tried to listen but could give her very little support except that I thought she was a good director and that we shared some common vision. We went back to our room and I began to hint at splitting up and I kept pushing at it and I kept threatening. Liz said we’d have to sell the loft if we broke up. She grabbed her coat and ran out. I kept asking her where she was going and she ran out. I let her go. Thought that she was leaving for good. Those fears and wishes for total desertion. The image I remember strongest was of her running across the lawn toward the woods. She looked like a crazy lost child boy girl (when she tries to look like a woman, it doesn’t work for me makes me irritated) but what I’m trying to get to was how Liz made me feel something like love and sorrow mixed seeing her running made me feel like “to the lighthouse,” at base of all the impossible sadness—my inability to take pleasure in life (thinking of how she makes love to me like a child makes me angry). So I walk out to look for her and she is at the bottom of a big cliff sitting by the silver water like a lost boy. I watch for a long time. I think she may have been crying. I had the impulse to take her in my arms like a ? not like a lover but like a friend. I’ve never had a better friend and never loved anyone else before (fear of getting lost fear!) but I only walk down and we made our way home along the stream. The impossible sadness of it all.

  Reading David Copperfield upset and threatened me—says we have to be revolutionaries finding out for ourselves what works—finding out about relationships. Working hard on our own. I lean toward Virginia Woolf because there is no sex threat no mention of sex—ships passing in the day—relationships never working. Brings me to the fact that there are at least two MES, two selves. One is the sensual sexual self that sometimes sleeps naked and the other soft old teddy bear man, old before his time—a joke. These two are in constant conflict. So now I want to explore the sensual self outside of my work—where does it go when I’m not working on theater. I think I equate sex (love?) with death. I know that there’s a part of me so in love with death that I feel like I have already died and am looking at the living.

  JUNE 25, 1976

  [Back in New York]

  Talked to Flip about relationships and also gay scene in relationship to quick object orgasm. I’m thinking a lot about orgasm and energy and directing sexual energy into my work. I told Flip that I feared I was a total narcissist and that I came back from India to make love to the other self that I saw dancing here. I could see this other me in my mind’s eye. Now I realize, crazy as it sounds, that I was trying to get back to myself. What I haven’t been able to integrate is the homosexual side of me and I know I have to face it here in New York with the me that’s here. First, I have to do my work. But my “work” leaves no time for relationships so I have to answer that question, why not Greece?—a vacation makes it all too unreal. It’s easy to have sex on a vacation. I’m trying to find it in my regular life, whatever that is. If things don’t work out at _________ I can come back to N.Y.C. and start to face the music. How heavy life has gotten, how sad, how outrageously sad and lonely mere orgasm is, how I need both orgasm and relationship.

  I feel as lost and desperate as the summer in Provincetown when I got out of college, not knowing who I am and ready to grasp at anything. Should I be this or that, here is what presents itself.

  1. a world traveler

  2. a Zen monk

  3. a lover

  4. a movie star

  5. a dancer

  6. a maker of a group to carry out my vision

  7. a suicide victim

  8. God

  9. a family man just in love with Liz

  UNDATED ENTRY

  I’m back [in New York] and hit by the wave of sloppy materialism, all this concrete and pork chops and beer and the over stuffed Grand Union. It’s impossible for me to make any selection among the ten thousand cans and great fluorescent through of meat and meat people sexy meat people and not so easy to meet people.

  So what comes into my head is wanting to sell myself. So, I’m trying out for the movies, porn movies or New York Gangster movies, any kind of movies and Liz is going to push me … going to manage me. I’m also trying to do my own work whatever that means sort of running around and going crazy based on some thoughts and memories of my mother’s suicide.

  Gray did, in fact, act in two pornographic films in 1976, when he was thirty-five. The first, The Farmer’s Daughter, was about three escaped convicts who storm a Pennsylvania farmhouse and rape a mother and her three daughters. The second, which Gray worked on for only one day, was called Little Orphan Dusty. Gray later wrote an essay called “The Farmer’s Daughter,” in which he describes the experience of not being able to sustain his erection for the shoot on the film. “I was beginning to experience my limpness as The Great Refusal, but all of this was at the expense of the production. But, fuck it, I thought, someone always has to pay. There is no place in this world that doesn’t cost someone something,” Gray wrote. “The director had a new idea. It would be a new configuration. Rick would ass fuck Alice while she sucked me off … The director was right, something about this configuration worked. I closed my eyes and stretched back over the bed as I gave myself to this newfound pleasure … In order to avoid premature ejaculation I ran the gamut of images,
and at the same time, was careful not to choose an image so traumatic that it would lead to disengorgement and disengagement … I pictured starving bloated children in Africa. I watched god in his heaven stumble like a drunken bowery bum over his orange crate furniture. I saw Sissy Spacek with a wicked case of intestinal flu. And, for one terrifying second, I had a black webbing vision of cancer of the prostate. In short, I saw the end of the world as we have known it pass before my eyes, and breaking through these images I heard the director’s voice as he strode above me, ‘Make sounds, move around more, make it look like you like it. Moan, moan god damn it make some sound.’ ” In his journal, Gray wrote simply of this encounter, “I break down on the porno set because director gives me a hard time. I have tears.”

  JULY 13, 1976

  I dreamed that I made love to myself. I was in a big house and I walked by and found myself asleep on a couch and I was surprised and happy to find myself and I touched myself to wake me up then I climbed on to myself and began to make love to myself.

  AUGUST 29, 1976

  It’s been ten years July 29th since mom’s suicide and this is the Bicentennial.

  [The actual date of Elizabeth Horton’s suicide was nine years earlier on July 29, 1967.]

  After returning from his trip to India, Gray performed Sakonnet Point again from October 15 to November 13, 1976. According to members of the Performance Group, he seemed to be able to focus while working during this time, even though he was barely functioning in the outside world. On December 16, he performed an early show of Rumstick Road as an open rehearsal, with no set, for an invited audience. The show opened officially at the Performing Garage on March 25, 1977, and ran through the end of April. It ran twice more throughout the months of June and December.

  In 1977, at thirty-six years old, Gray made a vow to write in his journal every day. After discovering he was unable to make a decision on his own in India, he decided to keep a regular diary in order to take responsibility for his life. It was “also a more therapeutic way of splitting off a part of my self to observe another part,” as he explained it in Sex and Death. “It was the development of a writer’s consciousness. I tried to write mainly about detail of fact and action, rather than emotions. This report became like a Christmas tree, the structure upon which I could later hang my feelings, like ornaments.” As a result, the entries from this year, which are not excerpted here, often read like a police report—a recounting of the details of his day, including the weather, what he ate, whether he was hungover, and what time he went to bed.

  The section below, however, is different: these are notes from a trip that Gray took from California to New York by car in 1977. On the way, he stopped in Las Vegas for the night only to find himself waking in jail.

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1977

  MONDAY

  Hard driving through beautiful red hills straight on, flat out to Las Vegas. I drove 12 hrs. and came in to V. with “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto # 1” full blast on the radio. I took the first motel I came to on the strip, showered, dressed nice and went out to see the town. Everything was an ugly plastic front. I got real depressed, had about three beers and I was headed home when I got into one of those dark “feeling sorry for myself” places—making sounds and what not when two cop cars moved in on me and I asked them Why had they stopped me (because I was feeling angry anyway) and they put the cuffs on me, took me in to the station, booked me, sprayed me with DDT, put me in prison outfit, finger printed, mug shot, put me in a cooler 15 x 15 with 24 other men. [The police charged Gray with vagrancy.] A pimp that had just gotten off a murder rap, a guy that had just beat up both his brothers out of love and a supporting cast. At 5:00 AM they took us down for breakfast then locked us up.

  Gray was kept in jail for six days. On the fourth day, he was granted a phone call. He called LeCompte, but there was no answer. He convinced the guard to let him try someone else. He called Schechner; the line was busy. He was taken back to his cell. Finally, Gray managed to get word to LeCompte by asking an inmate who was paroled before Gray to contact her and tell her what had happened. LeCompte sent the bail money to the bondsman, and Gray was released. His trial was set for October of that year, but he never returned for it.

  The following is a letter Gray wrote to his father while in jail in Las Vegas (and likely never sent, as the original was tucked into one of his journal notebooks).

  Sept. 22, 1977

  Dear Dad,

  I’ve seen a lot of crazy things but this one takes the cake. I am a prisoner in Clark County Jail in Las Vegas. I mean, I would never have dreamed such a thing could come to pass. Someone in Santa Cruz loaned me a car to drive to New York, so I started by driving 12 hours straight to Las Vegas. I got in about 9:30 PM, Monday night, took a motel, washed up, and went out for a walk on the strip. I was dressed well with white pants and clean shirt. Two cops, in two different cars, stopped me. I did not have my ID with (a mistake I know) me, so they handcuffed me and ran me in. I spent the night in a detention “cooler” standing with about 24 men, all of us in prison outfits. They stripped me and sprayed with DDT, put me in a prison outfit, and photographed and fingerprinted me. All of this was like some mad dream. I mean I was stone sober. I had not broken any law I knew of, but I went along with it all … just played it cool. About five in the morning, they took us down in the basement for breakfast and then I was locked up in a cell with forty prisoners, some in for armed robbery, some in for rape, murder, trespassing, you name it.

  Well, I just work at staying calm for the first two days. I mainly stayed in my bed and watched what was going on. It was all like a movie, but a little too real. On my second day here, someone stabbed himself with a wire and was taken away.

  I find the only way for me to stay sane is to talk with the prisoners about their lives and that has helped, but what stories. I mean it’s all like out of a movie. The worst thing that is going on is that the jail guards will not let me make a call to Liz to get bail money, and Vegas is such a rip-off town I don’t know when my hearing will be. My bail is set at $250.00 which is not bad. I don’t know what’s happened to my car or any of my bags and money. They were all left at the motel and I don’t trust them there either. Santa Cruz was paradise … full of love and Vegas is hell … full of hate and money mad zombies. It’s a long story. I’ve tried everything to get out of here and feel like a helpless child.

  So … I’ve had some time to do some real thinking. I’ve sort of gone over my life … kind of figuring out how or why I was here … how I got into this jam. One of the things I’ve come up with in thinking about my past—nothing to do with why I’m here—but having to do with our relationship, is that I’ve felt we have never been very close to one another. I mean, we’ve had some times in the past. I remember you helping me with algebra, and going frost fishing together, and you doing the stop watch while I ran around the block. These events are all part of a long gone past and I wonder what’s happening now. I get so little time in Rhode Island, so we hardly have a chance to talk. I mean, it’s not that I think you don’t love me. Your helping me with the psychiatrist last winter made me feel that you still cared for me and wanted to help. Perhaps it’s been a little one sided and I have not showed you that I care, but I want to take time now to thank you for that help last winter and I do remember a good visit with you at Christmas. I think I’m feeling age coming on me (you know all about that) and I want to have contact with you while there is some time left … not trying to be morbid but just realistic.

  I guess I have some heavy questions. I don’t want to get heavy like Rocky, but I often wonder how you feel about me and I don’t mean just being nice … I’m not sure what I mean. I just feel strange about our relationship. I think that I did a lot of shutting down after mom’s death, when we were together at Shady Hill, and that might have been a time together. Although, the visit in New York was good but I do feel bad about one past event. Shortly after mom’s death, I was in the Robert Lowell play in N.Y.C., and you call
ed to say you’d like to come down and I did not encourage you to do it because I was embarrassed that it was such a small role. After all was said and done, I was sorry I did not ask you down. Anyway, that’s water under the bridge. I think it was a problem of false pride.

  I am going through a lot of good and bad turmoil in my life now. I think it’s change, and growing up, and part of it all, but I need to know where we are at. I don’t feel we make contact, and that we are both uptight around each other. I’m sure a lot of it comes from not seeing each other much, but I can never tell if you want me at your home or if you are just being polite … doing what you think a father should do. I know you say you want me there but I’m missing the feeling. I think feeling is very important to me now and I want to feel where I’m at when I’m at it. I mean, I want to feel a little more. I’ve done all the thinking I want to do for a while. I’ve been so serious all these years and I had a good chance to loosen up in California (not in Vegas).

  Anyway, why don’t you write me a letter? I hardly ever hear from you by mail and would enjoy a letter. If all goes well, I hope to be back in N.Y.C. on October third. I don’t want to go to Europe. I want to do a new work. There is a meeting in N.Y.C. about our European tour. It’s tonight and I was going to call in my vote, but my jailer won’t even lend me an ear. They just grin and say “Sure thing,” “We’ll see what we can do,” etc. But I would like to hear from you. Nothing heavy, just some response. I feel I missed you somewhere along the line. Why do you think that is?