Well, I hope you have good fire insurance and from the way you give directions you’ll probably collect.
OH OH OH
JEASUM CROW It’s all built on clay! HA HA. He had one of these wrap around
blinds like it was stuck on
JULY 12, 1985
Having screens just at the far end of the porch has created a diabolical situation. Like some sort of giant lobster trap all the moths and flies have flown in and stuck. When the chimney sweep was here, a beautiful bird flew in and I guided it out with a broom.
The chimney sweep told me to watch out for first leaves and be careful to cap my chimney to keep the rain out and animals because they could get stuck and eat their way to the house. I know for a fact that there is something eating the house now. It’s chewing right above me while I write.
JULY 19, 1985
Read a review about “Memory Babe” [Gerald Nicosia’s biography of Jack Kerouac]—His hero worship was more an evasion of an insupportable self than a strong identification with other people … Kerouac had myth to him all right … but it only came through his remarkable ability to become his own “true” self on paper. Without paper and words he was a loser. His relationships with men as well as women were painful and unresolved; he was a bleeding ball of contradictions and private hells. He was in the flesh infantile, insecure, paranoid, and desperate. (He) was afraid of driving, terrified of flying, fearful of falling under wheels of trains. He ruthlessly sought out new experiences, then tried to redeem in words what he had botched in life. Well, I thought so much of it applied to me.
JULY 20, 1985
I walked up to Fred Fraudt to see if he was in to talk about the foundation. No one was in but as I was leaving I heard what sounded like a young woman being sexually penetrated on the other side of the stream and I got very turned on and as I walked over to hear it better the stream mixed in with it then it turned into a baby crying.
AUGUST 13, 1985
INFIDELITY
The mystery of a child exploring with the full response of a man’s body behind it. The new female body like a foreign country and I do mean country matters, every experience was completely different. And almost every time I fell in love. Could I please be faithful in my infidelity?
SEPTEMBER 12, 1985
Renée and I walk back through the craziest architecture I’ve
ever seen TO WRITE MARRIAGE VOWS
SEPTEMBER 26, 1985
Had this dream that I was arrested for holding a mirror up to people on a beach in England. I was taken to a very fancy English Prison where they had carpet on the floor and I got angry with the head guard and said I was going to file suit. There was an invalid in a wheelchair who was getting all the attention and I made fun of her warden to make the other inmates laugh and to draw some of the attention she was getting, to myself. Somehow, I escaped from prison and found that I was on the beach yelling out to all the people who were fully dressed and very ugly. “Hey I was put in prison for holding a mirror up to people on the beach”—and as I was saying this I saw a reenactment of myself holding this long body length mirror. I was standing in the surf. Some people seemed to listen but no one did anything, I could feel that the police were about to arrive but it didn’t matter to me because I had all intentions of going back to jail. I had just stepped out to protest and be heard, not to try to escape or run away.
After I did my protest, I started back to jail and suddenly I realized I was free and that I didn’t have to go back if I didn’t want to. This was such a surprise to suddenly realize this and I stepped out on the highway to hitch and I get a cab and as I was riding I realized I was now in a movie that I was making up myself. It was an instant film that I was the center of.
SEPTEMBER 27, 1985
I have been thinking that a lot of this passion may come from drinking and that I should make every effort to stop for a while. I have these enormous fears that I am some portion of Christ. Something about the mirror dream perhaps.
If I continue being who I am now, I see disaster written on the walls
OCTOBER 16, 1985
We had to make up death—not the threat of death or the fear of it—but it was hardly seen any more. Or was easily avoided. Then I started to see AIDS, the new plague, everywhere. Well not everywhere. If it were put in a road side bulletin board it would somehow have made it—yes maybe less fearful. But now it was leaking out in small portions like the way sometimes in certain rural, say non-urban situations, you might see a mother lose her tit. AIDS was like the nipple and I would fly to it and stick. How or why did it happen that the life giving creative act had reversed itself? How could something that feels so good be so bad…. In the face of it all, I can’t believe we’re still so polite to one another. Somehow I think all that politeness comes out of the illusion that we—you, I—that we will not be the ones. That we will not die. And when I really look at it I see myself tumbling toward it … the very realization of or meditation on eternity leads me to almost despair because once you can just begin to get the slightest inkling of the fact that you won’t be here forever, it begins to make you not be here now.
Mid-80’s AUSTRALIA
[Touring Swimming to Cambodia and traveling with Shafransky; this entry is likely from 1986 as Gray performed twice in Australia that year]
Edward said they are not laughing because they are slow and also you have an ironic sense of Jewish humor and I realized I had no sense of humor before I moved to New York to some extent New York City saved me.
He had come to the show and I had made eye contact with his girl turned out she was Jewish. I’m automatic charm to Jews.
Hazards of the trade. Keeping Swimming to Cambodia fresh and the realization that I’m incanting the same neurotic fears each night.
I don’t want to do another monologue. I want to do a book. A book is meditative and private. The reader can go back over it again. It goes deeper or has the potential to go deeper because it is private. The performance is written on the mind.
I was beginning to see how the New York audience had put the stamp of humor on Swimming to Cambodia. To some extent they made it what it is. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t play as well or fall out in other places. Melbourne WAS a PIE IN THE EYE sort of place.
Strange dreams:
1. Liz waking the spirit of a cat off a death mask. I could see the spirit disappear like smoke and turn into something like a hologram of a kitten. A ghost. The spirit of the cat was headed toward me and I rejected it. (Liz working witchcraft?)
I rejected it by yelling “Mom no, mom, no!”
2. Strange long dream in which I know I was guilty for a murder.
I had the full sense that I was guilty and then Annette from Jones group book. Why Annette? She took the rap and went to prison. The evidence was a big package of blood like the wine pack here. Somehow I knew there was one piece of evidence left under a hospital bed. It was an L. L. Bean shoe with cobwebs around it. A red headed idiot boy who could read my mind would not leave the room and the more I tried to get him to carry stuff downstairs …
In my sleep, I thought enough of this dream. I’m tired of feeling guilty, time to wake up.
FLIGHT TO PERTH
The flight was turning into a bore and I began to wonder if my self-generated fear of flying all these years was not just a cover for boredom and that I would choose fear over boredom any day.
I order a third beer triple X Castel Marie. Anything but Fosters. With the beer she, the stewardess, hands me a little card that says have a fantastic holiday and it occurred to me or at least I had time to think about it that in Australia general leisure time is referred to as Holiday without any definite article. In America, it’s vacation. A holiday would be Christmas or Thanksgiving or V. J. DAY (Victory in Japan). But there is something I like about Holiday. It comes I guess from Holly day but it rings of festivity and open celebration. Vacation is sort of vacuum. To empty out. To vacate.
PERTH
We h
ad a big fight over fiction in THE FISHY AFFAIR [seafood restaurant] we waited in line for a long time and Renée said she only could wait because of the name of the place.
We had a local (NAME) Gulled fish and fell into a fight about my novel. I said I wanted to do a book about “the male” or THIS MALE’S experience of infidelity and why it was such a deep or maybe not so deep part of my life. I wanted to mention names. She said write a fiction. I said I wasn’t interested in becoming a good writer as much as I was becoming a good person. All fiction was a continuance for me. How to make a good ending? I wanted to be a journalist reporting on my life.
To trace the motion of my life as Spalding Gray, a reporter on myself.
We had a wild fight. The only time Renée came out of it was to laugh at two old men who were looking over at us. She couldn’t finish her dinner and I knew I should at least pretend I had lost my appetite as well.
And suddenly I was back in L.A. and all the streets were buzzing and breathing have you heard the news about the new Seidelman movie? [Referring to the film Making Mr. Right, directed by Susan Seidelman.] It’s being shot in Miami and its starring John Malkovich and Ann Magnuson and I could feel it all coming back—competition and what did I miss and I could smell that METALIC smell of ANGST in my pots and the muscles ball up in my calves and all of a sudden I felt my sex drive come back.
KEEP YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR
I’M NOT HOPEFUL
THERE WAS A MISTAKE!!
MY MOM DIDN’T LEAVE A NOTE.
TRYING HARD TO UNDERSTAND MY WAY TO DEATH
Don’t you recognize me? I was in The Killing Fields
AMERICA = THE COUNTRY THAT DARES TO BE HAPPY WITH A BIG TOUCH OF SADNESS WITH A BIG BIG BIG TOUCH OF SADNESS.
In 1986, Gray signed a contract with Alfred A. Knopf, thus beginning his five-year struggle to write Impossible Vacation. Before its publication, he managed to wrest some humor from this experience by creating a narrative that became his 1990 monologue, Monster in a Box—a story, as he put it, “about a man who can’t write a book about a man who can’t take a vacation.” He performed this monologue with a large box containing his manuscript—the “monster” of the title—sitting on his wooden desk.
JANUARY 7, 1986
[Los Angeles]
The press here seems to think that my neurotic self-absorption is particular only to New York City but I say, “Just scratch the surface of any place.”
During the writing of this book I began to think my vision, my way of thinking had in some way been polluted and that I should go back into a meditation retreat.
SELF INDULGENT
THAT I WILL DIE OF AIDS because I’m not among those that are helping. Do nuns die of cancer? Yes and that is because they _____ not.
GOD I love you RENÉE but I am not YOURS.
I have to leave Renée. Dear Renée I have this awful feeling. I kind of know I can’t be in a relationship.
Dear Liz,
I don’t know where to begin …
I don’t.
Idon’knowwheretobegin I have two of the grey notebooks you held in India. The Irish drug is alcohol. I have an awful feeling you should be checked for cancer.
I would rather write this book than have a child.
APRIL 1986
Dear Renée,
I can’t and won’t make any more promises. I’m in love with change. I can’t say when I want a house or if and when I want children.
In October 1986, True Stories, a film directed by the musician David Byrne, opened in New York. Gray had a role in the movie—which centered on the 150th anniversary celebration of a fictional town in Texas—alongside an ensemble cast including Byrne and John Goodman.
1986 REFLECTING ON SHOOTING “TRUE STORIES”
About an hour outside of Dallas, we could see the location glowing under lowering skies like some sort of Barnum and Bailey Space City. It was transcendent. Besides the location for the American Embassy party in The Killing Fields, this was the best location I’d ever been. There in the middle of these flat Texas plains was a huge yellow and green striped circus tent. All the Honey wagons [film industry term for an actor’s trailer on location] were lined up. Then beyond that was the most spectacular structure. It was the stage for the talent show. It was made of translucent corroded green plastic. There it sat giving off rays of green light into that pitch black Texas night. It was a thing of rare beauty like a great square spaceship (THE KIND DAVID MIGHT DRIVE). Beyond that endless Texas plains spread like a sea of land and I walked further out and could see the suburban TRACK HOUSES’ lights glistening at the edge of civilization like a town at the edge of THE SEA or me walking on the bottom of a dried-up sea. Up until then I had felt landlocked in Texas but now my head and mind opened up to the same feelings of freedom produced so often in me by the Atlantic and Pacific.
The fantasy that I had been chosen as the first straight articulate sufferer of AIDS was beginning to take over. I had begun to fantasize that the AIDS cause needed me to speak out and I had even developed this elaborate theory as to who had transmitted the virus to me. It was a woman I HAD SLEPT WITH YEARS AGO whose father worked for the Department of Defense. I saw the INCREASING breakdown of immune and internal defense systems as a reaction to so much external defense spending. It was a sign from God to tell us to stop spending money on star wars and start spending money on education and food (other than cheese) for the poor.
AND I AT THAT MOMENT I SAW I had been chosen as the spokesman to bring this information to the people. Well, you may laugh and say perhaps I had had too much leisure time on my hands and I should really be working in a hospital and you’re right that was the other idea that was taking me over. The more fun I had on the film set the more guilt I felt. It seemed to go hand and hand. Each morning I woke up I’d promise myself to send away for a Peace Corps Application. But mostly the issue was AIDS.
Just as I thought I’d come to something about the nature and construct of my paranoia, the door of my honey wagon flew open and Bill Edwards from wardrobe hurled in a copy of New York Magazine which fluttered like a great insane paper bird and then landed on the floor. This was followed by him shouting, “There’s the article on AIDS you were asking me about.” And he slammed the door.
Terrified I jumped back from the magazine as though it were the giant virus itself and the whole bottom of my mind dropped out. There was no paranoid puzzle left, there was just plain BIG FEAR. There was no outside eye left to examine the fear. Everything suddenly had become FEAR. That was the new reality and there seemed no way out of it. I was totally convinced that I was dying of AIDS and I began to freak. Who could I run to I wondered and then I realized two things. One was that I didn’t know anyone well enough to drop this craziness ON which at the same time gave me the distance to realize that it was craziness. The other thought was about how I liked all the people on the film so much that I didn’t want to bring anyone down into my fear. In other words I had to wrestle with it myself.
It was then that I realized the inside of this claustrophobic honey wagon was GOING TO DRIVE ME NUTS. I opened the door and stepped out again into that supremely transcendent night. Now everything was a carnival glow of lights. The circus tent was light and the great green corrugated plastic stage sent off its great green rays into the BLACK night. I headed straight out into the plains. I was trying to walk fear off. Faster and faster I’d walk and as the fear hit me with the stars in and around my heart I would let out with little shrieks and groans. Not wanting to get too far away from the location I began to circle it in a great arch keeping within earshot in case the A.D. called me. And as I walked the fear took over until I couldn’t stand it and just stopped and said, “Alright Spalding just stop and accept it. So you’re going to die,” and at that point I had a vision. I had never had anything happen to me like this before. It was not a hallucination but rather like an image laid over the image of reality. It was like the pictorial scrim DROPPED over that Texas landscape. I could clearly
see BOTH THE LANDSCAPE AND THE IMAGE and clearly be in both places at once. And what I saw besides that Texas night was my old therapist dressed only in a diaper and kneeling in the sky surrounded by thunder clouds and a frozen lightning bolt. It all looked like A STRONG CONTEMPORARY Blake engraving only it was my therapist and he was reaching down to pull me up. OUT OF MY fear. He was not pulling my body up, he was pulling my spirit up and he brought me into a blissful condition of the moment. I was suddenly present in life and death. I was there. I was here. I felt delivered to an extreme state of calm elation. For a moment I was in WHAT I COULD ONLY CALL a state of grace and as I stood there I now saw that this cloud-caped image of my therapist was surrounded by long brown tubes that were made of some organic woven STRAW-LIKE substance. Those tubes in the DU CHAMP PAINTING OF THE NUDE descending the stairs except these tubes extended horizontally RATHER THAN VERTICALLY into the night. And I could see that some seemed to go on forever and others were truncated and STOPPED at various distance over the plains. Seeing these tubes I thought I almost understood something. It was like the ambulation of an idea and a feeling. I thought I understood that there was clearly a constant swirling incomprehensible mix of good and evil in the world. It was not at all clear like the EASTERN YIN and YANG pattern in which the dark and the light CLEARLY balance off each other. It was instead a great untranslatable swirl of cosmic weather which no earthly weatherman COULD EVER GET A HAND ON.
I realized that there was a no speaking line into that swirl. It was the line of acceptance. A quality of grace in the middle of that turbulence. The eye of the hurricane and that there are very few people on earth that can go to that place without HELP and that help came through a relationship to a helper, to a guide. Some people go for the big ones. Buddha, MOHAMMED or JESUS. OTHERS GO FOR THE LITTLE, LESS POPULAR ONES. Other small thinkers and ones like me of little faith go for small ones still on earth but SOMETIMES it takes a relationship with some other—a lover, a therapist, a lesser God TO LIFT YOU OUT OF GUILT and sin. THE only sin of not being where you are. And standing there elated and in the present, I realized I’d just experienced some sort of classical transference.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 17