AUGUST 3, 1987
Up for the walk and then first day of shooting which I think went well. All that focused attention and getting a chance to act out and be in that dreamlike, the kind of LIVING DREAM OF LOCATION. There I was, barefoot in my PJs walking down this LA Street at 92°. It was all like a strange fever dream along with their intense dry light. But a very long 12 hour day which ended with me TIED to a Weber Grill saying, “father I amend my soul to the deep” under a beautiful ½ moon just up between those two buildings and it all occurred to me that I was still working out my water themes what with the water dripping through the ceiling and me jumping in the pool.
AUGUST 6, 1987
I have nothing more to report today except that I seem to be in better mental health when I’m working. When I’m not I begin to question everything. The point of life now seems not so much to leave the earth a better place but to just do something to make it keep going. A big point of my book could be that the person who seemed most positive in my life, i.e. mom, in the end opted to take her own life. Part of why I don’t trust the positivists.
AUGUST 12, 1987
These days in the screening room have been good. We watched [Luis Buñuel’s] The Exterminating Angel which I still do not like then the documentaries which are good but hard to take. In El Salvador and then Vietnam there were some gruesome shots. The leaders were the worst—the face of Duch [Kaing Guek Eav, a leader in the Khmer Rouge movement]—a rather nightmare face and the military leader. The repression there is incredible. I think Renée and I were both very depressed after the day trying to figure out how we were not going to make fun of these events. Americans who go down to Nic to try to help out. So we will try to write the script from my point of view.
AUGUST 13, 1987
I can’t think right. I’m hung over and we are rushing off for Nicaragua with the harmonic convergence coming on. I spent a boring day on floor 41 of HBO doing these ridiculous pick-up shots for HBO special [of Terrors of Pleasure]. Also making long distance calls. We went out for a late Italian feed and that’s where I overdid it trying to keep up with Michael with three scotches and three beers and I hardly felt drunk at all. We went right to bed when we got home. I had tried to pack the night before but was in such a panic. I kept losing stuff and it all feels so crazy. I guess I’m more afraid of the flight than anything else.
AUGUST 14, 1987
[Leaving for Nicaragua]
We go to the airport real early. Had too much coffee. Had a crazy full Mexican flight which landed real fast because of the fact that we are up 8,000 feet. No time to get through customs but a long time to get a cab to the MAJESTIC hotel where Renée and I had taken new roommates. John who went to the Atomic test site to PROTEST and gambled with god at craps and won $15. which he is going to donate to a NIC hospital. He said he was shaking all over because he was actually asking for a sign from god yet he says he’s not a spiritual person. I had a flash in the hotel that you could never do a Hollywood film about these people because none of them look the look.
While in Nicaragua, Gray and Shafransky stayed in a house that was divided into two with men living on one side and women on the other. Gray’s roommates included a born-again Christian, a social worker, and a college student from Berkeley named Daniel, who suffered a psychotic break while there.
AUGUST 17, 1987
First the children’s hospital. I liked the doctor there but all these sick children were very depressing. We took up a collection of $425. just after we left. Then all the Nic money was passed out from the bus which was a ludicrous sight. Then we went off to the marketplace to spend our money. Bought a painting and a box then back for lunch. Real hot. A little sleep after lunch and then a boring lecture on what I don’t remember. Renée and I were passing notes back and forth like school kids. Oh these long hot days. Dinner was late and then we got blasted by this very intense American man who is not a citizen of Nic and an economic adviser. He talked for 2½ hours and really lay it on. I tried to record it but my tape recorder kept stopping. To bed early.
AUGUST 18, 1987
Dripping with sweat we heard all the testimonies from children being chopped in pieces to six kids being pushed out of a helicopter. I have this picture of these innocent children falling in horror. Daniel blasted me with his paranoia after. “Are you a reporter or are you here to help me?” I felt like I was tried as a counter revolutionary.
AUGUST 1987
NOTES FROM NICARAGUA
There are two faces in all the faces that my memory keeps going back to and I write this only to figure out why
There was this boy who didn’t break the bubbles in the encampment of the deodorant. I call it that because that was the main item they wanted—DEODORANT and I thought it was NOT because they smelled but because it was an EMBLEM of America—IT WAS LIKE A GET WELL GIFT = DEODORANT
But the face I remember was of the boy that didn’t break the bubbles and of the perhaps PARAPLEGIC BOY OVER EL SALVADOR
There was an untouched innocence that was like all any one has longed for in the idea of Christ
AUGUST 22, 1987
Time for a brief drink with some of the group and then rush for our flight which was on time. The report at the airport was that they were not going to let Daniel on the plane. What a schlep. After a long day of flying, we got back to find Liz and Willem’s stuff in our loft. I was so angry I could not get to sleep. Even took a sleeping pill and that didn’t seem to help. At last I got to sleep and dreamt I was in the middle of Liz and Willem’s redone loft just yelling at her and letting all of my rage out.
Among Gray’s journals, there were also recordings he made throughout life—audio letters for friends and girlfriends, interviews with family members, recorded therapy sessions, snippets of his favorite NPR shows. On October 5, 1987, Gray recorded a letter for Pavel, his therapist, while sitting on Santa Monica Beach. In it, he told of going on a hike with Shafransky. During their walk, Shafransky tripped and fell down “wailing on the ground,” and to Gray’s own surprise this allowed him to feel closer to Shafransky rather than critical, as he so often felt—of her, of himself, of their not being “the super beautiful people, super rich, beautiful, power people of the world.” Below, he refers to this experience again in his journals.
OCTOBER 10, 1987
When Renée fell down in that hot sun and brayed like a donkey it was at last refreshing to me because it was extreme enough to go beyond the bounds of a travel poster. It broke the frame. It was a possible tragedy doubled by the fact that it was in the land of the beautiful. The land of the perfect bodies and two images came back: Jack, when as a baby I took him to that strange place and he cried. It was as though he was crying for me. He was my vulnerability that I was carrying outside myself. The other memory was of the way I hurt Liz in Kashmir and then was able to love her again.
It was as though a bright searchlight had been blasted into all that flat beauty to make a single act of ugliness beautiful.
The following is a letter from Pavel from January 1988 discussing Gray’s obsessive fear that he might have AIDS.
FEBRUARY 1988
[Gray and Shafransky were invited to an American film festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, where The Killing Fields and Swimming to Cambodia were screened]
LENINGRAD
I had this dream just before I woke up. I was riding on the back of a bike with this BOY/MAN. He had the body of a boy and I was somehow aware that he had the psyche of a man. Mature. His shoulders under a white T shirt were beautiful and I held on to them to keep my balance and I found that I was holding more and more to his beautiful undulating shoulders that were going up and like a dancer’s. Soon we were on the edge of a great cliff by the ocean, and then there were three of us. Myself, he and another man. And I was overwhelmed by the view. It was like one of those breathtaking California Ocean views. But then I realized that all three of us were on the edge of a cliff that was slanted down and I had the feeling that I might fall at
any moment and I remember saying, “I shouldn’t have smoked that marijuana last night.” Then I had a sense that if I could get rid of my fear that I was going to fall that I wouldn’t. That is if I could only relax. Now just to go back a bit I also was aware that I was in love with this man-boy and that I only had three days before I had to go so I knew I should not hesitate to express my love. Because I had promised someone (maybe Renée) that I’d be back in three days. So we were on the edge of this cliff and the boy-man said to me “you are so filled up with fame.”
Then I went to bed without him and he crawled in to bed with me and he was dressed in camouflage and I began to make love to him. To pass my hand over his chest and down over his hips and was giggling and his skin was soft and warm and brown and just as I was about to pass my hand through the back of his thighs to feel his balls, Renée woke me up or I woke up on my own I’m not sure which.
MAY 1, 1988
THE FIRST OF MAY
I couldn’t stop examining my skin for signs of cancer and old age. My arm had turned into a Milky Way of freckles and yet I couldn’t stay out of the sun.
Mom wanted—she needed to be ARTISTIC.
I’m now in the presence of Mom.
That’s right dear.
The message is—try to be artistic.
Is it important for me to know why Mom killed herself?
OPEN WITH THIS because she couldn’t paint. That’s what “TO THE LIGHTHOUSE” was about.
But “Swimming” was my CROSS.
Why does madness feel like insight?
MAY 7, 1988
[Gray spent part of the month of May at MacDowell, an artists’ colony in New Hampshire, writing Impossible Vacation]
I remembered to take the little man for a walk today for our first walk and we stepped out the door. I saw all the birds and I thought maybe if I’m still, one will come and land on me and they all got closer and closer until one did twice on my shoulder and once on my head; almost on my head like my pet bird used to do. The only aspect that kept this event balanced were the constant annoying May Flies.
Today I have been included in magic.
[“The little man” was an eight-by-ten drawing of a Balinese icon, a man with four legs, a grass skirt, and no head; his eyes in his chest. Gray was given this picture by a healer in Bali who infused it with power to help make Gray feel more present. As he told it later in his monologue Gray’s Anatomy, one day when he was leaving his MacDowell cabin to hike in the woods, he heard the little man say in a small voice, “What about the walk? What about the walk?”
Gray went to the little man, cradled him in his arms, and then went outside. “There, about seventy-five feet from the cabin, is a huge maple tree with red buds on it. It’s about fifty feet tall,” Gray recalled. “As I’m aiming the little man’s eyes up at it, the thought occurs to me that if I call a sparrow, it will come and land on me … All I do is have the thought come to me and a sparrow swoops down and begins to circle my head, so close in that I can feel the wings in my ears. I have chills. I am very high at this moment, and I feel very, very superb. This bird lands on my left shoulder and simply sits there, breathing … So I knew there was magic in the world.”]
JUNE 11, 1988
Renée talks about her dream of a small wedding up at the Duchesse Anne. I drag my feet and look at other women on the street.
JUNE 1988
Renée caught the flowers at Peter’s wedding. She caught Anthemia’s bouquet and it was as though in a movie. It was as though Renée had magnets in her hands and all the other women were so catty and jealous.
Ron said, it’s no big deal to get married. It’s when you have children that you are cemented.
JUNE 22, 1988
Renée woke from all these strange dreams, me with two cocks, front and back, one for affairs.
AUGUST 4, 1988
I get stoned to meet the other me. The other side of everyday me. But I can’t imagine marijuana replacing booze. I want to drink to relieve the MANIC MIND it all sets off.
AUGUST 5, 1988
We had Ron and Donna over for a nice cook out and I was saying how I sat with DOORS keyboard player and how I said to Ron I was never really a fan of the DOORS.
Then when I went to buy coals LIGHT MY FIRE came on full blast. SYNCHRONICITY is more exciting for me than any circus or fireworks, etc.
DON DELILLO [From his novel Libra] on secrets page 26.
“You’re here because there’s something vitalizing in a secret. My little girl is generous with secrets. I wish she weren’t, frankly. Don’t secrets sustain her, keep her separate, make her self-aware? How can she know who she is if she gives away her secrets?”
AUGUST 31, 1988
[Gray and Shafransky rented a house in Sag Harbor, New York, for a month while Gray was working on Impossible Vacation]
Here we go; we are out at Sag Harbor and the whole place wants to make me feel like we are in love and I kept thinking we should have been through this already. After all how long have we been together and why do I hold back?
Every real sight and event has a fantasy with it of how it could be otherwise. It’s like I’m here but not here. I am here and I am somewhere else too much.
SEPTEMBER 22, 1988
Living is like dying and telling the story is like coming back from the dead to be reborn.
NOVEMBER 6, 1988
One of the fears about death is that there will be no rebellion—that “I” will be like an ant and just belong to it all—no individualization just all this overwhelming ONENESS. No individual VOICE left.
JANUARY 20, 1989
I needed to choose the book to make it important. It was interesting that Renée set up what I should ask for and when I did and got it, I chose the book. TO WRITE without an audience is to be alone in the worst way. It is to be without a super ego that I answer to each night. And the nights are so lonely.
Walk away from temptation.
I know it’s sort of crazy and competitive but I can’t help WANTING TO REENACT Christ in the desert from LAST TEMPTATIONS. But I liked that scene the most and I kept wanting to go to an American desert and do a BIG FAST as in: “books on a desert island …”
We as Americans need to win our spiritual identity back from India.
I was hoping my book would be a creation and not merely a report.
JANUARY 20, 1989
I made up my mind because I ran into an anonymous fan on the street who said I was the best part of Beaches for her and then when she said, “Is that really where you want to be?” The answer inside was “NO.” I need to stay on the EAST COAST of AMERICA and try to come from a quiet mind and see what comes next.
JANUARY 23, 1989
[In December 1988, Gray debuted as the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, directed by Gregory Mosher and starring Penelope Ann Miller, Frances Conroy, and Eric Stoltz at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway]
Maybe I’ve made a big mistake with the book. Maybe it’s the telling of the story that cures me and not the writing of it. That I am straying from what I do best.
Being in OUR TOWN is like being STUCK back there again = some kind of smothering SECURITY like it’s a metaphor for all that is always going on.
Renée said, “Maybe you just had a fantasy of yourself as a writer and you’re working that (hollow) fantasy out.”
JANUARY 1989
Yes, the synchronicity comes in when I’m searching for an answer.
After a visit to Renée while walking down West Broadway and thinking about India—(just after Renée told me I should finish my book) I was thinking to myself that the devils were at work in me again and I saw a newspaper that was wrapped around a pile of shit and it said “DEVILS REKINDLE A MEMORY.” Then a man stopped me to tell me how wrong Frank Rich was and how good I was as the Stage Manager. [In reviewing Our Town for The New York Times, Rich called Gray the “one major casting miscalculation”; Gray later reflected on this bad review in his 1990 monologue, Monster in
a Box, which, in turn, Rich reviewed favorably.] Then I thought, who shall I call next and I looked down and saw RON written in the cement.
APRIL 4, 1989
After working on the book and out for a walk with THE LITTLE MAN I began thinking again about the problems of fiction and how Liz and I made something transcendent in our relationship by transcending through work and our work was our love and unless that is somehow built into the novel as a working metaphor that is to say an image that turns you on as much as an actual incident in your “real” life does then if you can’t find that your—my—writing is hollow.
I want to say that my life represented in the written or spoken word is already one step away from the unspeakable heart of the matter—to translate that into a fictional metaphor is to get even further away from the heart of it.
Could Meg [the character Gray seemingly based on LeCompte in Impossible Vacation] see that I needed to be an actor and direct me in a one man show of THE SEA GULL? But the truth is that we were held together by the glue of the performance group and it took us a long time to accept and understand that and that’s where the heart of it lies, not in the fiction of going looking for Kashmir rugs [Meg buys and sells these rugs in the novel]; it also gives my character some mobility and deals more with issues of the times.
In short I can’t seem to solve the problem of THE LIE THAT TELLS THE TRUTH.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 19