JUNE 9, 1989
The worst fear is that I’ll learn to be happy AT LAST and then get real sad when I see what I’ve missed.
JUNE 17, 1989
I was coming up my driveway and I saw an unexplainable light in the woods and I tried to pretend I hadn’t seen it.
I have the feeling often that something is waiting to reveal itself to me the more open I get.
SEPTEMBER 19, 1989
I have been having the strangest dreams lately and because I’ve been working on my book I’ve not had time or patience to write them down but I will make a brief note here:
(1) Dream of Pavel and how we were in this room and he was surrounded by narcotic women and I challenged him by saying that he was trying to escape from the real pain of his life by overworking. I was accusing him of being a workaholic and when I did this, his head disappeared and turned white—a white fuzzy light the way ORIAH’s did for me at Omega. [Here Gray is referring to a storytelling workshop he taught at the Omega Institute in upstate New York where he asked everyone to look into each other’s eyes as an exercise. When Gray looked into the blue eyes of a thirty-six-year-old woman, “her entire face began to slide off her skull. It was pouring down; it was drooling off like in a horror movie, like a bad LSD trip; and then her face turned in to an oval ball of pulsing light,” as he told it in Gray’s Anatomy, “all of a sudden the ball of white light came into a point and went Pfff! Whoom! and vanished out the window behind her head, and her face recomposed and smiled back at me.”] Then Pavel told me that that was my projection.
(2) Dream in which Renée, Liz and I and BETTY, Liz’s mother, were all in one house, that the water came right up to—came right up to the front steps and Renée was running around real happy in the house like a little kid and Liz took my head in her hands and held it and said, You’re wonderful. You are a genius but you are too self-indulgent.
(3) A real horrid dream of a woman seducing me and she lay on the floor, all beautiful and naked and I just lay my head on her belly and looked down to see an uncircumcised cock just like mine and she was a woman with a cock and then when she spread her legs it was like her vagina was an asshole just under her balls and flecks of fresh blood were all over her and her balls and the flecks of blood were sticking to my hands and I went to wash my hands and cut them on the faucet which was also like an uncircumcised cock.
And when I went out of the room to the toilet, I came back to find that I’d been robbed and she said, look in your wallet, and I found my money was gone but I found new money in an old spot in my wallet. New money I’d forgotten that I’d put there and I realized that I would never have found that money if I’d not been robbed of the original money—all these $50 bills.
Could be a dream about creativity and SACRIFICE and how new and positive grows out of the old negative.
I went out drinking with Sam. He told me that he and Susan were having a separation. We talked a lot about Pavel—a good common point between us. He told me that he did not discuss what went on between himself and Pavel with Susan. He kept it to himself. A private thing.
And I realized I have no private thing.
the nineties
THAT IS WHEN suicide comes. It comes when the shadow part or let’s say the part of you that you hate starts to take over and fill up or push out all the other parts until you are all the part that you hate and there is this one little part left that is the killer and the killer is closely related to the self hate and at last it does its dirty little deed.
APRIL 1, 1995
In 1991, Gray had a dream that he was standing on top of “a very tall tower or slender geological formation.” A boy holding a drum—possibly a younger version of Gray himself—stands so close Gray can feel his breath. The boy kisses him on the mouth. Gray doesn’t want to stop kissing but is afraid that if he doesn’t, he’ll lose his balance and fall.
“Being love is my last big public secret that I dance around?” Gray asked after describing the dream in his journal. It’s a meaningful question, particularly in this decade, which ushered in years of romantic destruction and, subsequently, forced Gray to reconsider himself, privately and publicly.
On January 13, 1990, Gray met Kathleen Russo (“Kathie”) in Rochester, New York. He was forty-eight years old at the time; Russo was twenty-nine. He’d traveled there to perform his new monologue, Monster in a Box, at the Pyramid Arts Center, where Russo was the publicity director. They began an affair that weekend. In February 1990, Russo was offered a job as an agent at SoHo Booking, a Manhattan booking agency that primarily worked with dancers. She took the job and moved to the city the next month with Marissa [Maier], her three-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. Once Russo was living in Manhattan, especially after she moved to Tribeca, a neighborhood within walking distance of Gray’s SoHo loft, in August 1991, the two became more involved. This violated a quiet understanding between Gray and Shafransky—or at least an understanding Gray felt they had—that he would sleep with other women only while he was out of town.
“Having an affair was not uncommon for me, but I had them only out on the road,” Gray explained in his monologue It’s a Slippery Slope. “They were the most powerful means of nonverbal communication I’ve ever known, as well as being fun. I always felt that it was safe to have them if they were kept out there and never brought home.”
For over a year, however, Gray did not mention Russo in his journal for fear of Shafransky reading it. When he finally did start writing about Russo in his diaries, he referred to her variously as “the other woman” and “H.”—for Hester Prynne, the so-called adulteress from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.
Despite his ongoing affair with Russo, Gray went forward with plans to marry Shafransky in August 1991, two months after his fiftieth birthday. “I thought that once I married her, it would put an end to the affair with Kathie,” Gray told his Slippery Slope audiences. “When I got married it was like a cork going into a glass bottle, and I started feeling, Oh, help, I can’t breathe, let me out. The affair with Kathie heated up.”
As with all of his monologues, this story is relayed with the distancing calm of hindsight. In life, Gray was in raw, torturous agony for the first half of this decade as he divided himself between two women—Shafransky and Russo. He did, indeed, go forward with marrying Shafransky, as described above, but the doubt he felt leading up to their wedding and throughout the subsequent breakup of their relationship ultimately precipitated another severe breakdown.
In the midst of this emotional collapse, Russo told Gray that she was pregnant. Soon after, Gray wrote her a letter asking her to get an abortion. Shafransky found this unmailed note stuck in The Philosophy of Sex, a book that Gray was reading at the time. Gray then confessed to Shafransky everything about his relationship with Russo. Despite subsequent requests that Russo not have the baby, she went forward with the pregnancy on her own. Gray tried, at the same time, to keep his relationship with Shafransky together. But a month after Russo gave birth to a son in September 1992—and the two women had an accidental run-in on the street in Manhattan while Russo was walking with the baby—Shafransky finally left him.
“Renée was the delight. Renée was always the delight behind the stories,” Gray wrote in his journal in January 1993. “She was the heart of the story and I have cut the heart out. Now I’m afraid to go anywhere that the story can’t be tied to an AUDIENCE.”
Gray retreated to his former self, the one who had not yet driven Shafransky away, in his performances. This was the person he presented in his monologues that he debuted in 1990 and 1993, respectively: Monster in a Box, the story of his struggle to finish his novel; and Gray’s Anatomy, about his quest to find an alternative cure for his macular pucker, “scrunched saran wrap” on his retina, a condition that caused blurred vision in his left eye.
In May 1993, not long after Shafransky had left him, Gray met his eight-month-old son, Forrest, for the first time. “Bending over him, I looked down
into his eyes, and fell in,” Gray said of this meeting in It’s a Slippery Slope. “I did not expect the gaze that came back, it was absolutely forever. Long, pure, empty, not innocent, because way beyond innocence, mere being, pure consciousness, the observing self that I’d always been trying to catch was staring back at me; they were no-agenda eyes.”
This was a dramatic—and authentic—turning point for Gray: he became a father. The journals in the period that follow express doubts about Russo, sadness at the loss of Shafransky, fears about his work, and yet a clear, committed love for his son, Forrest. Gray was not miraculously relinquished of his weaknesses—he still thought about himself too much, drank too much, relied on the attention of his audiences too much—but he was powerfully changed by becoming a parent.
“I saw him as transformed. The passage in Slippery Slope in which he first meets Forrest is one of the most beautiful passages,” Francine Prose recalled. “I was in tears hearing it, because it was just so beautiful and because I knew what he’d gone through around it. He was incredibly happy, once he resolved all of that, or apparently resolved it. That was the happiest I’d ever seen him—and the least tormented.”
Gray was aware and grateful as a father—two things he seemingly hadn’t been able to achieve as a lover or husband. Parenthood offered him a path out of himself, a reprieve from narcissism; he let go a little and was able to relax his racing mind. “The thing that was great about being with Forrest was that he slowed me down and I loved him because he was not needy in the park. He was not after anyone else’s toys and he was satisfied with that little stick,” Gray wrote in his journal in May 1995. “Then every so often I would look up and see that perfect blue spring sky with three or four puffy white clouds suspended and I would feel, this is good … this is alright. My heart filled by the simple presence of this boy. This day with this boy.”
Gray also appreciated the wisdom and mysticism of a small child, as well as the reflection of the childish impulses he’d long observed—and been fascinated by—in himself. He wrote often about the child within him and within Shafransky in his journals, and also spoke of this in It’s a Slippery Slope. “We had a strong case of arrested development going on just under the surface of our adult appearance, where there were two children who had never been seen or, rather, had been seen by their respective parents—and then gobbled up,” he explained. Gray felt caring for Forrest allowed him to move out of this emotional limbo.
Gray and Russo’s second son, Theo, was born on January 16, 1997. Gray relaxed further into family life. He settled into his relationship to the baby, to Forrest, to Marissa—and found that in doing so, as he tells it in his journals, he’d come to love Russo as well.
Meanwhile, Gray came clean about his adultery in public. In 1996, he performed It’s a Slippery Slope, a story about both his learning to ski—the feeling that he’d found “balance” on top of a mountain—and his affair with Russo and the end of his relationship with Shafransky. He worried that this confession would push the audience away—particularly because many among them had come to know and love Shafransky as a character in his monologues—and that they would finally see him as unworthy.
“Bravura stand-up unreeled with grand minimalism—his acting honed to a Beckettian simplicity that ripples out levels of meaning,” wrote Laurie Stone in The Nation before changing course. “Faced with the consequences of his impact on others, Gray loses his thread. He stops spinning tales of fear and loathing—and psychobabbles.”
“A clear-eyed and life-affirming performance piece,” wrote Peter Marks in a positive review in The New York Times, but only after a description of Gray as “that fellow at the party who convulses half the guests and leaves the other half muttering, ‘Why are that man’s neuroses any more interesting than mine?’ ”
At the end of the decade, debuting at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center on October 31, 1999, Gray presented Morning, Noon, and Night, a paean to family life and to his new hometown of Sag Harbor, Long Island, where he and Russo and their children moved in 1996. In this piece, Gray described his life in Sag Harbor as presenting “a complicated present.” By this he meant that Sag Harbor so reminded him of his childhood hometown of Barrington, Rhode Island, that it felt he had returned to his starting place and, for good or ill, was seeing it for the first time.
FEBRUARY 24, 1990
What is it I don’t want to see? Am I real tired of just LOOKING at life and describing what I saw saw?
Is writing my book making me blind?
So alright what if I do trust first thought best thought, so what when Oriah says the New Age people would ask me, “What am I sick of looking at” and the answer came in my mind … first thought, Renée maybe.
MARCH 16, 1990
The work should not SHOW EVERY THING. It should have some mystery to it—like LIFE!
MARCH 21, 1990
[Performing Monster in a Box before premiering it later in the year at Lincoln Center in New York City]
WASH. D.C.
THE PARODOX IS THAT WHEN I TALK ABOUT MYSELF I FORGET MYSELF
Here then is another reason why I like the monolog form. When I was writing about our summers in Jerusalem [there is a scene set in Jerusalem, Rhode Island, in Impossible Vacation] the order of the memory seemed random as I’m sure it is. The memories would appear to me as if on a wheel and to set them in print would be to stop the wheel but to speak them in different order each night would be to be free to spin the wheel until the right combination came up and what is the right combination? Finding the right combination is finally some intuitive combination of psychological insight and aesthetic form.
The monolog form is more open.
It is not set in print. It is a wheel that spins in a new way each night. It is more true to how reality is.
APRIL 1990
A longing for the acceptance of mystery in my life. My resentment at Pavel and all analysis for destroying mystery and real magic.
MAY 16, 1990
Today is rainy and a relief. I am at the point now where I find it difficult to be out in the spring day streets because the beauty of all the women drives me wild. I can’t stop looking and wanting until the wanting HURTS so much that I get angry with them.
JULY 4, 1990
Riding home last night under almost full 4th of July moon I had a very clear vision of at most 30 short years left. I am beyond midlife now and I saw these 30 short years—they go so fast—as a series of little lines
/ / / / / / /
/ / / / / / /
which would take me up to a very old 79 and I could see myself crossing them off and I could see how fast they could go and how finally there was not even a guarantee of 30 and then there was endless nothing for the one that is me that I’ve slowly come to love and know.
JULY 15, 1990
I have been off drink now for three weeks. [Gray once again tried to quit drinking, this time as part of his effort to heal the trouble he had begun to experience with his left eye—mainly blurred vision that was later diagnosed as a macular pucker.]
I hardly have sex anymore, but I don’t dream of that. I dream of beer.
JULY 1990
Now I awake each morning with a focus for my ANXIETY. Before it was free-floating, now it’s more focused on my eyes.
Why does it feel bad to feel good? Why does it make me feel so much like a goodie-goodie? Why is health so _____?
IDIOPATHIC
“THE PATIENT MUST MAKE DECISION.”
JULY 21, 1990
SATURDAY
I’m thinking that I understand why Virginia Woolf killed herself and it was that she could only write about living as in TO THE LIGHT HOUSE but was not living it. She was outside of it all the time.
JULY 26, 1990
I don’t like the way I am after 6 when I don’t drink. I get real shut down. No expansive spontaneous anything. Just a sober, somber man. The little bit of white wine changed me a little. I get just loose and more outspoken
but it’s that horrid TAPPING DOWN I feel.
SO PENT UP like I’m sitting on something. I seem only to overcome that in performance where I’m the center of focus for 90 minutes.
At this time, Gray became increasingly obsessed by the disintegrating vision in his left eye—both as a disorienting health problem and as the subject for his next monologue. He began to seek out alternative cures in a race against time with his eye. His ophthalmologist advised him that, yes, he could try any alternative therapy he’d like—diet, acupuncture, prayer—but if the condition worsened, he would have to have surgery. In an attempt to cure his eye problem using alternative practices, Gray went to a sweat lodge prayer in Minneapolis, visited a nutritional ophthalmologist in Poughkeepsie, and traveled to see a so-called psychic surgeon—who claimed to be able to reach into the body to remove pathological matter using only his hands—in the Philippines. In Gray’s Anatomy, Gray calls his psychic surgeon “Pini Lopa” and describes him as a fifty-seven-year-old man who looks like “a performer from Vegas,” with “a powder-blue suit” and white leisure shoes. In his journals, however, Gray refers to the psychic surgeon as “Alex.” When Gray saw Pini Lopa work on a Japanese woman, his “fingers seem to go right into her stomach,” and he pulls out “a meatball the size of a cantaloupe.” Gray witnessed many more of these operations—yellow and green pus came out of a woman’s neck; “big bloody grapes” are pulled from a man’s stomach—and then went through the surgery himself. Lopa pushed his fingers into Gray’s eyes, and blood gushed out. “Blood!” Gray cried out in his monologue. “It’s pouring down and someone is sopping it off my face.” And yet there was no blood when Gray rushed to look at his eye in a mirror. Lopa recommended that Gray do this surgery for seven days, twice a day, for a fee of fifty dollars each time. Gray fled the Philippines before doing so. He could never resolve whether there was a trick played or if it was truly a miracle. Shortly thereafter, he underwent the traditional treatment—a microsurgery involving scraping the macula—that had been recommended to him from the beginning. In his journals, Gray drops into the story midway through, without entries leading up to his decision to pursue alternative cures.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 20