JULY 30, 1990
Now, once again I’m turning inland from the sea. The sea, the place of great pleasure and relaxation for me.
“In myths, when the hero fails a crucial test because he lacks faith; when … his old conditioning reasserts itself and he turns away from the one thing he must do. And it is problematic whether the opportunity will ever arise again.”
[From Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens]
There are times when you have to go with the flow and trust the great god of SYNCHRONICITIES.
On my way to Niagara [where Gray traveled seeking another cure for his macular pucker], I began to really wonder what my intentions were. Was I a reporter or a patient? Was I going to report on this event or give myself to it. And I began to see the reporter as that part of me that always held out, that always did it … for an audience. That I would suffer for my audience, that I would suffer in order to make a good story. And as the plane landed in Syracuse, I thought I could be in the Atlantic Ocean tripping on mushrooms and making it with Renée in that backyard and I almost wanted that more than I wanted to be healed or perhaps thought that would be more healing in the end but I still haven’t made up my mind about the operation and I head toward it now not as though I have willed it and am not PLUNGING into it but rather dragging my heels, always dragging me heals. No, I’m not diving into it. I’ve not yet turned my fall into a DIVE!
The operation has the inevitable feeling of death. All my days are getting squeezed, all my days are getting squeezed in around it and it hangs like a black cloud blotting out the sun.
I wonder now if maybe I’m running away from Renée.
You see, I’m not used to functioning this way. I tend to adjust to what happens to me, ADJUST to events rather than attack and try to fix them. THE OPERATION feels like an attack on my eye. THE OPERATION FEELS like a major attack.
But I had to follow out this PSYCHIC SURGEON IDEA because of how much it has appeared in my life.
Do I dare ask the question: WHO AM I MAKING THIS DRAMA FOR?
Alex [the psychic surgeon]: “You’ve come here because you believe in God” as he pressed his hand over my eye. I want to operate he said. Is there blood? There’s always blood, he said smiling.
He seems too nice to be a charlatan.
It seems like I keep failing the healer test.
It’s not that they are all fakes. It’s that they long to walk on the water and do their best not to fall through so much. They don’t drown.
At dinner I get depressed. They said the healer’s energy had gone down since the 70’s. I felt the same for myself. (Rather than see a person, I tend to fill them up with myself to see me coming back at myself.)
I knew that if I started believing in this stuff, I’d stop my depression but I also knew I could only live in doubt.
RENÉE
IT WASN’T HATE. IT WAS THE REVERSAL OF LOVE—something going backward. I love you in reverse I kiss you going out the door.
Next to the pool is a large stage where a Filipina woman singing Tracy Chapman songs to no one and it goes on and on with full commitment. THE SAD PART WAS WHEN SHE SAID THANK YOU TO NO ONE.
PERFORMANCE ARTIST KILLED BY PSYCHIC SURGEON.
Performance artist dies from AIDS spread by hands of Filipino psychic Surgeon.
THE STORY WILL BE MY ONLY HEALING. I ALONE HAVE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU.
AUGUST 7, 1990
[Back in New York for the surgery originally recommended by his ophthalmologist]
I am in the hospital in the waiting room and am amazed how profane it is. I’m sitting under a TV that has a show TALK show about dominating mothers. A very difficult place to develop positive energy then again DAY’S INN was not much better.
AUGUST 9, 1990
Days of looking at the floor and sleeping alone. Renée on the floor. I have to sleep face down. It has all been very uncomfortable. [After his eye surgery, Gray was required to keep his face down for fourteen days to prevent glaucoma.]
DREAM: I am backstage waiting to go on in a Shakespeare play. Maybe King Lear and a blond boy maybe 14 or 15, who I take to be Jack all grown up, is lying on his back on a platform whistling and I scold him for it. I, to my surprise, am able to express direct anger without guilt or qualification. Jack sits up and stops. He looks at me all innocent and wide-eyed. He looks almost like a cartoon character in something like little ORPHAN Annie or the little prince. I go for a long bike ride and I find that I’m way out in the country somewhere, a countryside I don’t know. I’m riding through green fields and the air is turbulent like it has just rained or is about to rain and I came to this rushing stream or more like a swollen river and it is all rushing down under the bridge. I see a speedboat being sucked under. I see it underwater and I think I’m going to have to go that route and I realize I’m naked and that I may have to kick myself to a fence board and go down stream and risk drowning.
And then I think oh no I can’t do this because there are no witnesses (I don’t realize that it’s the dreamer who is the witness) so I don’t risk it because there is no one to see me do it or realize that I am missing. Then I realize its time to get back to the theatre and in fact I feel it is too late to make it on time. I decide to ask this family who are in a strange sort of Camper for a ride. I can see they have room but they just fold everything up and the father drives off. The father of the family. At last, I realized that without a ride I will never make it back and my absence will have ruined the play which means they will most likely cancel my run of MONSTER at the MITZI in reaction. [Gray performed Monster in a Box at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center from November 2, 1990, through May 27, 1991. On November 21, 1991, he moved the show to the Vivian Beaumont Theater, also at Lincoln Center.]
AUGUST 19, 1990
SUNDAY
My eye is back to 20/60 like before when I was so upset. Now, after the 20/200, it feels better by contrast.
More dreams of drinking.
SEPTEMBER 22, 1990
BOOK
SOLIPSISTIC
NARCISSISTIC
SELF-INDULGENT
PIECE OF POOP
DECEMBER 3, 1990
Well we’re back [at Sedgewood] after five weeks and on this gray December day I did reconnect with this place and love it for so many reasons.
When I walked down to see our little lake almost healed—with a few more inches to go, my heart filled up as I saw it there in our first light snow and I saw it both as it was then in the moment and also all the other ways in which I have experienced it in the past as well as future. Ice skating under the moon and cross-country skiing in the snow that day last winter. So there it was the wonderful use of memory and the way it came in beautiful layers around the present moment.
DECEMBER 17, 1990
Fears that here I am about to marry Renée and I don’t even know if I like her scripts. I only know I like what she does for me. Is that bad? Look out.
DECEMBER 22, 1990
I was expecting Bill and Sally after the show [Monster in a Box] but Demo and his actor friend came instead which worked out for the best. I could tell they really liked the show and it was a great show one of the best. A lot of people stood at the end and it was three excellent curtain calls.
I rode down on the number one train with Demo and his friend who is trying to be an actor here in New York and says its so discouraging because it’s all about selling sex. And he wanted advice and I learned that all I could do really—what I always do—is tell him my story and as I told it I had the incredible sense of how lucky I have been. That somehow by a series of wonderful chance events I’ve come into my own wonderful form of theatre and it could have so easily not happened as it did not for so many others and suddenly I had that sense that I was that one sperm that had reached the egg. And for the first time in a long time, I felt blessed.
DECEMBER 27, 1990
I got blasted on Christmas and still feel poisoned. How could I have
slipped? I had one beer, one Bloody Mary, two and a half shots of peppered vodka, two glasses of wine, and two of champagne within two hours of that fine dinner Renée fixed. I had one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had.
DECEMBER 29, 1990
I can’t seem to rid myself of this endless hypochondria.
There is a very hard lump or gland in the right side of my neck and I have this strange discomfort or odd sensitivity in maybe the muscles of my arms. I have very few good days where I make it through without all these fears even though I gave up on drink.
JANUARY 23, 1991
I went up to the Beaumont last night and I thought the show went well but it was something else very far from being intimate BUT after the show I was amazed when Renée told me that I left out the section: “How shall I do it dear … ?” [In Monster in a Box, Gray talked of sitting with his mother when he was twenty-four years old; she was holding The Christian Science Monitor in front of her, and Gray, annoyed with her for putting a barrier between them, flicked the newspaper with his finger. “And she pulled the paper down,” Gray remembered, “and looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘How shall I do it, dear? How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?’ ”]
And was at first depressed but the next day (today) while talking with Anne Rhoney I realized that there was something in me—perhaps some private aspect of myself that was not ready or able or did not want to give that story away and that realization was a sort of turn on that something so subconscious still existed in me.
FEBRUARY 9, 1991
Renée has gone to L.A. to look for work. Hard for me to work in the day because of many upsetting vitreous floaters in my right eye. Renée called me to say she’s not pregnant and she only seemed “a little disappointed.” She told me to read MIRABELLA MAGAZINE, an article about how everything gives you cancer even herbal tea. The report got me so upset that I went out to the Manhattan Brewery with Munz after we saw BRACE UP [the Wooster Group’s version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters] at the Garage. I was split focus between the show and watching a young (maybe 23) Japanese girl to my left. What beautiful skin she had. I could not stop thinking about touching her naked white, white naked body. I had that old fantasy that just being around her would meet 97% of all my needs. Fears too of what will become of Renée and I now that we are officially childless. A relief and a sadness came over me. It’s hard for me to live a meaningless life and enjoy it.
FEBRUARY 19, 1991
I think I want to live in a story of my own. I cast myself in my next story and then I tell about it. I need to cast myself again.
I go out and look for a story and then I cast myself in it and tell about what I saw happened or what happened to me. And I have to have something to support me other than despair which is what takes me over when I’m not performing.
I’m taking an hour here to be my own therapist.
FEBRUARY 27, 1991
My fear is that I will get so good at artifice that I will no longer lead an authentic life.
MAY 3, 1991
DREAM
I am on the top of a very tall tower or slender geological formation and a young boy—maybe a younger version of myself—has a smaller version of my new favorite drum placed straight on—and he is standing so close and I can feel his sweet breath (like slow dancing in 7th grade) and I’m afraid of being up so high and am barely able to keep my balance—then he begins to kiss me on the mouth and I love it but plead with him to stop because I’m afraid that his kissing me will throw me off balance and I will fall.
(Being love is my last big public secret that I dance around?)
JUNE 6, 1991
I turned 50 years old yesterday and I never thought I would have made it. All I want to do now before I die is learn how to laugh. Last night I had a DREAM that I was watching some big Russian play or extravaganza LIKE CIRQUE DE SOLEIL (where I didn’t laugh) but just as the last scene was being played out I ran between the two men who were playing it out and I started to laugh BUT I was still laughing onstage and then there was the blackout. Next I was in a small elevator going up and down and not able to get out.
Renée made a wonderful surprise party for me and I drank a lot of champagne. She also bought me a great suit. Renée really loves me! What a fool I’d be to throw all that away.
JULY 1, 1991
DREAM
This was a very disturbing dream. Someone had stepped on my face although I don’t remember how—perhaps it happened while I was lying on the beach—and I had to have plastic surgery performed on the my eyebrows and TREVOR was my surgeon. The operation destroyed my innocent whimsical look. I ended up with dark thick ethnic eyebrows that made me look all heavy, stern and serious and I was very upset because I know that these eyebrows would never allow me to work in the same way again. Fear of HOLLYWOOD MAYBE?
JULY 17, 1991
Pavel said, go do it do what you have to do to learn from it see if it works. He also said GUILT is the mother of COMPASSION.
[This is an allusion to Gray’s desire to see more of Russo. He had, according to Russo, just returned from a camping trip with her in the Adirondacks.]
JULY 21, 1991
SUNDAY
I’m on the train to R.I. and Block Island. I cannot believe that I’m still in this paralyzing ring of sadness and depression. I find it almost impossible to read or see anything that doesn’t threaten me. I look forward to drinks at five. The drinks are about all that calms me down. Deadens the pain. Something about east coast SUMMER maybe. I don’t know what triggered this one but I think it started—if not with that great sex—then at least from the constant obsessive calling it back over and over until it eats a hole in my head and there is no peace of mind. [This is a reference to his time spent with Russo.] A certain amount of major masochism operating here that makes it so difficult to stand seeing happy people. I run from laughter and have fantasies of going with Pavel to see all his patients dying of Aids. I make that child up in my mind and even EVEN see her in the back of the car. Mel told me that John Malkovich must be a masochist because he was happy with Michelle Pfeiffer and then walked away from that. He had it all and walked away so he could feel…. the PAIN. I am making life a mess for Renée. I can’t look at my book. It makes me sick I can hardly look at anything. It is like a skunk beast SKUNK beast is in my ear lapping with his tongue saying GOD IS DEAD ALL THINGS ARE PERMITTED
Gray and Shafransky rented a house in Wainscott, in Long Island, New York, for the months of July and August, in anticipation of holding their wedding there on August 24, 1991.
JULY 22, 1991
This is the perfect location. Its like a HOPPER painting and I walk out nervous and instead of the perfect house (BE HERE NOW) I see her and her child [Russo and her daughter, Marissa] and my child with her all living at Sedgewood waiting for me to come home then I think I have to call Pavel and I remind myself of mom when she was crazy and calling her PRACTITIONER and then repeating what he said over and over. I don’t have my voice of Pavel. I have no calming nurturing voice in me or do I? Sometimes I can calm myself and talk myself down but it takes constant work.
Now I am being filmed for CBS so I’m suddenly calm. It’s as though the camera adds meaning to my life as a sort of witness. I feel less alone knowing that this event is somehow larger than me or going to be in more places than me.
JULY 23, 1991
Oh God! this is starting to get as bad as 1976.
The skunk mouth the skunk tongue is in my head saying all things are permitted God is dead therefore all things are permitted
AUGUST 1, 1991
I got sick at last and then I broke down and cried. Renée said that I hadn’t cried like that since I broke up with Liz. I thought then that I must be breaking up with Renée but I had to marry her first. This is an insane twist if it is true. I’ve not been so unhappy and depressed for years. I had to get sick. It was the only way. Renée asked if the house was haunted. I thought I could see Marissa in the
guest room. The empty beds make me crazy. I keep thinking of them as filled with children. I was too sad to ride to the ocean this morning. Sad and sick. Renée rode alone. She said it was nice. I lay sick in bed and told Renée that I felt I used her as a nurse to get famous. Just used her to keep me afloat.
Renée made me love her again when she told me that birds choke on rice so she is going to throw bird seed at the wedding. I keep saying lets call it off. Renée says we should do it now. Calling off the wedding would be BREAKING UP.
AUGUST 6, 1991
I started talking about how Pavel said maybe Renée should be prepared to be a single mother and to be in an open relationship. Renée flipped out and got angry but by the time we got to the beach she was crying and she told me to go back to New York. This made me cry. As soon as she started to cry, I cried and then comforted her and we were able to stay on the beach for an our hour. Renée said she didn’t want to be a single mother. She’d rather talk to me than to a baby.
We went to Robby [Stein, a child psychoanalyst and friend of Gray’s] and Freya’s for dinner and before we went I told Renée that I could stop groaning if we could make an agreement that I would try being married for one year. She shook hands and said but don’t tell anyone else.
I was able to enjoy the dinner party but I could not taste anything because of the cold. But we found some nice people to talk to and Renée seemed happy but she was smoking and drinking a lot of white wine. She was very upset because it looks now like the head of Columbia pictures, the man who wants her film is about to get sacked. I cannot believe it. With all else that is going on now this has to happen. It is too outrageous but Renée didn’t get as upset as she might have and when she asked me to guess why I couldn’t and she said it was because she had fun doing it.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 21