And here I am running away and it’s true. Renée said I have no right to cry anymore. I have to rise to the occasion. I don’t know what else she said or we said because I am so confused. I told Renée that I was stuck in the middle and could not move. Can’t get on the airplane and am impotent to boot. I find myself in HELL.
What is there to write?
What is there to read?
“Ramona called and said she’d seen Kathie on the street with the baby and it had destroyed her,” Gray wrote, using a pseudonym for Shafransky for legal reasons, in the 1997 book version of It’s a Slippery Slope. “She’d gone to bed. Would I please come home? I went into another paralysis. I was paralyzed and divided. In my imagination I saw myself sitting on the bed comforting Ramona. And I also saw myself standing beside Kathie, meeting my son for the first time. For two days I was quite paralyzed. And for two days I was quite out of my mind, lying on the floor in a stupefied trance.”
OCTOBER 27, 1992
Yesterday I had a break down at the airport and they almost didn’t let me on the plane. I got on because I thought Renée would leave me if I didn’t come home. And when I got home she told me that she was going anyway. So it’s over and I feel like a dead man. The only thing left is my work. “Our work.” I feel dead and like I have killed myself.
The cab round trip to the airport is $80.- MONEY!
OCTOBER 30, 1992
The whole city seems ugly beyond belief; horrid and I can’t go away to house in the country because I’d miss Renée too much.
Renée is sick of being the limit setter; she can’t get what she needs.
I only see her for what I need from her. Please read this someday.
NOVEMBER 2, 1992
I’m up too early to take a train to Providence. Renée and I had a date last night. She looked sweet and even though she is out to take a great deal of my money, my heart went out to her when I saw where she was sleeping … on that day bed right by the window. [Shafransky moved in with a friend for a few weeks and then to an apartment of her own in Tribeca in downtown Manhattan.]
If Renée knew I was in touch with K. she would not be so pretty anymore, she’d be angry. She told me that every time she goes away I have to have an affair. And that is often true. What else is there to say besides Renée looked good and she was wearing blousy clothes to cover her big places, which she pointed out to me? Oh, one other thing, it was nice to hear her talk to Mary Beth’s son. Renée would make a good mom (“the grounding reality of children” as Chan said) but also Renée is smart and I like to hear her talk politics. I had a long walk with Ken [Kobland] yesterday and Ken thinks I’m a DRAMA QUEEN.
NOVEMBER 9, 1992
After lunch I went out for a walk and was absolutely seized with a thought that I loved Amber [an eighteen-year-old intern at the Wooster Group] and that I could not live without her and now was my chance to find out and I had to get back and these “thoughts” these compulsions began to make me insane because I began to see all sides and I’m everywhere in my head and I was shouting out and even now as I write this I began to think about her. Is this what Renée calls ACTING OUT? Always have to have a perfect distant woman. A woman at a distance.
JANUARY 3, 1993
Having a real bad shaky day. Yesterday, Renée showed me her apartment and I don’t think I could grasp it. Today, I have found that it is almost impossible to be alone. So I went and walked around and around Washington Sq. and on my way to the bookstore groaning all the way, I ran into a more extreme version of myself, the man was shouting at everyone. Far gone and for a while it shut me up.
Renée is going to Alanon meetings and I can tell she’s depressed by the people and says all the alcoholics across the hall have more fun.
JANUARY 9, 1993
[In England, doing publicity for the Picador publication of Impossible Vacation]
The negative power of the mind. I thought of trying to get out of this press tour by pretending I was sick and now I am sick. I am very sick. My chest cold has blossomed into my head.
What am I doing in search of the miraculous? I can’t begin to express how depressed I feel trapped in The Montcalm Hotel and it’s raining out and I feel like I’m going to die. Myself keeps falling apart. There are these big gaps that I fall into.
I have nothing more to write except sad sad sad. I am working against myself to prevent pleasure. I’m only at peace when I’m on drugs or booze. I don’t know how to go on without screaming. I feel such rage and pain. And I will never forget that chant I did on Jim’s deck. I want to be in a group all chanting stoned on mushrooms. I’m going primitive and I can’t bare civilization.
When Jim Barton said K. got good genes from me—“you’re good looking and smart.” It put me into a panic like when the sun bursts out and I feel so suddenly over-stimulated and I think what am I doing wasting my time. I’ve got to “use” my looks and “use” my smarts. I don’t know what I’m doing here in England. It feels like such a waste of my body but I’m so sick.
WHAT WAS THE DATE MOM KILLED HERSELF?
But the image that constantly tears my heart, the image that rips at me is of Renée on her red bike with the fender rattling and her in her brown shorts and we are riding together down to the ocean to take our morning walk and I am there but not there. A kind of be here then sort of guy and she is looking back at me with love in her gaze and I respond. I let the love, her love, bathe all over me and we ride and we walk and her hand that I held is cold (cold sea/cold child). Then the moments all fall away and leave me thrashing. Leave me nowhere.
“You have to be a father or not a father. You can’t just drop in.”
APRIL 1, 1993
Back from skiing at Blake Street and already missing it. All the anxiety is coming back on me now. It’s snowing again in Vermont and I can’t get the picture of Renée out of my head….. her lying on the couch saying, “You have broken my heart.” So, here I sit. With all the old anxiety coming up. All the old sadness and indecision. Where to go next? Who to be with? Where to write? Should I fly back East? And the pure memory that pure head clearing memory of being out on those white slopes and how I didn’t want it to stop or be over. Like when I get off six good turns in a row. Six good turns without thinking about them.
In May 1993, Gray called Russo and asked if he could meet their son for the first time. Gray and Russo had not seen each other for nearly a year; Forrest was eight months old. Gray visited them at their Tribeca apartment—Russo was still living with members of the Blue Man Group along with Marissa and now with Forrest too—on the same day that he called. He returned the following day, Russo recalled, to take Forrest to the park for a couple of hours. (In It’s a Slippery Slope, Gray told of taking Forrest on his own to Brewster just after he met him. In reality, this trip took place two weeks later.) Shortly thereafter, Gray learned that his father had passed away. “My father had died just three days after I saw Forrest for the first time, died not knowing he had his first grandson,” Gray recollected in It’s a Slippery Slope. “I didn’t even know he was in the hospital dying, because my stepmother didn’t call me due to the fact that she was so angry with me for the way I portrayed her in my novel.” In the journals, however, Gray describes what seems to be a conscious decision not to be with his father when he was ill at the end—a decision he later mourns.
“I found out that he was in a small hospital down by the ocean in Rhode Island and I went there and he was suffering from DTs and completely incoherent,” Gray’s younger brother, Channing, remembered of this time. “And the doctor said I should go out and buy him a pint of bourbon. That’s high-end medical care in South County, Rhode Island. I remember, the next day, during my daughter’s birthday party, my stepmother called and said he had died. He did look like death when I saw him; his face had changed, he looked like he had aged ten years. But I didn’t expect him to die that day. I don’t think the staff was aware that he was close to death. So nobody was with him. I think he died in the
night.”
MAY 14, 1993
Dad’s death. An absence of absence.
My next book, “An Absence of Presence.”
[Gray’s father died on May 22. In this entry, Gray may have been anticipating the event that would soon take place.]
JUNE 8, 1993
In Montreal, I woke with a rare erection. And it made me feel more lonely. Something about male anatomy, the way it stands out and demands and reminds you like it has a mind or “head” of its own and it must get in somewhere. It was so demanding.
3 FEELINGS about DAD’S spirit. When I was with Renée in Central Park, we were sitting like we never sat before….. quiet on a park bench in the brambels and I felt a soft wind come and caress my bald spot and at that moment it was as if it were the ubiquitous spirit of dad passing over and touching me with some sort of graceful forgiving some forgiving grace before he enter into the spiritual.
2 When I was saying a prayer for him at the little Balinese icon here in the loft, I saw his spirit spiraling up and in some other world becoming incarnate and making passionate love to mom.
3 When Chan drove me down to the grave sight, I picked three begonias from a common bush and put them on his grave sight and I saw his old face, old disapproving face up in the sky above me like Woody Allen’s mother. “Don’t pick flowers from these bushes.”
JUNE 14, 1993
At the Sedgewood house, I see Renée (as she was) everywhere. I drink too much and I cry almost all the time. Like an indulgent child, I do the thing that feels good at the time and have no respect for the future.
I told K. that I had a secret wish that the plane would crash with all of them and she didn’t even get real upset. She only said, “I’m sure a part of you would be sad.”
Am I behaving like Henry the VIII? Ditch one great lady to get me a child? When I embraced her on the dock, it was not so much her but the both of them. That white sleeping moon face. That out of its head. The way he can sleep through anything and everything.
JUNE 20, 1993
Ron says that I have to resolve things with Renée. He thinks we are in limbo now. He says I would not have carried on with Kathie for as long as I did if I didn’t like her. So its time to find a therapist.
Ron thinks a woman therapist would be good because women know how to make decisions and I am missing that ability. Women seem to have that quality.
To have gone to Rhode Island and sat by dad’s bed—sad to say—would have been only an intellectual exercise.
Last night I called Renée to say good-bye. We talked about divorce for the first time. I brought it up. She said that it had been on her mind a lot but didn’t want to bring it up (yet) because of dad’s death and the opening of the monologue at the Goodman. [Gray’s Anatomy was set to open at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in September 1993.] She also said that if I did go into therapy and found someone new to replace her that she would be very angry.
As for sex with Kathie, I worry that it is as charged as it is because it is all or was all being done “behind mom’s back.” It is not adult sex but juvenile and all hot because it’s a secret. Not only is it behind Renée’s back but also behind the backs of the kids. And I miss Renée’s intellect and child like view of life and language like the way she laughed on the phone when she said Renaissance angels.
JULY 21, 1993
I went to see Martha [a new therapist] and I cried again when I told the story of Renée putting out her hand at the end of the great crossing and asking “Still Friends?” [Gray relayed this story, from early in his relationship with Shafransky, in his 1980 monologue Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk. When Gray and Shafransky finally reached the West Coast after driving cross-country together, “Renée turned to me, extended her hand and asked, ‘Still friends?’ And we shook.”]
I did have a great time alone with Forrest but the fact that he won’t select it out and remember it bothers me. That it is not yet a shared memory or a personal history between the two of us and the thought of how long that will take.
Today I feel such deep sadness. At times it is almost unbearable and I have to say Forrest sometimes takes me out of that sadness because perhaps takes me out of myself.
Kathie thought I loved her. That’s what she said. And yes I did and still do make physical love to her but I’m so split.
At night alone down at the dock I thought how easy it would be to drop Forrest in the lake and watch him drown which reminded me of how mom told me that Chan was such a beautiful baby that she wanted to put a pillow over his face and smother him.
FORREST = MY MAP THAT I HAD THE POWER TO DO WHAT DAD NEVER DID FOR ME (MOM GAVE HIM NO EMOTIONAL ROOM BECAUSE HE WAS WOUNDED).
MY MAP THROUGH THE FORREST. I HAVE TO AND CAN CUT MY OWN WAY.
JULY 29, 1993
When I told Martha of the fantasy I had of dropping Forrest in China Lake and watching him drown, she said I could integrate these fantasies and mom could not, which Martha thinks drove mom mad.
AUGUST 4, 1993
It was the way Renée and I came together on that one LINE = “A HOUSE WILL BREAK YOUR HEART.” Kathie would never be in tune with something like that. She is so proletarian. So materialistic but a good mother nonetheless. But I felt so connected to Renée at that moment. So in tune.
Renée asked me on the phone where it was that I felt most centered and I could not bring myself to tell her that its with Kathie and the kids. I only said it was with Forrest which I’m sure was hard for her to hear.
AUGUST 20, 1993
It bothers me that K. has the TV on in the morning and that she believes in an “after life.”
FORREST = first he throws his head back and cries then he talks like a ventriloquist then he fights sleep. He goes up and looks for me last look and then it goes down on my chest and the delicious feeling comes. I am calm in his being. I think that I love him more than I’ve ever loved before/ his pale moon face glowing alabaster back at me. The sound of the Carousel and children crying.
K. knows things from just being a mother. That in itself gives her knowledge. We talked about how children create a balanced bond between the two parents. I see it with Chan I see it with K and I.
[Here, Gray is describing the first family vacation that he took with Russo and the children in Newport, Rhode Island, when Marissa was seven and Forrest was nearly eleven months old.] This clam house didn’t serve clams. Drunken kids screamed dickhead out the window. Marissa gave up and turned out to sea and I turned to her and said “I love you” and the pain that I never heard it from dad and how I was a dad who could and wanted to.
SEPTEMBER 10, 1993
[Performing Gray’s Anatomy]
GOODMAN/CHICAGO
Renée called about the dedication (“DEAD”ICATION) to the book and was afraid of being drawn in again to my perverse love. [Gray dedicated the published version of Gray’s Anatomy to Shafransky.] Me manipulating her to stay around until I try to make up my mind.
The only joy in my life is Forrest and I’m now afraid that K will take him away from me. All I feel is fear. I’m a little more relaxed here in Chicago because I am in a forced situation. I am too afraid to fuck up my work so I work. Had I not got good reviews, I think I would have gone into a very deep depression.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1993
[Shooting Damian Harris’s Bad Company, starring Laurence Fishburne and Ellen Barkin; Gray played the minor role of Walter Curl, a crooked businessman.]
Vancouver B.C.
Early to bed to get ready for horrid NIGHT SHOOT on this fucked up film.
Just after I cum the phone rings and it’s Renée. She tells me Lincoln Center is almost sold out [for the New York run of Gray’s Anatomy, which premiered on November 7, 1993]. I get up a little from that. I can’t believe that many people want to see me before reviews.
When will I ever be able to enjoy reading a book again?
I began to think that anyone could play the role of CURL and I am unable to find my signature, my un
iqueness. UNIQUENESS.
I’m sitting here in my trailer going over and over all the things I loved about Renée. 1) her eyes up at me when she was in the bathtub. It was her childlike trusting eyes. I had seen into them once so long ago on John Street when I was making love to her and I suddenly saw into her eyes. 2) It was the crazy kidlike way she rode her bike, her red bike so fast to the beach and how I’d be alongside of her groaning. What was that about? What was and still is wrong with me? Am I insane? To continually reject joy and want to beat it down? 3) The way she would visit me at Our Town and the lovely Christmas she made. 4) Her skin. Her neck, her breasts. The dinners she fixed. The sweaters she wore. The way she helped me with my dreams. All the things she did for me. What would cause me to do what I did and what is stopping me from trying to HEAL IT?
But I’m not supportive, that’s the point. All I do is take. I only give to the audience.
Vancouver
Why am I working 12 hours on a film I don’t even believe in for NO MONEY? Just because they wanted me.
Renée on the phone made me feel more sad but sad in a real and more connected way. But I asked her why she wanted the separation and she said that there was a long list. 1) I was not there for her (Renée’s question comes to mind here. When she asked me and this is a big and important question—why was it that she spent so much time making a scum bag cad look so good on stage?)
OTHER REASONS for leaving me—BIG ONES I reconnected with K. and F. before I made an attempt to reconnect with her. But I do think it’s interesting that Renée is still spending her time—some of it—making me appear to be Mr. Nice Guy on stage. I also think that I do that. I go out there in order to Charm.
SEPTEMBER 27, 1993
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 24