Coming home for Forrest’s first birthday was like living in a sad strange dream in which my life was no longer my own. The kid is beautiful, no doubt. K was away. Marissa was there. She scares me. The indifference scares me. Pavel was right, I should have lived with them for a week before I got married. That was the one thing Pavel may have been right about.
I THINK I MAY BE CRAZY
I THINK I AM.
SEPTEMBER 28, 1993
THE SEA ALWAYS BRINGS ME BACK TO MOM. DID I EQUATE THE LANDSCAPE WITH HER
Not sharing Forrest with all hurts. Not sharing Forrest with Renée hurts. Not celebrating him hurts. Not holding him up to the world hurts. He’s so beautiful! It’s almost like he is some sort of separate issue. Like he came from outer space.
OCTOBER 8, 1993
[Performing Gray’s Anatomy]
Cambridge Mass.
I feel very fuzzy about what I want to say. Because Renée and I have been working so hard on the monolog, I’ve fallen behind with my journal so that things that once seemed important so very important days ago have slipped away and I’ve just said goodbye to Renée and it felt more OK perhaps because she stayed another day to work and we got a lot of good work done.
In the Boston Phoenix Carolyn Clay calls Renée—“Spalding Gray’s Better Half.” God, how right on.
OCTOBER 9, 1993
Cambridge
There was a brief moment I had sitting in Harvard Square listening to street music and some guy leaned over to me and said, “You wrote a great novel.” And I thought, I should feel so very satisfied. So 25 odd years later I realized I had done what I had fantasized or dreamed of so long ago in Boston. And there I was … still unhappy. Or, still dissatisfied.
As for the show last night, it was not easy to do without Renée. The audience was too abstract. I knew I’d have no contact with them after and be very lonely.
There is nothing more to say except that I don’t regret Forrest’s being. I like sex with K. and I still love Renée.
Nothing else is new.
OCTOBER 17, 1993
I’m still afraid to write freely. I started the morning with coke and cigarette, this morning. Woke with a hang.
HONEST EYES = RENÉE
Those eyes in the photo on the wall and how I can’t give over to any other human eyes. Kathie in particular. I can hardly look into her eyes and she made me do it last night at the busy Inn. And it was not easy. Her face is sort of twisted, weasely. Why am I writing this? But what is going on?
I did tell her that it was like a mail order bride and that Forrest was part dropped on my doorstep.
Then there was the constant farting and the laughter. I laughed with Kathie until I cried. Good lord! Think of that. I don’t remember any woman I’ve done that with. That was a big one. I really laughed.
OCTOBER 1993
OCT.? SEDGEWOOD
At last I can sit down and write. FORREST has fallen down for his nap after hurling his bottle at me.
Being with him indoors is like taking some heavy disorientating drug. He is now NON STOP. I think just a month ago he would occupy himself more in one spot and I’m sure that has to do with his now walking. But I cannot think straight. Also all I do now is feel for Renée when she heard Forrest in the background.
OCTOBER 28, 1993
Renée called this morning to say she no longer felt sorry for me. She felt sorry for herself and she wants more money for what she calls collaboration. I don’t know what to do. I do feel she is right and I also feel I’ve given her a lot of money.
Session with Martha yesterday at 3:00 and I brought Forrest. He slept in my arms for most of the session. She said he was a beautiful old soul whose eyes went on forever.
Martha’s most important phrase to me was that MOM NEVER CONNECTED ME TO MYSELF so what I have now is attachment to a woman and then the fearful abyss. She said, and I agree that it’s just too hard for me to be alone. THERE is this terrifying abyss. After the session I took Forrest for a walk in the park. He was sleeping AT LAST. A long day for him. I picked him up in a stretch limo at 7:30 then after the radio station we were off to the doctors then back to my place while he helped me trash it.
Back to the ABYSS. I think that was what I experienced when I saw I was too far out in the ocean and I was measuring the distance from Renée on the beach and that the sea was the personification of the abyss and that I was not really dreaming but instead experiencing that cut off state from the mother.
OCTOBER 31, 1993
Renée said that she would “direct” me if I ever did a monologue about “the break up,” our break up. Of course it would be a way of taking revenge. Forrest has to know his history someday. Renée pictures herself at 60 and Forrest a young man coming to her after reading my books and asking her, Who are you?
NOVEMBER 4, 1993
Martha seemed to have a breakthrough. I think she got excited about the fact that I could move away from the mother complex with Forrest. She got so excited and talked so fast that it was hard for me to follow. But I did see that the image of the perfect woman was in conflict with Forrest.
But then when I asked Martha what she meant when she said that mom never gave me to myself she also got very animated and she began to almost act. She frightened me with the intensity with which she re-enacted mom as the mom that instead of mirroring—that is giving myself back to me (MY GREAT NEED TO BE SEEN AT A PARTY ETC.)—she devoured me or swept me into her needy aura. That, according to Martha, is when she became the devouring mother and said “me, me look at me!” So, if Martha is right I do have a big problem. But I don’t feel I’m doing that with Forrest. In fact I do remember that last time I changed his big shitty diaper I was smiling back at him. What Martha said made sad sense to me. She keeps saying that I’m a victim of a Mother Complex and I will be somewhat saved by being both mother and father to Forrest. That is, I’m playing out both parts when I’m with him and that is why I related to Forrest exclusive of Renée. That is why she thinks I excluded Renée from him.
She also said that it is now an important time for me because in the same year that I outlived mom (and she said she did not think I would make it through the summer but did not want to inter“fear” because it would make her into another mother for me). And yes the same year I out lived mom I had a boy child and I am now trying to relive my childhood in a healing way through him.
Well it was a very loaded session. She also almost called me Forrest again.
On November 7, 1993, Gray opened Gray’s Anatomy at Lincoln Center; he performed the show until January 3, 1994.
NOVEMBER 15, 1993
I didn’t feel like doing the Monday night show. For me every show is one step toward the separation papers [with Shafransky—this was the last time she would direct him]. But the show went so well, the audience was outstanding. They blew me away. It was the best audience ever. If only we could have an audience like that when the press was there. I think I had a fever. I think I still do but I’m trying to ignore it. Also I think there is something wrong with my prostate because I keep having to pee.
NOVEMBER 16, 1993
The show did not go as well as the night before. Renée said the wonder went out of my voice and I started to get glib toward the end. Laurie Stone from the Voice was there. Shit! After the show Renée gave me a talking to and said if I smoke grass and mess up my head she will kill me. Then we went to the board of directors dinner and I downed over a half pint of pepper vodka before then had a lot of white wine then went out to a local bar for champagne. I asked Renée to come but she said she had to pack up for Boulder. Then she called me about something and I called her back but I can’t recall the conversation most likely because of drink. I know it was something about how she enjoys her independence, that much I remember. I am very depressed living alone and can do very little for myself. I’m too depressed to even unpack my laundry and put it in the drawer.
The loss of Renée makes me feel like someone has died.
I feel like I killed Renée.
NOVEMBER 17, 1993
I had Forrest over to the loft for dinner. I hope I did not give him the flu. There was one divine moment with him. He was in my arms on the couch and instead of fighting sleep he went into this blissful stare at the ceiling. It was as though he was hallucinating. His eyes were in a state of divine ecstasy. There are the times that he transcends being a child and becomes angelic. Then he passed into sleep and his face was all bliss.
NOVEMBER 30, 1993
Day after good reviews post partum depression. [The Los Angeles Times described Gray’s Anatomy as Gray’s “funniest and most profound monologue since ‘Swimming to Cambodia’ ”; The Boston Globe called it “graphic, funny, provocative and terrifying”; The New York Times declared it “a rarefied exercise in levels of consciousness and perception that is more cogently of a piece and more emotionally moving than perhaps anything else Mr. Gray has done.”] What’s next? As soon as I have something off limits in my life, I want to talk about it. Forrest! The way he was so good and then turned into a little wild thing teasing with his teeth at my wrist. Biting into my palm. I wondered why Renée was so up about the reviews when they didn’t give her any credit as director and then I called her this morning to find her depressed and very angry. She even screamed on the phone. She says now she has to start all over to find her voice that had been buried for years in my voice. She said she never had any freedom. Never had a life of her own.
DECEMBER 5, 1993
The Good Morning America People arrived at 6 AM and I tried to sleep. The show was sad because they kept asking about my wife Renée. And I’m kind of at the end of the road with this surprise of ALCOHOLIC HEPATITIS [one doctor diagnosed Gray with this, while another later told him he didn’t have it]. I never expected to get hit by it. I never heard of it. All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not dying from it YET but I feel like I’ve lost my two best friends, Renée and Alcohol. I’m now really alone although the visit from Forrest, Marissa, and Kathie did help me out. I mean made me feel a little better. Forrest slept for two hours which was a blessing. It is ridiculous that I’m performing Gray’s Anatomy while I’m sick with a disease I most likely won’t do a monologue about.
DECEMBER 8, 1993
I dragged myself to dinner at K’s to bring her the bad news about skiing or NOT skiing. It was real hard to be there without drinking. Not easy to deal with Marissa’s needs and the way she sometimes attacks Forrest, that makes me angry. But I had no protection. That bubble of alcohol. YES! GOD, how I missed that bubble of ALCOHOL that I would always wrap around me just to walk out on the night streets. Now to see the night streets without that protection for the first time in three years. Well, what a horror! And then I get to K and she does a good job cooking and then she tells me that if I really wanted Renée back I’d be down there now throwing myself upon her. Cooking for her—not taking “NO” for an answer. And this is coming from K. She at last gets me so upset that I go out to call Renée from a payphone but she’s not in.
DECEMBER 21, 1993
K. thinks my madness is or was AN ACT. Case in point. She says I was flipped out in the car on the way to N.Y.C. from the beach and then I had that phone interview. And she said I was just fine on the phone.
I’ve gone back to drinking after two weeks.
Renée said I ate her. I did. She was my muse and shadow and I ate her up and spit her out as art.
Renée said, “Now I am on a journey that will let me die. That I will die fulfilled and without regret.”
DECEMBER 1993
Martha turns out to be a Jungian!
Yipes! But she did cheer Ken for saying I was not manic-depressive.
DECEMBER 24, 1993
CHRISTMAS EVE
Lamb for Christmas dinner. A lot to drink. I’m back on it. My poor liver. I’m just not a controlled drinker. And how I love to drink! After I met K’s family at COXSACKIE [in upstate New York] and what a warm place we met. God I almost had to pee next to K’s father who is only three years older than I. After all of that we stopped at a store for beers and they tasted so good I couldn’t stop. Then K said a cop was after us and that frightened me. But he never came. We went to New Paltz for dinner. I had four shots of Irish whiskey in a bar, while K waited with Forrest. 1234 right down and only felt mildly relaxed.
In the first week of January 1994, Russo, Forrest, and Marissa moved into Gray’s half of the loft on Wooster Street. (LeCompte and Dafoe, along with their son, Jack, still lived on the other side.)
JANUARY 3, 1994
[Last show at Lincoln Center of Gray’s Anatomy]
I was very nervous to see Renée. We both knew it, us, we were coming to an end because these were the last two shows.
JANUARY 10, 1994
I’m in the MAS office [Gray’s psychopharmacologist] with a hangover. Could not keep my hands off the scotch last night while we were putting the house in order [in Carmel; Gray kept this house after his relationship with Shafransky ended] which was real chaotic but the drinking started early after I finished skiing at the Patterson. What a mess that was. Lines and short icy runs. So I started in on the beers Heineken draft at 3:30 and K. was in with the kids at 4:00. K. never seems to get impatient: “You can take another run if you want.”
Dinner at the Carmel Diner was a riot. I could not stop laughing and now I can’t remember what I was laughing about. I think much of it was regression. I was farting a lot real loud like mom used to do. Also the waitress was real beaten down. When I asked her the difference between lamb and duck. She went, “Bah” & “Quack Quack.”
Woke at 8:00. My inner alarm. Hangover. Off to have the dreaded breakfast with Renée. I felt like I was going to the dentist. Sad ending but Renée was right—is right. Renée’s story about our form of intimacy being a form of sparring, she saw how we made a little play when she played her HiFi for me and I said ?? What did I say? Because I don’t remember it then it went to her telling me about how Steve Martin’s wife left him because he was manic-depressive. But Renée told me she wanted the papers signed because I was about to go off on the road again and she did not want any legal responsibility for me. After we signed all the papers she said, “It’s been an incredible journey.” And I felt that.
JANUARY 11, 1994
DREAM: this was a very strong dream in the sense of the feeling that was in it.
I was traveling on a train with loose doors and somehow Forrest slipped out although I didn’t see him go but I knew he had gone and I was desperate running up and down the train in hysterics. Then I was at the Performing Garage grabbing a woman’s face screaming, My son is gone!
FEBRUARY 1, 1994
When I got out of the limo and looked back at Forrest, I was sure he knew I was leaving for a long trip or maybe forever. It was that face of great concern. It was that deep look. Those deep eyes. And as I sit here remembering it I’m sure (but I’ll never know) that it was not a case of projection.
My session with Martha was odd. I wanted to leave after 45 minutes. I did talk about how worried I was that Kathie would have the next one if she was or did get pregnant. Also how I was not romantically in love with K. I also find it interesting that Martha is beginning to discuss her sex life with me.
We fly into Singapore [to shoot John Boorman’s film Beyond Rangoon, with Patricia Arquette and Frances McDormand; Gray played a supporting role as a tour guide in Burma] at 825 mph at 37 thousand feet and as soon as I get excited about Phuket [Gray planned to revisit Thailand during a break in filming] I think of fearful things. Of Kathie being pregnant again and how she might not abort I think also of ROSEOLA and how that might hit me before Phuket. I think of the women I might meet on location and I try to think of skiing but not many memories come. It’s like describing sex and so much of what I feel and think feel like old clichés.
FEBRUARY 7, 1994
In Phuket I dreamt of skiing. Every night over and over it
was me rushing to catch the last lift up before 4:00.
It was incomprehensible that JB [John Boorman] could be paying me what I’m being paid and that I could also run off to Phuket
I WANT TO SKI!!!
ALRIGHT after lying
on the floor and crying
for a half hour I
came up with
I THINK
I’D LIKE
TO BE
A SKI
INSTRUCTOR
YES!
I’ve always wanted to teach something and this is it.
Why else did I have these dreams? I must learn to ski and teach it. I want to be out DOORS for the rest of my life.
I miss Forrest so much. SO MUCH I miss now the changing of his diaper and the way he lifts his legs for me. I miss his face I miss him
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SKIING
I AM DRUNK
could I do a ski class in skiing and story telling
YES and you know what Kathie could put it together.
FEBRUARY 11, 1994
THE FIRST DAY OF SHOOTING This is the most boring unrewarding work! I feel like a stand in. A model. I spent the afternoon standing on the top steps to an airplane.
Kathie and I kept fucking waiting for FATE to come and change our lives. Forrest is the embodiment of that fate, that change. He—his whole birth has shaken my life to the bone. Now I worry for his life. I just had a thought now of Aspen and how Marissa cried out for me in the night and how quickly I ran to her and how good that felt. To at last be needed by her. Also I know I am “with” Kathie to some extent in order to get closer to Forrest.
I’D LIKE TO BE REINCARNATED AS A GOOD MOTHER
FORREST—Then in Aspen when I was at last alone with you and I lay you on your back on the bed about to become our bed you looked back at me with those eyes and you gave that look that pure look with no judgment or attempt at interpretation.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 25