It was a look of mere being and what a long look it was
and that old cliché I’d so often heard did then come to mind. This is an old soul. These eyes I am gazing into are not the eyes of a child but old eyes. And I stayed with them until your eyelids began to flutter and close.
I’m sitting in this trailer now remembering holding your pure moon head in my hands as you slept that other summer night near Charleston Beach. I had returned to Rhode Island and brought you back to no one but the MOTHER SEA. And how I cried. Knowing that you would not be the same come another summer. And now I am crying at the loss of you, the loss of that pure child. Your head is starting to grow brown hair and I can’t even adjust to that. I understand for the first time why people have children. I could never get that from dad. Or at least he could never tell me.
FEBRUARY 11, 1994
I’m trying to think this one through I am afraid that Forrest will reject me and I realized that this concept of rejection is not HISTORIC for me or rather it is but I don’t know with my own I want to say DAD but I can’t (SAD). My father SO FORMAL he was a very uptight man at least with us only at the funeral did I hear from people how much dad loved me (us) and that was the OLD story. Mom used to do it too. She would tell me “your father is proud of you.” I hope I’m always very direct with Forrest. ALWAYS.
MARCH 3, 1994
Miami
It’s cool clear and windy here. I have a hangover and that lost lonely feeling again. I already miss Forrest. I did have too much to drink and I overreacted to K., all after a very bad Cuban dinner that Forrest, at least, had a good time at. White rice in his hair and even on his balls which he reacted to later with laughter as he pulled the rice off them. But I have had this guilt ever since I came back. It was this guilt that I was more happy to see Forrest than I was Kathie. I would never be with Kathie if it was not for Forrest. I am quite sure of that. I mean I would never have left Renée for her. But really remember, Renée left me because I could not be the man (I wanted) she wanted. But anyway, that presenter from Fort Lauderdale, I cant remember her name, told K. that I better get my priorities straight about loving Forrest more than I love her and then Kathie told me that her mother had said the same thing. So being a little drunk I started thinking that Kathie was bringing that up to let me know that that was a problem for her but during our walk on the beach she insisted that it wasn’t and that she could clearly understand how my love for a child could be as big or larger than that for an adult.
MARCH 10, 1994
Burlington
Went to bed very early and had two DREAMS.
1) That I was invited to Bob Dylan’s birthday party. It was a small gathering of people I really didn’t know and I could not or would not look at him—the way they don’t show God in the movies.
2) I dreamed that I had to cut out Forrest’s (left) eye with a chainsaw (like Abraham and Isaac) and I couldn’t. I’d keep crawling away with him on the floor and then have to come back and try again.
MARCH 28, 1994
O.K. I do like the way Kathie says, “Let it go.” That one she has learned. “LET IT GO.” That for me was a big one around that time with Marissa and Marissa is testing Kathie’s love all the time LIKE me. Marissa and also Forrest are BIG MIRRORS TO ME.
SKIING. Why am I running after it? Why does it short out all the other reality around me and make me say BUT I could be skiing now!?
I have to say Kathie was really cool. This morning just before she left, I was spilling my shit out all over her and keeping her late from Garcelia [Forrest’s babysitter] and WORK—SHE SAID, “I know I look good and you are not going to change that.”
I WANT TO THINK OF NEW LAND and how big unfamiliar mountains change our consciousness. ON THE WAY OUT TO NEWARK AIRPORT to go to ski in Burlington there was a front, a grey mountain of clouds and I flipped out. I thought, my God, how uplifting.
How fantastic! I never knew New Jersey had mountains and the longing for those clouds to be mountains cheated the feeling that there were and I sat there in the car thinking what in hell, what makes a mountain so important to me? And it came to me that it was simply HIGHER, a way of being alive, a way of getting high, both connected to the earth and above the earth.
BOTH ABOVE THE EARTH AND CONNECTED TO THE EARTH.
The combination of sea and mountains is overwhelming. I don’t know what to do with it.
Vermont
Nothing is real for me suddenly. I had a view of Kathie as a SEX DOLL and Forrest as my play toy that just popped out of her. It all feels at times like a Twilight Zone, like Rip Van Winkle. I woke up one day and I had a family. But could I stand by them? Do I have the courage to live?
APRIL 11, 1994
Wanting to learn how to ski grew directly out of my fantasies about suicide. I want to directly test my levels of self-preservation and contact real fear.
APRIL 1994
Flight to S. F. from Houston. April Something
After three beers, three Becks (one I had to beg for) on Continental, I watch the way my mood swings from BLISS memory to anger.
After 2 beers; bliss memory and how sweet it was. After my show in Austin I met Kathie and Forrest in the lobby of the DRISKILL HOTEL. I arrived with a group of people and the whole scene was rather confusing in the way that it often is after a show and then there he was MY SON FORREST cutting through everyone to get to me and I knew and know his motivations and intention was all pure because there is no language yet and therefore at least no linguistic manipulation. Kathie did or could not TELL him to do it. So for me there was all that trust of the non-verbal. That little guy cutting his way through all those others to get to me like the smell of DNA like a sweet little bird flying into a nest and nest is exactly what he did. He curled up in my arms almost in a fetal position and just HUNCHED in and I patted his back and just felt amazed and overwhelmed by his love. It almost outdid the love the audience gave me. Or rather, it was a nice balance.
Kate called this morning to say Ron died 30,000 feet up. [The Wooster Group member Ron Vawter, who had AIDS, died of a heart attack, at forty-five years old, in an airplane en route to New York from Zurich, Switzerland.] Renée cried on the phone when I told her. She said he was closer to heaven. And I cried when Renée cried.
If RON had a shadow SIDE it was THE ACT OF burning his candle at both ends (as it were). But for me and to me he was all heart. He was the closest man to a saint I’ve ever known. He was all heart so it did surprise when his heart burst 30,000 feet closer to the heaven he deserves. My heart is with him now and forever. AMEN.
JULY 5, 1994
THEN AT LAST IT
BECAME AN
ACCUMULATION OF
DEATH NOT IN THE
ABSTRACT BUT THERE
AT LAST AROUND
ME AND CLOSING IN
(1) PAVEL (2) DAD
(3) RON & CYNTHIA [Horner, the fiancée of John Perry Barlow, a writer, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and a friend of Gray’s]
(4) Jackie O.
JULY 1994
[At Sedgewood in Carmel, New York]
JULY SOMETHING
I don’t know how I am holding on to my sanity. Or is it that I’ve lost it? SYLVIA PLATH comes to mind. Also mom who didn’t have the outlet of poetry. We have not had one sunny dry day in weeks. It feels like the whole house is ROTTING. It is all like a jungle outside. Then yesterday we—Chan, Amanda [Channing Gray’s daughter], Marissa, Forrest and I—were all trapped in the house as well as AGNES the 18 year old Polish baby sitter. And all the power went out for some time. Chan and I sat on the porch to watch the lightning strike in and around the trees. Forrest was in a cranky mood perhaps because of his cold. At last I got him to sleep by taking him upstairs and lying down on the bed with him so that he could gently kick me perhaps to feel his boundaries. Perhaps to feel that I was there but not too much … then one of those surprises happened, Forrest started to laugh just before he went to sleep. It was one of those delightf
ul laughs that apparently came out of nowhere then he rolled over and went out. I too went out for a while. Then I get up and lay on the couch and talked with Chan in the humid POWER OUT. Chan expressed the same fears I always had about Renée and I, that without Bianca as his “KEEPER” he would fall apart and die. He was sure he would die of some major illness and I knew exactly what he was talking about because I had and still was going through that with Renée. I still feel that I will not survive this.
JULY 1994
Saturday Sunday
When I told Chan that I was afraid to speak my next monolog because of how it would alienate the audience he told me I could say anything and they would still laugh. He said that they had no idea of the real life pain that was at the bottom of it all. He told me that I was the “TEFLON of autobiographic monologists.”
JULY 15, 1994
I sit here fearing Forrest’s waking up. All that chaotic NEED coming at me. Forrest is like a sleeping volcano (SHADOW DANCING) LOVE at a distance. “He felt he could only experience the world through a woman’s eyes.” That Updike line came back on me when K. and I were driving over the swollen reservoir, the wind was blowing the backs of the leaves and I, at that moment, needed Renée to be there so I could feel it in its deepest way and that put me into a panic again. Renée would call that need for a perfect moment A FANTASY BUBBLE. I might call it a transcendent moment. A place I would like to be able to enter alone and without drugs.
JULY 28, 1994
There is so little that “works” in this world. SO if you are self destructive on top of that you will go down nice and FAST. THERE IS SO LITTLE THAT WORKS.
I CAN’T LIVE WITH BEING A BAD PARENT.
I do see how having children can and does make us appreciate our parents. Now mine are both dead. But I think of mom as the “chaotic mother” that Winnicott [the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott] wrote about. She certainly was that for the two years before she killed herself. So when I see that coming at me from Forrest I freak because I can’t see an end to it. WHERE IS THERE AN END TO IT?
AUGUST 1994
[In 1994, Gray and Russo rented a house in Martha’s Vineyard for the month of August while Gray performed at the Vineyard Playhouse. They returned every August—with Gray arranging to do a show at the playhouse—for the next eight years.]
MARTHA’S VINEYARD
I’ve been wanting to write in my journal for a long time now and could not focus because of Forrest and what I perceive as his constant NEED. It is odd that now life seems like a gigantic lesson from which we never learn or like Beckett, after we learn we die … so it seems to me to be very important to leave any wisdom behind, something so few people have the time or take the time to do. For instance Renée said that she sees the kind of therapy she is in as a great luxury.
PAGE 74 WINNICOTT
THE “CHAOTIC” MOTHER (As I write this I am aware of the guilt connected to my getting better. The big thing that stops me often is the question: How could I get better for Forrest and Kathie and not for Renée? And then as I write this I realize ONCE AGAIN: I am supposed to get better FOR MYSELF.)
AUGUST 9, 1994
I think I drank less last night. Also that crazy scramble to get dinner together was insane. I kept having to run out to the Weber grill then ZOE that dog would come hopping with deer ticks and Forrest would freak and I had to beat the dog off with my giant spatula. It was crazy and I could not center around my meal. I could not really taste or enjoy the wine. Not like last summer when Forrest would hang out in my lap. Now he has three bites and he’s off into CHAOS again while I leave my meal and go after him. I feel like the house is burning down all the time and I’m the Fireman! Forrest needs 100% attention. JUST WHAT I NEEDED from Renée. When making dinner I turned my back on him for all of two minutes and he found my walkman, unplugged the earphones, put them on his head and went and plugged them into the bathroom wall socket and I caught him just before he connected with the JUICE. Getting him down on the beach made all the difference. We actually watched the sun go down together. I’ve not done that since I was with the kids on Block Island. I kept calling the sun “THE BALL.” Watch the big ball go down!
I am now thinking about therapy and how we go in circles and how I need Martha to tell me over and over again that it could not work with Renée because she wanted me to be other than I was and that Kathie was a rare one and GOOD for me. Yet as I sit here now I think but Renée really wanted me to be a grown up responsible adult. And with Kathie because she doesn’t police me, I drink, take drugs. In other words, with Kathie I keep falling into my shadow self and do not seem to know how to pull myself up and out for my own good.
I do see something remarkable in Kathie. Watching her plane take off framed in the fence I thought I saw another plane almost hit her plane. Then at the end of our phone conversation she told me almost in a matter of fact way that something did go wrong and their plane came within 100 feet of the other plane and all the businessmen groaned. It was the way in which she accepted this event that surprised me.
AUGUST 14, 1994
Opened by telling Martha about my dream. I called it an “incest dream” with Forrest. Of course Martha saw my desire to have union with the child within INNER CHILD AND here is the hard part for me to consider; when I asked her why I would always go after and try to kill the child in Renée (which Martha saw was there in her). She said that I was projecting my inner child on to Renée and then killing it in them as a way of killing that child in myself. She says that I have a beautiful whimsical inner child in myself that I am out to kill. (I am not so able to project that child on Kathie perhaps because she has already put her child outside of her self in the actual form of two children.) Martha said once again that Kathie was right for me “NOW” because she had so little judgment. I told Martha that I’d always seen Renée’s judgments and strong (like LIZ) opinions as my necessary boundaries.
In regards to the dream about Forrest she asked me what Forrest was symbolic of. I told her that I was not aware of him as a symbol but that the one aspect that stood out for me about him was the way in which he was able to express his FEELINGS and then pass on like a thunderstorm passing.
AUGUST 21, 1994
WHAT I CAN’T STAND IN MARISSA, I CAN’T STAND IN MYSELF THAT IS: HOSTILE MANIPULATION OF THE MOTHER.
ALL I CAN SHOW AN AUDIENCE NOW IS MY SHADOW. MY SHADOW HAS COME IN TO RULE NOW.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1994
I’m flying to Denver and I can’t stop crying that I didn’t come to Dad’s bedside. That I never did. That I could not give to him. That I am angry with him that, I was angry. That he paid me off. That for whatever reason, he could not bear paradox and confusion. I don’t know who he was or what he wanted. And perhaps I’m crying for that. That I had to betray him.
In his death I betrayed him.
If only Dad had said something to me about some way he had perceived me as “GOLDEN.” Why did I have to hear it at the memorial?
OCTOBER 7, 1994
NORMAN MAILER = it is not so much that sleeping with different women make us feel like different people. It is that some of US (ME) different people.
I am understanding with my body why I want to live outside of N.Y.C. I don’t want to go out anymore.
It is time for the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK!
For the first time in such a long time these thoughts HAVE CREATED A FUTURE for me. I WANT TO LIVE!!!
As for Forrest—I can never leave him. I didn’t know that in any way before I saw him. But as soon as I saw him I knew I could never leave him. It was the first permanent condition I’d known in my life.
NOVEMBER 30, 1994
Had a long lunch with Renée after therapy. Therapy—somewhat about MY SADISM toward others and toward myself. But we were with each other from 1:30 to 2:45. (“NARCISSUS HAS NO SHADOW”) We, Renée said, were doing a “REALITY CHECK” and so we were but then at the end I could not let her go.
I had to tell her (and I am
crying now) that I had felt that I could never go on and live a life without her and she said that that was a case of SADISTIC behavior of mine toward myself. Beating myself up again. I held on to that thought just long enough to get away from her and then it all came back again, THE GREAT FOG OF DOUBT.
Martha said, “Oh, you don’t feel for Kathie because she won’t show her vulnerable side.” Kathie does not offer her NECK.
JANUARY 25, 1995
One of the things I don’t think Martha understands when she says, “You are so much better.” She does not understand that the way I center into being is through a well told narrative. So I come together in her office and then I come apart again.
In June 1995, Gray began to workshop a show about skiing and the dramatic changes in his romantic life; this would eventually become It’s a Slippery Slope.
FEBRUARY 5, 1995
N.Y.C.
Perhaps all I know is cannibal love.
WILL YOU READ THIS?
MARCH 31, 1995
Vermont last day
of March STOWE
1) It’s all about balance on the slope I have to find balance in my body which leads to my head. I have no head balance.
2) Uninhibited Bliss (perhaps my face looks this way when I perform).
I act from my unconscious then I do the monolog to process my actions. So it’s a form of public processing and in that way it is a gift to the audience.
APRIL 1, 1995
April One April Fools
Day. I’m the fool
I talked with Kathie on the phone today. She called this morning and I started in again on her and what Karen [Russo’s sister] said about her not thinking ahead and acting in the FUCK BUG heat of the moment. Anyway Kathie said “Face it, we were both playing Russian roulette with taking a chance on pregnancy.” And I had to admit it. That is what made it HOT (But why is it still hot now?)
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 26