The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  THE NEXT MONOLOG HAS TO DO WITH: THE TOWN, OUR TOWN, SAG HARBOR

  for instance, where did the name “SAG” come from???

  OUR HOUSE = “CHARM HAS ITS PRICE” said by the man who came to clean the windows.

  For instance, the ORANGE PUMPKIN ON THE TABLE … just ON GOOD DAYS. ON GOOD DAYS, JUST THE SIGHT OF THE ORANGE PUMPKIN ON THE TABLE (THE SUN COMING THROUGH THE FRENCH DOORS) IS ENOUGH.

  OCTOBER 7, 1996

  Had dinner with Amelie [the philosopher Amélie Rorty]. She’s very disarming and I still feel that she thinks the break-up with Renée was a great mistake … her reaction to the sad “line” that “Renée’s bright lights will never shine on me again.” She thinks that I think well in my work. The most disarming question that she asked was what did Kathie see in me? Also, she said you don’t look for a pay back in your children—you just LOVE them and send them out into the world. YOU DO NOT LOOK FOR A RETURN FROM YOUR CHILD … this I guess is UNCONDITIONAL LOVE.

  When I told her I needed to be alone (or is it really with a different woman every night) Amelie said, What better place to be alone than right in the middle of three children.

  From November 2, 1996, to January 6, 1997, Gray performed It’s a Slippery Slope at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. In January, after the show closed, he began guest starring as a therapist on the actress Fran Drescher’s television sitcom, The Nanny. (He appeared on the show sporadically until 1998.)

  On January 16, 1997, Russo gave birth to a second son, Theo Spalding Gray.

  UNDATED ENTRY

  I was fortunate to be there for the birth of my second son, THEO. It took place in the Southampton Hospital in Eastern Long Island. Kathie was in labor for 13 hours in the middle of the wild, wet north eastern. I helped as much as I could with the birth, holding her right leg up and back while a nurse guided her left. There was a strange turmoil in the air. It was not only the storm, but there had been an unexplained stillbirth that morning, which had left all the nurses somber. That was coupled with the memory in my mind of our first visit to the hospital for Kathie’s amnio, which just happened to be the morning after TWA flight 800 went down. The whole hospital was on a very tense emergency ALERT.

  When Theo’s head first started to crown and I got my first real glimpse of the coming him, I thought Kathie was giving birth to a dead beaver and I kept looking at the doctor’s face to try to read his reactions. He seemed fine and I had to trust that.

  This was an unforgettable event for me. I had always heard that children come into the world with a great INDIVIDUALIZED personal character in tact and at last I had a chance to witness this. That old perplexed expression on Theo’s face lasted for weeks and can still, at seven months, be seen. Holding him in my arms, I completely identified with that density of perplexity. As he looked up at me, he seemed to be asking over and over, Why this? Why something and not nothing? Why this glorious accident?

  JANUARY 22, 1997

  I’m in rainy L.A. again. I had a good flight out but drank too much so I don’t know what all that scribbling is about.

  THEO, our new baby was almost hit over the head from a piece of siding that fell down from the cupboard while Kathie was holding him in her arms. “It could have killed him,” she said. The thought of it made me feel ashamed and angry. A stupid random death of a little angel.

  Forrest took my heart by the way he arranged his little animals on the lip of my grandfathers bureau and how it gave a life history such a full dimension. THAT SACRED CHEST of drawers come to this …

  JANUARY 28, 1997

  Trying to get used to so many beings in the house. THEO makes it so much fuller. The other morning I was holding him in bed and Forrest came in and saw the windows … the bedroom windows reflected in his eyes and said, “THEO has windows in his eyes.”

  FEBRUARY 1, 1997

  Austin Airport

  DREAM: I was living by what seemed to be a kind of inland waterway. In this dream, I was doing most of my relating to what felt like ANOTHER MAN. This other man, who I could not see in the dream, owned a powerboat and I discovered that there had been some vandalism done to the boat and I was outraged by this and I kept telling him that he had to get out of such a place where people would do that to his boat.

  Then I looked across the waterway canal where his boat was and saw that the whole place was like a huge MAUSOLEUM. And there all these soulless Mafia DONS standing like statues and staring out at me. And whoever I was with said, “These guys are buying us out.” And I said, “Will I get a fair price?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Time to move. I’ve lost a house and I’ve lost a son. It’s time to move on.”

  But I felt no remorse or sadness. I have no idea who I was talking to or what HOUSE or what SON I was referring to. It was a strange dream because it was so visual and so without feeling. It seemed to be about resolution.

  Kathie got me … or helped get me out of New York.

  FEBRUARY 3, 1997

  I always thought I was too unstable to be a father. Now, just when I think the children will drive me crazy they make me sane. LIKE THIS MORNING when I was doing YOGA and Forrest came down with the “Where’s Waldo in Hollywood?” book.

  He was in such an unexpected good mood. Marissa has not gotten much better for me. Is so so confrontational but is so so good with the baby. She can rock him and sing him to sleep like no one else. So, there, WHAT A SURPRISE.

  Last night I kept waking up to listen to THEO breathe and to hold his hand. I am the one that is getting so nervous about every breath. I am on the jitney now. On the move again. Will I ever slow down? I have to make CHOICE.

  No real time at home. Frantic home. But first sex with Kathie this morning in over two weeks. Used a condom but felt like I was shooting bullets into a rubber wall. Not like I was shooting into her.

  MARCH 4, 1997

  I am not suffering from original SIN. I am suffering from “ACQUIRED SIN.” It is after all an accumulation and I think what I may be forgetting is that I did have a kind of nervous breakdown and I think that I GET MISLED by the AUDIENCES’ laughter at the report of this, and because they take it lightly, then I begin to take it lightly.

  THUS THE NEED FOR A MORE PRIVATE NARRATIVE WITH MARTHA, in order to remember MY MADNESS. I’m not mad, I’m just anxious.

  On March 19, 1997, the film of Gray’s Anatomy, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was released. “I saw the monologue and I think Kathie called and we discussed the possibility of doing it as a film,” Soderbergh recalled. “The budget was really, really cheap. And this was on the heels of doing Schizopolis [Soderbergh’s previous film], so I still had a crew, and it came together quickly. We shot it in this warehouse in Baton Rouge. It really was kind of like a group of people putting on a show … What was interesting about Gray’s [Anatomy] was how easily Spalding could drop in and out of the monologue, since we shot completely out of sequence. It was astonishing to put it together and see how perfectly modulated it was. That was startling to me.”

  Critics gave the film good reviews—though their tone was more often cheerfully appreciative than rapturous. “A chatty, colorful, nicely sardonic account of how this crisis led Mr. Gray to assess his medical state, consider his mortality and take one more funny, self-dramatizing look at the eccentric world around him,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times.

  MAY 1997

  MONTH OF MAY

  DREAMS, SO MANY DREAMS OF THE WILD SEA, A WILD SEA ALMOST, ALWAYS ALMOST, SWEEPING ME AWAY.

  The following are notes for Morning, Noon, and Night, Gray’s 1999 monologue leading his audience through a day in his life with his family in Sag Harbor. At this time, Theo was four months old, Forrest was four, and Marissa was nearly eleven.

  MAY 29, 1997

  *MORNING CHAOS

  MONOLOG MAY 29

  Must do the CHAOS of me with THE KIDS in the morning.

  “CRASH” the sound of glass breaking. “Dad, do you know that picture of George Washington
dying in bed? Marissa just threw her shoe at it and it broke.”

  “I did not throw it. It came off. I’m not used to CLOGS.”

  “But those clogs are your mother’s shoes. Why did you ever have them on?”

  “I was dancing.”

  “But you are supposed to be eating breakfast. And you don’t eat in here. I wanted to listen to NPR news. Since when do you dance to the news?”

  “Spaldy what does SODOMY mean?”

  “Why did you not even touch your oatmeal?”

  “I thought I wanted it but I’m not hungry.”

  “Marissa, I cannot believe you broke that picture. Now there are shards of glass everywhere! It’s all over the couch. Don’t you know that’s bad luck?”

  “That’s nonsense. In Colonial times the plantation owners tried to make their slaves and servants believe it was bad luck to break precious objects but you can’t fool me. You can’t repress and dominate me.”

  “Why did you kick that shoe? You must be angry about something.”

  “No, no reason.”

  “Don’t tell me NO REASON. Maybe you don’t know a reason but I’m sure there is one somewhere.”

  “Well if no one knows the reason does that mean the reason exists somewhere in the unknown?”

  “And where is that?”

  “HELP!”

  (LOOKING NOW AT THIS PICTURE THIS PHOTO OF THEO. It is as though my father has been reborn and now I can kiss and touch him. And, touch his soft spot.)

  Marissa goes out the door with a pocket book and high heels and says, “Goodbye you two losers. I have a date.”

  She comes back in and says, “Oh my God! It’s a no man’s land out there.”

  JULY 1, 1997

  NEW MONOLOGUE

  2 GIANT Horrors as I drifted off to that great undifferentiated void.

  (1) That I was separated from Forrest FOREVER.

  (2) That I could not tell you about it. I could not tell you how it felt.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1997

  The phone call from Kathie this morning and to hear Forrest’s innocent voice of pure joy (Renée at her best) I just melted on the phone.

  EACH TIME I try talking to myself there’s no one home = AUDIENCE dear audience, it’s you I’M TALKING TO.

  JANUARY 19, 1998

  Fabulous grass sex. I went twice again last night like old times but after I come, it does set off strong fantasies of wanting to escape but get out to where I wonder. Where would I run to this time? Good sex and happy children and Kathie being a good cook are all the GLUE and the STICKER that holds me here in this sweet grey town in SNOWLESS January.

  JANUARY 27, 1998

  MISSOULA, MONTANA

  What is important, Forrest? (THOUGHT)

  “Well, say if someone drowns….”

  (LONG PAUSE)

  “You’ve got to save them.”

  I had had a thought maybe I was stoned, I think I was. It went like this (somewhere in Montana)—the whole idea is to live the real life—the one that makes the unreal-real feel real.

  God is something.

  God is the thing that’s not there when you need it.

  *MORNING, NOON, & NIGHT*

  I look at each book and try to remember what they say. Try to recreate a book report for each one. They seem to divide into EAST AND WEST. I think of Adam Phillips and BLOOM and “NEAR DEATH” experiences. I think of Martha and how I realized there could be no transcendent reconciliation with my mortality. Taking on THEO—for better or worse, was the only radical act for me to choose LIFE. TIBETAN DOGMA, the HIERARCHY of the priest that can only give you the good death. No wonder Kathie reads People Magazine to get to sleep.

  MAY 1, 1998

  A secret for me is like a black hole in which I feel myself disappearing. As in “this secret will never have a life.” And that is where it gets a little destructive when I NEED to share all my secrets, secrets and fears and doubts with Kathie.

  FORREST IS BECOMING AN INDEPENDENT “OTHER”

  —MARISSA ALREADY IS. ALWAYS WAS.

  Also, of late, THEO has reminded me of me—the way he has a real good time and then cries when it’s not happening anymore as though there is no satisfying MEMORY TRACE.

  JUNE 18, 1998

  When I sat in the Captain Glover house [a house in Sag Harbor that Gray and Russo considered buying], it was so nice to see the way one room would run into another, the way the house rambled but now back here at our “sweet little cottage” I see the whole setting; the whole landscape in which this house is set, also RAMBLES and goes in its own way from room to room, only the “rooms”; our outside: the yard, the cemetery, the glitter of the Lowell pool seen through the dapple of green trees. [The house behind Gray’s house in Sag Harbor belonged to Robert Lowell’s stepdaughter Ivana Lowell. Lowell’s third wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, bought this house in 1987. When Gray discovered this fact, he told Russo he felt it was a sign that moving there was meant to be.]

  So, I am still happy with this place.

  AUGUST 29, 1998

  M. V. [Martha’s Vineyard]

  Theo running naked, running in circles into and out of the waves. A Perfect Moment. The end of another summer. The sad rhythm of the seasons.

  Kathie constantly challenges the image I have of MY FRAGILITY so I keep asking. I don’t know whether I’m having a good time or trying to kill myself and then, of course, there is that BORING IN BETWEEN.

  OCTOBER 30, 1998

  CAUGHT MY FIRST FISH

  savage eye of nature BLUEFISH.

  the silver shimmer of fish like a piece of the water itself

  like a part of the mother

  like a wild silver tear

  and then the way the fish held still when I held as though it knew this game of

  being caught and thrown back in again

  NOVEMBER 1, 1998

  DREAM: That I was waiting in line to be guillotined, have my head cut off, and Woody Allen was the guy next to me.

  NOVEMBER 18, 1998

  I no longer know the difference between intuition and paranoia; the truth attacks the lie and the lie eats the truth; they are so close now they suck each other’s tail soon to catch the body, eat it and become one.

  DECEMBER 20, 1998

  It’s near Christmas and all the toys are talking. Ernie [Gray’s accountant] gave Theo this FARM GAME type toy that just came in and said “good bye” to me as I went out the door. Also that Gorilla keeps going off with “HEY MAGDALENA.” And then there is FLICK, the talking ant.

  We all had a good time at “Babe, Pig in the City.” We all went out to the South Hampton Brew Pub with Teresa and Sienna. THE FAMILY DRIVE HOME from the South Hampton Brew Pub … we had Garrison Keillor on the radio and they were all singing Silent Night while I was secretly weeping. I mean the tears were just pouring down and at the same time I was crying, I was also ANALYZING why I was crying and just as I came into the clear and simple insight that it was not the actual story of the birth of Jesus that is depicted in Silent Night rather it is the history of that piece of music in my life. I mean it goes so deep, so very deep (like how I cried at the opening of the “Killing Fields” not FOR THE HISTORY DEPICTED but for the personal history behind the making of the movie).

  AND THEN, right in the middle of my weeping, Forrest from the back seat said, “Mom, what does Gampa do for a living?” and Kathie started telling Forrest what LIFE INSURANCE was and I jumped in to tell him that if I died there will be enough money left for the family and Forrest just yelled, “YES!”

  And what did I say? I laughed. I really laughed and said, “Oh my God, I expected that not from you but from Marissa.”

  I thought I had an insight as to why I have felt that I’ve lived for such a long time in this family. It’s because each year of the child’s life seems so long and so different—so full of growth and change.

  DECEMBER 20, 1998

  SUNDAY

  I don’t know if I want to do a different monologue. Anothe
r. (Or this one.) Some part of me thinks I really wanted to step back then and settle in there but would the children be a surprise? “NO.” That is the only way Forrest and Theo came into the world.

  It was the way Kathie said to me in the canoe, when we were on mushrooms, and I told her that Renée had already ordered the wedding cake and Kathie said, “Oh, well, you could always give it back.” I wouldn’t care to know how to make up this situation in a play or fiction. I only care about it now, IN PRIVATE.

  Liz, see if you can remember John Lennon and the reaction to his death.

  JANUARY 1999

  At parties I’ve run out of things to say I sit there stunned thinking of my sons and how

  TIME IS STEALING THEM AWAY.

  FEBRUARY 1, 1999

  These are good days. In spite of Forrest’s irrational rage at his chicken salad sandwich today. (He stood in the yard and screamed)

  I have, in spite of these little things; I have often thought that things will never be better than this … than these moments in our family life now. Last night I carried Theo home from the movies asleep in my arms under a full moon in this small sweet town.

  FEBRUARY 12, 1999

  Morning, noon and night went very well at Purchase, SUNY PURCHASE. The audience was really “up” at the end. Lenny and Marguerite Harrington gave me a ride home in their CLEAN Volvo. I could tell that they really liked the show. But on the way home in their CLEAN VOLVO, Lenny said something that kind of upset me. He told me that he got real angry about one section of the monologue—and at first he couldn’t remember it. (INNOCENCE at all COST = THE PARENT REGAINS his innocence through the child) Then I helped him remember it. It was, of course, about the new section I’d written tonight—about how I told Forrest about death at an early age but—and I added this tonight—that I felt I saved him from THE FEAR by telling him that I loved him and that “Everything would be alright,” that phrase, that phrase EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT. Lenny told me that he stopped being angry when I said that second part about “I love you” and I was thinking that maybe I don’t say that enough to Forrest anymore. Then I had a sad flash of the preschool video of Forrest singing. My God! He was so THERE! Just so uncomplicatedly present. I wonder if Theo could ever be that way. And I also wondered if I helped take that innocence away from him. Lenny said his father told him completely honest answers to all questions and he resents him for that. He also said that Marissa wanted to spoil Christmas for Forrest and that was the first protective PANG I had about AIRING all our private stuff … that Lenny took it upon himself to say that Marissa wanted to kill Christmas for Forrest. THAT WAS WRONG.