The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  “We were both in dorm rooms with six beds in each one,” Russo said, describing their hospital stay. “They gave us no hospital gowns, toothbrushes, or anything to change into because they said most patients ‘bring their own,’ as if we should have had an extra set of clothes in our car in case we were in an accident. There were two bathrooms in the hallway. I couldn’t use the one that had a toilet and sink because there was shit all over the toilet. The other one had a bathtub with cigarette burns all over it; I would stand in it to go to the bathroom.”

  On her fourth day there, Russo walked out, even though her doctor wanted her to stay for further observation. She felt that she had to get back to the children—and that she was the only person who would be able to get Gray out of the hospital and under better care.

  JUNE 24, 2001

  [From notes Gray took two days after the accident while in the Midland Regional Hospital in Tullamore, Ireland]

  THE ACCIDENT

  The Hospital: that this one event could rule so, could change so much in one carnal-like image. The speeding little vet’s assistant mini van hopping and popping over that crazy little road.

  On this past tour [of It’s a Slippery Slope and Morning, Noon, and Night], we had stayed in more bed and breakfasts so when Kathie wanted to look at the Corwin house again [the house in North Haven that Gray and Russo bought five months prior to this accident] it felt more roomy like a Vermont B & B and I had been put in some instant head from traveling as all of a sudden you’re here and it just falls in around you. I had lost my wider standing of reality of the slow reality of actual transformation how once you start to actually make the change from a place you have stabilized and perfected in your mind; how it rules, the object you’re leaving takes on new and incredible detail as never seen before.

  The American flag in the cemetery across the way when seen through a particular pattern, a frame of our Purist hedge was like a red, white and blue heart beating as it blew in the wind.

  My self keeps shifting in relationship to these things but when the boys call me DADDY I respond.

  When Theo stood there and said, “Are you going to be old now?” It broke my heart.

  Forrest can’t seem to express his emotions.

  You eat the wafer in the morning, body of Christ; and in the afternoon you go 194 miles an hour and crash and in the evening you enter the glorious gates of heaven better than a famous life.

  60—Yes, it all began with NO party which I thought was great. NPR made these announcements and Garrison Keillor once again ignored me and my three best male friends did not call, reminding me of Dad at 80.

  Last night I woke and thought I was one of the many painful casualties on a civil war battlefield. I felt trapped in the pain of my body. A sound of crows and magpies all around.

  If I was wearing a seatbelt I might have walked away from that accident and would have had a fun summer with Kathie, Marissa and the boys but instead there is this story and this advice. Always put your seatbelt on. First thing.

  But I am alive and you are alive and we will now all go our separate ways until one day we stop and something else begins.

  [Russo had Gray transferred, through the help of a friend who was the head of the Irish Arts Council, to an orthopedic hospital ten miles outside of Dublin.]

  JUNE 2001

  Have been moved to Dublin. I freaked when I was rolled into the windowless 6 bed room, all full. With suicide windows that just crack because someone did jump. How I resent that unknown suicide.

  When the doctor told me that the nerve damage to my foot might not be permanent I said with deep feeling, “OH THANK GOD.”

  Would death be as simple as this blackout or is something contained in the still unconscious body and when it goes in it? A return to the nothing that was before something that was conceived by two,

  “NO SEAT BELT

  NO EXCUSE”

  LOVE = a misunderstanding between 2 idiots

  BEGIN: I don’t know where it all started. In Charleston when we saw those tombstones or in the hills of Ireland when we saw that sad crippled calf that couldn’t get up and we hear a horticulturist to CALL THE VET.

  So here’s the little story I tell myself lying alone at the end of June in a dark hospital room at what is looking like the beginning of the worst summer of my life …

  I say,

  Spalding, you’re lucky to be alive. Give thanks.

  The only healing cure I can think of would be to at last be able to TELL THE STORY.

  They have come in and given me the PRE-THEATRE bath and suppository and pills [“pre-theatre” as in operating theater—Gray was about to get surgery on his broken hip in an effort to relieve his damaged sciatic nerve and drop foot] now I am alone. (Why do I keep thinking of TIMOTHY McVeigh?) Am alone and thinking am I some sort of VICTIM? Am I the one chosen to suffer the most in these imperfectly annoying ways? The past five years of my life were very good. The best five years of my life and now this. I didn’t want any more of this. I swear I didn’t cause it.

  2001

  July 1 or June 30?

  First time out into the hall and on the walker and realized I was crippled—my GREATEST FEAR and I started to faint and had to go back to bed.

  A fear, this morning that I drank myself into the place I’m in. That the drink was my HOLLOW support system to get me wherever I am.

  JULY 5, 2001

  Just came back from my short walk on crutches and I am sweating wet from the humidity but I still prefer it to air-con, at least you feel the changes of weather. Kathie discovered a dent in my head and the doctor confirmed it this morning. This morning I woke up before 6:00 and then went back out by doing deep breathing and trying to flood my hip with positive energy but what is positive energy? If I try to fill my mind with good images from the past and think, say of that summer in MV when Theo was only two and me doing my catcher AQUA ACT of letting the wave sweep over me and letting him go to bob up above me. I feel also the sadness of the loss and how I NEVER EVER HAD IT. I was of the moment but never possessed it. I think what a sad thing it must be to die and how it all feels like a dream and I try to get back to this moment in the hospital but I can’t stand to look out my window at the other windows and only to see the top of a dead tree. Why me?

  “I can’t remember being moved MORE by a book. [Jonathan Franzen’s] “THE CORRECTIONS” saved me by lifting me out of my APRÈS car crash pain in a Dublin Hospital. It’s a wonderful story book.” [Gray was drafting an endorsement for Franzen’s novel, The Corrections.]

  I cried so at the end of “THE CORRECTIONS.” I cried at my loss, of not sharing Dad’s loss, of my not being there. How sad. And Dad was also like ALFRED, a lot about the great refusal. He found his strength in saying “NO” to so much so perhaps I’m crying for him, for his life.

  JULY 7, 2001

  SAT.

  Even with this new information about my just discovered FRACTURED FACE [Gray’s orbital fracture caused his forehead to cave in] I had one peaceful moment during lunch as I ate my garlic potatoes and green beans … everything settled down. It felt like that calm morphine state maybe 5 minutes of peace.

  FEAR! All my life I have been afraid and all my fears culminated in this accident. I can say, “There, you see something bad did happen in this random world.”

  I’m afraid I will see the outside world as no longer one I can live with. And that I don’t have any real friends, real close intimate friends, because I’ve isolated myself with my minor celebrity.

  JULY 8, 2001

  SUNDAY

  Kathie seems not to accumulate. In most cases she is constantly LETTING GO LETTING GO.

  At this point it’s hard for me to see Kathie as separate from THE BOYS. She is so with them all the time that they have become an extension of her. I am by nature more distinct. They are objects of mystery to me but they are coping well.

  They are very flexible.

  JULY 9, 2001

  Went out for the firs
t time. K. took me in a wheelchair. It was like a rebirth and would have been so ugly seen through other circumstances, me as a visitor, and I understood Kathie’s depression. The revolving doors had Styrofoam packing chips with wooden reeds painted in gold paint, stuck in them. Outside a crow flew over and the SKY! Crane’s Shopping Mall in the distance.

  Gray went for a day of testing at St. James’s Hospital in Dublin, where doctors told him he would need orbital fracture surgery. Gray and Russo decided to fly back to New York for the procedure. Because they had planned to stay at Sedgewood for the summer, they had rented out both their Sag Harbor and North Haven houses. Upon returning from Ireland on July 12, the family spent the week before the surgery at their friend Robby Stein’s house in Wainscott, Long Island.

  JULY 13, 2001

  Friday the 13th

  We are back at Robby’s. It’s beautiful. Clear, windy, almost more than I can take. It’s odd but in some way the hospital room was easier because you could have your own selective fantasy of the outside world. Now I’m suddenly hit by life going on without me. I feel like a 90 year old man as I sit stupefied by the pool watching the boys play in it. Then there are sweet breakthroughs where I see the sun on the boys’ bodies, broken and in motion through the slots of the picket fence by the pool and later when the boys played for hours with the CITRONELLA CANDLES as I lay on the bench and looked up at their faces illumined by the flame.

  “When he came back from Ireland and stayed with me, we sat outside a lot and he was telling his mother’s story,” Stein said. “This was a period where they hadn’t moved out of the old house completely. The house had meaning to him, but what kept going in and out was his mother’s story.” At this time, Gray began taking medication to help him cope with his growing emotional struggle. Over the next three years, he would try an array of mood stabilizers—Celexa, Zyprexa, Neurontin, Aventyl, and Lamictal, among them—in an attempt to alleviate his depression.

  JULY 14, 2001

  Robby had a date and K. went for a massage and T. took Theo out so I was all alone at COCKTAIL HOUR and it was not easy. Oh no, it was not. I tried to read that book on Depression and then I called Farley and then I just sat there with such bad thoughts. I still haven’t done any FORMAL MEDITATION.

  I remembered my first dream or first dream remembered.

  DREAM: Renée was going in hospital and I was looking at all these stretchers to try to find her but she was AMBULATORY and walking into the hospital so I followed her and tried to wish her well. Then I was at a beach with the boys and there was a strange woman there lying on her belly and talking too low for me to hear and I was letting her know that I was not attached, no longer involved with Renée. I was free. Who was this woman?

  JULY 18, 2001

  I talked to Doctor Stieg [Gray’s surgeon for the orbital fracture] and he told me that the nerve when damaged in that hip area does not often regenerate. This report took me way down and, in fact, I’m down there still.

  (Robby just called to try to put my mind at ease to tell me that classical neurosurgeons do not know about nerve regeneration as much as orthopedic doctors do.) Kathie wanted to have sex last night and I was able to get on my knees and mount her from the rear and we did come together but my orgasm was still in slow motion. Like a leakage rather than a burst of pleasure.

  I find it so difficult to have a positive mind when sitting still. POSITIVE = MOTION for me, my body in motion.

  What is thinking positively maybe it’s not telling people what Dr. Stieg said about my foot which I feel so sad for. But who do I pray to, to the QUARKS and the atoms, to the idea OF VIBRATING strings?

  JULY 21, 2001

  Depressed. I can’t seem to keep it up. We had lunch yesterday at our new old house with the PHYSIO [physical therapist] who was from Wicklow, Ireland. Ken came out. It was good to see him even though he had a cough. Swimming in the pool was almost fun. I could tell Forrest was happy to see me swimming and Forrest swam beside me. (FATE FATE FATE) I just can’t believe this is happening to me, that this is me and I should at least take joy in the good weather and the giant cherry tree. To be doing my exercises and see the birds with the sun through their wings … the sun through their feathers … but the discomfort at night just before bed is unbearable.

  JULY 24, 2001

  Spent a horrid day in the hospital. The trip down was THE WORST with the traffic and I kept breaking down and falling through the cracks and saying “NO, NO, I CAN’T” but then Theo broke down and started to cry because he found out we were not going to pick up Forrest but we were in fact going to another doctor and I find it hard to face Stieg because he was the one who said my foot would not come back but Theo pulled himself together. He got through it all and started playing with his toys or crashing them.

  The nurses don’t talk like in Ireland. There is no river of language, river of work to carry you on from one nurse to another save the blacks. The blacks are more likely to do it amongst themselves but not at work.

  But the man who made my day and almost made me cry was the black attendant at the elevator who said, “Are you Spalding Gray? I love your work particularly ‘Swimming to Cambodia.’ ”

  “The operation lasts six hours. They cut me from ear to ear, peel down my forehead, and put in a titanium plate,” Gray explained in Life Interrupted. “More titanium plates in here; bone splinters are released into my frontal lobe—I think they have to try to pick those out—from the smashing of my head against Kathie’s head. They sew me up; it looks like I’ve had a face-lift.”

  JULY 28, 2001

  SAT.

  Theo never says tomorrow he says, “I’ll see you after this night’s over.”

  AUGUST 5, 2001

  Sunday Aug. ?

  Last night was the Sedgewood party. Liked the looks and sounds of our new neighbors. Good band. Hard to see.

  K. and I slow danced on crutches. K. has to be taught how to slow dance. She starts out with a hyperness. She is not slow, languid or sensual but we did get into it. I wanted to dance and swim. I saw my other self there getting drunk and swimming and dancing.

  AUGUST 7, 2001

  TUE.

  K. and I spent the day in three hospitals with three doctors yesterday. I seem to get most freaked out with Stieg. I hear him say things Kathie does not hear like how he damaged my nerve to my forehead so my forehead feels like a robot.

  I am afraid…. I even find myself holding my breath when I am talking to people on the phone. I am so afraid they will describe some sensuous, sensuous summer scene to some idyllic spot or perfect moment.

  Then when people say, “but just think, you could be worse off,” I also think but that’s down the road. This accident does not cancel out all the other slings and arrows of outrageous FORTUNE no no no. But be positive please be positive.

  AUGUST 9, 2001

  THUR.

  Theo keeps asking me to tell him a “scary story” and at least I don’t say, “LOOK around you. This is the scary story” but instead I tell him a story about PIRANHA FISH and after a while I say there are really no more stories it’s only one story: “The fish are small and their teeth are sharp. When people or animals fall in and that school of piranhas comes there’s a splashing and a thrashing and then there are bones.”

  AUGUST 10, 2001

  It’s impossible to be perky, manic or frantic on crutches. Every day starts in the same slow, OLD, creaky way. It’s as though I grew old in a flash.

  AUGUST 2001

  SUNDAY

  Theo breaks my heart sometimes. He picked a flower and brought it to me saying, “Here’s a flower for the one who was hurt the most in the accident.” I so often think that he doesn’t notice me or that I have disappeared from his life and then he does something like that and it just blows me apart. Then our pretty next-door neighbors came down and disrobed and dove in and swam and that did me in. God how quickly the moments change sometimes.

  AUGUST 19, 2001

  Back at Robby’s. I go
t through the first of the interviewing at Guild Hall. [Gray did several shows of Interviewing the Audience—booked before the accident—at the Guild Hall theater in East Hampton, New York.] It being taped by Barbara’s crew [documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple filmed Gray for her miniseries, The Hamptons], Don on camera, did help in the sense of making it all seem more important and it helped me come out of myself. Made me want to make a good appearance.

  AUGUST 20, 2001

  Monday

  It’s back to NOT BEING CONFRONTATIONAL I’ve not been with any one but the children not with Martha who is NOT calling me back which gets me depressed instead of angry but I can’t I CAN NOT LET the children see me go crazy. I can NOT play that one act on them. NO big “NO.” Because I am in the place of my mom now at home in hot non functional summer with thunder in the distance and me out in the woods with the deer groaning, on crutches, all three children are upstairs and Theo is screaming. I am sitting here with the distance of DEATH. I only long to be asleep or unconscious.

  We live in between we live in the cracks of chance and disaster. The voices say, I won’t get better and then they say oh yes you’ll get better only to be sick again and die.

  AUGUST 21, 2001

  TUE.

  Physiotherapy today. Kathie asked me if there was some part of me that was into being this way—THE VICTIM for people to feel sorry for? Oh God I’m afraid of that one!