The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  AUGUST 23, 2001

  Yesterday was the HARD one. K. and I drove to the city and dealt with DR. D’ANGELO [Gray’s orthopedic doctor] and it was a strange office and he was odd and I freaked out in the exam room when he told me about the 30 to 40 percent chance the blood would not make into the bone depending on the nature of the break. He told me that it was lucky I didn’t stay in the country hospital.

  He said, “You are over 30, you’re a mature man so I can tell you.” No, no I say I’m twice 30 and I am not mature. I can’t take any more. And of course he got down on me for dwelling on the negative and I told him that I always have. It won’t work I think; we will never be able to do it.

  AUGUST 24, 2001

  FRI.

  Kathie comes down late. I am frantic and need to go over the whole seat belt scenario again. This morning she put me at ease with “We were going slow. It was a back country road etc….” She talked me down enough to have first GOOD SEX. I was actually kneeling and it felt alright I had a long full thrusting orgasm.

  AUGUST 26, 2001

  SUN.

  It was like out of a BERGMAN FILM when that guy at the block party asked me if I had any children or he asked which were mine and I led he and his wife…. I led them on crutches to show them on there at the end of the docked framed by the rippling lake the boys Theo and Forrest were sitting together and it was the most idyllic moment of my life of this summer. It was a proud perfect moment.

  Gray took Interviewing the Audience to Bumbershoot—an art and music festival—in Seattle, Washington, over Labor Day weekend, September 1–3, 2001. He began the show with a short piece detailing the story of the accident and the many medical traumas that followed. This became the basis for his 2003 monologue, Life Interrupted.

  SEPTEMBER 4, 2001

  What is Willem doing?

  And John Malkovich?

  What did Oliver Stone do on the fourth of July?

  How long it takes to hitch Christopher Reeve up in the morning.

  Distant love of 2,000 people. Cheering at an image they have of me. I raise my crutches and they scream.

  Gray and his family moved to their new house in North Haven, an area just north of Sag Harbor, on September 12, 2001—a day later than planned. On the morning of September 11, when Russo told Gray that terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center, he thought she was making it up to distract him from his depression. And it did momentarily: Gray went to a vigil in Sag Harbor that night and wrote a short love letter to New York City, his adopted hometown. “I fled New England and came to Manhattan, that island off the coast of America, where human nature was king and everyone exuded character and had big attitude,” he wrote. “You gave me a sense of humor because you are so absurd.” (This was later published, posthumously, as a New York Times Op-Ed under the title “Dear New York City …”) But Gray soon returned with a new intensity to his misery about moving.

  He began to tell this story: Moving to the new house was a fatal mistake. His own mother had made the same mistake when she moved away from her hometown of Barrington, Rhode Island—away from the house that she loved with the restorative views of Narragansett Bay—to a secluded property in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Now he, too, had left behind a beloved house to live farther from town, where Gray also felt isolated and uneasy. This story became his obsession, a mythic rant. He told it again and again as he tried to explain why he could not bring himself out of his black mood, why his thoughts had, as his mother’s had, turned toward suicide.

  “Quite a number of years earlier, he had flirted with the notion that there were potential parallels between [our mother’s] life and his. That was built into his obsession with her suicide,” his brother Rockwell remembered. “But he wove it in more toward the end and felt that he was under a malign influence, that the stars were aligned against him somehow.”

  SEPTEMBER 12, 2001

  MOVING DAY

  All night I tossed and turned and dreamt that the whole move was a mistake and that in fact we could still stay in an old house. When I woke I felt like I was going to THE GAS CHAMBER.

  No MEN I knew at the candle light vigil just Dan and Donald and then there was Renée who looked great. “Same old Spalding,” she said. Yes LONG GUARDIAN ANGELS

  FALL 2001

  Kathie bought me this composition notebook last night in South Hampton. I’m afraid it’s going to fall apart like every thing as in, “the center will not hold.” The choice between moving into the new house and not is too ugly to face. The new house needs more light. I am on the ferry to try to go to work on my show. I am on Klonopin [an antiseizure medication prescribed to Gray to treat his anxiety] and worry about my liver and nerves. The sky over Conn. looked hazy and polluted. I flipped out this morning when the movers came. I must save Forrest but how can I?

  I can’t write what I’m thinking because it causes me too much FEAR, anguish. I don’t have the courage to GO ON.

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2001

  I am far gone. The loss of the house and the neighborhood of houses is too much for me. I dull myself with champagne and beer and wake up in pure panic. What have I lost and how could I not see that all around me was beauty! But the saddest saddest thing that happened today was THEO broke down and started to cry and he cried and cried and said “Stop arguing.” It was so sad. It was so very very sad. At first he went to Kathie and then he went to me. This is a very very sad time. Have I created this? The angel of our soul.

  Things that might be helpful:

  1) Sit still

  2) Look into eyes

  They’re dark, the floors are darker than I had realized. Although I did catch a glimpse of them earlier on, I didn’t realize it. Even though the house was bigger how could I have liked the wall tapestries? Last night when I went to bed it was difficult for me to face the windows.

  I like Sag Harbor. I feel like I’m living in a house that was cast out of Sag Harbor and now we can’t get back.

  In October 2001, Gray began performing Swimming to Cambodia once a week at the Performing Garage in order to rehearse for a reprise of the show at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco at the end of December, another engagement arranged before his accident. “I saw him do Swimming to Cambodia at the Garage,” said Eric Bogosian. “The performance was okay, but afterwards he was exhausted. It was the first time I’d seen him since the accident, and clearly he was not happy. However, he was interested in the fact that I thought it was a good show. I think he saw hope. I had the feeling ‘Spalding is coming back.’ He was fucked-up, but he was going to get better.”

  OCTOBER 8, 2001

  I can’t stand the thought that there is no town outside. That I can’t step out into THE TOWN. I have lost my sense of space.

  Going to the old house today was some of the worst pain I felt since I broke up with Renée.

  HELP!

  I’m in suburbia!

  OCTOBER 11, 2001

  I am so unhappy and the family doesn’t really understand. Kathie still thinks it’s the accident and not the house. I feel like a ghost of myself. I don’t want to lose the kids. They are so good! I loved my house, our house. I loved it. How could I kill the things I loved? Death is the mother of beauty.

  OCTOBER 31, 2001

  Halloween

  This house is a piece of shit. I can’t believe I bought it.

  The sacred ABODE and the FIRE HAS GONE out.

  I knew I can’t live here. I knew I can’t. I’ve never felt more crazed and it’s a full moon. I will explode. Did some part of me choose this house to make myself insane?

  Or was it just lazy fantasy?

  NOVEMBER 1, 2001

  I’m a dead man; a ghost.

  Ikea cupboards

  From December 26 to 31, Gray performed Swimming to Cambodia in San Francisco. He also told a fifteen-minute version of Life Interrupted. It did not lift his spirits to be in front of an audience again. “He wasn’t excited about doing the show,” Russo recalled. �
��And he didn’t feel good about how it went afterwards.”

  Following his performances in San Francisco, Gray put on the same show at the University of California, Los Angeles, in March. Later, he told Russo that he had considered throwing himself from the balcony of his hotel room. When she pressed him, he said he’d only imagined what it would be like, that he wasn’t actually going to do it. The family met Gray in Aspen, Colorado, after his California stay for a weeklong ski vacation. Gray was meant to perform at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, but Russo canceled the show because he seemed too depressed and was having trouble getting out of bed.

  MAY 2002

  Fear, fear that I am trying to imitate mom’s route. Could not allow myself that steady state of happiness. Had to act out in front of the children.

  Had a difficult visit with George [Coates, an old friend], who was full of questions as to why this and why that. Keeps wanting to know what my therapist says. G. has great recall of my life stories, remembering all the details. Calling Kathie a monster mom. I keep thinking about the bridge.

  Can’t seem to write because I keep going back to the house, which haunts me. I am not haunting a house. It’s haunting me.

  On June 10, 2002, at the suggestion of Gray’s psychiatrist, four friends—Ken Kobland, Howie Michels (Francine Prose’s husband), Paul Spencer (Gray’s creative consultant on It’s a Slippery Slope), and Donald Lipski (a sculptor and friend from Sag Harbor whom Gray met through Kobland)—along with Russo, confronted Gray in his doctor’s office and convinced him to commit himself to a psychiatric hospital. With some coaxing, Gray agreed to go.

  A week later, Russo and Kobland took Gray to Silver Hill, a hospital with a forty-five-acre campus in New Canaan, Connecticut, specializing in treating mood disorders and substance abuse. (Billy Joel was a patient at the time Gray checked in; later, Gray would interview Joel about their time together there for a theater magazine called Show People.)

  “We had to take him to the area of the building where there is a lockdown—the doors are locked and the rooms are suicide-proofed, there are no lights,” Kobland recalled. “And he freaked out … The idea was that he’d go through this for a week until he was examined carefully and then he could be put into a more hotel-like room, which was like an inn where you could be in your own room and go to dinner. You didn’t have the kind of restrictions that you had in the first building, which was like a twenty-four-hour watch … He just said, ‘Please don’t leave me here. I’ll never get out.’ We left him there. But he couldn’t be alone in the street. I mean he would have been arrested at some point because sometimes he would act so crazy. I apologize to him eternally. I wish there was a place he could have lived at that point.”

  After a week in the locked ward, Gray was moved to “the country club,” as Russo later wryly described it. Gray stayed in Silver Hill for a month. He did not write in his journal while he was there.

  JULY 2002

  Last night Kathie once again read the riot act to me and gave me five weeks to shape up and I keep saying I don’t know how she thinks Silver Hill should have taught me how and I just sit, going back to all those places in the past where I could have stopped the sale of the house which is what I’m doing now and I hear myself say “cosmetics? This place needs a major, major face lift.”

  If I had written yesterday it would have been a long suicide note to all I love including Ken.

  Today, we are fighting a lot. So what’s new? “I can do it” Kathie says to me, “it’s an act” “snap out of it.” We went out in the kayak and fought always in the kayak. She called me a “loser” and I agreed. Left over grief growing. Virginia Woolf oh yes.

  AUGUST 3, 2002

  Saturday

  Really bad morning where Kathie lit into me. I was lamenting the house and she said that I rushed into buying it, which is unbelievable but true. It was not thought out at all (concrete thinking?) I was in such a state. I don’t know if I only have a few days to live or not. It’s up to me. I love everyone, all my friends. I do feel love for my family and friends. I can hardly stay awake with these thoughts in my head all the time.

  At the end of August 2002, Gray traveled to Martha’s Vineyard to perform Interviewing the Audience at the Vineyard Playhouse.

  AUGUST 2002

  Tue.

  Interviewing the audience did not go very well. I, of course, was bringing up the house in my mind. I’m choosing the house over almost every other reality. Wine at the Bebe’s dinner party. Not good I know, pouring gasoline on the fire.

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2002

  I’m starting to get more and more insane. I’m sitting here thinking about walking Forrest home. The old walk and how I was the stage manager of OUR TOWN right next to the cemetery and how Greg Mosher had rented that very house and wanted to buy it. And I think how I threw all of that away to move out of town. It was those walks and talks with Forrest that I loved. NOT RIDING IN THE CAR! Oh my God help me please help me. I have made such a great mistake.

  If it means not meeting Forrest and walking him I should have said “No! I won’t do it!”

  The whole thing feels like some humble set up. The way I act things out in my life on such a real life scale. I have moved out of the town I love just like Mom.

  SEPTEMBER 2002

  double vision rotting truth. I don’t want more trees. I wake and I see the house and the street and lights.

  I feel like I’m going insane. Nothing will get better until I do anything but obsess on the house. I’m in a vision’s loop. It is relentless. It takes all my energy to relate to the boys. I feel trapped here and dependent on a car. There is nothing more to say. It was the sale of the house that did it.

  In dreams, a house is often your body.

  We were blessed and I complained and now I am paying for it.

  On the afternoon of September 29, 2002, Gray paced back and forth on the Sag Harbor bridge—which connects Sag Harbor and North Haven—hyperventilating. He told a stranger that he planned to jump off. A woman who witnessed the scene called the police. By pure coincidence, Russo, driving over the bridge after a doctor’s appointment, saw Gray huddled with the police. She stopped, and the police allowed her to take him home. She called Gray’s psychiatrist—the same doctor who had recommended the intervention that brought Gray to Silver Hill—who advised her to take him into Manhattan immediately and admit him to New York University Langone Medical Center. Gray voluntarily committed himself to NYU and spent four days there. The hospital did not take his insurance, though, so he was moved to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic on the Upper East Side. Marilyn Monroe, Mary McCarthy, and Robert Lowell, whom Gray had so long admired, were all once patients there. Gray remained at Payne Whitney for a little over four months.

  “We had to ring a buzzer and a guard came, searched our bags, and let us in. There was a communal room as you walk in where most patients are watching TV or playing cards. In the center was the nurses’ station—they only spoke to the patients by microphone because they were behind protective glass,” Russo said. “The first time the kids came, we brought their artwork and a ton of photographs and covered an entire wall in Spalding’s room with it to make it cheerier. The kids would only visit on the weekends because of school, but after about a month of this Forrest [who was ten years old at the time] broke down and said he couldn’t do it anymore. It was too depressing. Theo was very young [five years old] and would go anywhere I went at that point, and Marissa was a teenager, so she had her own social thing going on at home.”

  Spalding’s younger brother, Channing, and his wife also visited Gray. “There was a large waiting room where the patients sat with a nursing station that formed an island in the center,” he recalled. “Spalding was walking at full speed with his bum foot about twelve hours a day. In order to talk to him, I had to pace along with him. His hair was all disheveled, and he was in his pajamas. He really looked bad. I had a fair number of conversations with him about the house … It was regret, which is a t
ough one, it’s like anxiety … His psychiatrist would say, ‘That house is just a pile of sticks, it’s nothing, you can get another one.’ But it was an illness, an affliction.”

  In Payne Whitney, with the reluctant consent of Russo, Gray received electroconvulsive therapy [ECT], also known as electroshock treatment, a last resort for patients with severe depression. Russo remembers his having a total of twenty-one treatments. Initially, ten were done on one side—they were hesitant to administer bilateral treatments because to the metal plate in his head—but when the unilateral approach failed to bring him out of his depression, eleven more were done bilaterally.

  “After the first few treatments,” recalled Kobland, “there was a noticeable—to me, to many people—improvement. He was more cogent, more relaxed, more stable, less repetitive. But it didn’t last. He drifted back to the kind of crazed suicide desire.”

  Many, including Russo, now believe that Gray wasn’t able to come out of the obsessive torment he felt about the house because he had some kind of brain damage. “This last breakdown was different … There was something implacable there. When I was helping him in other times, there wasn’t that wall, that very hard presence,” Bill Talen said. “When I used to go and sleep next to him on that braided carpet in the lockdown, he would go into his looping conversations, looping phrases about his old house. And that had a much scarier aspect to me … He had lost control of his thoughts. They were just going round and round. I thought, ‘Oh my God, how can you get out of this?’ It was a mechanical breakdown, it was a brain injury.”

  Russo was unhappy with Gray’s treatment at Payne Whitney and requested his release after six weeks. The hospital, she said, asserted that he was still a threat to himself and did not release him until three months later, in January 2003. Throughout his stay, Gray’s friends wrote letters to the hospital, advocating for him to be discharged. In one of the letters, a friend complained that he felt the staff neglected Gray, not giving him his medications at the proper times, failing to provide him with physical therapy or even change his bedding. He was, another friend wrote, “treated like the cranky village idiot.”