Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  Acclaim for

  Spalding Gray’s

  IMPOSSIBLE VACATION

  “A funny, scathing … terrifically honest book … spoken in the direct, darkly humorous first-person voice known by the many fans of his monologues. Gray plays wonderfully on the gap between belief and irony, takes us to places we might not have stopped in, and shows us things we might not have otherwise seen.”

  —Washington Times

  “A vivid and revealing tale … Spalding Gray in search of lost bliss … He sure can tell a story.”

  —People

  “Droll and humorous … laced with funny incidents and observations. Gray successfully evokes the turbulence of those times.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “This uniquely gifted actor-writer … knows how to spin a yarn, and his sense of the comic is unerring. His wide-eyed, earnest delivery, his wry, telescopic sense of the absurd, and his ability to fashion his experiences into a quixotic American quest for psychic calm and perfect fulfillment [will] make you laugh out loud.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Funny and poignant … a sort of neurasthenic’s On the Road, or Huckleberry Finn as told by Woody Allen. Gray turns everything into a story.”

  —New York Post

  ALSO BY SPALDING GRAY

  Swimming to Cambodia

  Sex and Death to the Age 14

  Monster in a Box

  Impossible Vacation

  Gray’s Anatomy

  Spalding Gray

  IMPOSSIBLE VACATION

  Spalding Gray’s monologues include Sex and Death to the Age 14, Swimming to Cambodia, The Terrors of Pleasure, Monster in a Box, and Gray’s Anatomy. He lives in New York City.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1993

  Copyright © 1992 by Spalding Gray

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1992.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gray, Spalding, 1941–

  Impossible vacation / Spalding Gray.—1st Vintage contemporaries ed.

  p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80068-8

  I. Title.

  [PS3557.R333I46 1993]

  813′.54—dc20 92-50593

  Author photograph © Paula Court

  v3.1

  TO MY MOTHER,

  the Creator and Destroyer

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  First Page

  “You will not know … what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you have performed them you will not understand that they were expiating any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.”

  —WILLIAM KENNEDY, Ironweed

  I would like to express my thanks to my faithful agent, Suzanne Gluck, for saying, “I think you have a novel in you,” and then selling that idea to Knopf; also to the MacDowell Colony and the Edward Albee Foundation, for giving me a supportive and creative environment in which to write; then to Ron and Donna Feiner for their lovely gift of that grand writing table on which I finally finished it. Thanks to Gary Fisketjon for his edit of the original nineteen-hundred-page monster and to his assistant, Garth Battista, for his nurturing ordering of that sprawling handwritten mess. And last of all, my loving gratitude to Renée Shafransky, who put up with five years of my anxious complaints about this book and at last added her talented red pencil to it all.

  AND I HALF DREAMED and half remembered Mom’s never-ending passion for the sea. We were all on our way to Gram’s summer house in Sakonnet, Rhode Island, in our wooden-slatted ’38 Ford beach wagon. What a car! I see it now in my mind like a gloriously varnished antique: the long stick shift jiggling on the floor; the dark tan leather seats that smelled so good and felt so cool against our thighs; and the windshield with its slightly blue discoloration at the very bottom near the crank that opened it to let the fresh air in. The air was fresh then. The air was so fresh that it burned like a pure white fire in our lungs. To be in that car with all the family on the way to Gram’s house was to be alive. I was one and whole; I was right there and nowhere else in my mind.

  As soon as we were out into the country, which didn’t take long, we’d begin to count cows until we got to the most awe-inspiring place of the trip, the landscape that signaled our proximity to the sea: Windmill Hill (though it had no windmills on it that I can remember). It was the only large hill near the coast of Rhode Island. It was the first and only large hill that I had ever experienced, and coming onto that hill was like flying for me. Going over Mount Hope Bridge on our trip to Gram’s was pretty spectacular; but Windmill Hill was very special, because it ran along the edge of the Sakonnet River, and there below the hill, built on a flat bank along the river, were all these little summer bungalows. And to me at that height and at my age those houses did not translate in my mind into actual-size real beach houses but instead stayed exactly as I saw them—a settlement of tiny toy beach bungalows, or as I realized later in life, something like Monopoly-game houses. They were like the entire Lone Ranger town that Tommy Atwater assembled from the back of Cheerios boxes until there was no place to walk in his room without stepping on the little bank, the jail, or the post office. It was a view that at age five absolutely agreed with me. It was a little world that made me feel like a giant.

  Then Mom, nosing the open crack of the windshield as she rode in front next to Dad, would cry out, “Do you smell it? Do you smell it? Do you smell the sea?” Coleman and I were bouncing in the leather seat, all excited; and Mom was right, we could smell it, we could smell the sea from miles away on top of Windmill Hill as we rolled down the hot asphalt highway, our little wooden Ford headed for the sandy edge of the world.

  Then came our momentous arrival: the parking of the beach wagon and the running through white sand dunes scattered with wild beach roses, the hot soft sand underfoot and between our toes, running into that little protected beach which was the world, which was the only world, the world of totally protected pleasure. Mom chose a place for us to settle down, and there we’d spread our towels on that perfect little beach, that perfect little desert of white sand with beautiful high rocks that defined the beach on either end. There I’d lie feeling the sun all over me, idly watching one distant freighter move like a toy as it marked time and defined the horizon, the edge of that perfect world. Beyond that horizon was only an inkling of some faraway place of a war where Mom’s brother, my uncle Jib, was.

  Gramma North would sometimes come join us for lunch. And at the end of the day—after all the swimming in the surf, the sand castles, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and Dad diving off the high rocks—Mom would call us in and we would go back to Gram’s house, which was near a field with a haystack, and everyone seemed all together and happy. In the night there was deep sleep, and in the morning there was fog, so much fog that you couldn’t see the haystack; and Gramma North would say, “But it will burn off before noon,” and she was always right. Soon we could see the haystack while we ate fresh blueberries and cantaloupe melon balls. Dad stoked the wood stove and Mom made sandwiches as the fog lifted. Then we all went back to the beach again.

&n
bsp; One day in July when I was five years old and standing in my little paradise, a part of me was swept away. It was a dazzling blue day with high white cotton clouds, and I was on the beach standing in front of Mom, who was in her bathing suit, lying stretched out in a blue-and-green-striped canvas beach chair. And suddenly my Mom’s brother, my uncle Jib, had come home from the other side of the horizon. He was dressed in his pure white sailor’s uniform, so white against the blue that he seemed almost absent, like a window to blank white space at the edge of the rolling waves. Jib was just standing there with his hands behind his back. He was barefoot, and the slight summer wind was blowing his white bell bottoms, and I knew from Mom’s enthusiastic celebrating that the big war had ended and that her brother, Jib, had come home from it, and he was all new to me and born now for the first time in my eyes that day, born full-grown as some white hero. It was as though he had walked in on the water from the other side of that horizon that stretched before me. Dad was not there; he and my brother Coleman were somewhere else—perhaps about to dive off the distant high rocks. Topher had not been born yet. That was the day I heard the word “Bali” for the first time.

  Mom was saying, “Your uncle Jib has just come back from Bali and he brought you something,” and then Uncle Jib pulled out a crazy wooden monkey mask from behind his back and gave it to me. It was like no other mask or toy I’d ever seen or touched before, and I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with the war. Had Uncle Jib been fighting monkeys in a place called Bali? Bali in my mind was like some funny beach ball on the other side of the earth from where we were all so happy here. Was this the sacred head of the enemy brought back to this beach in Rhode Island? I took the monkey mask in my hand with fear and trembling. It was made of painted wood and had a movable jaw that was tied to the face by little leather straps. Jib helped me to put it on. He guided a larger leather strap over my head and I was suddenly in a foreign, faraway world that smelled of rough smoky wood and weathered leather and I felt the animal spirit of the monkey go into my face and body and through those little wooden eye openings. I suddenly saw things as different and faraway. I could hear Mom laughing in her distant beach chair. I could see Mom’s laughing eyes tear up as I became half child and half monkey in her eyes, and I began to spin and spin around and around until the beach and the distant rocks, the ocean and Mom and white white Jib blowing in the wind became like a solid spinning smear of colors. Mom’s laughter mixed with the sound of waves breaking and I spun and spun in the protection of Mom’s gaze and I was not dizzy because in my eyes there was a new abstract world and I knew I was safe spinning in Mom’s eyes and Mom’s laughter. I was her monkey boy spinning and spinning until the hard wet sand of the beach came up and slapped me. I was down, while that whole Garden of Eden that I had known for five endless summers spun on around me and the waves rolled in over my toes and Jib’s big hand came into my monkey’s-eye view and he lifted me up. Mom cried, “Brewster, Brewster, my monkey boy, my little monkey boy!” That day another place was born in my body and in my mind, which then was all imagination and no thinking.

  Then that night, or one night shortly after Brewster the monkey boy was born, Mom was sitting by my bed on a summer night at Gram’s house and she was reading to me—no, not so much reading as guiding me through my favorite book, which was almost all pictures and no words. I don’t remember the name of the book, but I remember the story and Mom guiding me through it again that night under my new other self: the strange wooden monkey mask from Bali that hung on the wall above my bed. The story was about a little penguin who lived in the South Pole and was oh so very dissatisfied because he was always so cold and he desperately wanted to escape from all that snow and ice, so he took his few belongings, which included his toothbrush and his bathtub, and he cut away a large piece of ice from the solid ice of the South Pole and began to float off for the South Seas, where I knew Uncle Jib had come from. When that little penguin’s ice block at last got into warmer waters, it began to melt until there was nothing left of it, and the penguin was forced to jump into his bathtub to save himself; and so, jumping into his bathtub, he turned the shower around so that it could take in sea water and spit it out the shower head, and that acted as an ingenious little motor that propelled him to his perfect paradise island, where at last we see him lying in a hammock between two palm trees, sipping a large glass of lemonade made with fresh lemons, and he’s sweating and fanning himself and he is so dissatisfied because now he is too hot.

  I remember being there in bed thinking, or imagining—because back then there was no difference between thinking and imagining—that the island he went to was Bali and that this book, this story that Mom was showing me, was somehow, although I had no words for it then, a lesson about dissatisfaction and the impossibility of ever attaining any earthly paradise. At the same time that monkey mask on the wall was calling me away from our island of roads to some other palm-treed island in my mind. That monkey face was calling me away from Mom.

  We all had fun as our wonderful summers blended together in Sakonnet, although I could never lie on that beach again without thinking of Bali. Then after a while I just accepted that as a part of my life, accepted that forever I would always be a little bit in the place that I was not, a little bit in my body and a lot in my imagination.

  WE KEPT RETURNING to Sakonnet for the summer because Gramma North kept renting a house down there, and then one summer she didn’t, so we stayed at home and swam in the Barrington River, which was not in any way as exciting as the ocean but still it was fun. Dad joined the Barrington Yacht Club, not because we had a yacht, or any boat, but because the yacht club had a little beach and a raft we could swim out to. By then Topher had been born and was two years old, and Mom would lie on the beach and watch us wallow in the water. Mom was always relaxed and happy then. She was the best she ever was whenever she was on a beach. She was even more relaxed than after church. It was as though the water was a god for her. It was as though the water was as important as Jesus, but she’d never admit that. She’d get real nervous and pent-up if she couldn’t make it to the water in the summer.

  Although I still had my monkey mask on the wall I had pretty much forgotten about Bali. I made a secret promise that I’d get there one day, and that secret promise allowed me to swim in the river and have fun in the ocean during all the special times we went there. But sometimes in the winter I’d have fantasies of Bali and how when I was old enough I would join the merchant marine and work my way there on a freighter and then return triumphant with monkey masks and all my dirty laundry in a duffel bag over my shoulder. And Mom would be there at the front gate to greet me and I would tell her about Bali and shower her with gifts from Bali. I would shower her with shawls and cloth of every color and there would be monkey masks for everyone.

  Then one summer things went strange. I think I was about nine years old, and that was the summer that I noticed Mom didn’t go to the beach all that often anymore.

  That was the summer that Mom first really started to go crazy. I don’t remember it starting slowly that time, all I remember was that it was hot and my brothers and I were in the playroom with our friends from down the street and we would hear Mom cry out from the kitchen. She would cry out all these wild and crazy things. Sometimes it was words or Dad’s name, or she’d cry out, “Jesus save me!” Other times it was just moans and cries. All of a sudden she’d burst into singing Christian Science hymns real loud and all out of tune. It was a cry of madness that seemed to come out of nowhere, and our friends would look at us with this panic in their eyes. Later on in the day she’d be all right. But what was strange (and I don’t think we thought of it as strange then) was that no one ever talked about it. That’s what seems strange now. No one ever mentioned it. Not a word. Neither Dad nor Gram North, who lived with us then, ever took us aside and tried to explain. I guess they were as confused as we were.

  Mom was then a fairly devout Christian Scientist, and I suppose this to some exten
t was causing her to deny the fact that anything was wrong. It was some time during that summer, someone came to tell me—but I don’t remember who, maybe it was Dad or Gram—that the three of us, Topher, Coleman, and I, had to be split up for a while because Mom was real nervous and couldn’t stand us fighting all the time. I didn’t remember us fighting all that much, but if some adult came and said it, it must have been true.

  I do remember that I used to hit Coleman a lot in the balls, and when he ran to tell Mom she would tell me, “Never hit Coleman there! Never hit him in that place again!” But I did it over and over again; no matter what she said I still did it, and Cole never hit me back. But he was a lot bigger and heavier than I; and at last one day that summer, he pinned me to the ground and wouldn’t let me up. It was an awful feeling because I couldn’t move and I remember I was kicking and screaming. He said he wouldn’t let me up until I stopped screaming and kicking. And that made me scream and kick all the more. I felt like I was going to explode. I thought the veins in my head would burst. When I stopped moving at last I felt like a statue of myself. I felt like a dead boy—I felt dead! Finally Cole let me up and I went and shut myself in the bedroom and moved my bookcase against the door because we didn’t have any door locks. When Cole came to bang on the door I screamed, “Stay away or I’ll jump! I’ll jump out the window.” I ran to the window. “I’ll kill myself like Milton Berle’s wife!” is what I yelled at Cole that summer that Mom couldn’t stop crying out loud.

  I remember standing in that second-story window and looking down, wondering if I really had the courage to jump and if I did would it kill me from such a small height. I think I figured I’d just break a leg or something and end up in a cast for the rest of the summer, and that would be much better than dying because of all the attention I’d get. But then I also realized that Mom wouldn’t be able to give me any attention, because she was cracking up and needed all of it for herself.