Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  The next ride I got was a Chevy van with two guys in the front and one guy in a wheelchair in the back. The guy in the wheelchair had just come home from Vietnam, where he had received some horrid spinal injury, and would most likely never walk again. He said that when he shot his first “gook” he was so freaked out that he forgot to take his finger off the trigger of his automatic and he cut the guy right in two.

  My last ride was with a man who sold Tupperware, and that was all he told me about himself. He had an easy-listening channel tuned in on his radio and after I got in he never looked at me once. He brought me right to the outskirts of New Paltz.

  I had no problem finding Joe McCreedy’s bookstore. There it was—Wyoming Books—right in the middle of town. I walked into that beautiful little bookstore to find Joe involved with a very intense woman. They were standing by the front window arguing over an idea for a window display and had reached a standoff. Joe was saying, “It matters to me,” and she was yelling back, “But don’t you think it matters to me?” And back and forth it was going like that as they fought like two kids, each trying to get their way; only I could see that she had already won just by how much more passionately she was expressing her needs.

  I was immediately drawn to her strong, angry face, beautiful in its rage as she stood there with one raised blue vein on her forehead, screaming one final time, “But it matters to me, Joe! It matters to me!” Joe turned away from her and walked into the back of the bookstore. I didn’t move. I stood there smitten, watching this woman, now suddenly empty of rage, carefully arranging the window display exactly to her liking. I just stood there feeling my whole being focus through hers. I stood there thinking that I’d made the trip just to meet her.

  Joe and I had a shaky reunion in the back of the bookstore. He was happy and surprised to see me, but I could tell he had not fully recovered from that argument. We sat and talked. Joe told me things were going fine for him since he had escaped the draft. He was running the bookstore with his girlfriend, Diane, and that passionate woman at the window was her sister, Meg.

  Joe and Diane let me stay in the back of the bookstore on a little cot until they could figure out how to put me to work. Then after a few days they decided that I could help Meg make the weekly runs to buy books at a wholesale house in lower Manhattan. I liked this idea a lot.

  I loved the long drives down to New York with Meg. They really gave me a chance to space out and get uncomplicated again and try to learn to hang out. I also liked Meg’s company. On the other side of her rage, I found a calm center that I could be quiet with. It was as though there was an unspoken understanding between us. When we got to New York we’d spend the whole day in the book warehouse, browsing in what was essentially a giant library. We would get lost in the aisles of books, only to meet by chance to share ideas and information instead of kisses. It was like spending a rainy day with a friend in a giant library that contained as much as you’d ever want to know about the world outside. It was a windowless protected world of its own where I felt safe at last.

  After we finished buying the books for the store, Meg and I would go stay at a friend’s place on Seventh Street on the Lower East Side. At the time, Seventh Street was the ultimate hippie haven of the East Coast. Everyone on the street seemed to have perfected hipness, to be able to live their lives totally in the moment, while I was only reading about it. But one of the things that I liked about Meg and Joe’s friends up on Seventh Street was that they still liked to read, which was something that a lot of hippies weren’t doing much of. In exchange for letting us crash in their pad, Meg would often steal them one or two books from the warehouse.

  When we’d get to Seventh Street, I would cook chicken hearts for Meg and drink red wine. Most of the people at that pad were vegetarians and kept insisting I was paranoid from eating dead meat and drinking cheap Spanish wine, but I just laughed, or sort of laughed, and tried not to let it affect me. It seemed that everyone was in competition to be hipper than the next person. Also, the fact that all of them at Seventh Street smoked marijuana to relax was a big threat to me. When I tried to smoke marijuana with them I never relaxed; I just got real wired, and couldn’t sleep. But Meg seemed to be naturally high. She didn’t use any drugs at all that I was aware of, except an occasional sip of that Spanish burgundy with her chicken hearts.

  It wasn’t long before I was falling for Meg in some new strange way that didn’t have to do with sex as much as it had to do with friendship and just being comfortable together.

  This new experience of friendship with a woman other than Mom was a little confusing to me. I didn’t know if I was falling in love or looking for a new mother or what. But I realized that Meg looked somewhat like my mom at that age. She had a very angular New England face, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones and very clear hazel eyes. She was the kind of woman who, in the old days when everyone got married, would have made a very beautiful bride. Also “Meg” was short for “Margaret,” which was Mom’s middle name. I’m not saying I didn’t miss sex—I really did miss it. But I didn’t miss the anxiety that sex produced. Good sex was like a drug for me and it could not be had without some unnerving side effects.

  The whole world seemed crazy to me then in 1966, what with the Vietnam War, people taking drugs, free love and sex, and the constant image in my mind of Mom at the asylum getting another electric shock treatment. Or the image of Dad at home alone, drinking bourbon until he fell on the floor. It was a crazy time for me and I felt perpetually wounded by all that came at me.

  As time went by, things got more settled and ordered into a nice routine that made me feel centered, which I felt was all I could expect at that point—the grace of habit. I got attached to the simple habits of my days: I still lived in the back of the bookstore, and I had started doing yoga in the morning to calm down. After yoga I’d eat a simple healthy breakfast, and then reread my little bible, Psychotherapy, East and West, underlining certain passages in red. Nothing all that mind-shattering happened. My life just went by without much passion, emotion, or despair. I wasn’t depressed and I wasn’t elated; I just was. It was like the life of an old rabbi studying his Talmud.

  The only person who disturbed my peace was Joe. He didn’t think I was in the best of mental health, and he wanted to shake my habituation by converting me to Christ. I didn’t realize that Joe had become a born-again until I saw him reading the Bible a lot. Joe, I soon found out, was a born-again Christian who took LSD as the Holy Eucharist.

  At last, after much effort, Joe talked me into taking LSD with him, alone. I discussed the idea with Meg. She didn’t really seem to think it was a bad idea as long as I was aware that at some point on the trip Joe would probably want to read to me from the Bible and try to convert me to Christ. She warned me not to get too paranoid when it happened.

  It was a beautiful, clear Saturday afternoon in late summer. Joe wanted to drop the acid at his house and take it all real slow and quiet—just mellow out as it fell into place. I was extremely nervous and couldn’t stop falling asleep. I felt as if I were going to die or something, like the dread before you take off on a roller coaster. Then all of a sudden we just did it. Joe took out a whole sheet of blue blotter Holy Eucharist LSD and cut off two small dots that seemed to glow in the nervous focus of my eye. With a trembling hand I did what Joe did: I put the dot on my tongue and washed it down with a big gulp of Dr Pepper. Then we just sat there smiling at each other like two cats that had just swallowed two mice.

  But soon Joe got up to fetch his Bible and began to thumb through it. It was then that I asked him if we could please go up into the mountains. I wanted to be outdoors for the trip and I thought I knew a beautiful place to go: it was the stream on top of a mountain that flowed down to a waterfall that cascaded into a deep pool where everyone swam naked on hot days. If we could just get to the beginning of that stream, I thought, everything would be fine. I also thought if I didn’t get near some water real quick I’d go mad. But I didn’t t
ell Joe that. I kept wondering what madness would be for me. What would my crazy activity be if I really let go? Then I suddenly knew that madness was only a smoke screen to keep us from looking all the way down into the pure bottomless pit of death. What came to me then was the full and complete realization that we were all going to die and beyond our personal death there was only one thing larger, the end of all human history, when at last the sun would go out. But I didn’t tell any of these thoughts to Joe because I thought they would provoke him into reading to me from the Bible. I was sure I didn’t want that. At the same time I was happy to know what I did want, and that was water. We went to the water.

  Joe drove, telling me that the acid would probably just be coming on strong by the time we got up there. We reached the edge of the woods in about twenty minutes. Neither of us had watches, so time was just a sort of conditioned feeling by then. Not seeing any real path into the stream, we bushwhacked for a while. Then we found a path and came to a little clearing by that rushing stream. We stood there for a minute and then separated without a word. I followed the descent of the stream which led to the waterfall. It wasn’t long after that I felt the acid coming on quite strong. Since I was a virgin to it all, I didn’t know what to expect, but I felt like my whole mind and body was on this roller coaster just as it was starting up its first giant rise. I just stood there and watched that clear stream flow and break around some small rocks that sat out in the center. The clear water made silver rings around the rocks, which shimmered to blue as the water reflected the late-afternoon light. Then I hopped out and landed, with what felt like perfect balance, on one of the flat rocks in the center of the rushing stream. I felt the whole stream as one big snaking, ever-changing body all around me.

  Out of some need to define myself against that stream, or perhaps out of some feeling of being born again for the first time, I just opened my arms and cried out, “I am!” My voice seemed small and low against the sound of the rushing water. I stood there waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. So I tried it again, a little louder this time. “I am!” I called to the sky and trees. Still no answer; nothing happened. The water continued to flow on, and the sun sank a little lower into the lush green all around me. Once more, I thought, and this time I really shouted until I could feel it down to the base of my balls: “I am!” It was only then that I suddenly got self-conscious and wondered if in fact I might be disturbing some of the campers in the area. This new feeling of self-consciousness, coupled with a touch of loneliness and curiosity about what Joe was up to, sent me back to where I had left him.

  Joe was standing tall, beautiful, and glowing by the stream. His smile was the most open, completely relaxed smile I had ever seen on any face anywhere. He was even more beautiful than the drugstore picture of Christ Mom kept as a bookmark in her Bible. The sun set behind his head, creating a sort of red halo that fired up the edges of his beard. I couldn’t get enough of all this in my eyes.

  I chanted over and over again to Joe, “This is too much. This is too much to stand. I can hardly stand this beauty anymore.” I saw a wild and crazy bat flying over Joe’s head. I saw two bats with long peacock feathers coming out of their tails and I saw that the whole sky above Joe’s head was filled with glorious, ornate, spectacular, almost suffocatingly baroque waves of peacock feathers, which I now tried to negate with Mom’s old familiar pattern of escape. I couldn’t stop assaulting Joe with what-ifs.

  “Joe, this is really great here, tripping in the woods,” I said. “But what if we were at the ocean? What about tripping at the ocean? What if we were down on Seventh Street now? What would it be like to be tripping on acid with all those Seventh Street hippies?” No sooner had I asked Joe that than out of the woods came this band of East Village hippies. I swear. I could immediately tell by the way they were dressed and the way they moved and talked that they were genuine East Village hippies come up to the country for an acid weekend. I thought Joe had set it all up. I thought that he had rehearsed the whole thing and had brought them up to hide in the trees until I gave them their cue so they could come out and play their Seventh Street hippie antics on me. Then I thought maybe I had conjured them. I thought that this was all a big theater and I had conjured these spirits to teach me a lesson. I felt some higher forces were speaking to me, telling me that I had the power to get exactly what I asked for, so be careful. I felt that I had the power to create my own reality. At the same time I tried to realize that these hippies who surrounded us in the dark were not phantoms but real human beings. I could only see them as a group of actors playing out some scenario that had been put together in some place I could not yet comprehend. I had the dark feeling of being completely and absolutely lost, stupid and blind and lost, and I knew that my only connection to meaning would be to tell Joe this. So I did. I said, on the verge of tears, “Joe, I feel lost.” It was so dark now that I could hardly see his face. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to him or one of the phantom hippies. Then I heard him laugh back at me his easy, comforting laugh and say, as if his words were smiling, “Yes, that’s because we are lost. I didn’t bring a flashlight and there’s no moon tonight.”

  I was amazed at how quickly the sun had gone down. We were indeed lost. We were lost in the dark. If there was a path back to the road we had no idea where it was. Then Joe, who seemed more in control, asked these crazy hippies if they knew the way out of the woods. They seemed ready for a great adventure and cried out, “Follow us.” They had a couple of kerosene camping lamps that they held high over their pale-blue demonlike faces as they led us into the thick of it. Every so often one would take a little hatchet and stoop and begin to hack at a tree root and scream, “Die! Die! There, it’s dead! That’s the fifth poisonous snake I’ve killed tonight!” But I only saw the snakes they hacked as tree roots and was never sure what they were seeing or if they were just trying to scare us. The funny thing was that in spite of all their mad antics I trusted them completely to lead us out onto the road. As we walked, Joe kept whispering to me in my ear, “Let the little children lead you. Let the little children lead you.”

  At times the woods turned into a gigantic jungle tangle and at other times it seemed like we were on some sort of path, until at last we were miraculously on the edge of the highway somewhere near where we had left Joe’s truck. As soon as we got onto the road, the hippies left us as they laughed and sang, “We are the happy wanderers …” and they staggered on down the road swinging their lanterns like a band of happy gypsies, all disappearing into the night as magically as they had come out of it.

  Relieved to be on the solid asphalt, I walked into the middle of the road and looked up and gazed upon that gigantic night sky. I was seeing the night sky for the first time in my life. I just plain saw it, just saw it directly without any mediation of thought or comment. I saw the stars for the first time and they were just stars. There was no word for them in my mind. I saw it all not as hallucination but so clearly and powerfully and directly that it brought me to my hands and knees right there in the middle of the road. I could feel the warm asphalt still radiating the heat of the day, like it was a warm body under me. I lay down and clung to it with all my might. When I rolled over and looked at the sky again I was amazed not to be looking up; I now had the sensation of looking out. I could feel the complete roundness of the earth and I knew I was looking out into the universe. This view of the stars as “out” lasted for some time, and was always on the edge of being unbearable. It was awful, in the sense of inspiring awe. There was no longer any room for fear. It was all just one big AWE.

  When I stood up I saw that Joe too was looking at the stars, and I went over and hugged him and his whole body felt like a great warm loving bear as I wondered how I would ever live my life after this trip into the mountains.

  “Shall we head down?” Joe asked.

  “Oh my God, whatever. Let’s go get a beer or whatever, I don’t care.” I felt no need for anything. My body was in total harmonious motion as we
sauntered to Joe’s pickup truck and got in. It never occurred to me that Joe might not be able to drive. All things seemed possible. Why, we could even fly down to town if we chose. Joe made a U-turn and we started toward town. Not far down the road we came to a spectacular turnout, one of those scenic overlooks, and he pulled in to let me out while he sat in the truck and waited. I walked to the edge of the lookout and there below me the whole Hudson Valley was stretched out with its scattered streetlights and farmhouses, and New Paltz sparkled like a gem in the distance. Looking down on it all, I could see that it was breathing—the entire Hudson Valley was breathing, and not only the entire valley, the entire earth, and my breath was in union with it, or its breath was in union with mine, I couldn’t tell. The waving swell of my diaphragm was also the swell of the valley below. There was suddenly no me, or I should say no complication of me. There was no Brewster with a history anymore. My body was filled with a colored liquid, like the mercury in a thermometer, and then it all went down until it drained out my feet and left only an empty outline, like a Matisse drawing. Now I was the landscape, which was all liquid and flowing through my outlines. I don’t know how long this lasted or what it meant. I only know that I never experienced anything like it before or ever after.

  At some point I turned to see Joe glowing behind the wheel of the pickup. I climbed in beside him and everything in that cabin was as liquid and interesting as the valley below. As we drove down the winding mountain road toward New Paltz I began again with the what-ifs. But this time it wasn’t Seventh Street. “What if we were in Vietnam tripping right now, Joe? What if we were in the middle of that war? What if we couldn’t get our fingers off the triggers of our machine guns?”