Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  Joe didn’t answer. He just smiled and drove. As the what-ifs spun by in my mind, I knew I could stop the Ferris wheel at any point and take the thought out and examine it. Or I could let the Ferris wheel keep spinning. Then the Ferris wheel turned into a stream just like the one I’d been standing by and its seats were now wooden boxes floating down the stream and every box, I knew, contained a thought. I could drag it out and open it up. Or I could let the boxes go—and I did. I watched them flow by.

  That night I pledged myself to Meg. “I think we should try to make a life together,” I said to her at the diner over a BLT. “For better or worse, let’s try to make a life together.” Meg seemed a little surprised and then took my hand while I turned to her and said, “I like you, Meg, because things matter to you.”

  MEG AND I had made love once or twice, but I didn’t like that out-of-control animal feeling. I liked that all-over spiritual feeling I got from the LSD better, and I began to feel that my little room in the back of the bookstore was meant to be a monk’s cell, not a sex pad, and I wanted to keep it that way. I had had the sex pad with Melissa; now I wanted something else with Meg.

  One day I found a way to re-enter that joyously transcendental state without using drugs. Actually, Meg found it. Meg came up with the idea that I should try modeling for her life drawing class to make some extra money. They were looking for a model, so I took the job. I had never modeled before but I knew I’d be right for it. I was in good shape and had an almost classic body. I had no objection to being naked in front of an art class, although a jock strap was required. I hated jock straps and had never owned one.

  I bought one at the college athletic store and then, repulsed by the horrid white clinical aspect of it, I decided to dye it red. On Monday at nine in the morning I showed up at Meg’s life drawing class with an old bathrobe I had bought at a thrift shop and my new scarlet-red jock strap. I think the drawing teacher and the whole class were impressed and thought of me as a real professional.

  It all happened on that first day. I made the wonderful discovery within an hour. I found that I could empty out and turn into an outline again. I could disappear without fear because I knew that the whole class was keeping me in that room with their eyes. The more people looked at me, the more I was present, and I was also free to come and go from that presence. If there were ten students looking at me, times two eyes, then I’d feel twenty times larger than I usually felt. It was their constant gaze that kept my body in that room, while my imagination flew to Bali, then out into the cosmos, getting ever closer to a state of nothingness. It was a way of constantly dying and being brought back from the dead, resurrected once again by the voice of the art instructor, which was like the voice of God bringing me back into the world of the living when he’d say, “Let’s take a break,” and whoosh, I’d be back in my body and putting on my robe and talking with Meg about all the places I’d been in my imagination.

  They paid me very little, only $3.50 an hour, but that was fine, because I was getting paid for just standing still, or sometimes sitting, and that left my mind free to roam and soar. The only thing I had to be careful of was not to roam into any sexual fantasies, because it would lead to erections that would swell up and try to peek out of my red jock strap like some sly snake with a mind of its own. Then I would have to relax the snake by saying the simple phrase over in my mind: “Remember, Brewster, you are going to die. One day, you are going to not be—forever.” That would pretty much take care of it.

  Then I’d look around, or rather my eyes would look around, because I couldn’t move my body—I had to remain very still—and I would see Meg and all these other students looking at me and drawing me, and I would feel my whole body fill up with substance again in their eyes. I’d come and go from that. I would come and go; it was like a game of hide-and-seek.

  I liked the long sitting poses in a comfortable chair best of all, just sort of lolling there, stretched out and lounging, for forty-five minutes until I turned into a soft, languid statue, like one of the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn. I’d sit in the most delicious of places, the place of greatest hope, the purest, most delicious place of suspended desire and anticipation, that place just before action destroys perfection and leads to the completion of desire and the inevitable corruption and disappointment of consequence.

  These long poses not only brought a stillness to my body, they also brought a stillness to my mind. It was no longer racing over the past in a manic state. My mind came to this still place until, at last, the room and I were one.

  After a three-hour session of modeling in those long poses, I would be stunned by how vividly I saw the world around me. Colors and sounds vibrated in me. It was as if I had the eyes of a ten-year-old. I didn’t mind the low pay. I would have done it for free because it was for me a special kind of meditation. It was about being alone and not being alone all at the same time. But most of all it was about my body being consumed by those eyes.

  After a while it was not enough just to have my body be seen, I wanted my mind to be seen as well. I wanted to move it in some more creative direction, and that was when I got interested in theater again. I began to wonder what it would be like to get my body and mind together, so that both aspects were being seen simultaneously.

  There was a little theater group in New Paltz then. They were staging real straight, traditional plays. All around me the whole world was falling apart. There was nothing straight or traditional about it. The Vietnam War was boiling, Mom was cracking up, everyone seemed to be spaced out on some psychedelic drug; and in the middle of all this I found myself gravitating toward a conservative community theater, composed of people who imbibed little more than scotch or cheap sherry. I mean, they’d just sit around sipping cheap sherry and say, “Why not do Shaw’s Heartbreak House?” or “Why not do Long Day’s Journey into Night?” And then they’d just up and do it. They would put on the three-and-a-half-hour uncut version of Long Day’s Journey into Night in front of ten people.

  They called themselves the New Age Players, and that was odd, because there was nothing new age about them. But I liked working with them because it gave such order to my life. Having to rehearse and learn lines was so focusing. And I didn’t have to be me. Not that I felt that there was a real me to be. I mean, taking the LSD had showed me that I was really empty, so I was perfectly happy to be filled up with someone else’s words and someone else’s personality. That’s what I liked about acting in plays. I felt like no one; and I guess that in some secret way pretending to be someone else saved me from the giant fear of death. It allowed me the fantasy that I had to be someone in order to die, and that as long as I was no one, or just an actor, death would never find me; death would somehow pass me by.

  So I played small roles and big roles. I even got to play Edmund in Long Day’s Journey into Night, When Mom heard that I was in Long Day’s Journey, she immediately wanted to come up and see it, which made me think that she was getting better. But Dad didn’t want Mom to see Long Day’s Journey because he felt it would be as disturbing as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had been for her. So he brought her up to see The Knack instead, a very silly, sophomoric English play where three very cool and crazy kind of guys try to learn the knack of picking up women. I was cast in the role of Tolen, a kind of cocky, strutting stud. At the time that was a real big stretch for me as an actor.

  So Mom came up with Dad and they stayed at a motel. You can imagine how disappointed she was having wanted and expected to see me play the role of poor tortured Edmund in Long Day’s Journey into Night and ending up instead seeing me strut my wares as Tolen in The Knack.

  After the show, Meg, Mom, Dad, and I all went back to their motel for drinks. I could tell that Mom was annoyed. I think she was beginning to perceive that she’d been brought up there on false pretenses, and she was just sort of clamming up at the table. She was polite to Meg, but that was about it. She sat there like a nervous little bird sipping her 7UP. Dad, on the oth
er hand, got slightly drunk on bourbon and kept dropping hints about how nice it was to be back in a motel with “your mother” (that’s what he always called Mom in front of me) after all these years. She didn’t respond to his motel innuendos. She only got annoyed.

  Anyway, that was the night that I broke it to Mom and Dad that I had gotten a paying offer at the Alamo Theatre in Houston, Texas. Some sort of talent scout for regional theaters all over America had seen me play the role of Boss Mangan in Heartbreak House. He asked me to come down to New York City to audition for two major regional theaters. One of them was in Wisconsin and the other was the Alamo Theatre in Houston. I chose the Alamo because they were planning to do Chekhov’s The Sea Gull as one of their plays that season. I loved Chekhov and loved that play ever since I’d seen it through drunken eyes in Providence. I had always wanted to play the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich because of the way I often acted so tortured and hung up on Mom. That’s exactly how Konstantin was: tortured, sensitive, and very much hung up on his mother. Also, and best of all, Konstantin gets to commit suicide at the end of the play—every night! over and over again!—and for some reason I thought that would be really neat, to be able to kill myself every night and come back to life the following evening to do it again.

  I broke the news to Dad and Mom over motel drinks that night. Meg and I had spent a long time discussing it. It was her plan to finish school and then join me for the summer in Mexico, where we would have our own perfect vacation after I’d finished my first season at the Alamo Theatre. That was to be our first vacation together and our first time out of the United States. Dad’s response was “How much are they paying you?” And Mom just looked sad and said, “I wish you’d get a job acting in Providence so we could come and see you there.” That was it. That’s all they said.

  After Mom saw me in The Knack Dad had to send her to Fuller Sanitarium again. I think it had to do with the fact that he had brought her to see me in The Knack and not Long Day’s Journey. She was most likely angry at him but kept turning all her rage back on herself. It was going in instead of out. In the old days when something was bothering her and she couldn’t talk about it she would often fart at the dinner table. That would drive Dad wild. He’d jump up and go read his newspaper. I don’t think he really read the paper; I think he just held it up in front of his face like a paper wall or a Japanese screen. And there he would sit in the living room just steaming and fuming behind the headlines of the Providence Journal.

  Now instead of just farting, Mom got real crazy. She had what they call irrational behavior, and Dad would not put up with it and packed her off again to Fuller Sanitarium.

  Then shortly before I was due to leave for the Alamo Theatre, I got this letter from Mom:

  Hi Darling!

  I’m home and all well and deliriously happy to be here! I called Cole a few nights ago and broke the news to him. He was overjoyed as are Dad and Topher. I wanted to talk with you but Dad says you can’t be reached by phone so will you please call me right away quick!! I can hardly wait for us to be all together for a while anyway. What a reunion that will be! I feel as though I have been reborn. They call me the miracle patient at Fuller Sanitarium. The doctor said he had never seen anyone get well as fast as I did. The other patients there couldn’t understand it. They kept asking me what I had that they didn’t have.

  Love Ya!

  Mom

  Just reading this letter made me nervous. I could hear Mom’s old frantic voice in it. I didn’t trust her miracles anymore. I wanted to believe she was healed but I feared the worst. I knew when I called her I had to be careful not to let that fear show.

  On the phone Mom sounded really high and told me all about this big family reunion she and Dad were planning to welcome Coleman home from Spain and to send me off to the Alamo Theatre.

  I went home with more than a little trepidation, but it turned out to be fun, almost like going to the drive-in to see Mary Poppins. I was amazed that Mom had made such a miraculous recovery. She seemed to be back to her old “7UP Kid” personality again. Dad was in good spirits, cooking his big fat steak on the portable barbecue in the middle of the driveway. It was good to see Coleman back from Spain, and Topher, who had taken a brief break from playing the pipe organ, which he had grown obsessed with, going through a pair of shoes a month just working those pedals like a maniac. It was really a wonderful family reunion.

  Cole brought Topher and me wineskins from Spain and we filled them with Almadén burgundy and danced around the picnic table squirting red wine into each other’s mouth. Dad laughed once or twice and didn’t even get angry with Cole when he did his crazy version of a Spanish dance around a full glass of wine in the middle of the driveway until at last, quite by accident, he stepped right on it and smashed it to bits. I really expected Dad to blow his top on that one, but he didn’t. It was as if Dad was so happy to have Mom home that he was really trying to turn over a new leaf at fifty-six.

  IT WAS THAT happy reunion that let me think it was all right to fly off to the Alamo Theatre to pursue an acting career.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time I would see Mom forever and ever. You see, you never know; you never know when it will be the last time forever.

  Upon arriving in Houston I was at first a little stunned and overwhelmed by the newness of the place. It was almost tropical and I’d never been to the tropics before. It was hot, very humid, lush, and there were palm trees everywhere, the first I’d ever seen. But after a while things began to settle into a routine and I began living a rather isolated life. I played small roles and kept to myself, occasionally going out to smoke dope at the homes of Houston locals. I didn’t get on that well with the other actors, and after a while I wasn’t really sure why I was there—if I was just doing time to earn my Equity card, if I was trying to escape from Mom, or waiting to see if I would get to play the lead role in The Sea Gull. I didn’t have a telephone in my apartment, so I only wrote letters to Mom and Dad, but rarely. Mostly I wrote letters to Meg. Some time in early winter, which really wasn’t winter for me down there in Houston with all those palm trees and swimming pools and muggy warm days, I got the following letter from Dad:

  Dear Brewster,

  I have not been a very good correspondent lately, have had to write twice a week to the Bentons, get my housework and meals done and I suppose it’s somewhat due to lethargy. Mother is not doing well at all. Not long after you left for Houston she had a relapse. I had high hopes that she might get better at Fuller, but, if anything, I think, she is worse. While in the beginning I phoned her twice a week, there was very little to say and I only seemed to upset her. Hence I infrequently call now. I did talk with her last Tuesday, but it was very discouraging—she is now certain that she is insane and that she can never recover. This is a very difficult frame of mind to recover from. While I keep avoiding the thought, I find myself more and more wondering if maybe this is so—it does happen to people—but I can’t believe it is really happening to us.

  There had been some thought of Mother coming home with a Christian Science nurse if one could be located—at least to get her out of the institution atmosphere—but nothing definite as yet.

  Friday night when I came home I went into the bedroom and found glass all over the floor—then discovered that the storm window and one 8 by 10 pane next to mother’s bed had been smashed. I was about to call the police and looked around for the stone or other object, but found nothing—then discovered feathers and after looking further found a partridge, dead on my bedside table. It’s hard to believe that a bird which weighed one and a quarter pounds could go through two windows, brush through the curtain, knock over the TV aerial and, without losing any altitude, zoom across the room hitting the corner and dropping dead on the table without even disturbing the lampshade.

  It took me about two hours to clean up the mess and, I might add, dress the bird for the ice box. Gram North came for the weekend and we had a delicious partridge
dinner Saturday night. So far I have not been able to get hold of the storm window man but have the window covered with a sheet of cardboard and masking tape, which does a pretty good job considering the temperature this morning was five degrees.

  Would love to hear further from you when there is time.

  Love,

  Dad

  It was as though the mad bird in Mom had at last burst out of her and broken free like a heart with wings flying out of that sanitarium, to find its way to home to crash and die on Dad’s bedside table. Then, after all of that, to at last be eaten by Dad and his mother … well, it was all really too much.

  And what was happening in Houston didn’t make it any better. The role of Konstantin in The Sea Gull was given to an older, less sensitive actor named Brian, who was not at all right for the role. But he had tenure, which means he’d been suffering down there for five years, and I, after all, had only just arrived. And to add great insult to injury, the director of the theater decided that because of my obviously tortured sensitivity, Brian should use me as a life study. He should observe me in my daily routines. What he was really observing was my disappointment at not having the role of Konstantin. I went home and cried alone for one whole day.

  The director, who was this very histrionic, flamboyant woman named Thelma, decided that I should also “create” (I think that was her word) a very imaginative collection of sound effects for the final dinner party that is going on offstage while Konstantin has his last sad unrequited love meeting with Nina. She wanted me to organize the other actors to sit around me in chairs offstage while I conducted them like some demented symphony orchestra in the jangling of silverware and the striking of empty glasses. I was to give them cues for laughter as well as maintain a constant improvisational mumble of “rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb” or “peas and carrots, peas and carrots.” All of this had to be orchestrated around Konstantin’s and Nina’s onstage lines. What was worse was that I agreed to do all this. So there I sat backstage during each show conducting all these ridiculous, meaningless sounds while Brian as Konstantin spewed and strutted his badly performed sensitivity for all of Houston to see.