Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  They planned to tour wherever and whenever they thought they could. Rex assured me that they were in no hurry and did not work under any kind of deadline. They were, he said, an organic theater group.

  As soon as Rex went to the little dimmer on the wall and turned the light down, the group abandoned their coffee cups and scattered. Now the room was dark and silent except for the distant grind of trash trucks. For a long time I sat in the dark thinking nothing was going on and maybe that was the whole point, that I was supposed to get in touch with that nothing.

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to see various leotard-clad bodies stirring in and around the four corners of the room, accompanied by low moans that grew into one shared tone as the group slowly came together under the single light bulb in the center. The bodies began building a body pile in which they seemed to be crawling up each other to turn out the light. Soon the pile (which now resembled a sort of spastic rendition of the Flying Wallendas) stood still for a moment, then collapsed. As soon as this happened, the uniform voice drone went into wild dispersions and everyone crawled off growling, barking, and grunting into the various corners of the room, until once again there was only the sound of distant trash trucks grinding.

  Rex turned the light bulb up to full and everyone slowly got up and came over to sit in a circle. Someone made space for me. I was more than a little nervous, because I was sure they would ask me what I thought, and I really didn’t know what to say. I had a sense that it was art, but that it would be more fun to be in it than outside of it, which seemed to me to contradict at least one of the definitions of art.

  But Rex simply asked me if I wanted to join. Without hesitation, I said yes. What they were doing was original and like nothing I’d ever seen before. I wanted to learn how to perform with equal commitment.

  That night it worried me that I was not able to come up with the words to describe what I’d been through to Meg. But she let me off the hook by saying that it was most likely a nonnarrative, visceral experience, not easily lending itself to linear translation. Thank God for Meg.

  AFTER MANY WEEKS, somehow, and I don’t know how, Rex and his company got invited to bring the production of The Tower to play in grade schools outside St. Louis. We were so happy that someone wanted us somewhere that no one questioned it. Rex divided the company between two rental cars and we were off with our show to St. Louis.

  The first school we played at was a rambling single-story clapboard building in the middle of a cornfield about forty-five minutes outside of St. Louis. It looked, on that gray March day, like a combination of an Edward Hopper painting and a set for a new Alfred Hitchcock movie. There was a dirt playground with a baseball diamond and a couple of old tires hanging by a rope from the limb of a giant spreading oak tree. As soon as we stepped out of our cars we saw the school kids flying to the windows of the classrooms, pressing their faces and wildly waving, their teachers pulling them back to their seats, shooting us disdainful glances.

  We were all taken in to be shown the sacred performance space. It was the school cafeteria, with the tables and chairs pushed aside. The floor was cold, hard concrete, but the ceiling was quite high, so at least we had a grander heaven to reach up to.

  We changed into our leotards in the girls’ and boys’ toilets and came out to do our warm-ups. It was freezing, and that concrete floor felt hard and ungiving after working all those months on wood. Rex refused to give in to any of these problems and proceeded to carry on as if we were in our laboratory in New York City.

  After our warm-up we were all led to a small empty office to wait. We could hear the excited commotion and yelling as the children were ushered into the cafeteria single-file by their teachers. When it was filled to overflowing with screaming kids, Rex guided us through the drafty corridor. I don’t know about the rest of the group, but I definitely felt like a Christian being escorted into a Roman arena.

  We arrived outside the cafeteria, got down on all fours, and began to crawl, making contact with our personal sounds as we crept. In the distance we could hear the teachers trying to discipline the children by blowing what sounded like police whistles to bring them to order.

  We crawled into the cafeteria to almost total silence and awe, broken by a few hysterical whispers. There we all were, crawling in our ripped and tattered leotards, feeling the cold from the concrete floor leaking through to our warm flesh. Three men and three women making strange sounds, groveling on all fours in front of a mob of grade-school children somewhere on the outskirts of St. Louis. Don’t think about it, I thought. Just don’t think about it.

  We crawled to the center of the room to build our tower. At first the kids seemed mesmerized. There was a very intense hush as we moved toward the center. And then it happened. It happened as soon as we began to touch each other to find our balance. As soon as the first one of us touched another, the entire room went wild. Anarchy spread like a brush fire. The children became hysterical. They went out of control and started jumping up and down and spinning like tops. They were screaming and spinning and running toward us and running around us. Police whistles began to blow again. Teachers ran to try to drive the children back, but they slipped through the teachers’ arms and legs and ran spinning and shouting toward us. A very large, matronly woman was rushing toward Rex, waving her arms and blowing her police whistle, giving him orders: “Stop this show! Stop this show immediately!”

  Rex touched us all like some gentle football coach and said, “Okay, people, clear the space. Clear the space,” and we all jumped up and ran for the exit.

  Rex was called down to the principal’s office while we, completely humiliated, changed back into our street clothes in the girls’ and boys’ rooms. Then we went back to the empty office to wait. Twenty minutes later Rex came in to join us, his sense of humor still intact. He was smiling when he told us that we were to return to St. Louis to meet Mr. Tweedy, our sponsor.

  In St. Louis Mr. Tweedy told Rex that the Missouri Arts Council, which had originally put up the money for our tour, was pulling out. As far as they were concerned the tour was over and they were not about to honor the rest of our contract. Tweedy said it was because we were exposing inappropriate naked flesh to minors and attempting to build obscene body piles in front of schoolchildren. The “inappropriate flesh” had consisted of the patches of skin that had shown through the small rips in our leotards. Mr. Tweedy had most likely lost his job, he told us, and we were banned from Missouri forever. It was, he said, a scandal.

  We were totally humiliated. We were stunned. We were cast out of the Garden of Eden. We had lost all innocence about our art. The Tower of Babel had turned into the story of the Expulsion. We had come face-to-face with America and they had found us lacking.

  I lost my faith in Rex and the Laboratory. I also lost my faith in America and the chance of ever bringing it art. I was depressed. I even thought that I never wanted to go to Bali.

  Meg laughed when I told her the story over beers, and that helped. That made me feel good; once again, telling a story saved me. But where was I to go from there? I knew I no longer had a group I could thrash with.

  The Rex Duffy Laboratory Theatre was never the same. Before we went to St. Louis, we never even noticed the holes in our leotards. Now we made jokes about them. Before we went to St. Louis we thought our body configurations as we built our Tower of Babel were sacred and beautiful; now it felt like a group grope. We had not converted Middle America. They had instead oppressed and broken us. We were down and out—at least I was. I now saw myself as a fool for spending so many days rolling on the floor in a dark room when I could have been doing Chekhov.

  AFTER MY DISILLUSIONMENT with art I turned to fantasies of Liberation. The idea now was that I would give up on art and just lead a regular life and become liberated by learning how to live it in the moment. The word was clearly out that “being here now” was all there was and you better live now or fall prey later to hellish regrets like Mom’s what-ifs
. It could drive you mad to wake up to the fact that your whole life has been about chasing some false goal. I wanted to learn how to just be. I wanted now to take a regular job and work toward accomplishing some personal salvation in my life. I wanted to learn how to hang out in the blissful present. After all, if I was eventually going to Bali someday, if I was ever to try to take a perfect vacation, I knew I had to have a life from which to take it. After all, a vacation doesn’t exist without a life that you’re vacationing from. So I had to have a regular job; but also I wanted to let go of my past, and let go of Mom. I thought that the right way to do this was through Zen meditation, a relatively popular but rigorous route to the blissful present.

  Ironically my attraction to Zen was historic. I could see how it was mirrored in Mom’s father, my grandfather Benton. He was a man who led a middle-of-the-road life of peaceful New England centeredness. He did nothing in excess. You could almost say he did “nothing in excess” to excess. He was excessively unexcessive. Grampa Benton rarely talked about the past. For that matter, he rarely talked. He was a living example of New England Zen. He was also an example of what we might call the Zen miracle.

  The story about the Zen miracle was always one of my favorites. It goes something like this: Some very sensational Hindu miracle worker is having a competitive discussion with a Zen master about various miracles, and the Hindu is discussing how he can fly, walk on the water, and materialize diamonds, rubies, and pearls out of thin air. The Zen master listens quietly, with stern enthusiasm, and then replies, quite simply, “But that’s nothing. Listen to the miracles I can perform. When I’m hungry I eat. When I am tired I lie down and sleep.”

  Grampa Benton never got overly excited. Grampa Benton was a sailor, and the whole way he sailed was a reflection of his calm stability; he was always, as they used to say around the Barrington Yacht Club, “steady as she goes.” How he ever fathered such a manic daughter as Mom, I will never know.

  To sail with Grampa Benton was to become completely relaxed. Every move he made on that boat was done with New England Zen, with perfect attention and care. He would row the dinghy out to his sailboat, which was named The Stout Fellow. Grampa Benton would row his dinghy out to the side of the sailboat, hold it fast and steady while we all climbed aboard. Then he would slip around to the stern of the boat, tie the dinghy on, and come aboard himself. Once all of us were aboard The Stout Fellow he would, with some help from Uncle Jib or Dad, prepare the sails and rigging. At last we would motor out of the harbor, with all of us shouting over the sound of the engine, crying out things like “What a beautiful day!” and “Not a cloud in the sky!” and “Couldn’t be better!” Grampa Benton would hoist the sail and cut the engine and we’d all pass from that noisy mechanical world into the silent world of wind and sail. There was only the sound of wind in the canvas and the halyards whipping against the mast, and the water rippling along the gunwales as Grampa Benton pulled the mainsheet in, bringing the The Stout Fellow onto a high heeling tack toward the great clock tower on the distant Warwick shore.

  Around lunchtime, Grampa would let me take the tiller. He would choose a landmark like the Warwick clock tower or Popersquash Point off Bristol, and he’d say, “Just hold it there—steady as she goes.” The salt water would spray up in my face and over my bare legs and arms as I sat straining in the shadow of the sail, holding it, steady as she goes.

  Then, exactly at noon, as we heard the Warren groaner blasting, Gram Benton would break out lunch. There would be peanut butter and jelly (the grape jelly leaking through the doughy holes in the bread) or egg salad or tuna, all made on Pepperidge Farm bread and wrapped in waxed paper. There would be orange pop and Hires root beer for us kids, and for the adults there would be beautiful frosted cans of Schlitz beer. Gram Benton would pull them out of the cooler, perfect white cans with that strange word “Schlitz” on the brown label. Beads of moisture would drip off the cans as Gram opened them and passed one to Jib and one to Grampa Benton, who would always have only “just one.” I loved to watch Gram open those cans of Schlitz for the men. Gram was a Christian Scientist, so she didn’t drink, but she was great at opening cans of Schlitz. She pressed the metal church key into the top and then there would be a hiss of foam that sounded just like the name of the beer itself. I always thought the beer had been named after the sound it made while it was being opened. Snap, hiss, schlitz!—and up would rise the smell of hops, mixed with the salt smell of bay foam and the spume racing along the gunwales, and for a moment the whole bay was beer. Then Grampa lifted the can to his slightly trembling-in-anticipation lower lip and sipped it down. His giant Adam’s apple pumped in and out, letting the foam flood down into his belly. As he looked up from the can to check his navigating points on the Warwick clock tower his face was blissfully relaxed. When he was thirsty he drank, and when his thirst was quenched he stopped. He never confused his biological thirst with a metaphysical thirst, which could be, as in Mom’s case, a bottomless pit.

  Looking back now, I’d have to say Grampa Benton was a remarkable man, remarkable in the simplest and most unexciting ways; a little distant, but still remarkable. He had his own little advertising firm and only took on the most proven and trustworthy accounts, things like Hospital Brand cough drops. Grampa Benton prepared his only son, Jib, to take over the advertising firm so he could retire at fifty-five years old. He wanted to enjoy the money he made and not leave it behind for others. And he’d say that; he’d speak it right out: “I’m spending it all while I’m here.” He also said that if he ever had a stroke and was in any way reduced to a vegetative state, a hammer should be placed by his bed so he could use it before he lost all the strength in his hands. It was a ludicrous scene in my mind, Grampa Benton left alone for a few minutes because Gramma had left him to go get him some cranberry juice or something, and him reaching over, taking that household hammer, and knocking in the side of his own head. What a mess. It didn’t seem in his nature to do that, to leave a bloody mess on the pillow for Gramma Benton to clean up.

  He didn’t retire at fifty-five; he retired at fifty-six. He retired to work in his vegetable garden, where he grew tomatoes, and to take trips with the only woman he’d ever loved. He spent his money traveling with her. They took a freighter to Panama. They went to China to see the Wall. They sailed to Bermuda. They sailed, they walked, they rode bikes, they laughed. They spent all their money. Gramma Benton believed in heaven and Grampa believed that this fantastic accident on Earth was all we had or ever would have. He lived his steady-as-she-goes life with no regrets, and left nothing behind but memories and questions in my mind.

  I will never know how manic Mom came out of the union between Gram and Grampa Benton. They were both such steady-as-she-goes types; and Mom, perhaps in reaction, before her dark days, before the sanitarium, was always acting up a storm: tap-dancing in the kitchen, singing, farting, and laughing, always trying to rock the boat.

  There is no question but that Mom’s suicide was an incomprehensible horror to Gramma and Grampa Benton. After it happened, Coleman and I had a quiet lunch at their house. Cole was always the more confrontational. He tried to speak of Mom’s death in the middle of our fresh shrimp salad. Grampa Benton stopped him and said, “No more. I don’t want to talk about it. No more.” Gramma Benton quickly followed with, “She’s better off in heaven now. We know that. She’s better off in heaven.” We finished our shrimp salad in silence, and I had this strange feeling that Grampa Benton was the only one who could taste his shrimp that day.

  SO IF THERE WAS any propensity on my part to take up the path of Zen, it was that steady-as-she-goes quality of Grampa Benton’s—coupled with a very beautiful book that had come to me by chance. The book was called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. It was utterly without pretense or style. If it had any style at all it was that of a very insightful ten-year-old talking. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind read the way Grampa Benton sailed The Stout Fellow. beautifully, directly, without complication or unnecessary excitement.
It cried out to me to let go of all the manufactured drama in my life, all the hype that I felt I had to make in order to feel I was living, really living. I wanted to be done with that once and for all. Zen was about concentrating on everyday routines, becoming calm and ordinary, making everyday life into a state of present enlightenment.

  I began to practice meditation at a Zendo on the Upper West Side, just a short walk across Central Park from my apartment. It was a neat little parquet box of a place, relatively quiet and without dust, which is a rare phenomenon in New York City. I’d go over there two or three times a week, sit for an hour and count my breath while I looked at the blank white wall. It was good. There were only two things I didn’t like. One was the smell of incense. It made me sneeze. The other was the fact that you were required to count your breath from one to ten, over and over. When you got to ten you’d go back to one and start again, and this made me feel completely hemmed in by numbers. I could see the number attached to each breath. I could see a 1, then a 2, and so on rise up from my diaphragm and go up and out of my nose. The room filled with numbers, numbers everywhere, hundreds of 1-to-10s. Except for the numbers and the incense, my Zen sittings were all quite relaxing and centering.

  On the other hand, my new sort of regular job was not so relaxing and centering, which I guess is often the case. It was not a regular job so much as a full-time part-time job, in the recently finished Gulf & Western Building at Columbus Circle. I was in charge of making sure all the right office furniture was placed in all the right offices. And each day I could see my job heading toward termination, because each day we’d be on a higher floor, working our way to the top.

  It was an absurd job, because all the furniture looked exactly the same. The movers, who were very aware of this, kept trying to shove any old generic piece of furniture into any old generic office. My job was to stop them from doing it. My job was to get the properly tagged desk and chair into the properly numbered office. Visually it didn’t matter, so I completely sympathized with the furniture movers, and I’m afraid they knew that. But I could in no way behave as if I did. I had to use all my old acting techniques to pretend that I was very very concerned that all the tags on the furniture matched up with all the office numbers.