Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  At the end of seven days of silence I was popping to talk. I was bursting at the mouth, and what amazed me was that no one else at the Zendo seemed to have the same need as I did. I came into the men’s dorm room just after we were allowed to speak again and a fellow meditator was making his bed. As soon as I saw him I burst into a vivid description of all I’d seen, felt, and heard over the past six days. He would not even turn from what he was doing. I told him about Big Mind and the hot-buttered-corn cocks with wings and the butterfly cunts, and he just turned to me very directly and said, “There are things to be done.”

  All I wanted to do was talk. It was as though the meditation experience had simply fed more into my storytelling library rather than bringing me the power of insight and value of focused silence.

  It was the same driving home. All the people in the car seemed more interested in maintaining the silence they had cultivated than talking about what happened to them there. They just sat there and looked out the window, while I babbled on and on about the butterfly cunts and flying cocks and Big Mind versus small mind. All that silence had made me sad and a little crazy. The silence allowed the great and always present sadness behind words to rise up in me, and I didn’t like it one bit. It covered me like a great gray web. For the rest of the trip I rode in silence thinking about Grandpa Benton, and I realized for the first time that I’d never known him beyond his style of control and order. That upright, uptight pillar of the community. That steady-as-she-goes man. And for one dark moment I wondered if Mom had gotten beyond that in him. Had they ever touched hearts? I wondered.

  Meg was happy to see me and I was happy to see her and to be back in our nest again. Our apartment looked completely new and vivid compared to that empty wall I’d been looking at for so long. Well, not exactly empty, but certainly black-and-white. Our apartment seemed to shimmer with light and color. I was immediately struck by another reason I loved Meg so much. She instinctively knew how to make a neat, comfortable little place to get centered in. She could make a home anywhere. This is why she stayed in New York City, I was sure. She had settled in here for better or worse and realized that one place was no different from another once you made your nest in it. I was happy to be home in a place with colors, shapes, and forms and lots of small mind. It was as though now that Meg had given up doing her charcoal drawing, she had put her creativity into making the apartment perfect, like a work of art we could live in with our cat, Phil.

  In a nonstop gush I told Meg all that had happened at the Zendo over the past seven days. She listened with rapt attention. She smiled, she laughed, and at times she laughed so hard I thought that, like Mom, she would wet her pants. I could tell she was happy to have her old storyteller back, and for a while I was happy to be telling stories, to be opening and pouring beers again after not having one for so long. And that old welcome fuzzy feeling returned, that beery fuzz that clouded all thoughts of mortality and creeping time.

  BEFORE I WENT to the Zendo it had never occurred to me to pay money to see people have sex. It had never occurred to me to go to a porn film, although they were beginning to be more and more popular at the time. Deep Throat was the rage, and Behind the Green Door—things like that. I simply wasn’t interested. But now that I was out of work, I was back on the streets walking again, and I found that I had become obsessed with women’s bodies. Most specifically, I was focused on asses, particularly asses that filled out faded jeans. I could follow a dungaree ass for blocks and blocks until I’d find myself lost in neighborhoods I’d never seen before. Then the dungaree ass would disappear into a doorway and I’d just stand there totally frustrated, looking for another dungaree ass to follow out of that neighborhood to another one.

  This was a major change in my life. I’d never experienced anything like this before, never; and I wasn’t sure if it was a sign that I was becoming a man or if it was a symptom of some sort of growing obsessive-compulsive condition.

  When I first moved to New York City in 1967 I had spent some time with a friend who had lived in the city for a long time. I considered him a pretty normal, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. By that I mean he was married and watched a lot of baseball on TV. He drank a few beers when he watched it. The rest of the time, when he wasn’t working as an actor, or wasn’t with his wife, or watching a ball game on TV, he was girl watching. It was impossible to take a walk with him without him stopping every few feet to ooh and aah and ogle some new woman. “Oh, my fuckin’ word, look at that piece,” he’d say. And here I’d been trying to talk to him about philosophical issues, the meaninglessness of life, the shortness of time. It never occurred to me to ogle women on the street. I don’t mean I was ignoring them or not noticing them so much as I was just taking them in as a part of the whole picture, along with men, children, trees, dogs, cars, and buildings; I rarely selected a fragment to fetishize in those days. And now I found myself in that boat, and I had no idea how I got into it, how to get out of it, or if I even wanted out. I was just walking around like a dog with his tongue hanging out. That was the way of the world for me then, and I tried not to judge it. I tried to be open.

  Asses led to more asses. I’d follow them anywhere. I felt biologically determined, like those cocks on the wall, the way they flew from cunt to cunt like bees flying from flower to flower. I was a walking penis with no mind. I would spy a young woman in dungarees on the subway and just lock onto her rear with my eyes. When she’d get off the subway at her stop, I would get off and follow her. I would follow that ass again until some door slammed in my face, leaving me standing there on the street looking for another one. Eventually I would find an ass that would lead me home to Meg.

  Soon it was not enough to see the asses clad in dungarees; I had to see them naked. Yes, nude. I had to see the way they were put together, the way they shook. I had to feel them. I was too shy, too embarrassed, too considerate really, to just stop women and ask them if they would, you know, take me inside and pull down their pants. Instead I discovered pornographic movies. I was not interested in the plot; I was interested only in the bare asses. I was just interested in seeing women naked. And as many as I possibly could see; so I’d go to the cheap porn films. I’d go to a theater on Eighth Avenue. It was called Eros II, and you could see four or five porn movies in the afternoon for a dollar ninety-nine.

  Like any drug, it decreased in its effect over time. At first I was instantly mesmerized and turned on by the sight of all those naked bodies doing all those crazy naked things. I would just stand there in the aisle of the theater with my mouth hanging open and my eyes glazed and transfixed. This hypnotic condition was not unfamiliar to me. I had read about it in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book instructs that as you die and leave your body, you must keep your eyes on the clear white light and must not look away, lest you see the image of a copulating couple and get drawn back, sucked back into the womb, trapped and reborn in yet another life. But I could not understand how a clear white light could be more attractive than an open womb.

  After my eyes adjusted to the movie theater and to those naked strangers doing it on a twenty-foot screen, I’d try to find a seat down front and away from everyone else. I preferred not to have other people’s heads in front of me, so that I could imagine it was all being shown just for me, not for the obsessive-compulsive businessmen on lunch breaks and bums and street people catching up on their sleep. I didn’t want to see them and I didn’t want to be seen.

  I was more than a little nervous about sitting down in the theater because I was sure that the businessmen were always slowly and silently working themselves off under their coats. As for me, I never masturbated in a porn theater. In fact I rarely even got an erection. I was all in my eyes. That’s where the stimulation was going on. I was in my eyes, memorizing the images that I was seeing so that I could replay them while I was having sex with Meg. It may have been lack of imagination on my part, a need to collect other people’s erotic images.

  Meg had no idea why I’d com
e in off the streets of New York so horny, but she didn’t question it. She had an absolutely fantastic ass, and she would leave her boots on for me. That was the only thing she didn’t take off, her brown Italian boots, her high boots with the zippers on the side.

  I’d never seen that in a movie. I saw this: Mother addressing daughter, “Gloria, your new flute teacher is just about to arrive. I’m going out for lunch with friends, then I’m going bowling, then I’m going shopping, and I won’t, and I mean will not, be back for hours and hours and hours, so don’t you get into any trouble, Gloria. You hear me? Don’t you get into any trouble while I’m gone. You have a nice flute lesson, you hear? Give me a kiss now. Goodbye, dear.” Mother exits; flute teacher arrives; then, “Hi, Mr. Flute Teacher, blah, blah, blah.” Two or three scales are played on the flute; then, “Let’s fuck.”

  After a while it got boring. You know, back shot of an asshole and tight scrotum pumping, pumping, so you got a chance to compare the size of your balls with his; a side shot of his long flesh shaft going in and out, in and out, accompanied by a generic sound track of moans and groans and a few select words like “Do it to me,” “Oh, it feels so good,” or “Don’t stop now.” Finally, there was the horrible perfunctory cum shot in which the man had to pull out and bring himself off on the woman’s belly, she pretending to love it and rub it into her flesh as though just feeling his warm cum was making her come.

  I could not break through. I could not feel it. I could not get to the other side of the screen and be in it—and that’s what I wanted. I wanted to feel what the sex I was seeing was like. I felt lonely, so lonely and outside. When I felt that way I’d flee the theater and try to fill myself with some other more wholesome images, if I could find them. That was rare, so I’d walk all the way home until I was exhausted and then would come on to Meg. I couldn’t believe that all of this, this obsession for porn films, had come from Zen meditation in the Poconos.

  Again, I longed for a way out and found it one afternoon at the Eros II. I don’t remember the plot. I’d really given up on plots at that point. What I remember is that extraordinary close-up of a very tanned long-legged woman with a fantastic manipulatable ass. She was being fucked by two very long-donged guys, and I’d never seen anything like that, not even on the walls of the Poconos Zendo. It was like a sexual circus act. She was totally filled up. One cock was all the way up into her ass, just wedged there pumping, and the other was pumping away in the more traditional place, and still to this day I don’t understand how their bodies were arranged, because it was such a close-up, all you were seeing was two pumping cocks and one sucking cunt. I don’t know how they timed it or what the director said to them or what the cue was, but both men pulled out and came at the same time, and the extraordinary thing was that she not only had her period but she also had a very bad case of diarrhea. So as the dicks unplugged from her and shot their white loads, an ocean of menstrual blood and hot brown watery shit mixed with semen gushed with such force that it actually sprayed the lens of the camera and turned the whole thing into an abstract Chinese landscape painting. The audience groaned. The bums woke up and moaned. I’d never seen such a responsive audience. They choked, they gasped, they got up and fled from the theater with more energy than they ever had coming in. For the first time the place was alive with vibrant energy. I stayed. I was mesmerized. If the smell was there I too would have retched and run. But I’d never seen such a beautiful work of art.

  I never went back to the porn films after that. I felt like something inside of me had been completed.

  THERE’S AN OLD Tantric idea that excessive indulgence in sex can take you to the other side and free you of a need for it. I thought I was going to have a chance to test it. I could see opportunity looming on the horizon in India, of all places. Yes, I was off to try to take a vacation in India, the place where Tantric sex began.

  Meg had the great idea to import Kashmiri rugs and sell them at one of the New York City flea markets. She had saved some money and borrowed enough money from her father to pay for two round-trip tickets and buy the rugs. I had saved money from unemployment and my furniture-moving job to live there, so we were off.

  One minute we were in New York City feeling like it was the center of the world and the next minute we were in Amsterdam, stopping over on the way to India, riding in from the Amsterdam airport, looking out the bus window at people skating on the frozen canals. It was a dark, cold, ancient Brueghel scene: small fires burning on the ice with lean, dark figures skating all around. When I could see it as a picture, I felt safe, but when I saw the people as living, individuated others, I felt undermined and depleted, uncentered and swept away, like that time on the beach with Mom at Jib’s out-of-the-blue homecoming when I first perceived that there was a world elsewhere. Now, riding into Amsterdam with Meg, seeing all those people skating, I had a deeply disturbing thought: Why me here—why can’t I be them out there? It was ludicrous, but at that moment I had the fantasy that there was a choice involved and I could have been some Dutch person skating out there instead of who I was. That feeling permeated my entire being, stole me away, reduced me to a frozen scarecrow, a heap of overstuffed winter clothing sitting beside Meg.

  We got off the bus and looked for a taxi to take us to the home of our friends Hans and Sonia as a cold wind swept down. I could not visualize the place from which that wind blew. In New York I would imagine Chicago and the sweeping plains, or Albany and Montreal; but now I couldn’t tell. I could imagine nothing of the landscape beyond that little patch of street on which we stood, all hunched in the cold. We were in Holland, the tulip capital of the world, and it was cold and gray and there was not a tulip in sight, but it didn’t matter because it was all new and beyond tulips.

  Hans and Sonia were a mime team. I had seen them doing a street mime in Washington Square a year before and offered to put them up for a few nights when they needed a place to stay. Meg thought it was real weird of me to drag them back to our apartment, because she knew how much I hated mime. But they weren’t so bad; at least they didn’t work in whiteface, and they seemed to be genuinely in love. They treated each other with mutual respect and concern, holding hands, touching each other in a nice simple way. We planned to spend the night with them and then fly out to Delhi on Air India the next afternoon.

  Sonia was pregnant and looked radiant. Hans was his old tall, dour self. We ate thick Dutch homemade pea soup with little hot dogs cut up in it and drank room-temperature beer. Everything tasted good. The feeling in my eyes and mouth was like a child’s. We were four kids all having our own little backyard party. The only reality that dimmed that fantasy was Sonia’s pregnant belly.

  Meg and I slept under an old cozy Dutch eiderdown in their attic room. I dropped off to the sound of the north wind blowing like it was coming from the cheeks and lips of a storybook Mr. North Wind cloud. The banging of old rusty iron shutters and the shivering of distant buildings turned my dreams into a great animated cartoon of winter.

  I was awake the whole next night straining on Air India to see anything, any glimpse of the wildly imagined landscape below. Meg slept while I pressed my nose to the window and saw a portion of my face, reflected, which I first mistook for Turkey or Saudi Arabia.

  Soon it was dawn, but we were too high up and over too many clouds to see anything of the earth below. Meg was still asleep. Almost everyone else was too, so I felt free to explore.

  I stretched my legs near the cockpit door, and with that haphazard boldness that often comes from lack of sleep I just reached down and turned the handle, stepping into the cockpit, where there were three Indian men all dressed in pilot uniforms. No one protested or acted surprised, as it all continued like a waking dream. Slowly adjusting to the intricate, innumerable dials and panels, I zeroed in on two of the pilots, who were carefully taping a newspaper comic strip across the front window with two rolls of Scotch tape. I could see nothing but funny papers. “What are you doing?” I cried. Both pilots turned t
oward me, their heads bobbing like strange dolls. “We are flying directly into the sun now; we are on automatic pilot.” I forced a smile and staggered back to my seat. There it was, spread below my window like an endless hot, colorless mud pie: India. I didn’t want the plane to land. I felt like I’d already seen too much.

  I was dazed in the airport. I followed Meg like a somnambulist. She turned and pointed and following her hand I was swept away into some other world. It was a strange family scene she pointed at—not a family waiting for a plane but a family engaged in communal repair work on a brick airport wall. They were mixing mortar in an old wooden trough. A slight man, dressed only in a loincloth, was squatting by the trough, playing with the mortar like a fascinated child. A woman dressed in a beautiful sari stood chipping at the brick with a little trowel. Surrounding them was what I took to be the rest of the family: an older woman in a sari pouring tea and two young girls holding babies in slings. The scene was slow and self-contained, like some strange piece of theater composed to usher travelers into the rhythms of ancient India. We watched and we sighed. We felt something together, like “Here we are at last.”

  Like the trip from the airport into Amsterdam, the ride into Delhi was confusing; but there was no time to reflect on it. We both held on for dear life as the cab careened through streets of chaos. I only had time for two thoughts: one, how Gandhi had ever imagined he could bring peace and order into such a place, and two, that I did not want to die here and that was what I felt was about to happen. Precarious, chaotic, whimsical anarchy is all I saw. Our driver leaned on the horn the whole way, which made a high-pitched, crazy, raspy, tinny sound as he wove from lane to lane, trying to avoid the huge cows that were standing docile in the road like stuffed museum pieces. People in the sweaty hundreds squatted by the edge of the road doing everything Western people usually do in the deepest privacy of their bathrooms. Motorcycles buzzed by with whole families balanced on them, Mom in her sari sitting sidesaddle behind smiling Dad, a baby in her arms, a child behind her, and another one balanced on the gas tank between Dad and the handlebars, and they were all smiling this crazy smile. It would not have surprised me to see one of them doing an Indian classical dance on Dad’s head. Big, steaming colored dump trucks roared by; on one of them we saw a man dressed in shorts riding balanced on the front fender, one hand holding the side of the hood up while his other he adjusted the carburetor, working the throttle while another man steered his truck through flower vendors, crazy people, happy people, dying people. The scent of jasmine, and the smell, the great smell of streets mixed with cheap diesel fumes. This was an overpopulated world, and it immediately brought up those old colonialist attitudes in me: There must be some order imposed here immediately! There are too many people in the world! Humankind is a virus that must be stopped!… I never sensed my father in me more—that constant, almost fascistic craving he had for order and control at all costs.