Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  From my window I could see, as if framed in a storybook, great clouds billow, give off streaks of sun, then fold in on themselves. They would grow black and spit rain on the old irregular glass panes as I lay there cozy, thinking of that rain splashing on giant white fields of cauliflower, fields that spread near Dutch dikes, and beyond, the gray North Sea rolling in its late-spring chop. I was empty at last, empty of desire, content for the first time in months. I was content to live only in my imagination. It was purer, safer, sweeter. I’d seen enough to remember for the rest of my life, and I wanted to stay there under that quilt in that little room, just remembering.

  Gradually I got better. I drank the mugs of homemade vegetable soup that Sonia brought up to me. As I got better I began to miss Meg a whole lot, and I tried to figure out when she would be passing through Amsterdam on her way to New York. I was sure she planned to spend twelve or fourteen days at that yoga school in Delhi, so I figured in twelve days’ time I would have all the incoming flights from India paged at the airport.

  On the third day of my recuperation I got curious about the books on the little shelf in my room. I pulled out a small paperback called The Grammar of Living, having no idea what a vulnerable state I was in, and how careful I should have been about what I filled my empty head with. Looking back on it now, I know it was the wrong book. I should have been reading my copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I should have even carried that with me. Yes, that’s why people carry Bibles with them: for when they get in dark places, places of temptation or sickness. Then they have a book to turn to, to guide their thoughts. Anyway, The Grammar of Living was filled with all these lusty, sexy sixties stories, told under the guise of teaching the reader how the nuclear family, with its accompanying Oedipal problems, had to be broken down and destroyed immediately, so we could all become free of guilt and experience liberating good sex. I lay there and swallowed it whole.

  This guy Cooper would tell about how he was just hanging out at the local antifamily commune in London, hanging out tripping on pure Sandoz LSD, happy just to be there with no longings or desire, and then came this knock on the door. I mean, it wasn’t even his door. It was just the door, because he was involved in this communal nonego, nonfamily door situation. So there was this knock, and there she was, this leggy Suzette, a long-torsoed, beautiful Frenchwoman from across the Channel. Without a word, the next thing Cooper knew, he was locked into some Kama Sutra Tantric pose with her—Cooper deep and hard into Suzette, and she with her long legs wrapped around him, swooning like a swan in blind lust. They were in the doorway just doing it in front of the whole commune, if they even cared, just doing it so the whole commune could observe and celebrate the end of the nuclear family. They were in what he called a deep sexual meditation, the unification of opposite poles, sex as a big France-and-England joy-juice spiritual thing. Pure sex with no words, no conditions, no apparent historical consequences, just dying to the moment.

  Those stories put me in an almost unnatural state of desire and lust. I was so taken in by this damn book that I forgot to realize that this guy, this Cooper, had to have taken the time to write it all down and to get it edited and to get it published, which most likely meant that he must have rewritten it a number of times; but all of this didn’t enter into my head then. I just kept seeing him as completely ecstatic in this state of ideal, pure, sanctioned, antifamily sex. I wanted some myself right away.

  As I lay there in bed I began to have a big stirring notion that I could find what I needed down at the Dam, the main square in Amsterdam, where all the hippies hung out. And to make it even more perfect, Hans and Sonia were going away to the country for the whole month of July and they offered me their apartment for free! I could have it, I could stay there and do anything I wanted. I could smoke hash all day, or drink, or take LSD or read whatever books I wanted or indulge in Tantric sex.

  I put down that damn provocative book and lay there in bed having elaborate fantasies of what I was going to do. I was going to pick up a young, dark, foreign woman—an Italian hippie who spoke no English, just enough for her to understand what I needed. I’d get her back to my little cozy Dutch apartment and get her in Tantric poses all over the apartment. It was about to become my new Garden of Eden. We would do it in the window, on the table, on the stairs, sliding down the banister in the open doorway and out onto the street. This was like a new fever, a fever in my brain.

  I told Hans that I’d like to go down to just sort of look at the Dam, you know, from a distance. “You know,” I said, “I’ll take a nice little walk through Vondel Park, and then head on down to the Dam.”

  Hans said, “Well, please take my bike.”

  And I did. I took Hans’s big black Mary Poppins bike and I had that sickening, dizzy freedom feeling yet again. I was wobbling all over on that bike, the wind blowing in my hair. I felt free and alive, and God what a scary place it was, what a wobbly, scary place. It was as though I suddenly found myself on a high wire doing a tightrope act without having had any practice, without any idea how I had gotten out there. I was in this scary, risky place that I felt could collapse at any moment into that dark, soft, destructive side of pleasure—the pain that feels so good, the masochism—or I could opt for the joyous, humorous side, which I really knew nothing about and had a feeling Mr. Tantric Cooper didn’t, either.

  The Dam was jammed with all sorts of hippies, hanging out, playing wooden flutes, dealing dope, selling their used VW buses. Everyone looked so fucking great, so beautiful, in their shaggy confidence, and so together, stoned and part of something that was beyond me. What was worse, no one even noticed me. No one noticed my incredible new skinny fresh-out-of-India body. No one noticed me in my raw-silk Nehru jacket riding high on my magic Mary Poppins bike. No one noticed me as I got off my bike and stood at the edge of it all, like a lame boy longingly gazing in at some glorious schoolyard playground at recess.

  I thought maybe I should just go and have a beer and think all this over some more, go and make a few notes on the back of a napkin about what I just saw and try to put the puzzle together again. I could always come back to the Dam and pick someone up in a few hours.

  But I was tortured by this new gnawing dark thought that this had been the history of my life: retreat. I’d never gone after what I wanted, because I’d never trusted that what I wanted was what I wanted. Everything always seemed like an illusion covering over another illusion, layers and layers of it.

  I went to a bar for a beer anyway. At last back to the hops! The river of forgetfulness, I thought as I took my first slow sip. I knew I liked hops better than hash, because hops were grown in cooler climates and helped diffuse the flames of lust that were so often brought on by marijuana or hashish. Oh God, that wonderful Dutch beer was relaxing and smooth! But as soon as I’d get relaxed, all the ten thousand things would start entering my head again, the temptations that came like those wild and crazy birds flying at me, all those shoulds and woulds and coulds, which started now like an infernal engine in my head: shoulda-woulda-coulda. Maybe I should go to Bali, I thought, or maybe I would or could take a train down to Greece. Maybe I should go to Ireland. Then I’d order another beer to try to quench what now seemed like endless desire spinning in my head like a giant wheel of fortune. I sat there in that overripe place of desire and expectation, poised and teetering on the edge of a life not yet lived.

  I ordered another big pint of slow, thick beer as Bali came back to my mind and then passed like those ever-changing Amsterdam clouds. I didn’t even know what day it was now and I didn’t care. I loved the lostness.

  And so the days went. I would wake in my attic room, go downstairs and have sweet rolls and strong Dutch coffee with Hans and Sonia, then I’d play a little with Baby Willie. I’d talk obsessively of Bali. I think I was hoping that Hans or Sonia might tell me no, that was not the place to go. Although neither of them had ever been to Bali, they did have friends who had gone and reported back that it was very beautiful, that it was
very, very beautiful. I would get very anxious, not wanting to think that I would be one who would flee from all that beauty to an ugly summer in New York City. I wanted to believe that I was one who, if he had the choice, would opt for beauty. What would be the sense of going home? I asked myself. This would set me off and I’d begin to think of that other home, not New York or the bookstore in New Paltz, but my first home in Rhode Island, and how shortly after I returned there would be the great celebration—the Fourth of July, the big American bicentennial—and there would be the parade in Bristol. I could imagine Meg and me at the parade, holding hands, smiling and waving at the red fire trucks and the Bristol Drum and Bugle Corps. I could imagine us eating cold salmon and green peas with Dad and my stepmother, Babs, next to their blue swimming pool on the Fourth of July, and I wanted it all. I wanted to be there as well. I craved to be this little ubiquitous god. I couldn’t stand to give up something for anything else. I wanted to be an endless, sensuous, conscious wind that blew here and there and everywhere. I didn’t have any idea at the time that I was designing my own nervous breakdown.

  I was on the brink of creating the very condition I’d seen take Mom down. It never occurred to me that by not making a choice, I was about to be acted upon. I was trying to make my life stand still by taking no action, or by making stabs at action, little tentative stabs that were never completed. I was there, flying high in Amsterdam, flying high in this new lithe boy freedom unaware that I was soon to be shot down to earth in the rudest of ways.

  After I finished my Dutch breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls, I would play at making a decision and say to Hans and Sonia, “Well, I hate to say goodbye, but I’ve decided to take the two-o’clock flight back to New York City.” Because I had never unpacked my bags from India, I was always ready to go. After making my announcement, I’d go out for a last farewell look at that quaint and cozy city. But I would always take just one more peek into the window of the travel agency around the corner, see that poster of Bali, and get swept away all over again, the sound of the sea crashing in my ears. It was as though I thought I could walk into the poster like Alice through the looking glass. I’d begin to treat it like a real place. After coming out of the poster I would go inside the agency to talk with the travel agent, hoping all the time that he would tell me that this was not the right time to go to Bali because it was the rainy season or something like that. But he always said, “Oh, you must go to Bali. It’s temperate there. It’s never really hot. It’s always perfect and very beautiful any time of the year.”

  It turned out the agent was from Bali and had moved to Amsterdam in 1941, the year I was born. A coincidence like this no longer surprised me. I saw it as a sign that came from I knew not where, and it was my job to interpret it in order to get to the right place—as though there were some right fixed place, some safe harbor waiting somewhere to receive me. Did the sign mean that because I was born in 1941 I should now go to Bali to be reborn in 1976? Or was it a sign that I would be unborn—that is, die—if I went there? All the time I was thinking these things I was vaguely aware of how my regular old neurosis was edging its way toward full-blown psychosis; yet I still had faith in the signs, which never came out all that clear. I’d change my mind about flying to New York and go back to Hans and Soma’s. When I got there I would call the airline to cancel my reservation. They were always very polite and would always say, “Yes, Mr. North, anything you want. You have an open ticket. You can fly to New York anytime in the next year.”

  It became a routine: calling each morning right after breakfast to reserve a seat for the afternoon flight to New York, going out for a farewell walk and a few lunchtime beers, and then coming back and canceling again. After canceling I’d slip into the deep fantasy of what the KLM flight-information and reservations lady must be thinking about Mr. North. Was she thinking I was doing hot diamond deals? Was I having a wild affair? This would be followed by guilt and anxiety that I was not living up to the fantasies that I was having about her fantasy about me.

  Eventually I developed a new plan—that I would get work in one of those live sex shows in the red-light district of Amsterdam and have a sort of guaranteed, sanctioned, and remunerative sexual activity. I’d get on Hans’s big black Mary Poppins bike, and with great purpose and direction, not weaving or wobbling anymore, I would ride down into the red light district at midday, before the sex shows were open to the public, and make my rounds. I’d go to each sex show and make a rather formal request to the manager. To my amazement, they all treated me with respect and credulity. They were not unlike the flight-information and reservations lady. They told me that I would have to do three shows a night with a female partner and the shows would consist of some dancing, a lot of stripping, and then: public sexual intercourse. They said I didn’t have to come three times a night, but I should be able to get erect and make a full-blown, obvious vaginal penetration in public. It struck me as a wonderful way to make money and have a good time. Like the New Leftists say, it would be true erogenous work; all the senses would be involved, and furthermore, the porn-show managers said they were open to me creating my own show. But (and here was the big, show-stopping “but”) I had to have a female partner. They did not supply the female partners. The first person that came to mind was the KLM Royal Dutch flight-information and reservations woman. But somehow I knew that was just a fantasy and out of the question.

  Now I had a reason to go down to the Dam again. I would go to the Dam and try to find a partner. I was sure I could, but first I needed my lunchtime beers, and after two of them I was thinking of Bali again. I no longer had a will. I was being swept away by an endless succession of fantasy whims. My will had been eaten away, and I was blowing around like some weird wind.

  The days came and went. Sleep in my little attic room was fitful and filled with strange dreams. My largest span of concentration was little more than five or six minutes. Then one fateful Saturday, while waiting for Bali or my live sex show partner to appear, I made the mistake—or perhaps it wasn’t a mistake, who can really say?—that completed my division of self.

  I was out for a walk and I found that I was standing outside The Tubs, the infamous gay baths of Amsterdam. I’d never seen the place before; I’d only heard of it. Without thinking I just walked right in. I’d never been in a gay bathhouse, and I was very curious just to have an anonymous look around. As I paid my four guilders, put my clothes in a locker, and walked naked into those steamy tubs, I thought, Curiosity may have killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. I hadn’t realized that my time in India had feminized me. By that I mean it had activated a very passive, languid, and beautiful side of myself. It had always been there but India brought it to the surface.

  I don’t have to tell you that everyone is bisexual. That’s an old story. It’s just a whole lot easier to live in the world if you make a choice to go one way or the other. Trying to go both ways tears most people apart. I know because I got torn.

  As soon as I walked in, I found myself surrounded by all this very active and aggressive European male energy, a whole lot of which got aimed at me. I didn’t feel aggressive at all. I felt extremely passive, and I must have been giving off that vibe in a big way because guys kept coming on to me, and I was surprised to find I liked it. Before I went in there I was feeling that old lonely, disappearing feeling again. But I had arrived in the eyes of all these men. I was no longer looking; I was being looked at. This was the way I thought a woman must feel being eroticized by the eyes of her lover. I could feel the energy of eyes all over me. Being looked at made me alive and present: alive in proportion to the number of eyes that were gazing at me. My whole body was tingling as those eye beams reified it.

  Not only were these guys looking, or “cruising,” but they were also asking me to go upstairs with them. I would answer with these little throwaways like “Not now,” “Maybe later,” or “I’m just looking.”

  After a while, a young blond guy came up to me and in a ve
ry attractive British accent asked me if I would please go upstairs with him. He was very good-looking and about twenty-two years old, but he didn’t seem to want me enough to just take me. He was too polite in that British way, with his little “please.” If I was going to have any sort of sex (and I had no idea what that would be at that point), I did not want it to be polite. I wanted it as raw as that whole place felt—big and juicy and raw, like some giant overripe fruit. At the same time I was curious to see what was going on upstairs, so I said “Okay,” and then he asked me to stay where I was because he had to go to the loo, which I thought was weird because the whole place felt like one big loo, but he said he had to go and he’d be right back. Well, just the thought of him and his male biology doing something human in the bathroom was a turn-off, but I stood there waiting, and no sooner did I see his naked body get swallowed up by all those others than I felt a tug on my right arm, which turned into a caveman yank, and I was off for the upstairs, being dragged now by a new stranger. He took me—oh, how he did take me. And this too, like the feeling of all those eyes, was a totally new sensation.

  This strange naked guy pulled my skinny nude body upstairs, which was a darker dream version of the downstairs. I felt like Eurydice being led by Orpheus out from the underworld. We were in a long corridor with small chambers closed off by sinister black rubber curtains. There was very little light, and the whole place was filled with gruntings and moanings and the strangest of primordial smells. I’d never quite smelled anything like it before. It reminded me, and yet didn’t remind me. It was not a bad smell, not like the smell of raw sewage or shit, but more like a smell of seaweed and algae rotting at the bottom of a pond. It was like the smell of flora and fauna mixed with mud and fresh horse plops. It was not the sweet-fishy, fresh-cheesy smell of heterosex, but a deeper, darker sump-pump smell of men probing men in the most forbidden ways.