Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  Then one day, while shouting and groaning my way up West Broadway to buy some chicken hearts at the Grand Union, I ran into an old friend who asked me how I was. I just turned to her and said, “Crazy! I’m crazy!” and then I went on shouting my way up the street. Well, this friend, Helen, who was a dancer and into all sorts of New Age diets and healing stuff like that, called Meg and suggested that I take a glucose tolerance test to find out if I was hypoglycemic. “Hypo what?” I groaned. “I never heard of such a thing.” Meg explained that it was a condition of low blood sugar and could make people act crazy. Meg tried to get me to go for the test, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stay awake long enough to go through it. It was supposed to be something like six hours long, so I kept putting it off. I had good intentions. I wanted to take the test, but I kept falling asleep before I could get out of the house.

  Other friends also tried to be helpful and gave me books to read about depression, but I got depressed reading them or fell asleep with them over my face. I remember one called From Sad to Glad, which was just the right weight and size to keep cracked over my face while I slept. The weight and smell of that book were very comforting.

  The content, however, was not. I was able to get up to page 9, where the author writes, “There are a host of symptoms that help us identify the affliction. Not all of these symptoms are found in every case, but together they make up a classic syndrome. Please note that it is unusual for all of them to be present in a particular case.” And then came the horrible list:

  1. Reduced enjoyment and pleasure

  2. Poor concentration

  3. Fatigue

  4. Insomnia

  5. Remorse

  6. Guilt

  7. Indecision

  8. Financial concern

  9. Reduced sexual activity

  10. Decreased love and affection

  11. General loss of interest

  12. Anxiety

  13. Irritability

  14. Suicidal thoughts

  15. Unusual thoughts and urges

  16. Concern about dying

  To my horror I realized that I had every symptom but insomnia. I had the classic syndrome. I was the classic syndrome, and recognizing that, I suddenly experienced fifteen out of sixteen symptoms and passed out again on the couch with From Sad to Glad over my face, glaring at Meg all day like some insane advertisement.

  Things were definitely not going well, and I think the only reason I didn’t try to kill myself was that I simply was not awake long enough to do it. I also knew, somewhere in the back of my addled, panicked mind, that I was very lucky to have Meg as a nurse and that she cared for me deeply and was watching over me as I slept. It was in her eyes that I continued to exist.

  With Meg’s help, I was finally able to stay awake long enough to take that dreadful glucose tolerance test, and it showed that I was extremely hypoglycemic. This led me into the megavitamin therapy program at the Fryer Research Center, where I went once a week for giant syringe doses of vitamin B complex and niacin. I also had to take large doses of liquid vitamin B and liquid niacin at home. I was told to immediately give up all sugar, alcohol, and caffeine, which was an enormous shock to my already depressed system. I was put on a very strict, very boring protein diet. I had to eat five small protein meals a day in order to keep my blood sugar stable and stop my body’s overproduction of adrenaline, which had been going off like a fire alarm ever since India. This, the doctors told me, had kept me in my perpetual hyper state, which had finally reversed itself into all that sleeping.

  When I ran out of ideas for protein and got bored with fish, eggs, and meat (no milk because of lactose), I resorted to swigging from a plastic bottle of flavored animal collagen (melted intestine), which came in three flavors: orange, cherry, and grapefruit. It was sweetened with saccharine and tasted horrid, but it did the trick; it stabilized my blood sugar, though in the most unpleasurable way. I was now able to stay awake long enough to get uptown to see my new therapist, and that was important. I was even able to stay awake through the whole session.

  A friend of Barney’s had told me about a good therapist who worked on what they call a sliding scale, and said he might see me for only thirty dollars a session, which, unfortunately, was not sliding enough for me. Thirty dollars a session was an enormous amount considering I had no money coming in. Anyway, I’d talked with Dad about it and was amazed when he offered to pay for half of it. So by November of 1976 I was on my way to some sort of slow recovery—but recovery from what I was still not sure.

  HARRY BRILLSTEIN was a psychiatrist and not just a psychotherapist. He was able to prescribe tranquilizers for me, and he did that the first day I saw him. Harry worked in a kind of classic Freudian mode. He never spoke first. He always waited for me to speak, and if I didn’t, we would go the whole session in a tense, silent standoff, which he would usually end by saying, “Well, I’m afraid our time is up. I’ll see you next week, Brewster.” After a while Harry tried to get me to come in twice a week, which I thought was odd because I wasn’t doing all that much talking. I told him I couldn’t afford twice a week, because I was also paying for my megavitamin therapy sessions. When I told Harry that, he said something that made me really distrust him and just lump him in with the whole disgusting crowd of drug and medicine men, like the guy on the admissions desk at Bellevue. Harry said, “Why are you taking all those vitamins, Brewster? Is it because you’re afraid of growing old?”

  I had the feeling that Harry was probably a good man, and was only saying those stupid manipulative things to provoke me; and I was curious to see who he really was under that damned neutral mask. One day I came into his office and saw a book on his desk. I wondered what he was reading, so I just went over and tried to take a peek at the title. Harry picked the book up, turned it over, and slammed it down on his desk. Then he just stared at me with that damned neutral stare. I didn’t say a word. I thought it was weird. I just sat down and stared back at him. I’d be damned if I was going to give in to his methods of provocation.

  Now, as I said before, this psychotherapy was coupled with megavitamin therapy, and my new light protein diet, and slowly it all began to come together and make me feel better. Slowly my horizons broadened beyond “Honeymooners” reruns; and toward the end of October I had a minor breakthrough with Harry.

  It all happened one day in therapy when I was telling one of many stories about my family and how my brothers and I had longed for some sort of mystical transformation in my father. It was not so much that we wanted him to convert to Christian Science and be happy with Mom but, rather, we all wanted Dad to simply cop to the fact that there were forces larger than himself at work in the world, forces outside rational thought. In short, I think we all longed to blow Dad’s mind. One night Coleman succeeded. I was in my bed and only heard it. I didn’t see it, but I heard it, and I couldn’t believe what I heard. I heard Dad in all sobriety crying out to Mom, “Katherine—Katherine, come quick! My slippers are flying! My slippers are flying!” I jumped up and ran in to witness what sounded like a great suburban miracle, but when I got to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, the miracle had turned into a typical family fight. Dad was scolding Coleman for what he called his “weird behavior,” and Mom was laughing in the bathroom doorway, laughing at Dad’s confused rage. As usual she was laughing so hard she was wetting her pants, or in this case her nightgown.

  When everything had calmed down and Dad was back in bed grumbling and pouting and trying to tune his radio into some relaxing mood Muzak, Mom took me into the bathroom and told me the story of the slippers. It seems that Coleman, who was then about fifteen years old, had crawled under Dad’s bed some time before Dad came upstairs and just waited there. Every night Dad would go to his bed, usually in his blue pajamas and mahogany-colored L. L. Bean slippers. He’d arrange his slippers just so at the foot of the bed and then climb in to listen to his Muzak. But this particular night, Coleman reached out from under Dad’s bed and tossed both of his sli
ppers straight up into the air with such strength that they hit the ceiling, and Dad cried out, “Katherine, come quick! My slippers are flying! My slippers are flying!” And for just a few split seconds, Coleman was able, to his eternal satisfaction, to witness Dad as a true believer.

  Well, when I told this story to Harry, that whole neutral mask of his dissolved into laughter, and I felt good for the first time in his presence. I felt a kind of connection to my history. At last I felt Harry open up and let me in.

  IT WAS a few sessions after he laughed that, in some simple pop-psychology way, I had an epiphany with Harry. I understood that the guilt I felt running away to the Alamo Theatre when Mom was in the throes of her nervous breakdown had inhibited and prevented me from fighting for the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich in that production of The Sea Gull years ago. I did not fight for what I wanted, and in a way I had been as depressed about that as I had been about Mom’s suicide ever since. I understood that I couldn’t bring Mom back from the dead, but I could perform The Sea Gull in my own way, and put some part of my history in order so that I could go on. I had flown the nest to become a successful actor and I had failed, and now I had to go back and succeed on my own terms. I had slipped into a postadolescent passive state of unproductive fantasy, which I’d not been able to come out of for years. I knew I had to stage my own version of The Sea Gull, and only when I did that would I be cured. Only now I decided to play not just the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich but all the other roles as well.

  This decision was influenced by readings I’d done of Gestalt concepts about dreams in which the dreamer is an aspect of all the characters in his dream. I had had a very powerful dream at that time about Meg being pregnant, and in this dream Meg and I were both standing naked and her belly was very full, and I was standing there with my hand on her belly and I was all three of us. I was me and I was Meg and I was the child in her. I knew, too, that this dream meant I was to play all the characters in The Sea Gull and that Meg would direct it and we would be pregnant together with this play. I know this may sound like a big leap to you, but believe me, in my new clear megavitamin mind I was sure that I had to be directed by Meg in our experimental version of The Sea Gull to clear myself of the past.

  So that was the next item on my agenda. I knew that I would be the actor and Meg would be the director. It was clear. Barney had an empty space in the back of his loft that he let us work in. I began by making a tape recording of the whole play, in which I read all the roles. Then I played the recording back through speakers set up around the loft. At one end of the loft I hung some dark curtains, so it was clear that I was backstage peeking out. The only props I had were a small tree that looked quite large when it was set in the loft and a whole bunch of old china plates and flatware that Meg and I had picked up at the Salvation Army. For a costume I had black pants, work boots, a sort of Russian peasant shirt, and a large faded-yellow stuffed sea gull that Meg and I had found in a taxidermy shop on the Lower East Side. I hung that around my neck. Then what I did mainly was move around the loft space, telling Meg, who acted as my audience, my personal history with that play. I told her what I remembered of the production at the Alamo Theatre. I demonstrated how I made the naturalistic party sounds with the dishes and flatware. I took a number of Konstantin’s speeches and memorized them and then in a direct-address form spoke them out, interrupting them at different points to explain why I found it difficult to say certain lines in a truthful and honest way. I talked about how the translation felt antiquated and foolish to me at times. I told the story about eating the soybeans and how I gassed that carload of people, and about Mom’s nervous breakdown, and about how a whole lot of young people were trying to get me to take LSD and go to Houston’s first be-in. I told about all the offstage lives of the different actors and how the woman who played Nina would never go out of her apartment, and how the man who played Trigorin was having an affair with a wealthy art dealer in Houston, and how the actress who played Arkadina was knocked out by an overstrenuous character actor when their two heads bumped while making drunken love. Oh, it was a shameless production I was doing. It was as though I was doing a giant, scandalous, gossipy audition for the audience. I’d have to call it creative gossip. I even created a scene that never happened, where I at last confronted the director of the play and demanded that I have the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich.

  It was definitely a deconstruction. For instance, I would focus on the speech Konstantin makes to his mother just days after he has tried to shoot himself in the head. His mother is sort of infantilizing him as she changes his head bandage. She says, “You won’t play about with a gun again when I’m away, will you?” And Konstantin replies, “No, Mama. That was a moment of mad despair, when I had no control over myself. It won’t happen again.” Then there is a stage direction—“kisses her hands”—and Konstantin goes on to say, “You’ve got magic hands.” And that was where I’d take my subtextual associative break and go into stories about my mom and her hands and how she touched me in two different specific ways: one to wash my uncircumcised penis when I was too young to do it myself, and the other to give me a back rub to put me to sleep. I followed that with a story of how at a family picnic just before I left for Houston, and just before Mom killed herself, I had seen Mom’s hands as suddenly very old. I had said, “Mom, your hands look so very old.” Then I went on to tell my “audience” how I knew I’d said it to hurt her as soon as it was out of my mouth. I just let these associations go on like that, at last ending up with the story of how when I once knocked myself out (hyperventilating) and burned my arm on a radiator, it was Dad and not Mom who changed my bandage every night. After I got all of this stuff out, I’d go back and say the speech. I’d say Konstantin’s speech, and both Meg and I thought it would then have new meaning. That’s what Meg said anyway, and I trusted her. She said there will certainly be people who will walk out on this production, this deconstruction of The Sea Gull, but there will also be people who come with a knowledge of the play who will appreciate it even more. Meg said we just had to look at it as a new kind of personal translation. And I agreed.

  In the end, our production of The Sea Gull was a mad deconstruction, a rambling hodgepodge of mixed emotion, straightforward acting, and a lot of direct autobiographical address. Meg in her own ingenious ordering way had been able to help me frame it and put it all together. At first, only friends came to see it. Then, when the word of mouth was good, strangers came. The play—or “piece,” as we called it—was entitled A Personal History of “The Sea Gull,” and it even got a favorable review in one of the downtown papers which read something like, “In this small downtown loft production, Brewster North explores the backside of a misguided Sea Gull in Texas.” And the headline over that read, “Misadventures of Big Bird.” It was, if nothing else, an interesting review, and it brought people in.

  My life was suddenly coming together in an odd way. Meg and I were running this little theater in the back of Barney’s loft and even pulling in enough money to pay half of Barney’s rent. People were coming to see our crazy little play, and on those nights life had meaning. The rest of the time was spent mostly waiting to put on the play. It was as though Meg and I only lived for our newfound art. But as I got better at it, I began to want my life to be as full as the play, only I had no idea how to make it that way. The fullness only existed in fantasy, and the fantasy kept growing in what was left of my private mind. The fantasy was about me living somewhere on the West Coast, perhaps San Francisco or a small town north of there, with a wife and children in some very together community. I kept seeing myself as this man I made up. Brewster North would act the role of some man actually living his life.

  I’D NOT HAD any drinks or drugs for several months and I was getting better, but my newfound health was almost boring. I’d wake up at six in the morning and not know what to do with all my energy, so I’d get up and go for an excessively speedy walk around Washington Square Park. I think I was one of the
first speed walkers in my neighborhood. And it was on those walks that I’d be taken over by my fantasy of running away to the West Coast and becoming this new man. I had a very clear image of the woman I would meet and marry there. She was slim and had a boyish, athletic body and an absolutely extraordinary ass. She was beautiful, young, innocently sensual and wanted nothing more than to live in the present. She was intelligent enough to know that the United States of America was no longer united, and that it was rapidly going under, but she would also know that raising a family in a small-town community was our only salvation. We’d live in a tract house there and feel that we were blessed to be able to live out our days in a kind of sweet and sober peripheral harmony that could and would be possible, provided that we did not expose ourselves to too much information, and that we read only good old classics like David Copperfield, Treasure Island, and the Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. We would have three children and no TV. I would get into my body and learn how to wind-surf, roller-skate, and hang-glide, and I would be able to do it all without a witness. I would at last live a witnessless life, in the present, not even asking or caring for God to see me. I would have the courage to disappear and drown in the eternal now. I would teach school for a living and on weekends I’d bike with my wife and kids and we’d explore the giant redwoods. As I was speed-walking around Washington Square in those early New York mornings, this fantasy would become as vivid as a movie. I was sure I had to have a wife and family in a small American community or I’d destroy myself. Acting The Sea Gull out was no longer enough. I wanted my whole life to be a successful play. I wanted to be “on” all the time.