Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  I admit it occurred to me that pursuing my fantasy might be self-destructive, and that self-destruction was part of my construction. It was like my bite, or the arches in my feet; it was built-in.

  In spite of all my West Coast family fantasies, when I saw Sherry hanging out in her earnestly flirtatious way after a performance of A Personal History of “The Sea Gull,” I sensed that my life was headed toward a new uncontrolled, massive addiction. My body was craving a new drug, and I was about to find out what that new drug was. It was sex.

  It wasn’t as though Meg and I didn’t have a good sex life. We had a nice, balanced, comfortable one, but whenever I got balanced and comfortable, some little demon in me always rose up and pushed me over the edge.

  Sherry was a theater student at Juilliard, and was nicely set up, I guess because there was money in the family, in a sweet little studio apartment on West Sixteenth Street. She gave me her address after The Sea Gull. She invited me for afternoon herbal tea. I hated herbal tea, but I was shaking all over at her invitation. I was shaking all over when she slipped me her address. It was such an obvious seduction. I could tell she wanted me as much as I wanted her, and that made good sense. I rang her bell at noon the following day. Her apartment was white, simple, and spare. It was a kind of neutral room, a place to work things out. It didn’t reflect too much of her. It didn’t overwhelm me with the details of real life. I had a feeling it would be all very safe and easy with Sherry, an exercise in pure, selfish pleasure. I hoped I was about to have that unbridled sex I’d searched for so hard in India. I hoped that Sherry was in a similar frame of mind.

  On that first hot afternoon, we made the beast with two backs six sweating, ripping times. Our bodies flew together and stuck. Nothing I did seemed to embarrass her, although the sound of our bodies stuck together like two toilet plungers almost did me in. I must admit I blushed.

  I did everything that first hot afternoon. I turned her upside down like an ice cream cone and tasted all her flavors, and she complied and sighed and cried. I shocked myself with the animal sounds that were coming out of me. They were foreign to my old Puritan ears. God, I thought, I was coming to real raw sex at such a late age. I was supposed to be nineteen when I was doing this. Well, better late than never.

  We grunted and we groaned together and then we slumbered for a while, to awake only to grunt and groan again. These afternoon sex rituals quickly became a habit, a real big habit. I was hooked and so was Sherry. Sherry was hooked to the point of rescheduling all of her classes at Juilliard around our afternoon events. But strangely enough, my visits to Sherry did not cut down on my sex drive with Meg. It was as if my new diet had given me a potency that I never thought possible before. Sherry was Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and Meg was randomly on the days in-between. It was as though I was re-creating Poona on my own terms.

  And on the weekends I went on performing our deconstruction of A Personal History of “The Sea Gull,” which was playing to evergrowing audiences. Most nights were sold out, which wasn’t saying a whole lot since we could only seat thirty, but still, both Meg and I were impressed. In short, my life seemed to be filling up.

  I had found at last a precarious web of structure that was not only getting me through but helping me make a comeback. I was working with Meg on our Sea Gull, doing my megavitamin therapy and my regular psychotherapy, and best of all, balling with Sherry. That’s what Sherry called sex—“balling.” I got real turned on the first time she said the word. I thought, if Sherry called making love balling, then she was probably tough. That’s what I thought. She was real tough and wouldn’t go to pieces when I left her, because all the time I was balling with her I was thinking of leaving her. And, whenever I thought of leaving her, it made me want to do it to her more. It made it feel better. It always made it feel right on the edge of death, pretending that this was the end, this was the last time. I had this idea that I was going to run away soon, run away from “it,” run away from it all, and step into that perfect West Coast situation of love that was not about human obfuscation and obsession.

  Meg was very happy working with me in our new creative relationship. She had no idea about my discreet, steamy affair with Sherry. I think Harry Brillstein was the only one that knew, and I do remember him saying something like “Well, Brewster, are you thinking of trading one body in for another, is that it? Is that what you’re after, Brewster?” Harry thought I was dealing in bodies. I thought what I was doing shouldn’t be judged.

  I got more and more focused on my performance in The Sea Gull, and when I was performing I was completely present. I never thought about the past or the future. The only other time that kind of presence took over was in Sherry’s perfect sex den.

  But in between these two events that damn shadow would fall again, all the real stuff, the constant condition of imperfection, and worse: the terrifying consciousness of NOTHING—the constant mind-boggling awareness of how we come from nothing and return to nothing. That awareness would lead me toward great performances in our little loft theater and equally great performances in bed with Sherry.

  Meg was truly dedicated to helping me make inspired art. She would watch every performance of A Personal History of “The Sea Gull” and give me notes the following day, and the next night would often be better because of her notes. We were beginning to understand how to shape our strange and beautiful idiosyncratic theater form. There was nothing else around like it, and it wasn’t dependent on reviews or outside responses as much as it was a necessary act to go through a personal ritual expressing publicly what we couldn’t express between ourselves. It brought us to a full sense of satisfaction, but for whatever reasons it did not spread to the bed. The more innovative and experimental our work became, the more traditional and perfunctory our sex life became; and in reaction to that, the more experimental my sex life with Sherry became.

  Sex with Sherry was no longer confined to bed. I would do it to her while she was cooking, while she was eating, while she was talking to her mother on the telephone on Sundays. We never made it in the streets, but we got pretty close by doing it fully lit at night with all the shades up. We had a regular little audience, all framed in various windows across the way. It was as though Sherry’s white apartment were a giant canvas and our bodies were the paint. We were turning into great, gross, living Francis Bacon paintings.

  Sherry’s little Sunday-afternoon phone calls to her mother down in Florida were remarkable. These were the calls in which she would suck me and talk to her mother at the same time. She would suck on me while she listened to her mother, and take my cock out of her mouth just long enough to answer back or make a brief comment. Luckily for me, her mother was a big talker. And somewhere toward the end of the conversation I would have some new, strange, never-before-dreamed-of climax. It was as though Sherry and I were equals in our tendencies toward exhibitionism. We had a sort of unspoken sexual charm together. If I hadn’t already worked through my fantasies of acting in porn films, I would surely have found a perfect porn partner in Sherry.

  By now I was thinking of myself as a Performance Artist, the new prestigious, downtown term that, although it didn’t bring in money, certainly allowed for some very romantic and bohemian life-styles. I’d meet Sherry two hours a day three days a week, and for those two solid hours we would drown in each other. We would get lost in the fingering, the endless exploring, the sucking and fucking and the tasting of each other’s parts. We didn’t use drugs; we didn’t need drugs. We were each other’s drugs. We only went outside together once, as I remember, and that’s when Sherry wanted to work out her new fantasy with rubber Halloween masks. She wanted to stage her own little porn show. Her mother had given her a new video camera, and Sherry wanted to have some fun with it. She wanted the two of us to go out and buy Halloween masks that we would wear while we were fucking in front of the video camera. It was her idea; she was only twenty-two years old, so I had to give her credit. I was amazed, shocked, and wondered what the
hell was going on with these young people, but I went along with it, feeling it was good to get out on a nice fall day for a change, convincing myself I was getting a little bored with in-house sex, you know, stuff like that. Anyway, we went out to Forty-fifth Street and Broadway to a store that sold rubber masks. There were all sorts of masks: a Nixon mask, a Khrushchev mask, and a Kissinger mask, a Snow White and a Lassie mask, and a traditional, classic Frankenstein, all made from very realistic rubber molds. Well, as soon as I got there I told Sherry I wanted to buy the Nixon mask. And she said, “No way! It would never work.” So I ended up with the Frankenstein mask and a pig mask, I mean a mask that really looked like a pig’s head. We both had a deep, gut turn-on response to the pig mask. We got a feeling it would really work. Sherry took her time and picked out a Lassie mask and a lovely Snow White mask. I wanted to rape Snow White on the spot. And as we stood there, Sherry paying for it all, we both knew in our genitals that the Lassie and the pig would just do wonders together, wonders.

  So when we got home, Sherry set up her new video camera, laughing and singing; she set it up on a tripod and we, as they say, went to town. We balled and balled, we laughed and we balled. It was ridiculous—all the different combinations: Frankenstein meets Lassie; Snow White meets the pig; Lassie and the pig. It was a lovely afternoon.

  I have to say making our own homemade sex video was very exciting. It was as exciting as putting on A Personal History of “The Sea Gull.” As much as Sea Gull gave me a personal identity, Lassie and the pig stole it all away and delivered me back to my body. The only thing that was missing was someone on the video camera to do close-ups, but neither of us had any idea who might do that job, so we were satisfied with the conventional side shot. After a while we got more elaborate and set the camera up closer, to shoot us at different angles. Then we got up again and moved it even closer. We just wanted shots of cunt and cock—no mask, no bodies, just the galloping, independent organs, like wild birds in a bush. That wild, wild animal stuff. Like those scenes I saw on the Zendo wall.

  At last we had created this crazy, sometimes funny, sometimes very sexy home video that we’d watch together in order to turn ourselves on. Sometimes we’d even watch it while we had our regular sex workout without masks, so that we were surrounded by ourselves on the TV monitor, while at the same time being watched by the neighbors across the street. We couldn’t seem to celebrate our newfound lust enough. We were on the edge of committing sexual suicide. It was as though we were trying to make ourselves disappear by eating each other up. We were both turning into greedy monster cannibals: Frankenstein eats Snow White, Lassie eats out the pig’s ass, and other mindless and endless combinations of coupling animals. We never talked. We were in a state of either perpetual arousal or perpetual waiting for arousal. We had turned into what I could only call “rhythm pigs.”

  I had no idea what Sherry’s redemptive outlets were. I had no idea if she had other, more transcendent elements to her life, and I didn’t care. I had Meg and The Sea Gull, and I hoped Sherry had something so that we could continue our mutual rituals of sexual indulgence.

  After a while I began to realize Sherry was trying to steal me away from Meg and that sex was her bait. She began to try to get me to stay overnight on the pretext that we could be better observed by the neighbors at later hours. Also, she said, her next-door neighbor, who was her best girlfriend, was home then and would like to be an ear-to-the-wall witness to our lust. I was really beginning to get frightened by this, and I longed somehow to get it all under one roof. I was also sure that by now Meg must be suspicious of my affair with Sherry. So one day, or rather one night, not being able to hold back anymore, I blurted it out to Meg. I just said, “I have to tell you, Meg, I’m having an affair.” Meg just burst into tears, and as soon as she did I knew where my heart was because I could feel it again. I could feel it melt for Meg. I knew I loved her then with all my heart, but by then my heart and head and balls had all been divided and scattered. I felt like Humpty Dumpty, who had had a very great fall, and I could not imagine who or what could put me back together again. My heart and head seemed to be floating around the room with Meg, while my cock and balls were bouncing off the ceiling and walls at Sherry’s place.

  After Meg stopped crying, she gave me two weeks to break it off with Sherry. That ultimatum only heated my lust up more, until at last the straws that were to break the camel’s back showed up as Sherry’s lusty scratch marks on my back. Sherry had left her brand on my back and shoulders to let Meg know that I no longer belonged only to her. The day Meg saw those scratch marks on me, she refused to sleep with me anymore, and then I realized that things had come to an end. It was time for a change. I knew I had to run away from it all and try to get to some abstinent and simple place of recovery. I couldn’t afford a rest home, but I knew I needed something like that.

  That’s when I started to think about going to visit Wally, an old friend, in Santa Cruz, California. Wally had written me and had claimed to have found a simple, happy life there, working in a photography store. He was taking a lot of portraits of all the young hippie drifters, all those young and not-so-young people in motion, coming through town on their way up from Mexico to find work in Alaska. Their motion was the new escape, the way of relating to the world that was perishing right under their feet. To walk up and down on the earth seemed the only right way to celebrate it now, and mourn it while it was passing, all at the same time. I understood that and was drawn to it. I understood how Wally could find his center by taking still pictures of people in motion. He was trying to create a photographic book of the new American nomad.

  And here I was about to make another move in my fall from the top of the world to the bottom. I decided not to tell Sherry this until I had one last fling with her, and then I would break it to her gently. That particular afternoon I decided to fuck her in all the positions we’d ever gone through, until I just couldn’t come anymore. Then I would hold that memory in my mind, of at last being satiated by Sherry, and bring up that memory when I needed it to cancel out all those sexy obsessive images that ruled me.

  So we did it and we did it until she was kneeling and I was reaming her from behind. I had a full erection, but at last it was numb and I couldn’t come. After a while Sherry turned her head up and in the calmest, most centered voice I’d ever heard come out of her she said, “Are you having a good time?” I just pulled out and collapsed next to her and told her, just like that. I said, “Sherry, I’m going to California.”

  And she said, “Do you want me to come?”

  “No, I’ve got to get away from it all. I’ve got to go it alone.”

  I was amazed at her strength. She didn’t cry or protest. She must have known all the time what was going on, that she was involved in an exercise of brutal lust.

  I CHOSE an old hippie bus called The American Dream, which cost sixty-nine dollars—a very sexy ticket price, I thought, as I dreamed about the cross-country orgies that would take place on it. The American Dream was to be leaving, as advertised, from the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue on June 30.

  And on June 30, Meg went with me to see me off. It was there, just where they said it would be, an old converted Greyhound bus from the fifties, painted a chocolate brown, with its insides all converted from seats to beds.

  The owners and drivers, Jacob and Floyd, had removed the seats and put in plywood platforms, which they filled with old mattresses covered with different colored patterns of paisley. With the exception of the paisley spreads, it looked like a mobile hospital. At first sight it was frightening to me, and I almost fled to the Greyhound station in search of a more conventional mode of travel. Being inside it made my head spin, made me dizzy and claustrophobic, made my eyes roll, made me grab Meg’s hand in fear, made me say to myself, “Let this cup pass from my lips.”

  At last, after much procrastination, I kissed and hugged Meg and said goodbye, and I got on. Slowly the bus filled up with hippies, just as I
dreamed it would. There were close to twenty-eight mattresses, and I huddled way in the back and watched, my terror mixed with curiosity. Then I had an awful heart pang as I saw Meg out the window for the last wave goodbye. Why, I wondered, was I putting myself through this? Why did I want to put myself in these constant situations of conflict? Why did I have to reject Meg to make me feel love for her? It was as though the only feeling I could feel was the sadness of separation.

  Within an hour The American Dream was filled with a wild, merry, carefree bunch of hippies, all choosing their mattresses and unrolling their bedrolls. They seemed so confident and without doubt. They wore their life-style like a proud badge. Single guys were already trying to couple up with single girls as I huddled in the back of the bus with the only other two nonhippies, Heidi and Hanna, two physed teachers from Norway.

  Everyone cheered as Floyd and Jacob got on the bus and gave a peppy little speech about how they were our drivers and how they would be driving day and night, just under fifty-five miles an hour so as not to attract unnecessary attention. They went on to say that one of them would be sleeping in back, in what had once been the toilet when the bus belonged to Greyhound and now was a little bedroom for one of them to sleep in while the other drove. I peeked in from where I was sitting. The back of the bus was indeed a curious little boudoir. It looked like a miniature opium den or a very small Indian restaurant. The ceilings and walls and floor were all covered with paisley spreads. Because the bedroom had replaced the toilet, there was, of course, no toilet in the bus.

  Jacob and Floyd assured us, though, that we would make numerous toilet stops. We would also make stops at health food stores that were off the main highway, where we could purchase alternative food like yogurt, sprouts, and almonds. There’d be no stops at Howard Johnson’s or Stuckey’s. Everyone cheered. There would be some stops for swimming. Everyone cheered again. At last we were off and everyone cheered a third time, twice as loud.