Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  After I packed up the Karmann-Ghia with my few belongings, I drove over to say goodbye. Mustang came out of the house to greet me, and then Shanti came out, but sort of hid behind her and wouldn’t look at me.

  “Shanti doesn’t like goodbyes,” Mustang said, and then stepped forward to give me my farewell present. She had drawn up my astrological chart and wanted to tell me exactly what to look out for on my trip across the Mother (which was what she called the earth). I could hardly think of what was left of America as a mother, but for her sake I put on a smile and tried. The main thrust of Mustang’s astrological reading was that I should be very careful to get involved with working for an institution or I would soon end up inside one. I laughed and scratched my head, having no idea how right her prediction was about to be. I thanked Mustang and said goodbye. It was easy to say goodbye to her, but not to Shanti, and I was glad that he had disappeared back into the house before I left. I knew then that I was like him. Goodbyes to people I loved were just too much.

  WHAT IS THERE to tell about a cross-country trip? It’s so monotonous. I had no idea how monotonous it was going to be. Had I known I probably never would have jumped in that car in the first place. The further I got away from one ocean, the more I just wanted to leap to the other. I felt as though I was simply racing from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I drove with the gas pedal mashed to the floor, hoping to make Las Vegas before nightfall.

  I didn’t want to stop to eat or break my pace. I wanted to get to Vegas fast, so I bought some Swiss cheese and a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes and nibbled and smoked as I drove straight out over that baking hot desert. The car was not air conditioned. I’d never experienced a blast of heat like that before; it was like driving through a great sauna. But as night came on it got cooler and beautiful beyond expectation. The clear, sharp angles of light highlighted hundreds of cactus, like those armies of cactus I’d seen fighting in Mexico, and gave a dark-line silhouette to the distant mountains as they met the clear orange and turquoise sunset colors above them.

  Soon it was dark and there were only the stars and that little black Karmann-Ghia rambling along like a turtle on the ocean floor, being guided by a giant profusion of stars. Then in the distance I could see a glowing field of light like the landing pad for a giant space ship. It was, I realized, Las Vegas. I tuned my radio into Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” and headed straight for it.

  I drove down the main drag strip, its blast of neon and glitz bringing me back from that hypnotic desert darkness. Vegas was such a contrast to Santa Cruz. There was so much more to be seen and done. I decided to quickly find a cheap motel and go out and do it all right away, maybe even hit the jackpot. I had no idea at the time that if you looked right—that is, like an average American on vacation—you could stay in a big fancy hotel for free, provided you gambled in the hotel casino. No one had told me that.

  The motel I checked into was $29.95 a night. That was the best I could do in my rush to get to the gambling tables. My room had a vibrating bed in it. All I had to do was put a quarter in the slot and the bed went wild—just what I needed after my long trip across the desert. But I was too excited; I wanted to do it all. I took a hot shower with the Jacuzzi spray attachment, then lay on the bed, only to jump up in mid-vibration, dress, and run out to the casino, hoping to win and win again. I really believed that this was how I was going to make my next little nest egg to live off of.

  I dressed up in my white cotton pants and brown raw silk Nehru jacket, left the black turtle parked safely in the parking lot, walked to the strip, and started down the row of casinos, one after another.

  I’d always loved the look of roulette: the big, colorful table, the wooden ball dancing, and the blurred beauty of that big wheel spinning. I started safe, just playing red and even. I did not want to associate myself with black or odd—not yet, anyway. I saw those as the shadow and bad luck. I hadn’t learned my lesson. Playing only red, I would slowly win a little, but it all seemed to keep balancing out, like life. I’d win a little and then I’d lose a little, and then in a very little time I was bored and started wandering around watching people play dice and fill up the slot machines. They looked like a bunch of compulsives to me, and I soon realized that I was not really attracted to anything there. It was like a big gaudy funeral parlor with a bunch of toys in it. As for the money to be won, it made me think of that old quote from Freud that I’d read in Norman O. Brown’s book: “That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish.”

  After Santa Cruz, Las Vegas seemed so unhealthy. I began to feel a little depressed and longed to go to sleep in my vibrating bed, so I could get on the road bright and early the next morning and make it to the Grand Canyon before sunset.

  Walking back to my motel, I realized that part of the reason I was feeling so spaced out was that I hadn’t eaten. I’d missed my dinner. The initial excitement of the place had made me lose my appetite, and now it had come back in full force. So I found what looked like a regular restaurant and went in. I ordered a typical American meal: a cheeseburger, medium rare, and two Budweisers. The cheeseburger came well done and with very little cheese on it, something like Velveeta, and when I got the bill, the price was so high that I was outraged. When I got to the cash register I found that no one was there. Fortified by the two beers, I decided to just walk out. The meal was certainly not worth paying for. I felt justified in not paying for it. I stuffed the check in my pocket and walked out and headed back to my motel. But before I got three blocks two police cars, each speeding from different directions, came to a screaming halt on either side of me. A cop jumped out of each car and came at me in the most threatening and aggressive way.

  The one on my right said, “Okay, guy, let’s see your ID,” and that’s when I realized that in my rush to get out of the motel, I had left it behind. So I said, “It’s back in my motel,” and the cop on my left said, “What’s the name of your motel?”

  Good question, I thought. I said, “I don’t remember. I just checked in.” Then he asked, “What’s your name?” And for some reason, maybe because of the beers, I just politely said, “Why do you ask?” And I realized at that moment that it came out of me sounding rather snooty, and I hadn’t meant it to sound that way. Then everything went real fast. The cop on the right said, “Where you coming from, boy?” And when I proudly answered “California,” that did it.

  The cop on the right said, “Well, we’re going to teach you that you’re not in California anymore,” and they did. The next thing I knew I was down on my knees with my hands handcuffed behind me and the two cops were standing over me with their nightsticks vibrating just inches from my head. Then I was in the back of one of the police cruisers, and then I was emptying my pockets to a man behind a wire mesh screen, and then I was standing in a big room being told to take off my clothes, and then I was naked and someone was yelling, “Cover your eyes and mouth,” as someone aimed a big gun at me that blew a great gusty cloud of DDT all over me, which made my skin itch and made me very quickly realize that I was indeed not in California anymore. I was in the Las Vegas, Nevada, jail. I was, just as Mustang had predicted, in an institution before I’d even had the chance to work for one.

  After they sprayed me with the DDT, I was issued a gray prison jumpsuit that zipped up from the crotch to the neck, and I was led by two guards down the hall to some sort of holding tank, and I was locked in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cell with about twenty men. There were nowhere near enough benches to accommodate everyone, so most of the men were lounging or lying on the floor in various states of rage, regression, and intoxication. I was told that I was allowed one phone call, but I had no idea who to call, and because I was so confused by what had taken place, as well as mesmerized by it, I think I went into a sort of mild dissociative shock and suddenly became an observer, a fly on the wall. It was as though some part of me was outside watching it all, watching this new stranger in a gray prison outfit, who, just moments before, had b
een Brewster North, all dressed up in white cotton pants and raw silk Nehru jacket. Now life had changed real fast and this same Brewster North was among what looked like a mob of soulless, hardened criminals, a bunch of losers, people arrested for all sorts of misbehavior, from jaywalking to attempted murder. A young man was talking to his father on a telephone the guards had passed through the bars to him, and he was bragging to his dad about how he had almost killed his brother in a fistfight, saying things like “Maybe I’m in the fucking slammer, but Jimmy got the worst of it. You should see his fucking face. He’s unrecognizable,” boasting in front of us all.

  I was fascinated by this, by the level of depravity I found myself so suddenly in. It was much more interesting than the casino activity—I guess because it didn’t have to do with money. Also I was surprised to find that something like that could happen so quickly, so fast, in America: that I could be Brewster North walking on the street, going home to my vibrating bed, and then suddenly be this prisoner, arrested for what I didn’t know—for coming from California? And strange to say, it was not anger that took me over so much as it was a deep sense of curiosity.

  After a few hours in the holding tank, a guard came and took me to another room to book me. It was there that they fingerprinted me and took my photograph. I expected to be taken back to the holding tank, where I would try to make my one phone call to Meg and ask her to help me. But instead the guard led me down a long battleship-gray metal corridor, past a series of dormitory cells. Then he opened two big gray iron-barred doors and pushed me into a very large room filled with bunks and about thirty men sitting and standing around in different positions all slowly turned and looked at me as though they’d been expecting me to come and join them.

  The guard told me to choose a bunk. I took the first empty top bunk that I came to, then immediately lay down on it, covered my head with the stinky pillow, and softly cried for about twenty minutes. After crying, I came up more resigned to my new quarters. I looked around at my new home and all those very strange strangers in it, and I decided right then and there that I better start socializing and get to know them before they got to know me and noticed my New England accent and took me for a Boston Brahmin or, worse, a Harvard graduate, and crucified me at dawn.

  So instead of talking to them, I just drifted among them, all through that large dormitory cell, trying to be as casual as possible, trying not to look like an educated weirdo they might want to crucify. As I did this I began to see that the men were sort of divided up into groups, or at least that’s how I began to perceive it. I divided them all up into professionals, night people, poets, madmen, and, last of all, losers. I did not put myself in any category outside of the one that might be called “I alone have escaped to tell you.”

  The professionals were a very cautious and private group. They seemed to have consciously chosen a life of crime and were resigned to serving some time in jail as a consequence of that choice; it was their occupational hazard. They all seemed to be dealing with it like adults, without too much bitching or complaining. They had photos of their families and loved ones hanging on the walls beside their bunks. They were family men. They were dedicated criminal family men, and they spoke mainly in a rather dry legalese, a language that you might associate more with lawyers or lobbyists in Washington. They spoke without passion or imagination or love, and when I came too close to them, they’d just shut up and eye me with suspicion. After I moved on, they’d begin to talk again in low, secretive tones.

  There were no windows to the outside world. It was a totally enclosed little world, with twenty-four-hour air conditioning belching down through a number of ceiling vents. At the back of the cell were two toilets without seats. They were completely exposed. There was no privacy. As I made my way around the cell I saw that some of the prisoners who had bottom bunks had made their own privacy by taking the one blanket that had been issued them off their beds and hanging it from the top bunk, to make a little tentlike enclosure where they hid out all day. I came to call the men who lived behind those blankets the night people. That was their category. They were mostly black and spent the whole day sleeping behind their blankets and the whole night playing cards and gambling for push-ups. The lights of the cell were never turned off; they were on twenty-four hours a day, so the night people could play cards all night. And they were in great shape, particularly the ones who lost all the time, because they had to do the most push-ups.

  There were really only two outstanding losers. The first was a man who was originally from Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. He had one of those consistently sad lives and had been in and out of jail since he was busted for passing bum checks at age eighteen. That was the same year his girlfriend was killed falling off the back of his motorcycle. After that he just kind of lost it and would spend his nights going down to Weirs Beach, where he would shoot off the mortar he had bought from a buddy who had brought it back from the Korean War. Then he became a truck driver, and when he was stopped outside of Vegas recently for a traffic violation, he gave the cop that stopped him a lot of lip, so the cop roughed him up and tore his leather jacket off him and threw it in a trash can, and when he told the cop to get it out of the trash the cop refused and hit him with a blackjack. Then he told the cop that if he hit him one more time he’d take the blackjack away from him and hit him back, and he did. So that was that, and he was in the slammer for a while. “I wish I had my fucking piece under my seat where it usually is,” he said. “I would have blown that fucking cop away.”

  So this loser had been there on that bottom bunk for quite some time waiting for his trial to come up, and while he was there he had created a beautiful pencil mural on the wall behind his bunk. It was a drawing of all the things he loved—a New Hampshire covered bridge arching over a little stream, and bouncing like little cartoon figures down a New Hampshire country road, all headed toward the covered bridge, came his big semi truck, his old motorcycle, his mortar, and his piece, which looked like a hefty .45. There they all were, dancing toward the covered bridge. The mural had no people, not even the ghost of his dead girlfriend, just a bunch of guns and machines headed for a covered bridge somewhere in New Hampshire. This man was sad, and under his sadness I could sense a deep, deep anger.

  As for the other loser, I hardly got to know him because he was in and out of there so fast. He was a dark, wiry guy, maybe Mexican-American, with a little dark mustache. Just after he was brought in I noticed him madly scraping something in the corner. He was giving off a kind of frantic energy, and at first I thought he had some kind of drug paraphernalia over there that he was fixing to shoot up with, because I could see he was unzipping his jumpsuit and beginning to expose his torso. Then he got up and walked over to the barred doors and, with his jumpsuit now hanging off his hips, he called to the guards. Just as the guards came running, he lifted into the air what I could now see was the well-sharpened end of a coat hanger and brought it down full force into his side. His crimson blood gushed and ran down his dark skin. The metal coat hanger was sticking out like the bolts that stick out of Frankenstein’s head. The guards dragged him away, and then when they came back to check on the cell, one of the inmates said, “Did he die yet?” And the guard retorted, “If he hasn’t, he should. That’s the second time he’s pulled that shit on us.” Then everyone in the cell started yelling at the guards and calling them assholes, but the guards didn’t even respond or pay attention. They knew who had the power; they knew who was in charge. They were blond and big and looked like pleasant, smiling astronauts or like captains of some football team. They knew who had the power.

  As for the madmen, there were two that I remember most. The first was also of Mexican descent, and he just loved to steal transport vehicles of all sorts—the greater the variety, the better. He was not only into stealing cars; he had stolen an army jeep, an army truck, a Greyhound bus, and, at last, the vehicle that had landed him in jail: a police plane. He told me how the police all chased him in their planes, broa
dcasting over speakers behind him, “Land that plane. This is the police. Land that plane.” His eyes lit up when he said, “Land that plane.” His eyes lit up like Shanti’s eyes when Shanti said, “Do it again.” I could tell he had a real good time stealing that police plane and that he hadn’t done it for the money, but for fun. His eyes shone in a bright devilish way, a way that made me like his more than any other eyes in that prison. While listening to his story I could clearly see the image of him hunched over the joystick of that police plane. His story was like a bright cartoon, lighting up that bleak gray prison cell.

  The other madman was as regular as some odd cuckoo clock going off every day around cocktail hour. He always told the same story, and it always came just before dinner, after a whole day of lying on his top bunk with a blanket pulled over his head. He would suddenly tear the blanket off and sit up and cry out to everyone, who ignored him, “You want to know how I got here? Well, I’ll tell you how I got here,” and he’d proceed with this great rapid-fire diatribe that went so fast you could hardly catch it. His story started somewhere in the South Bronx as a teenager and moved its way through many turbulent years to that Vegas jail.

  Then, last of all, the poet, who was this young, sensitive con man. I got closer to him than anyone else in that cell, in the sense of having a dialogue with him. He was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old and was really only into petty conning. He was also writing poetry and rock-and-roll songs on the side. His crimes were relatively innocent and somewhat creative, most likely not committed exclusively for the money, at least not yet. That was soon to come. For instance, he had made copies of credit cards from discarded carbons he’d found in dumpsters behind restaurants and then with these new counterfeit credit cards he made long-distance calls to China just for fun, just to see if anyone was there. Oh, sure, he would have bought hi-fi equipment and cameras and stuff like that if he had a place to put them, but he didn’t. He was always on the move. He’d also do false setups, as he called them, to create parties. He loved parties, and no one could ever throw enough for him. He’d never had any as a kid. In fact, it was all for want of a party that he ended up in jail. He worked with his pretty sister and his buddy. That was their con team. His pretty sister would go into a casino bar and hang out until she was noticed by the owner or maître d’. She was pretty and hot, so she always got noticed real fast. When the owner started coming on to her, she let it all heat up real nice to the boiling point until the guy was about to make the big move. Then she’d give the cue to her brother and his buddy to enter, and they’d come in and put on this great show. She would start squealing and crying, “I don’t believe it—it’s Mickey! It’s my long-lost brother, Mickey! What are you doing here? My God, I haven’t seen you in ten years! Oh, lord save us, this is a miracle, a true miracle! What are you doing here in Vegas, Mickey?” Then she’d burst into tears. She’d actually break down and cry, and nine times out of ten the owner of the club would be so impressed and moved by this rare coincidence, this joyous chance family reunion, that he would order champagne for all, and more champagne, until a big party would take place. But one day, after a number of these parties, Mickey got busted for drinking underage.