Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  It was strange, but a part of me was fascinated by everything that was going on in that jail, and that part kept me from demanding my one phone call, although each day I put in a written request, and each day I received no response. Once I got over the fear that I was going to be raped, beaten, or persecuted, I was more at ease there. People didn’t seem to notice my New England accent, perhaps because I was listening more than I was talking. After all, I was in a prison suit just like everyone else, and I was even beginning to adopt a rather tough prison posture. At the same time, I really did want to get out, but for the first time in months I was experiencing a feeling of being centered. It was as though at last, because I was required to stay in one spot, I was able to enjoy it. I sensed that this was a necessary break from my perpetual motion. I now had a new order, a new force upon me. I’d been conscripted into a weird monastery in Las Vegas, and was being held there until all parts of me slowed down, stopped and grew into a stronger, calmer center. It was, I was sure, the daily, simple, ordering jail routine that did that.

  They would wake us up at 5:30 a.m. Why so early I didn’t know. It was not as if there was a whole busy and productive day ahead. Perhaps they just wanted us to be awake so we could contemplate our crimes and suffer more for them. Maybe that’s what they meant by “doing time.” They did time to you. They made you feel time. That was the punishment. I still had not been charged so I would meditate upon all the minor sins and crimes of my life as I staggered along that early-morning line down to breakfast, the first of the day’s two meals. On the way down to the basement dining room, I would walk past the one window that we could look out of, and as I passed I would see all of Vegas still going full steam, spinning and flashing at 5:30 in the morning. And never once did I wish I was out there. I was surprisingly relieved to be in that air-conditioned prison where I could think freely about all the places I was not in.

  All the jail’s inmates were seated at breakfast at the same time, so that meant there were about two hundred and fifty men eating powdered scrambled eggs and grits and drinking very weak coffee together. After a rather subdued breakfast, we’d be herded back to our cells, where we would pace and smoke and sit and talk and pace and walk, never go out, maybe read an old tattered Ellery Queen paperback mystery book that came around on a little cart. It was as if every day was a rainy day in summer and we were all little kids shut inside, condemned to do our best to entertain ourselves until the sun came out again and Mom said we could go out and play.

  But the thing that saved me the most from the monotony of those long lunchless days was writing letters. We were all allowed paper for letter writing and I took as much as I could get. I wrote one or two letters a day but never mailed them. Just writing them felt like enough, and besides, in most cases I didn’t know the addresses of the people I was writing to. I wrote a letter to Mom asking her to forgive me for running off to the Alamo Theatre in her hours of need and then I ended the letter with my fart story. I knew she’s find that funny, since she had a great history of it herself. I wrote Dad a letter thanking him for all his meat, all those great steak and roast beef dinners on Sunday and Monday nights. Then I thanked him for sending me to college and asked if he would lend me some money to pay my bail so I could get out of jail.

  I wrote Rajneesh a letter telling him how he was wrong and Proust was right—there is no such thing as being in the present. I also mentioned I wished I’d stayed at his ashram longer—not for the sex, but to do the Primal Scream workshop, because I felt I could really use that now.

  I wrote Meg asking her to forgive me for being so selfish and self-absorbed. I told her I would try harder not to be.

  I wrote Sherry telling her just about the same thing I told Meg, except I told her how much I missed fucking her.

  I wrote Norman O. Brown telling him how much I loved him, so would he please write a book I could read.

  I wrote lots of letters, and last of all I wrote Shanti telling him how much I loved him and missed him and how I’d always keep him in my heart.

  All those silly letters I wrote and never mailed saved me from total despair. I had never experienced anything like that before. Because I couldn’t spell I had always been embarrassed to write, but now I was just spelling the words the way they sounded and that was fine because the letters were not being mailed. They were for me. No matter what was going on in that jail cell, I always felt better after a letter.

  Some days, after I finished my letter-writing, we were offered group showers, which I did not participate in. The back of the cell, a large metal slab by the two toilets, slid away, revealing a dormitory shower room where you could take a group shower. Also, if I remember right, I think I was very constipated most of the time, because I don’t remember ever squatting over that seatless toilet. While everyone else was showering and shitting, I was pacing, smoking, and waiting for dinnertime. Dinner was something like my old high-school hot-lunch program—mystery meat with mashed potatoes and overcooked vegetables, or mystery meat with red sauce, boiled potatoes, and canned cream corn. It was the height of white-trash cooking. It was gourmet white trash.

  After dinner we’d be herded back to our cells again, and that’s when the TV, which was hung from the ceiling at the front end of the cell, would be turned on full blast. It played only cop shows and it played them at top volume—sirens going, guns shooting. There wasn’t much language or dialogue, just grunts and groans and “You do this” and “I’ll do that.” Some prisoners would sit gawking at this pale imitation of the world of crime they’d known since they were ten. Others would retreat to the rear of the cell and play cards and do other things—like the time two professionals, Vinnie and Frank, tried to make toast under my bunk. I thought the whole cell was on fire. After I found out what had really gone down, I got paranoid that it was directed at me. I suspected it all had begun when I showed too much enthusiasm over Vinnie’s carrots.

  That night at dinner Vinnie had offered to give his carrots away. Vinnie said, “Anyone want my fucking carrots?” But he said it with a tone that sounded more like “What asshole here likes carrots?” I jumped at his offer and said, “Oh sure, yeah, I love carrots,” and at that moment I realized I was too enthusiastic. I had made myself into an individual. I was taking a stand by confessing my love for carrots. I was a carrot lover, and I had shown my weakness and my vulnerability. I was just a little bit too uncool. Up until that time Vinnie and Frank had never noticed me, but when Vinnie passed me his plate so I could scrape his carrots off it, the idea crossed my mind that nothing comes without consequences in any place, particularly that place. So I did not exactly eat Vinnie’s carrots with relish; instead, I chewed each single soft, faded, tasteless piece about forty times before nearly choking as I swallowed. Vinnie and Frank eyed me all the time to see just how much I loved carrots.

  Later that evening, some time around the second cops-and-robbers show, smoke, soot, and embers were floating up around my bunk, and I thought, My God, the whole place is on fire. I sat up in a panic and looked over the edge of my bunk, and there were Vinnie and Frank making a little campfire under the empty bunk below me. They were trying to toast some bread they had stolen from dinner. They had rolled up the mattress so that the metal surface of the bottom bunk was exposed, and then they had lit a whole roll of toilet paper under the bunk to heat it up. The spongy white bread was lying like some strange artwork entitled Wonder Bread on Gray Metal, while much smoke and a little flame lapped up around the edges of the bunk.

  I was incredulous. I couldn’t believe they were really trying to make toast. I thought they were harassing me instead, and I also could not understand how or why all the rest of the men in the cell would tolerate such a pollution of their atmosphere, as well as such demented selfishness. To smoke up the entire cell for two pieces of toast? It was outrageous. All that smoke and cinder had nowhere to go except into the air conditioner, where it got recycled and transformed into cool, smoky air for all of us to breathe.

&nb
sp; I went to sleep that night angry, thinking I had to make a real effort to get the hell out of there. I had already been in four days and no charges had been brought against me. Also my buddy Mickey the con man was beginning to frighten me with his stories about how I was most likely being held on what they called a John Doe charge. He told me that because I had refused to give my name to the arresting officers, they could now refer to me as John Doe and spend years in search of my real name. “But,” I protested to Mickey, “I did finally give my right name when they stripped me and took all my money. That’s when I gave it to them.” Mickey said that didn’t matter. If you didn’t give your right name when they first arrested you, you could be booked on a John Doe clause and disappear forever. “You’ve got no ID, right?” Mickey said. “And if they don’t have no ID they don’t got you. Without an ID you’re lost forever.” His voice was slightly sad, but also a bit sadistic.

  Mickey’s analysis was beginning to put me in a real panic. No one I knew on the outside world knew where I was. I could simply disappear. That was about the time I really began to press to make my one phone call. I was determined to get out of there, and it felt like one of the first times I’d been determined in years. I began thinking about a phrase I had read in Life Against Death: “All determination is negation.” I began to get obsessed by all the things I had negated by being in that jail, and they came at me in vivid images. I was beginning to be aware of how my imagination was often more vivid and exciting than the actual experiences I had in the outside world, that the essence of my life was imagining the places I was not in. And here I was in a place where I could experience it in a dynamic way. It was not unlike my time in the Poconos Zendo. I could experience all these things that I hadn’t done so vividly because all I had in that jail was my imagination. I would lie there on my top bunk imagining all the sunsets I was missing, and saw that I could imagine more places than one. If I was out in the world I could only be in one place with one sunset, but here I could skip from Provincetown to Santa Cruz to Alaska to India and follow the sun around the world. I could see the sun setting and rising over the Grand Canyon at the same time. The Grand Canyon—one of the places on my aborted trip I could have been but was not—became more alive than the place where I was. For the first time in years I felt a strange freedom. I felt incredibly free in the Las Vegas jail.

  Another part of me was determined to get out. I managed to find out that my bail had been set at $285, and I thought if I could just get that information to Meg, I would have her send it to a bondsman in Vegas. On the fifth day, I was granted my one phone call. Two blond astronaut guards led me to the phone. Mildly shaking all over, I dialed Meg and waited with excited anticipation, my heart in my throat. I waited for Meg’s responsible, all-saving, all-loving voice to come on the line. I got a busy signal. My heart sank. It was now that a very real feeling of fear set in as I pleaded with those smiling guards. “Oh, please,” I said, “one more call? The line was busy. Let me have one more call, please?”

  “Okay,” the tall one said begrudgingly. “But make it snappy.”

  I called Barney and counted the rings, praying he would soon pick up. Fifteen rings later the guards made me hang up. They took me back to my cell, where I began to feel truly trapped. And I immediately made this deal with Mickey that if he got out first, he would call Meg and get her to send the bondsman the $285. Vinnie, the carrot man, in a more generous moment, had told me that that was how it was done—a piece of information I would have welcomed earlier, but didn’t think to ask, because each day I’d been expecting to be released.

  Every day just after breakfast, two or three astronaut guards would come into the cell and read a few names, followed by “Roll it up,” which meant roll up your bedroll and get the hell out of there. I would sit on the edge of my top bunk and hear them call out, “Lombardo, roll it up—Crenshaw, roll it up—Allison, roll it up,” and then that would be that. No one ever said, “North, roll it up.” For the first few days I had felt like a bad schoolboy in afternoon detention, but now I was beginning to feel like a lifer. I gave Mickey Meg’s phone number and told him, “Please, Mickey, if you get sprung first, give her a call.”

  Then at last, into my seventh day, the guard called, “Mickey Janis, roll it up,” and Mickey smiled, gave me the power shake, and said, “You’ll be out tomorrow, buddy boy—tomorrow we’ll have a champagne toast together at the Sands,” and he went out whistling. He went right out and called Meg and told her to send the $285 directly to him and he’d take care of it, he’d take care of everything. Only Meg was her old smart self. She didn’t trust the way Mickey sounded on the phone. She did a little research and sent the money directly to a bondsman instead. So on the seventh day I heard “Brewster North, roll it up!” and I rushed to roll up my bedroll.

  After getting dressed up in my white cotton pants and brown raw silk Nehru jacket, I was given a certificate with my trial date, which was set for two months later. I was given my money back in the form of a check. I didn’t even have any cash to take a cab back to my motel.

  At first I was very excited, and anticipated the great rush of freedom I would feel when I walked out of that prison door; but nothing happened. Instead I felt a rush of complications, as though I was entering another prison, a larger prison, the prison of the real world.

  I hailed a cab and figured I would pay him with a traveler’s check when I got back to my motel. I was beginning to learn the con system and didn’t tell the cab driver until I got to my motel that I didn’t have any cash, but I was able to put him at ease when I said I had traveler’s checks in my room.

  I was relieved to see the little black Karmann-Ghia getaway car still parked just where I’d left it, but I was surprised to find that my motel room had been emptied of all my luggage. I went to the front desk, where I found that the management was holding my bags until my return. “Where were you? Why didn’t you call? We were going to report you to Missing Persons,” the guy at the front desk said.

  “I was in jail,” I said, now with this light swagger, like at last I’d been initiated into the true ways of Las Vegas.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, “I figured as much. Too bad. A lot of people go that way. So here’s your bill.”

  I got my traveler’s checks out of my suitcase and paid the cab driver, then went back into the office to deal with my bill, which I was shocked to find was $240. “What!” I protested. “My room was empty. You could have rented it.”

  “No, no, not without you calling us first. We needed your permission. You had not checked out. You should have called. I would have checked you out.”

  I paid him off from my now-skinny traveler’s check book and grabbed my bags and got the hell out of there. I got out of Vegas as fast as I could without breaking any speed limits. At last, back in that hot desert, I breathed a sigh of relief. I put the pedal to the metal and headed full speed straight for the Grand Canyon, completely ignoring the spectacular Grand Coulee Dam to my left.

  I REACHED the Grand Canyon at sundown—perfect timing at last. I parked the car and ran straight to the edge, but when I got there, I could only see it as a beautiful flat backdrop. I saw it as a picture of itself. Too many postcards too early in life, I thought, as I stood there straining to see it for what it was. My imagined view of it in the Las Vegas jail had been more vivid than the real thing.

  I checked into a log cabin motel right near the rim and vowed to climb to the bottom of the canyon in the morning, determined to penetrate it with my body and eyes; and feeling this new determination, at last I went to sleep again, and dreamed of the place I was not in, the Las Vegas jail.

  Early the next morning I made my slow way down, deep into the bowels of Mother Earth at last. I was dressed only in my red shorts, and the hot, dry sun baked my newly freed body. I made my journey to the center of the earth with no provisions other than two oranges and three slices of Swiss cheese, which I carried in a plastic bag. Down, down, down I went. My knees shaking, I stopped
every so often to look back up at the layered earth walls, then turned to go farther down into the crotch of the Mother, back down into her hot womb. Hours later, at last at the very bottom, I came upon a stream. It was crystal clear, a rushing transparency magnifying a bed of round, brown, glossy stones that lay beneath its glistening flow like a great nest of wet quail eggs.