The Time of His Life

Swimming with Spalding Gray, through good times and bad

By Laurie Stone

Spalding Gray in performance (photo by Massimo Agus)

(An abridged version of this essay appears in the magazine's print edition.)

Spalding Gray joked that he dated his mother all through college. He joked that he spent a summer trying to drive from Barrington, R.I., to Provincetown, Mass., where he hoped to "hang out." It was the '60s, after all. He'd pack the car each day with his father's frozen steaks and his mother's cans of Metrocal, but after a few blocks he'd turn the car around and return to Mom. She didn't ask questions about his comings and goings. They would swim in Narragansett Bay. She called him "dear," as in "How shall I do it, dear? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?" Meaning, How shall I kill myself? When she wasn't plotting death, she laughed with her kids, even tap-danced, a contrast to Spalding's father, who held his emotions close to the chest. In a documentary about the performer, Rocky Sr. describes his son Spalding as "a shy, backward young fellow." He looks at the camera perplexed, even a little embarrassed, by the attention being paid his son, recalling that Spalding hadn't been interested in anything and that the extent of his athletic abilities had been playing catcher in softball. In Monster in a Box, Spalding quips that his father failed to see Swimming to Cambodia. "There were no matinees and he wouldn't miss cocktail hour." The line was good for a laugh. It was a WASP joke. The audience was laughing at a WASP spilling his guts.

I had lunch with him the summer of 1996 when I was writing a column for the Village Voice. He chose Spring Street Natural Food, and we sat beside a large picture window. The day was sunny, and he squinted, the glare bothering the bad eye he chronicled in Gray's Anatomy (1993). I had praised the monologue, and maybe that's why he'd come out. In the piece, he develops a macular pucker in his left eye, meaning the vitreous humor has liquefied and pulled away from the retina, leaving behind a piece of Saran Wrap-type tissue that causes words to slide off the page. An operation is recommended, but Spalding chases after alternatives such as "nutritional ophthalmology" and psychic surgery. The performance is bravura stand-up. In one sequence, feeling helpless and depressed, he wanders to the Bowery. He's wearing a shabby overcoat and sporting a day's worth of stubble, and he fits right in. A car pulls up, a car full of Hasidic Jews, and they invite him in, and he accepts the ride. They drive him to Williamsburg to clean the yard of their synagogue, and he does the job. He does it so well, he's asked back, and he's happy—having found a porthole out of fear.

Over the years, he'd caught flak from other Voice critics. Michael Feingold quarreled with Rumstick Road (1977), which uses tapes of Spalding's family members as they reflect on his mother's suicide. In one sequence, "Spud" tells the audience that his maternal grandmother has asked him not to play a tape of her reciting the Scientific Statement of Being by Mary Baker Eddy. Immediately afterward, we hear her voice over the sound system. Later, a phone conversation is played between Spalding and the psychiatrist who treated his mother. Unaware he's being recorded, in a fumbling way the doctor defends the shock treatments he administered to Bette Gray and reassures Spalding he won't necessarily go mad, himself. As an audience member, Feingold felt hijacked into complicity with violations of privacy. Director Elizabeth LeCompte made the decisions, but in a letter to the Voice, Spalding supported her choices. Their aim was to separate texts from their authors and in so doing dissect the social structures that produce language and other forms of coersive control.

At the time of our lunch, I didn't realize how ravaged Spalding was feeling. I knew the figure from the monologues who might describe becoming a hedgehog rolling around on the floor, but the hedgehog didn't tell his stories. The persona who went on stage spoke in measured tones, and his delivery was honed to Beckettian simplicity. Meaning could ripple out from a sip of water or the slight rearrangement of his feet under his wooden desk. His plaid shirt was as much clown garb as Bozo's red nose, his circumflex eyebrows shooting asides to the audience like thought bubbles above a cartoon character's head. But the hedgehog was the one who came to lunch.

He was squinting from pain, I now understand. To have registered it then would have felt presumptuous, and I was excited to be with him. He had an aura, some kind of nimbus that invited play or intensity. He always had a story. Maybe he thought he had to sing for his supper. That day he'd gone to the post office, having been away from New York for six months, and he didn't know the price of a stamp. He approached several people, but they shrank back, he said, "as if I were imposing on them or was a madman about to go off." Finally, he shouted the question into the room, and a few tepid bleats came back, "Thirty-two cents." He wondered if he'd become more wild-eyed or if the city had grown angrier. It was probably a little of both.

We had salads with carrots, sunflower seeds and sprouts. On the side were pitchers of tahini and hunks of seven-grain bread. He slathered his with butter and chomped hungrily. He looked thin and worn out. Traffic crawled along Lafayette Street. Gym rats and tattoo freaks lazed by. A waitress poured coffee. She recognized Spalding but didn't linger. Everyone knew him Downtown, and he liked being seen. He needed to be recognized in order not to bleed into the sidewalk and store windows. In his neighborhood, people afforded him slouchy, casual space as he ghosted around, mixing it up with drifters and hookers, hitching the rides of his life. In a love letter he wrote to New York after 9/11, he said it was the city's absurdity that had given him his sense of humor.

At the time of the lunch, he was working on It's a Slippery Slope (1997), a monologue about learning to ski at 52 and starting an affair with Kathie Russo, a woman he meets at a gig. She gets pregnant with his child, and after seeing the boy, Forrest, who is eight months old by then, he ends his marriage to Renée Shafransky, with whom he'd lived and worked for a dozen years. The monologue troubled him. After 20 years of autobiographical stories, the ethics of the form still felt shadowy. What would the audience take away from the story? How would the real people feel? He believed, as an artist, he was entitled to the materials of his life, but did he have license to portray others? Renée directed several of his monologues, and while they were collaborating, she assented to his portrayals of her. Slope, however, depicted her suffering at his hands. How could he profit from hurting her? Now that he was a parent, how much of his child's life would he publicize? He shook his head slowly, staring at the lettuce on his plate.

The conversation has stayed with me. The doubt felt authentic—the hollowed eyes, surprised brows, and questions that couldn't be answered. The words authentic and real are hazy when applied to anyone, but they are especially elusive in regard to Spalding, who often said he was living his life in order to perform it—performing was the part of life he was waiting to get to. In Slope, he reports that during the period of our meeting he went a little crazy. He chose his son over Renée, but he didn't stop missing her and their vagabond existence. He found himself muttering on the streets and barking like a hunted dog in the manner of his mother when she was mad, and he thought he was joining her, or becoming her, or just too weirded out by his emotions to contain them. He couldn't tell if he was acting crazy or really was crazy, but he figured not knowing was a kind of crazy, too. In his writing, you don't feel him falling in love with Kathie. For that matter, you don't feel him in love with Renée, either. Most often in his stories he is swimming away from a woman to a place where his body can dissolve. When he embraced his son, he could not get his fill of little-boy squirm, and smell, and curiosity. He chose to stop choosing and let life take him like a wave, but that doesn't mean domesticity suited him or that the wish to be in two places at the same time was ever quieted.

In June 2001, on a trip to Ireland to celebrate his 60th birthday, Spalding, Kathie and three adult friends were driving back from dinner. It was raining. Kathie was at the wheel, stopped on a country lane and about to make a turn, when a speeding yellow van crashed into them head-on. Spalding, in the back without a seatbelt, sustained a broken hip and a skull fracture. His hip would have to be held together with a metal plate, leaving his right leg almost immobilized. He had to wear a brace up to his knee for a condition called drop foot. Due to nerve damage, he couldn't feel the top of his foot. The skull fracture went undiagnosed for a month and left hundreds of bone fragments in his brain as well as a jagged scar across his forehead. Metal plates needed to be inserted into his head to prevent infection from entering his brain. Overnight, he lost his mobility and physical attractiveness, he believed, although directly following the accident he took notes and found humor in spooky confluences that had led to the crash.

In time, his sciatic nerve was scraped to remove scar tissue, which might have restored feeling to his foot and improved his walking, but the healing takes 18 months, and he didn't live long enough to see its effects. He intended to kill himself in 2002 by jumping off a bridge but was talked down by a passerby. He consulted with myriad therapists, including Oliver Sacks, about a black depression that enveloped him like a fog. At his memorial service, his stepdaughter Marissa evoked him after the accident, stationed in an armchair and dwelling all day on loss. He believed brain damage kept him from writing, although, nearly until his death, he continued to perform Life Interrupted, his monologue-in-progress about the accident. On Jan, 10, 2004, he jumped off the Staten Island Ferry and drowned. On March 7, 2004, his body was discovered floating near the shore of the East River.

Why did he jump that morning? The day before his disappearance, he had seen Tim Burton's film Big Fish, which ends with the line, "A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal." Kathie told a reporter from New York magazine she thought the movie had given him permission to end his life. In an interview with Fresh Air host Terry Gross, Kathie further surmised that "the point of no return" was the family's move in February 2001 to a big house a mile outside the village of Sag Harbor. He obsessed about it, felt trapped out there. "It was this, not the accident," that killed him. Urged to sum up what cannot be known, she offered the sorts of answers Spalding spent his life poking with a stick.

Okay, if not with these pat answers, how do we assess the final act of a man who made his life visible? It's as if we want to piece together the unwritten monologue of his suicide and in that way keep him talking. But even if we could understand his end, what would it change? The work is what stands, and it's the work, most importantly, that his disturbing death raises questions about. What are the conditions that enabled his art to flourish and what choked it off?

You can't beat the irony of Spalding killing himself when all his life he most dreaded death. He would shudder at the thought of no longer being able to speak. "When I die, will it be forever?" his older brother, Rocky, would ask their mother, as the boys were drifting off to sleep. "Yes, dear," Bette would calmly respond, even though she believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and had a vision of him appearing before her. She claimed, too, that Jesus cured her first nervous breakdown. Spalding always waited for the other shoe to drop. The other foot? By the time he slipped into the icy waters of the Hudson, he had just about stopped speaking, except during his performances.

In Slope, he tells a story about acting in Steven Soderberg's film King of the Hill (1993), where he plays a suicide who slits his wrists. The gory makeup takes hours to apply, and on his last day of shooting, before returning to the set for his scenes, he returns to his hotel, looking bloody and disheveled. He can't wait to finish the job because the next day he's going skiing. He's headed to the Rockies with a guy he's met on the set so he can learn to live in his body instead of his head, and he's juiced, as usual, about extending his break from Renée, New York, responsibility, himself. It looks like he's got it made with good pay, a job with a director he respects, a swank hotel, free food and movie-set intensity. Outside, people think he's glamorous, and inside the film family things feel cozy. He's connected but not tied down. He hasn't got it made, though. He is 52, his mother's age when she killed herself, and often these days he imagines leaping off a cliff to a watery death. The thing is, the movie job is so cushy he can distract himself from dying by playing a suicide.

At the hotel, he's amused and alarmed by his bloody wrists. It's like déja vu, where the brain experiences something as familiar before it has actually become a memory. Feeling a "diabolical Halloween 11-year-old-kid energy," he spots a woman behind the counter in the pharmacy. She's his age, but in his mind she's his mother's age and he's still Spuddy, and who can blame him, the way he's pampered? He walks over to her and raises his bloody wrists. She, alone, doesn't know he's in a movie. He says, "Do you have anything for my wounds?" And she shrinks back and says, "Oh my God! Oh! Oh! We have mercurochrome!" And he thinks, "Mercurochrome! That's ridiculous. She must be in shock." Right after this, remorse sets in for getting her worked up, and a bulb lights in his head, and he realizes he is trying to punish his mother for killing herself while he was in Mexico, while he was roaming around the way young people are supposed to and couldn't be reached and didn't learn she was dead until he stepped off the plane and his father said, "She's gone." Just like that, "She's gone." By then, her ashes had been placed in a box that sat on Rock Sr.'s bedside table. Spalding looks out at the audience, his face ruddy, his lips moist. "I was trying to reverse history. I was trying to show Mom what it was like for her if I were the suicide." And his tenses get out of whack. He says, "was like," not would have been like, maybe because he feels he's already died, a trick of the mind, in that he and Bette Gray lived so much inside each other when she went something of him disappeared, too.

He declared many times he was incapable of inventing things, especially in his novel, Impossible Vacation, a loosely strung series of memories without fictional texture. Unlike the monologues, the novel lacks a plot, subjects and characters. Only the narrator, a Spalding double called Brewster North, is realized. The novel's outline follows the events of Spalding's life. Nesting with Mom, problems learning to read, boarding school in Maine, discovering acting, college and girlfriends, regional theatre in Houston, Mom's suicide, experimental theatre in New York, joining up with Richard Schechner, who is called Barney, traveling to India and experiencing a mental breakdown, creating theatre that deconstructs classic texts with Liz LeCompte, who is called Meg, and creating monologues based on his life. With all the unfocused incident of Vacation notwithstanding, what emerges here with more clarity than anywhere else is the degree of madness he grew up with. It is investigated in Rumstick Road, but there such theatrical effects as Libby Howe whipping her head back and forth in a 10-minute sequence make events seem symbolic and surreal. LeCompte isn't interested in autobiography. She hones in on the social forces fueling Bette's madness, and so for the most part in the Rhode Island Trilogy we're not made privy to the emotional costs to Spalding, her son. Spud, the character in the theatre pieces, stands as a witness. His lips are parted and aghast.

In Vacation, the mother rattles the windows of the family, her grief a weather condition that funnels everything into itself. The real Bette, unhinged by raising three sons with a remote, affectless man, fanatically devoted to Christian Science, artistic and theatrical but unexpressed, is the sun and moon to her middle son, Spuddy. The boy is a drama queen from the get-go, feeling that ordinary life needs amping. When, say, a car on the block backfires, why not claim the neighbor is shooting his son? Spalding seems never to have moved out of his mother's warp. For months and sometimes years, she is in and out of mental institutions, subjected to shock treatments, stretched out limply on her bed. She hovers over Spalding, part annunciating angel, part secret sharer. As a Christian Scientist, she might let him bleed to death, but she doesn't judge him. He will form a similar bond with his audiences. Spalding and his mother sit across from each other in a mother/son marriage that neither wants to leave because no one reflects them back better.

He discovered acting at prep school when he was nearly 20. He had flunked several grades earlier. Cast as a psychotic in The Curious Savage, he improvised a hopscotch across a rug, and when the audience laughed he woke up. It had taken that long for desire to form in him. You have to remember he was 10 when his mother had her first breakdown. You have to think that witnessing her wild-eyed ranting turned on some switches and shut down others. You have to factor in that reading and writing were difficult for him and his dyslexia went unnamed and untreated. The first compliment he remembered receiving was from his English teacher, Ruth Hartz, who directed the play and said he had excellent timing. "I had never heard the word 'excellent' applied to me in any way," he said in an interview. So acting it would be, work he conceived of as a substitute for having a life. As a young actor, he yearned to play Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull because the character kills himself at the end of the play and the actor gets to come back and do it again every night. He was never cast in the role.

It would take another 15 years before he and Liz LeCompte would begin devising Three Places in Rhode Island, plays that explore his mother's suicide, introduce the character "Spalding," and inaugurate his direct address to the audience. Spalding dedicates Vacation "To my mother, Creator of everything and destroyer of everything"—an homage to the Indian goddess/god Shiva. Bette leaves the bread-crumb trail her son's work follows: first with the Wooster Group and then in his monologues—most notably Swimming to Cambodia (1987), Monster in a Box (1991), Gray's Anatomy, and It's a Slippery Slope. His solos are road trips to Death, the theme park. Our guide, a man who thinks he can't have fun because his mother might kill herself, journeys to the mouth of nothingness, pushes past the cave of regret, tracks Mom to the precipice of gloom, and leaps into the sea of forgetting. He tries to escape the story by seeking refuge in the arms of strong, male guru types and shrinks. Often they are versions of Rock Gray, who, in reality, does not sweep him up and whisk him to rescue. At the end of each story, Spalding returns with the tale, and he is laughing. "We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh," Nietszche wrote.

When Spalding is on stage, you have to watch him, preening and relaxed, the way an actor needs to be, his face sly and expectant, enjoying the feel of your eyes. At some point in a monologue, he will roll up his sleeves and flash his toned forearms. He dominates the pieces he devised with the Wooster Group, not only because his biography is their source material but because when he opens his mouth he speaks to you. He's knowing and innocent. How does he do it? He's Puck, feeding you inside dope. Under the spell of his broad, New England vowels you smell salt beaches and pines, hear gulls crying overhead, feel the sharp Atlantic wind cutting your cheeks. In his deadpan delivery, nothing is unsayable. Playing the doctor in Nayatt School (1978), which slices up T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, he says archly of a character who dies painfully, "If she chose the life that led to her death, it's a happy death. If that is not a happy death, I don't know what is."

In this play, he begins speaking directly to the audience, discarding the pretense he is conversing with another actor. Building his solo pieces, he develops an art of bricolage. Scenes and images are juxtaposed with each other, and meaning leaps across their boundaries the way (through a montage of images) films tell stories. In the introduction to the published version of Sex and Death to the Age 14 (1986), he describes keeping a notebook. He practices looking out, at people and events, rather than directly at his emotions. How he feels is revealed by the way he tells a story about something other than his feelings. Something captures his attention. It reminds him of another moment, and the sandwich of present and past summons an emotion.

He told an interviewer he could never run out of material: "There is no such thing as nothing because as soon as it's observed, it's something. So when I sit down to speak I'm really recounting a kind of memory film. And I'm trying to do it in as much detail as I can. There's no way I will ever go blank unless I have Alzheimer's or something like that." [Writers Dreaming, Naomi Epel, Carol Southern Books, NY 1993, p. 87] In another interview, he said there was nothing he hadn't talked about to someone: "Either with the woman I'm living with or the therapist or the audience. Everything that has come into my fantasy and consciousness that I can articulate I have talked about. But not all of it to an audience." These two elements—finding potential interest in any subject and approaching it with drop-dead candor—are the linchpins of his art.

The early monologues—Sex and Death to the Age 14, India and After (1979), A Personal History of the American Theatre (1980), and 47 Beds (1981), among them—are playlists of memories he shuffles and mixes like discs in a jukebox. In A Personal History of the American Theatre, Spalding sits at his desk, in front of him a box of cards with the titles of the plays he's acted in. Some cards prompt a mere sentence, others a worked anecdote. We see the names through a glass panel, but having shuffled the cards before each show Spalding doesn't know their order and so every performance is different and the emotional meaning of a story changes, depending on what brackets it.

In India and After, he cuts up seven narrative strands into segments that range from thirty seconds to four minutes, and he shuffles them. The stories include: spending a week in a Las Vegas jail for refusing to give his name to an arresting officer, falling in love with a hippie child in California, and performing Mother Courage in remote parts of India where, in one village, the corpses of the poor await the collection of coins to pay for their cremations. A bit of one story is told and then a fragment of another comes without regard to the chronology of any of them. Some start with the ending, others with the denouement or a moment of bafflement, comedy or regret. No story emerges in its entirety, and every performance is incalculable, although by playing with the combinations night after night he learns to heighten drama, no matter the order. In this exercise, he is applying LeCompte's ruthlessness to text to his own writing. He will return to these stories again and again in later works, discovering what kinds of meaning or meaninglessness can be devised from them.

Working this way, he creates theatrical immediacy. He's after emotional truth, not literal truth or firm facts. For example, the anecdote about cleaning the synagogue in Williamsburg really did happen but not at the time he was contemplating eye surgery. From the start, his comedy embraces darker moods, and pain is introduced matter-of-factly. In A History of the American Theatre, recalling his performance in The Knack, he says, "My father brought my mother to see this play while she was having an incurable nervous breakdown." Pause. "She thought she was going to see Long Day's Journey into Night." Pause. "But this was the play that sent her over the edge." From the start, too, he sees personal experience as shaped by historic forces and he interprets the zeitgeist as a collection of individual energies. Big and little, the political and the private, are not opposed in his understanding. Conjuring Richard Schechner's Commune (1970), which treats of the Manson family murders and the Vietnam War, he reports that at some point in the show the audience was ushered onstage and directed to play the villagers who were massacred at My Lai. If they balked, the performance was halted and the doors of the theatre locked. "One woman called her lawyer to get her out," he quips. The early monologues are witty, bold, freewheeling and entertaining, although Spalding hasn't yet learned to make the parts sing as a greater whole.

He did not start a monologue by writing it down but by speaking bits into a tape recorder and workshopping skeletal performances. A piece was constructed over as many as 200 shows. He used to present an evening called Interviewing the Audience, which he'd start by fishing for lively specimens outside the theatre. Then he'd call each person onstage and improvise an evening from the exchanges that got going. He thought of his monologues, too, as conversations with the audience. He'd tape performances, listen for laughs and music in the flow, and adjust the text and delivery. When a piece was "set," it became the published version, but even then he didn't memorize a script. Sitting at his desk with notes before him, he'd evoke the memory of past performances, wanting to create the illusion (though it was also the reality) of events recalled on the spot. He made himself visible only to make himself invisible again, so that the work would show—the way we see the beating heart of a guppy through its translucent skin.

He knew a memory had become a story when it generated uneasy laughter and snaked in and out of big and little themes, such as, in Gray's Anatomy, the comedy of failing eyesight in a world where AIDS is taking out a generation, and in Swimming to Cambodia, the vertigo of personal arousal on a landscape of global horror. What makes a subject feel trivial or large, he discovered, isn't its historic dimension or lack of one but whether or not there are stakes for the teller and the amount of complexity a story unfolds. No one really cares about the real life of the narrator, he understood. We care about stories we're made to feel are about us, and this happens when the narrator isn't trying to protect anything. At the top of his game, Spalding goes on seeing, no matter the consequences, and he allows his doubts to be seen. He knows that the power position in comedy—in all art, really—is the place of no power, where the teller is stripped of protection and keeps investigating uncertainty. In each story, he journeys out beyond his depth, wanting to be catapulted past the boundaries of a self that he knows, too, is his only home.

As staunchly as he believed he could not run out of material, he also feared he would. In part, this was garden variety anxiety. His worry mounted, however, during his career. The fear wasn't that the world would become too small but that he would stop investigating doubt.

And he did. He shaved truth in the second half of Slope. Unlike the "impingencies" of Monster in a Box, about a man who can't write a novel, and Gray's Anatomy, about a man who may be going blind—both struggles with the self—the crise at the core of Slope is his affair with Kathie and his choice of Forrest over Renée. Faced with his impact on other people, he starts to justify himself: "Renée and I fused. She became very involved with my work . . . I had to propose to Renée in front of my therapist who knew I was having an affair with Kathie . . .. Kathie was simple, she liked the outdoors. . . . Kathie had no leftover mothering energy." In Slope, we learn why the rushed marriage to Renée that concludes Gray's Anatomy feels forced. He was still fucking Kathie.

Renée's pain is acknowledged in Slope but not taken in by the narrator or shown to the audience. Spalding doesn't evoke the women as characters but rather as instruments that cause him to feel one way or another. He sounds ruthless. What about calling Kathie "simple"? He admits he chooses neither woman but a mirror of himself he sees in the little boy: "There is always another woman, but never another son," he declares, calling Forrest a "little Archimedes [who] had the geometry to split up me and Renée." Spalding might have satirized this new, headlong romance with paternity as he had his other enthusiasms in earlier work, but fatherhood is placed out of bounds. He may believe he is shielding his child, but we feel him protecting himself. It's not a crime to embrace your kid, even prefer him above all other people, but Spalding speaks as if reproduction, in itself, entitles him to do whatever it takes to claim his offspring. He stops exploring the subjects his story stirs up, such as infidelity, fantasy, boredom and repetition, and he asks us to look at him. He wants forgiveness and understanding, but this is a job no audience wants.

After Slope debuted, Fresh Air host Terry Gross told Spalding he'd lost her. Groping for an explanation, she said she couldn't identify with the way he'd hurt Renée. Dryly, he responded, "I'm not a nice man," but ignored in the exchange is the issue that good art isn't about portraying good actions but rather asking plangent questions about whatever is on the boards. Sounding stung, Spalding told Gross that a lot of people shared her view. His next monologue, Morning, Noon, and Night (1999), chronicles a day in 1997 and portrays the former Bohemian docked in Sag Harbor amid his new family, including Kathie, her daughter Marissa, Forrest, and the couple's second son, Theo. He seems to be saying: I was a bastard to Renée, but look what a great dad I've become.

Morning debuted at Lincoln Center, and Spalding toured it for several years. Francine Prose, a close friend of his, calls it a "hymn to happiness and domestic contentment, to the joy he had finally found in being with his Kathie, Marissa, Forrest and Theo." New York Times reviewer Peter Marks praises Spalding for confirming "the liberating power of devotion to a child" and achieving "the psychically centering properties of responsibility." Spalding is praised here for achieving happiness and maturity, but what about the work? A hymn? An inspirational guide?

Prose adds Spalding fretted that family life lacked what he needed for his writing: "anxiety, conflict, doubt, trouble." In Life Interrupted, he declares, "My life is without crisis and usually . . . [the monologues are] based on crisis. . . . Things are going smoothly." But who believes that a family is free of crisis or that contentment can be harnessed? Anxiety, conflict, doubt and trouble are in every family, and either, as an artist, you mine the drama, or, reasonably, you protect your intimates from your fluctuating feelings and write about something else.

Spalding chose to stick with his own experience, but he disappeared from it. In Morning, he asks us to celebrate ordinary moments—a trip with five-year-old Forrest to the five-and-dime, attempts to screw Kathie, a lamb-stew dinner the kids won't eat—ordinary moments that remain unremarkable. He's the guy on the train who fans out pictures from his wallet, wanting you to confirm his good fortune, while what you see staring back are neediness and doubt.

In the family that Spalding started out in, you weren't allowed to mention the elephant of Bette Gray's madness. You weren't allowed to reflect on it even after she was dead. Theatre is Spalding's great uncorking: first swirling and sweating in the Schechner playpen, then opening his chakras in his monologues. Like Jonathan Swift, Spalding Gray is a great excremental comedian. In Vacation, on a fad diet of soybeans, Brewster North drops silent-but-deadly slow burners on unsuspecting foes. Bette, too, unleashed by her madness, farts rebelliously at the dinner table, causing Rocky Sr. to storm to the living room and bury himself in a newspaper. Monster ends uproariously with the description of a performance of Our Town in which a child actor projectile vomits on cast members, one of whom is supposed to be dead.

The elephant in Morning is Spalding's entrapment in family life, each sunrise ushering the same groundhog day. In the pileup of family demands, he's come to feel estranged from himself, and it can't be named. Lobbed, instead, are disclosures that make you wince, such as that he asked Kathie to abort both pregnancies. What sort of knowledge is this for his sons to live with? Near the end of the piece he blurts: "I don't know how people raise families and work at the same time. What's more, why would they want to do it? With only one life to live, why bring more life into the world to be responsible for? It's absurd. It's ridiculous . . .. I love my children, but they could only be accidents born out of a kind of blind passion. I could never have had a child if I had to think about it." These are feelings no amount of lecturing to himself can dissolve, nor should he have to apologize for them. He's come to feel that his subject, ambivalence, is a pathology.

His art has flourished in two environments. First, the Downtown avant-garde, working with the Performance Group and the Wooster Group from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Second, living and collaborating with Renée Shafransky from 1979 to 1994 when he created his major monologues and moved into more mainstream film and theatre venues.

Downtown is Spalding's art home. The framework for seeing, the street rhythm he speaks in, the sound of thought in his head, the feeling of his mind shaken by bliss and terror. Downtown, he originates the role of Hoss in Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime (1973), and he plays Swiss Cheese in Brecht's Mother Courage (1975). As he's starting out, avant-garde pioneers Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater and Joe Chaikin of the Open Theater are making work in the cultural surround. Shepard, Ronald Tavel and Maria Irene Fornes are prolifically writing plays about the politics of love and the psychodynamics of power relationships. Spalding works with sound artist Laurie Anderson, encounters the image theatre of Robert Wilson and Martha Clarke, studies dance at Wilson's Byrd Hoffman School, sees the deconstructive experiments of Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman and Charles Ludlam. At La MaMa, international soloists and ensembles infuse downtown with Asian and African theatre and dance, European and Chinese circus, and theatre pieces inspired by Artaud and Grotowski—among them the wildly personal dream plays of Polish innovator Tadeusz Kantor.

Exhibitionism is rampant, the boundary between private and public shredded. Ellie Covan opens her living room as the performance space Dixon Place. The Hungarian troupe Squat Theater live and work in a storefront, passersby becoming part of performances, life and art melting into a slippery, punk gob. Solo work explodes in hole-in-the-wall clubs like WOW Café, 8BC, Limbo Lounge and the Pyramid, wafting a democratic, unregulated atmosphere in which anyone can publish fantasy and opinion, anyone can broadcast a version of Wayne's World from their bedroom. Part of the surge is economic. Solo pieces are cheap to mount and transport, and they don't depend on producers. It's no accident they explode while public money for theatre companies is drying up and New York City's Mayor Koch, rather than subsidizing small theatres, enables developers to gobble their property.

For a decade or so, soloists aren't deemed commercial because, for the most part, they are females, minorities and queers, and because, like Karen Finley with her yam-slathering and Stelarc and Ron Athey with their self-mutilations, they inject raw pain and violence into their performances. But in the mid-1980s a number of soloists are swept toward a larger audience at the same time that comedy—trumpeted as the new rock-and-roll—mushrooms and comedy clubs open across the land.

Standup comedy and solo performance cross-pollinate. Performance artists learn timing and delivery from stand-ups, and comedians such as Sandra Bernhard and Jimmy Tingle develop solo evenings structured around themes rather than rat-a-tat joke sprays. Increasingly, there is a healthily blurred edge between the avant-garde and show-biz, an uncensoring of language and outlaw subjects, an openness to queers and the catastrophe of AIDS. Amid this creative and politic swell, Spalding gains permission to be funny, sexual and queer.

He's in the right place at the right time, along with solo performer Eric Bogosian, to ride the comedy/solo wave from Downtown into the larger world. Both performers have practiced theatre chops, but it's no accident that Gray and Bogosian, who are white and male and perceived to be straight, gain broader access than their female and minority peers. Spalding—a reassuringly hetero Candide in his L.L. Bean plaid shirt—is able to take his audiences to places that make them uncomfortable. And they let him.

He develops his monologues Downtown, at the Performing Garage and P.S. 122, but he also appears at Lincoln Center when, during the 1980s, Downtown is marketed in BAM's "Next Wave" festival and Lincoln Center's "Serious Fun." Spalding is cast in Roland Joffe's searing film The Killing Fields (1984), depicting the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and that country's genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The experience inspires his crowning achievement, Swimming to Cambodia (1987), and the film version, directed by Jonathan Demme, debuts the next year, as well as the HBO broadcast of his monologue, Terrors of Pleasure. He becomes famous and tours the world. He's cast in more films—there will be over 30 in all—and in 1989 he plays the Stage Manager in a Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

All the while, he remains connected to his avant-garde roots. He ceases to be an active member of the Wooster Group after completing Three Places in Rhode Island in the late 1970s. He wants to interact directly with the audience and in the monologue form he has found his ideal expression. Still, the Performing Garage remains his lab. He collaborates on and appears in Point Judith (an epilog) (1979), debuts Sex and Death to the Age 14, and develops and presents five more solos there between 1979 and 1982. Several months before his death, he returns to the Garage with Life Interrupted, his work-in-progress about the accident.

In his best efforts, the storyteller resolves nothing, apologizes for nothing, and translates nothing. He may be surprised by life's strangeness, but he isn't shocked. Emotion isn't pure, nor is sexuality. In Morning, we hear the tenderness, protectiveness and mirrored adoration of child love, but Spalding is careful to keep his wild hairs trimmed. Outside the family, he's far more rapturous and exploratory. With all the longueurs of Vacation, several interludes quicken to startling life, revealing a yearning for the male body and producing sultry, anarchic poetry.

Toward the end of Vacation, Brewster/Spalding leaves Meg/Liz in New York and journeys to California in search of a golden girl. He meets Mustang, the mother of a fatherless, six-year-old boy named Shanti, and, as if predicting his own future with his sons, he describes Brewster's connection to the boy: "Shanti ran toward me and I swept him up in my arms and felt his glorious suntan-lotioned body slip and nuzzle against mine and we fit together like perfect pieces of the puzzle. . . . I pressed his glorious young warm body close into mine until we almost melded. . . . Then suddenly I was mom and Shanti was me and we were on the edge of that other ocean so long ago and I knew then that it was Shanti I wanted and not Mustang. I wanted to be the mother of this child, and for a moment I was."

Spalding/Brewster is a reed here, open at both ends—child and parent as well as woman and man. Uncensored, he seeks to circumvent conventional relationships. Women are his intimates, but he's drawn to the opaque elusiveness of men like his father, Rock Sr., whom Spalding almost always portrays as physically stiff and vague about his children's lives. Spalding liked to quip he once asked his father why, of his three sons, he was the only one not circumcised, to which Rock responded, "You're not?" But this is not the whole of Rockwell Gray. In Rumstick Road (1977), tempting depths glint out of a letter Rock Sr. wrote to his son in 1966, a year before his wife's suicide. Spalding reads it during the performance.

Rock has returned from seeing Bette in the hospital, and he's beginning to despair. "I did talk with her last Tuesday, but it was very discouraging—she is now certain that she is insane and that she can never recover. This is a very difficult frame of mind to recover from. While I keep avoiding the thought, I find myself more and more wondering if maybe this is so—it does happen to people—but I can't believe it is really happening to us... Friday night when I came home I went into the bedroom and found glass all over the floor—then discovered that the storm window and one 8x10 pane next to mother's little shelf corner in the front had been smashed. I was about to call the police and looked around for a stone or other object, but found nothing—then discovered feathers and after looking further found a partridge, dead on my bedside table. It's hard to believe that a bird which weighed one-and-a-quarter pounds could go through two windows, brush through the curtain, knock over the TV aerial, without losing any altitude, zoom across the room hitting the corner and dropping dead on the table without even disturbing the lampshade. It took me about two hours to clear up the mess and, I might add, dress the bird for the ice box. Gram Gray came for the weekend and we had a delicious partridge dinner Saturday night."

To the members of the Wooster Group, the bird seemed to figure Bette Gray. But the letter is more remarkable as a porthole into her husband, who emerges, of all things, a writer. Note the detail of the bird's flight and the macabre relish of making a meal of the little martyr, a comic ending worthy of Hitchcock or Spalding. Touchingly, Rock seems to want to entertain his son, and in this space father and son are attuned.

How dear that aligning must have felt to Spalding and how treacherous to seek it, since it flashed only to vanish many times. Anyone with a seductive and unreliable parent knows the hiccupping affect of their allure and the way, if you see it, to make comedy out of the pattern. Comedian Spalding frequently draws power by casting himself as a willow bending toward an in-charge man. In 47 Beds, on a plane to Greece, he meets a gay stranger. They go to a hotel and take separate rooms, but Spalding wonders why his new friend doesn't make a pass. Should he lose the inch he can pinch around his abdomen? He knocks on the man's door and says, "We have to do something." Aside to the audience: "I mean, who would ever know?" The man asks, "What do you like to do?" And Spalding isn't sure. "The next thing I knew I was in bed with him, and I went right down on him, and I thought, 'I'm a homosexual.' It's like sucking on a rubber hose," he says of the cock in his mouth. The man says, "Spalding, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do," but he doesn't know what he wants. Alone again, he wonders what Ernest Hemingway would say about his masculinity. "What would the Village Voice say?" He's sure, now, his shenanigans will make front-page news.

Spalding ups the stakes in Vacation when a depressed Brewster, on his way back from India, drifts into a gay bathhouse in Amsterdam. All at once, surrounding him, he feels "this very active and aggressive European male energy." He finds he likes watching shapes moving in the smoky darkness. He likes the smell of shooting semen. A German man nets him and sweeps him upstairs. "I moved with the motion of this man, who guided me with a willful roughness that was irresistible because it was like nothing I had ever remembered feeling before... At last, finding an unoccupied chamber, he pulled me in and threw me down on an empty bed, like a hospital bed with rubber sheets on it. The little room was deliciously repulsive. It was filled with the leftover smell of perpetual sex to the point that the room itself seemed exhausted and very close to death. But I never wondered what I was doing there." The German licks his skin, and he becomes his skin. The problematic self disappears, for he sees that the self is what the mind invents as it waits for the next sensation. On the bed, there is no voiceover consciousness, no dolly shots from multiple perspectives. The German fucks him in the ass and he feels like a woman, because there is always a woman inside him. Imagining that the German's cock is attached at the base of his own penis, he grows hard and comes. At the end, he's sad because the German, in search of another trick, departs without tenderness. He's sad, but not ashamed or remorseful.

Romance with a man drives Swimming to Cambodia, as well. In this case, the object of desire is Ivan "devil-in-my-ear" Strasburg, the handsome, Mephistophelean South African who goads Spalding toward risk. And Spalding, to prove his worthiness, braves the dangerous currents of the Indian Ocean. Their exchanges have the feel of Shakespeare's comedies of sexual confusion, where, at the drop of a handkerchief, girls turn into boys and boys into girls pretending to be boys. Ivan likes seducing as much as Spalding enjoys being swept away. "He was a bit of a sadist playing into my masochism," Spalding confides, and our narrator loves imitating Ivan's flirtatious baritone. "He said, 'Well Spalding, Spalding, listen man. On our next day off I'm going to teach you how to scuba dive. You'll see fish you've never seen before, you'll have Rapture of the Deep, man, and it will be incredible.' And I said, 'Oh my God, at last. It's like an initiation. I'll become a man.' I've always wanted to overcome my fears with another guy, you know, skin diving and all that. I've always wanted to try scuba diving but I was afraid of sharks coming up from behind. And now Ivan would help me through my fears and become my scuba-guru. Ivan said, 'We'll go. And Spalding, you will see fish of all colors—you have never seen anything like it . . . but there are these Stone Fish . . . and you don't want to step on one of them Spalding, because you'll be dead in seven seconds. There's no remedy, so wear your sneakers.'"

Years before his death, Spalding had moved far from such experiments and the comedy they inspired. After Morning, he told interviewers he wasn't sure there would be another monologue. And then the accident shook him in its Brobdingnagian fist and flung him back into the world. The first 30 pages of Life Interrupted present him back in form with his observing juices flowing. There are strangers to mingle with. Oh, joy! And premonitions, and a cross-dresser in the hospital, and the Irish temperament to parse. His forebears are Irish. He doesn't know what the story of the accident is about, but he is shaping events to look like clues to a mystery. Sensing death in the air, he walks six miles through dairy country, and in the monologue freezes the moments. "The cows were baying and mooing. Mad cow disease was around. I had a feeling they were trying to warn me about something. It was the last long walk I'd ever take in my life. I had no idea at the time, I could not imagine it. At the end of the walk I came upon a calf that was in real distress. It couldn't stand up, it had arthritis, and it was looking me right in the eye and pleading with me to put it out of its pain. I told the farmer, 'That calf is suffering. You should call a vet or have something done with it.' He said, 'Yes, I'll be doing that then. Thank you for looking after it.'"

Terrible things are happening to the animal, and to victims of mad cow disease, and to his broken body, but terrible things are supposed to happen in a Spalding monologue, and it is his job to return with the bloody pages. He's hurting and scared but also excited. He's excited to get a good deal from Dr. John McElwain, who will operate on his hip for under a thousand dollars. He's remembering what he sounds like vain and petty, prurient and sexual. He is not a role model for anyone except maybe another savage clown. Constipated in the hospital, he finally needs to take a shit. Oh, joy! "They close the curtains and somehow, in a bedpan, they deliver this long brown snake. It's the oddest angle I've ever taken a shit at. I don't know how they do it, not batting an eye. Who would do a job like that? It was like they were delivering a baby. Then they open the curtains and everyone just put down their forks and drinks and stared at me. I'm so excited that I get my notebook out to write about it, and the other people are looking over at me as if to say, 'Oh, another James Joyce have we here? Leave it to a Yank to take a shit in the middle of lunch and then write about it.'"

He's even jaunty about falling into a depression after his morphine is cut off: "I didn't know whether to discuss it with the Irish. I didn't know if they'd acknowledge the condition, or recognize it. I mean, does a fish know it's swimming in water?"

Back in New York, awaiting the operation on his head, he's still carving details and mining his helplessness for laughs, but during the procedure bone splinters are released into his frontal lobe. "I think they have to try to pick them out," he says. Afterward, hysteria swamps him. You can hear it blowing down a long, winding corridor, and you know it is not going to stop.

As much as he can manage, he will perform his work-in-progress, but mostly, inside the house that engulfs him, he will stop writing and he will station himself in an armchair, imagining himself a calf baying for relief. If only he and Kathie had left the pub a few minutes earlier or later. If only it hadn't been raining, he will obsessively repeat. Life Interrupted stops abruptly, and the reader is told it is the last line he added to the text, and you wonder how the terror took over when, up until then, he had been able to balance salt against pepper, vinegar against oil, booze against a brisk walk, the wind whipping his hair and face, his body steadied in the chaotic streets of New York. But he cannot walk, and he will not wait to see if his scraped sciatic nerve improves his mobility. Is the release of the bone fragments the crucial event? Do the splinters damage him beyond repair or does knowing about them do that? He will believe he is going mad, and he will want to spare his children that spectacle, knowing, firsthand, its toll. Does he realize his concern means he hasn't slipped away entirely? Does it make him feel he must act while he can?

The day he died, he wrote, "This is my last journal entry Kathie. It's an old story you've heard over and over. My life is coming to an end. Everything is in my head now. My timing is off. In the last two years, I've had at least 10 therapists and all those shock treatments. Suicide is a viable alternative for me instead of going to an institution. I don't want an audience. I don't want anyone to see me slip into the water."

Why he chose to die then, why at all, we cannot know. His performances remain, though, and they are joltingly alive. Spalding's work helped clear a path for many other comedians of ambivalence, among them John Leguizamo, Holly Hughes, Jonathan Ames, Deb Margolin and Danny Hoch. His texts have earned a place beside enduring memoir literature including My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley, Stop Time by Frank Conroy, Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon, Maus by Art Spiegelman, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick, Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, The Liar's Club by Mary Karr and The Blue Suit by Richard Rayner. These artists loft out the murk of secrets with the ordering instrument of candor. They don't believe they can be fixed or straightened, and they don't want to be.

Let's leave Spalding at the top of his game—on the lip of a wave, going up, up, reaching for a perfect moment. Ivan has been luring him to druggy bashes, evenings with Thai prostitutes, and dangerous rip tides. Spalding decides to leave his money on the beach and jump in the water, even if there are sharks. The memory of freedom will bleed into days when he's caught in a cat's cradle of fear. When, for example, he meets a CIA agent on a train with his finger on a green doomsday button, a man who spends his days stoned on blue-flake cocaine that is undetectable by urine analysis. Spalding is still looking for an exit from consciousness, knowing there isn't one. He is out of his depth, where he always wants to be, floating in the Indian Ocean off the island of Phuket, and it looks more beautiful than anything he has ever seen, like beauty that could swallow you whole. "An oriental Hudson River School painting," with towering waves, and monsoon skies, and sailing white birds, and shivering palms. He's thinking about the way he can't stop thinking, and yet for moments he can. He's a creature unlike anyone else and in that separateness exactly like everyone who exists. He sings and soars and coos about losing the boundary of that difference. "Suddenly, there was no time and there was no fear and there was no body to bite. There were no longer any outlines. It was just one big ocean. My body had blended with the ocean. And there was just this round, smiling-ear-to-ear pumpkinhead receiver on top, bobbing up and down. And up the perceiver would go with the waves, then down it would go, and the waves would come up around the perceiver, and it could have been in the middle of the Indian Ocean, because it could see no land. And then the waves would take the perceiver up to where it could look down on this great wall of water, to where Judy Authur and John Swain were body surfing—like on a Hawaiian travel poster—far below, and then—'Whoop!' The perceiver would go up again. I didn't know how long this went on. It was all very out of time until I was brought back into time by Ivan's voice calling, 'Spalding! Spalding, come back, man! I haven't tested those waters yet!'"

How does he do it each time? Create a drama of experience without innocence shattered? This is no Lenny Bruce trying to gross us out. He isn't protecting the velvet rope across the fringe—rather, ushering everyone inside it. Our Puck, our Pied Piper with the caramel, WASPy voice that's almost genteel, that reminds you it will be civil even in the midst of conflict, making strangeness not so strange, and yet it is. Funny. You could be minding your own business and find yourself cleaning the yard of a temple in Brooklyn or performing Mother Courage in a fishing village in India. Yes, you. Funny thing.

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