More on Spalding
"Is Spalding Gray Finally Swimming to Cambodia?
07:48 PM
I'm in New York, where it was zero degrees last night with a wind that seemed to be hauling some large chunk of the Hudson River with it as it clawed its way down Grand Street. Somewhere out there in that grim dark is whatever remains of my old pal Spalding Gray.
Both seriously and humorously, more often both, he's been threatening for years to do himself in. Indeed, his jokes about suicide preserved him and certainly entertained me. But now that it's starting to look like he's actually gone and done it, suicide is not so amusing.
I try to imagine him actually attempting a swim to Cambodia. I see him swan-diving from the rail of the Staten Island Ferry late Saturday night when he disappeared, rounding Sandy Hook by dawn, and turning south for Cape Horn. He'd be well past the mouth of the Delaware by now, strong swimmer that he is. What a great monologue this is going to make. Or not. Spalding inhabits a magical reality where such feats might actually be possible, but there is something about the current state of New York Harbor that seems adamantly unfit for human survival. In my less magical reality, it's easier to see him beneath all that black water.
Still, it seems premature to write one of those eulogies that I all too often compose for my closest friends. Part of me thinks I should be out there looking for him rather than writing this. Perhaps, I think, he just went out on one of his famous walks, walks that I shared for many droll miles. Perhaps he was hit by a cab and is lying comatose and unidentified in one of this perilous island's anonymous hospitals. He left his wallet and ID at his loft and would thus have been taken for another homeless drifter, as he frequently was. He could be holed up somewhere, waiting for his mood to pass. But he hates (or hated) to be alone. Neither seems likely, but where there's no proof, there remains hope, however unrealistic. What is grief without finality? A terrible confusion and an opportunity to celebrate what one might still have.
Spalding, or Spuddy as some of us called him, shared with me a keen interest in weird adventure. Pursuing the Perfect Moment, we would set forth intentionally unprepared, begging fate to play a practical joke on us.
Once I idiotically agreed to appear on a daytime talk show defending LSD. Spalding planted himself in the audience, which was not exactly on my side. At the right moment, he rose looking professorial and Protestant - the sort of WASP he usually played on screen - and astonished the audience by giving a recondite, if slightly mad, homily on the connection between the psychedelic experience and enlightenment. We barely escaped un-tarred.
Another time, we were together at a rave in San Francisco and when one of the kids there asked me who he was, I told her that he was Timothy Leary. Word spread fast. Spalding came over looking alarmed and said, "They think I'm Timothy Leary for some reason. What should I do?" "Don't disappoint them," I advised. And he didn't. He spent the rest of the night answering their questions with marvelously oblique answers that Tim would have loved.
We made together a great store of stories that he never included in his monologues, largely, I think, because we had too much fun. Our tales generally lacked that morbidity that was the well-spring of his humor. Now they feel like both a blessing and a curse. These memories are a warm part of this cold day, made colder by the near certainty that we will make no more of them. I feel like making a monologue about our adventures right here and now, but I know this medium doesn't permit such length as that would require.
Spalding spent years fearing death so much that he made a living of it, and a friend. And yet, during the last ten years, he came to embrace a wholesome form of life. He became a devoted family man who, up until Saturday night, loved his children and his wife Kathie even more than he loved death. He tamed himself to an astonishing degree. He took up skiing and a quiet place in the country. Indeed, he seemed like such a reliable father that, two years ago, when my youngest daughter Amelia wanted to attend a day school in East Hampton, Long Island, I sent her to live with Spalding and Kathie.
Tragedy struck right before she moved in. Spalding was in an auto accident while touring Ireland (with Timothy Leary's widow, oddly enough). His hip and face were shattered. The hospital where he spent weeks focused primarily on healing his hip and, when he returned to New York, a CAT scan revealed that maxillary fractures had left an open passage between his nasal pharynx and his cranial cavity. In a bit of excessively heroic medicine, they peeled his face right off his head, and re-broke it. When he awoke from the surgery, he was a changed man. It was as if they had surgically removed all the joy from his world. He entered the most leaden depression I have ever seen.
Instead of trying to correct whatever neurological pressures had so altered his world-view the doctors responded with drugs that only seemed to make it worse. All the horrors of physical and emotional frailty that had been so hilariously contemplated in his monologues were suddenly far too real to be funny. And so they remained. Kathie was incredibly brave, as she is now, in maintaining a good home in spite of the crushing sadness that now lived in it. And Amelia's heart, already a generally compassionate zone, was broadened for the experience of a year there.
When I saw him last spring in Salt Lake City, he was well enough to perform and he got a standing ovation. He was perplexed that he had been so well-received. I didn't think it was a mystery. He had made a career of being a publicly depressed and obsessive creature. Now that he really was depressed and obsessed, he was more credible than ever. But when we went out afterward, it was steady work. Where once we might have gone Mormon-baiting on a walking tour of Salt Lake's earnest architecture, we sat in his hotel bar and engaged in the least funny conversation we'd ever had about suicide.
I told him that if he felt that life had become unendurable I could not, as his friend, ask him to go on enduring it. But I begged him to leave some room for hope. Which I guess he did for months. But now my own hope is dwindling down to a recognition that I will probably never again be able to laugh at the theatrical gloom of Spalding Gray, a gloom that seems to have become as real and deep and dark as the waters of New York Harbor.
New York, the Capital of Magic, seems haunted and lonely tonight. During the enchanted year I lived here with my late, lamented Cynthia Horner, we passed much of our social time with Spalding and John Kennedy, Jr. We all four of us loved New York and devoted many delighted hours together to exploring its eccentric crannies. Now, I think, two of them have been swallowed by water and one by air. And I remain, trying to keep the fire going."
cut from:
http://barlow.typepad.com/barlowfriendz/2004/01/is_spalding_gra.html
07:48 PM
I'm in New York, where it was zero degrees last night with a wind that seemed to be hauling some large chunk of the Hudson River with it as it clawed its way down Grand Street. Somewhere out there in that grim dark is whatever remains of my old pal Spalding Gray.
Both seriously and humorously, more often both, he's been threatening for years to do himself in. Indeed, his jokes about suicide preserved him and certainly entertained me. But now that it's starting to look like he's actually gone and done it, suicide is not so amusing.
I try to imagine him actually attempting a swim to Cambodia. I see him swan-diving from the rail of the Staten Island Ferry late Saturday night when he disappeared, rounding Sandy Hook by dawn, and turning south for Cape Horn. He'd be well past the mouth of the Delaware by now, strong swimmer that he is. What a great monologue this is going to make. Or not. Spalding inhabits a magical reality where such feats might actually be possible, but there is something about the current state of New York Harbor that seems adamantly unfit for human survival. In my less magical reality, it's easier to see him beneath all that black water.
Still, it seems premature to write one of those eulogies that I all too often compose for my closest friends. Part of me thinks I should be out there looking for him rather than writing this. Perhaps, I think, he just went out on one of his famous walks, walks that I shared for many droll miles. Perhaps he was hit by a cab and is lying comatose and unidentified in one of this perilous island's anonymous hospitals. He left his wallet and ID at his loft and would thus have been taken for another homeless drifter, as he frequently was. He could be holed up somewhere, waiting for his mood to pass. But he hates (or hated) to be alone. Neither seems likely, but where there's no proof, there remains hope, however unrealistic. What is grief without finality? A terrible confusion and an opportunity to celebrate what one might still have.
Spalding, or Spuddy as some of us called him, shared with me a keen interest in weird adventure. Pursuing the Perfect Moment, we would set forth intentionally unprepared, begging fate to play a practical joke on us.
Once I idiotically agreed to appear on a daytime talk show defending LSD. Spalding planted himself in the audience, which was not exactly on my side. At the right moment, he rose looking professorial and Protestant - the sort of WASP he usually played on screen - and astonished the audience by giving a recondite, if slightly mad, homily on the connection between the psychedelic experience and enlightenment. We barely escaped un-tarred.
Another time, we were together at a rave in San Francisco and when one of the kids there asked me who he was, I told her that he was Timothy Leary. Word spread fast. Spalding came over looking alarmed and said, "They think I'm Timothy Leary for some reason. What should I do?" "Don't disappoint them," I advised. And he didn't. He spent the rest of the night answering their questions with marvelously oblique answers that Tim would have loved.
We made together a great store of stories that he never included in his monologues, largely, I think, because we had too much fun. Our tales generally lacked that morbidity that was the well-spring of his humor. Now they feel like both a blessing and a curse. These memories are a warm part of this cold day, made colder by the near certainty that we will make no more of them. I feel like making a monologue about our adventures right here and now, but I know this medium doesn't permit such length as that would require.
Spalding spent years fearing death so much that he made a living of it, and a friend. And yet, during the last ten years, he came to embrace a wholesome form of life. He became a devoted family man who, up until Saturday night, loved his children and his wife Kathie even more than he loved death. He tamed himself to an astonishing degree. He took up skiing and a quiet place in the country. Indeed, he seemed like such a reliable father that, two years ago, when my youngest daughter Amelia wanted to attend a day school in East Hampton, Long Island, I sent her to live with Spalding and Kathie.
Tragedy struck right before she moved in. Spalding was in an auto accident while touring Ireland (with Timothy Leary's widow, oddly enough). His hip and face were shattered. The hospital where he spent weeks focused primarily on healing his hip and, when he returned to New York, a CAT scan revealed that maxillary fractures had left an open passage between his nasal pharynx and his cranial cavity. In a bit of excessively heroic medicine, they peeled his face right off his head, and re-broke it. When he awoke from the surgery, he was a changed man. It was as if they had surgically removed all the joy from his world. He entered the most leaden depression I have ever seen.
Instead of trying to correct whatever neurological pressures had so altered his world-view the doctors responded with drugs that only seemed to make it worse. All the horrors of physical and emotional frailty that had been so hilariously contemplated in his monologues were suddenly far too real to be funny. And so they remained. Kathie was incredibly brave, as she is now, in maintaining a good home in spite of the crushing sadness that now lived in it. And Amelia's heart, already a generally compassionate zone, was broadened for the experience of a year there.
When I saw him last spring in Salt Lake City, he was well enough to perform and he got a standing ovation. He was perplexed that he had been so well-received. I didn't think it was a mystery. He had made a career of being a publicly depressed and obsessive creature. Now that he really was depressed and obsessed, he was more credible than ever. But when we went out afterward, it was steady work. Where once we might have gone Mormon-baiting on a walking tour of Salt Lake's earnest architecture, we sat in his hotel bar and engaged in the least funny conversation we'd ever had about suicide.
I told him that if he felt that life had become unendurable I could not, as his friend, ask him to go on enduring it. But I begged him to leave some room for hope. Which I guess he did for months. But now my own hope is dwindling down to a recognition that I will probably never again be able to laugh at the theatrical gloom of Spalding Gray, a gloom that seems to have become as real and deep and dark as the waters of New York Harbor.
New York, the Capital of Magic, seems haunted and lonely tonight. During the enchanted year I lived here with my late, lamented Cynthia Horner, we passed much of our social time with Spalding and John Kennedy, Jr. We all four of us loved New York and devoted many delighted hours together to exploring its eccentric crannies. Now, I think, two of them have been swallowed by water and one by air. And I remain, trying to keep the fire going."
cut from:
http://barlow.typepad.com/barlowfriendz/2004/01/is_spalding_gra.html