Read Online Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray - Free Book Online Page B

back into the world of the living when he’d say, “Let’s take a break,” and
whoosh
, I’d be back in my body and putting on my robe and talking with Meg about all the places I’d been in my imagination.
    They paid me very little, only $3.50 an hour, but that was fine, because I was getting paid for just standing still, or sometimes sitting, and that left my mind free to roam and soar. The only thing I had to be careful of was not to roam into any sexual fantasies, because it would lead to erections that would swell up and try to peek out of my red jock strap like some sly snake with a mind of its own. Then I would have to relax the snake by saying the simple phrase over in my mind: “Remember, Brewster, you are going to die. One day, you are going to not be—forever.” That would pretty much take care of it.
    Then I’d look around, or rather my eyes would look around, because I couldn’t move my body—I had to remain very still—and I would see Meg and all these other students looking at me anddrawing me, and I would feel my whole body fill up with substance again in their eyes. I’d come and go from that. I would come and go; it was like a game of hide-and-seek.
    I liked the long sitting poses in a comfortable chair best of all, just sort of lolling there, stretched out and lounging, for forty-five minutes until I turned into a soft, languid statue, like one of the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn. I’d sit in the most delicious of places, the place of greatest hope, the purest, most delicious place of suspended desire and anticipation, that place just before action destroys perfection and leads to the completion of desire and the inevitable corruption and disappointment of consequence.
    These long poses not only brought a stillness to my body, they also brought a stillness to my mind. It was no longer racing over the past in a manic state. My mind came to this still place until, at last, the room and I were one.
    After a three-hour session of modeling in those long poses, I would be stunned by how vividly I saw the world around me. Colors and sounds vibrated in me. It was as if I had the eyes of a ten-year-old. I didn’t mind the low pay. I would have done it for free because it was for me a special kind of meditation. It was about being alone and not being alone all at the same time. But most of all it was about my body being consumed by those eyes.
    After a while it was not enough just to have my body be seen, I wanted my mind to be seen as well. I wanted to move it in some more creative direction, and that was when I got interested in theater again. I began to wonder what it would be like to get my body and mind together, so that both aspects were being seen simultaneously.
    There was a little theater group in New Paltz then. They were staging real straight, traditional plays. All around me the whole world was falling apart. There was nothing straight or traditional about it. The Vietnam War was boiling, Mom was cracking up, everyone seemed to be spaced out on some psychedelic drug; and in the middle of all this I found myself gravitating toward a conservative community theater, composed of people who imbibed little more than scotch or cheap sherry. I mean, they’d just sit around sipping cheap sherry and say, “Why not do Shaw’s
Heartbreak House
?” or “Why not do
Long Day’s Journey into Night
?” And then they’d just up and do it. Theywould put on the three-and-a-half-hour uncut version of
Long Day’s Journey into Night
in front of ten people.
    They called themselves the New Age Players, and that was odd, because there was nothing new age about them. But I liked working with them because it gave such order to my life. Having to rehearse and learn lines was so focusing. And I didn’t have to be me. Not that I felt that there was a real me to be. I mean, taking the LSD had showed me that I was really empty, so I was perfectly happy to be filled up with someone else’s words and someone