Cockroaches, Truth Telling, and Spalding Gray

Recently I went to a reading of the diaries of Spalding Gray put on by Writers Bloc LA . I became a fan of Spalding Gray over 20 years ago, when I discovered his book Sex and Death to the Age 14. I recently re-read it, and missed his voice all over again. Here’s why I was happy to traverse the city at rush hour, about 90 minutes of traffic to travel a few miles, for what promised to be the literary equivalent of a Ouija board:

I was 21 years old in the summer of 1990 and living in what I now realize was a truly crappy apartment in Boston. My best friend and I shared a room, and my ne’er-do-well ex-friend Rick occupied the other room with his ever-growing mountain bike collection. At the time I flagellated myself into thinking that I/we weren’t clean, creative, or enterprising enough to make the place lovely. But I came to understand that there was only so much I could do against the tide of broken plumbing, curtainless windows, and cockroaches. Sharon and I brought our college-issue futons with us from Vassar. We hoped to return to college in the fall with money in our pockets and glamorous memories of our first summer on our own in a city.

We did end up having a memorable summer, sort of a mutant hybrid of Laverne and Shirley and Sex in the City. Friends from college lived a few blocks away and across the river near Tufts University, and we hung out with them whenever we could. But by July, the reality of having to work multiple jobs in order to pay the rent (in a building where we sometimes had to step over a vagrant between the “security” doors) was wearing thin. We rushed to our jobs at the yogurt stand downtown and to our catering gigs, across the river to our lit class at Harvard, perpetually missing the T while we cursed and sweat. The pièce de résistance came when a thief broke into our apartment while we were sleeping. Lucky for us, he (?) was a coward and ran out as soon as our alarm clock went off. Had he stayed, the most valuable thing he might have found would have been the tabs of acid my burnout roommate Rick kept in the freezer.

Things had taken a turn for the depressing and creepy. The vile Boston College or Boston University guys upstairs, forever blasting the worst songs by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, regularly stole the care packages our moms sent. One day in Harvard Square I stepped into a bookstore. I might have been looking for something to replace the V.S. Naipaul book I was assigned to read (and hating). I browsed aimlessly and came across an intriguing title. The man on the cover, with a white oxford shirt and unruly graying hair, sitting at a desk and staring into my eyes, caught my attention as much as the title: Sex and Death to the Age 14. It was my first encounter with Spalding Gray. I stood in the bookstore and read. By page two, I knew that this was a book that I must read, now.

I don’t think I read the book on the train home. The train was usually crowded enough that I couldn’t settle into a book, so fixated was I on making sure some creep on the train didn’t grab my ass. (Again.) I got off the train, passed the “erotic” bakery that was the classiest part of my neighborhood, and rushed into my apartment to read the book. I don’t remember how long it took me to read. I must have had to break for dinner, work, and some gnashing my teeth aloud with Sharon about guys. But I know that I loved the book. In my world of ennobling, canonical liberal arts texts, Spalding Gray’s voice was arresting, the stories he told an alchemy of sadness and comedy, chaos and coming of age, and (as I would later read) the search for the perfect moment.

In later years I would read Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. After I moved to Los Angeles, I went to see Spalding Gray perform two of his last monologues, “It’s a Slippery Slope” and “Morning, Noon, and Night.” His death knocked me off-balance; like the viewers in “The Truman Show,” I felt that I’d come to know him. Even after the debilitating car accident in Ireland, when he would describe the surprising happiness that having a family late in life gave him, I thought, he’s going to be okay. Of course, the facts of his injury and the history of depression and suicide in his family were much more complicated than his public version of events revealed.

But back in 1990, the gift of reading Spalding Gray was that rare feeling that there was someone else in the world whose storytelling describes the particulars of his own messy, anxious existence and somehow shines a light on aspects of my own that I hadn’t realized were there. I left Boston with cockroaches hidden in my towels, weary of my summer gig as a member of the urban poor, but awakened to a kindred spirit.

If you would like to read more about Spalding Gray, visit his fan website: www.spaldinggray.com

And here are links to some of his other work, including the recently published diaries:

It’s a Slippery Slope

Morning, Noon and Night

The Journals of Spalding Gray