Swimming to Cambodia (14 page)

“Well, we look forward to it. Yes.”

Then I went out on a limb a little further and said, “Oh, I played a romantic lead in a ski film. I was a ski instructor in
Canadian Sunset.”

“Really?” Hope said. “How wonderful. Where was it filmed?”

Suddenly I drew a blank on all the cities in Canada ... and then Toronto came to mind, so I just said, “Toronto.”

And Hope just went and pushed me right off the limb by saying, “Toronto? I didn't know there was any skiing up there. I thought that it was all flat country.”

“Oh, yes, it's very flat. Really. Actually, the film built a mountain. Fascinating to watch that. The building of the mountain was a whole film in itself and they made a separate documentary about the building of the mountain called
Too Steep to Fall
. But basically, that's the difference between film acting and TV acting. In TV, they go to the mountain and in film, they bring the mountain to them.”

 

 

Now everything was going fine. I was making myself up. I've seen people make themselves up in an afternoon, become instant holy men, just make themselves up. I saw Richard Schechner do it in Central Park. It was on a lovely May day, back in the days when the Hare Krishnas used to chant from the Bowery up to Central Park, and they'd be so high by the time they reached the park that they'd look as if they were floating six inches off the pavement. They'd all come floating down the steps of Bethesda Fountain and a crowd of about two hundred people would gather around. Well, on one beautiful May Sunday, this spectacle stirred Richard's competitive juices and he took off all his clothes except for his Jockey underwear and asked me to hold them for him while he took out his Indian prayer rug, laid it by the fountain and stood on his head. This outrageous new spectacle immediately drew the crowds away from the Hares to him. I got a little panicked. It looked very much like a
Suddenly Last Summer
situation. All I could see were the soles of Richard's feet sticking up through the crowd, and I could see some of the people dropping little chunks of Italian Ices down through the holes in his underwear.

After about twenty minutes of this, Richard came down and ran over to me and said, “Quickly, give me my clothes. Let's get out of here.” And as he was getting dressed I looked over to see that he had about twenty-five new converts ready to follow him anywhere. Some of them were asking, “When will you return?” As Richard answered over his shoulder, “I shall return,” others asked, “Where are you going?” And Richard said, “I am walking east.”

I think they would have followed him right into the East River without a doubt in their heads.

 

 

Now, to some extent, Sri Rama Krishna also made himself up. He was an actor of sorts. He was the last great Indian saint who didn't have twenty-nine Rolls Royces—the last great
poor
Indian guru.

Sri Rama Krishna went through a number of dynamic character transformations in which he became the people he worshipped. Although he was a Hindu, he was in no way hung up on one religion. He embraced them all. When he worshipped Christ, he became Christ; when he worshipped Buddha, he became him. He even performed his tantric practices with a woman and when he worshipped Mother Kali he
became
a woman and people in the Kali temple would mistake him for one. He had no sense of self. He was an actor, a conduit, a man without an identity. And because he lived in India, he didn't have to go to a psychiatrist. He was seen as a holy man and not as a psychotic. At last, a naked sadhu ran out of the jungle, stuck a sharp stone between Sri Rama's eyes and he saw Nothing.

Now, who are the holy people in the West? Actors and actresses. They are the only people who can say they don't know who they are and not be put away in an insane asylum for it. Peter Sellers, the actor, was not unlike Sri Rama Krishna to the extent that he made himself up and acted as a conduit through which he allowed many voices to pass. Sellers insisted that he never knew who he was. In the West that was a problem, so he had to go to a psychiatrist, but in my mind, he was a kind of holy man. And in our utilitarian, materialistic world, where is Mecca for these holy people of the West? It's the furthest west they can go without going east. It's Hollywood. And where does their immortality have its being? On film. The image set forever in celluloid. And who is God? The camera. The ever-present, omniscient third eye. And what is the Holy Eucharist? Money!

 

 

So I said, “I'm going!” And I put on the magic John Malkovich suit, the brown one, I took my Thai bhat and converted it into $600, got a ticket on TWA and headed out to Hollywood to select an agent.

After the plane took off without crashing, I was opening one of those fucking little salad dressing packets and—“Oh,
shit
! Oh, Lord, why does this always happen the one time I put a suit on? Chewing gum flies to me on the subway and sticks. Salad dressing eats through my new pants.”

This traveling salesman next to me said, “Don't worry about it, take it right in to the cleaners as soon as you get there. Hope it's colorfast. Where'd you have it made?”

“Bangkok.”

“Oh. Well I don't know about that. You never know how those guys will put something together.”

 

 

So as soon as I arrived in Venice I took my suit to the cleaners and rushed right down to see the boardwalk. I was so excited to be in a large city that was so close to a major ocean—I couldn't wait to see and breathe that ocean. I couldn't wait to see and walk on that boardwalk I'd heard so much about. I thought, the agent can wait for a day. I'm going to see that Pacific Ocean.

When I got down to the boardwalk I was a little disappointed to find that there were no boards. It turned out to be an asphalt walk. But still, I was excited to be by the ocean, and as I was walking along that asphalt boardwalk with a bounce, breathing deep, an unmarked car pulled up behind me and two unmarked guys jumped out. Holding chrome-plated forty-fives with both hands, they braced themselves on the top of the open car doors and almost blew away two winos. I thought I was in a movie or at least on
Hill Street Blues,
and I ducked behind a pizza counter. I watched these two unmarked men run up and press the barrels of their guns right to the winos' heads, handcuff their arms behind them, knee them in the back and then throw them into the unmarked car. I thought, Lordy, Lordy, this is dangerous territory. I better go get my magic John Malkovich suit on. But the suit wasn't ready yet, and soon cocktail hour rolled around.

I decided to ride out on my borrowed ten-speed bike in search of beer. I found a little beer store on a side road and went in and bought a king-size can of Rainier
Ale, and I just couldn't wait to get home—I opened it right outside the store. I was brown-bagging and chug-a-lugging just like I would in New York, when this L.A.P.D. cruiser came full speed down the little side-street and did a U-turn. And something about the way the car turned made me think that maybe they were after me. Like they had beer radar. And I wondered, can it be that they would take time out of their busy schedule to bust me for drinking one king-size can of Rainier Ale?

Not wanting to take any chances, I chucked it into a cardboard box beside me which was filled with empty beer cans. The police pulled up and shined the spotlight attached to the side of their car right on that box, and the two of them got out of the car and went over and pulled out the very can from which I'd been drinking. Somehow they were able to pick that can out from all the others. And they pushed me up against the wall of the beer store and made me put my hands over my head while they searched me with a club.

“What's your name? Where's your I.D.?”

“I don't have my wallet. I left it back at the house where I'm staying—and my name is Spalding Gray.”

“Oh, yeah? What do they call you?”

“They call me Spalding Gray. I swear it.”

And one of the cops said, “Okay, get in the car,” while the other one put my bike in the trunk. And just as I was getting into the cruiser the cop who was handling my bike demanded to search me.

“Okay, I know my partner's searched you but we like to do double searches around here just to make sure.”

So I got searched again and then they put me in the back of the cruiser and said, “What's the address of the
house you're staying at?” And for a moment I blanked out. Then I remembered six days in a Las Vegas jail in 1977 for refusing to give my name to an officer when first asked, and I remembered 9227 Boccaccio. It just came to me like that—and I thought, oh my God, I'm getting good. I'm getting healthier. I'm on my way to success.

They drove me there. It was a very short trip and when we got there one cop stayed in the car to guard me while the other went into 9227 Boccaccio to find out if anyone knew one Spalding Gray. And luckily, someone there knew me that day and the cop came right back out and said, “Okay, get your bike out of the trunk and consider yourself lucky for getting a free ride home.”

I would rather have ridden my bike home, I thought, but I didn't tell them that. What I did say was, “Look, I don't want to sound ungrateful or testy, but I just flew in from New York City and people brown-bag all the time in New York, so I didn't know.”

The cop replied in a very stern voice, like a voice I remembered from boarding school, “I think if you check your New York City laws you'll find that it's against the law to drink in the streets. We just happen to enforce our laws here in L.A.”

 

 

Right to bed! The next day I got up bright and early, feeling like a new man, and I went and got my suit out of the cleaners and got my friends to drive me to Ugly Duckling Car Rental, which was the cheapest I could find. I rented an Ugly Duckling Toyota. The only problem with the car that I could see was that the seat was
broken so that it was at the angle of a lounge chair, and I could barely see over the windshield.

By that time I had boiled it all down to two agencies. If both were interested I would have to make the choice between them. One was Writers and Artists and the other was Smith Freedman Associates. First, I visited Writers and Artists and they were very nice—I think they wanted to sign me. The only problem, as I saw it, was that they were not “other” enough. They were too much like My People. They were very WASPy and I could see them all wearing topsiders and vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. Also, I wasn't sure if it would be such a good idea to be represented under the title “Writers and Artists” in this day and age if, in fact, I wanted to make enough money to buy a house in the Hamptons.

So I decided to drive over and see Susan Smith at Smith Freedman Associates, and if she wanted to sign me I'd do it. As soon as I walked into her office she said, “We want you. We want to sign you right now.”

Well, I was kind of sober about all this because it was all so smiley, all going so fast. I responded in my very serious and rather ponderous East Coast way, “Well, that's nice, isn't it? Now let me think about it.”

And Susan said, “Would you have smiled if we said we didn't want you?” Then she said, “Let's go, we don't have time for this. You've got one day left out here and we want to send you out to all the casting agents in town just to say, ‘Hi. I'm a new face in town and I'm with Smith Freedman.' ”

They gave me a map of all the studios and I headed out to the first stop, Warner Brothers, to audition for
The Karate Kid.
They had me read for the role of the
tough guy, the kind of karate killer who teaches all the neighborhood kids his aggressive, evil ways. Well, you can imagine how that went.

The next stop was
Hill Street Blues,
which went a little better. Gerri Windsor, the casting director, was very nice and she told me that if I moved out there she could almost guarantee me some work on the show. I asked her how she could say that when she hadn't even auditioned me, and she said, “New faces. We're always looking for new faces and you're a new face. With a good agent. So I think we're pretty safe in saying that if you move out here we can get you work—but you have to live out here because we really can't afford to fly you out.”

So I left
Hill Street
and continued to follow my little map to ABC, NBC and CBS. All was going fine, but by noon I understood why all actors out there have air-conditioned cars. My Ugly Duckling wasn't air-conditioned and I was beginning to leak through my shirt. Also, that hot, dry air was turning my hair into an insane frizzball. I was coming unglued. And by the time I reached Twentieth Century-Fox I looked like a madman.

I parked the Ugly Duckling, being careful not to park it within eye-view of the casting director's office because I'd heard that they look out to see what you're driving, and the Ugly Duckling was not looking good in comparison to the other cars in that lot. I went into the office and was happy and surprised to find that the receptionist recognized me from my monologues—and she was excited to see me.

“Oh, Spalding Gray, what are you doing here looking for work? You should be working all the time. You
could play a lawyer, you could play a doctor, you could play a psychiatrist . . .”

I went inside the casting director's office and quickly realized that she had no idea who I was, beyond being a “new face.” There was something both comforting and discomforting about being there. The comforting part was the physical office itself, the fantastic white couch and the way in which it received me as I sank in and slowly gave up all thoughts of ever moving again. Also, the clean view out the window of lush palms and pines, coupled with the secure feeling of being in that oh-so-clean, solid room. And most of all, the way the corners of the ceiling and walls came together at perfect, solid, white, right angles. But the discomforting part of the experience came when she told me that she just called me in to see me, “have a look,” I think she meant. But she said, “We've heard all about you and now we'd like to see you.”