Swimming to Cambodia (15 page)

And we made small talk while she looked and I could feel my imperfect jawline sagging, my face puffing and my bald spot shining. I could see all those things and I suddenly and clearly realized what it feels like to be a woman scrutinized by a man. I've hardly ever had that feeling before. Only in Morocco.

But that big, soft couch had made me feel secure, and I found that I had made it on time, without getting lost or arrested, to all my interviews and I felt a kind of Triumph of the Will as I sped along the freeways in my little Ugly Duckling.

The only problem was that the front seat had fallen all the way back and was now resting on the back seat. I was using this as a positive experience by holding myself erect by the wheel and giving my stomach muscles
a good isometric workout. It was wonderful to be out on the open freeway again and feeling that I had willed it all, and also feeling, isn't it funny that after you've willed something you wonder why you wanted to will it in the first place? But it felt good anyway.

Think of it, I considered, way back on the beaches of Thailand I wanted an agent and now I've got one. I've willed it and I got it and isn't that what everyone out here wants?

 

 

An agent. Even my friends the Cambodian refugees from Long Beach wanted to know how they could get an agent. They had suddenly found that they were in a very good feature film and were sure that the next logical step in the progression was to get a Hollywood agent. When I went to visit them they asked me if I could help them get one. An agent. An agent. “Can you help us get an agent?” I wanted to help but I couldn't imagine where Cambodians would find steady work in the Industry. Then a very perverse idea occurred to me. Norman Lear had just produced a sitcom called
A.K.A. Pablo
that had given a lot of Chicanos steady work. Perhaps the new sitcom of the eighties could be
A.K.A. Pol Pot—
which would give all my Cambodian friends a lot of work.

It wasn't all that far-fetched. I got the idea from a very poignant film I had seen at the Margaret Mead Festival a few years earlier. The film was about the relocation of the Laotian Hmong tribes. After the CIA lost the war in Laos all the Hmongs had to get out fast because they sided with “the American military effort in Laos.” The film was about their relocation from Thai refugee camps to immigrant condos in Washington State.

They all arrived at these furnitureless condominiums that had wall-to-wall shag carpeting as long as your fingers. I guess they saw the shag as a kind of organic growth so they began by washing it down with a garden hose and then sweeping the water into a heating duct, thinking it was a drain. After that they tried to cook chicken breasts in the toaster. It was all very sad and very funny at the same time.

The supermarket confused them totally. Thinking it was a bar of soap, they bought a big, yellow block of Velveeta cheese. This is how I picture the opening shot of the sitcom: a Cambodian singing “Do You Want to Funk?” in the shower as he washes under his arms with a large yellow block of Velveeta, which is breaking into chunks from the hot water and washing down the drain in yellow streams.

 

 

So I had gotten an agent by willing it and I was home-free on the freeway, and didn't it feel oh-so-good to put the pedal to the metal and spin. Turn up the radio and blast. And, yes, I could do it, we could do it. Renée and I could move out here and have a little house in a canyon. A little bungalow which all came together in solid, clean, white, right angles. We could do it. I could get some work on
Hill Street, St. Elsewhere
or
Knots Landing
and we could do it.

I would come home exhausted after a day's work at the studio and instead of having cocktail hour, I'd go jogging around the reservoir while Renée arranged sun-dried tomatoes and smoked mozzarella and tossed a big bowl of sprouts and leafy greens. We could do it. And I'd come in all sinewy and tired, just wanting to eat
and rest and be with, and sleep with, my little Renée. My little sweetie. And soon the beautiful children would come along and there'd be fun with them on weekends out in the high desert, or downwind, surfing off Venice. And we'd make it. The kids would grow up and we'd have enough money to send them to good schools. Renée and I would grow old together and we'd make it. We'd make it through.

 

 

Then the freeway would grind down into an impossible gridlock situation and clog with smog. And the Ugly Duckling would come almost to a dead stop, and the image of MX missiles flying low over pine trees would flash in my mind. I needed to get back. I had to get back to the East Coast to save the world and stop the war.

And wasn't life about service? Didn't I have enough pleasure in my life and wasn't it now time to help ease the pain of others? And the Bodhisatva's vow came to me: If all people can't reside in a state of pleasure in Southern California, then no one can until all can. And I could see the State of California collapsing, not from earthquakes, but from the weight of the world as all the wretched of the earth clamored toward the sun that broke through bare lemon trees and devoured fruit bushes. How could I think of my pleasure when the world still suffered so? How? How? How? Oh, the shame of it!

I needed to get back to give my old sweaters away to the Cambodian refugees in Far Rockaway. And the death image of Jean Donovan—chopped to death in El Salvador—came to me. And the
Cocktail Party voice
of Celia Coplestone from her anthill crucifixion played in my ears:

And I thought, I've got to get back where it all counts. I've got to get back.

Then the traffic would pick up and everything would feel clear, as the not-so-long-dead voice of Alan Watts floated up from his Sausalito houseboat saying, “Relax, Spalding, relax. Enjoy. You're in California now. What is there to feel guilty about? Relax. Enjoy. Life's a party. So what if you came in at the end of it? Relax. Enjoy.”

 

 

I made it back to Venice and had a couple of good-sized shots of tequila and went to bed. And I had this dream.

I was babysitting for a boy in a cabin in the woods. There was this huge fireplace, and the boy kept playing a game with me where he would run into the fireplace and get partially consumed by the flames and then run out—just before he was completely consumed—and reconstitute
himself. I was very nervous. I was watching him out of the corner of my eye and all of a sudden he ran in and I saw that he was completely in flames. There was no torso left and the flames were in the shape of legs, flame-legs. And I grabbed the fire-poker to try to pull him out and ... nothing. It just went right through the flames; there was no substance. And the flames burned down and left this pile of gray ash on the hearth.

I turned to see, in the corner of the cabin, a straw boy, an effigy of the real boy. And I took the gray ash in my hands and went over and blew it into the straw boy's side. Slowly, the effigy came alive. And his face had this great, ear-to-ear, joyous, all-knowing, friendly smile as he shook his head. And I realized that he hadn't wanted to come back, that he had chosen to be consumed by the flames—and then the spirit went out of the straw boy and I was left holding this empty, straw effigy in my arms. I thought, how am I ever going to tell this story to his mother? No one will believe me. And I went searching for someone to tell the story to. I found that I was wandering through the streets of Hollywood.

The first person I came across was Ron Vawter, an actor friend from a theatre company called The Wooster Group, and I told Ron the story. He said, “You should have called the police right away. You need a witness with authority. There's no way you're going to prove that this happened and there's no way you can reenact it.”

I left Ron and continued my search for the straw boy's mother, and came upon Elizabeth LeCompte, the director of The Wooster Group. She was sitting, drinking orangeade with the boy's mother by a Hollywood pool.
I started to tell them the story but I couldn't articulate it and instead of telling the Straw Boy Story, in a very loud, theatrical voice I said, “THE REASON I'M UPSET IS THAT I WAS JUST IN A NEW PECKINPAH MOVIE OF CHEKHOV'S SEAGULL . . .”

And I had played the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich, the writer who shoots himself in the head at the end of the play . . .

“AND WHAT I'M UPSET ABOUT—IS THAT I SAW THE FILM, I LIKED IT, BUT I CAN'T REMEMBER DOING IT. I can't remember acting in it. All I saw was an image with no memory attached.”

And I knew all the time I was telling this story that it was a cover for the real story, the Straw Boy Story, which, for some reason, I found impossible to tell.

T
his is a recording. Spalding Gray's
Swimming to Cambodia,
that is. It is a record as history is a record. Dare I say that it is a new form as well, or really an old one reasserting itself in a new way? Call it an “epic monologue,” remembering what “epic” has meant during the several millenia of its history: a text performed first, written down later; a vessel for great themes expressed through mighty events extending past earthbound reality up into the splendor of paradise and down into the devastation of hell; a canvas of life forever on the move between the individual and universal, and always beset by the irony of mortality; a confluence of history and myth.

An over-inflated order for a couple of hours on the stage, to be sure—especially hours spent with someone so entertaining and downright hilarious as Gray. But the two parts of
Swimming to Cambodia
are such rich, deep reflections on the world as we are obliged to live in it right now, and so clearly culminations of work their author has been creating for several years, that they invite hyperbole.

Gray's life as a performer is an important part of the history of American avant-garde theatre over the past
generation. He was active in the 1960s and 1970s with Richard Schechner and the Performance Group, continuing with that theatre after Schechner's departure and its transformation into the present Wooster Group, one of the most exciting, innovative experimental ensembles operating anywhere today. It was from parts of Gray's personal history, particularly the events surrounding the suicide of his mother, that director Elizabeth LeCompte fashioned the
Rhode Island Trilogy,
the Wooster Group's first work and its first typically controversial artistic success.

Adjacent to those complex, ensemble performances of his past, Gray developed his own monologues which have inevitably become ongoing explorations of his present. First, there was
Sex and Death to the Age 14
(childhood to puberty), then
Booze, Cars
and
College Girls
(young manhood), A
Personal History of the American Theatre
(his early career as an actor), India and
After
(the times and, to a degree, the life of the Performance Group), right up to
Interviewing the Audience
(which is just that).

When he first sat down behind a modest wooden table, took an almost calibrated sip from a glass of water and began to read from his journals about memories of early erections and the death of pets, Gray surely did not realize that his experiment would become the focal point of a vast range of performance art which would dominate New York's Soho and other bastions of the artistic vanguard during the 1970s. He became a major influence in that work, praised as an original by some, damned as a perpetrator of the “me-decade” by others. (After all! A guy sitting at a table just talking about himself!)

It would be incorrect to think that these early monologues, eight in all, could be written down and served up end-to-end to total a neat autobiography. All are impressionistic; all weave back and forth in time and place to form tapestries of intertwining themes and imagery which only occasionally reveal a strand of sequential narrative. Some are experimental in the extreme: In
India and After,
for example (the first monologue that was not strictly “mono”), a partner chooses words from an unabridged dictionary to which Gray responds with free associations having to do with his trips to India and across the United States during the early 1970s.

Likewise, it would be false to consider these pieces to be the narcissistic exercises of an actor's overgrown ego, unconcerned with such irrelevant externals as politics, history and society.
Sex and Death
begins and ends with two cataclysmic punctuations: the A-bomb dropped at Hiroshima, the H-bomb at Enewetak. What Gray conveys in between, albeit in the subtlest and most indirect way, is the coming of age in this country after World War II. All of the monologues have had such an added, often hidden, dimension. If you stare at any one of them long enough, you find that what has happened to Gray reflects in a startlingly illuminating way what has happened to the world, or at least a significant section of it, you and I certainly included.

But such allegorical relationships are never explicit, or even apparently deliberate. Each new work is a new development of the Gray persona, which could be characterized as an incorrigible witness, mirror or, well, sponge. And as the material moves through his childhood past into his adult here-and-now, the autobiographical
“I” more and more shares the stage with the bystander “he.” It has gradually become Gray's chosen lot simultaneously to live his life and to play the role of Spalding Gray living his life,
and
to observe said Gray living his life in order to report on it in the next monologue. Perhaps this hall of mirrors, this endless playoff between performance and reality, has always been the situation of the artist. It is certainly the quintessential perspective of the actor, though seldom dramatized so blatantly. But has it ever been more plainly the predicament of everyone else in this media-ridden age of instant replay? Conditioned by McLuhan and Warhol, Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue, we are all to an extent the subject of our own self-writing life story, our shoot-as-you-go movie. The possibility of celebrity for everyone seems to grow with each news-cast.