Spalding Gray R.I.P.

The first time I watched Spalding Gray in live performance was at Lincoln Center in the early 80s, escorted?no, handcuffed?by the late Gene Schwartz, an impassioned, distinguished collector and lonely patron of my early work, along with his lovely wife, Barbara Schwartz, still lively, still among us. I thought of Gene the moment I heard that all my bravado on Jan. 28 here in the Press, calling out to my missing friend, "Please Don't Go," echoing the old Blues classic, had fallen, into the East River. It was Gene's example that drove me in January: Though he died in the end from a stroke, he conceded nothing to depression, in public. Paralyzed in one hand, he learned to program computers with his left hand, composed a program for writers?and dared to become the first collector of WebArt.

Gene did not hurt inside: He glowed in the face of adversity. Spalding, another friend, further away from my daily life, hurt. Bad. You could see it in his face and hear it in his voice even in the early days when he was regaling the crowds at Lincoln Center, at the Performing Garage, a few doors away from me on Wooster Street, at P.S. 122, where his pal and mine, Mark Russell, insisted he transform his traumatic, bone-crushing car crash in Ireland in 2001 into "material," into the monologue many of us attended, over and over, this past fall.

Even when Spalding chatted away over the bombs and hysteria in Swimming to Cambodia, the film millions of us saw, remembered, couldn't forget...you could sense the darkness. Don't you see why? Spalding was narrating, wryly, about genocide, about the deepest hurt in this century, no matter what Mel Gibson tries to tell us in his skewed story of Christ's passion. The hurt of millions of dying Cambodians, flayed by our foreign policy, ate up every inch of Spalding's being.

Why...again? What hurt him inside so deep, so down, lodged there in rigid, unmoving terms? No one will ever know. The physicians and therapists judged him to be bipolar, a disease spreading throughout the world of brilliant men and women?my wife, once a productive critic and social worker, has it, though she is more often high than low (we used to call bipolarism manic depression, which tells you more than the idiotic cover story you read last week in New York Magazine, which made this horror seem like the latest glossy turn in life styling?the street style, if you will, of life and death).

Why...for the third, the lucky time? Last night, I found Spalding's old book, Sex and Death to the Age 14 (Random House, 1986) on the floor, as if he were sending me an answer. When I picked it up, I found a page marked down from long ago. The moment I read it was the moment I found the answer?not far off the point I tried to make about him on Jan. 28 (that he was brilliantly different even from you and me...that no finale ought to surprise us...that this was Spalding Gray missing, not W. Bush or Martha Stewart). Filled with monologues, this page occurs in one of the early talks, where he discusses his exceptional youth, age 14:

At last I began building bombs. I'd take a birthday candle and stick into a wad of clay, lay a big cherry bomb firecracker at the bottom of the candle, and put it behind a toilet in the boys' room. It's not that I never thought someone might sit on that toilet?I did think about that. I did think that would be bad. Then I'd light the candle and head for the English class from where, exactly 15 minutes later, I'd hear this enormous explosion and all the teachers would run out to catch the mad bomber. Was he mad? No. I ask you to read these lines carefully. He knew right from wrong. He didn't want to harm anyone. He simply wanted to wake us all up, in as radical a manner as he could devise. I see those three months of tragic-comic monologues at P.S. 122 as his subtly adult and cerebral cherry bomb. The leap into the river was his 14-year-old explosion, 40 years later.

Now we, the teaching staff, have to find the Mad, Kind, Spiritual, Uplifting bomber. Let us think Gray thoughts for a long time now, in multiple hues. He told much in those monologues: Let's read, let's hear them again, over and over.