I met you one night, Spalding Gray, many, many years ago. You were headlining the “O Solo Mio” Festival in San Francisco, where monologists from all over the world came to tell their stories. This was when I was doing little shows at the Holy City Zoo, a comedy club across the street from my apartment on Clement Street, before it became the new Chinatown.
There was a young man with you who had been building an ad campaign to be launched in movie theatres which included public service ads alerting the audience to the AIDS epidemic. It subtly maintained a wry, ironic wit to a terribly distressing issue. You were the jewel in his crown. Was his name Matthias? I forget, but of course I remember you, and seeing you rush into the almost empty club that night, very late, sitting right in the front row to catch the tail end of my show.
You had on a corduroy blazer, a camel color, with earthy suede patches on the elbows and a Pendelton plaid shirt tucked into wide whale forest green baggy pants, your hair wild and frayed, gray as your name. You shook my hand emphatically, and said you were a big fan, and that my work was very important. I was awfully impressed, more than starstruck, and while I couldn’t really believe that you’d ever seen me or heard of me, I think that was the first time in my young life as an artist that I actually felt important. Your endorsement of my importance provided me with strength that carried me through many trials that I might not have survived, so it proves that small acts of kindness reverberate in ways that we cannot predict, and that if we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love’s reach. I am grateful to you for that lesson, and I try to be giving in my interactions with all of mankind.
Your work always astounded me, the sheer quiet genius of you, the humor and the pathos interwoven to create spellbinding tales of a life that was at once simple and then utterly, incomprehensibly complex. Masterpieces painted with words and gestures, real and surreal, personality substituting persona, a life happening instead of an image being controlled for mass appeal. Your art was at once ancient and modern, from the tradition of oral history passed down through storytelling, to the hipster, self incriminating revelatory confessional which made pain and oddity, human frailty and life’s strangely sweet small wonders heroic and compelling. The world of Spalding Gray was one that I’d hoped was a happy one, that you’d walked for miles on cool, fall mornings in Connecticut, letting the air leave your lungs in white clouds, while your mind created rough sketches of memory, remembrances of long lost lovers, hopes and aspirations, worries and doubts, laughter and irony. Perhaps it was this way sometimes. I hope that you were happy sometimes, because you gave so much more happiness than you will ever know.
My friend, an eccentric and frostily beautiful woman who was my nearest associate for about a year, and then suddenly, without warning, dropped out of my life altogether, gave me one of your books, “Sex and Death To The Age Fourteen” with the inscription, “M – This book is why I am still alive. Love, C.” I wish that you had a book like that. How is it that you could save lives, but were unable to save your own? You are sorely missed.
I wish love to your family, your many friends, all those who loved you, from up close and far away. They are many, too dazed and saddened to accept the loss of you. Good night sweet teacher, good night.