I didn't know who Spalding was when he woke me from my sleep with a telephone call inviting me to his performance of Monster in a Box, in Santa Cruz, about a decade ago. "We're supposed to meet" he said, according to Lindsay, our mutual friend who admitted later she should have warned me. That night, a riotous performance to an appreciative audience who laughed while they applauded the moment he walked on stage. His first line, " This is going to be easy," brought the house down before he even began the monologue. We drank beer that night. The next day he came to my lecture on drugs and religious experience. We began a friendship. The next day he called me for help. He was flipping out. I'd never met a more manic man. He was flipping out because he couldn't get on the plane to leave. I forget for how long he stayed but I was sure at first he was collecting experiences for a new monologue. For him it was life. He was flipping out because he had just gotten married and was about to have a baby with another woman. The wife had no idea about the baby and Spalding could see no way out of this. He was freaked out about being a father and freaked out about being a husband. And I think it was the anniversary of his mothers suicide and his 50th birthday. She took her life on her 50th birthday. I may have some facts wrong. After a week, maybe longer, I think my son helped him the most. He was 2, maybe 3. Being a father is the greatest, I told him, "You'll love it.". My son buried him up to his neck in the sand which quite literally and psychologically grounded Spalding enough so that he could finally leave town and sort out his life. I still think Spalding roaming around Santa Cruz crying out for help to all the new age healers in town who just met their rich, famous, and crazy dream client, would make great theatre. In the many times he came back to visit or to perform in this town that loved him, he'd been treated with crystals, magnets, mountain biking, fung shui, massage, MDMA, astrology, gesalt, medical and other marijuana, past life regression, rebirthing, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, vodka, friendship, Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, sex, tarot, zen, tantra, jnana, bhakti, karma, and astanga yoga, to name a few ... And he got better. Well, he quit smoking cigarettes and never drank before 5. But right at 5 he began. He was quite civil and punctual about it.

One time a local surfer dude who was taking a course in performance art was sick with worry because he had put off to the last minute his assignment to write a term paper about his favorite performer, Spalding Gray. Like a lot of Santa Cruz denizens, this one wisely decided to solve his problems by going to the beach and smoking a joint. At that moment Spalding walked by...shocking this experienced smoker who, once he realized he wasn't hallucinating, interviewed an equally surprized Spalding on the fine art of monologue where timing is everything...

A couple years later Spalding called, happy and proud that Impossible VAcation was on the best seller list in Chicago where it was called "the best writing on sex since Henry Miller, and the best writing on psychosis since Sylvia Path." Spalding said to me "So I thought, here's Sylvia Path, head in the oven, and here comes Henry Miller, pulling up her dress, mounting her from behind." 

WE met up in Aspen one year to ski and where he was performing. He was sane and happy when he skied but sort of bombed in Aspen where he interviewed the audience, usually a brilliant performance but one that requires a audience that can appreciate and laugh at their own vunerability. 

Four or five years ago I saw him perform in San Francisco, and I had a sinking feeling that his career was coming to an end. He was thriving but I feared he was becoming too sane. Too happy. His genuis was in articulating his abundant neurosis, that most people share at least some of. His Morning Noon and Night monologue about his home life was sweet and brilliant but it didn't have the edge. He was a happy family man, until he went to Ireland and suffered that crash. Making things worse, he had finally gotten used to his new house in Sag Harbor and for some inexplicable reason, they sold it. Now he had to heal in a new house, that he didn't know and didn't like. Two pitifully weak suicide attempts didn't have me worrried but when I first saw him exactly a year ago on the psyche ward of New York Hospital he was so morbidly depressed and so fucked up on hospital drugs I was doubtful he would pull out. How'd this happen Spalding? He told me. It was an act, a cry for help, that got out of hand and now he was derranged on drugs he feared. But in several visits that month,I saw he was improving, showing off to me his progress walking and he even laughed, once. By the end of February I was hopeful he would transmute this darkness into brilliant humor and I'm still hopeful he will do that, in this life or one of the next...

--- Robert Forte

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