Free Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray

else’s personality. That’s what I liked about acting in plays. I felt like no one; and I guess that in some secret way pretending to be someone else saved me from the giant fear of death. It allowed me the fantasy that I had to be someone in order to die, and that as long as I was no one, or just an actor, death would never find me; death would somehow pass me by.
    So I played small roles and big roles. I even got to play Edmund in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
, When Mom heard that I was in
Long Day’s Journey
, she immediately wanted to come up and see it, which made me think that she was getting better. But Dad didn’t want Mom to see
Long Day’s Journey
because he felt it would be as disturbing as
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
had been for her. So he brought her up to see
The Knack
instead, a very silly, sophomoric English play where three very cool and crazy kind of guys try to learn the knack of picking up women. I was cast in the role of Tolen, a kind of cocky, strutting stud. At the time that was a real big stretch for me as an actor.
    So Mom came up with Dad and they stayed at a motel. You can imagine how disappointed she was having wanted and expected to see me play the role of poor tortured Edmund in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
and ending up instead seeing me strut my wares as Tolen in
The Knack
.
    After the show, Meg, Mom, Dad, and I all went back to their motel for drinks. I could tell that Mom was annoyed. I think she was beginning to perceive that she’d been brought up there on false pretenses, and she was just sort of clamming up at the table. She was polite to Meg, but that was about it. She sat there like a nervous little bird sipping her 7UP. Dad, on the other hand, got slightly drunk on bourbon and kept dropping hints about how nice it was to be backin a motel with “your mother” (that’s what he always called Mom in front of me) after all these years. She didn’t respond to his motel innuendos. She only got annoyed.
    Anyway, that was the night that I broke it to Mom and Dad that I had gotten a paying offer at the Alamo Theatre in Houston, Texas. Some sort of talent scout for regional theaters all over America had seen me play the role of Boss Mangan in
Heartbreak House
. He asked me to come down to New York City to audition for two major regional theaters. One of them was in Wisconsin and the other was the Alamo Theatre in Houston. I chose the Alamo because they were planning to do Chekhov’s
The Sea Gull
as one of their plays that season. I loved Chekhov and loved that play ever since I’d seen it through drunken eyes in Providence. I had always wanted to play the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich because of the way I often acted so tortured and hung up on Mom. That’s exactly how Konstantin was: tortured, sensitive, and very much hung up on his mother. Also, and best of all, Konstantin gets to commit suicide at the end of the play—every night! over and over again!—and for some reason I thought that would be really neat, to be able to kill myself every night and come back to life the following evening to do it again.
    I broke the news to Dad and Mom over motel drinks that night. Meg and I had spent a long time discussing it. It was her plan to finish school and then join me for the summer in Mexico, where we would have our own perfect vacation after I’d finished my first season at the Alamo Theatre. That was to be our first vacation together and our first time out of the United States. Dad’s response was “How much are they paying you?” And Mom just looked sad and said, “I wish you’d get a job acting in Providence so we could come and see you there.” That was it. That’s all they said.
    After Mom saw me in
The Knack
Dad had to send her to Fuller Sanitarium again. I think it had to do with the fact that he had brought her to see me in
The Knack
and not
Long Day’s Journey
. She was most likely angry at him but kept turning all her rage back on herself. It was