Gray Matters

'It's odd that I met you,' said the late Spalding Gray. 'It's too many coincidences.'

I killed Spalding Gray. Even though I hoped that the actor-writer-monologuist's "missing" status meant he simply wandered off to get his head together, I knew he was dead. I did it.

October 2001, New York City was a ghost town. The streets were so quiet you could hear the candles burning outside the fire stations as you walked past.

The Algonquin Hotel hosted the awarding of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. That's where I killed Spalding Gray, in plain sight of dozens of people. It would be more than two years before his body was found in the East River, just last week.

"I knew what killed Marilyn Monroe": Gray
photo: Thomas McGovern
"I knew what killed Marilyn Monroe": Gray

Multiple sclerosis has taught me about crutches. I use aluminum forearm crutches in weaker periods, though that night I had only a cane. This man's crutch was one of those light-colored, wooden, up-to-the-armpit forks. Experience told me one crutch was the wrong number.

What I saw of this man—the single crutch, the unkemptness, the crowd's physical avoidance of him—told me he was a smelly homeless person who had wandered into the Algonquin. As I stepped away from the refreshments table, he speared a hunk of smoked salmon on a serving fork and held it in front of him, apparently puzzled to find he didn't yet have a plate.

I was fascinated. Would he carry his food the few yards between himself and the plates? Eat it directly from the serving fork? Try to catapult the salmon toward a distant plate, with all the slapstick consequences that implies?

A banquet guest provided the answer, appearing with a plate and, I swear, a little curtsy. When the tottering explosion of gray turned toward me I saw his eyes were immense—not least because of the acres of eyebrows above and bags below—yet the irises were tiny and piercing. You can't see it on the movie screen, where they seem almost childlike, but Spalding Gray had grave eyes.

He pinned the crutch under one arm and picked up a glass of wine with his now free hand. At least one of his encumbrances—the wine, the salmon, or the crutch—wasn't going to get far. Instead of enjoying the farce, like a world-weary cosmopolitan man, I helped, like a good Midwestern boy.

"Mr. Gray?" I said. "How about I take all that to your table and you take my cane? It'll help you balance."

The world-weary cosmopolitan man saw the flaw in this offer. "Can you walk without that?"

"Sure," I lied.

He took my cane, walking a few steps away and a few steps back like he was trying on a new pair of shoes. "That does help," he said. Then, missing the point of the exercise completely, he handed the cane back to me, picked up the plate and glass, and hooked the hand with the wine glass over my shoulder. "Where is your table?" he asked.

Like some sort of bizarre, six-legged clockwork waiter, we wobbled across the room with our plate hands held out for balance.

The reality of the situation hit me. This was Spalding Gray, a New York-Hollywood "somebody" (see Mark Russell's tribute). I was something else: a tourist, maybe an audience. Our literal physical reliance on one another couldn't erase the implied distance. I half assumed that when we got to my table it would be swamped by famous people and I would move to my proper station somewhere else.

But I realized I actually had something to talk to Spalding Gray about. I was writing a novel set in Thailand, and my heroine relied on his film Swimming to Cambodia as her entire pre-trip preparation.

"We're updating that," he said.

"The film?"

"The monologue. We're redoing Swimming to Cambodia this year."

The idea didn't make sense. The monologue was about a film he'd made 15 years ago, which itself was about events that had taken place a decade or more previously. How would that be a good candidate for updating? I asked. He didn't answer.

"You," he said. "It's odd that I met you. It's too many coincidences."

"Such as?" I asked, innocently.


I was exhausted hearing it, particularly because so many of these things made him cry. I thought I could help by asking questions. If I could peel away the petals of this artichoke of pain, expose the heart, I could ask just the question that would trigger just the realization and make something, somehow, fixed.

The heart was probably the house. It's hard to say because of the fractal nature of his offstage speech, which wove between topics desperately. I could hardly weigh one idea before he brought up five others and circled around to the first. He frequently apologized for his manner, a manifestation of his severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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