by Mike Daisey
I have a new gig at P.S.122 in the East Village, performing a new show every Monday night. It's called All Stories Are Fiction, and every week I report on what has happened since the last week. It's half confessional, half storytelling, and challenging as hell--I only really start observing life when I have a deadline.
More exciting than being at P.S.122 was the company I'd be keeping--throughout the spring Spalding Gray would be performing upstairs, while I'd be downstairs. I felt anointed--I remember walking home that day after booking the gig and feeling luminous and lucky.
I didn't like Spalding's work at first--a heresy, but I found him a tad boring and rangeless. "All those glasses of water and all that talking!" I'd tell people, shocking them with my artlessness. This is youth--if you don't want to be a suck-up and you want to stand on your own, you distance yourself. You talk shit and convince yourself you mean it. My own work is what changed my mind; with each year I find myself stripping away more and more theatricality, letting the story rise and rise until it fills the whole space. With each year I'm learning the landscape, and Spalding makes more sense to me. I was ready to be downstairs from him.
By the time spring came, Spalding was gone. Step by step decisions were made: Change the posters, cancel the brochures, rerecord the voice mail, a million cruel, stupid chores. He's still everywhere, though--in boxes, in notes and proofs, in subscribers' calls, in the dressing rooms, everywhere. When people vanish, what they leave gets charged with terrible importance--I ran across a rehearsal schedule with his name on it while cleaning up and couldn't move it. I sat there, powerless, for half an hour. People would suddenly mention him--out of nowhere the box-office person told me, "He was getting better, with each show in the fall. I can't believe he'd leave now. I can't believe it." Everyone knew him, or everyone felt like they knew him, and were all waiting dreadfully for the ice to break up in the river.
When they found his body and told the world, I was getting ready for the show that evening, my universe collapsing down into a hot, brilliant focus. Should I talk about Spalding? Can I even think about anything else? I was absolutely terrified. Backstage before the show I began to hyperventilate, drowning on the idea.
I didn't speak about him--it was too much to face. I did a good show about other things and went to a bar, where I got drunk and played darts. My wife was drunkenly throwing for the bull's-eye when I imagined him, like it should have been, like we were just going out after our shows, nothing serious, just sitting across from one another, when I would have turned and told him how glad I was he was there.
Mike Daisey is a monologist and author in New York City.
