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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
A chance meeting on a nude beach with my literary hero, Spalding Gray, inspired me to write. I was never able to thank him.
Mar 11, 2004 | The absolute last thing you expect to see at a nude beach is any sort of public figure. But by the third time I passed the alarmingly familiar man squatting at the water's edge -- his skinny butt looking like a flesh-tone "W" hovering just above the sand -- I realized who it was: Christ in a sidecar, I'd happened upon memoirist and actor Spalding Gray.
This was 1994, at the now-closed Black's Beach just north of San Diego. It was the first time I'd ever been nude in public. That summer I was rereading Gray's first memoir, "Sex and Death to the Age 14," a book I'd initially gobbled up in college, becoming consumed by his rollicking style and searing candor. I'd never read anything like it. I swore that, goddamn it, one day I would write like that.
I was lying on the blanket, the sun beating on my breasts, while I reabsorbed revealing passages from "Sex and Death" and bemoaned my inertia. I was 26 and still I wasn't writing, like my beloved Spalding (whose every book I'd read and held aloft like a plate of communion wafers), or anyone else. I got up to walk the beach. And then -- suddenly, magically, unbelievably -- he appeared: Spalding Gray, the closest thing I'd ever had to a role model, a god figure, a chieftain. And he was naked as the day he was born.
My fight-or-flight response surged as celebrity anxiety kicked in. I wanted to run, but I knew I'd never forgive myself if I did. Then I had to wonder if he was really there at all, or if I had snapped and he was a figment of my unconscious mind gearing up to scold me for my literary reticence. Because, really, what were the chances of this?
I tried not to gawk. Instead, I surreptitiously crept by two more times, growing dizzier with each pass. Spalding stayed right where he was, his skin an even oak color with nary a tan line, his frizzy gray hair bouncing in the breezes as he searched for guppies at the edge of a tide pool with a cherubic toddler, also naked. He wasn't an apparition; the man was real.
I had to talk to this hilarious, sincere, confessional storyteller who, in regularly laying bare his soul, had inspired me like no other. Never mind that he would see parts of me only gazed upon by previous paramours and my physician. The time was now. What was I going to say?
I approached softly, but with purpose, hoping not to shatter any sort of reverie he had going with the boy. "Are you Spalding Gray?" I asked.
"I am," he said, rising from the guppy search and slapping his hands together to get the sand off before offering up a shake.
The short monologue I delivered then fell from my mouth in an ungraceful tumble. In a rush, I told him that reading "Sex and Death" in college was pivotal for me. The book made me feel like my neurotic spew -- if I could ever get off my ass to put it onto the page -- might actually be entertaining. Marketable, even. I was sure he'd heard the same stuff from fans the world over, but I was relatively certain he'd never heard it from someone who was naked.
"Oh, 'Sex and Death' is not my best," he said humbly, almost shyly. "Have you read my first novel, 'Impossible Vacation'?"
We talked naturally then, like new neighbors over the fence. I ceased with the gushing and he wasn't pompous. And it didn't matter one iota that we were nude. Speaking with slow California contemplation braided with a Rhode Island accent, Spalding asked me what I did for a living and why I was at the beach at that moment.
I was unable to ramble much about myself; I was, rather simply, a journalist on vacation. I'd also set up a job interview in the area, and we talked about my bad timing: Just months before, two local dailies had merged, creating a giant glut of journalists. It didn't look like I'd be making a career in San Diego.
I tried like hell not to look at Spalding's crotch, but I couldn't help it. He was uncircumcised, and there were tiny globs of sunscreen lodged in his penis's various folds. But he was a better man than I; not once did I catch him sneaking a glance at my breasts.
In a languid tone that seemed at odds with the frenetic pace in his work, Spalding told me he was in town performing his most recent monologue, "Gray's Anatomy," and was headed to London after the following night's show. We talked about his thoughts on nude beaches as compared to nudist colonies (beaches are better). We spoke of the scary cliff we'd had to scale to get down to the beach (much fear and sweating); the hang gliders above; the child, his first son, playing at our feet.
