Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray Page A

it all. I was determined to finish the season out so that I could save enough money to spend the summer in Mexico with Meg. That was my big celebration plan. I had been writing her about it, and she planned to join me as soon as she graduated from college.
    I’d decided to relocate in San Miguel Allende, an American art colony high in the central plains of Mexico. I made arrangements to ride down there with two Houston locals, Axel and Odele. In my deepest fantasy mind it was a sort of trial run for Bali, just to see what it would be like to vacation in a foreign country.
    The trip down was like a hallucinogenic dream. I rode and sometimes drove in Odele’s VW bus while Axel rolled joints and tookphotos with his little Leica. I don’t think we had one normal slice of conversation the whole way down. It was just driving, looking, smoking, peeing, and eating trashy hot Mexican food at roadside stands. I don’t know how Axel and Odele drove stoned. I was incapacitated by the grass most of the time and lay on the back floor of that VW bus vibrating all over. When I was able to pull myself up to look out the windows, all I could see was endless armies of cactus that looked like they were fighting each other.
    We got to San Miguel forty-eight hours later with very little rest or sleep. I was spent and very ready to be alone. Then Odele and Axel went their own ways, Axel off to the Michigan area to deal in pre-Columbian art and Odele hitchhiking on to Mexico City to visit a Dutch sculptor.
    I walked into my little hotel room and stood in front of the tin-framed mirror and just stared at my gaunt bearded face. I didn’t dare move. I just stood there watching my face dissolve and then re-form in the mirror. I felt out of touch and really away from home for the first time. And as I stood there, barely having arrived, I had that fantasy again of coming through the driveway gate with a duffel bag full of dirty laundry and presents, and Mom rushing out to greet me. I could see myself standing there, a brave independent hero, like one of those Greek sailors dropping in with gifts and stories just long enough to get his laundry done before heading out to the next port. Coming from Mexico would not be as great, perhaps, as returning from Bali, but it would still be triumphant.
    The following day I found my own apartment up at the top of a hill overlooking the entire town and the wild purple central plains beyond. Far below I could hear church bells chiming and the sound of slow-rolling wooden wheels on cobblestones. It was old, it was beautiful, it was slow. It felt just right, and I immediately sent off a postcard to Meg with a little map to “our” new place in Mexico.
    She arrived, and we settled into a comfortable routine of working, shopping for food, and just walking around looking at it all: going down to the
zócalo
, the public square, at dusk, with the long-tailed black birds cruising in at sundown to fill the trees, and fill the entire square with their mad cackling.
    We discovered an art school for Americans there, and Meg signedup for a rug-weaving course while I did live modeling for food money. While Meg worked on her rug I’d go shopping at the open market to buy goat chops and vegetables.
    The weather was always ideal, warm and dry, and there was no apparent reason for depressions, yet I kept falling into them. I began to figure out that some of them were connected to tequila and marijuana. Between the two of them I was not doing very well. I craved altered states of consciousness. I liked feeling good all day but was not able to take too much of it. Too much feeling good became flat and boring, and I’d want to push it a little. So at sunset I would sit on our little balcony and sip tequila and go into quiet raptures, waves of minor beatitudes. Meg didn’t drink. She read, or sat beside me looking out. The marijuana was strong stuff, and I’d just take a few tokes and that would be it.
    I stopped altogether after