Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray Page B

I had a very disturbing hallucination, or vision. I was alone in our apartment. Meg had gone down to the art institute to do some photo printing in the darkroom and I was alone and anxious. I was pacing a lot and trying to resist getting drunk when I heard this party going on in the apartment below. They were playing a cut from a Stones album over and over. It was “Ruby Tuesday,” and the music pulled me out on the balcony and at last pulled me all the way down to their door. The apartment was rented by some Norwegian guy named Olaf who looked like a Viking god. Olaf drove a new white VW bus. Meg and I would often see him driving around town in search of a girlfriend. He was always checking out all the new single women who passed through town, and he had recently scored with a real blond beauty. They made a great couple to look at: a blond goddess and a blond god.
    Olaf had a large apartment, which he had opened up to another extraordinary couple, who had been driving around Mexico in an old Chevy panel truck with California plates. He looked like one of those California free spirits, with shoulder-length blond hair and a full red beard. She, his traveling companion, was a slender Welsh beauty. She had long black hair and very beautiful pale skin, translucent and untouched by the Mexican sun. You could see the blue veins just below the surface. The man had contracted viral hepatitis on their travels and she was nursing him in the back room. By “nursing him” I mean shewas pretty much keeping him stoned day and night on strong Mexican grass.
    Olaf was having a wild get-well party down there and I was drawn to it. I came in and saw another couple from New York City who were down traveling around Mexico in a pickup truck camper. He was shy and she was real outspoken. She was in the middle of relating an acid trip she had taken in the Mexican mountains where she had split from her boyfriend to go off alone in the hills to masturbate with a green banana. I was both shocked and drawn to her brazen openness. She was talking loudly in order to be heard over the Rolling Stones and was telling, just as I came in, how the banana seemed to have a life and mind of its own and how it came alive and softened “like the flesh of the gods” as soon as it entered her. Her story set me off, and right in the middle of it her boyfriend passed me a lit joint and without thinking I took three deep, greedy drags as though I was sucking on that green banana and
whammo
, it hit me—I got instantly stoned. Everything was suddenly too much for me. Her story, the fire in the fireplace, the red-bearded man with hepatitis, it all closed in and beat on me. I felt wide open and devastated. I went out to the hall and began to pace.
    The Welsh woman, who must have had a kind of built-in nurse in her, immediately noticed my anxiety and left her hepatitis-stricken lover to come out and try to comfort me. When I saw her standing there in that dim amber light I saw for the first time how beautiful she was, which made me even more anxious. I wanted her right there and then. I tried to ground myself by talking to her, but her spare black-and-white beauty distracted me so that I couldn’t even finish my sentence.
    But she talked me down by telling me about her hometown in Wales. It had the strangest, longest name and the way she spoke it was like pure music. I think it was the longest name of any town or city in the world. It was more like an entire song, or a Druidic spell, than a name, and each time she spoke it I got calmer.
    Lulled by the sound of that Welsh woman’s hometown I was able to re-enter Olaf’s apartment. I went right to an empty chair by the fire and that’s where I saw it, staring into that roaring fire. I saw it and, horrible as it was, I could not stop looking. In the middle of the flameswas a woman sitting up in bed, and the flames were raging all about her, going in her ears and burning out of her screaming mouth. The flames