The Gray Gray Hereafter

Yesterday, I thought Spalding Gray spoke to me from the dead. The IFC channel that afternoon aired the 1991 film adaptation of his monologue, Monster in a Box. I had never seen it. Probably in the early nineties I thought I was too cool to see it, maybe I thought I was over his Jewy-Waspy salingeresque, breakdowns already then an echo of some other gotham fading into fiction, making way for Carrie Bradshaw and the Guliiani years; maybe I was feeling the pull of the nascent, newly branded generation x, thinking all baby boomers were souless vampires; most likely I was in the thrall of a polemical-hate-the-white-man mode, and who more to get ethnic-studies on than some neurotic new england transport spinning anecdotes about LA on the eve of the Rodney King riots. For whatever reason, I never saw Monster in a Box. But I remember liking swimming to Cambodia and the stuff he did for American Playhouse (remember when PBS really was a bastion of the left, trying to revive old lefty institutions like american theater?) I forgot how compelling his logorrhea, his blathering sublime could be. I was making dinner, frying up chicken and zucchini and eggplant for parmigiana, so was only half listening to the monologue when I caught the bit about some high school student asking him what David Letterman was like. I thought oh my god he's talking about Ms. Jester's guidance/career-counseling class I think my sophomore or junior year in high school. Ms. Jester, who looked kind of like Dianne Keaton and had the same penchant for drawing out her sentences in dreamily sibilant whispers, taught guidance and I'm not sure what else maybe social studies. She was schooled in the pedagogy of all aging-hippies and yippies turned teachers: she was your friend and confident first and your ill-prepared, burned-out teacher second, I remember her T.A. for our class was some pale, jet-blacked, punk, sporting suspenders dangling from the seat of his ass-tight dickies and probably had t-shirts for corrosion of conformity or econochrist. (To her credit, Ms. Jester was the only teacher who gave us the straight shit when Mr. Cholandria our history teacher took sick halfway through the year, she told us the truth, that he was dying from ARC as it was called back then) Ms. Jester as it turns out was a childhood friend of Spalding Gray's and so one day brought him into class. I think I was the only one in class who knew who he was. Later he had us write down question's on index cards. I think that was my question, what was David Letterman like, having just seen him on Late Nite plugging what I can't remember. To my question I remember him giving some curt, cursory response like "oh, yes, Letterman was great," and I thought maybe he was snubbing me for thinking I was better than everyone else in the class for actually being familiar with his work. In Monster in a Box, Spalding Gray says that he had wanted to tell the students that Letterman was actually really great, that Letterman treated him very well and made him feel important, like a real downtown artist. Turns out I was wrong, the reference wasn't to me at all. I rewatched the segment this morning when IFC re-aired it. I had missed the part about him being in Russia for a film festival, running into high school students from West Chester, NY at the Hermitage, and a few of them recognizing him and asking him about David Letterman. How disappointing. Then I remembered that that wasn't even my question. I had asked him a different question. That was my friend's question, probably Salvador Covarrubias who thought Letterman was the fucken funniest thing. My question as I remember it now was even more of an obnoxious, wise-ass, name dropping question: I asked Spaulding Gray what it was like working with Jonathan Demme who made his first film Swimming to Cambodia--and I do remember him glossing over my question, muttering "he was great" under his breath, as if to say "I drive all the way out here to the east side, way past the 110 freeway which itself is way out of bounds of my comfort zone, I expect to talk to some real LA kids who along with their parents probably have nothing to do with film or television, and you throw me another fucken industry question, balls to that!" Oh well, Spalding Gray, I hope the afterlife hasn't calmed your neurosis. I hope that you blather on eternally, forever digress discomfitingly , world without end.