Spalding Gray - R.I.P.

In 1999, I was working in the deli of a natural foods grocery store in Santa Cruz, California. It was a thankless job at which I filled my shifts making sandwiches, slicing turkey and tomatoes and onions, washing an ever-mounting stack of dishes, and getting reprimanded by supervisors for eating the occasional sandwich before paying for it at the register. There were, however, certain elements to the job that I grew to cherish; the best of these, by far, was interacting with customers. And a natural foods deli in Santa Cruz--the freak capital of the known universe--is certainly a beacon for all kinds of surprising walk-on characters who help make the time pass.

In fact, I had a running fantasy at the time that I often shared with my co-workers--that we should create a sitcom based on our lives at the deli, and the entire show would be driven by the random people that came in and out, ordering sandwiches and the gourmet fare we stocked in the deli case. I loved the idea of various B-list celebrities sauntering into the deli while we catered to their whims--sort of like the Love Boat, where every subplot is served up with sliced, free range turkey and Nicoise salad.

I’m sure it was in the midst of this day-dreaming of mine that Spalding Gray, an actual celebrity, not imagined, walked into the deli. It was a slow afternoon, and I was the only person on the counter. He ordered two avocado and tofu-scallion spread sandwiches, and after asking him what he’d like on them (vegan mayonnaise? sprouts? cucumbers?) I whipped out a loaf of sliced multigrain bread and went to the task at hand. Then I thought for a moment. I thought to myself how odd it was that I recognized him. As I was in my late twenties at the time, I was certainly not in the usual middle aged liberal theater-going milieu likely to have known who he was. I’d never even seen Swimming to Cambodia, or any of his films, other than the movie version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in which he played the Stage Manager, and I’d only seen that one because we read the play in my high school English class one year.

I turned my head toward him, and I said to him, as I smeared tofu onto a piece of bread, “Pardon me, but you know, you look a lot like Spalding Gray.” And, to that, he said simply, “I am.” And we proceeded to have a nice, low key chat about what he was doing in town, and how life was treating him. He said he’d just driven up from Carmel, where he had spoken at a community center, and that he’d be performing that night up on the UC Santa Cruz campus, at Kresge Town Hall. I asked him how the response was for him, down in Carmel, and he said the audience was fine, but that the folks he encountered about town seemed a bit snotty. I concurred--telling him about my experiences back in the days before I was a sandwich babe, when I was a political organizer for a peace group, and that I’d always found canvassing in Carmel rather difficult--in fact, I told him, a lot of the people of color I worked with, who had to canvass in Carmel, were startled at how rude and racist some Carmelites were at the doors. He was not surprised at that, but fascinated to hear it.

On learning that I used to work for a peace organization, he told me that he’d also been doing anti-nuclear work, having just flown out here from New England where he’d been helping to raise funds for a campaign to stop a nuclear power plant from being built.

I don’t claim to have known Spalding Gray, but it was clear to me that afternoon that he was the kind of person you could just talk to like this, that you could have a real conversation about real issues with him, and that he was entirely concerned and genuine in his interest, despite his being a celebrity.

I finished off his sandwiches and halved them and wrapped them in paper, and we said our good byes. It’s a weird thing, brushing with celebrity. It’s kind of surreal and you hope, after it, that you haven’t acted all doe-eyed and stupid. The impression I had of Spalding Gray left me to believe I had nothing to worry about.

Rest in Peace, Spalding.

P.S. This is a really lovely piece about Spalding, written by his close friend, John Perry Barlow, during the time of his disappearance (Barlow is a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead). The article has sort of become an “early eulogy” for Spalding. Unfortunately, the time has come for actual eulogies.

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