First published in the
New York Times Magazine
Lives
March 21, 2004

Desperately Still Seeking Spalding
By Hugo Perez

If you read enough detective fiction, you are repeatedly told that people often return to the scene of the crime. I am not a criminal but guilt did compel me to return to the Staten Island ferry. I felt that I should have sensed that something was off on the night I met Spalding Gray, the night he disappeared. When I heard three days later that he was missing, I had called the police; I had done the things one should do, but it did not seem like enough. I knew that nothing would come of riding the ferry again but in some small, deluded way, I thought there was a chance I would find him still riding the ferry back and forth, riding and waiting for someone to recognize him and take him home. In the little fantasy that was running through my head, I would find him standing at the back of the ferry and this time I would say, ''Spalding, let me take you home.''

As the sun was setting, I hopped the subway down to Bowling Green. At the ferry terminal, I scanned the gathered commuters for that distinct mane of silver hair. Nothing. I boarded the ferry and walked back and forth on all three decks as the ferry pulled away from Manhattan. No Spalding. It was another cold night and I was alone on the back deck as the city receded. It felt as if the darkness were swallowing the world bit by bit. The constellation of Manhattan lights became denser and denser. It was a lovely view and it was easy to imagine how he could have stepped over the back railing and into the welcoming darkness.

On that other evening, the bitterly cold evening that Gray went missing, my girlfriend Betsy and I rode the 7 p.m. ferry with a group of expatriate German filmmakers to a documentary screening at the Staten Island Institute for Arts and Sciences. Halfway through the ride, after risking frostbite on the forward bow, I walked hand in hand with Betsy down the length of the center deck. Betsy tugged my sleeve and said, ''That man that walked by us. . . . I think it's Spalding Gray.'' I turned and looked over my shoulder at the tall slouching figure walking away from us and replied, ''Yeah. That is absolutely Spalding Gray. It's cool that he rides the ferry, huh?'' And I thought to myself, this is why I live in New York, to cross paths with Spalding Gray.

A little while later Betsy and I stood just inside the doors that led outside to the railing. A rope stretched across the doors to keep us from walking onto the back deck. We stared out at the city receding into the distance, our faces almost pressed up against the glass. We noticed a familiar stooped figure by the other end of the doors. I can't be sure that Gray saw us looking at him or suspected that we recognized him, but he walked over to us. There was a dazed look in his eyes, or in retrospect maybe it was a questioning look. When he walked up to us, maybe he wanted to be recognized. Maybe he wanted to hear his name.

He pointed at the rope that stretched across the back doors of the ferry, the rope meant to keep people from walking perilously close to the back railing of the boat, and asked, ''Do you know why they put that rope there? It wasn't there when I rode the ferry earlier.'' An odd question, but then I thought, he's Spalding Gray.
''I'm not sure,'' I answered.
''Why? Is the view better out there?'' Betsy asked.
''There's a great view of the city from out there,'' he said.

At this point, I was tempted to confess that we had recognized him and to say that “Swimming to Cambodia” was brilliant, that it couldn’t be more relevant today, and to ask what he was working on. Something kept me from playing the part of the fan. This was a man who thought about the details of the world, who created works wonderful and moving and strange out of his every day experiences. I didn't want to intrude upon his journey. I didn't want to be like the unwanted visitor who disrupted Coleridge 37 lines in writing ''Kublai Khan” and prevented it from being finished.

But that is precisely what I did. ''The Staten Island Ferry is the best deal in town,'' I said. Pretty banal but that's what came out. Sometimes you say things to fill the silence. A moment later he walked away without word.

I grew up watching movies that taught you to believe that if you tried hard enough everyone could be saved. I grew up reading books that told you that you would be able to understand why people acted the way they did. I wanted this to be the kind of story where everyone is saved, or at the very least where I understood the why.

Spalding Gray's body was found in the East River yesterday after two months. I know how the story ends now, but not the why. I had hoped that Spalding would reappear at some point to tell the story of his disappearance on stage, even though in my heart I knew that would not happen. The look in his eyes that night was not the look of someone who was on the verge of taking a header off the back of the ferry, but the look of someone on a journey to find an answer.


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