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it's a slippery slope
BY SPALDING GRAY
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NOONDAY
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NONFICTION
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112 PAGES
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- BY SARAH VOWELL | during my five winters as a bartender at a small ski area in Montana, I developed a serious, not unfounded prejudice regarding the verbal prowess of skiers. Or the lack thereof. Maybe it was my demeanor that left them all monosyllabic; I didn't have much more to say than "Here ya go" and "What's Clamato?" But every day spent on skis, they maintained, was a good day, or rather, "Great!" Especially when the snow was "Deep!" and there was lots of "Powder!" I always rolled my eyes and thought, "Can't they do any better than that?" I could get two, maybe three sentences just out of shoveling snow off the bar's deck. All day with the up and the down and all they could say was "Whew!" Well. After reading Spalding Gray's midlife-crisis narrative, "It's A Slippery Slope," I owe all my old drunk customers an apology. I'm now grateful they didn't burden me with long-winded descriptions of the alpine life. Because if their version of learning to ski was halfway as horrifyingly solipsistic as Gray's, then listening to them would have turned me into a bigger alcoholic than they ever were. About his reason for attempting to learn to ski, Gray writes, "I wanted to do something extremely physically exertive, without an audience, to do something that wasn't going to be a story." Just one of many failures. As the print version of one of his self-obsessed monologues, "Slippery Slope" left me cold. Freezing, in fact. There's nothing wrong with turning your life into art, just as long as your life isn't irrelevant (read Gray's descriptions of his pointless New York days and you'll understand his preoccupation with suicide) and your art doesn't give the phrase "male fantasy" a bad name. (Fave sentence: "My erections belonged to history.") At one point, I found myself so appalled by Gray's smallness that it seemed like he should be asked to forfeit capitalization privileges with regards to the letter "I." It might have been the scene where he proposes marriage to his longtime girlfriend, Ramona in his therapist's office. Or it could have been the part where he says, "I need an organized woman to organize my life." And by the time he destroys Ramona by fathering a child with another woman, every mention of the pleasures of skiing is offensive. Who does he think he is trying to enjoy himself after the mess he's made?
His new vision all comes together on the slopes when he tells a fellow skier, "I don't know if I'm having a good time or trying to kill myself." And the man replies, "When you're in that place that's when you know you're alive." Total jock bullshit. I could almost stomach Gray back when he was just another neurotic, city-slicker blabbermouth. Wrapping his act in Gore-Tex makes him unbearable.
Sarah Vowell writes the Sound Salvation column for Salon.
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