This was 1994, at the now-closed Black's Beach just north of San Diego. It was the first time I'd ever been nude in public. That summer I was rereading Gray's first memoir, "Sex and Death to the Age 14," a book I'd initially gobbled up in college, becoming consumed by his rollicking style and searing candor. I'd never read anything like it. I swore that, goddamn it, one day I would write like that.

I was lying on the blanket, the sun beating on my breasts, while I reabsorbed revealing passages from "Sex and Death" and bemoaned my inertia. I was 26 and still I wasn't writing, like my beloved Spalding (whose every book I'd read and held aloft like a plate of communion wafers), or anyone else. I got up to walk the beach. And then -- suddenly, magically, unbelievably -- he appeared: Spalding Gray, the closest thing I'd ever had to a role model, a god figure, a chieftain. And he was naked as the day he was born.

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