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Friday night I had begged friends to spend $50 to see Steve Buscemi do Spalding Gray, you know, like a tribute, not some leftover household videotape. Not that I wouldn’t watch it, because I would watch that too. Anyway, prior to this show I had fallen on my belly, been hit in the back of a head with my two-ton laptop, bled all over the testing center, failed the test, and stood in the rain mentally calculating the distance between my apartment and the Hudson River. I don’t mean to suggest that I was actually suicidal, but it was one of those moments where I thought for the fleetingest second, yeah, well, there’s always that option. The subway flooded, all trains but one stopped running, and the crowd to board the N train filtered out to the street. I stood forty minutes in the rain waving for a cab.

Thus, I was in a bit of a snit. My friend chews gum more vigorously than I think proper, but then I don’t think gum proper. She also hums constantly, sings even, and talks with her hands, is one of those people always buzzing with noise like she’s got to keep you knowing she’s there, gnawing through life on this gum. For these reasons I nearly slaughtered her en route from the pre-show cocktail to the theater, even after she’d just paid the bar tab. And then she wads her discarded gum up in a little corner of cocktail napkin. Dinner arrives, and the gum just sits there, bright green soaking through the tissue, all of its slimy, used, stale, gummy chewedness. What is the point of gum? It is food that you regurgitate. Either eat, or don’t eat. Don’t perpetually eat, ugh its so gross I can’t even look at it. I need to go back on Prozac.

The Spalding Gray tribute included Steve B., Aidan Quinn, Jon Ames, and four others, in a room slightly larger than my hell’s kitchen apartment. Okay, way larger but, for a theater, tiny. If you live in a small town and your small town has a small local theater group and that small local theater group has built a tiny make-shift stage to host its earnest productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” well, this theater was about a quarter of the size of your theater, and this with fold-up chairs and benches for seats. Still, it is hard to be claustrophobic when you’re breathing the rare air of Steve Buscemi’s exhalations. If that’s a word. He just makes everything better.

It’s odd to hear Spalding’s stories read in another voice, but his writing still stands. You know, I laughed, I cried… I’ve never seen Cats so I can’t compare it. Actually, that’s not true, I have seen Cats. But I was very young; the only thing I remember is that the Cat who broke the fourth wall by prancing past my seat had a thunderous erection. God did he seem happy.

It’s tough to find a way to talk about the show that doesn’t sound morbid, which it wasn’t: mostly we laughed ourselves into tears but we all knew how it ended. Still, Gray killed himself after a car accident and consequent head trauma, and also post 9/11; the show included his writings about the accident, his 9/11 entry and his last entry before his death (a suicide letter, essentially). As for 9/11, I think any New Yorker would feel, watching the show, a sense of kinship, even a “there but for the grace of George Plimpton go I…” But given the key obsessions: growing old undiscovered and without health insurance, the consequences of head trauma, terrorist attacks that leave one feeling oneself to be a coward: this summarizes my life thus far a little too neatly. It would be an insult to Gray’s talent to say that anyone in that room was less affected than I was, but half of me spun around the “39 and undiscovered: it could still happen!” and the other half swung to the day he floated up in Greenpoint.

Sir, no. You were not a coward. Think on that time you took the car to Williamsburg. Williamsburg was scary then! Those Hasidims could’ve been selling you into slavery for all you knew! They wear funny clothes! And so okay, you didn’t really handle the first marriage so well, who does? You were brave enough to stand up on stage and tell us what a bastard you’d been. Peter Kramer* can shove his opinions up his Prozac-powdered ass. It takes courage to get up on stage, to pour your heart out, a different kind of courage sure, and not to take anything away from the firefighters. But, baby, some of us were born to run. As brutally funny and cutting and wonderful as the show was, like I said, it ended with his death. This hung in the room so pungently, even the presence of Steve Buscemi wasn’t enough to make me feel any better about it.

So we left. I drank really delicious cocktails and let my friends have the first taxis. In the end, I was forced to share a livery cab with a 17-year-old girl from the upper west side. I gave her lots of good advice concerning how best to lie to her parents but still not ruin her life. Oh dear. She’d been drinking, her parents check her breath. The driver waited as we ran into the bodega to get her coffee grounds and wintergreen gum. In the spirit of the situation, I had a piece myself, thinking, well, maybe there’s something to it. Nope. I still don’t get it. Yick. Don’t chew it, at least not unless you’ve been boozing with the boys all evening, and your mama’s really, really strict.

*Peter Kramer wrote Listening to Prozac. He once ran into Spalding Gray. Said, “you look familiar,” and after sometime finally pieced together that he’d seen Gray do a performance. And then he started railing on Gray for leaving his wife and getting his mistress pregnant. And his mistress, now his second wife, was standing a ways off, with their first child, and pregnant with their second, which Peter Kramer, Prozac author, had a hell of a lot to say about.