Spalding Gray, where are you?

I don't know a soul who is not spayed with fear over the missing Spalding Gray, who disappeared on Sunday night, Jan. 11. Here and there he has been spotted, but still there is no definitive news.

Nothing but fear. His wife, Kathleen Russo, was told by someone he took the Staten Island Ferry one day, "as though he was rehearsing," she reportedly said. Losing him would be worse than losing several presidents of this and other countries?most of all in Lower Manhattan, "the center," as the man now re-creating Ground Zero said, "of the world."

Like many gifted creative people, Spalding was prone to long periods of depression. He tried to commit suicide in 2002. But his recent three months of delightful, moving monologues at P.S. 122 about the cause of that depression?a painful car crash in Ireland in 2001 that almost crushed his skull, hip and leg?were filled with laughter. The comedy built up over those months (the monologue changed whenever I saw it?four times) to the point where on the last night, in early December, the audience roared and roared and roared. At the end they all stood up, applauding.

But Spalding wouldn't come back to acknowledge us. I noticed this every time I came. Several times I went up to him afterward, shook his hand, traded warmth, talked about meeting for lunch?I wanted to tell him about my own horror (prostate cancer) and how I wanted to defeat it as he was crushing his car crash.

But we never made it. His wife kept trying to put us together, but life wouldn't allow it to happen. Now I feel lost, bereft, alone, without a man who touched me with his politics, his humor, his fearless, wide-open autobiography?posing as witty, hip monologues.

He also taught me, at once with his bravery and his style. All of you remember him as the writer and narrator of Swimming to Cambodia, a film that exposed the genocide in Cambodia after the Vietnam war. He sits there at a table reading from his notebook?as he did at P.S. 122?laying out the hard, cutting truth, laughing, in effect, at killers like Pol Pot, Kissinger, Nixon and the CIA.

He saved my sanity. One day in 1994, I found myself performing with a new group of players at the American Place Theater near Broadway in Midtown. We were asked for personal revelations about "The Family." Mine, the deepest I could think of, was watching my professional boxer stepfather, K.O. Kelly, beat up my mother, over and over. I was about nine then; I could fling myself between them but K.O. could knock me out with the back of his left hand. When I first read the truth out?the truth in hundreds of my nightmares?I cried from start to finish. But the director, Wynn Handman, and my colleagues cheered. "Keep on," they said. "You'll stop crying. You'll kill the audience."

On opening night the tears finally stopped. So, later, did the nightmares. But, emboldened by Spalding's style, I held up a notebook each night, shielding my insanity. It worked: My mother is dead but now I won't kill K.O. if I ever see him again. I'll simply cuff him with the back of my left hand.

Man, please don't go. I once heard the blues sang by the aged R. J. Lockwood (he must be near 100): "Baby, please don't go," he sang, and the elite audience at the J. Paul Getty auditorium in Los Angeles virtually collapsed in sobs and applause.

I'm sobbing now, Spalding, and applauding, whether you're dead or alive. You graced my block, Wooster St., where you helped found the Wooster Group, the soul of avant-garde theater. I felt you there for years. I'm still feeling you.

If you give up, you'll join too many giants and goddesses we still need?Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Mark Rothko.

A young, manic-depressive actress-writer, Carrie Fisher, lately wrote a book: The Best Awful. Think about that, if you ever read this...as I often think of Roethke's lines: "I learn by doing what I have to do/I learn by going where I have to go." Going on is the key; it's in the genes of Lower Manhattan. Look what we've done since that horrid year you and the WTC were attacked. We're staying, not going, and we're moving...with you, I desperately hope.