Swimming to Cambodia

by Spalding Gray

  Now colleagues and friends—actually, I don’t know if he had any friends—but colleagues of Kissinger wanted him to resign. And Kissinger said, “What if I resign and then the President has a heart attack? We’ll be left with Agnew. That’s the only reason I’m staying on. For national security.”

  Because of all this, the Cooper-Church Amendment went through. This was an amendment meant to stop any ground support troops from going into a country where war had not officially been declared by the Senate or Congress. But, as Roland reminded me, we’re not living in a democracy. I had forgotten all about this: the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and can simply bypass Senate and Congress. Which is just what he did. Nixon kept saying, “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” and the bombs kept falling.

  The only thing that the protest accomplished was to frighten Nixon enough that he declared, “No more close ground support troops more than twenty-one miles over the border into Cambodia.” How they controlled that, I don’t know, whether the troops had odometers strapped to their legs or what. But twenty-one miles in they had to go right back out, or turn into pumpkins.

  During this time they sent Alexander Haig over to speak to Lon Nol because Lon Nol had been told that the American troops weren’t going to be in Cambodia anymore. Lon Nol, of course, saw in this the downfall of his country. It was very clear; the handwriting was on the wall. He turned to the window and wept.

  And Haig went back and reported this to the American government, that Lon Nol had cried in front of him. The American government was so upset that they sent over an official psychiatrist to examine Lon Nol for crying in public. He came back and reported that Lon Nol was an unstructured, vague individual. Not only that, but that he made astrological, occultist and folkloric references in his addresses to the nation. Can you imagine? “My fellow Americans, I am not going out for the next two weeks because my moon is in Gemini.”

  This freaked the Americans out, so they compiled a whole report on Lon Nol in which they detailed his weird rituals. One was to cut the skin of the troops to let in the spirit of Buddha. Another was to create the illusion that there were more troops than actually existed. (I don’t know how they were supposed to have done this—with scarecrows or what—but it caused enormous extortion of American funds.) The third ritual was called“transference of grass into troops.” I’m not sure what this means; I assume they were sending marijuana to the front, but I don’t know why they would refer to marijuana as “grass” in a government report. Fourth, they faced all statues of Buddha in toward Phnom Penh and away from China in order to revitalize the city. Number five, the Cambodians debated but never settled on. The question was whether they should copy the old Khmer warriors’ magical markings from the uniforms in their museums onto the soldiers’ outfits. The markings had been meant to stop slings and arrows in the old days, but no one was sure they would be powerful enough to stop bullets. It was still in debate.

  While that was being argued, according to Roland, the unsung hero, Donald Dawson, reared his ugly head. He was a Christian Scientist flying B-52 raids out of Bangkok, but he was home on leave. He was watching West Side Story on television but all he could see were bombs falling, people screaming, dying—he was hallucinating. When he got back to flying his missions he found out that a Cambodian wedding party had been wiped out by accident. He held his own wedding to be the most sacred event in his life and he refused to fly anymore, so he was court-martialed.

  Dawson got together with three other flyers who refused to fly and, with the help of New York congress-woman Elizabeth Holtzman and the ACLU, they began building a case to be taken to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court had never dealt with the illegality of this bombing that had been going on for years, but it just so happened that at that time they weren’t in session. The ACLU got the case to Thurgood Marshall, who was sympathetic. They then had to get it to William Douglas, who was in Goose Prairie, Washington, in a cabin in the hills, with no telephone. There didn’t seem to be any way to reach him. But Burt Neuborn of the ACLU flew out to Goose Prairie, hiked in to the cabin, presented the case and Douglas was sympathetic as well.

  The Supreme Court was about to meet and vote on the bombing when Donald Dawson received Conscientious Objector status from the U.S. Air Force, so they never met, the whole five years the bombing went on, the Supreme Court never met about it. And the generals still note with pride that the bombing killed twenty-five percent of the enemy. That’s sixteen thousand killed, they say. And there’s a military rule: If you kill more than ten percent of the enemy you cause irreversible psychological damage.

  So that five years of bombing—along with the traditional diet of lizards, bugs, bark and leaves, education in the Maoist doctrine including a touch of Rousseau, and other things that we will never know about in our lifetimes including, perhaps, an invisible cloud of evil that circles the world and lands at random in Germany, Cambodia, possibly Iran and Beirut, maybe even America—set the Khmer Rouge up to carry out the worst auto-homeo-genocide in modem history.

  Whenever I travel, if I have the time, I go by train. Because I like to hang out in the lounge car. I hear such great stories there—fantastic! Perhaps it’s because they think they’ll never see me again. It’s like a big, rolling confessional.

  I was on my way to Chicago from New York City when this guy came up to me and said, “Hi, I’m Jim Bean. Mind if I sit down?”

  “No, I’m Spalding Gray, have a seat. What’s up Jim?”

  “Oh, nothing much. I’m in the Navy.”

  “Really? Where are you stationed?”

  “Guantanamo Bay.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Cuba.”

  “Really? What’s it like?”

  “Oh, we don’t get into Cuba, man. It’s totally illegal. We go down to the Virgin Islands whenever we want R & R. We get free flights down there.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “Get laid.”

  “Go to whores?”

  “No. I never paid for sex in my life. I get picked up by couples. I like to swing, I mean, I’m into that, you know? Threesomes, triangles, pyramids—there’s power in that.”

  And I could see how he would be picked up. He was cute enough—insidious, but still cute. The only kind of demented thing about him was that his ears hadn’t grown. They were like those little pasta shells. It was as if his body had grown but his ears hadn’t caught up yet.

  So I said, “Where are you off to?”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “Pittsburgh, my god. What’s up there?”

  “My wife.”

  “Really? How long has it been since you saw her?”

  “Oh, about a year.”

  “I bet she’s been doing some swinging herself.”

  “No, man, I know her. She’s got fucking cobwebs growing between her legs. I wouldn’t mind watching her get fucked by a guy once, no, I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

  “Well that’s quite a trip, coming from Cuba to Pittsburgh.”

  “No, no. I’m not stationed in Cuba anymore, man. I’m in Philly.”

  “Oh, well what’s going on in Philly?”

  “Can’t tell you. No way. Top secret.”

  “Oh, come on, Jim. Top secret in Philadelphia? You can tell me.”

  “No way.”

  And he proceeded to have five more rum cokes and tell me that in Philadelphia he is on a battleship in a waterproof chamber, chained one arm to the wall for five hours a day, next to a green button, with earphones on. I could just see those little ears waiting for orders to fire his rockets from their waterproof silos onto the Russians. He sits there waiting with those earphones on, high on blue-flake cocaine, a new breed from Peru that he loves, with a lot of coffee because the Navy can’t test for cocaine. They can test for marijuana five days after you smoke a joint, but not the cocaine. He sits there high on cocaine, chained to the wall, next to the green button, in a waterproof chamber.

  “Why waterproof?” I a
sked. I thought I’d just start with the details and work out. I know I could have said, “Why a green button?,” but it didn’t matter at that point.

  “Waterproof, man, because when the ship sinks and I go down to the bottom of the ocean, any ocean, anywhere, I’m still there in my waterproof chamber and I can push that green button, activate my rocket and it fires out of the waterproof silo and up, up, up it goes. I get a fucking erection every time I think of firing a rocket on those Russians. We’re going to win! We’re going to win this fucking war. I like the Navy, though. I fucking like the Navy. I get to travel everywhere. I’ve been to Africa, Sweden, India. I fucking didn’t like Africa, though. I don’t know why, but black women just don’t turn me on.”

  Now here’s a guy, if the women in the country don’t turn him on, he misses the entire landscape. It’s just one big fuzzball, a big black outline and he steps through to the other side of the world and comes out in Sweden.

  “I fucking love Sweden, man. You get to see real Russkies in Sweden. They’re marched in at gunpoint and they’re only allowed two beers. We’re drinking all the fucking beer we want. We’re drunk on our asses, saying, ‘Hey, Russkies, what’s it like in Moscow this time of year?’ And then we pay a couple of Swedish whores to go over and put their heads in the Russkies’ laps. You should see those fuckers sweat, man. They are so stupid. We’re going to win. We’re going to win the fuckin’ war. I mean, they are really dumb. They’ve got liquid fuel in their rockets, they’re rusty and they’re going to sputter, they’re going to pop, they’re going to land in our cornfields.”

  “Wait a minute, Jim. Cornfields? I mean, haven’t you read the literature? It’s bad enough if they land in the cornfields. We’re all doomed.”

  “No, they’re stupid. You won’t believe this. The Russians don’t even have electro-intercoms in their ships. They still speak through tubes!”

  Suddenly I had this enormous fondness for the Russian Navy. The whole of Mother Russia. The thought of these men speaking, like innocent children, through empty toilet paper rolls, where you could still hear compassion, doubt, envy, brotherly love, ambivalance, all those human tones coming through the tube.

  Jim was very patriotic. I thought it only existed on the covers of Newsweek and Time. But no, if you take the train from New York to Chicago, there it is against a pumpkin-orange sunset, Three Mile Island. Jim stood up and saluted those three big towers, then sat back down.

  Meanwhile I was trying to make a mild stand. I was trying to talk him out of his ideas. I don’t know what my platform was—I mean, he was standing for all of America and I was just concerned for myself at that point. I really felt as if I were looking my death in the face. I’m not making up any of these stories, I’m really not. And if he was making up the story he was telling me, I figure he’s white, and if he wants it bad enough and he’s in the Navy, if he wasn’t down in that waterproof chamber then, he must be down there now.

  “Jim, Jim,” I said, “you don’t want to do it. Remember what happened to the guy who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima? He went crazy!”

  “That asshole? He was not properly brainwashed. I,” he said with great pride, “have been properly brainwashed. Also there is the nuclear destruct club. Do you think I’m the only one who’s going to be pressing that green button? There’s a whole bunch of us going to do it.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. You, all of you, don’t want to die, do you? You’re going to die if you push that button. Think of all you have to live for.” I had to think hard about this one. “The blue-flake cocaine, for instance. Getting picked up by couples. The Swedish whores. Blowing away the cobwebs between your wife’s legs. I mean, really.”

  “No, I’m not going to die. We get ‘pubs.’ ”

  Everything was abbreviated, and “pubs” meant Navy publications that tell them where to go to avoid radiation. And I could see him down there, after the rest of us have all been vaporized. He’ll be down there in Tasmania or New Zealand starting this new red-faced, pea-brained, small-eared humanoid race. And I thought, the Mother needs a rest, Mother Earth needs a long, long rest.

  If we’re lucky he’ll end up in Africa.

  Anyway, he was beginning to realize that I wasn’t totally on his side. It was hard to see that because I didn’t have as detailed a platform as he had. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Listen Mr. Spalding,” (I think by then he was calling me Gary Spalding) “you would not be doing that thing you do, writing, talking, whatever it is you do in the theatre, if it were not for me and the United States Navy stopping the Russians from taking over the world.”

  And I thought, wait a minute, maybe he’s right. Maybe the Russians are trying to take over the world. Maybe I’m the one who’s brainwashed. Maybe I’ve been hanging out with liberals too long. I mean, after all this time I thought I was a conscientious pacifist but maybe I’ve been deluding myself. Maybe I’m just a passive-aggressive unconscious coward, and like any good liberal, I should question everything. For instance, when did I last make a stand, any kind of stand, about anything? When did I just stand up for something right? Let alone America. What is America? Every time I try to think of America as a unit I get anxious. I think that’s part of the reason I moved to Manhattan; I wanted to live on “an island off the coast of America.” I wanted to live somewhere between America and Europe, a piece of land with very defined boundaries and only eight million people.

  So I had no concept of America or of making a stand. I hated contact sports when I was a kid—I really didn’t like the bumps. When I moved to New York City I wanted to be able to make a stand, so I took karate. But I had that horrid feeling of bone bouncing on bone whenever I hit my instructor or he hit me.

  When I was in the seventh grade I fell in love with Judy Dorci. Butchy Coca was in love with her too. He lived on the other side of the tracks. He had a black leather motorcycle jacket and I had a camel’s hair coat. I was careful never to go into his territory—I stayed in mine, Barrington, Rhode Island—but they didn’t have a five-and-dime in Barrington and I had to buy Christmas presents. I went over to Warren, Rhode Island, Butchy’s territory, to the five-and-dime, and one of Butchy’s gang saw me—put the finger on me. I stepped outside and there they were, eight of them, like in High Noon, one foot up against the brick wall, smoking Chesterfield Regulars. I thought, this is it. I’m going to know what it’s like to make a stand—but why rush it?

  I ducked into the Warren Gazette just to look at Christmas cards, take my time, and there was Mr. Walker from Barrington. I said, “Hi, Mr. Walker, are you going my way?”

  “I am. My car is out back. Do you mind going out the back door?”

  “Nope. Let’s go.”

  When I arrived in London for the first time, I was jet-lagging and I had to rent a car to go up to Edinburgh so I felt a little out of it. All right, I was driving on the wrong side of the road—easily done—you know, no big deal. I cut a guy off first thing, and when I rolled down the window to apologize, he said, “Take off those glasses, mate, I’m going to punch you out.” Just like a British redcoat announcing his intentions ahead of time.

  I just rolled up the window. Why rush it?

  Last year I cut a man off on Hudson Street in Manhattan. I cut off a man from New Jersey, which is one of the worst things you can do. A man from New Jersey! And I rolled down the window—why I do this, I don’t know—to apologize again. This time I saw the fist coming toward me and I thought, now I’ll know what it’s like to have my jaw broken in five places. At the last minute, just seconds before making contact with my face, he pulled the punch and hit the side of the van instead. He walked off with his knuckles bleeding, cursing. I rolled up the window and pulled out. Why rush it?

  I had a friend who wanted to rush it, because he was going into the Army and he’d never been punched out. So he went to his friend Paul and said, “Paul, I’ve never been punched out. But I’m drafted, I’m going into the Army. Please punch me out Paul, quick.” And Paul knocked him o
ut.

  I didn’t want to go into the Army. I didn’t want to get punched out. So I checked all the boxes. I admit it. I did it. I checked “homosexual” and “has trouble sleeping.” Where it asked “What do you do when you can’t sleep?” I put that I drank.

  My mother was at home at the time having an incurable nervous breakdown and I was studying acting. I thought that if worse came to worse I would just act the way she was acting and I’d get out of the Army. But there was a guy in front of me who looked very much like me; we both had beards. They touched him first, on the shoulder, and he just went bananas. He flipped out and they took him away screaming.