You go down into this small room and for a little bit of money you take off all your clothes and she stays dressed, and you get a mild, tweek-tweek massage; nothing Reichian about it. A mild, tweek-tweek surface massage. And for a little bit more money she takes off all her clothes and gives you another mild, tweek-tweek surface massage, and occasionally you might feel her warm, brown Thai body brush-brush up against yours. A little bit more money and you get a hand job. A little bit more money and you get to fuck her. A little bit more money and you get the supremo-supremo ... the body-body massage. For the body-body massage she puts you in a tub and she completely soaps you up. She doesn’t rinse you. She puts you, slippery, on a waterbed. Then she gets in the tub and soaps herself up so she’s slippery too, and she doesn’t rinse herself either. And she gets on one side of the room and runs and hops on top of you and goes swiggle-swiggle-swiggle, body-body-body, and you slide together like two very wet bars of soap. For the final facial massage she’ll let you put your face between her breasts, she’ll part them and then let them go and cry out “Boobily-oobily!”
After you’ve been fucked, sucked, had your tubes cleaned, toes cleaned and nose cleaned and you’re ready for more, you can go rest and relax at a live show. At a live show the women do everything with their vaginas except have babies. One starts with ping-pong balls and a soda fountain glass: Chung, chung, chung, she catches the ball in the glass. Then another brings out a Coca-Cola bottle, a king-size Coke, which she shakes for a long time, really shakes it hard. She works on it and works on it for a long time until—I don’t know how, but she does it—she opens it. I don’t know if she has a bottle opener in there, or teeth, but the Coke sprays all over the audience (because it’s warm, and she’s shaken it). Then she pours the rest of the Coke into her womb, squats and—whoosh—refills the bottle like a Coca-Cola bottling machine.
Then comes the banana. First she shoots a few lame shots, just boring shots like those Russian rockets that are going to sputter and pop and land on our cornfields. One, two, three. Then, for the finale, she aims her vagina down the center aisle like a cannon, loads it with a very ripe banana and—FOOP!—fires it. She almost hit me in the eye, almost hit an Australian housewife in the head. The banana hits the back wall and sticks, then slowly slides down to the floor where it is devoured by an army of giant roaches.
For the last act, out comes a Thai couple to do a live sex show. They do all the kama sutra poses—and the Thais are the most beautiful race of people I’ve ever seen. When you see them coming toward you on a Bangkok street you don’t know whether they’re men or women; there is such androgyny afoot. And when they get closer to you it doesn’t matter. The couple does this live fuck show as if they’re dancing. They are so beautiful as they go through their poses and positions. And they end with her completely wrapped around him, belly up, in this incredible contortion. And he’s got his dick deep in her to hold her up, as she balances in a classic praying position, watching a rerun of Poltergeist on the TV over the bar and waving to her friends. Then it’s time to go home.
Now some men have no problems with all of this, men who can admit to a longing for the old Henry Miller days. I know I’m too ambivalent about it to count myself in. In fact, some of the British actors said I was resisting tradition, that the whores were there for me and that I should go to them. That was a rule of the culture. But I was ambivalent about it. I found it very difficult to just leap in and not think about it. But the man who wants to, who knows the power balances he would like, who knows that if the bomb doesn’t go off, the sun will go out eventually so therefore he’s not concerned with history, who knows that after he dies his history will last maybe twenty minutes at most, who just wants to regress a little bit, that man should go to Thailand for a vacation. But he should be careful because it inflates your estrogen and ego in the worst way, making it difficult to reenter the West. He may end up staying on as a schoolteacher—many men do. They get stuck in the Lust Ring. I met them there and they were schoolteachers.
Now one of the American actors in the film was determined not to get stuck in this Lust Ring, and to be loyal to his wife back in the States. He just didn’t want to get stuck in a situation of lust, so he worked out his libido by jogging and playing tennis. On the third or fourth day out jogging, he pulled a muscle in his right leg very badly, and in our hotel—which was like a Ramada Inn—he saw a sign for massage. He figured it was on the up and up, as it were. He asked for the “regular massage.”
Later, he said, “I went in, my God, they worked on the wrong muscle for an hour! For an hour I got a hand job; where am I going to get my leg fixed in this town?” You see, it’s subtle.
We were in the posh lounge of this Ramada Inn-like hotel. The only difference between it and a Ramada Inn was that it had those King and I round windows to make it Siamese. There was this woman singing with a Thai combo, “Killing me softly with his song . . .” and we were ordering Kloster beers. “Killing me softly . . .” and rats, posh rats, were running across the wall-to-wall carpeted bar to hide up under the furniture. “Killing me so/t7y...” and the Art Department was coming through with Cambodian body parts, artificial limbs for the film. Skeletons, skulls, legs, bones, then “Killing me softly . . .”
The waitress was on her way over with two beers, slinking and dancing, three inches off the carpet. And she had a slit up the side of her skirt so you could see her naked leg flashing through. She came to deliver the two beers, slid in and knelt at our feet, took the beers off her tray and put them on the coffee table. It’s subtle.
We were out by the pool and this woman came out, May. We called her Chang Mai May. She said, “Dear sirs, I can’t read this writing. Can you please read this letter to me?”
It said, “Dear May: I will be arriving from Saudi Arabia on Friday. I trust your judgment implicitly. I hope you have a lovely escort waiting for me in my room. If I like her I will marry her. She must be prepared to return to Saudi Arabia where she’ll spend the next six months, at which time we’ll move to London where she will spend the rest of her life.”
By the way, marriage is a very simple thing in Thailand. It’s a verbal agreement. It can be done in a telephone booth, a swimming pool, a bed, on the beach, wherever. But I’m told that when Thai women marry foreigners and get taken out of the country, they don’t stay very long wherever it is that they’re taken. They miss Thailand and go back.
I am also told that Thai wives are very jealous. If one of them ever catches her husband with another woman, when he least expects it she cuts off his cock with a straight-edged razor and feeds it to the ducks. (When I first heard this I thought it was a joke, but since then I’ve heard otherwise.) Thai husbands have gotten so used to this behavior now that they’ve learned to run and get the severed penis out of the duck’s throat—before it’s swallowed up—and get it to a new plastic surgical penis transplant wing that Thai hospitals have. In order to beat this, the Thai wives are now beginning to tie the penises onto gas balloons and send them up in the backyard.
So there we were, driving through the black smoke and Marine guards, heading for a Sikorski that didn’t exist. We got to where the Sikorski was supposed to be and, “Cut.” End of shot.
Five months later, when the filming was over, they located the Sikorskis—at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. That was the only place they could find any. So we went down there for one last shoot—it was incredible. The pyrotechies were running around pulling those same rubber tires, sending up black smoke, but this time the crew had tee-shirts on that read “SKIP THE DIALOGUE, LET’S BLOW SOMETHING UP.”
So there we were on this Marine base, the actors, these Thai kids who were playing Dith Pran’s children who had been flown in from Bangkok for the day, and the Marines, who were very excited. It was the day after the Beirut Massacre and they weren’t even talking about Beirut. Their flags weren’t even at half-mast. (Actually, I figured out why that was. California American flags are the largest American flags in the
world. If they were put at half-mast they’d drag on the ground. California also seems to have the smallest flag poles in relation to the size of the flag.)
The Marines were thrilled to have real actors on the base.
“Craig T. Nelson? Big Chill, I know it. Don’t say no. I saw you in The Big Chill.”
“Tom Bird? Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. I’m sure I saw you in that. Don’t say no.”
So we weren’t saying no. We were milling around, talking about what it was like to be a star, giving autographs, when over the horizon came these three giant birds. These Sikorskis are really big. And the Marines turned as though they’d rehearsed it and, on cue, sang the “tune” from Apocalypse Now, you know, The Ride of the Valkyries, “ba-BA-ba-ba-BAA-ba, ba-BA-ba-ba-BAAA-ba ...” as the helicopters came in and landed. We got on one of them with the wind blowing and the black smoke, and in the finished film it only lasts about thirty seconds. I got on with Ira Wheeler, but then we had to get right off again because we weren’t allowed to take off. Only the Marines who were playing Marines were.
One of the Marine guards who had escorted us onto the helicopter got a Polaroid picture of the scene from Continuity and asked us, “Would you please sign this picture for me? I want to send it to my folks in North Carolina. Because if I never do anything else in my life, at least I can say I have done this.”
The actual evacuation of Phnom Penh took place on April 12, 1975. Lon Nol had long since fled to Hawaii and there were two million people in the capital instead of the usual six hundred thousand. There was no food. Khmer Rouge rockets were coming in and landing in the streets, on schools, randomly. At six o’clock in the morning John Gunther Dean put out a letter to all American and Cambodian officials, notifying them that the evacuation was taking place: “You have two-and-a-half hours to make it here to the embassy and then we’re taking off.”
The Prime Minister of Cambodia Long Boret said, “Two-and-a-half hours? How are we going to convince the Russians that we’re Socialists in two-and-a-half hours? We’re ruined.”
Long Boret, Lon Non and Prince Sirik Matak stayed behind. By the way, Lon Nol had two brothers, Lon Non and Lon Nil. Lon Nil was killed in an early insurrection and they cut out his liver and rushed it to a Chinese restaurant, cooked it up in a wok and fed it to the people in the streets. The Khmers were really big on the powers of the human liver.
Prince Sirik Matak sent a letter to the American ambassador informing him that they were not going to evacuate. It read:Dear Excellency and Friend,
I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me toward freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have the sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. But mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot, and in the country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must one day die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans. Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.
Sirik Matak
Five days later their livers were carried through the streets on sticks.
The Americans thought it would be like Danang during the evacuation, but it wasn’t. There was no rioting, there were no people hanging off the helicopter runners like in Vietnam. The Cambodians just waved and called, “Okay, bye-bye. Okay, bye-bye.” They were still smiling. The last helicopter took off and a Khmer Rouge rocket came in and killed one of the people watching. Five days later, April 17, 1975, it was “Cambodia Year Zero.”
In marched the Khmer Rouge in their black pajamas and Lon Nol’s troops threw down their guns and raced to embrace them, thinking that the country would then be reunited. The Khmer Rouge did not smile back. They took strategic points in the city. Some of the kids, because they had grown up in the jungle and never seen cars before, were jumping into cars, getting stuck in first gear and ramming them into buildings. There was chaos for awhile, but soon order reigned. And the Khmer Rouge said, “Out. Everyone out of the city. The Americans are going to bomb Phnom Penh. Get out. There’s no more food, so out. Who will take care of you? Angka will provide. Angka is out there, so get out of the city. Angka ...” like some sort of perverse Wizard of Oz figure, “Angka . . .” like some Kafkaesque thundercloud raining down manna to feed the people. They emptied a city of two million people in twenty-four hours.
Those who were in hospitals, who couldn’t walk, were just chucked out the window, no matter which story they were on. Out the window. Survival of the fittest. Then the mass murder began. Eyewitnesses said that everyone who had any kind of education was killed. Any artist, any civil servant was butchered. Anyone wearing glasses was killed. The only hope was to convince them that you were a cab driver, so suddenly there were a thousand more cab drivers than cabs. It was just the opposite of New York, where everyone says, “I’m an artist, I’m an artist. Sure, I drive a cab to make a living, but I’m really an artist.” There if you were an artist, boom, you became dead. Little kids were doing the killing, ten-year-olds, fifteen-year-olds. There was very little ammunition left so they were beating people over the head with ax handles or hoses or whatever they could get hold of. Some of the skulls were too tough for sticks and clubs, and because the kids were weak from eating only bark, bugs, leaves and lizards, they often didn’t have the strength to kill. So to make it more fun, they were taking bets on how many whacks it would take to cave in a head.
Some eyewitnesses said that the kids were laughing with a demented glee. And if you pleaded for mercy they laughed harder. If you were a woman pleading for mercy they laughed even harder. And if you didn’t die the kids just took your half-dead body and threw it in an American bomb crater, which acted as a perfect grave. It was a kind of hell on earth.
You were killed if you had your own cooking pot. It was better to kill an innocent person, the Khmer Rouge said, than to leave an enemy alive. It was nothing like the methodical, scientific German genocide. They were tearing apart little children like fresh bread in front of their mothers, gouging out eyes, cutting open pregnant women. And this went on for four years. Two million people were either killed outright or starved to death. And to this day no one knows exactly what happened, what caused this kind of mad autogenocide to come into being. Oh sure, it’s easy to research what happened in Germany because we can speak German, and Hitler’s dead or living in Argentina. But Pol Pot is recognized by the United States government. And he’s still out there, waiting.
We don’t know what happened because the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and they say it was a liberation. Others say it was a piece of cake, a xenophobic piece of cake. They invaded in ’79 and now they’re writing their own revisionist history. We don’t know what went on. Maybe a cloud of evil did land and the people simply went mad.
But whatever was going on, Pol Pot is still alive and up there and waiting to return. He’s protected by the United States and the United Nations, and the Red Cross brings him food. And he’s fighting the Vietnamese up there, the people who originally taught him to fight. Roland Joffe said to me, “My God, Spalding, morality is not a moveable feast.” But I keep seeing it moving, all the time.
My last big scene was with Sam Waterston in Waheen, Gulf of Siam. Not at the Pleasure Prison, where we were sleeping, but at this beautiful Victorian hotel in Waheen that they had emptied out for the film because it looked like the Hotel Phnom Penh. The only thing that made it inauthentic was that it didn’t have a swimming pool or a tennis court. So the film built a swimming pool and a tennis court.
Now what I haven’t told you is that the American Air Force had what it called “homing beacons” on the ground. And when the planes flew over, six miles up, they could take a radar coordinate off those homing beacons and then the navigato
r threw a switch and all the bombs were dropped over the target by computer. So no one really dropped a bomb from six miles up; it was done on automatic. The beacons were everywhere. There was one on the American embassy. There was also one in Neak Luong, and on August 7, 1973, a navigator made a mistake. He threw his switch at the wrong time and dropped an entire load of bombs on this strategic ferry town, Neak Luong. The navigator was fined $700 for the mistake.
Sidney Schanberg told me that he heard about it and went up to cover it for The New York Times. But the American embassy had put an absolute press lock on the whole area; no one was allowed in. Sidney bribed his way in, snuck his way in with Dith Pran, and they paid people to get them there. He told me that he reached Neak Luong about two days after the accident, and that all the dead had been removed, but he saw blood and hair all over the bushes and speculated that more than 200 people had been killed. He told me the Cambodians put him under “polite house arrest,” so he couldn’t break his story to the Times.
During the time he was under guard, the American embassy flew in officials to give out hundred-dollar bills to people who had lost family in the bombing, fifties to people who had lost arms or legs. And the Cambodians were grateful.
Sidney told me that he had the feeling he could just walk out if he wanted to; the Cambodians wouldn’t shoot him in front of American embassy officials, he was pretty sure. As he started to walk, he heard the safeties on their guns click and men start screaming, “Stop.” He said, “This may sound strange, but I’d never felt more alive in my life than when I was right on the edge of death. I never felt more alive!”
Swimming to Cambodia Page 5
