Swimming to Cambodia

by Spalding Gray

  I believed him and I thought that I was in trouble. And I fell back into time and back into my body and I swam in to Ivan. We treaded water together. I was panicked, always expecting to feel “Chomp!”—you know, just “Chomp!”—the whole lower part of my body gone from a big shark bite. Because now I was back in fearful time. I was also sad because I knew I’d had a Perfect Moment and I would now have to go home. And Ivan swam out to test my waters and he came back in choking . . .

  “Oh-ahkkkhhh!”

  ... water pouring out of his nose and mouth and he said, “Spalding, man, now I know what it’s like to drown. I almost drowned out there.”

  And I thought, oh, shit. Now I’m going to have to go out and “almost drown.” No. No, I won’t fall into this male competitive trap. I know what Ivan’s idea of a Perfect Moment is. It’s Death!

  So I swam in and joined up with Penny Eyles, the Continuity lady. Just who I needed at that point.

  I said, “Penny, listen, I had a Perfect Moment but I have no words for it. But I can tell you about my new theory of Displacement of Anxiety. You see, if you ever want to do something Penny, and you’re afraid to do it and you lack the courage, just take a big pile of money and leave it somewhere where it can be stolen. Then you’ll be able to do what has to be done. Just concentrate on your money.”

  She said, “Spalding, Spalding, you’re a strange bloke. You know what? You think too much. What are you doing testing your fears at forty-two years old? Didn’t you do it as a lad?”

  “No,” I said. “Was I supposed to? Oh lord, did I miss that, too? Oh no, I know, my brother Rocky did it all for me. He tested all his fears at an early age. One of his biggest fears was the basement in our house. When our parents would go away he’d turn out the lights and crawl on his belly from his bedroom down the front stairs, then down the basement stairs and, with his eyes closed, he would feel the basement walls, every crack, feeling his way around the entire room until he either died or didn’t die.”

  So Penny said, “I want you to walk with me down this beach without looking back once at your money. We will walk to the far end of the beach together. Let’s go.”

  And I walked all the way down the beach with Penny backwards, never once losing sight of my money. Then, when I got down to the far end of the beach I fell into a new cluster of energy. There were these enormous water buffalo that came up to my shoulder and these ratty, ragtag Thai kids with sticks talking to the buffalo in Thai and ignoring me. I was floating in between this boy-buffalo energy like Casper the Friendly Ghost. I was in their energy field, in my ocean briefs and ready to go anywhere they went. I was being swept away, just like the water. I was going with them and I was happy, and all of a sudden a human voice woke me and I drowned as I heard, in the distance, Judy Freeman calling, “Spalding! Spalding! Time to go. Time to go back to the Phuket Merlin.”

  So I went. I had to. These people had become my umbilical cord. I was breathing through them.

  I got back to the hotel and I went to the person who was fast becoming my father-confessor, Athol Fugard. Now, Athol seemed to like hearing my stories, and also, he had just given up drinking so he was buying me drinks and kind of living vicariously through me.

  “Spalding! I am going to have an orange and you will have yourself some beer. Now. What’s been going on? Tell me all about your day.”

  And I told him. I told him about the Perfect Moment in the Indian Ocean and he said, “Spalding. The sea’s a lovely lady.” (He’s South African, like Ivan.) “The sea’s a lovely lady when you play in her, but if you play with her, she’s a bitch. Don’t ever play with the sea. You’re lucky to be here. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  I believed him, and we went to eat—Athol, Graham Kennedy, Tom Bird and I. Afterwards Tom and I went window-shopping for whores and then went to bed. I slept rocked in the arms of the sea, like a kid again in Jerusalem, Rhode Island with sand in my bed. It was a beautiful night, perfect sleep, the bed rocking gently.

  The next day was June 24 and it was a back-to-work day for those that were still working on the film. I wanted to hang out on the set because it was supposed to be a very . . . explosive day, when the first bombs went off at the Coca-Cola factory.

  When I got down to the set everything was in perpetual flames, like a little version of hell. All the buildings had flaming gas jets around them so they could burn all day without burning down. Coke trucks were burning as well, and I got to throw cases of Coke at the wall, to smash the bottles, make it look like a bomb had blown up. And the Thai extras were lined up, covered with chicken giblets, fake blood and what looked like very real third-degree bums created by the art department. They were all lined up and smiling. While we were trashing the area I decided that I wanted to talk to certain people. I had a sense that Tom might be through with his role in the film any time and we’d have to leave, either for Hanoi or Krummville. So I was going into that kind of state when you think you’re about to die or leave a place forever, and you want to just get to know everyone before you go.

  Keith, the costumier, was first. I hadn’t talked with him. He’d always struck me as a little mad, and I was telling him about my theory of Displacement of Anxiety and he said, “I know all about it. Oh, sure. I’ve got a witch up there, white one, up in Nottingham. Oh, she’s a blessed one. Every time I fly she gets mildly ill, in a pub, you see? She gets sick. She takes on my anxiety and I have a lovely flight. I know all about it. I knew this actress. She hated a fellow actor and she wanted to get him out of the show. She stuck a note on the stairs, under the carpet on the stage. It said, ‘May you trip and break your leg.’ And he did. Oh, I know all about it.”

  Then I went on from Keith to talk to Haing Ngor. Now I hadn’t talked directly to Haing about his story, but I certainly had heard about it. I think I felt ashamed, or I didn’t want to bother him, because people had asked him about his story so many times before. He was playing the role of Dith Pran. Now, Haing had also been tortured for years under the Pol Pot regime, so to some extent he was reenacting his own life story as well as Pran’s. As the story goes, Haing was a Cambodian gynecologist and he had been performing an emergency operation on someone in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge broke into the hospital and demanded to know where the doctor was. Haing just threw down his stuff and said, “I’m not a doctor, I’m a taxicab driver. I drove the doctor here.” And he left the patient on the operating table and became a cab driver from that day on.

  The other thing about Haing Ngor that interested me was his anger. Of all the Cambodians that I met, his anger was most on the surface, and I think that’s why he was cast in the role.

  The others were always smiling. It was hard to believe they could still be smiling, but they were always smiling about everything. I don’t know what it came from, the Buddhism or that they’d seen too much to talk about, but they were always very gentle and smiling. But Haing’s rage was right there, and I went up and asked him what had happened to him.

  “They put! Plastic! Plastic bag. Over my head!”

  “And then?”

  “And then. They take me. They tie me to a cross. And burn my legs. And burn me right here.”

  And he showed me the burn marks on his legs.

  “They burned you? How did you get through this? What were you thinking about? What was going on?”

  “I know. If I tell the truth. I’m one hundred percent dead. Now I’m only ninety-eight percent dead. The truth. Hundred percent dead.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “They take me. And Khmer Rouge put. Me in jail.”

  “They put you in jail, yes, and . . .”

  “They. Burn it down.”

  The Khmer Rouge were really crazy. They put him in jail and then set fire to it and, of course, the prisoners ran out. Some got burned, yes. Some escaped. Haing escaped and ate his way across Cambodia on bark and bugs—the traditional diet—leaves and lizards. At last he made it to a Thai refugee camp and now he’s living in L.A.
r />   Then I went to the Sparks, the British electricians. I envied their sort of blissful ignorance the most. They were the ones who, as soon as they arrived in Thailand, went down and bought Thai wives. Now I think it’s a class thing. None of the actors did it. The electricians could do it. I don’t know if it has to do with electricity or what, but I know the actors didn’t buy women out front. They were more secretive about it and would sneak around doing it at night. These guys went right out and got these women and they made a little laughing family. I used to listen at their hotel doors sometimes. They’d be in there speaking pidgin English to each other in the shower.

  “Hey, beeg guy, ohkeekyouass I keeckassoh ho ho ho!” laughing. I mean the major English they knew came from the popular records there: “Lies, Lies, Lies, Liar,” and “Do You Want to Funk?” During the day the Thai wives hung out by the pool together and talked, and at night the men came home from work and everyone went out to eat. The Thai women knew just what to order and everyone had a good time there, laughing. The women talked among themselves and the men talked among themselves—now, not a radical idea, granted, but a lot happier than most nuclear families that I’ve come across in any McDonald’s or Howard Johnson’s. A lot more laughter coming off the table. I don’t know what laughter is indicative of, but it has something to do with joy and letting go.

  I’ve been with prostitutes in Amsterdam and New York City, and they are very cool, business-as-usual. It’s like going to a very cold doctor. You just wouldn’t naturally fall in love with one. But I think that you could very easily fall in love with a Thai whore, very easily. They really seemed to be having a good time there, feeding coconut-flavored rice to the Sparks as they lounged before them like gargantuan Gauguins. If, in fact, they were all acting, then a good many of them should have received Academy Awards along with Haing Ngor.

  And yes, I’ve heard the other side of it and I know it exists the way the darker side of everything exists. Just recently, while driving in L.A., I heard a very angry woman talking on KPFK Radio about an investigation she had made of child prostitution in Thailand. She said that evil people were kidnapping ten-year-old girls and bringing them to the city to be prostitutes, and they were chaining them to the beds like slaves. When one of the whorehouses burned down all they found were these charred ten-year-old skeletons, chained to beds. I didn’t hear about this until after I got back from Thailand, but while I was there it all looked like fun. I wanted in on it all, but I couldn’t get in because I was too conflicted.

  Then, all of a sudden, the guns went off and the machine-gun fire started, and the bombs. Five hundred Coke cases were blown across the warehouse. John Swain was running off camera behind Julian Sands, who was playing him, and John was yelling, “What a lovely war! What a great war! You know you’re not going to get shot!” This confirmed my whole idea of War Therapy.

  We were running through the machine-gun fire, the black smoke pouring off burning rubber tires, and all of a sudden it was lunchtime. We all sat down at a table with these Thai peasants who were completely covered with blood—it looked like their faces were falling off—and we were all eating together when a monsoon suddenly came up and one of the tents blew down and a real Thai woman got knocked out for real. They carried her in and put her in the middle of the table where the food was. So it was the monsoon versus the film. Then the monsoon passed and the film began again and there was so much black smoke you couldn’t even see the sky. There were rockets and machine-gun fire, and Judy Freeman, who was on sound, said to me, “Spalding, my God, what are you feeling guilty about? What are you doing in the middle of a war when you could be down on Paradise Beach? Chris and I have rented a house down there that we never use. You’re free to use it. Go, go. Have fun.”

  So I thought, ooh, why not? What am I feeling guilty about? After all, let’s not waste time on that.

  I walked out—it was incredible. What a beautiful day. The sun was out, I felt like I was in seventh grade and I was just walking out of school at ten in the morning. Just a free boy. And I went back to the hotel and got Billy Paterson and his girlfriend Hildegarde and some of the Cambodian refugees, and we hired a car and went back to Karon Beach. Now, it wasn’t as beautiful this time, it never is the second time around, but it was beautiful. And I was walking down the beach—completely empty, beautiful day, big surf—with one of the Cambodian refugees, and I said, “So, what are you doing here? I mean what have you been doing—aren’t you getting bored?”

  “No, I’m ‘fighting’ every night. Last night I ‘fought’ six times.”

  “What do you mean, ‘fighting’?”

  It turned out that this was a euphemism for fucking. For some reason the Cambodians had all these code words for their amorous escapades. If a Cambodian was going for a massage, he’d refer to it as “going for an interview.” This particular code had grown out of the fact that one of the Cambodians was there with his wife, and every time he went out for a massage and she asked where he was going, he told her he was going to be interviewed about the movie. (He had a very small role.)

  So, massage equaled “interview” and fucking equaled “fighting.”

  “You ‘fought’ six times last night?” I said. “Aren’t you afraid of that new Southeast Asian strain of gonorrhea that’s supposed to be so strong that it’s knocking down doors?”

  “No, no. Haing is a Cambodian gynecologist. He told me what to do. He says after you ‘fight’ you drink a lot of beer to wash out the germs and in the morning you eat a lot of penicillin.”

  So he was on a beer/penicillin diet. And he believed in it. He claimed it was working. We walked on the beach and he picked three fresh coconuts for us. He cut the tops off and we were drinking fresh coconut milk when we came upon two tourists. Now, on a beach like that, if you come upon only two tourists, sure, you’re going to stop and talk.

  It was Jack and Mary from Saudi Arabia—Mary via Dublin and Jack via Washington State. Mary was a nurse in Saudi Arabia and Jack was a plastic surgeon. They were traveling companions. They’d come on a vacation but Jack was particularly interested in Thailand because he said there were challenges in the plastic surgery field like in no other country. Jack had heard about the jealous Thai wives who cut off men’s cocks and feed them to the ducks. And he had heard about the special plastic surgery wings where doctors sewed them back on. He said there were more challenges in plastic surgery in Thailand and the Philippines than in any other country, so he was thinking of staying on.

  “Come! Come join us for lunch,” I cried. “Come sup with us—tell us of your travels of the world.” It was all like a big Hemingway novel. “Come! Sit! Tell us about Saudi Arabia!”

  Mary started: “Well, Saudi Arabia, my God. Man, you would not believe how primitive it is. They still have public executions there, and if you’re a foreigner you just get pushed right up to the front and when you see the head come off, plop, you faint dead away. Oh, and they cut off hands there. They cut off hands for thievery and they cauterize the stumps in boiling oil. Oh, also, they still do stoning, oh, do they ever. And it’s modem. It’s a more contempoary style—I was there. There was this woman, she was an adulteress and she got pregnant. They waited for the baby to be born, then they buried her in sand up to her neck and drove a big dump truck up filled with stones and just dumped them on her head. That’s their modern stoning method. What do you think of that?”

  I said, “Good God! Thank God I live in America!”

  So the conversation ran its course and spiraled down, as it often does at any dinner table, from sex, death and taxes to shit and money, depending on whether it’s mixed company. In this case it was mixed company, so it all ended with money. Now I don’t mind talking about money. When people ask me what I make, I tell them. But for many, money is a taboo subject. My father would never talk about it. He never told how much he made.

  It all started when Billy Paterson said to me, “So Spalding, what are you going to do with all the money you make?”
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br />   “What? What money?” This was a medium-budget film, about twenty million, and I had been told that everyone was making the same salary except Sam Waterston who was making a little more, and the Cambodians who were making a lot less.

  And Billy said, “Well, I’ll tell you if you tell me.”

  “All right. You go first.”

  “Well, as far as I know all the Brits are making $3,000 a week plus $325 a week for expenses.”

  “Ohuhoh. I thought I was doing very well, but I’m making $1,500 plus $325, and $3,000 is twice as much, isn’t it?”

  “Well, Spalding, you know, maybe that’s because you don’t have an agent.”

  All of a sudden I saw white. Of course! An agent! What am I doing lying on the beach like an old hippie at forty-two years old, trying to have Perfect Moments in Thailand? What am I doing searching for Cosmic Consciousness? Cosmic Consciousness belongs to the independently wealthy in this day and age. Go! Get an agent! Yes! Do not go to Hanoi! Do not pass Go! Go directly to Hollywood and get an agent! After all, what is this film about? Survival! Whose survival? My survival. Go! Get an agent! Go do five Hollywood films you don’t really like. Do them! Get a house out in the Hamptons where you can have your own Perfect Moments in your own backyard. Have your friends come over for an afternoon of Perfect Moments. Return to your own ocean. Go! Go! Go to Hollywood and get an agent!

  Exhausted from this epiphany, I staggered down to the beach, and went into a semi-miasma sleep in which I thought I was back on Long Island, in the Hamptons, hearing the sound of my own ocean without ever having to travel twenty-four hours on Thai Air. And I was half asleep when I heard someone yelling, “Boat People! Boatpeopleboatpeopleboatpeople Boat People!”