Swimming to Cambodia (11 page)

“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.

 

 

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?”

“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!”

I woke to see the Thai waiter from the restaurant looking out to sea with binoculars and I got up and looked out. And, way out, I saw this ancient old craft like an old wooden cider tub, bobbing with all these little heads along the edge like Wynken, Blynken and Nod. They were
way
out there and some Thai fishermen were trying to lasso their boat, and they looked like real Vietnamese boat people. But was it the real thing? I couldn't believe it—just when I was beginning to forget about Vietnam and dream of the Hamptons, these wretched sea gypsies came into view.

And Jack—Jack from Saudi Arabia via Washington; Jack who was the kind of guy who was so in touch with his body he was out of touch with it; the kind of guy who would climb Mount Everest for the weekend just to ski down it and videotape himself doing it—Jack walked over, pulled down his goggles and proceeded to go in the water, like in a cartoon.

And like a buzz saw he cut right through my Perfect Moment area . . .

right through Ivan's chartered waters . . .

and disappeared into the Indian Ocean.

I was pacing up and down the beach. Twenty minutes later he strolled back out of the ocean and I said, “What the fuck? Where were you? Where'd you go?”

And he said, in that casual, laid-back, almost indifferent way, “Oh, I just wanted to swim out and see if they were real boat people, but they got towed away before I got out there.”

“Jack, how far out would you say that was?”

“Oh, a mile, mile-and-a-half.”

“Do you do that sort of thing often?”

“Well, I do like long distance swimming. Once, when I was swimming about two-and-a-half hours off the coast of Jersey . . .”

“Two-and-a-half hours? What if a thunderstorm had come up?”

A distant, whimsical smile passed as Jack said, “Yeah ... I ran into this big leviathan-type thing, I mean whatever it was, it should not have let me hit it, and I panicked and started to swim in.”

(If you can imagine the quality of a panicked swim two-and-a-half hours out.)

“I swam in and the next day a guy had his leg bitten
off right to his knee, in knee-deep water, by a shark. So I just might have run into that shark but I was lucky and hit it in the nose.”

Jack and Mary wanted to ride into town with us. They said Shangri-La was not very interesting at night. In fact, it was a bore and all they did was “fight.” They wanted to dine with us in town.

“Sure. C'mon in. There's always interesting configurations—there are 130 of us. Sometimes you eat meals with people you like, other times you just go along and discover new people.

When I got back to the hotel I found that Tom Bird had finished his last scene and I thought, oh, God, time for the Last Supper. So I was really kind of down and I tried to talk Tom into staying on for a few days and going to Karon Beach.

“Tom, you've got to stay. You've really got to stay. We're going to have a beautiful, beautiful time at the beach, take the magic mushrooms. Just stay about three extra days?”

“Spalding, brush that sand off your legs before you come in here.”

So I knew something weird was going on. I really should have confronted him on it. If I have any major regrets about this trip, it was that I didn't confront Tom Bird about why he wouldn't go to that beach.