Swimming to Cambodia (6 page)

So Ira was playing John Gunther Dean, the last American ambassador. We got to meet Dean because he is now ambassador to Thailand, right there in Bangkok. And because Costa Gavras was getting sued for fourteen million dollars by the Chilean ambassador for
Missing,
David Puttnam wasn't taking any chances. He
was bending over backwards to have the text examined by the ambassador to make sure it represented history the way he remembered it.

Ira and I went over to visit him because we wanted to meet a real ambassador. I was very intimidated by this man. I had met politicians but never a
statesman.
And he was a true statesman, a combination of a ship's captain, say, of the Q.E. II, and a boarding school principal, say, of Phillips or Andover Academy. And he said, “We saw Cambodia as a ship floundering in high seas. We wanted desperately to bring her safely into port. When we saw we were going to lose her, we wanted to leave the ship with dignity, and I cut down the American flag that you see behind me, wrapped it in plastic and carried it over my arm.”

And there we were, Ira running with the American flag wrapped in plastic over his arm. And me, the ambassador's aide, running beside him, heading for a Cadillac limousine parked on the soccer field. We got to the Cadillac limousine, it was 110 degrees, and the first thing that happened was that the air conditioner broke. We had to spend the whole day in this black torture box—it was going to take that long to shoot the scene—and Ira was sweating, he was dripping. It was cooler outside than in, and Ira is the type who sweats like a, like . . . an
Ira.
He sweats so much that he says he beats his opponents at squash because they slip in his puddles.

Wardrobe was changing his shirt while we sat in the limousine and next the electric windows broke, the radiator boiled over and by the end of the day the entire exhaust system and muffler were dragging on the football field. I was laughing—I found the whole thing very funny. Roland Joffe had told us, “Look like you're on
the verge of tears.” Ira, who was studying Stanislavsky acting for the first time and had read
An Actor Prepares
and
Building a Character,
thought that Roland meant “on the verge of tears” all
day
long, just in case the camera was turned on. So he was doing an emotional memory and he was in a deep funk. You couldn't even approach him.

I was so bored that I began talking to the driver—an extra. He was an expatriate from San Francisco, an elephant expert, who was spending his time counting elephants in the Thai jungle because he thought, “America is going crazy. Going nuts, going to the dogs. Going to the wow-wows.” He went to Thailand to get his sanity back, and in Thailand he only trusted elephants. So they were all he was interested in. He slept in the bush at night and in the morning he got up, grabbed his elephant counter and just counted elephants.

He had a limp, a game leg—and he knew that if you frighten elephants at night they will charge. They sleep standing up and he was sure, he confided to me, that he was going to be killed within the following two months by a stampeding elephant.

In the middle of this Ira looked up and cried out, “WILL YOU STOP TALKING ABOUT WHATEVER IT IS YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT? I'm trying to have an emotional memory.”

“Ira, Ira, this guy is about to be killed by an elephant, for
real.
Think on
that.”

And we were driving through this black smoke, pouring up off of rubber tires, which were burning to make it look like a real war. We headed for a nonexistent Sikorski—I guess because the American Air Force had
not given the Thai Air Force any Sikorskis. They just had little choppers. We were supposed to be getting into the Sikorski but we were just pretending it was there. We drove through Marine guards, lots of extras dressed as American Marines—I don't know who those guys were. I think some of them were Marines who didn't get enough of the war so they went back to join up with Bo Gritz, who had a foreign legion going in Laos to look for MIAs. Others were there to deal drugs, which is extremely lucrative but very dangerous in Thailand. And still others were there basically for the sex. Because on one lower Chakra level Bangkok is one big whorehouse. It's not all our fault, or the fault of the troops on R&R, or the Japanese sex tourists. The tradition existed way back before the war, when there were concubines in all the villages. It just got way out of hand during the war. They had hundreds of prostitutes in quonset huts the size of airplane hangars, to service all the soldiers—and for birth control they took Chinese herbal potions. There were a lot of Amerasian children being born.

 

 

After the Vietnam war they put all the prostitutes in Pat Pong. If you've been to Bangkok you've probably seen Pat Pong. (There's nothing else to see in Bangkok but the Gold Buddha. You can see the Gold Buddha during the day and Pat Pong at night.) If you've seen the film
The Deer Hunter
, you've seen Pat Pong; all of the Saigon sequences were shot there, at the Mississippi Queen. The Mississippi Queen is still there, and walking into it is like stepping into that film.

There is no sense of seduction, as in “across a crowded
room.” The whores just fly to you and stick, and they're small enough that your body can carry six at once, two on an elbow, two on a lap, two here, two there, until you feel like a Christmas tree. You just sit there and they go wild. They smile, giggle, reach into your pockets, and if you can make up your mind which one you're in love with by one o'clock, which is closing time, you can go home with her. Or, if you have enough money, you can go home with all of them. Each one costs 500 Thai
bhat
(about twenty-six dollars) for the entire evening. If you want to buy her out early you can pay another 300
bhat
and go home anytime. You can even walk to the hotel to save money.

If you don't want to spend the whole night with a giggly, happy Thai whore driving you nuts, or if you're afraid of the intimacies involved and would rather be in control, you can go instead to a massage parlor. The massage parlors are very much like huge department stores; there are three floors. You go in and there are, maybe, thirty-five women on one floor, behind a one-way glass, all fully clothed under fluorescent lighting, sitting on tiers and wearing numbers. All of them are looking at a focal point just under the partition. You don't know what they're looking at, but it's a TV. They're all watching TV.

So you strut up and down in front of that glass like a little Sultan until at last you think you've found the perrrr-fect body, suppose it's Number Eight. You say to the man, “Could you call Number Eight for me, please?”

And he calls over a microphone, “Numbah Eight.”

Number Eight stands up and you can tell by her disgruntled expression that it's not going to be as great as
you had thought, because you've interrupted her TV show.

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.