Swimming to Cambodia

by Spalding Gray

  Now how was I going to follow that? I was depressed on two counts. One, it looked like I was going to be drafted, and two, it looked like I was a bad actor.

  Recently in Manhattan, I was up early on a Sunday for some reason. It’s rare. If you’re up early in New York City on a Sunday, there’s a strange overlap between those who are up early and those who haven’t gone to bed yet. I was down in the Canal Street subway station—concrete no man’s land. There were no subways coming, no law and order down there. There was just this one other guy and he was coming toward me. I knew he wanted something—I could feel the vibes. He needed something from me, wanted something. He was about to demand something.

  “Hey man, you got change for a quarter?”

  “Uh, yeah, I think I do. Here—wait a minute, I got two dimes here and one, two, three, four pennies. How’s that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?”

  “I got a quarter and a nickel. Got three dimes?”

  “Yep, I do. Here.” And I counted them out carefully in his hand.

  He turned, walked away, then turned back to me and said, “You only gave me two dimes, man.”

  “Wait a minute. I’m very careful about money matters.”

  Now, was this where I was going to make my stand?

  “Very well. If you feel you need another dime, here.”

  Renée has this upstairs neighbor who is a member of the Art Mafia. She has her own gallery in Soho, along with a drinking problem, and she is unbearable. She plays her quadrophonic machine at all hours, full blast, Bob Dylan’s “Sarah,” over and over again. Something must have happened to her way back when that song was popular and she can’t get it out of her head. She comes in drunk, puts it on at 1:30 in the morning. Now if it was I: 30 every morning, it would be great. It would be like feeding time, you know. You could get through it. You’d get used to it. But it’s 1:35 or it’s 2:10 or it’s 4:14. You call the police but it does no good. She turns it down, they leave, she turns it up. You call the police again, they come, she turns it down, they leave, she turns it up. What can you do? You can’t go to the landlord—he’s Italian Mafia and lives in New Jersey.

  I don’t know which Mafia I dislike the most. I’m leaning toward liking the Italian Mafia because they are just immoral and still believe in mother and child. But the Art Mafia is immoral and, from what I can tell, they’ve stopped procreating.

  So we’re in Renée’s apartment and I call up, “Please stop persecuting us.” And she sends down these young, new artists who have gotten rich and famous in New York, but are now camping out in sleeping bags until they find their niches. And they say, “Hey man. MAN. You know New York is Party City. That’s why we moved here. So we could have parties on weekday nights. If you don’t like it, move to the country—OLD MAN.”

  I try to practice my Buddhist Tolerance—I am turning all my cheeks to the wall at this point. I mean, really, Buddhist Tolerance in New York is just one big pacifist-escapist rationalization. Renée is not practicing it. She is pacing while steam comes screaming out of her navel.

  Now there are some people who say that this woman should be killed. And I find that I’m not saying no. I don’t protest it. They are talking about vigilantes.

  I don’t know the language. I knew the language when I was with my people in Boston in 1962, in whitebread homogeneous Boston, brick-wall Boston. In the old days, when I spoke a common language with my people, they had what was called the “hi-fi.” And when the hi-fi was too loud, all I had to do was call up and say, “Hi, Puffy. Spuddy Gray, down here. Yeah. You guessed it. The hi-fi is a little loud. Yeah. I wouldn’t say anything but I’ve got an early dance class in the morning. Great. Thanks a lot. Yeah, Merry Christmas to you too, Puff.” Down it would go. You see I knew the language.

  Now Renée knows the language because her father was in the Jewish Mafia. So she calls up, “Bet you want to die, right? Bitch! Bitch! Cunt! I’ll beat your fucking face in with a baseball bat. Bitch!” And she slams down the phone. The music gets louder.

  One day I was walking out the door carrying an empty bottle of Molson Golden. I guess I was going to get my nickel back. And I heard this party noise coming from upstairs and I was seized with gut rage. Maybe I’d had a few drinks and the rage finally made it to my gut. Not that my intellect wasn’t still working—it was going like a ticker tape, repeating that old adage, “All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely.” I just took the bottle and hurled it—my arm practically came out of its socket. It went up the flight of stairs, hit the door and exploded like a hand grenade. They charged out with their bats and guns. I ran. Because it was an act of passion, I had forgotten to tell Renée I was going to do it and she was behind me, picking up some plastic garbage bags or something. She was way behind me so when they got to her door they met up with her. But she was innocent and they recognized that. They recognized that she was truly innocent and they didn’t kill her. So there’s hope.

  But I wonder, how do we begin to approach the so-called Cold War (or Now-Heating-Up War) between Russia and America if I can’t even begin to resolve the Hot War down on Northmoor and Greenwich in lower Manhattan?

  When I was in therapy about two years ago, one day I noticed that I hadn’t had any children. And I like children at a distance. I wondered if I’d like them up close. I wondered why I didn’t have any. I wondered if it was a mistake, or if I’d done it on purpose, or what. And I noticed that my therapist didn’t have any children either. He had pictures of cats on the wall. Framed.

  He may have changed since then, but my therapist was the kind who, if you asked him a personal question, would take the entire session to answer. You had to take the responsibility to stop him. You had to learn to be selfish. So I always said that he was like a drinking partner, except we never went drinking and I paid for the drinks.

  I asked him, “Why didn’t you ever have any children?”

  And he said, “Well, I was in Auschwitz when I was nineteen and the death marches were moving out as the Russians moved in. And I said to my friend, who was also nineteen, ‘I think now we have a beneficent Gestapo. Now we must run for it.’ And my friend said, ‘No, I am too tired. I must first rest.’ So I am watching him sleeping and I see blood from the corner of his mouth and I realize he is dead from exhaustion. So I run and escape and I make it to the border of Poland and Germany, and another death march of twenty thousand goes by, not so beneficent this time. They are shooting from horseback, and I surrender.

  “They take us to the edge of this great pit and machine gun the whole lot of us. Everyone falls dead except maybe some twelve or fifteen who fall into the snow and live. I am one. I am shot in and around the genitals so it’s a kind of automatic vasectomy. Two days later the Russians find me in the snow.”

  I said, “Two days in the snow and you didn’t freeze to death?”

  “What . . .,” he answered, “it was just snow.” (And I was the one in therapy?)

  “Listen, this is going to sound weird, but I really envy you.”

  “What, are you one of those who think suffering en-nobles?”

  “No, it’s not that. We’re all born by chance, no one asked to get born, but to be reborn by chance, to live like that, it must have made your life—you know— much more conscious and vital. Things must have changed enormously for you. Also, you don’t have to make a decision about whether or not to have kids. It must have changed your life in a very dynamic . . .”

  “No. Uh-uh. Nothing changes, no. We thought that, you see. In the first reunions of the camps everyone was swinging, like a big sex club with the swinging and the drinking and the carrying on as though you die tomorrow. Everyone did what he wanted. The next time, not so much, not so much. The couples stayed together. The next time, we were talking about whether or not we could afford a summer home that year. Now when we meet, years later, people talk about whether or not radioactive smoke-detectors are dangerous in suburban home
s. Nothing changes.”

  So I got the role and I went to Bangkok. The only thing that I knew about Bangkok was that my hero Thomas Merton had died there. Thomas Merton was a hero of mine because he knew how to shut up. It’s not that he wanted other people to stop talking, but he figured that people were chatting so much that someone had to keep the silence. He believed in the silence. And he believed in the power of silent prayer, so he became a Trappist. He got interested in Buddhism and the Trappists sent him to Southeast Asia to research Buddhism. He stepped out of a bathtub, touched an electric fan and died instantly. Judith Malina said it was a CIA plot but I don’t know. I don’t know.

  I arrived in this city, 200 years old, 110 degrees, built on a swamp and sinking, and under my door was pushed this letter from Enigma Films—with the “a” upside down—addressed to Spalding Gray, Esquire. It was my first major film for a British company—they spoiled me rotten. They referred to all of the actors as “artists.” They can get you to do anything that way.

  The letter was dated May 6, 1983 and was from David Puttnam, the producer:Dear Spalding,

  On Sunday we all start to make a very difficult but worthwhile film. It is by far and away the most ambitious that I have ever attempted to produce, and it will, by the time we get through, have thoroughly tested us all. I’m sure that, like me, you constantly get asked what movies you’ve worked on. I always hope that the one I’m presently working on will instantly top the list when answering that question. All too often it doesn’t work out that way. However, by nature, by sheer scope and theme, The Killing Fields is one of those few movies by which all our careers will undoubtedly be judged.

  Roland and I found a speech of President Kennedy’s this week in which he said, ‘I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war. And frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.’ Those words, spoken twenty years ago, have never been more relevant. We have a unique opportunity with this film to make our contribution. In the years to come, it is my honest belief that The Killing Fields will be the very first we mention in explaining and justifying the way we spent the best and most difficult years of our lives.

  For my part, I’ll always be around to help if things go ugly. But in the final analysis all I can do is stand back, support Roland to the hilt and hope that luck and good sense run with us. All the best to all of us. This story deserves to be told and told well. If we pull that off then every form of possible reward will undoubtedly follow, and we will deserve it.

  David Puttnam

  My first big scene was to be filmed on a soccer field outside of Bangkok. We were reenacting the 1975 evacuation of the American embassy in Phnom Penh. I was with Ira Wheeler, who was playing John Gunther Dean, the last American ambassador.

  Ira is an interesting man—he used to be vice president of American Celanese Chemical. After he retired he was singing in a glee club in New York, where someone saw him and put him in Jane Fonda’s Rollover. Now, at sixty-three years old, he was beginning his film career. If you live long enough I find it all comes full circle. Shortly after I arrived in Bangkok I found out that Ira served on the same ship in World War II as my Uncle Tinky. They were on an LST together in the Pacific.

  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.