Swimming to Cambodia (10 page)

And I said, “Yes, Judy Freeman came, Judy Arthur came, all the Judies came. Let's go get something to eat.”

So we walked over to brunch and suddenly I realized that I was with all these Real People, and I was feeling more and more like “The Little Drummer Girl.” I was with these real foreign correspondents. Up until then I'd been hanging out with actors—they're no one. They're conduits. They're not as threatening as Real People. It's one thing to build a role from a text, just build it and develop it. It's another to be playing someone—you know—playing Mark Twain or Harry Truman all the way across the United States, and never
being
them.

But Mark Twain and Harry Truman are dead. And I was playing a guy who was alive. He works for the American embassy in Bangkok and he's a Princeton graduate and speaks six languages including Khmer. I graduated from Emerson College and am still wrestling with American. And these people are all like foreign correspondents, people who can just get on a plane and go with no sense of loss. One minute they're in Beirut, the next they're in a nuclear submarine off the coast of southern France, now they're here, eating and talking about their experiences. They see the whole world as their stage.

John Swain, for instance, was arguing with people about whether or not there's any cocaine in the Khyber
Pass. They were having an enormous discussion over that. Then Judy Arthur started talking about her sixth trip to China. Chris Menges, the cinematographer, was talking about his film, a trilogy he'd made tracing opium from Burma to Harlem. And he said there was a price on his head in Burma; the opium warlords who run the place wanted to kill him because he was with the good guys, and he had eighteen months of rushes on the back of a donkey that he couldn't get out of Burma. He was talking about that. Then there was Ivan, talking about how primitive the Amazon is. He was down there making a film about cocaine.

“Spalding, man! You should just go down there. It's unbelievable. It's truly wild. No Buddhist inhibitions, like here in Thailand.”

Then there was Roland Neveu, who had just flown in after photographing Beirut. He had been in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge came in, and now he was here testing out his new underwater camera—just dropped in to say, “Hi ho mates,” and have a beer before heading for a nuclear submarine off the coast of southern France.

And there was Minty Clinch, a publicist, who was talking about hitchhiking through Patagonia. Skip the hitchhiking; I couldn't even visualize Patagonia. And there was this beautiful woman who was on a forty-day fast. She was half Thai and half Scottish. What a mix. Oh, la-la.

Her mother had come over from Scotland to marry a Thai man—just the opposite of the way it usually is. They were both doctors, and they had this baby who turned into this fasting woman. She had these almond eyes, these Thai eyes and this Thai complexion, but
this WASPish-Anglican bone structure and freckles, and she was very beautiful.

She was there fasting for forty days. She had first learned to fast at a Texas fast farm, and now she was here in Thailand doing it on her own, while watching us eat.

 

 

And then there was me, who was looking at this incredible bee that looked like a cartoon of a bee because it was so big and fluffy, and its stripes were so wide, and I was saying, “Wow! Look at that bee.”

And everyone said, “It's just a bee, Spalding.”

 

 

Soon, lunch was over and it was time to go back in swimming. Ivan and I rushed down to the beach like the two kids who couldn't wait an hour after eating.

And Ivan said, “Hey, let's toke up.”

I said, “All right. God knows I can let my Kundalini out on this beach.” It used to get stuck in my lower Chakra, but I knew I could just run it off on the beach.

I took two tokes and had a mildly paranoid episode about my money and where to hide it. At first I started digging holes in the sand, but then I changed my mind and went to hide it under the rubber mat in the van. Then I thought that this focus of all my concentration on hiding the money was setting up mind waves that could be read by the Thais and that they would find the money. And God knows they needed it more than I did. So, at last I just took it and left it, fully exposed, on the beach.

I could see Ivan way out in the big surf calling,
“Spalding! Spalding! I see you like the little waves. You don't know what living is until you get out here into this big stuff!” I really wanted to get out there.

I kept going out a little further and each time, I would think of my money being stolen and I was less afraid of sharks. It just sort of happened naturally. I realized I was out a little further and a little further until all of a sudden I was out further than I had ever been in any ocean, in any world, anywhere. I was beyond Ivan even. I was so far out—I could tell that I had never been in this situation before because of the view of the shoreline. I had never seen the shore from that point of view before. It was so far away that I felt this enormous disconnection from Mother Earth.

Suddenly, there was no time and there was no fear and there was no body to bite. There were no longer any outlines. It was just one big ocean. My body had blended with the ocean. And there was just this round, smiling-ear-to-ear pumpkin-head perceiver on top, bobbing up and down. And up the perceiver would go with the waves, then down it would go, and the waves would come up around the perceiver, and it could have been in the middle of the Indian Ocean, because it could see no land. And then the waves would take the perceiver up to where it could look down this great wall of water, to where Judy Arthur and John Swain were body surfing—like on a Hawaiian travel poster—far below, and then—“Whoop!” The perceiver would go up again. I don't know how long this went on. It was all very out of time until it was brought back into time by Ivan's voice calling, “Spalding! Spalding, come back, man! I haven't tested those waters yet!”

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?”