Swimming to Cambodia (1987) Movie Script

Saturday, June 18th, 1983.
Waihin, Gulf of Siam, Thailand.
It was the first day off in a long time,
and about 130 of us were trying
to get a little rest and relaxation
out by this pool at this very modern hotel
that looks something like a very modern prison.
Something like the prisons
people or private prisons people
are investing in here in the
United States instead of hotels.
Something like a pleasure prison.
A kind of place that, say,
if you were taking a trip to Bangkok
and you took a side trip down to Waihin,
you might come and stay at this hotel,
but you probably wouldn't go off the grounds
because of the high barbed
wire fence around the hotel
to keep you in and the bandits out.
You probably wouldn't even
go down to the Gulf of Siam
because of the dogs, some of them rabid,
that tend to intimidate you
and drive you up against a wall
until you learn to pick up a piece of seaweed,
shake it in their face,
and everything is hunky-dory.
And it was the first day off in a long time,
and the Thai waiters are running and smiling
and bringing us more closter,
closter, closter beer.
Everyone is ordering the closter.
No one is drinking the local beer,
which is exported to the United States,
because they say it has formaldehyde in it.
And the Thai waiters are
running and jumping and smiling,
and they can't get to us fast enough,
and there's a saying that says
the Thais are the nicest people money can buy.
And it's not a silly smile, it's a deep smile,
because they have a philosophy, sanug.
Sanug, loosely translated, means fun, pleasure.
And they don't do anything if it isn't sanug.
And they ask you first, and if it isn't sanug,
they won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Also, another idea that may have to do
with the rather radical Thai Buddhism,
after they have the sanug,
they don't have to suffer for it afterwards.
And it was the first day off in a long time,
and some of the British crew
had the good sense or bad sense,
depending on how you look at it, to buy women
as soon as they arrived in Bangkok.
I heard each man bought two,
so he wouldn't risk falling in love
when it came time to leave.
And there the crew were like
these 250-pound beach whales
out by the swimming pool desk,
lying there with these skivvy little chickadees,
90-pound,
in from the country in two-piece bathing suits,
walking up and down on them, giving them shiatsu.
And it was the first day off in a long time,
and the Thai waiter is running to jump over hedges
to bring us more Closter beer.
And all of a sudden, the waiter trips, falls,
the Closter beer is full,
and explodes on the cement by the pool.
And the waiter looks up
with a great smile and says,
Sorry, sir, we've just run out of Closter.
And Ivan, devil in my ear,
Ivan Strasberg, head of the second camera unit,
a bit of a Mephistophelian figure,
gray-beard, handsome man, South African,
comes up to me and says,
Spalding man, hey, there's a party tonight
up at the Gulf of Siam.
One of the workers' mother's
got a summer house up there.
Hey, could I borrow your toenail clippers, man?
Sure.
Come on over.
And do you want to smoke a Thai stick, hey?
Should I bring some marijuana, man, hey?
Sure.
Why not?
I mean, it's a party.
After all,
I hadn't smoked any marijuana since I've been...
Every time I am in a country
where the marijuana is supposed to be so good,
you know, India, Mexico, Northern California,
now Thailand,
I always feel that I should try it, you know?
Maybe this time it would be different.
Maybe this time I would
experience a sense of well-being
like everyone says they do,
you know, a sense of rest and relaxation,
be able to sleep even.
You see,
it tends to unlock my kundalini in the worst way.
It gets stuck there in my
lower chakra there like a snake,
like a fist, like a snake shaking its tail,
like a studebaker stuck in sand.
I thought, maybe I'll give it a try this time.
I thought, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait a minute.
I better speak with Renee first before I do it.
Renee, my girlfriend,
was over there visiting me for 14 days,
and I had made a promise, a commitment, you see,
is to return, as soon as the film was over,
to return to her because we had rented a cabin
for the summer in upstate New York,
in Krumville, New York, you know,
K-R-U-M-V-I-L-L-E.
And let me tell you, Krumville, New York,
was looking less and less interesting to me
the longer I was in Thailand, you see.
The other thing was that I
hadn't had a perfect moment yet.
And it's very important for
me to have perfect moments
in exotic countries like that,
you know, I always like to have them
because it gives you a good sense of closure,
you know,
kind of lets you know when it's time to go home.
And you never know when you're
going to have a perfect moment.
I mean, the best had a long,
and you never know when you're going to have one.
Look, I had a vision of myself by now
as a kind of wandering, bachelor, mendicant poet,
wandering all the way down
the beaches of Malaysia,
eating magic mushrooms all the way as I went
until I reached Bali,
evaporating in a state of ecstasy in the sunset.
But I wasn't telling Rene that.
But she could see that my will,
or what was left of it,
was beginning to vacillate,
and we fell into a fight
on the way to the party at the Gulf of Siam,
and we were fighting all the way,
and we got there to the Gulf of Siam,
and it was exquisite, you know,
unlike the Hamptons,
where you have a boat and a bigger boat,
and then a ship and a bigger ship,
and desire, and a carrot,
and a carrot, and a carrot, and desire,
and desire, and desire, and desire.
There was nothing to buy
out there in the Gulf of Siam.
I mean, it was like one big piece of calendar art.
I just said, look, look, look, Rene,
look at this beautiful sunset.
Please stop with the arguing.
I might be able to have a perfect moment right now
when we could go home together.
But she was very confrontational.
She always wanted to talk about
what was going on in the moment,
in the relationship, not about perfect moments,
what was going on,
and we fell into a fight, and she began crying,
and we were fighting,
and we went back to our separate corners.
Rene went to Julian Sands, who was consoling her.
She was crying on his shoulder.
I went to Ivan in my corner, devil in my ear,
Ivan Strasberg, who said, Spalding, man,
don't let her get the upper hand in this argument.
I mean, after all, what's she going to do, man?
How many straight single men your age are
that are left in New York City anyway?
I said, Ivan, no.
And boom, pow,
we went back at it again from our corners
and began to clash, and Rene said,
all right, I'll give you an ultimatum.
Either you give me a date when you're coming home,
or you marry me.
I said, all right, July 8th.
I'll be home by July 8th,
and now it was time to make up.
Now it was time to have the pleasure,
because in our culture,
first you suffer, then you have the Sanug.
That's the order of it.
So now it was time to have the pleasure,
and we went down by the Gulf of Siam,
and now it was dark,
and the party sounds were in the distance,
and the waves were lightly lapping,
and there we sat, Ivan, Rene, and I,
and Ivan lit that tie stick and passed it down.
I had no idea how strong it was.
I took a few mild tokes.
And closing my eyes,
this overwhelming wave of anxiety came over me.
And with my eyes closed,
I could see this pile of black and brown shit
steaming on the edge of a stainless steel counter,
and I knew that shit represented
all the negative energy in my mind,
and I could see a string going
from my third eye to that shit,
and I knew all I had to do was simply
pull my head and have done with it,
pull all that negative shit
off the edge of the counter,
and as I was pulling,
I saw beside it a bubbling pile of pastel energy
that was floating and connected from
tendrils that went from pastel to shit brown,
and I realized the pastel energy
represented all the positive energy in my mind,
and that if I pulled a negative off the counter,
I would pull the positive with it,
and I'd be left with nothing
but a stainless steel counter.
And all of a sudden,
the counter turned into a tunnel
that I was going down at the
speed of the Santa Cruz roller coaster
right toward the center of the Earth.
Aaaaah!
I knew I was getting healthier this time.
The tunnel wasn't black. It was gold leaf,
and the gold leaves were parting like an iris.
Ei-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!
Until I couldn't stand the speed of it any longer,
and I pulled back and grabbed
the beach and let out with a great,
oh, oh, oh, huh,
leaving that for Ivan to interpret.
I had no idea where I was.
Maybe in Southeast Asia.
I didn't know ratty palm
trees in the different distance.
I mean, it felt like I was in a
demented Wallace Stevens poem
with food poisoning.
Renee, I had no idea where Renee was.
Maybe going back to Krumville, maybe for a walk.
I saw in the distance what
looked like Thai Girl Scouts
dancing around a bonfire.
Gals holding hands, not an hallucination.
I had the clear sense that if I got in that circle
and held hands with them, I would be healed.
I would be whole.
I would be back in time again.
And I got up and I began to
stagger like a Bowery bum,
like a drunken teenager, like a fraternity brother
I've never been before in my life.
And all of a sudden I realized
I was gonna be very sick.
And I pulled off into a far corner of the beach
and up it came like a wretched Thai dog.
Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh.
And as the vomit came up,
I covered it over with sand.
And the sand turned into a black gauze death mask
that flew up and covered my face.
So be vomit, cover sand, mask.
Vomit, cover sand, mask.
Vomit, cover sand, mask.
Until I looked down and saw that I'd built
my entire corpse out of sand.
And my face was staring back at me.
And my teeth were cutting
through the rotting lips.
And my ribs were coming through
the decomposing flesh of my side.
And Renee was standing over me going,
what's wrong, hon?
I said, I'm dying.
That's what's wrong.
She said, oh, gee.
All this time I thought you
were having a good time
building sand castles.
She was at a distance.
They carried me out in that
drunken classic Jesus sailor
pose.
One arm over one man,
one over the other, feet dragging.
And I was mortified.
Because the following day I was supposed to do
my big scene in the movie.
What pisses me off is that
this country has a lot of faults
and a lot of strengths.
And we have done nothing but play to the faults.
I'm telling you, Sid,
I will be damn glad to get out of here.
This thing is dragged on too long for it
to end in all sweetness and light.
And after what the Khmer Rouge have been through,
I don't think they're going
to be exactly affectionate
toward Westerners.
In February of 1983,
I met this incredible British documentary
filmmaker, Roland Joffe, very intense man,
a combination of Zorro, Jesus, and Rasputin.
Body of Zorro, heart of Jesus, eyes of Rasputin.
And he'd been sent over by David Putnam,
who was producing
a film called The Killing Fields.
And he'd sent over two cast for actors.
And he was seeing people, and he was burning.
He was doing all the talking.
I was listening for 45 minutes.
He talked.
He burned with his story.
I listened.
45 minutes,
he told me about the story of the film.
It was about a New York Times reporter,
Sidney Shanberg,
who was covering the American
secret bombing of Cambodia
for the New York Times,
and his sidekick, Dith Pran,
a Cambodian photographer,
and how they were curious
to see what would happen
when the Khmer Rouge marched
into Phnom Penh,
and how after the American embassy
was evacuated and Dith
Pran sent his wife and children
out with the American evacuation, Sidney Shanberg
and Dith Pran fled to the
French embassy to hide out.
And the Khmer Rouge came
in and sent all Cambodians
out of the French embassy, or everyone dies.
And they sent Dith Pran out to his certain death.
The only one that didn't
give up hope was searching
with Sidney Shanberg, and he searched for years
until he located Dith Pran in a Thai refugee camp.
And now Dith Pran is working
for the New York Times.
I said, wow.
That's an incredible story, you know.
It's so hopeful,
it sounds like someone made it up.
I'm going to tell you right now,
I would do anything
to be in your film.
I don't even know what roles you're looking for,
but I want to be really straight with you.
I'm not very political.
I don't know anything about secret bombing,
and in fact, I've never voted before in my life.
And Roland says, perfect.
We're looking for the American ambassador's aide.
But I can't promise you anything.
I have to go out to the coast to cast out there.
We have to see how the
whole puzzle shapes together.
I'll be back in the city in three months' time.
We'll chat again then.
And I went out and I thought, you know,
I want to be involved in this project
more than any other project
I've almost been involved in.
But what can I do?
I'm going to tell you, part of why I gave up
professional acting was I got so tired of waiting
for the big indifferent machine
to make up its so-called mind.
I wanted to have some
influence over my own destiny,
my own life, you know.
But I wanted to be in this film.
I thought, what can I do to influence?
I mean,
the first thing that occurred to me was prayer.
And I thought, mm, Spalding, it's been so long.
You know?
So the next thing that came to
me was that old rational voice
that we all know so well, you know?
Well, if I get it, I get it.
If I don't, I'll do something else.
You know, after all, I can still see and walk.
And as my mother always said,
think of the starving Koreans, right?
So I was trying to think of the starving Koreans,
but my pre-conscious irrational
voice was not behaving so well.
It set up this kind of
ritualized magical thinking.
I mean, it started innocently enough.
I literally could not go out of my apartment
until I turned my little KLH
radio off on a positive word.
You know?
I was there all morning some days.
The stock market is rising.
I could go out.
Consider moving Marines to safer positions.
I could go out.
Or you may go to a doctor who belongs to the AMA,
but it doesn't necessarily
mean you're going to the best.
I could go out.
And as I went out,
I found that I was turning the doorknob 3 times.
3s became a crucial,
very important, magical number.
I was going 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3,
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2,
and knocking on wood when I could find wood.
Bop, bop, find wood,
6 sets of 9, and 6 and 3 and 9,
snapping on my way to the supermarket to buy soup.
You know, 6 sets of 9,
9 times every third can was fine.
The first 2 cans of soup had botulism,
you see, or cyanide.
And I thought, you know, Spalding,
you're going to end up in the insane asylum
before you get the role in the film.
And it was around about the
time that the little king took over.
I don't know if you know him,
the super ego figure,
not exactly my best friend.
And the little king said, Spalding, if you will,
something I also knew nothing about,
if you can will this magical thinking to stop,
this act of will will be the supremo,
supremo thing
that will get you the role in the film.
So around about the time I was developing A Will,
I was asked to do my monologues out in Hollywood,
and I was doing it in a small theater out there.
I got good reviews.
And Warner Brothers Television saw the reviews
and asked me to come in and read for a sitcom.
I said, well, please, you know,
come and see the monologue.
You'll get a better sense of what it is I do.
And they said, well, we'd love to,
but we go to bed early out here.
So can you please come in in the morning?
So I came in and read for the sitcom,
and the Lord works in strange ways.
And as soon as I was going outside that office,
then there, there was Roland Joffe,
who was costing for the Killing Fields
because Warner Brothers was putting money into it,
and he was using their offices.
And he said, let's chat again.
So I went home and put on my tie and jacket,
and I came in, and once again, once again,
Roland burned.
He did all the talking for 45 minutes.
I listened.
This time he was talking about Cambodia,
what a fantastic land it was,
why it was Shangri-La before it was colonized.
He said it was incredible.
He said Thailand was like a Nordic country
compared to Cambodia.
They're right next to each other.
And he said that 90% of the land
was owned by the people.
It was earth, it was dirt,
but it was theirs, and it was good.
And they knew how to have a good time.
They knew how to have a good time getting born,
a good time growing up,
a good time going through puberty,
a good time falling in love,
a good time staying in love,
a good time getting married,
a good time staying married,
a good time having children,
a good time raising children,
a good time growing old,
a good time dying.
They even knew how to have a good time
on New Year's Eve.
I couldn't believe it.
The only thing was that Rowland said
because it was such a beautiful country
that they had lost touch with evil.
Something like the Indian tantric colonies
on the east coast of India, B.C.,
they got so open and tantric and loving
that they were totally defenseless,
and the Huns came down and ate them up
like chocolate-covered cherries.
Now, Rowland said that the Samoans,
which also have a beautiful culture,
did not risk this because they had
ritualized tattooing,
in which they initiated their children
to pain in a ritual.
I didn't know what he was talking about.
My eyes are rolling in my head.
I mean, I was trying to get a fix on Cambodia
all the time I was talking.
I thought I knew where it was,
and I didn't even have a map of it in my mind.
There it is.
About the size of the state of Missouri.
Rowland told me that in 1965,
it had about 7 million people
in the entire country,
600,000 in the capital, Phnom Penh,
lovely freshwater lake right in the middle
of all sorts of recreational activity,
fishing,
more seaports along the Gulf of Siam here.
Then Rowland told me that in 1966,
that happy, sexy, sax-playing prince,
King Sihanouk,
maybe because of his Buddhist tolerance,
allowed the Viet Cong to put some few sanctuaries
along the border here.
Now,
the American Air Force was very upset about this.
They had a theory that the sanctuaries
were being controlled by a central headquarters
up here in the jungle.
A central headquarters
about the size of the Pentagon.
Maybe even a replica of the Pentagon.
And if they thought we could just send
some B-52s over from Bangkok here,
don't bother to tell the American public.
Just a few raids would take care
of the central headquarters,
and they had a secret meeting at breakfast time
at the Pentagon,
and they called it Operation Breakfast.
And at the secret meeting,
they came up with the menu.
And here is a map of the menu.
Now, it's a bit of an odd diet.
Remember these bombers,
the American bombers are coming over from Bangkok
six miles up like airborne holiday inns,
and they're dropping their bombs by computer,
and they come over, and the first stop
is this sanctuary for supper.
Then around the Parrot's Peak for breakfast,
this sanctuary.
Then up for dinner.
Then dessert, a snack,
and then shooting straight
up to where they thought
the central headquarters was for lunch.
Now, Roland told me this had a reverse effect
on the Viet Cong.
Instead of driving them back into Vietnam,
it drove them further into the Cambodian jungles
where they hitched up with
this weird bunch of rednecks
headed by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge,
and the Viet Cong began to teach the Khmer Rouge
how to fight.
Now, no one knows how they got so weird up there.
They were eating barks, bugs, lizards, and leaves
up there for about five years,
basically going wacko.
Now, there are some theories.
One is, Pol Pot was educated in Paris.
In his strict Maoist doctrine,
someone threw into the soup
a perverse bit of Rousseau,
which put him over the edge
and made him worse than Hitler even.
A back-to-the-land, pure
agrarian racist ideology
with no Jewish other to get, you see.
The only other they had was the urban other,
the city dweller here in Phnom Penh.
So you have to imagine,
it's something like 200,000 rednecks
rallying 90 miles upstate in New Paltz,
about to move in in New York,
eating barks, bugs, lizards, and leaves.
Also, I think Pol Pot was in
competition with Father Mao.
He wanted to have a pure cultural revolution,
alleviating all intellectuals except for one,
Pol Pot,
and not have any socialism in between,
a pure communist revolution.
Now, while all of this was going on
and they were rallying up there,
Sianuk, that happy, sexy, sax-playing prince,
was out of town for the day,
and there was possibly a CIA coup.
It was a coup.
No one's sure exactly who inspired it,
but I can imagine.
And suddenly, Lon Nol is in office.
All of a sudden, in a day.
Now,
no one in America knew anything about Lon Nol.
The press didn't know anything about Lon Nol,
except Lon Nol spell backwards, spell Lon Nol.
Now, while this was going on,
and again, leave it to a Brit to tell you
about your own history, I didn't remember this,
our President Nixon was
developing his madman theory
on the banks of Key Biscayne,
with Bob Haldeman saying,
Listen, Bob, just let the rumor get out
that I've gone mad.
And the Viet Cong will stop their bombing
because they'll be so sure
I'm going to press the green button.
And while he's developing his madman theory,
he was taking military advice
from B.B. Roboso and John Mitchell,
and watching reruns of Patton starring George C.
Scott
on his bedroom wall over and over again.
Now, while this was going on,
and again, leave it to a Brit to remind me
of my own history, Kent State occurred.
Certainly I remember Kent State to my dying day,
but I'd always lumped it in with the Vietnam War.
I forgot that it had to do with the Americans,
specifically American invasion of Cambodia,
and it was a lovely May day.
Granted, the kids were burning down
the ROTC training building,
and it was a lovely May day,
and Governor James Rhoades
just happened to call out
the Ohio National Guard,
who happened to have live ammunition in their gun,
and they opened fire on the students.
Fifteen were shot.
Four innocent bystanders killed.
This caused enormous dissension in America.
100,000 protesters marched on the White House.
Hague had troops in the
basement of the White House
thinking there was going to be a siege.
Nixon didn't get any sleep that night.
He was up, he made over 50 phone calls.
Eight to Kissinger, seven to Haldeman,
one to Norman Vincent Peale,
and one to Billy Graham.
And after one hour's sleep, he got up and put on
Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.
1 on the record player,
and with his Cuban valet, Manolo Sanchez,
he went down to the Lincoln Monument
to talk to the protesters about surfing, football,
how travel broadens the mind.
In fact, one student said,
I hope it was because our president was tired,
but when he asked me what school I was from
and I told him, he said,
how's your team doing this year?
Now, the Cooper Church Amendment went through.
This was supposed to stop
any close ground support troops
in a country where there was an undeclared war,
i.e., Cambodia.
But I found out only two years ago
that we are not living in a democracy
and that the president is commander-in-chief
of the armed forces and could bypass the Senate
and Congress to give orders for war,
and he did, he said, continue the bombing.
The only thing he did do was say
no more American close ground support troops
more than 21 miles into Cambodia.
Now, how they were controlling this, I don't know,
whether the troops had
odometers on their legs or what,
but more than 21 miles, you turn into a pumpkin
or you had to head back.
Now, someone had to go over to Phnom Penh
and tell Lon Nol of this new ruling.
Haig went over, broke it to him.
Lan Nol saw the downfall of Cambodia,
the writing was on the wall.
He turned to the window and
wept openly in front of Haig.
Haig went back and reported this public weeping,
and they sent over a team of psychiatrists
to examine Lan Nol and came back with a report
that he was a vague, unstructured individual,
that he used astrological, folkloric,
and occult references in
his addresses to the nation.
If you can imagine such a thing, I can actually.
Something like, my fellow Americans,
I'm not going out for the next two weeks
because my moon is in Gemini type thing.
Now, the Cooper Church Amendment went through
and this bombing went on for 5 years.
The Supreme Court never passed any judgment on it,
and the military speaks with pride today
that 5 years of the bombing of Cambodia
killed 16,000 of the so-called enemy.
That's 25% killed, and there's
a military ruling
that says you cannot kill
more than 10% of the enemy
without causing irreversible
psychological damage.
So 5 years of bombing,
a diet of barks, bugs, lizards,
and leaves up in the Cambodian jungles,
an education in Paris and Varennes
of strict Maoist doctrine
with a touch of Rousseau,
and other things that we will probably
never know about in our lifetime,
including perhaps an invisible cloud of evil
that circles the Earth and lands at random
in places like Iran, Beirut,
Germany, Cambodia, America.
Set the Khmer Rouge up to carry out
the worst auto-homeo genocide in modern history.
Whenever I travel, if I can do it,
I'll travel by train,
because I like to hang out in the lounge car.
People tell me fantastic stories there.
I think it's because we figure
we'll never see each other again.
I mean, for me, the Amtrak lounge car
is like one big rolling confessional.
Last year,
I was on my way up from New York City to Chicago,
and this guy comes up to me and says,
Hi, I'm Jack Daniels, mind if I sit down?
I said, no, I'm Spalding Gray, have a seat.
What's up, Jack?
Oh, nothing much, I'm in the Navy.
Oh, really? Where are you stationed?
Guantanamo Bay.
Oh, where's that? Cuba.
Oh, I should have known that, shouldn't I?
What's Cuba like? I've never been down there.
We don't get into Cuba, man.
We get free flights down to the
Virgin Islands any time we want.
What do you do down there? I get laid.
Oh, really, you go to horse, too?
Are you kidding? I never paid for sex in my life.
I get picked up by couples.
I'm into that, you know, threesomes,
triangles, pyramids, there's power in that.
I could see what he was talking about.
He was cute enough,
I could see how someone would pick him up.
He was in his civvies, though,
he wasn't in his Navy outfit,
but he had a nice little bod.
The only kind of weird and
demented thing about him,
it was that his ears hadn't grown.
They were like these little pasta shells.
I mean, it was as though his body had grown,
his ears hadn't caught up yet.
So I say to him, so where are you off to, Jack?
Pittsburgh. Really? What's up there?
My wife. Oh, how long's it been? A year.
Oh, I'll bet she's been doing some swinging,
too, herself.
She's been waiting for you all this time?
Oh, no, I know her.
She's got fucking cobwebs
growing between her legs.
But I wouldn't mind watching
her get fucked by a guy
once I get up there, as long as I can watch.
I wouldn't mind that at all.
Really? You mean, you're going...
Now, let's go over this again.
You're coming all the way from Cuba to Pittsburgh?
No, man,
I'm not stationed in Guantanamo Bay anymore.
I'm stationed in Philly. Philadelphia? Really?
What's going on there? Can't tell. No way, man.
Top secret.
Oh, come on, Jack.
Top secret in Philadelphia? You can tell me.
Nope, no way.
And he proceeds to have five more rum cokes,
and he tells me that in Philadelphia
he is chained in a waterproof chamber,
down there with his right arm chained to the wall,
sitting next to a green button
that goes to a waterproof silo in this ship
with a nuclear missile in it
and a nuclear warhead on it.
And he's down there, high on blue flake cocaine,
a new breed up from Peru
that the Navy doesn't test for.
And he's down there,
high on lots of coffee and blue flake cocaine,
just waiting with those
earphones on his little ears,
waiting for a message to
fire his rocket at the Russians.
And I just turned to him and said,
Why waterproof?
I mean,
I just thought with the details and work out,
I could have started with, Why a green button?
And he goes,
Waterproof, man, waterproof.
You ask, Why waterproof?
I'll tell you why waterproof.
When my ship sinks in an ocean,
any ocean, anywhere,
I'm still chained down there
in that waterproof chamber.
I press that green button,
it activates that rocket,
it goes up out of its waterproof silo,
up, up, up, up, up.
I get a fucking erection, man,
every time I think of firing
a rocket at those Russians.
We're gonna win! We're gonna win!
We're gonna win this fucking war!
But I like the Navy, man.
I got to travel everywhere.
I've been to India, I've been to Africa,
I've been to Sweden.
I fucking didn't like Africa,
though, man, I don't know why.
Black women just don't turn me on.
It's not that I'm prejudiced or nothing like that,
man.
Now, here's a guy,
if the women in the country don't turn him on,
he misses the entire landscape, you see?
He just turns into a big fuzzball, a black hole,
that he steps through that comes
out the other side of the world.
In Sweden, I fucking love Sweden, man.
You get to see real Ruskies there.
They're moshed in at gunpoint,
they're allowed two beers,
we drink all the fucking beers we want.
We're drunk on our asses, man.
We're over there yelling,
Hey, Ruskies,
what's it like in Moscow this time of year?
We hire Swedish whores to go
over and put their heads in their laps.
You should see those fucking sweat, man.
They're stupid!
You know, they got liquid fuel in their rockets.
That rocket's a rusty,
they're gonna sputter, they're gonna pop,
they're gonna land in our cornfields.
I said, Jack, Jack,
wait a minute, wait, wait, wait.
Haven't you been reading the literature?
I mean, really, it's bad enough if
the rockets land in the cornfields
with the radiation and everything.
No, you don't understand anything, man.
The Russians are stupid people,
they are backwards.
Do you know that on their ships,
they don't even have electrical intercoms?
They still speak through tubes.
Suddenly I had this enormous
fondness for the Russian Navy,
for the whole of Mother Russia,
the thought of these men like innocent children
speaking through empty toilet paper rolls,
empty paper towel rolls,
where you could still hear doubt, confusion,
brotherly love, ambivalence,
all those human tones coming through the tube.
Jack was very patriotic.
Hey, I forgot it exists.
I thought it was on the cover
of Time and Newsweek only.
It's still there if you take the
train up from New York to Chicago.
Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant.
Jack stands up and salutes and sits back down.
Now I can tell you, I felt to some extent
like I was looking my death in the face.
I'm not making up any of these
stories I'm telling you tonight.
Except for one.
Except for the fact that the
banana sticks to the wall when it hits.
That's the only one. Everything else is true.
Now I figure if Jack is making
up this story to frighten me,
if he wasn't down there in
that waterproof chamber then,
he's probably down there now.
If he's white, he's in the Navy,
and he wants it enough, he can get it.
So I am trying to talk him out of it.
I'm making a small stand.
I'm saying, listen, listen, Jack,
you don't want to do it, right?
Look what happened to the guy
that dropped the bomb in Hiroshima.
He went crazy.
You don't want that to happen to you, do you?
He goes, that asshole?
He was not properly brainwashed.
I, he says with great pride,
have been properly brainwashed.
And also it's a nuclear destruct club, man.
It's a brotherhood of fear.
It's a whole bunch of people
pressing those buttons, not just one.
I said, I know, Jack,
but if a whole bunch of you press those buttons,
you're going to blow up the world.
You don't want that.
I mean, think of all you have to live for.
Here I was hard pressed.
The blue flag cocaine.
Getting picked up by the couples.
Blowing away the cobwebs between your wife's legs.
The Swedish whores.
Any of that.
He said, I'm not going to die.
I said, how do you know?
We got pubs.
Everything was abbreviated.
What are pubs?
Pubs are Navy publications that tell
them where to go to avoid the radiation
after all of us have been vaporized.
And at that moment,
I pictured him actually down under in Tasmania
starting a new, small-eared,
red-faced, pea-brained humanoid race
after all of us have gone.
And I thought, you know, the mother needs a rest.
Mother Earth deserves a long,
long rest with no people on her.
Maybe if we're lucky,
after all of us have been vaporized,
Jack will end up in Africa.
He could see I wasn't exactly on his side.
It was subtle, but he could see it.
And he turned to me,
and he was starting to get a little pissed,
and he said, listen, Mr. Spalding.
I think by now he's calling me Gary Spalding.
You would not be doing your,
what is it you do again for a living?
Your talking cure.
If it was not for me and the United States Navy
protecting you from the
Russians taking over the world.
I thought, wait a minute.
Wait a minute. Maybe he's right.
Maybe the Russians are
trying to take over the world.
Maybe I'm the one that's brainwashed.
Maybe I've been hanging
out with liberals too long.
Maybe I'm deluded.
Maybe all this time I thought
I was a conscientious pacifist.
I was really just a passive-aggressive,
unconscious coward.
I mean, and like any good liberal,
I should question everything, right?
So I should question this.
For instance, when did I last make a stand?
Just stand up, for instance,
let alone for the United States of America.
Every time I try to think of
the United States of America,
I get the cold sweats.
I can't even look at a weather map anymore.
It's too big.
That's part of why I moved to Manhattan.
I wanted to move to an
island off the coast of America,
somewhere between Europe and America
with only 17 million people and clear boundaries,
outlines, something you can get a grasp of.
My girlfriend, Renee,
her upstairs neighbor is
a member of the art mafia.
She first got involved with it
when she was working for the man
that defaced the Guernica and became famous for it
and now has galleries all over Soho.
Now she has her own gallery.
She plays her quadraphonic
torture box full blast above us.
Every night, it's Bob Dylan's Sarah.
Something must have happened to her way back then,
and she really, I know it could be worse,
but every night, it's unbelievable.
It's like you're in the room with it.
I mean, if it was just 1.30 in the morning, fine.
It would be like feeding time.
You could get through it, but it's diabolical.
It's 1.36 in the morning.
It's 2.10 in the morning.
It's 3.15 in the morning.
It's 4.11 in the morning.
What do you do?
You call the police.
They come, she turns it down.
They leave, she turns it up.
They come, she turns it down.
They leave, she turns it up.
I mean, she's up there.
She gets these guys in from the Midwest
that want to become rich and famous in a year,
make five-figure number here in Soho.
They come in,
they're sleeping in sleeping bags on her floor.
Whenever we complain, she sends them down,
and they go, hey, look,
man, New York is party city.
That's why we moved here, you see.
You can have parties on weeknights.
Now, if you don't dig it,
you should move to the country,
old man.
I go back.
I'm trying to practice my Buddhist tolerance,
which in New York City could be translated
to one big escapist rationalization, right?
I mean, I'm turning all my
cheeks to the wall at this point.
Renee is not practicing Buddhist tolerance.
She's walking up and down.
She's got steam screaming out of her navel.
And there are people that
say we should start a collection
to hire a vigilante to off this woman,
to kill her.
And I find I'm not saying no.
That's how New York has changed me.
I'm willing to put money into the pot.
I mean, listen, listen, listen.
When I was back in Boston in 1964 with my people,
right,
white bread, homogeneous brick wall Boston,
back in 1964 when they had the,
what would you call it then?
It was a hi-fi.
If a hi-fi was on too loud above me,
I would simply make a phone call.
I would just call up, pick up the phone and go,
Hi, hi, Puffy, hi.
Hi, it's Buddy Gray down here.
Hi, guys.
Yeah, just a few notches.
I wouldn't ask you to do it,
but I got an early dance class in the morning.
Right.
Yep, thanks a lot, Puff.
Mm-hmm.
Merry Christmas to you too, guys.
Bye.
Write down.
We had the common language.
You know, Renee,
Renee's father was in the Jewish mafia.
She knows the language.
She grew up in the streets of New York.
She calls up and goes,
Bet you wanna die, right, bitch, cunt?
I'll beat your fucking
face in with a baseball bat.
Bitch, cunt, die, die, die.
Goes louder.
Renee's convinced the woman's a masochist
and is getting off on the language.
So the other day, I am walking out of her loft.
I have an empty Molson Gold bottle in my hand.
I don't know,
I guess I was going to get my nickel back.
And I am seized with these party sounds upstairs.
I'm taking, I'm not out of control.
It's a classic Greek rage.
My head and gut are completely balanced.
My gut is wrenching with butterflies.
My head has that old adage,
that old ticker tape going across the fur,
you know,
that old adage, all weakness tends to corrupt,
impotence corrupts absolutely.
And I just took that bottle and, zoom, hurled it.
It went up two flights of stairs,
it exploded, boom,
glass everywhere like a glass hand grenade.
They charged out with their bats and guns.
I ran.
Because it was an act of passion,
I forgot to tell Renee I was going to do it.
And she was way behind me
picking up plastic garbage bags.
So by the time she got to the door,
they caught her.
But they didn't do anything
because she was innocent.
She had no idea what they were talking about.
And they recognized this innocence,
so they didn't kill her.
So there's hope.
But I say, how does a country like America,
or rather, how does America,
because certainly there's no country like it,
begin to find the language to negotiate or talk
with a country like Russia or Libya?
If I can't even begin to get it with my people
on the corner of Broadway and John Street.
So I got the role.
And I went to Bangkok.
And I arrived, a 200-year-old city in a swamp,
and sinking 110 degrees,
I get a letter under the door
that says, welcome, Spalding Gray Esquire,
the British spoil you rotten.
They refer to all the actors as artists.
The AD goes,
would the artist please get on the helicopters?
Would the artist please jump off the cliff?
Would the artist please?
I mean, they will get you to do anything that way.
Now, the first big scene of the film,
or rather my first big scene,
which felt like the first big scene,
was here in Bangkok, outside of Bangkok.
Remember, we are reenacting
the events of April of 75
that happened in Phnom Penh,
but we are doing it in Bangkok.
And the first big scene for me is the reenacting
of the evacuation of the
American Embassy in April of 75.
And I am there with the man that's
playing the American ambassador,
Ira Wheeler, interesting man.
He was vice president of Celanese Chemical,
and someone saw him singing
in the Glee Club here in New York
after he retired,
and they put him in the Killing Fields
thinking he'd look like the American ambassador,
so he's beginning his film career at 64 years old.
He's playing the American ambassador,
John Gunther Dean,
who was the last American
ambassador in Phnom Penh,
was flown out,
now is American ambassador of Thailand in Bangkok.
John Gunther Dean.
I've met politicians before,
but I've never met statesmen.
This man was a noble, noble man,
a combination of a ship's captain,
we'll say the QE2,
and a boarding school principal,
let's say Phillips Andover Academy, right?
He said, We saw Cambodia as
a ship floundering in heavy seas.
We wanted nothing more than
to bring that ship safely into port.
When we saw we weren't
going to be able to do that,
we wanted to go off her with dignity.
I cut down the American
flag you see here behind me
and wrapped it in plastic over my arm,
and sure enough, there was Ira
Wheeler playing the American ambassador
running with the American flag
wrapped in plastic over his arm,
me, the American ambassador's aide,
running beside him,
headed for the Cadillac limousine.
The first thing that happens when you
get there is that the air conditioner breaks.
Then the electric windows break,
the radiator boils over,
and the entire exhaust system is
dragging on the ground by the end of the day.
I am laughing, I find this very funny.
Ira is not laughing, he is sweating.
This man sweats like-a, like-a, like-an Ira,
I would have to say.
They are changing his shirt.
He is back there in a slough of despond,
because for the first time in his life
he's studying Stanislavski in acting,
and he's brought the textbook An
Actor Prepares and Building a Character,
and he's trying to do an emotional memory
because the director, Roland Joffe, has
told him to look like he's on the verge of tears,
and he's trying to be on
the verge of tears all day,
just in case they turn the camera on.
He is in a slough of despond in the backseat
thinking about something awful from his past.
Up until then we've been friends,
now he's not talking to me.
I'm bored, so I'm talking to the driver.
He's an extra,
an American expatriate from San Francisco
who says America has gone to the dogs,
gone to the wow-wows, he called it.
He's gone to Thailand, the pure land,
to become an elephant expert.
He is working for the Thai Agricultural
Committee counting elephants.
That's what he does for a living.
He sleeps at night with
the elephants on the ground.
The elephants sleep standing up.
In the day he gets up with
his little elephant counter
and goes out counting the elephants.
The only problem is, he said,
he has a bum leg now,
a game leg, and he can't outrun
an elephant if it charges.
And it will charge in his
sleep if you wake it.
And he said he may be killed within
the next month or so by an elephant.
In the middle of all this,
Ira Wheeler looks up and says,
Will you stop it, please?
Will you stop whatever it is
you're talking about up there?
I am trying to have an emotional memory.
I said, Ira, here is a man that's
actually about to be killed by an elephant.
Try working with that one.
And here we are, driving through black smoke,
pouring off of burning rubber tires
that they're making look like a real war,
headed for the non-existent Sikorsky
helicopter we're supposed to get on.
It's not there, I assume,
because the American Air Force
has not given the Thai Air
Force Sikorsky helicopters yet.
Just these little choppers
driving through Marine Guards,
Americans dressed as Marines.
Who are these guys?
I suppose some of them
didn't get enough of the war,
so they're over there joining Bo Gritz,
who's starting his own foreign legion,
to go in to look for MIAs and LAOs.
Others are Americans that are
there dealing drugs,
which is extremely lucrative
but very dangerous,
and others are Americans
that are there for sex and drugs.
Capital S, small d.
Because on one lower chakra level,
Bangkok is one big whorehouse.
Now,
it's not all our fault for the R&R and the war,
the Australian tourists or the Japanese
sex tours that come through in busloads.
Certainly the tradition of concubines
existed for thousands of years in Thailand,
but we kind of blew it out of
hand with the Vietnam War.
We had Quonset huts filled with Thai prostitutes
that were drinking a kind of Chinese
herbal medicine for birth control,
so there were a lot of Amerasian
children born out of this experience.
Now, after the war,
they knocked down those Quonset huts
and moved all the prostitutes
back to the red light district, Patpong.
If you've been in Bangkok,
I'm sure you've seen it.
There's not that much to see.
You can see the gold Buddha
in the day and Patpong at night.
If you saw The Deer Hunter recently,
those shots in Saigon were shot in
the Mississippi Queen Bar in Patpong.
You go into the Mississippi Queen Bar,
it's like they're still shooting the Deer Hunter.
There is no sense of seduction
as in across a crowded room.
They fly to you and stick, and their body
is big enough and they are small enough
you feel like a Christmas tree.
You can hold six of them, two in your elbow,
two in your lap, two in your shoulders,
and they are laughing and giggling,
and they are so apparently happy,
and they are grabbing at your
tinkler and grabbing at your wallet,
and they are so cute, and if you can
make up your mind which one you like,
you can go back to your hotel and spend
the entire night for $26 a 500 Thai baht.
Now, if you don't want to do that,
because you don't want to be kept awake
by a laughing, giggling Thai prostitute,
and you want to be in control,
you can instead go to a massage parlor.
And the massage parlors are
very much like department stores.
Every floor has about 35 women
fully dressed with numbers on,
sitting on tiers under fluorescent lights,
all looking at one point.
It's not the Buddha, it's the TV set.
Now, the men walk back and forth
by this one-way mirror like little sultans
until they see, if not the perfect woman,
at least the perfect body,
and then they say,
Would you call number eight for me, please?
And the man goes, Number eight?
And number eight stands up, and you can
tell immediately by the expression on her face
it's not going to be as great as you fantasized,
because among other things,
you've interrupted her TV show.
And for a little bit of money,
you go down to a small room.
She stays fully dressed, you get completely naked,
and she gives you a mild tweak,
tweak, tweak, massage,
just surface, nothing right keen about it.
A little bit more money, she gets naked,
and now you're both naked,
and the mama-san is poking her head all the
time in to see that it's progressing financially.
She closes the door and goes out,
and now you're both naked,
and she gives you another mild tweak,
tweak, tweak, massage,
nothing deep about it, only occasionally you
feel her warm flesh brush up against your flesh.
And a little bit more money,
and you get a handjob.
And a little bit more money,
and you get to fuck her.
And a little bit more money, and you get the
supremo, supremo, the body, body massage.
She takes you and puts you in a bathtub and
soaps you up into your slipperiest bar of soap,
and she doesn't rinse you.
Then she puts you on a water
bed and she gets in that same tub
and soaps herself up until
she's as slippery as a bar of soap,
and she doesn't rinse.
And she gets on one side of the room
and takes this running gallop and goes,
boop, boom, and lands on top of you,
and it's body, body, squiggle, squiggle,
bubbles coming out between you,
you sound like two huge sewer plungers,
there's nothing erotic about it,
it's downright hilarious,
and when she finishes with
you, for the finale,
and I only heard about this,
I never saw it or had it.
It's called Boobly Oobly,
it's the final facial massage.
The GIs loved it.
If she had large breasts, she'd part them,
they'd stick their faces in and she'd cry out,
Boobly Oobly and let go.
Now, after you've been fuck,
sucked, had your tubes cleaned,
nose cleaned,
toes cleaned and you're ready for more,
for rest and relaxation, you can at last go
to Unwinded,
a live show in which women do everything
with their vaginas except having babies.
It starts with ping pong
balls and she's fully loaded
so they fire an automatic
into a soda fountain glass.
So it's pooh, pooh, pooh,
pooh, pooh, pow, pow, pow.
Then out comes the Coke bottle
and it's a king size Coke bottle,
a glass one I haven't seen in years.
And she shakes that bottle and she shakes it
and she shakes it and she shakes it.
She shakes it for so long you
begin to think that's the whole
act, just that shaking of that bottle.
And just to prove that that cap is on tight
and at last she opens it.
And I don't know how she does it.
I don't know if there is a
bottle opener in there or teeth,
but it sprays all over the audience brown,
warm Coca-Cola.
And what's left of it she
pours back into her vagina,
squirts over the bottle and refills it
like a Coca-Cola bottling machine.
Then out comes the banana.
And she takes a few lame
shots like the Russian rockets,
they're going to sputter and
pop and land in our cornfields.
And for the finale,
she aims her vagina down the main aisle
like a great cannon,
loads it with a very ripe banana
and fires it, almost hits me in the eye,
almost hits an Australian housewife in the head,
hits the back wall and sticks.
And slowly it inches its way down until it lands
and is devoured instantly
by an army of giant roaches.
April 12th,
1975 was the actual evacuation of Phnom Penh.
Lan Nol had long since fled to Hawaii.
Two million people in the
city now instead of 600,000.
Khmer Rouge rockets coming
in at random and landing
in hospitals, kids in the streets,
schools, whatever.
American Ambassador John Gunther Dean says,
we have two and a half hours,
all Cambodian officials
and Americans,
two and a half hours to evacuate the country.
Cambodians say, two and a half hours,
two and a half hours, we're ruined.
How are we going to convince the Russians in two
and a half hours that we're socialists?
So this leaves behind the Cambodian officials,
Long Bure,
Lan Nan and Prince Sirik Matak.
Lan Nol had two brothers,
Lan Nan and Lan Nil.
Long Bure, Lan Nan and
Prince Sirik Matak decide
to stay behind.
Prince Sirik Matak sends a letter
to the American Ambassador telling him
that they've decided not to
go out with the evacuation.
He reads, dear Excellency and friend,
I thank you very sincerely
for your letter and for your offer
to transport me toward freedom.
I cannot alas leave in such a cowardly fashion.
As for you and in particular
for your great country,
I never believed for a moment
that you would have the sentiment
of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty.
You have refused us your protection
and we can do nothing about it.
You leave and it is my wish that you
and your country will find
happiness under the sky.
But mark it well that if I
shall die here on the spot
and in the country that I love, it is too bad
because we are all born and must one day die.
I have only committed this mistake of believing
in you, the Americans.
Please accept, Excellency,
my dear friend, my faithful
and friendly sentiments, Sirik Matak.
In five days later,
all three of their livers were carried
through the streets on sticks.
The Americans took off in their helicopters.
We took off.
We thought it was going to be like Da Nang
with the Vietnamese riding and holding
on to the helicopter wheels,
but the Cambodians didn't.
They just waved and went,
okay, bye-bye, okay, bye-bye,
okay, bye-bye, okay, bye-bye.
And as the last helicopter took off,
a Khmer Rouge rocket came
in and killed one of the innocent bystanders.
Five days later, April 17th,
1975, Cambodia year zero.
The Khmer Rouge marched in in
their black pajamas.
Lon Nol's army threw down their
guns and raced
to embrace them thinking
that the country would be reunited again.
But the Khmer Rouge did not smile back.
They took strategic positions in the town.
Some of the kids who grew up in the jungle
and never saw cars before
jumped in and started ramming them
into first gear and getting stuck in first gear,
driving into walls and trees.
And then the Khmer Rouge systematically began
to empty the city of Phnom Penh.
Out, they said, everyone, out, out, out,
into the fields, they say.
The Americans are going to bomb, they say.
There's no more food left.
When the people ask who will provide for them,
they say,
Angkor, Angkor will provide.
Angkor, like some perverse Wizard of Oz,
Kafkaesque thundercloud meant
to rain down mana on the people
in the fields and take nothing with you.
You had to go into the fields with no possessions.
And then if you couldn't walk or in the hospital,
they'd chuck you out the window.
Seven-story,
10-story kind of weird survival of the fittest.
And then the killing began.
Eyewitnesses said anyone
that was educated was killed.
Any civil servant was killed.
Anyone carrying their own cooking pot was killed.
People wearing glasses would be killed.
The motto was better to kill an innocent person
than to leave an enemy alive.
Dead, dead.
Kids were doing the killing.
10, 11, 12 years old.
They were too weak from
their diet from barks and bugs
and lizards and no more ammunition left.
So they were trying to knock
in skulls with these axe handles
and hoe handles,
but they were too weak to knock them in.
So eyewitnesses said the kids were taking bets
on how many whacks it
would take to knock in a skull.
And they were laughing,
a lot of laughter going on,
a lot of laughter.
And eyewitnesses said if
you pleaded for your life,
they would laugh harder.
If it was a woman pleading for her life,
the kids would laugh even harder.
And then they would take the
half-dead bodies and drag them
into American bomb craters, which acted as a kind
of perfect shallow grave.
And it was a kind of visitation of hell on earth.
Who needs metaphors for hell or poetry about hell?
This actually happened here on this earth.
Pregnant mothers disemboweled,
eyes gouged out, kids,
children torn apart like fresh
bread in front of their mothers.
And this went on for years
until 2 million people were either
systematically killed or starved
to death by the same people.
And no one can really figure out how something
like that could have happened.
Certainly,
it could research that other holocaust in Germany
because people speak a lot of German and read
and write German and Hitler's either dead
or living in Argentina.
But Cambodia is far,
far away and no one speaks enough Khmer
and Pol Pot is still alive and waiting up here
on the Thai-Cambodian border
with 35,000 troops supported
by the Red Cross, by the United Nations,
and by the United States
of America because so many
people would rather see him back
in Cambodia with his nationalist coalition rather
than the Vietnamese who were in there.
And they came in in 1979, some people,
the British particularly
saying that it was a liberation,
others saying it was a xenophobic piece
of cake just biting off
Cambodia to protect themselves
from China, and I get very confused.
And Roland Joffe came to me and said, Spalding,
I hope this film has taught you
that morality is not a movable feast.
And I get dizzy because I keep
seeing it moving all the time.
Now, the last big scene in the film,
or rather my last big scene
which felt like the last big scene was here.
Remember,
we're in Waihin near Bangkok on the Gulf of Siam.
We are staying in the pleasure prison in Waihin.
We're not shooting there,
but it's in that same town.
Right in town in Waihin is this
old hotel that looks very much
like the Hotel Phnom Penh, a Victorian hotel.
I'm told it looked exactly
like it except it didn't have a
swimming pool and a tennis court.
So the film built a swimming
pool and a tennis court
to make the hotel authentic.
Now, I'm playing the American Ambassador's aide,
and for my last scene all I have to do is simple,
is walk down the steps.
I'm leaking information to Sam Waterston
who's playing Sidney Shanberg,
and I just have to say,
a computer malfunction put
out the wrong set of coordinates.
Seems a single B-52 opened up over Nick Long.
There's a homing beacon
right in the middle of town.
Check it out, Sid.
Easy enough for some actors, but for this,
I cannot do stuff like this.
This technical language is
like doing algebra or geometry.
I have to make an internal film,
internal, to memorize this.
Right? My own particular images.
So I'm starting to go through it.
A computer malfunction.
I see a Macintosh with spaghetti coming out of it.
That works for me.
Put out a wrong set of coordinates.
I see an oscillator from
7th grade science project.
I don't know whose it was, but I remember a grid
work oscillator.
Seems a single B-52.
Well, God, I remember many B-52s
from many a drunken dinner
in front of the TV watching
that war on television.
Open up over Nick Long.
Long, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick Long.
Nick Long.
I was having trouble with that one.
It was a night shoot,
and I was all grisk and bobbled.
Nick Long was a strategic ferry town in Cambodia
that had a homing beacon in it.
Homing beacons aren't supposed to be dangerous.
They're just beacons that the
planes take their coordinates
off of, then the navigator,
six miles up on that airborne
holiday inn, throws a switch,
and the bombs are dropped
over the jungle by computer.
No one really drops the bombs.
But this particular day, the navigator
threw the wrong switch and
dropped his entire load of bombs
up the main street of Nick Long,
killing over 250 people.
The navigator was fined $700 for his mistake.
And Sidney Shanberg told me
that he heard about the mistake
and went in to cover it for the New York Times,
but the American embassy
put a press lock on Nick Long
and didn't allow him in, so he snuck in.
He bribed his way in with Dithbran.
He got in there.
He said he saw blood and hair all over the bushes
and realized a lot of people had been killed.
Was about to get his story
out to the New York Times
when he was put under arrest by the Cambodians
and held at gunpoint.
Now, while he was under arrest, house arrest,
in flies the American embassy in a helicopter
to give out $100 bills to people who
lost members of their
family and $50 bills to people
who had lost legs and arms in the bombing,
and the Cambodians were grateful.
Now, Sidney told me that he thought
he could probably safely
walk out in front of the American
embassy and not be shot.
He wasn't sure.
He started to walk and he said the Cambodians
started screaming and clicking
the safeties on their guns,
and he said never before
had he felt more alive in his life.
Absolutely all the adrenaline going right
on the edge of death, absolutely, totally, utterly
alive.
Let's go, boys and girls.
Take 64.
It's a night shoot and we're up to take 64.
Roland is really covering his ass on this one.
All right?
A computer malfunction put
out the wrong set of coordinates.
By the way, I played one of those American embassy
officials that come in in the helicopters.
There was no way I was going
to get on a helicopter, right?
But they promised me that
it would just go up 10 feet
and land.
They just wanted a shot of it landing.
So the AD said,
would the artist please get on the choppers?
Artists on the helicopters, please.
Boom.
Right on like Pavlov's dog.
You know, call me an artist.
I am on.
And ready to go up.
Up it goes, straight up.
The helicopter goes up 1,000 feet, straight up.
I'm looking down out the door.
There is no safety belt. The door is wide open.
I felt like I was in a movie.
Then I thought I was in Apocalypse Now.
I had nothing else to relate it to.
And then I realized I was in a movie.
They were shooting one.
I had no fear because the camera eroticizes
the space it aims at.
You know, it's like Colgate, Gardall.
Somehow you know you're larger than life.
You'll be protected.
Even if the helicopter crashes, I
knew there'd be rushes my
friends could show at New
Year's Eve in the performing garage.
Something would come of this.
And about the sixth time up,
I looked down and see, my God,
look how much of the jungle this movie controls.
All the way up the Chao Phraya River,
you could see Thai peasants
paid to put burning rubber
tires on a fire to make it look like a real war.
And I thought, of course, war therapy.
Every country must and
should make a major motion war
film every year.
Put people to work,
get the economy up, get your rocks off.
Do an invasion, a movie of invading Libya.
Skip the invasion.
You land,
you don't have to method act when those blades
are going over your head.
Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba,
ba, ba, you're shouting.
You don't have to method act
when you look down and see Thai
peasants lying there for
12 hours with chicken giblets
and fake blood all over them.
They're getting paid $5 for a 12 hour day,
smiling back at you.
And if they're real amputees,
they get $7.50 for the day.
You don't have to act.
It's very much like the real event.
Let's go, boys and girls.
Take 65.
A computer malfunction put
out the wrong set of coordinates.
Seems a single B-52 opened up over Niklong.
There's a, I didn't get the image.
I didn't get the image for homing beacon.
And I just blanked and I went, there's a,
there's a housing device
right in the middle of town.
Cut.
I know, listen, please.
I knew I should have never drank that booze
and had the marijuana the night before.
How unprofessional.
My concentration was, but Roland Joffe told me
my character would be drinking a lot,
you understand?
So I thought I was in character.
You would be amazed what people did in this film
to get in character.
Let's go, boys and girls.
Take 66.
At last, I got the image for it.
For the homing beacon,
I saw a pigeon, a homing pigeon,
flying toward a beacon in a children's storybook,
a little lighthouse.
All right, I've got it.
Let's go.
Take 66.
A computer malfunction put
out the wrong set of coordinates.
Seems a single B-52 opened up over Neek Long.
There's a.
I knew it didn't matter what I was thinking,
because the audience had
just projected on the screen what
they were thinking.
It's all about projection.
As long as I had an idea, there's a homing beacon
right in the middle of town.
Check it out, Sid.
All right, you've heard of pilot error,
computer malfunction.
They screwed up on the coordinates.
A single B-52 dropped its
entire load on Neek Long.
There's a homing beacon in the middle of the town.
Check it out, Sid.
The entire crew burst into applause.
66 takes later, and five hours into the night,
we have finished with my first scene,
and my last scene of the movie, their first scene
of the evening.
They're going till dawn.
I am told that all of what I did that night,
if it was processed and the crew was paid,
it would cost $30,000.
When I get back to New York City,
I am called in to re-dub the entire scene because
of the sound of crickets.
But the film is over for me.
I am finished.
And Renee flies back to America
to give her man some space,
to give her man some room
to have his perfect moment.
And I hear that the film is relocating
to this magical island, Phuket,
here in the Indian Ocean,
off the southern coast of Thailand.
And I hear everyone's going down there,
and they serve you magic mushrooms
for breakfast and an omelet,
whether you order them or not.
I thought, if I don't have an organic,
perfect moment,
I will induce one.
So it's off to Phuket,
and I ask if I can come along.
They tell me, no, I can't.
I don't have a private driver anymore
because I'm not with the film.
But if I'd like to come along, it's
all right to ride on the artist's bus.
Fine.
I hear I have to get up at 5 in the morning.
It's a 15-hour trip on a dirt road.
I get up.
I get on this old converted Greyhound.
There's no artist I've ever seen on that before.
I don't recognize any artists.
It's mainly crew.
In the front row, Umberto Pasolini
of the Pasolini banking and film family.
He's dropped out of banking at 28 years old
to carry orange aid for the Killing Fields
to work his way up as a producer.
He is sitting in the very front row of the bus,
pretending his head is a 35-millimeter camera.
And he's practicing pans
of that meaningless jungle
for the entire 15 hours.
He's happy.
Next to him are the Cambodian refugees
from Long Beach, social workers,
because Pol Pot killed
all the Cambodian actors.
And they had to hire social
workers from Long Beach
to play small roles.
Next to me on my left is a British cook
who's saying, Spalding, what's going on here?
Where's your private driver?
I would complain to British Equity if I were you.
I said, well,
I'm not really with the film anymore.
Oh, on for a freebie, are you?
Well, that's good if you can get it.
Oh, 15 hours later,
which is a whole other monologue
unto itself, we arrive at Phuket.
And we're staying in the
raddiest old hotel so far,
the Phuket Merlin.
And we have two days off in a row,
because we work so hard.
And we hear that Shangri-La exists,
the most beautiful beach
in the world.
And a bunch of us rent a tuk-tuk and go down there
through those winding down 20-minute drive
through rice paddies and water buffalo.
And we come out on this exquisite beach.
I was unprepared for it.
I mean, there was no flotsam.
There was no jetsam.
There were no tourists.
There were no beer cans,
no trash bags, just beach.
And huge Indian Ocean pounding
on under black monsoon skies,
white seabirds blowing sideways,
ratty palm trees ripping in the wind,
rainbows arching.
It was a number nine on a scale of one to 10
for perfect moments.
It was fantastic.
Down the far end of the beach,
water buffalo posing
like they were stuffed in the mist.
And Ivan, Ivan Strasberg, devil in my ear,
the two of us, like the two kids,
charged right into that water.
The others go down to have brunch.
It is fantastic.
Body temperature, I am going,
oh shit, my money.
Oh fuck, Ivan, I've got $600 worth of Thai baht
and my ocean briefs.
I forgot to put it in the hotel.
What do I do with it?
I was saving up my per diem just in case
I didn't have a perfect moment,
I would buy one to get out of there.
What do I do with it, Ivan?
He says, oh Spalding,
just put it up on the beach there
with my cameras, man,
on the high part of the beach.
And we start into the water again,
and he turns to me and he says,
in Africa, I put my cameras up there on the beach
and the natives would run right out of the jungle
and steal them.
What are you gonna do?
Chase the natives back into the jungle?
So I was a little bit back
and forth with my money,
you know, a little nervous, not sure about Ivan.
And we started a little further and he goes,
Spalding, man, stay, stay.
On the next day off,
I'm gonna take you scuba diving.
You'll have rapture of the deep, man.
You'll see fish the color
you've never seen before.
It is fantastic.
And I've never been scuba diving.
In all my life, I've wanted to do,
I thought, this is it, this is a mission.
It's not just a film that I was here for.
It's all coming together now.
Look, I'm basically a very fearful person.
I call it phobic.
I'm a phobic person and sharks and bears
are at the top of the list.
I mean, I swim like this.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
so they can't get a grip, you know?
I swim really fast.
I check out swimming pools before I go in them.
So what I need is a man that I trust
that can guide me through these phobias
so I can get in touch with rapture of the deep.
I need a guru, a scuba guru.
Ivan is going to be my scuba guru.
And then Ivan turns to me and says,
but Spalding Man, beware,
because there are these stoned fish, eh?
And if you step on one,
you're dead in seven seconds.
No remedy, man, eh?
So wear your sneakers.
Ah,
he is a bit of a sadist playing into my masochism.
I'm not saying I'm not inviting it,
but by now he's out in the
high surf calling into me,
Spalding Man,
I see you like the little waves, man.
Come out in the highways, man.
And I am so terrified.
The water, my heart is in my throat,
this rolling, roaring surf.
Also,
I don't feel as though I deserve to be there.
This is, I'm like, instead of pinching myself
to prove that I'm there,
I'm running down the beach to look back,
to see myself.
And I run down the beach and look back
and miss myself every time.
And down the beach and back,
and down the beach and back,
and down the beach and back.
And the third time back, Ivan is gone.
And I go, oh no, oh shit,
oh fuck, oh, he's drowned.
I can't believe this is happening to me.
I don't believe it.
People do drown, I've read about it.
We get a notice under our door saying,
be careful when you swim at Phuket
because of the riptides.
Oh no,
and the first thing that went through my head,
and I'm telling you, it went so fast,
I can't even speak as fast as the images went.
The first rationalization that
went through my head was,
of course, making a film about this much death,
some real person actually has to go.
The next thing that went through my head was,
it's not my fault, not mine,
nope, he was suicidal.
The next thing that went
through my head was quickly,
find the most responsible man you can.
There was no way I was
going out in that high surf.
And the man that occurred to me was John Swain,
the Paris correspondent of the London Times,
who had been in Phnom Penh
when the Khmer Rouge marched in.
And perhaps the most
narcissistic of the reporters,
he'd come to watch himself be played
by Julian Sands in the movie.
So he happened to be there at brunch,
and I just went, John, John Swain, come quickly,
I can't see Ivan.
And everyone slowly put down their chopsticks
at that brunch and charged.
Some came through the swamp,
some came over the bridge over the swamp.
Judy Arthur, the publicist,
was the first to reach the beach.
I found out later that she was a lifeguard
in a past incarnation,
and had the good sense to
run on the high part of the beach.
I was down by the dip of the lip of the water,
and couldn't see out.
I was down there with my
knees shaking about to vomit,
and people were around me going,
don't worry, Spalding, don't worry,
he won't have drowned.
He'll be all right, he can't have drowned.
He's from South Africa.
And meanwhile, I'm trying to interpret this.
Meanwhile,
Judy Arthur spots him bobbing out there.
He's rode a rip.
This guy knows how to ride a riptide for fun
and circle back in.
And he comes in, she calls him in,
and I go, Ivan, no,
I'm never going swimming with you again.
How could you ever do anything like this?
And he says, I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry.
You mustn't worry, Spalding.
I had no idea that you were looking for me,
but don't worry, I would never have drowned, man.
I'm from South Africa.
So everyone goes back to the brunch,
and they leave Ivan and I
standing there by the ocean.
And he looks up at me and he says,
by the way, Spalding,
when you called, how many came?
Did Judy Freeman come, man?
Yes.
Judy Freeman came.
Judy Arthur came.
All the Judys came.
Let's go get something to eat.
The next day off,
there was no doubting where we were going.
Down to Keron Beach, it was fantastic.
Ivan passed me a tie stick.
I took a few tokes.
I didn't care if my kundalini
got loose on the beach
and went wild, even ran away.
I never wanted to see it again.
A little mild paranoia came over me.
Where to hide my money this time?
I began to dig holes in the sand.
Then I thought, no,
under the rubber mat in the truck.
And I thought, you know, Spalding,
thinking this much about hiding your money
is putting out waves the ties can read.
Let them have it.
Leave it on the beach where anyone can take it.
By now, Ivan is out in the highways going,
Spalding, man,
you don't know what it is to be a man yet,
man, until you get out in the big waves, man.
And I thought,
I'm gonna be a man today if it kills me.
And I'm starting out a little
further and a little further,
and I'm seeing hallucinations
of gray sharks all around me.
And every time I think of a shark biting me,
I feel all the anxiety come together in my stomach
and go out the top of my head
in a great gray arrow that lands on my money.
And every time I think of being bitten by a shark,
I think of my money being stolen.
And suddenly I have no fear.
And I'm getting further
and further out in that ocean
and further and further out
until I'm further out in that ocean
than I've ever been in any ocean in my life.
I am beyond Ivan even.
I can tell I'm further out
because of the view of the shore.
I've never had a view like that before.
And suddenly there is no fear
because there is no body to bite.
There are no more outlines.
There's no means.
There's this great body temperature Indian Ocean,
this great warm Indian Ocean
with this smiling bopkin head perceiver on top.
And up the ocean goes and up the perceiver goes
and down the ocean goes
and down the perceiver goes.
And wall of water comes up around the perceiver
and the perceiver looks both ways.
It could be in the middle of the Indian Ocean,
no land in sight.
And wall of water goes
down and lifts the perceiver
and the perceiver looks down a great bank of water
far below John Swain and Judy Arthur
body surfing like an Hawaiian travel poster.
And wall of water lifts the perceiver
and suddenly a human voice wakes it
and brings it back in time.
It's Ivan calling,
Spalding Man, come back, come back.
I haven't tested those waters yet.
And boom, ah, I'm back in time.
I'm back in fear.
And I'm swimming into Ivan
water pouring through my nose
saying it was fantastic, Ivan.
I mean, it was a perfect moment.
It was fantastic.
And he says, Spalding, I have to go out
and test those waters.
Now he swims out to where I was
and he comes back with
water pouring through his nose
going, Spalding, Spalding.
I almost drowned, man.
I came this close to drowning.
Now I know the experience of drowning, man.
And I thought, oh shit.
Now I'm gonna have to go out and almost drown.
I'll be damned if I'll be caught
in this male competitive trap.
I know what Ivan's idea of a perfect moment is.
It's death.
So having had my perfect moment, I swam in.
Now elated from having had it, depressed,
knowing that I had to go home,
I went in search for my audience
to tell the perfect moment to,
which is almost as important as having it.
Athel Fugard, my new father confessor,
the most fantastic audience back at the hotel.
Athel, who had just given up drinking
and I think to some extent was living vicariously
through me, at the end of every day would say,
Spalding, come, come to the bar.
I'll buy you a beer, I'll have an orange.
Tell me about your day.
And at first I wanted to tell
him about my new theory
of displacement of anxiety.
And I said, Athel, Athel, Athel, Athel,
if ever you lack the courage to do something
and you need that courage,
just take a big pile of money
and leave it somewhere where it can be stolen
and go do that thing.
Then I told him about my perfect
moment in the Indian Ocean
and he listened, raising an eyebrow
and putting his pipe down,
he turned to me and said,
Spalding,
the sea's a lovely lady when you play in her,
but if you play with her, she is a bitch.
Play in the sea, yes, but never play with her.
You're lucky to be here.
You're lucky to be alive.
I believed him and I went to
bed and slept like a kid again
in Jerusalem, Rhode Island,
the entire bed rocking,
sand in the bottom of the bed,
wrapped in the arms of the sea, fantastic sleep.
And the following day I got up
and a little kid was raging inside of me
and the adult was there too,
saying I should go home.
And the little kid is going more and more
and kept more where that came from,
stay, stay, stay, and the adult is going,
I've had my perfect moment, it's time to go.
And I thought, how will I get out of here?
How will I be decisive?
And I thought, you know, maybe I'll try acting
like a decisive man.
If I can't be one, I'll act like one.
And I went out of the hotel and
said goodbye to all my mates.
As though I were going.
Goodbye, mate.
We'll work together again one day.
Hey, you better believe I believe in this film.
Fuckin' A.
Hey, big guy, look out for those whores
and don't you drink too much, we'll meet again.
All right.
I got to Athelfugad and
he looked right through me.
So, Spalding, you're leaving paradise after all.
I said, Athel, you know, I woke up this morning,
I was thinking about a magic mushroom.
Spalding, go back to Renee.
She's a lovely lady.
Take what you've learned here
in Thailand back to Krumville.
There is no difference
between Thailand and Krumville.
I wanted to believe him.
I also wondered who he'd been studying with.
So I did it.
I got in the car for the
final ride to the airport.
And as I was riding,
I felt like I was going to the gallows.
I couldn't believe it.
Why was I doing this?
Why did I feel, mainly,
why did I feel so inflated?
I'd been there eight weeks
and I'd worked eight days.
Was waiting that difficult?
I felt all puffed up, but on the way I thought,
my God, I will never see a little piece of heaven
like this again.
This is the end.
And as I was riding, I said a silent benediction,
a silent farewell to all that
I had had and would miss.
Farewell to the fantastic breakfast,
free every morning.
You walk down and there they are waiting on you
with the papaya, mango, and pineapple
like I'd never tasted before.
Farewell to the Thai maids
with the king-sized cotton sheets
and the big king-sized bed.
Farewell to the lunches, fresh meat flown in
from America daily.
Roast potatoes, green beans, and roast lamb
at 110 degrees under a circus tent,
according to British equity.
Farewell to the drivers with the tinted glasses
and the Mercedes with the tinted windows.
Farewell to the cakes and teas and ices every day,
exactly at four o'clock.
Farewell to those beautiful, smiling people.
Farewell to that single, fresh rose in a vase
on my bureau in the hotel every day.
And just as I was climbing
into that first-class seat
and wrapping myself in a blanket,
just as I was adjusting the
pillow from behind my head
and having a sip of that champagne,
just as I was adjusting and bringing down
my Thai purple sleep mask,
I had an inkling.
I had a flash.
I suddenly thought I knew what it was
that had killed Marilyn Monroe.
Q8AKIRA