Swimming to Cambodia

Spalding Gray

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781559362542
• eBook ISBN: 9781559366373
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

“It took courage to do what Spalding did—courage to make theatre so naked and unadorned, to expose himself in this way and fight the demons in public. In doing so, he entered our hearts—my heart—because he made his struggle my struggle. His life became my life.”—Eric Bogosian

“Virtuosic. A master writer, reporter, comic and playwright. Spalding Gray is a sit-down monologist with the soul of a stand-up comedian. A contemporary Gulliver, he travels the globe in search of experience and finds the ridiculous.”—The New York Times

In 2004, we mourned the loss of one of America’s true theatrical innovators. Spalding Gray took his own life by jumping from the Staten Island ferry into the waters of New York Harbor, finally succumbing to the impossible notion that he could in fact swim to Cambodia. At a memorial gathering for family, friends and fans at Lincoln Center in New York, his widow expressed the need to honor Gray’s legacy as an artist and writer for his children, as well as for future generations of fans and readers. Originally published in 1985, Swimming to Cambodia is reissued here 20 years later in a new edition as a tribute to Gray’s singular artistry.

Writer, actor and performer, Spalding Gray is the author of Sex and Death to the Age 14; Monster in a Box; It’s a Slippery Slope; Gray’s Anatomy and Morning, Noon and Night, among other works. His appearance in The Killing Fields was the inspiration for his Swimming to Cambodia, which was also filmed by Jonathan Demme.

part one

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It was the first day off in a long time, and all of us were trying to get a little rest and relaxation out by the pool at this big, modern hotel that looked something like a prison. If I had to call it anything I would call it a “pleasure prison.” It was the kind of place you might come to on a package tour out of Bangkok. You’d come down on a chartered bus—and you’d probably not wander off the grounds because of the high barbed-wire fence they have to keep you in and the bandits out. And every so often you would hear shotguns going off as the hotel guards fired at rabid dogs down along the beach on the Gulf of Siam.

But if you really wanted to walk on the beach, all you had to learn to do was to pick up a piece of seaweed, shake it in the dog’s face and everything would be hunkydory.

So it was our first day off in a long time and there were about 130 of us out by the pool trying to get a little rest and relaxation, and the Thai waiters were running and jumping over hedges to bring us “Kloster! More Kloster!” Everyone was ordering Kloster beer. No one was ordering the Singah because someone had said that Singah, which is exported to the United States, has formaldehyde in it. The waiters were running and jumping over hedges because they couldn’t get to us fast enough. They were running and jumping and smiling—not a silly smile but a profound smile, a deep smile. There was nothing idiotic about it because the Thais have a word, sanug, which, loosely translated, means “fun.” And they never do anything that isn’t sanug—if it isn’t sanug they won’t touch it.

Some say that the Thais are the nicest people that money can buy, because they like to have fun. They know how to have fun and, perhaps due to their very permissive strain of Buddhism, they don’t have to suffer for it after they have it.

It was a lovely day and we were all out by the pool and the Sparks—the British electricians were called “the Sparks”—were out there with their Thai wives. They had had the good sense—or bad sense, depending on how you look at it—as soon as they arrived in Bangkok, to go down to Pat Pong and buy up women to travel with them. I was told that each man bought two women so as not to risk falling in love. And there the Sparks were, lying like 250-pound beached whales while their ninety-pound “Thai wives,” in little two-piece bathing suits, walked up and down on them giving them Shiatsu massages as a Thai waiter ran, jumped over the hedge, tripped and fell, hurling his Klosters down to explode on the cement by the pool. And looking up with a great smile he said, “Sorry sir, we just run out of Kloster.”

Ivan (Devil in My Ear), a South African and head of the second camera unit—and a bit of a Mephistophelian figure—said, “Spalding, there’s a party tonight up on the Gulf of Siam. Could I come over and borrow your toenail clippers?”

“Sure.”

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“Shall I bring some Thai stick? Do you want to smoke a joint before we go?”

I thought, why not? It’s a day off and I haven’t smoked since I’ve been here. Why not give it a try?

Now, every time I’ve been in a country where the marijuana is supposed to be really good—Mexico, India, Northern California and now Thailand—I’ve always felt that I should try it. Maybe this time it would be different. Maybe this time I would be able to sleep, like so many people say they do. Maybe this time I’d have a sense of well-being and feel at one with the world. You see, marijuana tends to unlock my Kundalini in the worst way and all the energy just gets stuck in my lower Chakra. It just gets stuck and spins there like a snake chasing its tail, or a Studebaker stuck in sand.

So I said, “Sure, bring it over.”

Then I thought, maybe I should have waited until I’d spoken with Renée first. Renée was over there visiting me for fourteen days and we planned to go back to New York together as soon as I finished the film. We had rented a summer house together in upstate New York, in Krummville, and Krummville was looking less and less exotic to me the longer I stayed in Thailand. You see, I hadn’t had a Perfect Moment yet, and I always like to have one before I leave an exotic place. They’re a good way of bringing things to an end. But you can never plan for one. You never know when they’re coming. It’s sort of like falling in love . . . with yourself.

Also, I was beginning to get this image of myself as a kind of wandering poet-bachelor-mendicant beating my way down the whole coast of Malaysia, eating magic mushrooms all the way, until I finally reach Bali and evaporate into the sunset in a state of ecstasy. But I wasn’t telling Renée that. I was only telling her that I wasn’t sure when I would be coming back, and that was enough to enrage her. We fell into a big fight on the way to the party that lasted all the way down to the Gulf of Siam. And there we were, arguing on this fantastic beach where, unlike the Hamptons, there was no boat and a bigger boat, no ship and a bigger ship, no carrot and the carrot and desire and desire. It was just one big beach with no boats. Nothing to buy. Just one big piece of calendar art.

And Renée and I were walking down the beach arguing and I said, “Stop, Renée. Stop with the fighting. Look at this beautiful sunset. Look! Look! I might be able to have a Perfect Moment right now and we could go home.”

But Reńee would have none of it. She’s very confrontational and always wants to talk about what is going on in the relationship, not the sunset. So she went off to cry on Therese’s shoulder and talk to Julian, and I went to Ivan (Devil in My Ear) who said, “Spalding, don’t let her get the upper hand, man. I mean, after all, how many straight, single men your age are there left in New York City anyway? What’s she going to do?”

And I said, “Ivan, no, don’t say things like that.”

Then Renee and I came out of our respective comers and went back at it for another round, until at last she said, “Listen, I’ll give you an ultimatum. Either you marry me or you give me a date when you’re coming back.”

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I thought for a minute and said, “July 8. I’ll be back on July 8.”

Then it was time for the pleasure. We had fought and made up and it was time for the sanug. That’s the order in which we do it in our culture. So we went down to the beach with Ivan and sat at the water’s edge. By then it was dark and gentle waves were lapping as party sounds drifted in the distance. We were the only ones down on the beach, under the stars, and it was almost too much, too beautiful to bear. Ivan lit the Thai stick and passed it down.

I took three deep tokes and as I held the smoke in, this overwhelming wave of anxiety came over me. I closed my eyes and saw this pile of black and brown shit steaming on the edge of a stainless steel counter. The shit was cold and yet it was steaming, and I somehow knew that it represented all of the negative energy in my mind. I could see a string extending from between my eyes to the shit and I knew that if I pulled that string with my head I could pull all that shit right off the edge of that stainless steel counter. I started to pull and as I was pulling I could see that next to the shit was this pile of bubbly pastel energy floating about two inches off the stainless steel counter. I saw that this pastel energy was connected to the shit through these tendrils that ranged from pastel to shit-brown. It was then I realized that if I pulled the negative energy off the counter I would pull the positive off with it, and I’d be left with nothing but a stainless steel counter, which I was not yet ready for in my life. And at the moment I realized that, the counter turned into a tunnel I was going down at the speed of the Santa Cruz roller coaster. But the tunnel was not black this time so I knew I was getting healthier. It was gold-leaf, and the leaves were spreading like palm leaves or like the iris of a big eye as I picked up speed and headed for the center of the Earth, until I was going so fast that I couldn’t stand it anymore and I pulled back, opened my eyes, grabbed the beach and let out a great WHOOOA. . . .

When I opened my eyes Ivan was there but Renée was gone. She must have wandered off down the beach. I had no real sense of where I was. It all looked and felt like a demented Wallace Stevens poem with food poisoning, and in the distance I saw what looked like a group of Thai girl scouts dancing around a campfire. I thought that if I could get in that circle and hold hands with them I would be whole again. I would be cured and back in real time. I got up and tried to walk toward the fire and found that I was falling down like a Bowery bum, like a drunken teenager or the fraternity brother I’d never been. And all of a sudden I realized I was going to be very sick and I crawled off like a Thai dog to a far corner of the beach.

Up it came, and each time the vomit hit the ground I covered it over with sand, and the sand I covered it with turned into a black gauze death mask that flew up and covered my face. And so it went; vomit-cover-mask, vomit-cover-mask, until I looked down to see that I had built an entire corpse in the sand and it was my corpse. It was my own decomposing corpse staring back at me, and I could see the teeth pushing through the rotting lips and the ribs coming through the decomposing flesh of my side. I looked up to see Renée standing over me saying, “What’s wrong, Hon?”

“I’m dying, that’s what’s wrong.”

“Oh. I thought you were having a good time building sand castles.”

She had been looking on at a distance.

Two men, I don’t know who, carried me out of there, one arm over one shoulder and one arm over another, like a drunken, crucified sailor. And I was very upset because the following day I was scheduled to do my big scene in the movie.

In February of ’83 I met this incredible British documentary filmmaker, Roland Joffe. He was very intense—a combination of Zorro, Jesus and Rasputin—body of Zorro, heart of Jesus and eyes of Rasputin. Roland had come to New York to cast a new film called The Killing Fields, produced by David Puttnam, and I was called in for an audition. Peter Wollen had seen one of my monologues and told Susie Figgis, who was helping cast the film, about me and she had set up an audition with Roland.

It was unlike any audition I’d ever been to before. Roland didn’t have me read; he didn’t even ask me any questions. He did all of the talking while I listened, and he talked and talked. He talked for about forty minutes nonstop. Roland told me the story of The Killing Fields.

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It was the story of a New York Times reporter named Sidney Schanberg and his sidekick, Dith Pran, who was a Cambodian photographer. It was about how they covered and reported the story of the Americans’ secret bombing of Cambodia, and how Schanberg and Pran stayed behind in Phnom Penh after the American embassy was evacuated because they wanted to cover what happened when the Khmer Rouge marched in. They wanted to find out if there was going to be a “bloodbath” or not, so they fled to the French embassy to hide out, and when the Khmer Rouge marched into the city they went directly to the French embassy and demanded, “All Cambodians out or everyone dies.” So Dith Pran had to be expelled to almost certain death because the Khmer Rouge were killing any Cambodian who was connected with Americans. Pran was given up for dead by most, but Schanberg never gave up hope and kept searching until, after three years, he located Pran in a Thai refugee camp. He brought him to New York City where Pran now works for The New York Times.

“Great story,” I said. “Sounds fantastic. Sounds like someone made it up. I want to tell you that I would love to play any role in this film, just to be in it. But I must also confess that I know nothing about what you’ve told me. I’m not very political—in fact, I’ve never even voted in my life.”

And Roland said, “Perfect! We’re looking for the American ambassador’s aide.”

He went on, “But I’m not saying you have the role. I have a lot of other people to see and I have to see how it all shapes up and fits together with casting. I’m going out to the Coast to see some people and I’ll be back in a couple of months. Let’s chat again then.”

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I said goodbye and left, and as I went out of the room I thought, I really want to be in that film. In fact, I want to be in that film more than any project I’ve ever been approached for. At the same time, I had no idea what I could actively do to get the role. That was a large part of why I had stopped trying to be a professional actor in the first place; I couldn’t stand all the waiting while that big, indifferent machine made up its so-called mind. I wanted some power and influence over the events of my life.

I couldn’t stand leaving it all to chance, and the first idea that occurred to me was prayer. But I thought, it’s been so long, God would know I was in bad faith.

The next thing that occurred to me was contacts. Well, no, maybe contacts was first and prayer was second.... But anyway, I didn’t have any contacts within the British film industry. So the next voice that came to me was that old logical, coping voice we all know so well: “Well, if I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t. I’ll do something else. After all, I can still see and walk.” And my mother had always said, “Think of the starving Koreans.” I was trying to do that.

But my illogical, preconscious voice would have none of this, and set up a condition I would have to call Compulsive Magical Thinking, which soon got quite out of control.

It all started innocently enough in my living loft. I found that I was unable to leave my loft without turning my little KLH radio off on a positive word. And do you know how difficult those words are to find these days? I would just stand there by the radio with my hand on the little knob so I could turn it off real fast when I heard the positive word.

“The stock market is rising.” (click)

“... consider moving Marines to safer . . .” (click)

“You may go to a doctor that belongs to the AMA but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to the best.” (click)

And then I could leave my loft. And as I went out I found that I would turn the doorknob three times. Threes became very important, as did right shoe in front of left shoe. I always made sure that I put my right shoe ahead of my left shoe when I left them by the bed. I led with my right foot as I started up the street, snapping my fingers three times, then in sets of three, then three fingers in sets of six, as I walked up to the supermarket to buy soup, where every third can was fine. The first two had botulism.

Then I went on to Barnes & Noble, snapping all the way, in search of books on Cambodia. When I got there I went to the piles of books in the Annex and, pulling out every third book, I whispered to myself, “Now this has power.”

Then I turned and saw a man behind me fleeing from stack to stack. I knew he didn’t work for Barnes & Noble because of his overcoat and the wads of newspaper stuck in his ears and I thought, this...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Author’s Note
• part one
• part two
• Afterword
• Copyright Page