Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray Page A

chicken giblets, fake blood and what looked like very real third-degree bums created by the art department. They were all lined up and smiling. While we were trashing the area I decided that I wanted to talk to certain people. I had a sense that Tom might be through with his role in the film any time and we’d have to leave, either for Hanoi or Krummville. So I was going into that kind of state when you think you’re about to die or leave a place forever, and you want to just get to know everyone before you go.
    Keith, the costumier, was first. I hadn’t talked with him. He’d always struck me as a little mad, and I was telling him about my theory of Displacement of Anxiety and he said, “I know all about it. Oh, sure. I’ve got a witch up there, white one, up in Nottingham. Oh, she’s a blessed one. Every time I fly she gets mildly ill, in a pub, you see? She gets sick. She takes on my anxiety and I have a lovely flight. I know all about it. I knew this actress. She hated a fellow actor and she wanted to get him out of the show. She stuck a note on the stairs, under the carpet on the stage. It said, ‘May you trip and break your leg.’ And he did. Oh, I know all about it.”
    Then I went on from Keith to talk to Haing Ngor. Now I hadn’t talked directly to Haing about his story, but I certainly had heard about it. I think I felt ashamed, or I didn’t want to bother him, because people had asked him about his story so many times before. He was playing the role of Dith Pran. Now, Haing had also been tortured for years under the Pol Pot regime, so to some extent he was reenacting his own life story as well as Pran’s. As the story goes, Haing was a Cambodian gynecologist and he had been performing an
emergency operation on someone in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge broke into the hospital and demanded to know where the doctor was. Haing just threw down his stuff and said, “I’m not a doctor, I’m a taxicab driver. I drove the doctor here.” And he left the patient on the operating table and became a cab driver from that day on.
    The other thing about Haing Ngor that interested me was his anger. Of all the Cambodians that I met, his anger was most on the surface, and I think that’s why he was cast in the role.
    The others were always smiling. It was hard to believe they could still be smiling, but they were always smiling about everything. I don’t know what it came from, the Buddhism or that they’d seen too much to talk about, but they were always very gentle and smiling. But Haing’s rage was right there, and I went up and asked him what had happened to him.
    â€œThey put! Plastic! Plastic bag. Over my head!”
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œAnd then. They take me. They tie me to a cross. And burn my legs. And burn me right here.”
    And he showed me the burn marks on his legs.
    â€œThey burned you? How did you get through this? What were you thinking about? What was going on?”
    â€œI know. If I tell the truth. I’m one hundred percent dead. Now I’m only ninety-eight percent dead. The truth. Hundred percent dead.”
    â€œHow did you escape?”
    â€œThey take me. And Khmer Rouge put. Me in jail.”
    â€œThey put you in jail, yes, and . . .”
    â€œThey. Burn it down.”
    The Khmer Rouge were really crazy. They put him
in jail and then set fire to it and, of course, the prisoners ran out. Some got burned, yes. Some escaped. Haing escaped and ate his way across Cambodia on bark and bugs—the traditional diet—leaves and lizards. At last he made it to a Thai refugee camp and now he’s living in L.A.
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    Then I went to the Sparks, the British electricians. I envied their sort of blissful ignorance the most. They were the ones who, as soon as they arrived in Thailand, went down and bought Thai wives. Now I think it’s a class thing. None of the actors did it. The electricians