Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray Page B

could do it. I don’t know if it has to do with electricity or what, but I know the actors didn’t buy women out front. They were more secretive about it and would sneak around doing it at night. These guys went right out and got these women and they made a little laughing family. I used to listen at their hotel doors sometimes. They’d be in there speaking pidgin English to each other in the shower.
    â€œHey, beeg guy, ohkeekyouass I keeckassoh ho ho ho!” laughing. I mean the major English they knew came from the popular records there: “Lies, Lies, Lies, Liar,” and “Do You Want to Funk?” During the day the Thai wives hung out by the pool together and talked, and at night the men came home from work and everyone went out to eat. The Thai women knew just what to order and everyone had a good time there, laughing. The women talked among themselves and the men talked among themselves—now, not a radical idea, granted, but a lot happier than most nuclear families that I’ve come across in any McDonald’s or Howard
Johnson’s. A lot more laughter coming off the table. I don’t know what laughter is indicative of, but it has something to do with joy and letting go.
    I’ve been with prostitutes in Amsterdam and New York City, and they are very cool, business-as-usual. It’s like going to a very cold doctor. You just wouldn’t naturally fall in love with one. But I think that you could very easily fall in love with a Thai whore, very easily. They really seemed to be having a good time there, feeding coconut-flavored rice to the Sparks as they lounged before them like gargantuan Gauguins. If, in fact, they were all acting, then a good many of them should have received Academy Awards along with Haing Ngor.
    And yes, I’ve heard the other side of it and I know it exists the way the darker side of everything exists. Just recently, while driving in L.A., I heard a very angry woman talking on KPFK Radio about an investigation she had made of child prostitution in Thailand. She said that evil people were kidnapping ten-year-old girls and bringing them to the city to be prostitutes, and they were chaining them to the beds like slaves. When one of the whorehouses burned down all they found were these charred ten-year-old skeletons, chained to beds. I didn’t hear about this until after I got back from Thailand, but while I was there it all looked like fun. I wanted in on it all, but I couldn’t get in because I was too conflicted.
    Then, all of a sudden, the guns went off and the machine-gun fire started, and the bombs. Five hundred Coke cases were blown across the warehouse. John Swain was running off camera behind Julian Sands, who was playing him, and John was yelling, “What a lovely war!
What a great war! You know you’re not going to get shot!” This confirmed my whole idea of War Therapy.
    We were running through the machine-gun fire, the black smoke pouring off burning rubber tires, and all of a sudden it was lunchtime. We all sat down at a table with these Thai peasants who were completely covered with blood—it looked like their faces were falling off—and we were all eating together when a monsoon suddenly came up and one of the tents blew down and a real Thai woman got knocked out for real. They carried her in and put her in the middle of the table where the food was. So it was the monsoon versus the film. Then the monsoon passed and the film began again and there was so much black smoke you couldn’t even see the sky. There were rockets and machine-gun fire, and Judy Freeman, who was on sound, said to me, “Spalding, my God, what are you feeling guilty about? What are you doing in the middle of a war when you could be down on Paradise Beach? Chris and I have rented a house down there that we never use. You’re free to use it. Go, go. Have fun.”
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    So I thought, ooh, why not? What am I feeling guilty