Swimming to Cambodia (5 page)

I ducked into the Warren Gazette just to look at Christmas cards, take my time, and there was Mr. Walker from Barrington. I said, “Hi, Mr. Walker, are you going my way?”

“I am. My car is out back. Do you mind going out the back door?”

“Nope. Let's go.”

 

 

When I arrived in London for the first time, I was jet-lagging and I had to rent a car to go up to Edinburgh so I felt a little out of it. All right, I was driving on the wrong side of the road—easily done—you know, no big deal. I cut a guy off first thing, and when I rolled down the window to apologize, he said, “Take off those glasses,
mate, I'm going to punch you out.” Just like a British redcoat announcing his intentions ahead of time.

I just rolled up the window. Why rush it?

 

 

Last year I cut a man off on Hudson Street in Manhattan. I cut off a man from New Jersey, which is one of the worst things you can do. A man from New Jersey! And I rolled down the window—why I do this, I don't know—to apologize again. This time I saw the fist coming toward me and I thought, now I'll know what it's like to have my jaw broken in five places. At the last minute, just seconds before making contact with my face, he pulled the punch and hit the side of the van instead. He walked off with his knuckles bleeding, cursing. I rolled up the window and pulled out. Why rush it?

 

 

I had a friend who wanted to rush it, because he was going into the Army and he'd never been punched out. So he went to his friend Paul and said, “Paul, I've never been punched out. But I'm drafted, I'm going into the Army. Please punch me out Paul, quick.” And Paul knocked him out.

I didn't want to go into the Army. I didn't want to get punched out. So I checked all the boxes. I admit it. I did it. I checked “homosexual” and “has trouble sleeping.” Where it asked “What do you do when you can't sleep?” I put that I drank.

My mother was at home at the time having an incurable nervous breakdown and I was studying acting.
I thought that if worse came to worse I would just act the way she was acting and I'd get out of the Army. But there was a guy in front of me who looked very much like me; we both had beards. They touched him first, on the shoulder, and he just went bananas. He flipped out and they took him away screaming.

Now how was I going to follow that? I was depressed on two counts. One, it looked like I was going to be drafted, and two, it looked like I was a bad actor.

 

 

Recently in Manhattan, I was up early on a Sunday for some reason. It's rare. If you're up early in New York City on a Sunday, there's a strange overlap between those who are up early and those who haven't gone to bed yet. I was down in the Canal Street subway station—concrete no man's land. There were no subways coming, no law and order down there. There was just this one other guy and he was coming toward me. I knew he wanted something—I could feel the vibes. He needed something from me, wanted something. He was about to demand something.

“Hey man, you got change for a quarter?”

“Uh, yeah, I think I do. Here—wait a minute, I got two dimes here and one, two, three, four pennies. How's that?”

“Nope.”

“Well, what are we going to do?”

“I got a quarter and a nickel. Got three dimes?”

“Yep, I do. Here.” And I counted them out carefully in his hand.

He turned, walked away, then turned back to me and said, “You only gave me two dimes, man.”

“Wait a minute. I'm very careful about money matters.”

Now, was this where I was going to make my stand?

“Very well. If you feel you need another dime, here.”

 

 

Renée has this upstairs neighbor who is a member of the Art Mafia. She has her own gallery in Soho, along with a drinking problem, and she is unbearable. She plays her quadrophonic machine at all hours, full blast, Bob Dylan's “Sarah,” over and over again. Something must have happened to her way back when that song was popular and she can't get it out of her head. She comes in drunk, puts it on at 1:30 in the morning. Now if it was I: 30 every morning, it would be great. It would be like feeding time, you know. You could get through it. You'd get used to it. But it's 1:35 or it's 2:10 or it's 4:14. You call the police but it does no good. She turns it down, they leave, she turns it up. You call the police again, they come, she turns it down, they leave, she turns it up. What can you do? You can't go to the landlord—he's Italian Mafia and lives in New Jersey.

I don't know which Mafia I dislike the most. I'm leaning toward liking the Italian Mafia because they are just immoral and still believe in mother and child. But the Art Mafia is immoral and, from what I can tell, they've stopped procreating.

So we're in Renée's apartment and I call up, “Please stop persecuting us.” And she sends down these young, new artists who have gotten rich and famous in New York, but are now camping out in sleeping bags until they find their niches. And they say, “Hey man. MAN. You know New York is Party City. That's why we
moved here. So we could have parties on weekday nights. If you don't like it, move to the country—OLD MAN.”

I try to practice my Buddhist Tolerance—I am turning all my cheeks to the wall at this point. I mean, really, Buddhist Tolerance in New York is just one big pacifist-escapist rationalization. Renée is not practicing it. She is pacing while steam comes screaming out of her navel.

Now there are some people who say that this woman should be killed. And I find that I'm not saying no. I don't protest it. They are talking about vigilantes.

I don't know the language. I knew the language when I was with my people in Boston in 1962, in whitebread homogeneous Boston, brick-wall Boston. In the old days, when I spoke a common language with my people, they had what was called the “hi-fi.” And when the hi-fi was too loud, all I had to do was call up and say, “Hi, Puffy. Spuddy Gray, down here. Yeah. You guessed it. The hi-fi is a little loud. Yeah. I wouldn't say anything but I've got an early dance class in the morning. Great. Thanks a lot. Yeah, Merry Christmas to you too, Puff.” Down it would go. You see I knew the language.

Now Renée knows the language because her father was in the Jewish Mafia. So she calls up, “Bet you want to die, right? Bitch! Bitch! Cunt! I'll beat your fucking face in with a baseball bat. Bitch!” And she slams down the phone. The music gets louder.

One day I was walking out the door carrying an empty bottle of Molson Golden. I guess I was going to get my nickel back. And I heard this party noise coming from upstairs and I was seized with gut rage. Maybe I'd had a few drinks and the rage finally made it to my gut.
Not that my intellect wasn't still working—it was going like a ticker tape, repeating that old adage, “All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely.” I just took the bottle and
hurled
it—my arm practically came out of its socket. It went up the flight of stairs, hit the door and exploded like a hand grenade. They charged out with their bats and guns. I ran. Because it was an act of passion, I had forgotten to tell Renée I was going to do it and she was behind me, picking up some plastic garbage bags or something. She was way behind me so when they got to her door they met up with her. But she was innocent and they recognized that. They recognized that she was truly innocent and they didn't kill her. So there's hope.

But I wonder, how do we begin to approach the so-called Cold War (or Now-Heating-Up War) between Russia and America if I can't even begin to resolve the Hot War down on Northmoor and Greenwich in lower Manhattan?

 

 

When I was in therapy about two years ago, one day I noticed that I hadn't had any children. And I like children at a distance. I wondered if I'd like them up close. I wondered why I didn't have any. I wondered if it was a mistake, or if I'd done it on purpose, or what. And I noticed that my therapist didn't have any children either. He had pictures of cats on the wall. Framed.

He may have changed since then, but my therapist was the kind who, if you asked him a personal question, would take the entire session to answer. You had to take the responsibility to stop him. You had to learn
to be selfish. So I always said that he was like a drinking partner, except we never went drinking and I paid for the drinks.

I asked him, “Why didn't you ever have any children?”

And he said, “Well, I was in Auschwitz when I was nineteen and the death marches were moving out as the Russians moved in. And I said to my friend, who was also nineteen, ‘I think now we have a beneficent Gestapo. Now we must run for it.' And my friend said, ‘No, I am too tired. I must first rest.' So I am watching him sleeping and I see blood from the corner of his mouth and I realize he is dead from exhaustion. So I run and escape and I make it to the border of Poland and Germany, and another death march of twenty thousand goes by, not so beneficent this time. They are shooting from horseback, and I surrender.

“They take us to the edge of this great pit and machine gun the whole lot of us. Everyone falls dead except maybe some twelve or fifteen who fall into the snow and live. I am one. I am shot in and around the genitals so it's a kind of automatic vasectomy. Two days later the Russians find me in the snow.”

I said, “Two days in the snow and you didn't freeze to death?”

“What . . .,” he answered, “it was just
snow.”
(And
I
was the one in therapy?)

“Listen, this is going to sound weird, but I really envy you.”

“What, are you one of those who think suffering en-nobles?”

“No, it's not that. We're all born by chance, no one asked to get born, but to be reborn by chance, to live like that, it must have made your life—you know—
much more conscious and vital. Things must have changed enormously for you. Also, you don't have to make a decision about whether or not to have kids. It must have changed your life in a very dynamic . . .”

“No. Uh-uh. Nothing changes, no. We thought that, you see. In the first reunions of the camps everyone was swinging, like a big sex club with the swinging and the drinking and the carrying on as though you die tomorrow. Everyone did what he wanted. The next time, not so much, not so much. The couples stayed together. The next time, we were talking about whether or not we could afford a summer home that year. Now when we meet, years later, people talk about whether or not radioactive smoke-detectors are dangerous in suburban homes. Nothing changes.”

 

 

So I got the role and I went to Bangkok. The only thing that I knew about Bangkok was that my hero Thomas Merton had died there. Thomas Merton was a hero of mine because he knew how to shut up. It's not that he wanted other people to stop talking, but he figured that people were chatting so much that someone had to keep the silence. He believed in the silence. And he believed in the power of silent prayer, so he became a Trappist. He got interested in Buddhism and the Trappists sent him to Southeast Asia to research Buddhism. He stepped out of a bathtub, touched an electric fan and died instantly. Judith Malina said it was a CIA plot but I don't know. I don't know.

I arrived in this city, 200 years old, 110 degrees, built on a swamp and sinking, and under my door was pushed this letter from Enigma Films—with the “a” upside
down—addressed to Spalding Gray, Esquire. It was my first major film for a British company—they spoiled me rotten. They referred to all of the actors as “artists.” They can get you to do anything that way.

The letter was dated May 6, 1983 and was from David Puttnam, the producer:

My first big scene was to be filmed on a soccer field outside of Bangkok. We were reenacting the 1975 evacuation of the American embassy in Phnom Penh. I was with Ira Wheeler, who was playing John Gunther Dean, the last American ambassador.

Ira is an interesting man—he used to be vice president of American Celanese Chemical. After he retired he was singing in a glee club in New York, where someone saw him and put him in Jane Fonda's
Rollover.
Now, at sixty-three years old, he was beginning his film career. If you live long enough I find it all comes full circle. Shortly after I arrived in Bangkok I found out that Ira served on the same ship in World War II as my Uncle Tinky. They were on an LST together in the Pacific.