In planning our trip, Andrew and I allotted as many days as possible for our time in Thailand. For me, this meant my semester break minus a week for travel time in China. But for Andrew, putting together the weekends and his Paid Time Off gave him around ten days in the Land of Smiles- about a week less than I had. We got to experience a lot together: two Muay Thai gyms, fights at the famous Lumpini Stadium and also in Pattaya, the wild, seedy streets of Pattaya, an afternoon trip to Koh Larn Island off of Pattaya, seeing the sites in Bangkok, and enjoying the cheap prices throughout Thailand.
It was Andrew's first time in Asia, so the ambiance and culture were surprising, fun, novel, and charming. Thanks to Andrew, I was able to experience and appreciate so much more than I would have alone. He brought his travel guides and he had researched our destinations, so we made wise use of our time and saw what Thailand had to offer outside the boxing ring. Unfortunately, we weren't able to visit a national park (Andrew's goal) or go on an elephant ride (my goal). Still, every day there was an adventure, and just being in Thailand, with its welcoming, foreigner-friendly culture, was an amazing experience. Andrew was constantly remarking how cheap everything was, and whenever the conditions were shocking, I was explaining to him how much better things were compared to China. ("But the drivers here stay in there lane, mostly, and there's an order to it. They're not honking their horns and scrambling through any opening they can find.")
There was one thing missing from our trip, though. Despite the exhilaration of experiencing a foreign country, training alongside professional boxers and a host of international amateurs, despite Andrew receiving some attention from the ladies and some attention from the trainers for his cauliflower ear ("Wow!" said Mr. Coke, "You must've had a taow-sand fights!), we hadn't experienced anything truly crazy. We had no incredible stories to tell.
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| Andrew was kind enough to send me this picture. Hold Ctrl and scroll on your mouse wheel to zoom in on the cauliflower.
I was thinking about this on our last night in Bangkok together, as we rode in a taxi to a bar street supposedly popular with tourists and locals alike. But we went there fairly early on a Thursday, so the street was quiet and the patio seating outside was mostly empty. The next morning, Andrew woke up before sunrise and I saw him off to his taxi, bound for the airport.
I was by myself in a lonely hotel room, not to see another American for the next five months. Nonetheless I was still thrilled to be in Thailand, spending my time walking around the local area in the evenings and attending work-outs during the day with only a handful of other boxers. So it seemed that the end of my trip would pass quietly, but at the end of one day's afternoon practice, Mr. Coke came in to the gym and happily announced to me, "There gonna be a movie here tomorrow. You gonna have a fight!"
A fight? I wondered. For a movie? What kind of movie, and what kind of fight? Thailand doesn't have American safety standards, stunt coordinators, and insurance policies. Are they going to just throw us in a ring and tell us to go at it?
"Kick him in the head!" Mr. Coke encouraged me as he walked back to the dining room, chattering in a loop about the movie.
The next morning I went for the six o'clock run and returned from the quiet, early morning streets to the 13 Coins parking lot, full of cars, pickup trucks, and a couple vans full of cables and equipment. People were everywhere, each somehow related to the production, although I could only separate people into general categories of cast or crew. Mr. Coke introduced me to the director, a silver-haired older gentleman who shook my hand and looked me over, and tole me he had a big name in the Thai film industry. A couple Thai-Americans were training at the gym that week, so I asked them what this film shoot was all about. They said Mr. Coke had connections to a production company that liked to film at 13 Coins Resort about every other month. They could use the walkways and garden area, and there were plenty of open spaces, empty buildings, and eclectic backgrounds to stage a variety of scenes. Sure enough, a few days later I saw a scene on TV of a kidnapped woman, bound in a chair, being rescued from an abandoned building and I recognized it as the concrete building at the far end of the parking lot that I jogged laps past every day.
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How is it to be part of a film shoot? Well, for my entire morning, as the lead actors filmed scenes of dialogue while walking through the resort's garden pathways, I busied myself by sitting and waiting. Mind you, it was anxiety-filled waiting. My opponent in the much-hyped fight scene arrived early on, and when he saw me, the nervous look he had in his eyes reminded me of seeing my real opponents at weigh-ins before a fight. So the question remained whether our fight was going to be choreographed or a real fight captured on film, and I felt bad about the idea of hitting some young Thai man I'd never met before, and also scared about this young Thai man I'd never met before hitting me. But the biggest cause for emotional strain, the chaos of the mind, was knowing that our scene was the final shot of the day, being saved for last, promoted by Mr. Coke ("Kick him in tha head! K.O.!"), and being eagerly awaited by the actors and extras who had been brought on set just so there would be a crowd around the fight cage. As the Thai actors filmed scene after scene, I kept asking myself, "Is this it? Is it time yet" Mike Tyson's legendary trainer Cus D'Amato said that having a fight is like going to the electric chair, where the dread weighs heavily on a fighter until he finally just wants to get the whole thing over with.
The other boxers training at the gym got in on one scene, lined up, hitting the heavy bags as the main characters walked past them discussing whatever business Thai serial characters discuss. My opponent and I had to sit that one out for continuity purposes (why would the fighters be hitting the bags with everyone else before their fight?), but halfway through watching them shoot and re-shoot the walk-by, the make-up artists started their work, wrapping our hands in thin bandages and applying fake blood to our faces.
The extras were gathered around the cage, Mr. Coke could not be contained as he shouted for more head kicks, and my opponent, the referee, and I were ushered into the cage. (The referee for the scene was the gym's trainer, Soren, wearing most of a referee's outfit- dress-shirt minus the bow-tie (I just thought I'd add another dash and hyphenated word to this sentence- T-shirt)). One of the lead actor's had a large hoop earring and an audacious ponytail; he came into the cage and gave my opponent and me a sequence of moves to perform on each other. I relaxed, thinking okay, this should be pretty simple. We went back and forth, play punching and kicking each other three or four times, then filming paused and the make-up artist rushed in to add more fake blood and spray mist to our faces, and the exuberant, pony-tailed actor (okay, I tried to be cute a couple sentences back by calling attention to the hyphens, so I have to question why ponytail is a compound word but pony-tailed operates under the logic of the hyphen), well, he started going through the move set again and encouraged us to play it up and make as big of movements and expressions as possible. Then he added another chain of techniques onto the end of what we'd been doing; about ten to twelve moves that moved us around and had me flying, knee-first, into the cage.
We worked on that some more, and then we had another round of make-up and choreography tips, but something had changed. The cast and crew seemed to want more and the director didn't stop the action when we stopped ours. Our choreography was over, I caught the last kick in the chain, but the pony-tailed ringleader was leading the cheers for us to go at it, and with a young Thai man whom I'd never met before gripping my head and throwing rough, play knees into my ribs, I went at it. Mind you, we were not throwing blows with bad intentions, but the scene quickly turned into a wild, free-for-all. The fighting was so sloppy (I wasn't applying fight strategy, just trying to play along with what my opponent did and throw some kicks back his way), and it must have looked so ugly on film, but the director can edit the cuts together however he wants, so it's better to just get a lot of material on film. And that's what he did. I was getting exhausted from the wild, free-for-all fighting and a little banged up from the knees and kicks thrown without caution. The scene had a playground fight feel to it- we were two guys without any animosity towards each other, just thrown into something so everyone else could watch, goad us on, and witness two guys take turns pummeling each other. And, just like the tussles from my elementary school memories, the playground supervisors were either not caring about the ongoing bedlam or turning a blind eye until the clamor of the crowd and the tempo of the action died down.
When the take was called to a halt, Mr. Coke and everyone seemed elated about it, and as I stepped to the side to lean against the fence, catching my breath and having my make-up fixed, three older Thai ladies started talking to me. They spoke English, I was surprised to find out, and one of them was telling me that her friend liked me- really liked me. I looked across the cage at the young Thai lady who had been staring at me from the start with such intensity that I thought she wanted to eat me. But I broke free from her Medusa gaze and turned back to read the older Thai lady's body language and intuit that she was speaking about one of the other grandmotherly women. It was too late to pretend I didn't speak English and walk away, so I just smiled awkwardly and tried to politely answer questions about where I was from and how old I was. When I told them I was on vacation from teaching in China, they echoed what I'd heard from several other Thai's during the trip: "You look Chinese." In China, I look "so handsome," in Thailand, I look Chinese. Well, pretty much everywhere I look some variant of Chinese/Japanese/Vietnamese/Asian mix. I played the "Two Truths and a Lie" party game once and said that my dad met my mom in Okinawa, and when I exposed that as the lie, one woman said, "Aw, I had this romantic image in my head and that story sounded so sweet."
Well, the fight had to come to a close, so the choreographer decided that I would be kicked in the stomach, and as I leaned forward, my opponent would finish me off with a flying knee. We shot this sequence three or four times, and on the last take my opponent landed the knee and I took the full impact on my eye socket and forehead. But the show must go on, and I used the pain to fuel my method acting, lying unconscious-like on the mat. After his hand was raised and the extras in the audience went wild, my opponent came over and held his hands together in the Thai style, apologizing to me, but I just told him don't worry ("Mai bpenrai") because I knew they could use it for the final cut; they better have used it in the final cut.
After the film shoot wrapped up, the crew gave me 1000 Thai baht ($33) and a T-shirt with the name of the TV show on it. I had a nice story to tell and I was eager to find my episode online and show it to all of my American friends. My enthusiasm cooled quickly as I spent my remaining days confined to my hotel room in Thailand, incapacitated with traveler's diarrhea. I'll spare the gross details save one: the air conditioner in Andrew's and my room constantly dripped through the ceiling tiles and we had been catching the water in the trashcan. It started spilling over the top one day as I was watching Discovery Channel (the only English channel I had), and I knew that, sick as I was, I had to get up and pour it out. Now, Andrew and I had resorted to using the trash can because it was the only large container in the hotel room, but as it was also our only trash can, it also held all of our garbage. That water-filled trashcan was not the worst thing I can imagine thrusting my hands into, but if there were a Family Feud category for "Things I Don't Want to Thrust My Hands Into" it would have made the list.
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| "Flowing lava? Number One answer!" |
You can watch my scene here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRoyGNHFC5I&feature=youtu.be
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