It would have been great to have had a real friend to travel with. It would have been even better to have had a real boyfriend to travel with. Instead, when I decided to go to Cambodia in the spring of 1994 for the Cambodian New Year celebration, I had Tyler. A former navy sailor, Tyler was the smartest and worldliest American I’d met in Chiang Mai and my most recent companion of last resort. He was handsome in a mean and careless all-star way, one of those guys who winked at plain women on the street knowing it would make them blush. I couldn’t have been less interested in him romantically, which was saying something, since what I really could have used at that point was romance. But that didn’t seem to be Tyler’s core strength anyway. While stationed in the Philippines, he’d met, married, and abandoned a local woman after he couldn’t get a Catholic divorce. He then moved to Chiang Mai, where he rented a two-story wooden house on the outskirts, turning the ground floor into an English-language classroom. I chose not to inquire about his current love life, but Tyler otherwise seemed relatively respectful of the local population; his Thai was impeccable, and having developed a serious book habit during long, tedious hours on a submarine, he read ambitiously in both Thai and English. If nothing else, we could talk about literature together, and we did.
The most noteworthy thing about Tyler was the way he peed at night. His toilet was located on the first floor of the house, a steep and narrow staircase away from his upstairs bedroom. To avoid a precarious descent in the dark of night down what was more a ladder than a flight of stairs, he’d rigged a long plastic tube from the first-floor toilet up the side of the house to the window of his second-floor bedroom. At night, he’d simply release into the plastic tube and the runoff would make its way into the bowl. Tyler’s system, alas, did not accommodate women.
He was kind of a solo operator generally. Though he and I didn’t know each other well, we managed to find something to fight about while waiting for our flight to Phnom Penh. Before boarding, we mutually decided to go our separate ways. My travels in Asia were too precious to be compromised by bad company.
“You can take the hostel,” I said to Tyler at the airport; we’d reserved a room with two beds in the city’s tiny backpacker ghetto. “I’ll find somewhere else.” This was easier said than done. It was early days in Cambodia’s tourism revival and accommodations were hard to come by. The nascent tourist industry hadn’t been helped when, three months prior to my trip, a professor from the University of Texas was kidnapped and killed by rogue Khmer Rouge fighters while she was visiting a temple outside Angkor Wat. Phnom Penh, the capital, was still dominated by UN forces and NGOs; the Khmer Rouge, who had been deposed more than a decade earlier, had yet to go on trial for crimes against humanity. There was only one luxury hotel in the entire country, a gleaming Sofitel for people of note; everyone else scattered into the remaining run-down establishments.
By sheer luck I wound up at the Renakse, an elegantly dilapidated French colonial hotel directly across from the Royal Palace. It was a step up from my usual grubby guesthouse, but I wanted to avoid bumping into Tyler within the cluster of budget accommodations. The Renakse, as it happened, was the prime hangout for a kind of expat very different from those populating Chiang Mai. Instead of missionaries and sex tourists, there were academics, artists, and nonprofit workers from Europe and the United States. So here were the people I’d been fruitlessly searching for abroad.
Despite parting ways with my ostensible traveling companion and making that departure much easier, I soon found good company. Based on title alone, I’d picked up a copy of Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray, the theater director, monologist, and author, and begun reading it on the plane. Whenever I travel, I try to pack at least three times as many books as can be expected to read, so as to always have on hand something that fits my mood at a given moment. I would load these books in my backpack, and then, unless they were truly disappointing, I would haul them back. Reading was so much a part of any journey that I hated to leave my Book of Books out, preferring to watch the accumulation of titles in its pages signal a trip well traveled—it meant I had plenty of time on trains and buses, and good reading lamps in my hotels. But Bob usually didn’t come with me; as soon as I would get home, I copied the titles and authors into his pages, the more, the better. This marked the end of every voyage, making it complete.
Especially when I chose the right book. It’s hard to describe the intensity of emotion reading Swimming to Cambodia, Gray’s monologue about his experiences playing a small role in the movie The Killing Fields. But it was immediate and all-consuming. Spalding Gray was my first literary crush.
There was no romance in this fervor, but rather a sense of total and complete identification. True, Spalding Gray was a New England Protestant who’d spent years working in avant-garde theater in Soho, and I was a near-unemployed college grad from Long Island. I didn’t share Gray’s struggles with drinking or his depression or the legacy of a suicidal mother. But I’d never, in reading a personal narrative, felt such a close affinity with a writer; it was as if we viewed the world through a shared lens. I found funny what he found funny and sad what he found sad. When I read him, I felt like I appreciated what he wrote in the way he wanted to be appreciated, and that he would have appreciated that.
Like me, Spalding was a compulsive narrator. That’s what led to his odd job of monologuing and one-man theater, and to writing his stories down in book form. “Stories seem to fly out of me and stick,” he explained in the preface to Sex and Death to the Age 14. “So I never wonder whether, if a tree falls in the forest, will anyone hear it. Rather, who will tell about it?” He began telling stories in college, when he got into a habit of recounting his day to his fellow employees at the Katharine Gibbs School, where he worked at night. Later, he told them to his girlfriend: “It felt as if I was peeling them off and dropping them in her lap so I could breathe again.” Yes.
What was so impressive about Spalding’s stories was that he didn’t have to make them up. The events he described actually happened and he hadn’t sought them out. “I saw vivid stories coming at me from the outside,” he explained. Moreover, he was—or at least he came across as—unsparingly honest. Even when he embellished, he did it for dramatic effect and not to make himself come across better. It wasn’t that he didn’t have insecurities—he did, otherwise I never would have been able to relate to him—but his way of overcoming them or at least dealing with them was to storify and share them. He was doing what I only wished I could do.
Just reading Spalding seemed to magically forge connections to like-minded people. After noticing me reading Swimming to Cambodia over breakfast at the Renakse one morning, a documentary filmmaker staying down the hall asked me to join him for coffee. His previous projects had included work with the makers of The Killing Fields, and now he was making a film about land mines for the PBS series Nova. At the time, Cambodia had one land mine for every seven inhabitants.
We talked about Swimming to Cambodia and William Shawcross’s Sideshow, which I’d recently read, and then, as if these books gained me passage, he invited me to join him and his friends on a boat they chartered on the Mekong River every Friday afternoon.