Sometimes I would take the afternoon nap in the hammocks that hung by the fence right next to the rings, cooler with a breath of air off the swamp. The swamp out back was full of high grass, stretching out to infinity, and there were often elephants and handlers hanging out there, sometimes right against our chain-link fence, the elephants methodically tearing the grass and eating it, and the handlers sleeping beneath them or nearby. I would lie diagonally in the small Thai hammock and maybe three feet away an elephant would be grazing peacefully, and his handler resting, and all of us dozing in the steady thrush of the elephant’s trunk curling and ripping long bunches of grass.
At three-thirty we’d start again—jogging (a far shorter distance, just a couple of miles), then another full training session, during which the pad rounds and sparring and clinching might go on longer and the sparring would be a bit more aggressive. We’d finish with a few rounds of shadowboxing—the Lumpini fighters would do it while holding five-pound dumbbells—and then sit-ups and push-ups and all the rest: shower–hot tub–shower, and the grueling cycle was finally done for the day by five-thirty. At night, the goal was to do as little as possible, just to get some rest and stay hydrated for the next morning’s run.
The days crawled by. At first, each day felt endless, and then they began to flow together. After three weeks, I could stumble through four rounds of pad work with Apidej, and my kicks were finally acquiring some snap. I now had massive, horny calluses instead of bloody blisters on the balls of my feet. The tender feet of the farang were often a problem; because of the two training sessions and rough canvas and stone floors, the foreigners often tore their feet up, got them infected, and had to go to the hospital. Actually, I was the only farang I knew who stayed for long at Fairtex and never went to the hospital once.
When I first started with the pad rounds, I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to scream like the Thais did. Finally, one day, maybe a month in, I just started doing it, yelling “Aish!” with every kick, my voice a few notes lower than those around me. I remember a Lumpini fighter named Neungsiam (the best fighter in the camp), who looked at me as I got out of the ring, and nodded. I was beginning to get it. Neungsiam and I would eventually become friends. He was my age, had been a Lumpini superstar at eighteen, had quit for a few years, and was now making his comeback. He was a tranquil guy, with pinpoint punching. He would come hang out in my room and we would bullshit in English, Thai, and sign language. I showed him pictures of the girls I hung out with in L.A., and I think that cemented the friendship. He loved those blond girls and thought maybe I could hook him up.
During my stay at Fairtex, I lived in the cheapest room. It was at the top of the stairs, above the rings, and hot and airless and foul with stale sweat, even with both windows open and the fan going. The room was small and high-ceilinged, maybe fifteen feet wide and twenty-five long. It was noisy, with traffic across the swamp and the boys calling and adults hollering and sandals flapping in the hall outside. There was the murmur of talk and breeze, the dogs occasionally barking like mad. There was barely space for the three people in there, the broke-ass lifers; the other farang who came through stayed for weeks or even days, and they all stayed in a nicer set of rooms with—God forbid—air-conditioning.
In our room, we slept on three single mattresses on the floor, evenly spaced, with green-and-white-checked bedspreads and sheets; girls would wash them about once a month. It was a little dirty, but we had wooden straw brooms if we wanted to sweep up (we didn’t). In addition to standing portable closets that were fairly useless, we had a little table and two chairs. Our stuff was strewn everywhere, or piled high in the corners. The mice would sometimes hide in it, and we couldn’t be bothered to chase them out. Despite the roughness, it was a haven for us, a refuge, where I spent a lot of time reading. By the end of my six months, I had something like two hundred English paperbacks stacked around the room.
There were two guys in the room when I got there, Michael and Johnny. Michael was Italian Swiss, a short, stocky man, slightly balding with thick, curly black hair and a hairy chest. He had been at Fairtex for three or four months already and had fought twice, winning both times against Thais. He spoke English, and, although he and Johnny at first resented my intrusion into their little domain, he was friendly to me.
There were ants everywhere, and when Michael spilled food, he would look at me in false shock and then sing, in his heavily accented English, “Don’t worry, the ants will get it.” And the ants would get it, just like they got everything; if you were drinking some juice and put the cup down, the next time you glanced at it there would be ants swarming thick along the rim. On the floor, on the table, it didn’t matter. Sometimes the big ants would wake you up at night when they ran over you. You got used to it.
Michael would also frequently go to Pattaya, a capital for the tourist sex trade, and when he got back, he would spend hours detailing his exploits in lascivious detail for Johnny. He tried to tell me about them until I made it clear I didn’t really want to hear what he had been up to. When the lights went out, he would talk with Johnny in his silky, low accent and chuckle to himself in an evil, delighted little burble.
Michael spoke a fair bit of Thai, and he fought at Samrong, the same place I would, and I went to see his last fight, against a Frenchman who trained out on the islands. It was agonizing to watch Michael chase this guy around, without the energy or the snap to connect with anything. The other guy wasn’t much better but was in slightly better shape, and that’s all it took. After that fight, Michael hung around, half-training, and then left Fairtex to go look at other, cheaper camps. He became convinced that his victories had been fixed, that he couldn’t have beat a Thai. I only spent maybe a month with Michael.
Johnny Deroy, on the other hand, I spent four and half months with. He was nineteen and this was the first time he had ever been out of Montreal. After finishing high school, he flew to Thailand to pursue his dream of being a muay Thai fighter. Before he left Canada, he dreamt that he had been stung by a scorpion on his leg but survived it, and he had a scorpion tattooed on his leg. He had gone north at first to a camp at Chiang Mai and been ignored and robbed. Instead of giving up, he found his way to Fairtex.
I was deeply impressed by his courage. When I was his age, I had gone backpacking around Europe, which is a far cry from Southeast Asia. Like Michael, Johnny didn’t like me at first, but we warmed up talking about movies and The Simpsons and then got along famously. He taught me to swear in gutter Canadian French, and I helped him with his English.
He was small, thin, and leanly muscled with a narrow, angular face. He would stand in front of the full-length mirror with his arms raised and yell, “I’m nature’s greatest miracle!” completely tongue-in-cheek.
I had been at Fairtex for about two months when Johnny got his first fight. Kum set it up back at his village, Chayaphum, where there was going to be a festival, and so naturally there would be fights. Johnny asked me to come (Michael had just left), and although it would break my training, I knew he would like to have a friend around. I was also curious to see some of the countryside.
On the second weekend in May, we packed up and took a cab from Fairtex to the bus station, Kum slick in his Fairtex jacket and movie-star hair. The bus station was the size of a major airport, a massive, chaotic edifice of concrete. I didn’t see any farang among the maze of levels and stairs crowded with people, and it wasn’t surprising, because you would have to be able to speak Thai. There weren’t many signs or numbers that I could see—I would have been completely lost on my own. The farang buses all left from Khao San, where tourists were herded together and charged five times the normal price. In Thailand, there is a 300 percent tax on foreigners, and it’s still an inexpensive place. I had flown there on an airplane; compared to most Thais, I was a millionaire.
We rode the bus, air-conditioned and smelling sweet, for about four hours, and then disembarked in a little town. Kum wandered around until he found a guy with a pickup truck who agreed to take us in the bed out to Kum’s house, about a forty-minute ride, with a few other Thais, who stared openly at us. The villages were havens for chickens and dogs, and the jungle walled us in.
Kum’s house was a big place for the village, with a tiled ground floor lined with glass cabinets. There was running water; a single spigot in the house filled a large concrete cistern in the only bathroom, on the first floor. This cistern or pool was ubiquitous; you’d find it in restaurants and hostels in Bangkok. There was a plastic bowl floating in it for dumping water, usually freezing cold, over your head. There was no toilet paper, but we’d brought some.
The second floor was bare, uneven, and unpainted wood. We slept in a big room there, in a line on little pads, a mosquito coil burning