at our feet. Michael had convinced Johnny that the mosquito coils were deadly poison, and I agreed with him. That smoke has got to be toxic. Still, at times it was necessary. I woke up much earlier than the other two and crept from the creaking room.
Kum had a wife, Dee, and two sons, the younger of whom was called Suphumvit and was beautiful in his hammock crib that rose in steep walls around his dense little body. Dee was also beautiful, with a warm matronly body and a smile that lit up her face and squeezed her eyes shut. She was always laughing, and the three of us got along great, Dee and Suphumvit and I. We sat on the front porch that morning while everyone else was still asleep, and I held Suphumvit and we ate mango. After I finished the mango, I put the plate down on the tile floor and washed the copius juice off my face and hands and arms. By the time I got back, the plate was crawling with several types of ants. I could hear Michael in my head singing, “Don’t worry, the ants will get it.”
After everyone else woke up, we went out to get Johnny weighed in and find an opponent for him. The event was being organized at a wat, or temple; it was jammed with men and boys, and the drinking had already started. As Johnny weighed in, the Thais crowded around to see him. An older Thai wanted to fight him, a tall, thin, mustachioed man with tattoos on his shoulders, but Kum wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not sure whether Johnny would have killed this guy or this guy would have killed Johnny. They started with the music, traditional Thai stuff, and began a sort of mini-parade around the wat, dancing and twisting their arms. They gestured for Johnny to join in, and like a good sport, he did, stepping delicately in his imitation Tevas.
We rode in the back of a different pickup that night out to the festival, and got there as the sun was setting. It was a small-town fairground, with Porta-Potties and garish lights strung up and little vendors selling everything. The area where the fights were going to be was cordoned off, and we went in there and found a corner of the grass to set up on.
The ring was homemade and small and lit by a string of four bright, bare bulbs that hung diagonally over it. The fights began with really little kids, maybe eight or nine, but the crowd followed closely and shouted and cheered. The kids were deadly serious, although they couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt each other too much (although one little boy was cut by an elbow), and the crowd rejoiced ecstatically.
Johnny was getting nervous, jumpy. He had been putting on a relaxed face all day, but now the nerves were setting in. He started to get his prefight massage from Kum, lying on a couple of towels on the pavement in the parking lot. Kum and I were going to be his cornermen.
It was a wild scene, with a cheerful, carnival atmosphere. The thick outdoor crowd milled tightly around the ring, hundreds of people drunk and shouting. There wasn’t another foreign face for a hundred miles. Because his fight was delayed through three or four matches, Johnny was getting more anxious. He had warmed up and then cooled off, which wastes energy. Kum was also angry, and insulted. I think Johnny was something of a draw, and Kum was a man of some standing around town.
Before the fight, Johnny danced the full wai khru and ram muay that the Lumpini fighters do, and the crowd roared its approval, cheering him on; the Thai fight enthusiasts always love it when the farang respect their traditions. The wai khru and ram muay are traditional dances that all Thai fighters perform before they fight, dances to honor their families and teachers. The dance appeases superstitious spirits but also centers the fighter, brings him back to himself. The musicians played throughout the fight, blowing and thumping with cigarettes in their hands.
After he finished, Johnny looked at me and the heaving sea of brown faces and said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
Johnny had a right to be scared. He was fighting a Thai who had been born into the sport. The Thai looked young, but just the fact that he was Thai was scary enough: He might be sixteen, but have five years and fifty fights.
In the beginning of the fight, Johnny dominated. He was bigger and stronger, and every time they clinched, Johnny would throw his man to the ground. But there was a cost. He was too tense, too worked up, and tiring quickly. After every clinch, his hands were lower; he was obviously struggling for air. Kum was trying to get through to him, calling, “Sabai sabai,” and I was translating, yelling, “Relax!” at him. Kum picked it up, and trying to be heard over the din, began yelling with me, “Re-lax!”
Johnny counted himself out in the third—just lay back on the ropes and gestured “No more” to the referee. The other fighter couldn’t believe it and threw his hands in the air like he’d just won a title. I was angry with John at first, although I understood the line of fear and exhaustion he was walking. He wasn’t hurt at all, just completely out of breath, and I knew within twenty seconds he was going to be wondering why he had quit like that. He was quiet on the way home. We sat in the pickup bed and watched the stars.
Eventually, we talked a little about the fight, just Johnny and me. We came through to a rationale. The problem was breathing. Whenever Johnny was in the clinch, straining to throw his opponent down, for a split second he would hold his breath. This was a deadly mistake because with muay Thai you are operating at your anaerobic threshhold for almost the entire fight. Those split-second breath holds were killing Johnny. Kum and the other trainers can’t talk about this with us (here the language gap makes itself felt), but breathing is critical. In the clinch, what the Thais do is stay loose, stay on their toes, and breathe. There isn’t any straining or wrestling, or if there is, it is quick, smooth moves in rhythm with the breathing.
Johnny was unhurt, but his voice was shaky. I could tell he was angry and a little ashamed to have lost the fight, but as we talked and figured out what had happened, he cheered up, and by the time the sun rose the next day, he was back to his old form, cracking jokes about everything he saw.
The next morning, Kum commandeered a truck, and we rode through the countryside in the hot sun, past rice paddies and thick forest, and stopped and wandered up to a waterfall. We all stripped down to our underwear for a dip and annoyed the hell out of a Thai teenager and his girlfriend who were up there for a make-out session.
After the swim, Kum took us to a Buddhist monastery, a huge complex up in the mountains that stood on a cliff and overlooked the valley. There were monkeys in dismal cages and a strange sculpture garden depicting the afterlife of a bad person. It was deeply disturbing, a wide area filled with hundreds of human-size wooden carvings. There were demons with animal heads and human bodies attacking the humans: cutting into a pregnant woman’s stomach, piercing eyeballs—real serious gore. The carvings were all painted to look lifelike. Over all this presided two huge statues, twenty feet tall, thin and wooden in the same style: a man and a woman with their skin flayed off and their eyes melted out and their tongues hanging past their waists.
We went back to Kum’s house and then wandered down through the one-road village to the square and grabbed some folding chairs. We sat there for a parade of elephants, all dressed out in finery and ridden by monks and children. Some of the elephants were walking billboards for Red Bull and Coca-Cola. There were a few hundred people in the square, mostly children running and shrieking and carrying on. Several columns of dancers in traditional costume came through. Although we were all exhausted from the unfamiliar sun—living at the camp, we never got any sun, as we were training under cover and resting through the days—we sat stoically through it.
After the parade was finished, we wandered back down to Kum’s house. On the way there I saw an elephant handler, a big, heavily muscled, tattooed guy punch his wife, hard, in the stomach, and Johnny saw it, too. I thought we should do something, but Johnny, from inner-city Montreal, said to just stay out of it. I looked around for Kum, but he was far behind us. The moment passed, and I did nothing. So much for the tough fighters.
Then there was the participatory parade around the village that we joined in—strangely crowded for such a small village—an endless line of trucks and vans and people. There was music, and we danced as we walked, and people sprayed us with water, which was welcome in the stifling heat. The Thais seemed happy to have us there, and we were happy to be there, willing to enjoy ourselves.
That night we caught the rickety old run-down bus that passed through town. It was full of people and children and chickens, so we clambered up onto the luggage rack and prostrated ourselves on the bags and baskets. The night air was thick with fat white locusts. We stayed as flat as possible, with our mouths clamped shut, watching the stars roll by. It was a mad, dreamlike ride, and I kept eyeballing the cheap, shitty welds that held the rack to the bus and thinking that we might go around a corner and the rack would shear off, that this is how tourists die in Southeast Asia, but the night was shimmering and the magic of travel and silence took away my free will.
Back in camp, time stretched on and on, but t