It’s Saturday night, my second week in Phuket, and I’m at the fights in Nai Harn beach, along with most everybody else from Tiger. The card is a mix of Thais and ferang, some of them from our gym and some from Dragon, down the road, and some from Simba Muay Thai, a gym with which we apparently have a rivalry, like in an 80s summer camp comedy. I’m four rows back from the ring, in a knot of other guys from Tiger, with six cans of warm beer in a plastic bag at my feet; it’s Chang, which is the shittiest brand of Thai beer. The ring’s set up in a wooded park a ways off from the beach, and it’s a sticky night with no breeze, and I’m actually wearing jeans for the first time in I don’t know how long, because this felt like a special occasion. I’m sweating.
We’d eaten dinner at a restaurant on the beach, figuring to miss the kid fights at the bottom of the card, but there are still a few to go. The two in the ring as we’re sitting down are about eight years old. It’s a rough fight, and the next one is even rougher, ending in a knockout by elbow. There’s a German-looking guy braced behind one of the corner posts, videotaping the fight. A little blonde boy lolls around at his feet, creamy and tow-headed, spitting distance from the fighters. By this point I’ve seen enough kids boxing that it feels commonplace, even boring, but the German boy rekindles some of the strangeness for me; he’s maybe three years younger than the boys he’s watching but is essentially of a different species. That kid’s not good for anything, I think to myself.
The real fights get underway. A gang of Thais crowd behind the corner of the ring nearest us, practically on top of one another. I start making bets with Bruno, a big hairy French-Canadian sitting behind me. He’s got a growly voice like a cartoon dog. All my picks win, and all of his lose; we keep going double or nothing. I finish up my second Chang and get a cigarette from the guy in front of me. Every drag makes the air press down heavier on my skin, but I soldier through it.
The next fight is a Tiger-Simba matchup. Our man is a stocky black guy, shorter than the Simba fighter by at least six inches. It’s Bruno’s turn to pick; we both agree that Simba is the safer bet, but Bruno doesn’t want to bet against our gym. I don‘t have any problem with it. The fight goes the full five rounds. Simba dominates the first four; the height difference is an issue, and Tiger can’t sort it out. He keeps throwing a flashy spinning kick, like you see in Tae Kwon Do, again and again throughout the fight even though it isn’t working; he’s at loose ends. Simba leverages his extra inches to land a lot of solid-looking overhead elbows; Tiger manages not to bleed, improbably. He rallies in the fifth, but it’s not enough. Now I’m up six hundred baht.
I get up and go over to the food tables. I consider an ice cream but opt instead for a skewer of deep-fried cocktail franks. The meat is lukewarm and practically dissolve in my mouth. I finish it and order another.
The fights keep going. I open another Chang, but it‘s warmer than the night air, and I end up pouring it out. I don’t feel well at all; I get up again and wander in the dark amongst the trees. There are at least five fights left, I figure. The prospect of staying to the end turns quickly from a chore to an ordeal to an impossibility. I hastily say my goodbyes and head out. Serendipitously, a group is heading back to Tiger right then, in a touk-touk. One of them is a Scottsman, insensibly drunk, and the others are escorting him home, so that he won‘t try to ride back on his scooter and die; I have to help a guy with a huge beard wrestle him into the cab. It’s the Scottsman’s last night, and he is very mournful about something, but it isn’t clear what. “He’s so damned pretty,” he says, a couple of times.
On the ride back my extremities feel tingly and brittle. I’m not sweating at all now. Me and the bearded guy discuss the Tiger-Simba fight. There’s a girl with us too, Cerie, a Midwesterner whom I met on my first day; she’s been teaching in English in Korea, like a lot of people here. When I first talked to her, she seemed a little overwhelmed and asked a lot of questions, but since then she’s come to understand her prestigious position as one of the few women at a Muay Thai camp, and grown accordingly more haughty towards me.
The driver drops us off at the Scottsman’s hotel, a little ways down the road from mine. I leave his friends to wrangle him home. Once I’m through my front door, the fever kicks in as if wired to the light switch. There is a thin layer of hot sweat trapped beneath my skin, which interferes with everything. Thirty seconds of a cold shower sends me rocketing in the opposite direction, and I am under the blankets, still wet, stabbing at the fan with its remote control to turn it off.
It goes on like this for a long time, hot and cold, frightening and tedious. At times I get so cold that the tremors of heat are almost pleasurable when they come. I cue up public radio podcasts on my laptop, and then forget about them, and then slip in and out of conversation with them. I feel badgered by presences and periodically uncomfortable with my nudity; over and over I realize that I am by myself, but this doesn’t bring any comfort, or even much lucidity; I struggle all night with a notion of my blankets as some kind of complicated apparatus, with four stages, the third of which keeps eluding me, and which I’ll be tested on at some point before morning.
It’s still dark when the fever finally breaks, but I can hear roosters crowing. I’m so relieved to find the world in order that it takes me awhile to notice how shitty I feel. There is a huge bubble in my stomach whose contours are so manifest that my flat belly in the mirror seems impossible. All I want to do is shit and fart but I can’t do either.
I spend most of Sunday in my room. I make myself eat a couple of times, rice and bananas. I’m not drinking enough water and I know it, but my stomach’s so bloated that I don’t care. In the evening the fever returns and stays for a couple of hours.
The next day is only a little better. By now people have noticed my condition and are eager to help. The brisk lady who runs the hotel presses a couple of lozenges on me; the packaging reads “anti-flatulence,” which would seem to be exactly what I don’t need, but I’m in no condition to argue. And there is Tuschka, a friendly and sinister Bulgarian covered in small, blurry tattoos. He gives me two packets of a powder called Szmekna. “You put in water—a little water,” he explains to me. “Two hours? You take again. And then…” He puts his thumb and forefinger together and nods decisively, as if at that point all this will be behind us.
I take all of it and more, but nothing helps much. My stomach continues to balloon, invisibly. I’ve already missed a day of training, and tomorrow is clearly a wash; the idea that this might be an indefinite condition starts to take hold. I sit at a chair by the pool, reading a dense fantasy novel I found at an internet café and regarding the people around me—capable of training but blithely not training—with a physical bitterness. I take my second packet of Szmekna. When the fever comes on again around sunset, I’m just about at wits end, but I drink six liters of water in ten minutes, and it retreats. The next morning I manage to shit a little, which feels like my first unalloyed triumph since coming to Thailand. In the afternoon I go running for an hour; I have to stop and throw up halfway through, but I’m right alongside an open sewer at the moment—more serendipity—and I feel better afterwards in any case.
The day after that, which is Wednesday, I’m back at the gym, though there isn’t any training in the morning, because they’ve brought in some monks to bless the grounds. We’re all invited to come watch the blessing. On my way over I fall in beside Cerie, who is dressed in short shorts and a top that’s really just a sports bra. Casually as I can, I suggest that if she has a t-shirt or something it might be good to put it on, out of respect for the monks, who have many of the same hangups about women and their bodies as monks of other religions. She looks at me like I’ve told her she has sweet tits. It serves me right, since I guess I said it mostly to make her feel bad. The blessing is interminable, and I’m not in any shape to eat any of the breakfast after. But training that afternoon goes well enough that I can convince myself I’ve recovered 100%.
Both sessions on Fridays at Tiger start with light sparring for twenty minutes straight, then some pads and bagwork before sparring hard for three more rounds; it’s Western boxing in the morning, Thai boxing in the afternoon. A three minute round can feel very long sometimes; twenty minutes of boxing is an eternity under any circumstances. This Friday I’m paired up with an Englishman named Ken. He’s about my size, with four or five professional fights, but he’s gotten a little out of shape since then. Ken and I get along very well as sparring partners, and though we start out light, it escalates, so that by two minutes in we’re going pretty hard; we try to keep the weight out of our straight punches—or I do, at least—but a punch thrown quickly will land with some force, regardless.
Class is sparsely attended that morning, and we zigzag like a couple of drunks over a wide, empty expanse of floormats, dominating one another by intervals, pausing every now and then to grin at how impossibly long this has been going on for. For a few stretches—twenty seconds or so, probably, but they feel longer—I find myself boxing with uncharacteristic inspiration: I pull off a few relatively elaborate feints; I slip down and to the outside of punches I would typically just absorb into my forearms, to pop up somewhere inconvenient; I suss out things he’s up to and preempt them with punches of my own. Towards the end I land a left hook to the body—always my gimpiest punch—that nearly folds him double for a moment. When it’s over, my left eye is already going black, and we’re both a little punch-drunk and pleased with ourselves and each other and that it‘s over.
I limp through the rest of class, but by lunchtime I can barely sit up straight, I‘m so tired. The smart thing would be to skip out on the afternoon session, but it’s my last day of classes at Tiger; I go back to Bangkok on Monday. I take a nap and wake up and drink an off-brand Thai Redbull, and then ten minutes later I drink another, a different kind, with a picture of a shark on it.
The afternoon training gets underway and I feel all right, at least at first. I spend twenty minutes sparring with a gangly British kid who stumbles back endlessly, making me chase him; it makes us both look bad. I start out light as I can, to show him there’s nothing to be afraid of, but it doesn’t make any difference; after awhile I start hitting him in the face every chance I get. I’m spaced out and pissy by the end of it.
We shadowbox awhile, and then do three rounds on the heavy bags, and then it’s time to spar again. I pull on my shin guards and start to tape my toes—I’ve bent them sparring at least a half dozen times this trip, and each time hurts worse than the one before—but my feet are too sweaty and so I give it up.
My first partner is another Brit, Jamie, my height but a world more muscled. I can’t land a thing on him, and he gets me hard a couple of times; we’d been an even match on Wednesday, but I don’t think much about it. Next up is a tall, curly-haired guy I haven’t seen before, and we tangle our limbs together to little end. In between the second round and the third I am daydreaming about all the television I’ll watch tonight in bed.
My last partner is Soren. He’s a short, oafish Swede, with a gut, and dull eyes beneath a sloped brow and ravaged hairline. We’ve sparred a couple of times before; he can‘t box for shit, but he’s strong and doesn’t know how to hold anything back. We square up. His whole body is tensed; his hands vibrate in their gloves. As I’m watching them vibrate, he punches me in the face. I circle around him a bit, trying to focus. He kicks; it’s clumsy and slow; I watch it arc upwards, into my ribs, hard. It hurts; I’m irritated. I snap a kick back at him, and my big toe catches his elbow and bends back a ways. An electric shock runs most of the way up my leg. I grit my teeth and stomp around for a few moments before I can compose myself. We square off again, and my whole foot throbs crazily; I’m furious that I’ve hurt my foot, and it’s Soren’s fault, for being such a clumsy fatass; he doesn‘t have any business being here; he kicks me in the ribs again. I roll my eyes. One of the trainers asks if I should stop, maybe, and I sigh and start to strip my gloves off, like a piqued little lordling who’s forfeited a joust.
Saturday I limp around in a funk, eating ice cream and popping anti-inflammatories. At lunch Bruno carries a tiny prostitute across the hotel dining room, trailed by four of her tiny friends, all of them shrieking with laughter. I go to Patong that evening, planning to see a movie, but there’s nothing I want to see. Sunday morning I’m on a flight to Bangkok.
I walk out of the airport and get into the first cab I see. I have a printout with the name and address of the gym—but written out in Roman letters, not Thai—and a mobile number and below that, two square inches of a Google map. I show it to the driver as I’m sitting down, and he glances at it and nods. We’re already getting on the highway once I realize how little English he has, and that he can’t seem to read the address.
He barks at me, “Name hotel?” and I tell him “Kaew Samrit Gym,” pronouncing this as best I can. He comes back with something that begins with “Kow” and ends in a yowl, as if to ask if this was what I meant. I repeat the name again. We have this exchange several times over the next ten minutes.
He tries the mobile number a couple of times but can’t get an answer. After a while he asks how much I want to pay. I point at the meter, which is running, but he’s not having it. “No, no, too far, too far.” I consider pointing out that he doesn’t know where we’re going yet, but I don’t. He wants eight hundred baht, and I get him down to 650.
We continue on at highway speed, apparently blind. Periodically, the driver glances down at the paper again, as if the characters will spontaneously become intelligible, and on the sixth glance they apparently do just that: he points to the word “Talingchan,” and looks back at me and asks, “Talingchan?” I tell him yes yes, Talingchan, and he slaps his forehead and moans. “Talingchan!” I tell him yes, again. “Is far, man! Talingchan! Not Bangkok! Far, far.” He renegotiates the fare up to seven hundred, plus the airport tolls, which I’d already figured on paying.
It does turn out to be pretty far; we stop to transliterate the address and then twice more again to have it clarified, and by the time we get to the gym the meter is close to what we‘d agreed on anyway. Kaew Samrit Gym is not in Bangkok after all, but in a suburb to the north. It’s a strange area. We turn off a dirty four-laned motorway into a hushed, residential maze: the streets are wide and shaded by drooping trees; there is very little traffic; the few dogs around are languid and even the children playing seem not to make much noise, or else the noise is swallowed up by the foliage. There are some of the hard-angled concrete row houses that are everywhere in Bangkok, but many larger, fancier houses as well, each one walled off from the others. These aspire to a western style of architecture but miss the mark somehow, throwing together columns and cupolas and gabled windows without much logic; the effect is like a man wearing a necktie, a sun visor and a watch on either wrist.
We are driving slowly down one of these streets, apparently close, when a woman runs out and flags us down. She helps me out of the car and leads me into the gym. It’s layout is similar to Jitti’s, a walled compound with a couple of small one-story buildings, and a ring set up beneath a freestanding roof. The mats and equipment seems a bit nicer than Jitti’s, but not by much. Behind one of the buildings I can see a second, larger ring; cartoonish figures on the wall demonstrate various Muay Thai strikes, with their Thai names written out phonetically beneath them. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else around. It is very quiet, quieter even than the streets.
The woman is very friendly, but does not have much English. She leads me back past the first ring and around a corner, past a bookshelf housing about fifty pairs of running shoes and up a couple of stairs and through a door, into a dim hallway. There are three doors on either side; my room is on the left, all the way at the end. It’s got very high ceilings and two twin beds and two massive armoires against the opposite wall, each at least eight feet tall. The sheets and the pillowcases on both beds are peach-colored satin, and so are the curtains that run the whole length of one wall. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a room done up with so much satin; the effect is somehow funereal. The pillow on the bed that isn’t mine has the words “Romance Mode” stitched out across it. The woman leaves me in this room, and I unpack.
I wander around the gym a little. I meet a couple of Thai men who look to be trainers; they shake my hand but don’t seem to speak much English either. There’s a stack of a magazines on a chair by the front office; I leaf through a French comic book that turns abruptly pornographic. As evening approaches, the absence of other ferang, of any sign of them at all, is getting difficult to ignore. I go back out into the streets, in the direction of a 7-11 I remember passing on the drive in. A group of Thais jogs past me, shirtless, back towards the gym; all but two of them are teenaged or younger; we smile at each other.
Back at the gym, the silence is oppressive. I linger in the hallway, first by one door and then another, listening for movement, but there isn’t any. I stare at the shelves of shoes, as if they might disclose somehow their owners’ nationalities. Then it’s time for dinner, which is held in the asphalt courtyard of a little tin-roofed building across the street. The boys I saw on the street earlier are all there, and few older men. They’re all at one table, and I’m seated off by myself, at a little table the size of a desk. Dinner is white rice and a bowl of dry ground beef that’s spiced to the limits of edibility. There are vegetables at the other table, but nobody offers me any. Everyone keeps smiling at me, though. It takes awhile for me to work up the nerve to ask if I’m the only ferang staying here, and a little while longer to make the question understood, but someone does, finally, and I’m answered in the affirmative: tomorrow, he tells me. They’re all in Pattaya for the weekend. Right then a cheerful tune wafts in from the street, as if my relief has escaped from my head and is vibrating through the air around us. It’s an ice cream cart; we all go out and buy some ice cream.
I wake up at six the next morning and eat a packet of peanuts I’d bought at the 7-11, and then I lie on my peach satin sheets for awhile, staring at the ceiling. At six forty-five I go out into the gym with my running shoes; I know from the website that the morning sessions begin with a 10k run. There’s nobody around though. I drift around the gym, confused. A Thai man comes out of the front office. I ask him, “run?” and he nods and tells me, “little bit, little bit,” and I go uncertainly out into the street. I run about fifteen minutes, backtracking a lot so as to stay close to the gym. I pass a couple of other ferangs, separately, both of whom seem to have been running for awhile already. When I get back to the gym, the class is already assembled in a circle, stretching, maybe fifteen of them, all of them Thai except the two guys I saw on the street. I join the circle.
The first day or two at a gym is always hard. I know I’m being scrutinized and it makes me tense, and tension gets exhausting fast. And there is the litany of small proprietary adjustments they want me to make: to hold my right hand a bit higher, and keep my left hand closer to your cheek, and turn into my kicks more, and into my punches a little less. I’d forgotten, too, how thick and wet the air in Bangkok is, compared to the islands; there’s more junk in every breath, and less oxygen.
Within ten minutes the pain in my toes starts in again, rising up through my leg every time my leg connects, and the anticipation makes it hard to keep my form correct. And my shoulder hurts, and on my right shin, just below the knee, a bulge of fluid has begun to rise as if in protest of all the kicks that have landed there. I’m tired in a way I’m not used to; every movement feels belaboured and pointless. Thai teenagers frolic violently all around me, with an ease that feels like a rebuke.
Lunch is white rice and steamed vegetables and a very salty broth with something that looks like stringy chicken but turns out to be some kind of mushroom. I’m seated across from David, one of the four other ferang at the gym presently. He’s a professional MMA fighter from British Columbia. I tell him about how I keep hurting my toes and he nods; his toes hurt all the time, he tells me. “Not so much when I’m over here,” he says. “But when I’m somewhere dry, it’s hard to take sometimes.” He pauses. “I’m gonna hate life when I’m 45.”
The rice fills me up too quickly. I’m used to getting a lot more protein. Also, the food is just sort of gross. I go down to the 7/11 after lunch to buy some peanut butter, but there isn’t any. I buy a couple of mini Snickers bars, then go take a nap; I don’t feel any better on waking up.
The afternoon session has barely started and the back ring is already full of Thais, boxing Western-style with headgear and big 20 oz. gloves. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone wearing head protection in Thailand. One of the trainers approaches and asks if I’ll be sparring. I watch them for a few moments more and then tell him no. Things don’t go any better than they had in the morning. I’m exhausted, and everything hurts; I don’t feel like I belong here.
I’m supposed to spend seven days here; in the end, I manage two and change. Something in me snaps shut, finally, about twenty minutes into the third morning. I muddle rotely through, then limp back to my room and start shoving things into a bag. The woman in the office doesn’t seem surprised that I’m leaving. She offers to call a car, and asks me where will I be going. I tell her Kho San Road; it’s the only place I can think of where I’m sure to find a room. She laughs a little, before she can stop herself.
Two hours later, I’m seated at an outdoor cafe on a street which bristles with similar cafes, surrounded by Anglophone signage and men in cargo shorts brandishing rifle-like cameras and momentarily a waitress will bring me a Heineken and a milkshake and curly fries. There will be plenty of time in the next few days for ambivalence and worse, but right now it’s hard to feel anything but relief, at having left behind those opaque streets and that cavernous pink room, at having nobody to fight this afternoon, at being just another sunburned asshole getting drunk.
On my first day in the new class, one of the trainers approaches me and asks me where I’m from. He’s short and stout, like a stern teddy bear. I tell him I’m from New York, and he exclaims, “New York!“ He holds up one hand, which I realize is meant to be a building, and then another, which is meant to be a plane, and crashes them together. We both laugh. “You got that right,“ I tell him.
I don’t think the trainers here are used to seeing ferang built as small as I am; Tiger is known for MMA—a sport that is much more forgiving to fat people—as well as Muay Thai, so the students here tend to be larger than at the other gyms. I think also that Thai men tend to be impressed by height; I saw something similar in India with my friend Derek, who is about 6’3” and couldn’t walk down the street without being approached solicitously by some soldier or policeman or local politician. It’s annoying. On my second morning they sequester me off from the other guys during Western boxing, and pair me up with a curly-haired Australian girl. She doesn’t really know how to box and I don’t like the precedent it sets. I bully her around the ring with light, incessant jabs until they break us up and put me with one of the Thais. Half his punches are too fast for me to see but he’s at least ten years older than me, and his body’s halfway hollowed out from the thousand fights I’m sure he’s had. I keep pushing at him for three full rounds, and by the end he’s more exhausted than I am. It’s better after that.
I settle into a routine here, quicker and more deeply than at any of the places before. I train six days a week, four or five hours most days. The gym is isolated, which makes it easier; the only places of interest within walking distance are the various bungalow hotels and their restaurants, which are all more or less identical. The closest beach, Na Han, (or Nai Han, or Nai Harn; Roman-alphabet spellings tend to mutate as you move about the island) is a twenty minute drive.
Most of the people training at Tiger get around by scooter, but I don’t. I rode one for a couple of days back in Koh Samui, against my better instincts, shamed into it by their ubiquity amongst even the very young and old. The appeal is obvious: they’re fast and fun and easy to ride, and gliding along past the shanties and the jungles behind them I felt like I belonged in the landscape, the way I do back home riding my bike through lower Manhattan. But at the gym in Samui injuries from scooters outnumbered those from fighting by a solid margin. And one day I saw a scooter overturned on the road side, and the driver picking gravel out of a rough red expanse across his bicep, and his friend kneeling and picking more gravel from another patch on the driver’s upper thigh. And the traffic here is much more hectic than in Samui.
But I have gotten around the island some. One afternoon I take a scooter taxi to Nai Harn, and from there hop on open-air busses to Phuket Town and then Patong. Patong’s a big beach town, like Lamai back in Samui but larger by an order of magnitude; I literally get lost in the canyon-like parking area of a seaside hotel, trying to find the ocean. But while the scale is large—big cliffs in the distance, hangar-sized massage parlors, multi-floor open-air gogo bars—the place feels limited and claustrophobic, like Kubrick’s backlot Vietnam in Full Metal Jacket; the streets all snake back around to the same few epileptic strips. Still, the bustle is a nice change at first from the hushed jungle suburbs I’ve been living in. They have crosswalks here, but solely to make tourists feel at home; motorists do not abide them in any way. I watch an unnaturally dark-skinned man stand at one for about five minutes, growing progressively more furious at the traffic’s failure to yield; it’s odd, because he seems tan enough to know how things work here by now.
I’m thrilled to see a big modern shopping mall, with air-conditioning and a cinema. I’ve come to cherish malls for their lack of ambiguity; you always know how to act there, and everybody acts the same, Thai or ferang. They are almost like nature that way. I order a large fries from a Burger King. I order an iced Americano from Starbucks. I hear Lady Gaga playing over the speakers in the bathroom and start to cry, briefly, from homesickness.
I find a place off the main beach road like a self-storage lot crossed with a half-assembled carnival midway: little octagonal booths punctuating rows of concrete garage-style units, which at night roll up their doors to host I don’t know what.
One interesting T-shirt I see in Patong reads, “No God, Only Content.” Another one: “I fuck on the first date.”
If you can divorce yourself from the danger of it—usually the best thing to do once you’ve committed to something you can’t control—one of the best parts about Patong is the scooter ride back: weaving out of the bright city into the darkened sprawl, curving up endless and vertiginous hills and then switchbacking down again, with the lights of the whole island spread out below you, surrounded by the black ocean. And then the road levels out and the lights and the buildings and traffic fall away, til it’s just two empty lanes with the hills on either side, silhouetted. The stars seem very low. Everything is silent except for the engine, which by this point you’ve ceased to hear. The headlight shining through the basket casts a net of shadow on the road eight feet wide.
But on the whole I don’t go out much. My time’s spent at the gym or in my bungalow, or on the stretch of road between them, three-hundred meters or so. It’s a lovely walk in the mornings. On a green hill in the distance you can see the Big Buddha statue who oversees the island, one hundred and fifty feet tall. Roosters crow all around me, some of them strutting free, out in the road, others in cages that look like upturned laundry baskets made of concrete. Most of the front yards have shrines set up, clusters of small blue and red pagodas with plates of food laid out in front of them. Every day I pass the same frog, rolled flat by a truck tire and sun-dried til he looks like an air freshener you’d hang on your rearview mirror. And there are a lot of dogs, obviously, though along with the standard third-world model (lean body, long snout, dust-colored fur, sores) there are a couple of pugs in the neighborhood too, and some ratty toy poodles. Dogs in Thailand don’t seem to bark much. There are rabbits also, as big as the pugs and as unhurried.
My room here is much more posh than I’m used to. It has air conditioning, and wireless internet, and a bathroom with hot water and a proper countertop and mirror. There is a television also; I’ve never lived anywhere with a TV in view of the bed, and I take to it immediately. This is the first room I’ve had in Thailand that is actually pleasant to be in. I’m struck by how much of an impact that has on the shape of my days.
Every morning save Sunday, I wake at 6:30 and head over to the gym. There are a couple of different classes at seven to get you warmed up for fighting, which starts at eight. The most popular is a martial-arts oriented yoga class, taught by an absurdly dashing Englishman named Simon. He’s small and wiry, with cascading brown hair which he pulls back into a pony tail. In addition to being a yogi and an expert Thai boxer, he is a renowned swordsman and speaks about nine languages. His manner is unflaggingly beatific, though I’ve heard a story about him flying into a rage at a Thai trainer who was disrespecting a female student. And once you’ve told him your name, he’ll use it every time he sees you, which seems to me like a conscious Habit of a Highly Effective Person, but I appreciate it anyway.
Most mornings I opt for breakfast instead of yoga, but I’ve taken it a few times. Simon is there before anyone else, seated full lotus, playing a long wooden flute. People arrive one by one and lie down on their yoga mats and listen; this goes on about ten minutes, and it‘s nice. Then there is some yoga. Some of the simpler poses I can manage fine, and some of the more advanced are unsurprisingly beyond me. But a few of the simple ones are beyond me as well; though I’ve gotten much more flexible since I came to Thailand, a few areas around my crotch remain geriatrically stubborn. I think they might be permanently deformed from all those hours on my bike.
I‘ve done very little yoga, so I don’t have much basis for comparison. But I know most yoga classes do not conclude with ten minutes of violent guided imagery. “You’re in the ring,” Simon tells us, as we lie back with our eyes closed. “ Picture the ring. Picture your opponent. You are working your favorite combinations. Jab cross hook. Hook jab, low kick. Jab, jab, right elbow. If you are fighting MMA, then maybe a scissor heel. Maybe an arm bar. Your strikes are landing. Picture them landing. Your opponent is coming forward. Beat him back. You are beating him back.”
I train at eight and then again at four. The classes here run about three hours, and they’re tightly structured; there are a few pockets where you can melt into the group and slack off, but they keep you busy for the most part. In the afternoons, the heat can turn things into a bit of a death march. Every day we listen to the same mix-CD on repeat, which has about six songs: one of them is a Flo-Rida remix of “Applebottom” by Nelly, and one is by the Pussycat dolls, and another is a house jam with a cooing, pornographic refrain. I know all these songs by heart, and they play for awhile in my head most nights, unbidden. I eat about six times a day, some combination of chicken, eggs and brown rice, and bananas and whey protein and Snickers bars. Sometimes when I’m not eating or training I’ll go get a massage or read by the pool, but mostly I lie in bed and watch TV.
The TV gets about fifty channels, but most of them are in Thai, and their novelty doesn’t last long. There are a few English-language stations, though. Channel 3 is an African station that shows mostly American police and hospital and lifeguard dramas, and also the Ellen Degeneres show. Channel 4 is all British reality shows, concerning either confidence scams or deformed children. During the day, Channel 5 shows American cartoons from the eighties dubbed into Thai; sometimes at night they have English-language movies, but they tend to switch mid-stream without warning, so caveat emptor. There are two other movie channels, 14 and 20. They show good movies on the whole, except they don’t start on the hour or the half-hour or with any logic I’ve perceived so far. I have to watch the last part of one so I can get in on the ground floor of the next one. 44 is all golf, which is good to have in a pinch.
I‘d have been put off, I think, back in New York, if I’d had some premonition of whole afternoons spent in bed watching golf with the blinds drawn. And maybe I’ll feel sheepish later on, but it doesn’t bother me now. I’m aware that my life has grown progressively circumscribed, going from Bangkok to Samui to Phuket. And this is the most boring of the gyms I’ve been to, clean and institutional and safe where the others were ragged and strange. That’s fine with me. I’ve been in Thailand for awhile now, and I don’t have the energy to sustain that charged connection a tourist has to his surroundings; I don’t understand Thailand by any means, but I feel like I live here, because I’m too tired not to. I came here to box, and for better or worse that’s pretty much all I do.
Training twice a day can be exhausting, like my body’s held together by naproxen and Tiger Balm. But this seems like the only way it can be right now. Sometimes I feel like I‘m bored by everything but training, or else emotionally overwhelmed by it; other times I feel like if I’m exhausted and in pain, then this can’t be a vacation, which is good, because a two-month vacation would be frivolous. Because if this is a vacation, then I would feel pressure to be having fun. I would be on a failed fucking vacation, which is the most depressing thing I can imagine.
But it goes deeper than that, for sure. A couple people have asked me about what it is I like about boxing. It’s a subject I’ve sort of avoided up to now. I don’t feel particularly qualified, and I don’t know where to begin; I have pages of scattershot notes, lots of them contradictory. There is also an intimidating body of boxing literature already extant. Lately I’ve been reading “On Boxing,” by Joyce Carol Oates, which casts a long shadow in two directions: every insight I’ve ever had about boxing is in there, better articulated than I ever could have managed, alongside a lot of vaguely embarrassing things like “the triumphant boxer is Satan transmogrified as Christ.” I think there is a lot about fighting that is elusive, that is true until it’s spoken or even thought through, at which point it becomes sentimental or romantic or just wrong. And then there is this, also from Oates:
”That no other sport can elicit such theoretical anxiety lies at the heart of boxing’s fascination for the writer…. The writer contemplates his opposite in the boxer, who is all public display, all risk and, ideally, improvisation: he will know his limit in a way that the writer, like all artists, never quite knows his limit—for we who write live in a kaleidoscopic world of ever-shifting assessments and judgments, unable to determine whether it is revelation or supreme self-delusion that fuels our most crucial efforts…the boxer’s world is not an ambiguous one.”
I can relate to this. In boxing, even failure is something that you can hold on to; alongside that, blog entries feel like a chore, irrelevant. As time goes on I find that the three roles I‘ve been playing here—tourist, writer and boxer—are increasingly at odds with one another.
En route to the Tiger gym in Phuket, I feel like maybe I’ve made a big mistake. Outside the truck it’s even hotter than it was this morning back in Koh Samui, and it’s overcast, something I haven’t seen since Bangkok. It’s about a forty-five minute drive to the gym from the airport, most of it on a four-lane highway with palm trees and the street lights alternating down the median, and timber poles strung with slack power lines and busy clusters of convertersion apparatus. There’s all manner of enterprise alongside the road, or seems to be; nearly all the signage is in Thai. And the buildings are mostly roofed pagoda-style, overlapping clay titles or sheets of corrugated metal made to look like tiles, but still it’s a familiar kind of sprawl; excepting the occasional temple and the jungles in the distance, this could pass for Southern California, and if you took out the palm trees too, it’s almost Delaware. I start to understand how big an island Phuket is, relative to Koh Samui, and that I might not be living a hundred yards from the beach this time.
The driver is adept at a fluttering double-honk, to draw the attention of any vehicle on the verge of drifting into us. He uses it a lot, always with cause. The radio is tuned to an English-language station that plays American music, which is a genre unto itself in Thailand. Taylor Swift. Radio Gaga, by Queen. Lil Jon. Aerosmith, Aerosmith.
A sign coming up reads “Tiger Muay Thai,” alongside a picture of a tiger, and we turn off. It’s quieter, suddenly, and shadier. The gym lies about halfway between two big roads, far enough from either one that you feel more isolated than you are. Forest grows right up to the road, palms and other frond-y sorts on one side and mostly birches on the other. It’s thick enough that you can’t see in past a hundred feet or so; the trees seem to run all the way back to the forested hills on the horizon, but that might be an illusion. Here and there are houses and little businesses; caged songbirds hang on porches where you might expect to see wind chimes, though there are some wind chimes as well. There’s a second Muay Thai gym, much smaller than Tiger, and a tin shed that sells cell phones and gasoline, and another with a pool table. Side roads lead down to little groves of bungalows for rent, occupied mostly by people training at the Muay Thai gyms.
Tiger gym is huge, five or six big open pavilions, each with its own ring and heavy bags. One of them houses UFC-style fighting cage. The pavilions roofs are supported by thick bamboo poles set into concrete bases. There are long skinny tin-roofed buildings where the students sleep, running through the middle and around the edges; the walls of these are made of concrete and bamboo as well, and the roofs are thatched, or probably faux-thatched, actually. The paths are lined with carved stones shaped like cresting waves. The lawns are well maintained. It’s all very picturesque, in the mannered fashion of a Disney village. I don’t mean that in a bad way.
The boxing facilities are all clean and relatively new; the mats sit flush and the canvas on the rings is taut and the bags are smooth leather lozenges. Back in Bangkok I was sort of charmed by the idea of a run-down gym, but by the time I left Koh Samui I was over it, thoroughly; the ship-shape state of things here is a relief. The periphery is all palm trees; there are potted fronds throughout, and hedges and wooden planters housing flowering bushes, red and white. There’s a well-appointed weight room, full of gigantic men. There’s a bar where you can order protein shakes and breakfast, and an air-conditioned office where you sit down at a desk across from a polite lady and matriculate, paying by credit if you want to. It feels like a college campus, brisk and orderly.
Tiger divides their Muay Thai program into beginner, intermediate and advanced classes; I figure I’ll be comfortable somewhere. My first afternoon I head over to the beginner pavilion, about a half hour before the start of class. It’s the biggest pavilion, with a full-sized ring on either side. I meet the instructor, Kai; he’s a small, older guy with small, hard eyes and a bandanna wrapped around his skull. He asks me where I’m from and I say New York; when he doesn’t say anything back I clarify that I’m from the States. He scowls at this and tells me that he knows where New York is, that’s he’s from Hawaii, and I apologize.
He asks me how long I’ve been training, and I tell him. I ask him whether he thinks I belong here in the beginner class or with the intermediates, and he says that we’ll see. He has skip rope in the meanwhile. They don’t have the thin nylon ropes I like to use, just the thick hollow hose kind; they’re too heavy for me to skip with for more than a minute or two at a time, but I cover this up by stopping frequently to stretch.
The rest of the students start drifting in. It’s a big class, close to thirty people, and a much more diverse group than I‘m used to; some of the students look to be in their forties, and some of them are pretty fat—one of them is really fat—and if others are quite fit then most are just normal, healthy people without tattoos, which aren’t the kind of people I‘ve been seeing lately. We line up to shadowbox before a wall-length mirror, and I stand out; I’m not all that muscular, but everything that’s not muscle has melted off by this point, leaving me lined all over by veins and ridges, like a comic book drawing. Also my skin is shiny with boxing liniment, and my chin is tucked down to my Adam’s apple, as has been drilled into me, and this gives me a pissy, feral look. The other students keep glancing over, and I’m vaguely embarrassed, like I’m trying too hard. I feel like I’m one of those douchebags in spandex who tear over the Brooklyn bridge on a triathlon bike.
Most of the class is new to Muay Thai; for a few of them it’s literally their first session ever. Many aren’t wearing proper boxing shorts, and one guy is actually wearing a baseball hat, which I think is bad form. I run drills with a middle-aged Swede; he introduces himself with a corny, grandpa-style joke; he’s glacially slow.
By now I’m thinking that I don’t belong here, but I keep quiet. Kai seems like a hard ass—he walks around with a reed cane, and apparently he’ll use it if you slack off—and I don’t doubt that he’ll keep me here out of spite if I start bugging him. And I haven’t seen the intermediate class, after all, and at least three or four of the younger guys seem at least as fit as I am; one in particular is definitely faster. The class is long and plenty rigorous in any case: a few rounds of technique, then three rounds of bag work, then three rounds of pads and then sparring, with every round punctuated by push-ups. In the end, though, things takes care of themselves. After my first round of padwork, the trainer with the pads tells me I’m in the wrong class. It’s gratifying; it may in fact be my first piece of positive reinforcement since getting here.
I don’t feel good for long, as per usual. Kai takes me over to the intermediate class the next day. It’s back to hard abs and sleeve tattoos, which maybe I hadn’t been missing after all. Everybody is a lot bigger; guys who look short from across the floor still have three or four inches on me; my body in the mirror looks too thin. I can’t imagine sparring with anybody here, but I don’t have to yet; sparring’s only on alternate days, with Tuesdays and Thursdays focused on clinching and grappling. Clinching with someone who’s stronger can be frustrating, but you won’t get hurt, unless they’re being a real dick about it.
I’m partnered with a chubby British guy; he’s been taking the beginner classes but it’s his last day so they’ve let him come up to the intermediates. We clinch about twelve minutes straight. He outweighs me by about forty pounds but doesn’t know what he’s doing; I’m mostly in control even before he gets exhausted, maybe three minutes in. After it’s over l tell him that he’s quite strong, which is true, and he thanks me and says I have better technique, and I think to myself no shit. But I’m really just worried about tomorrow.
I’ve been afraid off and on since I got to Thailand, always in the same way. It’s a mix of things. It’s a fear of being injured—distinct from a fear of pain, though I’m afraid of that too sometimes, especially when I’m still hurting from something else—and so sidelined, for a day or a week or indefinitely. My identity by this point is so bound up with training that missing just a single morning leaves me dejected, like I’ve let somebody down. Not being able to train at all would seem to require a reconsideration of myself daunting as growing a new face. Overdramatic, but that‘s how it is right now.
It’s also a fear of being seen as a fraud. Because I do think I’m a fraud like when I’m scared, that everybody else belongs, and I’ve slipped in amongst them somehow, against my own best interests; I feel like I’m in a burning building, wearing a fireman costume. I’m going to get hurt, and it’ll be my own fault, and those injuries will be proof of what I really am.
Luckily I’m afforded two opportunities every day of confront and overcome these fears, and the subsequent absence of fear—a thing people tend to take for granted—makes the runup feel almost worthwhile. On Wednesday afternoon I show up for class and everything is fine, as it tends to be. I’m up first against Magnus, a Swede about my own size. We’re a pretty good match for one another. The other guys in the ring are much bigger than us, and I figure we’ll be partnered up for all five rounds, but we‘re not. In the second round I‘m put with a far larger Swede. But that ends up fine too; he knocks me around some as I try to find a way inside, but I keep my chin tucked and most of his punches bounce off my forearms or my forehead, harmless. He‘s not quite quick enough to get in any uppercuts, which is what he needed to do. I keep my kicks low; I can tell he‘ll grab my leg the second it goes above his waist. Three minutes isn‘t long enough for me to figure much out beyond that—though I’m not sure I would even if I had fifteen—but he’s at least a half foot taller than me, so it feels like enough to keep it together.
It goes on like this. They’ve done a good job here cultivating an atmosphere that feels calm and safe. Some of the people here are quite new, and some have already had fights, both amateur and professional, but everybody tends to reign themselves in as appropriate. It helps that the sparring is preceded by some ninety minutes of technique and padwork, which will blunt anyone’s aggression; it helps as well—or at least it helps me—that a lot of the better fighters are newly arrived in Thailand, and thus crippled by jetlag. Most of the time, the sparring is just as it should be: we regard each other less as opponents than as problems to solve; you land things just hard enough to make a point, to indicate a vulnerability. Maybe a little harder. I’m learning a lot from these classes.
I arrive in Koh Samui around noon on a Monday. The airport is tiny, a series of interconnected bamboo pavillions. I want to cash in a traveler’s check, but the lady at the exchange window taps a sign saying they don‘t do that here. Someone from the WMC Gym is supposed to meet me here, and I wait for about fifteen minutes with mounting anxiety before I realize I’m in the wrong spot. He’s where he’s supposed to be, and we get into his van.
Back in Bangkok this morning, Jitti warned me that Koh Samui was full of dangerous men. “They’ll cut you for your money,” he told me. I’ve heard from a few sources of the southern islands’ somewhat sinister reputation, anecdotes I only half-remember now, involving predatory expats and drugged drinks and violence on the beaches at night. We drive towards the gym on a winding dirt road, with thick stands of palm trees on either side and big jungled hills rising up all around us in the distance. I try to gauge the character of the landscape, if there’s anything sinister about it, but it adheres so closely to my notion of an island paradise that I feel like it could be any number of places. Then we turn onto the main road, which rings round the entire island, and most of the flora in the foreground gives way to dirt lots, and little strips of one-story buildings, and roadside stands selling gasoline in 40-oz glass bottles. The hills scroll on behind all this in parallax; every now and then I get a glimpse of ocean on the other side. We turn onto the Lamai beach road.
The beach road is very hectic and fairly long, and probably feels longer for being so repetitive. The buildings are all three stories or under, but that’s tall enough to hide entirely the beach on one side and the jungles on the other. I’d guess that fully half are bars and restaurants; most countries you can name are represented here by at least one bar or one restaurant, however loosely, even Sweden. Money changers and laundromats and massage parlors and sandal/t-shirt/towel shops and Indian tailors and tchotchke stalls and travel agencies and hostels make up the balance. Signs for resorts and driveways leading to resorts appear at regular intervals, though the resorts themselves are set back towards the beach, away from the hubbub. There are quite a few 7-11s, and a couple of Family Marts—a local chain, though whether to all of Thailand or just the island I’m not sure—and also an off-brand general store, which has in addition to groceries and beach supplies a selection of shitty toys and weird clothing and which is home to a very obese golden dog and where on my sixth day I finally find a mirror to shave with: a baby-blue compact that reads “Huggy Bear” on the front, underneath a cartoon drawing of a bear.
Despite being relatively narrow and packed with pedestrians, the beach road is host to heavy motor traffic, made up predominately of the scooters rented out by every third business as a sideline, but also metered cabs and red pick-up truck taxis that shuttle between Lamai and the two other principal beaches, and a big van with pictures of boxers on the side, that drones out a tape loop about upcoming Muay Thai fights in Chaweng. Arbitrary sections of the road are marked off as one-way, but this isn’t reliably observed, in my experience. Long stretches have no sidewalk, and where there is one it’s usually blocked up by stalls selling, among other things, the cheapest and most convincing counterfeit sunglasses I’ve ever come across. So it’s important to watch your step.
There are a lot more men than women among the tourists here, and Thai women in turn greatly outnumber Thai men; the restaurants and bars—and the massage parlors too, obviously—are staffed overwhelmingly by women. This becomes even more apparent at night, when the other sorts of businesses shut down and the girly bars start ramping up their game. In fact most of the local men—or at least the most visible sort—are not Thai but Indian, standing sentry outside the many bespoke tailor operations, approaching passerby at all hours with the vigor of Mormon missionaries. It’s hard to imagine buying a suit in this heat.
Unlike most parts of Thailand, the beach communities on Koh Samui are very tolerant of shirtlessness. There is a lot of skin on display in Lamai—beach and beach road both—and for the most part it looks pretty bad. There is a general shamelessness here which probably comes from knowing that however fat you are, there will be someone within spitting distance who is fatter than you. When I do see somebody fit, seven times out of ten they’re a fighter from the gym. Needless to say, bad-tattoo afficionados will find lots to like here; my favorite so far is the “No Fear” logo, curved around the belly button of guy whose gut must hang at least six inches below the tip of his cock.
I also notice everywhere a kindof suntan that I’ve never seen before, distinct from the classic bronze glow or the uniform wine-colored burn that the pale and persistent can achieve, in lieu of an actual tan, or the radio-orange you see on reality TV: it’s skin tanned brown to the point of purple, darker than a Thai’s skin, a shade that’s no longer reminiscent of skin at all, particularly, but more of burnished wood, like a cigar-store Indian, like something that belongs in a dimly-lit sitting room rather than out in the sun. I don’t have any idea how long it takes to get this tan, though you see it sported mainly on people forty and up—a couple, typically, lounging side by side on daybeds with multiple packs of Galloise on the table in between—which suggests that it’s a serious undertaking. I have to assume that they’re retired, or at least reside year-round in tropical environs, because that is the only acceptable context for this tan. If you saw this tan in New York, it would stop you in your tracks; it would freak you the fuck out.
I don’t blend in so well among the tourists here, on the beach in particular. I’m gaunt and pale, and I’m bearded—having no mirror to shave by for the first five days—and the veins in my arms and neck have started standing out to where I can see them reflected in shop windows from the across the street. More than that, though, I’m by myself; there are plenty of couples here, and families, and here and there a pair of women on their own, and loads of groups of men; there are very few solitary males, and fewer young ones, and they attract attention. Most places, a man on his own could just be written off as lonely, but Lamai wants to attend to your loneliness the same way it would your hunger, or your need for sandals; and if you persist in being alone, it‘s for your own reasons. Which isn’t to say that the families and the couples look fondly on the pudgy Englishman shuffling alongside a nineteen-year old Thai girl, making monosyllabic attempts at conversation, or none at all, but they can understand him at a glance. I don’t have any signifiers of somebody on vacation, at least to them, and as such maybe I’m a potential disruption; I doubt anyone thinks all this through consciously, but I suspect they intuit something like it. Or maybe they’ve just noticed me judging their bodies and their tans and their bad tattoos. Anyway, all this is before I pick up a deep bruise under my left eye and a nasty scrape on the left side of my nose. I feel disreputable, moreso than at any point in my adult life, which is tiring: smiles go unreciprocated; chairs that I try to sit in are claimed occupied, though ten minutes later they’re still empty. Loneliness in the midst of perfect weather and fun can create an echo chamber, where the disparity between the world within you and without grows greater and greater and more toxic. I should mention, though, that amongst Thais my fucked-up face has the opposite effect, at least when coupled with a pair of boxing shorts, which I‘ve been using as swim trunks: someone will point to my shorts, typically, and then to my face, and say “Thai boxing!” And he’ll give me a thumbs up. One night a waiter gives me a free dish of ice cream. “Boxing boxing!” he says.
And there’s the WMC. The gym proper is a big open-air shed: two rings and floor mats and heavy bags, and sundry equipment, and a reception desk, all under steepled sheet metal thirty feet or so overhead. There are no walls, and the training area goes right up to the street, and tourists gather out front during the afternoon sessions to gawk at the spectacle. Behind the gym is an air-conditioned dormitory, and across the street is a row of little bungalows, without AC, one of which is mine at present.
The gym is situated on the beach road, between a bar and a massage parlor, and it fits in there well enough. Jitti Gym, where I was last, catered to foreigners too, but it‘s much more touristy here; the trainers and all of the staff are Thai, but it’s foreign-owned, and all the students are foreigners. There’s a venality to the whole enterprise; it’s a serious gym, not a scam by any means, but I think they see Muay Thai instruction purely as a service for Ferang, no different from the scooter rentals across the street. This is a little depressing but also sort of a relief; sometimes I felt obscurely beholden to Jitti and his trainers, as they puzzled over what to do with me, and if I skipped a day of training I’d have to explain myself. Here, nobody gives a fuck what I do or don‘t.
But it’s tiring to feel constantly hustled. The facilities at the gym are ferociously shitty. The floors of the two rings are stretched with thin, cheap canvas, like you’d see over the back of an army jeep, and which in both cases is torn to shreds in the center, revealing a thin layer of foam underneath. And the ropes of the rings are dangerously slack. There are only three heavy bags, and one of these has no stuffing whatsoever above the halfway mark. Behind the rings is a mirrored area where exercise equipment should be but isn’t, save for an obscure broken Soviet-era weight machine that you can sort of use to do pull-ups. There’s an affiliated gym across the street, with top-of-the-line equipment, that you can use for an additional fee. Towels are not provided. Water is not provided. Both are for sale. Gloves and shin guards are available, but in a sullen and perfunctory fashion; arrayed along the street-facing side of the gym is an Island of Lost Toys assortment of derelict equipment that you’re free to root through frantically mid-class, just before the sparring is about to start; of the thirty or so shin guards, there are maybe three viable pairs. The contrast between these and the glass-walled shop with its shelves of pristine equipment, neatly stacked, is clearly intentional. Also, all of the equipment for sale is branded with some Asian fighting reality show.
I’m being a little naïve in my comparison of WMC with Jitti Gym, I know. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival, Jitti had strong armed me into buying two T-shirts that I never wore, and that subsequently disappeared in the laundry; on my penultimate night, he wanted me to pay a thousand baht for admission to some after-hours brothel, and proffered a random assortment of British soft-core magazines to illustrate the sort of girls I would meet there. But Jitti also wrapped the blisters on my feet with tape every day, and he would give me sugar-fried eggs sometimes before morning training, and I spent about twelve hours a day with him, and whether or not he liked me we were on fairly intimate terms with one another. That counts for a lot, when somebody is hustling you.
WMC is a big gym, by Thai standards, with some thirty students in residence, and lots more who live elsewhere on the island; and so the faces and bodies tend to run together, at least at first. There are any number of powerfully built, crewcut or shaven-headed young men with sleeve tattoos that bleed down over their pectorals, and quite a few more with just a few tattoos, or none at all. Some of these men are British or Russian; quite a few are from Australia; there are at least two Irishmen, hairless above the waist save for their eyebrows, both very pale despite having resided at the camp for several months. It is a very fit group, for the most part; nearly every belly is rigidly partitioned; even my abdominals are starting to show. I’m the only one with any chest hair, though, except for one very tall guy who also sports the only other beard.
Some afternoons a handful of older men show up, relatively out of shape but very capable boxers, whose tans are so dark as to erase any clue to their ethnicity. There’s something Gallic in their swagger, though. There’s a Czech man in his late forties with a noble, haggard face and a military bearing; he always seems to be nursing some injury or other, and many days will not be not training but just observing. And there are three or four tall, raptorly men with short faux-hawks and sporadic clusters of tattoos all over their bodies, neck especially. All of them are aloof in their interactions with me, and this feels appropriate; they seem to belong to some other, more ferocious species and I am frankly relieved not to have their full attention. One of them is Slavic, which also feels appropriate, but the others are disconcertingly Francophone. Nobody here is American, though of course some people look like they could be, and I forget sometimes, and I’m surprised and a little sad when someone replies to me in a Polish accent.
There are three or four women at the gym as well, all very pretty, phalanxed always by at least three crewcuts. I never even think of tallking to them. There is a nine- or ten-year old British prodigy who takes private lessons in the late mornings, and has a rat tail. Shadowboxing, he cuts his limbs through the air in pure, twisting lines like the ribbons of those weird Olympic rhythm gymnasts. If his perpetual sneer and lurking, dickhead father are any indication, he’s well on his way to becoming a really monstrous individual.
There are eight or nine trainers here; some of them are very well known fighters and most of them are friendly and capable enough, but with the size of the gym I haven’t gotten know any of them too well, even by my second week; this is aggravated by four of them being brothers, with essentially identical haircuts; someone suggests going by their various tattoos. They all smoke a lot more than seems normal to me, though, and a few of the them are definitely shady. One in particular, Kah, has a sunken face and missing teeth and a build that loiters between sinewy and wasted; his tattoos are just a shade darker than his skin, barely discernable, and when he shrugs on his green fatigue jacket after training he looks a lot like a pirate, the scary modern-day kind. Kah has hit me up for money twice: first while I’m on the back of his scooter, after he insists on giving me a ride to dinner, and then again the next night, on the front porch of my bungalow; I manage to beg off both times. Later I hear that he’s pulled the same thing on two other people, with more success, and then someone tells me he’s addicted to crystal meth. I hadn’t suspected this, exactly, but it had occurred to me, looking at that face.
I first arrive at the gym at about one in the afternoon, in plenty of time for the afternoon session, which begins at five. By that time I’ve discovered the beach, though, and I decide to hold off training until the next morning. Mornings start at eight, but I’m told to show up early if I want to skip rope and stretch and what have you, so I head over at 7:30. The gym’s totally deserted. I pad around awhile, looking for a jump rope, and I’ve just found one when I notice a shiny black dog by the front desk, watching me. His head probably comes up to about my nipples. He’s standing very still, with his mouth closed, and he doesn’t seem aggressive, but I have his full attention. We stare at each other for a little while, and then I start to skip rope, tentatively, and he starts moving forward. I put down the rope and walk out of the gym and cross the street. He stands at the edge of the gym, looking me. Then he starts to cross the road as well, and I go back to my bungalow and read for twenty minutes.
At Jitti, the ratio of students to trainers was almost one to one. Here, with so many more students, the classes are more like those at my gym back in NYC; each session you partner up with someone else, and the trainers guide everyone through various exercises. But the students here are generally much more serious than back home—not surprising, given that we’ve all come to Thailand to study—and the classes reflect this; the technique portion takes up maybe forty minutes in a two-hour session, with the rest given over to sparring: first legs only, then technical (arms and legs, but no elbows and no punches to the head) then Western-style boxing, then grappling, or wrestling. The sparring isn’t broken into rounds; each bit runs for about ten minutes straight, which is a fucking eternity, believe me. After all that, you can loiter around and a trainer will eventually do two rounds of pads with you; it tends to be pretty lackluster on their part, but I don’t mind, by that point.
The thing about a routine like this is, you want someone who’s about as experienced as you, and most of the people here are either a lot better than me, or a lot bigger, or both. There’s one guy who’s just about a perfect match; he outweighs me some, but it’s mostly fat, and we both have a good session whenever we’re paired. But he drinks too much, and only comes in every second day at most, so the balance is off, usually, in one direction or the other. Some days I might work with Alexander, a lanky Australian who looks like Saint-Expuery’s little prince, whose form is fine but who locks up when he’s sparring; it’s like kicking a heavy bag who shuffles around. Other days it’ll be someone like Sergei, about my height but with thirty-something pounds on me, all muscle, and a handsome, implacable face whose eyes never unlock from mine, and a mind so hopelessly quick that it doesn’t matter how slowly he moves, it’s never slow enough for me.
In boxing, like most one-on-one sports, even a relatively small disparity between opponents can make real competition untenable. There’s things to learn from sparring someone who’s much better than you, but it’s fucking exhausting as well, especially in long stretches like these. When I fall for every feint, and everything I try is disdainfully parried or else pulls me into some painful and compromised new position, a learned helplessness will set in at some point, and then I’m just marking time. And worse is that underneath it all I’m aware of what he’s holding back, his capabilities, like a dog on a tether, and I feel sheepish about that being necessary, because he’s come across the world for this, just like me. And also I know that it’ll come untethered at some point, inevitably, if just for a second, and he’ll throw me to the ground, hard, or kick me in the solar plexus, and I won’t begrudge him that, at least in retrospect, because I’ve been on the other side of it, and I know how at some point it just becomes irresistible, like finally scratching an itch. But it still stresses me out, and training is stressful enough at the best of times. So far every class here has ultimately felt worthwhile, but I don’t like the everyday uncertainty. I’m worried I’ll get hurt eventually; I spend my whole first week training through the bruised ribs I got back in Bangkok, so the essential frailty of my body feels close to the surface.
That said, the days here have a lull to them that’s not at all unpleasant. Living so close to the beach, it seems to have imposed its rhythms on me. I wake up, then I train, then I sit on the beach. Then I train, then I sit on the beach, then I sleep. It would be easy to spend a year here, or more, and lots of people seem to. I read voraciously, on the beach; by the second day I’ve finished all the books I’ve brought, but I find a good used book shop. The radio there is always playing word-for-word covers of American rap songs. I’m in there practically every day. First I read “Where I Was From,” Joan Didion’s history of California cum memoir, then “The Quiet American,” by Graham Greene, which is a pretty much perfect thing to read in a slightly sinister tropical milieu. Next is “Jack Maggs,” by Peter Carey; it starts off great but then I leave it in the bathroom of a safari park. That same day I pick up “The Colour of Blood,” a Cold War political thriller by the Irish author Brian Moore, cited by Graham Greene on the back cover as his “favorite living novelist.” It’s just okay. Then it’s “Arthur Dressler,” by Steven Millhauser, which is fine but if you have read any of his numerous short stories concerning some series of increasingly ornate and mystical department stores or amusement parks, then it won’t hold many surprises for you. And then “On Chesil Beach,” by Ian McKellen: I had read a long excerpt of this already in the New Yorker and so held off buying it at first, because the novel itself is pretty short. But it’s a flat-out miracle and I’d recommend it to anybody. At present I’m reading “Longitude,” which is a pop history of the marine chronometer. It’s pretty good.
If I go on about the books it’s because the beach with the jungles rising behind it all looks like a postcard; it seems pointless to describe, except that like so much else here it’s scribbled with cluster on cluster of parasoled daybeds and sets of bamboo chairs and tables belonging to various resorts and cafes. But whatever, it’s gorgeous; the water is eerily warm. I eat every meal on the beach, or just about. You have to buy something to sit in the shady chairs, so I drink a lot of Diet Coke. It’s more crowded during the day, but quieter; at night all the restaurants turn on their sound systems, and they overlap. The peddlers put away their ice cream and wind-up birds and trot out barrels full of fireworks: serious fireworks, four or five feet long, like they use on the Fourth of July. People will set them off just fifty feet away from where I’m eating, and they’ll explode right overhead; I’ve never seen fireworks so close before. They also sell “lucky balloons,” which are like miniature hot air balloons made of white cloth, with a can of Sterno or something in the bottom. They float up to about a hundred feet and then linger, glowing in the sky, spirit-like. It’s breath-taking the first time you see it, and like the fireworks, and the ocean and the jungle, you never get entirely inured to it.
It’s Saturday afternoon and my last day of training at Jitty Gym; Monday morning I head to the WMC gym on Koh Samui. The session today is lightly attended. I’ve done my five rounds of pads and now I’m on a heavy bag, doing intermittent sets of push kicks but really just trying to look busy. Between rounds I get out my camera and take quick portraits of the trainers. I’m spent, from the pads and the morning session and the whole ordeal behind me. I have a giddy, valedictory feeling about leaving. In the past two weeks, my body’s gotten fit, and I‘m stronger; I can throw ten kicks on either side in quick succession, head height, on command, and the tenth kick will be pretty good. And I’ve escaped any serious injury, which was a prospect I’d dwelled on every morning, in the minutes between waking and getting up to train. I’m about to duck out early but then someone tells me I’m sparring with Doni.
Doni is my favorite trainer. He is small and older than the other trainers, somewhere in his forties, with smooth, feline features that look more Japanese than Thai. He has a smile that suggests secrets, largely happy ones, and that literally never wavers; his smile is persistent as my nose. It lends him a magical air, like that of a man who’s also a cat and so is party to a lot of special info. He hugs you after every round.
We suit up and get started. I’m fighting very sloppy; my affection for Doni maybe blunts the nerves I usually get when I’m sparring, and I’m exhausted in any case. His corrections are gentle at first and then less so. My kicks get harder as I tire, because it’s too much effort to modulate them. Doni follows suit. First he winds me badly with a cross to the stomach. He asks beatifically if we’re to go on and I say we are, for whatever reason. A few moments later I throw a body kick that bounces harmless against his forearm, and he throws one into my ribs so hard that it pulls my knees to my chest and my feet off the ground. The gym erupts in laughter. I’m back up a second later but there’s no question of going on. Another trainer tries to get my arms over my head, to help bring my wind back, which I am perfectly capable of doing myself except I’m too winded to tell him so.
A few minutes before, the trainers were clowning for my camera and slapping my back, but none of them will meet my eyes as I leave the ring. Their laughter was not with me, I realize. I don’t feel hurt or humiliated, though, only irritated. I’d been kicked in the ribs by a master boxer, and I fell down, which seems eminently reasonable to me. What did they expect, I ask myself. And then that night I find out, or begin to.
After dinner, they pile about ten of us into the back of a pickup, and we drive a harrowing fifty minutes to a temple fight on the edge of Bangkok. Excepting the temples and the Muay Thai at its center, a temple fight looks a lot like the carnivals that roll through town on Independence Day, though with different fried snacks and rides that are shoddier by an order of magnitude, if you can imagine. But the midways are more or less identical; Farmer, a darts champion back home, wins bear after bear for his girlfriend and then one for Jitti’s wife, Sarah.
The fights take place in a grove behind the carnival area: an elevated ring surrounded by huge old trees with thin strips of white-glowing neon hanging from their boughs. It’s an all-ages crowd, relatively subdued because no alcohol is served on temple grounds. Two old jokers in Hawaiian shirts provide commentary from a table by the ring; their voices are so amplified that certain syllables vibrate inside my head like a length of wire.
The first fight is between two ten-year old girls. The second is between two boys who are considerably younger, seven or eight at the most. One of them is about a head shorter than the other, and he exhibits all the sang-froid you would expect from a tiny boy who is kickboxing before a large crowd. But he—like his opponent, like the two girls before them—is practicing what is recognizably full-on, if clumsy Muay Thai: kicks to the head and to the solar plexus, knee strikes and elbows (the principal aim of an elbow strike, if you do not know, is to open a cut in your opponent’s face bloody enough to make the referee stop the fight.) They fight as Thais always do, in tiny six-ounce gloves and without shin guards or head protection.
There is some confusion between the second and third fight. Earlier in the day, Jitti had been joking to Dylan and Farmer that they would have to fight tonight; now he is suggesting it in earnest. The opponent in question is a young Thai lingering behind us by the loud speakers. It’s hard to say just how old he is. He’s small, but we all know that doesn’t mean anything. He looks back at us without interest.
Dylan ran about five miles this morning, and he trained all afternoon, and now he’s more exhausted than I am. Meanwhile Farmer has barely trained at all since his fight last week, choosing instead to swan about with his new rich girlfriend—five seats down from me at present with a Prada clutch in her lap—who buys him fancy dinners and lets him drive her car. Neither’s in any position to fight if he wanted to, but Jitti keeps at them regardless. He goes cajoling from one to the other, and his mood darkens progressively. He says that they are letting down the gym. He calls them chickens and cowards. He tells them they should get up in the ring and apologize to everybody for not fighting, a suggestion that baffles us all.
Affable sociopath that he is, Farmer is not much bothered by any of this. He sits with his girlfriend and chews gum and half watches the fights. Dylan is a more sensitive soul, however, and he prizes Jitti’s good opinion of him and so is hurt by Jitti’s scorn. He goes over and over his reasons for not fighting, with me and with everyone else; I don’t think he needs a reason not to fight at some Bangkok county fair on a moment’s notice, and I tell him so, but he’s still upset.
Eventually Sarah comes over and talks with him. She’s Australian. She’s been married to Jitti about ten years, though as far as I can tell they don’t see much of one another. I eavesdrop on her conversation with Dylan, but we’re close to the speakers and a lot of what she says is lost to me amongst droning Thai and feedback.
She tells Dylan something about the Thai’s word for ‘fighter’ being derived from their word for ‘animal,’ and how the concepts are linked in the culture. Fighters are expected to be animals, she says; they have to be, or else they‘ll be taken advantage of. It’s inconceivable for a fighter not to fight because he doesn‘t feel like it, she says, that’s just something they wouldn’t understand.
I’d be pretty stupid not to have picked up on this somewhat already, but I’ve never heard it all laid out explicitly. It explains a lot, as does the sight of a seven-year old boy kneeing another one hard in the chest, before a cheering crowd.
By the time I started fighting my personality was pretty well formed already, and what attracted me was its contrast to who I was and the life I was leading. Since then I’ve become a competent boxer and I hope to be good at Thai boxing as well, but I’m not a fighter and I never wholly will be. I roll my eyes at the backpackers in Kho Sahn but I’m tourist here myself, obviously. When I crumple from a kick to the ribs, or decline to spar a loutish Brit with thirty pounds on me, or decline an order to kick harder when my partner’s not blocking quick enough, it’s as a tourist, who’s come to study Muay Thai. And I think these are reasonable things for a tourist to do.
But now I’m starting to understand how alien that stance must seem to a Thai fighter, and why the trainers at the gym seem so bemused and often hostile towards me. To them, Muay Thai isn’t one interest among many, but an identity; and so in their eyes my actions are perverse, a repudiation of the self. Probably it would be easier for them to understand if I was fat, or an absolute beginner, if I dropped in now and then for an hour. But I’m there every morning and every afternoon, and I know the sport, and if you stand me up in shorts next to a real fighter like Farmer, there’s not much in our builds to tell between us. Except there’s an essential softness to me that’s evident soon enough, and that I don’t think I could ever be totally rid of, or would want to be. I think that makes me something of a distasteful hybrid to them, and though I’m sure they’ve seen plenty just like me that doesn’t lessen the strangeness of it.
As the fights go on, it’s easy for me to feel the blows as they land because it’s evident by now that my ribs are bruised, though I’m not sure how badly. I’ve had bruised ribs before and they tend to linger for awhile, like a bad stomach cramp on one side that lasts a week or so; I meditate gloomily on this. Up in the ring, one fighter throws a head kick that seems to fall short, grazing the other’s face with a bit of foot; this second fighter takes a step forward, then cocks his head to an odd angle and half-pirouettes on his way down.
After the fifth fight, we see to our amazement that Doni’s hands are wrapped, and Jitti is rubbing his limbs with liniment. Like I said, he’s in his forties, which in terms of Thai boxing is positively Methuselan. It isn’t clear if his fighting has anything to do with Dylan and Farmer not fighting; it seems likely to me that there’s some connection, but I don’t speculate out loud.
As Doni climbs up, Jitti ushers us out of our chairs to ringside. The bell rings, and the music starts up: deep, insistent drumming, unsyncopated, and a whining oboe line that twists after itself, ourobouro-like. The first round of a Muay Thai fight is subdued, a series of discrete engagements where the boxers sniff each other out. The other fighter—younger by more than a decade, easy—snaps out a couple of head kicks and Doni parries them nattily, as if wagging a finger at him. I start to suspect I’ll be witnessing some sort of feel-good miracle. The first round ends; back in our corner, the trainers massage Doni’s legs and give him water, and for good measure Jitti gives him a slug from a can of Heineken, and we all laugh.
By the third round, though, the other fighter is starting to dominate, getting the better of Doni in most of the clinches. The trainers exhort us to bellow every time Doni throws a knee, and we do, but most of the knees aren’t landing. Doni’s smile is gone now, replaced with something grim that looks all wrong on his face. In the forth, he gets thrown hard to the mat, tries to rise, then collapses flat on his stomach. And that’s it. He looks like an old man as the trainers help him down out of the ring.
The last match of the night is Sak’s, another trainer at the gym. Sak—which is Thai for “tattoo“—is twenty seven, a year younger than me. Most of his two-hundred-odd fights are behind him. He’s lean and handsome—one of the girls at the gym told me she won’t train with him because she finds him too attractive—with lively eyes that go flat as a chalkboard when he fights. He can be charmingly insecure about things, though, and is always solicitous of our opinions on his hair and outfits.
His opponent is a fucking giant, maybe not much taller but a whole world thicker, around the legs in particular. His face is a horror show: a hair lip above a mouth where half the teeth are absent, and above that’s a nose so flattened it spans the whole distance between his cheekbones. It soon becomes evident how he got a face like that. He moves only forward, never back and apparently never down; in the second round, Sak spins him round with a right cross to the face, but he stays up, for that punch and any number of others to come.
At first a knockout seems inevitable, but by the fourth the giant has absorbed so much without comment that we have to reexamine our assumptions; Sak is miles ahead in points, but the giant seems to throw harder as the fight goes on, clumsy for the most part but coming very close at times; he’s stronger in the clinches, too, though he doesn’t seem to know how to press his advantage there. We holler along to every blow; I’ve never wished harm on a stranger so intently.
The fight ends wit a standstill in the fifth and final, maybe fifteen seconds from the bell; the giant lets his arms drop to his sides, silently conceding. They stand side by side as some official gets up into the ring to present Sak with first a very large trophy and then a small one, which is a separate prize for Fight of the Night. Sak seems as blasé about the win as he was about the fight itself beforehand. Later on that night I hold the big trophy and find it disconcertingly light, because it’s made of hollow plastic.
As we leave the fairground Dylan is remarking on how Sak had only two days preparation for the fight, on account of a split shin he’d picked up in a match last month. Sarah says that Sak’s been at it long enough to know what he has to do, that he’ll fight regardless of injuries or training. Ethan asks, rhetorically as always, if it doesn’t make you dead hungry to get in the ring, watching a fight like that. I honestly can’t say if it does or not, but he wasn’t talking to me in anyway.
When I wake up this morning my neck is almost too sore to lift; there’s no way I’ll be up for clinching this afternoon, so I decide to train hard in the morning and then take off for the day.
After lunch, I head over to Sukhuvit and have some hairy patches waxed off my upper body, in preparation for the beach next week. If anyone out there is on the fence about this, don’t hesitate: you’ll feel like a new man after.
I take a ferry north from Saphan Taksin to Ko Ratankosin, one of the old parts of Bangkok and home to the Grand Palace and any number of big beautiful temples. What I want to see in particular is an amulet market which I’ve heard several people go on about, but it’s closed by the time I find it. I end up back at the ferry and eat dinner, and I look at a map for awhile.
I decide that since I’m in the area I should go look at Khao San Road, which is the city’s backpacking epicenter. Going from one tourist mecca to another, I don’t bother trying to get a metered cab; I’d have to walk halfway there before I’d even have a shot, and it’s not worth the two dollars I’d save; for the most part I think it’s fine to get swindled, as long as you know it’s happening.
Khao San is a wide street, largely closed to cars, with strips of Thai flags hung across at regular intervals; the flags remind me of New York’s little Italy, which I suppose is Khao San’s sister in cultural venality. The foot traffic is shoulder to shoulder, and everybody here is either farang or in the business of farang. On either side is a procession of tattoo parlors, noodle shops, “Italian” restaurants, currency exchanges, “Irish” pubs, hostels, cheap tailors, 7-11s (three on one block) and internet cafes; its easy to see what’s what because every business has a giant sign that lights up. At one end of the street’s a dental clinic, but I wouldn’t go there.
The sidewalks are lined with tables selling sundry eatables and dreadlock hair extensions and bootleg everything; at one stall, you can buy a “rock and roll” T-shirt with a video screen embedded in it. Ladies walk about selling jewelry that looks to me more generally “ethnic” than specifically Thai.
I want to sit down and take things in, but I’d feel guilty drinking beer after skipping out on training; after all, Muay Thai is what lets me feel like I’m better than the people here, and it’s an admittedly fine distinction at the best of times. I order an Italian ice at a sidewalk cafe, and I make myself nurse it so the waiter won’t bother me for awhile.
Sunburns; sunburns everywhere. Protuberances: bellies, backpacks. Cargo shorts are absolutely pervasive among the men here, a hard stream broken only by a few shirtlesses in board shorts and the tasteful lacunas of Japanese. Linen pants are pretty much their female equivalent, though a lot of women wear floral-print sundresses instead, and others wear both; I see a few hippy girls who do this and still manage to be achingly beautiful. Many people here look to be dressed in outfits bought entirely on this street.
A little ways off, a Thai with an open suitcase full of hip flasks in the crook of his arm marks me with his green laser pointer. A one-legged man scoots by him on his ass, shaking a cup of coins; he seems in high spirits. All about me is “Rite Round” by Flo-Rida and the sound of croaking frogs, made by ladies who are selling a wooden instrument which makes a croaking frog sound. But nobody offers me any yaba (translation: “crazy medicine.”) Don’t people in this town know how to have a good time?!
Every woman here above a certain age has a sunburned, Teutonic look to her, and wears angular eyeglasses. British boys seem to travel in matched sets—same stocky build, same ballcap, same haircuts and goatees—as if bulwarking each other against the strangeness.
There are no good tattoos on this street.
Eventually I have to leave my table, after the fifth visit from a woman grown incensed by my failure to buy her medallions. The ferry’s stopped running by now, and it will be even harder to get a metered cab here than in Ratankosin. I need to go a lot further now, however, so getting swindled is a more expensive proposition. But there’s not much to be done about it.
On the evening of my third day I still haven’t slept anything close to a full night since my penultimate night in New York, and I am starting to feel psychological effects: phantom movements in the peripheries et al. I’m dead on my feet by seven but worried if I turn in too early I’ll be awake again by 1 am. I settle on staying out until 9:30, and so wander a shitty and bracingly frigid mall in Lumphini district; I buy a pair of athletic shorts, which I mislay fifteen minutes later, and then a $30 cannister of chocolate-flavored protein powder (for point of reference, my plane ticket to Koh Samui cost maybe three times that,) imported from the States with white stickers slapped over the nutrional info; I start down what I take to be a broken escalator but is in fact a motion-activated escalator, apparently something that exists here, and nearly break my neck.
Once I’m finally back and into bed, I sweat out all my sleepiness in about ten minutes. My body’s a horse led to water. I realize if I don’t get to sleep I will lose my fucking mind. I get up and go sit at the dining table with Dave and Dylan and some of the trainers; they offer me a glass of beer and after six months sober I don’t hesitate. This is when I hear the story about Dave and Dylan and the prostitutes. I’m back in bed about forty minutes later, and I manage about five or six hours sleep night. Things start getting better after that.
The next night I go to the movies. I see “From Paris With Love,” which is a Luc Besson-produced piece of shit, French-financed and full of cynical French-baiting for its dumb American audience (just like its predecessor, “Taken”) and starring John Travolta as a fat ten-year old’s notion of a badass. But the cinema is a velour-upholstered jukebox-come-cathedral made even more fantastic for being set atop the Siam Paragon Center—a pretentious white-on-white faux Guggenheim with a Hermes outlet and a Lambourgini dealership—like a ringpop on a wedding cake. The screens are IMAX huge. They play lite-jazz versions of songs that were pretty fucking lite to begin with: “been around the world and I I I…” You pick out your seat when you buy your ticket, which is great for me because I get stressed out if I can’t sit dead center. The national anthem starts up after the previews, and the screen bids the audience to stand and to sing along if it wishes. Then it goes into a karaoke-style montage of Thai citizens enjoying life and being great parents. You can get soda in a big bear-shaped cup.
On Saturday during afternoon training, two hours in, I’m motioned into the ring; I’m to do a couple rounds of stand-up boxing with Alak: no kicks or knees, just punching. Alak’s maybe five foot one and of deeply indeterminate age, with a frosted mullet and abdominals out of a comic book; he rolls up the bottoms of his shorts, which makes the shorts look like a diaper and Alak in turn like a muscular golden baby. I am fucking terrified of him. I try explaining first to him and then to Sern that I would like to keep things light, but Alak can’t understand me and Sern doesn’t want to translate.
I try to set the tone by throwing out a few slow, gentle jabs, but he just looks confused as he slips in and gets me hard under the chin. Even then it feels weird to punch somebody so small full in the face. I move around a lot and throw a ton of jabs to keep him the fuck away, and I even catch him with an uppercut when he works some fancy slip for the third straight time. But in the next round I start to tire, and he starts to get inside, and the second time I get hit hard enough to cross my eyes something serious, and at the end of that round I beg off. Sern is all smiles afterward; in my post-coital relief at being clear of Alak I imagine that he’s pleased with how I handled myself, but in retrospect I think that he just likes seeing farang get hurt.
Today is the second day of my second week. At some point over the weekend my feet started swelling from the heat, and now I have huge a Cronenbergian blister on either pinkie toe, both jaundiced from a weird linament Jitti keeps applying . I picked up a black eye at some point yesterday, which makes me feel sheepish and trashy when I’m out on the town. Five days from now I’ll get on a plane heading south to Koh Samui, to train at the Lamai camp there. I’m looking forward to a change of scenery; I miss the manic discombobulation of those first few days, without which the regimen here feels a bit like work. Also, I’m getting sick of Bangkok.
Right now I am living and training at Jitti Gym, which is in Ratchapidisek, which is a shitty neighborhood in east Bangkok full of slummy two- and three-stories and cheap new mid-rise developments. I haven’t found the neighborhood in any guide book; I think the gym is its only point of interest to farangs, but last night I saw a fat white couple and their kid at the Metro so maybe there’s a basket museum that I don’t know about.
The gym is a little compound with granite-brick walls about twelve feet high, and a huge wrought-iron gate that’s painted gold and quite ornate and as such stands at odds with the rigorous unfanciness of everything else. All the cooking and eating and fighting is done in the open air, under corrugated metal roofs that start in about five feet above the walls. Right when you come through the gates you see a few big picnic tables made of dark wood, with logs for legs, and behind that there’s a fridge and folding table and a couple of rough cabinets with dishes and cooking supplies. All the food’s cooked back there, in one pot over a big gas burner. Up on one wall by the tables there’s some photos of fighters who’ve trained at the gym and photos of Jitti at various ages and some weird water-color portraits of boxers. Top row center, pride of place is given to a poster of Natalie Portman dressed as a galactic princess, which reads “One Love. One Quest. Star Wars.”
There are about eight foreign fighters training at a given time, and maybe four Thais, and then six Thai trainers. Everybody sleeps in a small two-story building, set in between the dining space and the boxing ring. I sleep on the ground floor, with Dave and Ethan. There are two other rooms upstairs, plus Jitti’s room. Some of the trainers sleep in tents on the roof. Outside my room’s another little room, with pillows on the floor, and when they’re not training the Thai boys sprawl out there like big cats and watch television, and sometimes sing karaoke. There’s a wall of lockers in that room, where we keep our passports and sundry valuables. And there’s a shelf with some trophies, and below those is a glass case with a carved figure of the King, seated at a table with his legs crossed, reading a newspaper. At his feet two little ceramic cats play with marbles. There are stuffed elephants and carved elephants everywhere all over the house, and many broken fans.
The training area’s out back; I can see it through my window, if the curtains aren’t shut. At the center of everything is big ring that’s about one and half times regulation size, with some mats and heavy bags arrayed around it. Some of the heavy bags are quite dilapidated, and some of them are little more than skeletons of heavy bags. There’s a pair of wooden sit-up braces that look like something a castaway might build, if he was training for a fight against a bear.
There’s a terrier who has the run of the place—on a side note, in Thailand the silouetted dog icon used in “no dogs allowed” signs is recognizably a terrier—who can stand on his hind legs more or less indefinitely, when he thinks there’s food in it for him. Sometimes he will steal off with one of your shoes and leave it up on the roof. It happened to me. And he will bite you if you touch him.
We wake up around seven—or we’re supposed to, anyway; jet lag wakes me earlier—and run three or four miles. We run around the city, or in a park, or sometimes through the city to a park and then back again. The other day a dog chased me for a couple of blocks, but I don’t think he expected to catch me, and he didn’t.
After the run we come back to the gym, and train for an hour or two, some combination of padwork and sparring and shadowboxing. What you do and how much depends on who you’re training with that day; an asshole like Sern will be throwing knees at your head halfway though the first round—and this is during padwork; I refuse to spar with Sern, because he’ll just hurt me and I won’t learn anything—and you’ll be fucked after twenty minutes.
Morning training is pretty quiet; people drift in and out, and some people just skip it. The afternoon session, starting in around three o’clock, is much more raucous. Everybody comes, and then a lot of people staying elsewhere on top of that. It’s about three or four hours, loosely regimented: five rounds of pads, then bagwork, then sparring, then clinching. The rounds are five minutes long, rather than the usual three: a fucking eternity. But you can take a round off whenever you feel like it, or even have a shower and come back; the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed and nobody wears a shirt, like a pool party where people are hurting each other.
This is the second part of my two-part report on the British men who sleep in my room with me.
Ethan is twenty-four, but it’s a “hard twenty-four,” as they say. He makes me think of those British mercenaries in North Africa, who drift from civil war to civil war: he has a perpetual squint, as if from a lifetime spent in harsh sunlight, but also skin that’s shut-in pale; his body is as strong and unsexy as a cudgel, and a bit doughy in the way that athletes get when gone to seed. There’s scars all over his body that don’t look boxing related and a raised circular burn in the center of his chest about the size of an Om tattoo.
I learn about most of the other people here in dribs and drabs; I know more about Ethan than all of them put together, probably, because he talks a lot. Farmer does too, but Farmer talks a little like a jazz solo, full of angular turns and flowering tangents. Ethan is more like a piece by Philip Glass: obsessively, hypnotically repetitive, delineating and relineating some small facet of Thai boxing, drugs, or prostitutes. I don’t mean that Ethan’s boring; he’s fun to listen to. He uses a lot of good expressions like “cheap as chips,” and appends a reflexive “innit?” to most of his statements, which is probably my favorite idiosyncracy of British speech. But a lot of those “innits” feel less rhetorical to me than Ethan probably intends, i.e. “A Paki’s like to lie about the time of day, innit?”
Ethan grew up poor in Leeds, in a council estate, and now he lives with his parents and sells weed and coke. His family life sounds relatively stable now, but he’s let drop a lot of bad details about his upbringing, for instance a laundry list of all the things he’s ever been hit and stabbed and burned with, snooker cues et al. When he says things like this I don’t think he’s angling to shock or to establish something hard about himself; in fact, he doesn’t seem to be talking to any particular end, usually.
Before coming to Jitti Gym, Ethan spent a week in Patai, smoking crystal meth with his girlfriend, a prostitute he met there and with whom he now has weird baby-talk conversations on his cell phone, while lying on the bed next to mine. Patai is another of Ethan’s pet subjects; I try to avoid discussing my travel plans with him, because he seems genuinely hurt that Patai is not at the top of my itinerary. From what I’ve heard, it’s a city-sized extrapolation of Bangkok’s gogo strips, with some beaches sketched in around the edges.
Ethan and I share real common ground; we both love Thai boxing, and if I don’t like drugs as much as he does, I did once, so I can relate, especially vis a vis the difficulty of balancing drugs and Thai boxing. But we really diverge on the subject of prostitutes. When I told him I was not interested in fucking a prostitute, full stop—something I put off making explicit for as long as possible, I admit—he was incredulous. He pinched my arm and asked if I was real and was not being wholly ironic. He asked me how many women I’d slept with, and I gave him a rough number, and then he asked me if I really hadn’t paid for any of them.
Although I object to prostitution for a lot of reasons, I’m not bringing this up to scorn him, not in a moral sense and certainly not in the sense of “what kind of man would need to pay for sex”; it’s not like I’m appreciably more handsome than he is, and I think a lot of girls would find him much more engaging than they would me. And I really do like Ethan, though I would I go to jail before I went out drinking with him. He’s funny and generous and doesn’t condescend to me when we talk about Muay Thai, though as a pro fighter he has every right to. I’m only illustrating the gulf between our sensibilities, and the gulf between my sensibilities and those of a lot of men at the gym, and a lot of the men who come to Bangkok. It’s evident everywhere and it’s in my thoughts a lot of the time, because—hopeless Jew relativist that I am—it does not feel as straightforward as it did before I got to Thailand; I don’t feel summarily hating half of the men I meet. I’ve been putting off unpacking all this here, though, and I’ll do so a little longer.
There are two Englishmen staying at the gym with me, Dave and Ethan. Dave arrived a few days before I did, and Ethan a few days after. They’re both likable, though you have to make a few more compromises if you’re set on liking Ethan.
Dave is thirty, the oldest fighter at the gym and the only one older than me. I’m an inch or two taller than him, though I feel as though I shouldn’t be: he has the presence of a large man, but without any jittery Napoleonic strain to be larger than he is. He’s built stouter than the other fighters here, with thickly muscled arms and legs, and serious, venerable-looking abdominals evident beneath a thin skein of beer fat. And he’s very handsome. I really like Dave. I like his hearty Midlands accent, whose long vowels render nearly everything either funny or compelling. I also like the magnanimous way he’ll repeat the key clause of other people’s remarks, as if savoring it, even when it’s nothing special.
During my first two days at the gym, Dave is either absent or in bed, asleep or half-asleep and surly. He’d apparently injured himself soon after he’d arrived, overexerting on the pads after too much time off. It’s not clear when he will be training again. When you show up somewhere new, it’s easy to mistake that moment for a permanent state of affairs; by the second night I’ve more or less written him off as debauched and invalid, but I’m wrong about that.
He’s back training on the third day, and it’s something of a revelation to see. His movements have a fearsome economy to them, and a speed that’s impressive in whippet-builds like Farmer or the Thai boys but is frankly disconcerting in a larger body. I learn that Dave has been training for about 14 years, off and on, and at one point was considered to have real promise. He had a high-profile televised fight about seven years ago, in which he acquitted himself well despite being entirely unprepared. Back injuries have since made it almost impossible for him to train seriously, however; he won’t compete again. He explains all this to me with equanimity.
A few days later he tells me a story in a similiar tone of voice, about a night when he and Dylan had gotten a couple of prostitutes—recommended to them by the trainers—and were fucking them in adjacent beds. I’m not sure where this was taking place; it may have happened at the gym, though I sort of doubt it did, and I really hope it didn’t. Dave describes how his girl was lying beneath him, still and silent, while Dylan’s had her legs up in the air—and here he gets on his back and demonstrates with his own legs—and screaming. “I figured he must have a monster of a knob,” he tells me, “but I looked over to see, and it’s about the same as mine.” He sounds pleased as he says it, as if describing something interesting he’d found on the street.
I don’t sleep much more on my second night than I did on my first, so my second day starts early, at about 1 or 2am. I cycle between Conrad and The Myth of Sysyphus and staring into the fan. By 7 AM I’m too hungry to read—breakfast is served at 10, after morning training—so I put on sandals and walk down the street to the 7-11. I buy a mini-snickers, which comes with a free Tigger stamp. On the way back I notice a bottle of Johnny Walker Red standing amongst the curbside detritus, with two or three inches left in it. I’m in the ring skipping rope at 8 sharp, even though nobody else is will be out there for a little while.
My whole body is sort of loopy from lack of sleep; I’ve probably managed less than 8 hours in the last 72, though my muscles are less sore than ought to be. But the soles of my feet are raw, because the mats here are rougher than what I’m used to. I do a few tentative kicks and feel the skin crinkle up brittle against the ground. I can see at least three spots where it’s primed to crack and blister. I go back inside and put on socks, even though I know the trainers will think I’m weird. My balance seems off, too, but I don’t give it much thought.
I warm up half-heartedly, and then Sern wraps my hands. He’s one of the trainers, and a giant, as far as Thais go, and he will reveal himself in the coming days and hours and minutes to be a fucking dick. I get into the ring with Alex, a young Phillipino guy brought up in Switzerland. Sern puts us in gloves and shinpads and tells us to spar. I feel up to it for about thirty seconds, until I realize I’m not. Alex’s boxing is more or less on a level with mine, but he’s fitter, and in any case my head is just not in it at the moment. I keep it together for the first round, though he’s usually a step ahead and I take a couple of punches to the face, and some kicks to the body. He also gets me in the balls twice, by accident—not particularly hard, but worrying—and when I ask Sern if I can go put on a cup he laughs and shakes his head.
By the end of the second round I’m too exhausted for any pretense of boxing. I fall for every one of his feints, and I can’t manage to keep a guard up. Jitti is watching too now, alongside Sern. They were boisterous at first, howling every time one of us landed a kick, but they aren’t now. After the third round Jitti takes me out of the ring, and berates me for showing up so tired. I feel like I’m about to cry, because I’m too tired not to. He notices my feet are bleeding, and makes me put on my running shoes. Then he has me do some pushups and wanders off.
I’m feeling better by breakfast, which is chicken and rice and peppers. There’s no question of any afternoon training, though. Jitti makes all of us give him samples of our handwriting; he needs someone to fill in the names and dates on some training certificates he’s making out for someone. But none of them are deemed acceptable, and the certificates go back in the envelope.
My first night I arrive at the gym just in time for dinner, and I sit down across from Euddi, who is huge and very Teutonic and shirtless; everybody at the table is shirtless, except for me. He’s very friendly, in the way that people tend to be when they’re too large to have even been fucked with. We have a lot in common, at least relative to the other foreigners training at the gym; he has a normal job back in Germany, as a systems administrator, whereas most of the others are professional fighters and MMA coaches or, in the case of Dave, a genial Englishman with a bed adjacent to mine, ex-pro fighters turned perpetual narco-tourists who live in Muay Thai camps but don’t train because of nebulous injuries.
I go to bed early but then can’t fall asleep. I lie in the dark for hours, listening to the Bangkok traffic and the whirr of the three floor fans in the room (one in front of each bed,) at some point rediscovering a “Great Books” application on my iPhone, with a large selection of public domain texts. I’ve read about a third of Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” before Farmer comes in at 7 and asks if anyone’s up for a run. I totally am.
Farmer is 19 but looks way younger; he’s milk pale and rail thin, with a buzz cut and big eyes with long lashes and a light spray of zits around his mouth; he could be a flashback to lost innocence from a gangster movie. Back in Ireland, he’s the top-ranked Thai boxer in his weight class (which we inexpertly convert from kilos to about 125 pounds) and on Wednesday he has his first fight against a Thai (which he pronounces “Toy”) and on Friday he has his second fight.
The fighters go to one of two parks by the gym to run. Today we go to the smaller one, with a narrow path twisting around a manmade lake through weird landscaping; it feels sort of like a futurist golf course. Farmer tells me about how last week he was chased through this park by security guards, because the national anthem had started playing (it plays every morning at 8 over loudspeakers throughout the whole city) but he hadn’t heard it, because he was wearing headphones. Whenever the national anthem comes on here, you are expected to stop what you’re doing; it’s a big deal; there’s a few things like this that you have to keep an eye on.
Farmer talks more or less continuouslessly from the moment we set out to the moment we get back, but he doesn’t come off as hyper or pushy, or even particularly talkative; information just flows from him as naturally as air or sweat, though his brogue is so thick that at least 1/5th of it slips pleasantly by me, uncomprehended. He tells me how he regrets having paid for a full 6 weeks at the gym up front, because he and Jitti are not getting along, because Farmer has been sleeping with too many local women; one of the first things Jitti had told me when I arrived was not to sleep with any women in the area; he gave a number of reasons. Farmer tells me a complicated story wherein he sleeps with three different women in one night—he stresses that they weren’t prostitutes, or else they were but didn’t make him pay, except maybe in one instance—and another story, or possibly part of this same story, where one woman mistook his subway card for an ATM card, and paid her own “bar fee” (this is one of the ways prostitutes operate here,) and took him back to her apartment, and made him a big breakfast from things bought at the 7-11 downstairs, and now wants him to come away with her to some beach house this weekend. Farmer tells me that women here especially like young, pale foreigners: this is because Thais associate dark skin with farming and manual labor, and pale skin with money; and also because they assume young men traveling abroad will be rich and virginal and easily overwhelmed with sex. “Let em think it,” he advises me.
Some other advice Farmer gave me during the run was not to go out drinking with the trainers, because they will stick you with the bar tab; to stay away from dogs in general, but in particular the gym’s salt and pepper terrier, who is prone to spontaneous violence; and to check your luggage before leaving the gym, in case the trainers have planted drugs in it and tipped off the cops for a commission.
About halfway around the track, the national anthem starts playing over loudspeakers all around us. Farmer does not seem inclined to stop, but then we notice some security guards a little ways off, so we do, and listen. “It sounds like something from a cartoon,” he says. It’s true; it does.
Out the window of the plane, Bangkok’s clean geometry of color and development remind me a little of the midwest. Even at a minute from landing there are still more green sections than building sections. Interspersed throughout are big rectangles of water, the size of several city blocks at least. A few of them are a little wooly around the edges, with big green patches on their surface that look like giant lily pads; most of them are no-nonsense, though. Some are bifurcated by thin land bridges, either vertically or horizontally, always dead straight. As we get lower things start looking less midwestern: fringes on buildings like Chinese pagodas, and roofs everywhere in a weird shade of electric blue.
I decide to hire a car from a desk at the airport, rather than deal with a curbside taxi; I had the foresight to ask Jitti how much to expect to pay for ride to the gym, but then I forgot to write it down. I figure I am paying a 100% markup or so, but it’s worth it if I can streamline things a little, because I’m really tired; at this point it’s been about 40 hours since I’ve slept. I don’t fall alseep in the car, but I drift in that direction. The street signs are all in Thai, but the billboards are mostly in English. The driver has on a Peter Gabriel CD. I find out later it was more like a 300% markup.
It’s my last day of work. My plane leaves in about 40 hours, and I’ve more or less accepted that no catastrophic bike accident will prevent my being on board; I’m going. I’d have thought I’d be giddy at this point, and I am, intermittently. But I’m mostly impatient. I’ve thought as much as I can about this thing I can’t properly imagine (I should probably have looked at a guide book by now.) I’m also a lot less sanguine about the condition of my body than I was at the beginning of the week; at the gym on Wednesday, after less than twenty minutes of drills, the muscles in my upper arms were drum tight and burning hot; they felt so weak on my bike ride home home it was hard to support my own weight. I probably should have jumped rope beforehand, or something.
It’s 4:06. There are a lot of things I need to do before I can leave work, and then a lot of things I need to do before I can go home, and on like that. My office keeps getting interrupted by quick little flashes of Thailand; they’re not exactly images, though, because I don’t know what Thailand looks like.
