April 2010
1 post
til the end of it
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...
March 2010
2 posts
phuket, part 2
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...
phuket, part 1
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...
February 2010
10 posts
in koh samui
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...
home + away
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...
pack it in!
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...
several days
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...
where do you live
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...
brits, part 2
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;...
brits, part 1
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...
chewed up
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...
lessons
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;...
& now i'm here
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...
January 2010
1 post
almost ready.
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...