Dawn broke. It was so hot, sweat stung my eyes. I couldn’t sleep, hadn’t since two A.M., and was waiting for day to come so I could get some orange juice, walk around, do something, anything.
I stepped onto the balcony. Bells rang across the river. Deep in the jungle, I saw the golden spire of a Buddhist Temple. The monks were up and praying.
I remembered something my friend MB told me years earlier: “The best way to get to know a place is to run it.”
The River Kwai was broader than I thought, languid, and slow. I put on my running shoes and did some light stretching.
I jogged through the hotel grounds and startled an employee placing a plate of oranges in front of a statue of Buddha. I felt like a voyeur. She seemed surprised by my presence, but quickly made a wai, placing her palms in prayer pose under her chin, and said, “Sawadee ka.”
I did the same.
“Sawadee khrup.”
I headed down the main road leading from the hotel towards the bridge. Everyone working on the flick had seen “The Bridge over the River Kwai,” and were excited to be staying next to it. A hundred thousand men died building the Burma Railroad for the occupying Japanese. A hundred thousand Thais, Burmese, Brits, Norwegians. You could still sense the blood in the soil and the river. In a clearing, men poured buckets of water over elephants about to begin their day as tourist curios. A boy positioned an ornamental headdress on a small one that must have been no more than a few years old. Even though it wasn’t tourist season, they looked like they were going through motions years in practice.
The bridge itself was fascinating. It clearly wasn’t the old wooden structure famous from the flick. It was set on concrete pylons and had iron sidings. Running across it was tricky, as the wooden planks weren’t flush. I could see the river beneath the large gaps between the posts.
The other side of the river was residential, but active for the hour, and curious. People cooked breakfast on porches, while others gathered, waiting for food. It seemed like some kind of low-level black market where people used their houses as informal restaurants.
I was a curio to be sure. Lanky, bone white, red hair, I was a farang (foreigner), but my Irishness made me a double farang. I waved as I passed, but people stared at me as if a space alien was jogging by. My goal was the road that led out of the western end of town toward the temple buried in the rainforest.
I disregarded the stares and wrote them off to me having the whitest legs anyone had ever seen. Even down in El Centro, I was famous for how white my legs were. They've been so fried by the sun, they don’t even burn anymore. A guy named Eddie Corvera made fun of me in PE once, saying, “You’re a white boy.”
I said, “Yeah, I know. I’m a white boy.”
He said, “No dude, I mean, you're a WHITE boy. Damn, you’re blinding me.”
I was no more than six hundred meters out of town when I saw the first two. They ran towards me from the northeast, snarling and barking. I stopped and took off my shirt, wrapping it around my fist and forearm. Others joined them from all directions in packs of twos, threes, and fours. Mangey & snarling, I found myself surrounded by a pack of twenty mean-as-fu&% dogs. I was in deep shit.
I picked up a stick with my left hand and played a game I learned growing up in border towns and dealing with strays. I pretended like I had a rock in my right hand and made a throwing motion anytime a dog got too close. It worked for a few seconds, but the pack grew bigger and bolder. I swung the stick at a black dog that snapped at my ankle. It darted back but immediately returned, meaner than before.
I wanted to scream, but didn’t. I was hyper-focused, swinging my stick, pretending to throw rocks, but in my mind, I made peace with the fact this was it. The big it. This was real, was happening, and the second the first dog bit into my calf, I was going down and the game was over. The snarls, the teeth, the collective level of frenzy was nothing I’d ever experienced. It was like being in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. If an egg with feet suddenly appeared with a knife, it wouldn't have fazed me.
My first day in Kanchanaburi, before I even got to start working on a flick called "A Bright Shining Lie," I was going to die. It was surreal, like the feeling you get when someone holds you up at gunpoint. You can’t believe it’s happening, but it's happening, and somewhere down the street you see the taillights of a cab, or a woman walking with grocery bags. Life goes on around you, oblivious and uncaring.
Then suddenly, miraculously, seemingly from nowhere, I heard a man screamed in Thai. I can’t tell you what he said, but it was so loud and high pitched, it cut through the cacophonic dog frenzy like a knife.
The dogs immediately froze and looked in the direction of the voice. A monk literally appeared out of the mist. He had a shaved head and wore an orange robe. He kept shouting commands in Thai at the dogs, never once breaking eye contact, even when he swung the kickstand down on his moped. He walked slowly towards me, all the while addressing the alpha dog in the pack, the black one that took the first snap at my ankle. He wasn't shouting anymore, just talking in a steady, monotonous, but mellifluous tone. I realized he was chanting.
He walked towards us calmly, but with purpose. He was water over stone. He never once stopped talking, never even blinked. The dogs bowed their heads and crouched slowly backward, clearing a path between me and the man. He grabbed my arm and led me to his moped, indicating with his hand to follow him on the left side of the bike. He started riding towards town while I jogged beside him, talking to me in Thai the whole time. I didn't know the language, but I knew what he was saying -- he was telling me to stay tight by his side. When we reached the safety of town, he went off on me in Thai, interestingly not looking at me as he did so. I imagined he was saying, “What the hell were you thinking? Are you crazy? Why are you so foolish?" The only word I understood in the whole spiel was farang. Its definition contains multitudes.
He left me and I jogged past the houses where the people were standing out front. They stopped eating and stared silently as I ran by.
Back at the hotel, I was still in a daze. I realized I'd forgotten my room key and felt embarrassed I had to go through the lobby wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
A well-known character actor was kicking back on a couch in front of the reception desk. He was reading a book and had both feet up on the coffee table. The hotel employees stood frozen behind the front desk, mortified. I knew immediately what the problem was. To Buddhists, one of the worst things you can do is show them the soles of your feet. It’s the dirtiest part of the body and deeply disrespectful. I knew he had no clue and I’m sure they understood, because, again, a farang was involved. They dealt with farangs all the time. Even more uncomfortable for a Thai than being in the laser beam of someone’s dirty-soled foot, was to be put in a position where they had to make anyone feel uncomfortable about their actions. They were caught in a deep quandary — being subjected to disrespect, literally locked behind a desk with nowhere to escape, but internally wired to be far too kind to ask the person to put their feet down to preserve that person’s honor.
I intervened.
“Hey, I heard you were working on this thing!”
The man looked up, smiled, put down the book, stood, and extended his hand.
“Nice to meet you, Do-nahl is it?” (His different mispronunciations of my name would be a source of chuckles between me and my friends for the next five months).
“A pleasure to meet you.”
“Ed Lauter, rhymes with ‘Scotch ’n water.”
We shook.
"I'm reading a book on Lee Marvin. Started it on the flight. Big hero of mine."
I leaned close and whispered, "Game ball," quoting Ed's famous line at the end of "The Longest Yard" when the evil warden played by Eddie Albert screams at Ed's character to kill Burt Reynolds.
He got immediately emotional. It was calculated on my part. It was as if I'd legitimized his life's journey in two words. I'd learn over the next few months just how deeply his sense of self was intertwined with the thumbprint he'd left on cinematic culture.
He lit up like a child. "Game ball!" he said, grabbing me in a bear hug.
RIP Ed.
