A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (3 page)

When I first started with the pad rounds, I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to scream like the Thais did. Finally, one day, maybe a month in, I just started doing it, yelling “Aish!” with every kick, my voice a few notes lower than those around me. I remember a Lumpini fighter named Neungsiam (the best fighter in the camp), who looked at me as I got out of the ring, and nodded. I was beginning to get it. Neungsiam and I would eventually become friends. He was my age, had been a Lumpini superstar at eighteen, had quit for a few years, and was now making his comeback. He was a tranquil guy, with pinpoint punching. He would come hang out in my room and we would bullshit in English, Thai, and sign language. I showed him pictures of the girls I hung out with in L.A., and I think that cemented the friendship. He loved those blond girls and thought maybe I could hook him up.

During my stay at Fairtex, I lived in the cheapest room. It was at the top of the stairs, above the rings, and hot and airless and foul with stale sweat, even with both windows open and the fan going. The room was small and high-ceilinged, maybe fifteen feet wide and twenty-five long. It was noisy, with traffic across the swamp and the boys calling and adults hollering and sandals flapping in the hall outside. There was the murmur of talk and breeze, the dogs occasionally barking like mad. There was barely space for the three people in there, the broke-ass lifers; the other
farang
who came through stayed for weeks or even days, and they all stayed in a nicer set of rooms with—God forbid—air-conditioning.

In our room, we slept on three single mattresses on the floor, evenly spaced, with green-and-white-checked bedspreads and sheets; girls would wash them about once a month. It was a little dirty, but we had wooden straw brooms if we wanted to sweep up (we didn’t). In addition to standing portable closets that were fairly useless, we had a little table and two chairs. Our stuff was strewn everywhere, or piled high in the corners. The mice would sometimes hide in it, and we couldn’t be bothered to chase them out. Despite the roughness, it was a haven for us, a refuge, where I spent a lot of time reading. By the end of my six months, I had something like two hundred English paperbacks stacked around the room.

There were two guys in the room when I got there, Michael and Johnny. Michael was Italian Swiss, a short, stocky man, slightly balding with thick, curly black hair and a hairy chest. He had been at Fairtex for three or four months already and had fought twice, winning both times against Thais. He spoke English, and, although he and Johnny at first resented my intrusion into their little domain, he was friendly to me.

There were ants everywhere, and when Michael spilled food, he would look at me in false shock and then sing, in his heavily accented English, “Don’t worry, the ants will get it.” And the ants
would
get it, just like they got everything; if you were drinking some juice and put the cup down, the next time you glanced at it there would be ants swarming thick along the rim. On the floor, on the table, it didn’t matter. Sometimes the big ants would wake you up at night when they ran over you. You got used to it.

Michael would also frequently go to Pattaya, a capital for the tourist sex trade, and when he got back, he would spend hours detailing his exploits in lascivious detail for Johnny. He tried to tell me about them until I made it clear I didn’t really want to hear what he had been up to. When the lights went out, he would talk with Johnny in his silky, low accent and chuckle to himself in an evil, delighted little burble.

Michael spoke a fair bit of Thai, and he fought at Samrong, the same place I would, and I went to see his last fight, against a Frenchman who trained out on the islands. It was agonizing to watch Michael chase this guy around, without the energy or the snap to connect with anything. The other guy wasn’t much better but was in slightly better shape, and that’s all it took. After that fight, Michael hung around, half-training, and then left Fairtex to go look at other, cheaper camps. He became convinced that his victories had been fixed, that he couldn’t have beat a Thai. I only spent maybe a month with Michael.

Johnny Deroy, on the other hand, I spent four and half months with. He was nineteen and this was the first time he had ever been out of Montreal. After finishing high school, he flew to Thailand to pursue his dream of being a muay Thai fighter. Before he left Canada, he dreamt that he had been stung by a scorpion on his leg but survived it, and he had a scorpion tattooed on his leg. He had gone north at first to a camp at Chiang Mai and been ignored and robbed. Instead of giving up, he found his way to Fairtex.

I was deeply impressed by his courage. When I was his age, I had gone backpacking around Europe, which is a far cry from Southeast Asia. Like Michael, Johnny didn’t like me at first, but we warmed up talking about movies and
The Simpsons
and then got along famously. He taught me to swear in gutter Canadian French, and I helped him with his English.

He was small, thin, and leanly muscled with a narrow, angular face. He would stand in front of the full-length mirror with his arms raised and yell, “I’m nature’s greatest miracle!” completely tongue-in-cheek.

I had been at Fairtex for about two months when Johnny got his first fight. Kum set it up back at his village, Chayaphum, where there was going to be a festival, and so naturally there would be fights. Johnny asked me to come (Michael had just left), and although it would break my training, I knew he would like to have a friend around. I was also curious to see some of the countryside.

On the second weekend in May, we packed up and took a cab from Fairtex to the bus station, Kum slick in his Fairtex jacket and movie-star hair. The bus station was the size of a major airport, a massive, chaotic edifice of concrete. I didn’t see any
farang
among the maze of levels and stairs crowded with people, and it wasn’t surprising, because you would have to be able to speak Thai. There weren’t many signs or numbers that I could see—I would have been completely lost on my own. The
farang
buses all left from Khao San, where tourists were herded together and charged five times the normal price. In Thailand, there is a 300 percent tax on foreigners, and it’s still an inexpensive place. I had flown there on an airplane; compared to most Thais, I was a millionaire.

We rode the bus, air-conditioned and smelling sweet, for about four hours, and then disembarked in a little town. Kum wandered around until he found a guy with a pickup truck who agreed to take us in the bed out to Kum’s house, about a forty-minute ride, with a few other Thais, who stared openly at us. The villages were havens for chickens and dogs, and the jungle walled us in.

Kum’s house was a big place for the village, with a tiled ground floor lined with glass cabinets. There was running water; a single spigot in the house filled a large concrete cistern in the only bathroom, on the first floor. This cistern or pool was ubiquitous; you’d find it in restaurants and hostels in Bangkok. There was a plastic bowl floating in it for dumping water, usually freezing cold, over your head. There was no toilet paper, but we’d brought some.

The second floor was bare, uneven, and unpainted wood. We slept in a big room there, in a line on little pads, a mosquito coil burning at our feet. Michael had convinced Johnny that the mosquito coils were deadly poison, and I agreed with him. That smoke has
got
to be toxic. Still, at times it was necessary. I woke up much earlier than the other two and crept from the creaking room.

Kum had a wife, Dee, and two sons, the younger of whom was called Suphumvit and was beautiful in his hammock crib that rose in steep walls around his dense little body. Dee was also beautiful, with a warm matronly body and a smile that lit up her face and squeezed her eyes shut. She was always laughing, and the three of us got along great, Dee and Suphumvit and I. We sat on the front porch that morning while everyone else was still asleep, and I held Suphumvit and we ate mango. After I finished the mango, I put the plate down on the tile floor and washed the copius juice off my face and hands and arms. By the time I got back, the plate was crawling with several types of ants. I could hear Michael in my head singing, “Don’t worry, the ants will get it.”

After everyone else woke up, we went out to get Johnny weighed in and find an opponent for him. The event was being organized at a
wat,
or temple; it was jammed with men and boys, and the drinking had already started. As Johnny weighed in, the Thais crowded around to see him. An older Thai wanted to fight him, a tall, thin, mustachioed man with tattoos on his shoulders, but Kum wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not sure whether Johnny would have killed this guy or this guy would have killed Johnny. They started with the music, traditional Thai stuff, and began a sort of mini-parade around the wat, dancing and twisting their arms. They gestured for Johnny to join in, and like a good sport, he did, stepping delicately in his imitation Tevas.

We rode in the back of a different pickup that night out to the festival, and got there as the sun was setting. It was a small-town fairground, with Porta-Potties and garish lights strung up and little vendors selling everything. The area where the fights were going to be was cordoned off, and we went in there and found a corner of the grass to set up on.

The ring was homemade and small and lit by a string of four bright, bare bulbs that hung diagonally over it. The fights began with really little kids, maybe eight or nine, but the crowd followed closely and shouted and cheered. The kids were deadly serious, although they couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt each other too much (although one little boy was cut by an elbow), and the crowd rejoiced ecstatically.

Johnny was getting nervous, jumpy. He had been putting on a relaxed face all day, but now the nerves were setting in. He started to get his prefight massage from Kum, lying on a couple of towels on the pavement in the parking lot. Kum and I were going to be his cornermen.

It was a wild scene, with a cheerful, carnival atmosphere. The thick outdoor crowd milled tightly around the ring, hundreds of people drunk and shouting. There wasn’t another foreign face for a hundred miles. Because his fight was delayed through three or four matches, Johnny was getting more anxious. He had warmed up and then cooled off, which wastes energy. Kum was also angry, and insulted. I think Johnny was something of a draw, and Kum was a man of some standing around town.

Before the fight, Johnny danced the full
wai khru
and
ram muay
that the Lumpini fighters do, and the crowd roared its approval, cheering him on; the Thai fight enthusiasts always love it when the
farang
respect their traditions. The
wai khru
and
ram muay
are traditional dances that all Thai fighters perform before they fight, dances to honor their families and teachers. The dance appeases superstitious spirits but also centers the fighter, brings him back to himself. The musicians played throughout the fight, blowing and thumping with cigarettes in their hands.

After he finished, Johnny looked at me and the heaving sea of brown faces and said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

Johnny had a right to be scared. He was fighting a Thai who had been born into the sport. The Thai looked young, but just the fact that he was Thai was scary enough: He might be sixteen, but have five years and fifty fights.

In the beginning of the fight, Johnny dominated. He was bigger and stronger, and every time they clinched, Johnny would throw his man to the ground. But there was a cost. He was too tense, too worked up, and tiring quickly. After every clinch, his hands were lower; he was obviously struggling for air. Kum was trying to get through to him, calling, “
Sabai sabai,
” and I was translating, yelling, “Relax!” at him. Kum picked it up, and trying to be heard over the din, began yelling with me, “Re-lax!”

Johnny counted himself out in the third—just lay back on the ropes and gestured “No more” to the referee. The other fighter couldn’t believe it and threw his hands in the air like he’d just won a title. I was angry with John at first, although I understood the line of fear and exhaustion he was walking. He wasn’t hurt at all, just completely out of breath, and I knew within twenty seconds he was going to be wondering why he had quit like that. He was quiet on the way home. We sat in the pickup bed and watched the stars.

Eventually, we talked a little about the fight, just Johnny and me. We came through to a rationale. The problem was breathing. Whenever Johnny was in the clinch, straining to throw his opponent down, for a split second he would hold his breath. This was a deadly mistake because with muay Thai you are operating at your anaerobic threshhold for almost the entire fight. Those split-second breath holds were killing Johnny. Kum and the other trainers can’t talk about this with us (here the language gap makes itself felt), but breathing is critical. In the clinch, what the Thais do is stay loose, stay on their toes, and breathe. There isn’t any straining or wrestling, or if there is, it is quick, smooth moves in rhythm with the breathing.

Johnny was unhurt, but his voice was shaky. I could tell he was angry and a little ashamed to have lost the fight, but as we talked and figured out what had happened, he cheered up, and by the time the sun rose the next day, he was back to his old form, cracking jokes about everything he saw.

The next morning, Kum commandeered a truck, and we rode through the countryside in the hot sun, past rice paddies and thick forest, and stopped and wandered up to a waterfall. We all stripped down to our underwear for a dip and annoyed the hell out of a Thai teenager and his girlfriend who were up there for a make-out session.

After the swim, Kum took us to a Buddhist monastery, a huge complex up in the mountains that stood on a cliff and overlooked the valley. There were monkeys in dismal cages and a strange sculpture garden depicting the afterlife of a bad person. It was deeply disturbing, a wide area filled with hundreds of human-size wooden carvings. There were demons with animal heads and human bodies attacking the humans: cutting into a pregnant woman’s stomach, piercing eyeballs—real serious gore. The carvings were all painted to look lifelike. Over all this presided two huge statues, twenty feet tall, thin and wooden in the same style: a man and a woman with their skin flayed off and their eyes melted out and their tongues hanging past their waists.