A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    After the swim, Kum took us to a Buddhist monastery, a huge complex up in the mountains that stood on a cliff and overlooked the valley. There were monkeys in dismal cages and a strange sculpture garden depicting the afterlife of a bad person. It was deeply disturbing, a wide area filled with hundreds of human-size wooden carvings. There were demons with animal heads and human bodies attacking the humans: cutting into a pregnant woman’s stomach, piercing eyeballs—real serious gore. The carvings were all painted to look lifelike. Over all this presided two huge statues, twenty feet tall, thin and wooden in the same style: a man and a woman with their skin flayed off and their eyes melted out and their tongues hanging past their waists.
    We went back to Kum’s house and then wandered down through the one-road village to the square and grabbed some folding chairs. We sat there for a parade of elephants, all dressed out in finery and ridden by monks and children. Some of the elephants were walking billboards for Red Bull and Coca-Cola. There were a few hundred people in the square, mostly children running and shrieking and carrying on. Several columns of dancers in traditional costume came through. Although we were all exhausted from the unfamiliar sun—living at the camp, we never got any sun, as we were training under cover and resting through the days—we sat stoically through it.
    After the parade was finished, we wandered back down to Kum’s house. On the way there I saw an elephant handler, a big, heavily muscled, tattooed guy punch his wife, hard, in the stomach, and Johnny saw it, too. I thought we should do something, but Johnny, from inner-city Montreal, said to just stay out of it. I looked around for Kum, but he was far behind us. The moment passed, and I did nothing. So much for the tough fighters.
    Then there was the participatory parade around the village that we joined in—strangely crowded for such a small village—an endless line of trucks and vans and people. There was music, and we danced as we walked, and people sprayed us with water, which was welcome in the stifling heat. The Thais seemed happy to have us there, and we were happy to be there, willing to enjoy ourselves.
    That night we caught the rickety old run-down bus that passed through town. It was full of people and children and chickens, so we clambered up onto the luggage rack and prostrated ourselves on the bags and baskets. The night air was thick with fat white locusts. We stayed as flat as possible, with our mouths clamped shut, watching the stars roll by. It was a mad, dreamlike ride, and I kept eyeballing the cheap, shitty welds that held the rack to the bus and thinking that we might go around a corner and the rack would shear off, that this is how tourists die in Southeast Asia, but the night was shimmering and the magic of travel and silence took away my free will.
     
     
    Back in camp, time stretched on and on, but things were changing. The trainers began to notice me. Yaquit, a big, handsome Thai who looked a little like Elvis, would sometimes train me, and he would kick the crap out of me and chuckle with delight. Kum would watch me kick the bag and frown and shake his head, then demonstrate a fuller extension or a thrust of the hips. Slowly, Apidej took more and more of an interest in me, and when I started doing whatever he told me without question—like eating a raw egg in the morning with a Sprite—he decided that I was his property.
    Anthony would at times come and lean on the ropes and watch us train. We’d chat and he’d ask me if I was ready to fight. At Fairtex, the farang could fight when they felt they were ready, but I’d put him off for two months while I was still getting my bearings. Then one day, as I was unwrapping my hands and covered in a cool film of sweat, Anthony, dressed in his usual black, sidled up to the ring. We bullshitted about training for a few minutes, and then he raised his