Dark and Stormy Night

I stayed at the same hotel in which David Carradine hung himself just a short while ago. The Nai Lert is the nicest hotel I’ve stayed at in Southeast Asia. At the time I was working for an equity mutual fund that wanted to invest in a low-cost flash chip maker in Thailand. As I had been through Bangkok a few years before while passing on my way to the southern islands for scuba diving, my boss felt I was somehow more qualified to take the trip to that steaming cauldron of a city and its Malay neighbor Singapore. The firm booked two nights at the Swissotel Nai Lert.

I’m not a big fan of Bangkok. The last time I had been there on vacation I earned a nasty cough from inhaling all the exhaust billowing from the dense traffic of taxis, tuk-tuks and tourist buses. My throat had been so raw I found I couldn’t breathe the pure air in my tanks without sudden and violent bouts of coughing, and this was discovered at one hundred feet under the surface of the South China Sea. So no, I wasn’t looking forward to the three-day due diligence jaunt.

But the Nai Lert was beautiful and the air was better than I had expected.

Now the Nai Lert is in a nice part of town nearby Siam Square. These are not the slums of Bangkok, nor are there many working people living here. Mostly the population is made up of transient westerners, embassy and hotel support staff. On my first morning I woke up early, still suffering from lag, ate a full breakfast of french toast, melon and cantaloupe, and then made my way to the lobby to rendevous with the car the company said it would send for me. After about twenty minutes of waiting it was clear the car wasn’t going to come, and all the taxis were being pre-reserved for the numerous nocturnal entertainers, some women, some men and some not-so-anchored either way, who seemed to have been released from their cells above, trickling down through stairwells and elevators to the molasses-like flesh conveyer that is Bangkok morning traffic.

After five more minutes, I decided to start walking toward a taxi stand I had spied the night before a few blocks to the east. Doing so I passed through an alley with deep gutters, the type common in Asian metropolises which suffer sudden downpours in the wet season. In these gutters were men, all men with physical bodies misshapen by what I believe to be leprosy. Where these men should have possessed arms and legs, there were stubs of various lengths. I believe the reason they were in the gutter and not on the sidewalk was because it eased locomotion, the gutter being essentially a curb with a 90 degree angle upon which their stubs could get traction.

I walked toward the lepers thinking they would not leave the security of the Bangkok gutter, but as I neared, several looked up at me, some with ghostly eyes cursed with glaucoma. They popped out of the gutter with bowls clenched in their teeth looking for some trifle or coin from me. I wasn’t more than two hundred feet from my soiled plate of french toast and maple syrup.

I didn’t know what to do then. I could spread a few Thai baht here, some more baht there, but there would always be more upward pleading and flagellating through gutters so as to deliver more bowls at my feet. The whole thing sickened me, though at the time I couldn’t figure out exactly what about it did.

I dropped a few coins and stepped over a few more bodies - you had to step over some of these men the way they strategically placed their torsos across the earth between me and the taxi stand. I did finally get a taxi which delivered me to the flash chip factory fifteen minutes late. Over apologies and tea, the company’s CFO and I watched as the line workers started their shift with ten minutes of Tai Chi led by none other than David Carradine captured in digitized video glory moving with both grace and strength.

So this is what I think now. I ask myself why would a guy who appears healthy and centered both spiritually, mentally and physically through training and meditation, a guy who I believe wasn’t hurting for money or fame (if he cared about that) or the affections of a sweet, probably younger thing, would hang himself from some appendage of the Nai Lert.

I think he might have stepped over those same lepers. Maybe his car didn’t show up on time at the set and he decided to stretch his legs only to discover a little bit of hell on earth. Some people don’t know how to handle that. They feel way too much for their own good. I didn’t know the man but he seemed like the type to keep things silent and bottled-up inside until those spears thrown at him by shaolin monks, those tiger blows, those swift strikes of bamboo staffs and that burning cauldron that the uninitiated must embrace, all those things made him numb and scarred up inside, so numb that parts of him began falling off. And what good is a five-star dragon death strike if you don’t have the arms to pull it off?