Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  My brain and body were on my side at this point. I felt strength return and a sharpening of mind at the mere thought of getting some opium vapors into my lungs. While preparing that first pipe I overcooked the pill—a botched job that normally I would never have carried through with, but on that day I sucked greedily at the thick white smoke and held it in my lungs while shakily beginning the preparations for my second pipe. This next one was better—the opium vaporized as it was supposed to, and the sweet vapors swirled about me as I exhaled gratefully. I rolled the third pipe with much less urgency. I even remembered to exhale through my nose to let the vapors pass along moist membranes, absorbing just a trace more opium. Every little bit counted.

  “Yah dee,” I whispered to myself in Lao, repeating the words that Madame Tui used to pronounce over my supine body after her pipes had done their work. “Good medicine.”

  Indeed. Closing my eyes for a moment I savored a miracle: the total banishment of pain. The vacuum was instantly replaced by a deliciously tingling wave that crept up the base of my neck and caressed my head with something akin to a divine massage. Whereas moments before my muscles had felt like they were being pinched by countless angry crabs, there now was a soothing sensation of calm and well-being. I prepared one more pipe—this time with almost no shakiness—and held the vapors deep in my lungs before exhaling slowly through my nose.

  With the torment quickly fading from memory, I noticed my naked and disheveled state. I rose from the mat with restored agility and calmly went into the bathroom to take a leisurely, hot shower, washing away the oily sweat and traces of vomit, mucus, and feces that covered my skin and clotted my hair. Refreshed, I dried and dressed for comfort in a clean cotton sarong and a linen guayabera before returning to the mat and reclining once more.

  I took a moment to admire my opium-smoking layout, a collection of rare and elegant paraphernalia that took years to gather and was worth thousands of dollars. Equal parts Asian artistry and steampunk science, like props from a scene concocted by a Chinese Jules Verne, the heavy nickel accoutrements waited on the wooden tray before me. There were picks and awls of obscure provenance, reminiscent of antiquated dentists’ tools; odd brass receptacles resembling miniature spittoons; pewter containers lidded with delicate brass openwork; tiny scissors with gracefully looping handles; dainty tweezers adorned with ancient symbolism denoting luck and wealth and longevity; strange implements with handles of ivory and blades of iron resting on a small brass tray etched with a detailed depiction of a young scribe offering tea to a robed mandarin. There was a tiny nickel-handled horsehair brush and a matching pan for sweeping up bits of ash. Enveloping everything was the warm glow of the opium lamp, the shining centerpiece of the layout tray. Second only to the pipe in importance, my oil lamp had a bubble-flecked glass chimney shaped like a fluted dome.

  The crowning glory of my entire layout was perched lightly upon the chimney of the lamp: a hammered silver lamp shade in the form of a cicada. Slivers of lamplight shone through filigree work in the insect’s abdomen and—most magically—illuminated its red ruby eyes.

  Lying on my back with my head propped upon a porcelain pillow, I hefted the opium pipe in my left hand like a gun, my index finger curled around its silver fittings as though on a trigger. The Chinese word for opium pipe translates to “smoking-gun,” and this one had just killed all my pain. With my right hand I lifted a tiny copper wok by its ivory handle and placed it upon the opium lamp. I measured five drops of opium into it. Within seconds the small pool of liquor began to boil and its heady sizzling was all I could hear.

  Once again I was the alchemist, the one who had rediscovered how to work these long-forgotten implements. I was one of just a handful alive who could manipulate the elixir in the old Chinese manner and create bliss-inducing vapors. I was a high priest, one of the last still vested with the powers to perform these mysterious rites. After years of patience and persistence I had relearned the ancient craft and brought these hallowed rituals back from near extinction. This exclusivity of knowledge—watching my own deft hands use esoteric accoutrements to work a rare vintage of opium—gave me as much joy as the narcotic itself.

  Complete layout of paraphernalia for opium smoking from the author’s collection. The components date to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were crafted in China. (Photograph by Paul Lakatos)

  As I began cooking and rolling another pill for the pipe, I smiled to myself as though amused by the foolish antics of a young child. “Why on earth did you put yourself through all that?” I said aloud.

  It had been barely thirty-six hours since I had begun my last attempt to quit on my own. Of course opium had won. Opium always won.

  Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.

  —Emily Hahn, “The Big Smoke,” The New Yorker, February 15, 1969

  Tench was a forgettable character with an ugly, monosyllabic name—a booze-sotted British dentist trapped in a Mexican backwater partway through a novel. The only reason I mention Tench is because of an idea put forth by his creator, Graham Greene—an idea that he uses the wretched dentist to illustrate. According to this premise, the course of the character’s life is set when, as a small boy, he finds a dentist’s plaster cast of a set of teeth in a wastebasket. The discovery led to Tench’s growing up to become a dentist—and then down a slow, steady path toward his eventual self-exile and ruin far from home.

  Is it possible that a person’s childhood fascination with some object could subtly influence every other decision made during his or her life, a snowballing of interests, propelled by obsession and compulsion, that rolls on long after the initial discovery is forgotten?

  And if this were possible, would it then happen only to the most obsessive and compulsive of us? I bring up the idea because I believe I remember the source of my own Tenchian fixation—the beginnings of an early fascination with things Asian. A fascination that, many years later, would inspire me first to travel in Asia and then to live there. A fascination that would eventually drive me to accumulate so much knowledge that I became the world’s foremost authority on a shadowy Asian ritual. A fascination that over time was to become so nuanced and narrow, it would lead me to become a slave to that most Asian of vices.

  But that’s all a long way down the road. Let me first explain how I believe I was instilled with a curious proclivity that affects a very small percentage of Westerners. Let me tell you how I was “bitten by the Asia bug.”

  When I was a small child my paternal grandparents had a glass display cabinet that contained, among other things, one of those colorful silk shoes that Chinese women with bound feet used to wear. There was only a single shoe in the cabinet and I remember during each visit, as I pressed in for a closer look, my grandmother would tell me that a whole race of women once wore tiny shoes just like this one. She never explained the part about the women being full sized, and I just assumed that their stature was in proportion to that silk shoe—a population of miniature women, perhaps related to the people who once inhabited the porcelain pagodas at the bottom of the adjacent fish tank.

  Now, lest anyone get the idea that my childhood was something that Bruce Chatwin might have invented, I must admit here that I had no spinster aunts who chatted about Samarkand over tea. I do not have an exotic family history; at least it’s hard for me to imagine anyone finding anything exotic about my past. I was born and raised in San Diego. My family on both sides had lived there a generation or two before I was born, but all had originally come from somewhere else.

  The San Diego of my youth—roughly the 1960s and ’70s—was a very livable place. I gather that most people have a favorable view of my hometown, and I think it’s deserved if weather and location are what makes a city pleasant. Like nearby Los Angeles, San Diego is blessed with a climate that can pass for subtropical much of the year. In truth, most of Southern California is a desert and rain is almost unheard of, but by diverting
water from faraway rivers, city planners have allowed anyone who can afford the water bills to turn their properties into faux-tropical jungles that are the envy of much of the rest of the country.

  As I remember it, even the city’s poorer residential areas were picturesque and interesting. There was street after palm-lined street of crumbling stucco bungalows, the foliage in their yards often a clue to whether the residents were locals or some recently arrived immigrants. Mexicans were partial to lemon trees; Filipinos planted clumps of banana trees; and, after 1975, Vietnamese immigrants arrived and began nurturing stalks of sugarcane. These were things I noticed because as a kid I was interested in tropical foliage. I knew the species of the palm trees that grew in my neighborhood, and during rides around the city I kept my eyes open for types of palms that I’d never seen before. Once home, I’d thumb through the Sunset Western Garden Book in order to identify them. Anything new that I had spotted went on a list, and if anyone asked me, I would have rattled off the varieties of palms that could be found growing around San Diego County.

  Palm spotting was not my only pastime. I also entertained myself by making exhaustive lists of anything that caught my fancy—an embryonic form of collecting that was my first childhood hobby. While poring through the family set of encyclopedias, I drew up lists of World War I biplanes; lists of breeds of toy dogs; lists of Old West outlaws. I spent hours gazing at the illustrations in my many children’s handbooks authored by Herbert S.

  Zim, books that inspired lists of Native American tribes and species of insect pests. I made a list of what kinds of sharks you were likely to come across if you swam off the California coast, and I lamented over my list of birds that had become extinct in North America.

  My parents must have wondered what to make of it. In one of those “school days” memory books that people used to keep, my mother wrote that in the third grade I wanted to be a “statistician.” She got it wrong. I wasn’t looking for patterns. It was nothing more than an impulsive gathering of information. Once I was old enough to do minor chores and wheedle an allowance out of my parents, I stopped making lists and began to collect objects.

  Despite my early fascination with the silk shoe, my first boyhood collections had nothing to do with Asia and were rather unoriginal. I look back now and realize that these initial attempts at collecting were simply an exercise in gathering and categorizing that is common among young boys: a cardboard box filled with seashells and colorful stones, followed by an album of foreign postage stamps and, later still, a bureau drawer full of the persistent offerings of the Littleton Coin Company.

  My first coin collection was a lesson in how the urge to acquire can cloud one’s judgment. I came across an advertisement for the Littleton Coin Company in the back of a comic book. I signed up and soon had a handful of tiny manila envelopes, each with a coin from some struggling or recently extinct country, such as the Republic of Biafra. “Pay for the coins you wish to keep,” said the accompanying letters from Littleton, New Hampshire. “Send back the coins you don’t want.”

  I wanted them all—despite having no way of paying. A new coin showed up in the mailbox every few days. I examined each one carefully before hiding it in a bureau drawer. Before long the coins began arriving with letters written in tones of polite urgency, which over time became curt and vaguely threatening. I simply stopped reading them. Finally there was a phone call. My father stuffed all the little manila envelopes into one large manila envelope, and my whole coin collection was mailed back to New Hampshire.

  I did better with fossils, which I dug out of the ocher-colored dirt in the backyard of my grandparents’ house. In the distant past the area must have been the bed of a shallow sea, because the fossils were recognizable as seashells—mostly bits and pieces but now and then a whole clam or snail shell looking as though it had been made from the same sandy earth, pressed in a mold and baked solid. The sheer excitement of finding a well-formed fossil was enough to keep me in the backyard for hours, troweling away in the shade of a huge rubber tree. I wrapped each fossil in a length of toilet paper and kept them all in a box, and as soon as I got home it was time to consult Herbert S. Zim. After a time I no longer needed the book because I’d committed to memory all the text and illustrations that applied to my finds.

  At this young age I was like a hyperdedicated sports fan who hungrily memorizes the professional statistics of a favorite athlete. As soon as I found something that caught my interest, I would read about it until I had exhausted all my resources: the family encyclopedias and books around the house, and later books at the school and public libraries. When I felt I’d learned all that I could, my obsession would start to cool and eventually burn out, but while blazing it was about the only thing on my mind.

  In my early teens I began to collect foreign banknotes, and with these I rediscovered my attraction to Asian imagery and iconography. This collection, gathered while I was in junior high school, contained samples of the worthless paper currency of the recently defunct South Vietnam, and of Cambodia and Laos, as well as earlier banknotes from when the three countries were part of colonial French Indochina. These mid-century bills, with their colorful and idealized images of native peoples, elephants, and pagodas, were miniature works of art.

  Travel was also a big part of my childhood. In 1972, when I was ten, my parents decided to buy a Volkswagen bus and hit the road. National parks were the primary destinations of the trip, and we—my parents, myself, and two younger siblings—visited the major parks in the western United States as well as lesser-known national monuments. We made subsequent road trips in the ’70s, each with a different theme. One trip took in the ghost towns of California and Nevada. During another, we made stops to explore ancient ruins left by Native Americans—sites in the Southwest with names like Casa Grande and Tuzigoot and Montezuma Castle. I remember enjoying the natural beauty of the national parks and monuments, but for me it was the historical human settlements that inspired. There was something about the mystery of these places that gave me a fascination for dwellings that had once sheltered past lives.

  This fascination also included antiques. As a boy I was convinced that certain inanimate objects had feelings. Okay, admittedly I was a weird kid, but I could not accompany my mother into a thrift store or junk shop without feeling sorry for some of the items that had been banished from the lives of their previous owners. At times these discarded things seemed to call out to me, and their pleas for a new owner were especially heart wrenching if the objects were damaged. My mother was patient but firm. “No, you can’t have that,” she would say. “It’s broken!”

  In an episode of the early 1970s television show Nanny and the Professor, the children found an enchanted antique radio that could somehow pick up music and events that had aired many decades previous. After watching the program I became convinced that the idea was plausible. I wanted a radio like the one on the TV show, one of those wooden cathedral-shaped models from the 1920s with a dial that glowed like a peephole into the past. I gabbed about it until my parents inquired at a couple of antiques stores, but by this time such radios were already collectibles, and if they still worked they did not run cheap.

  To console me my mother bought some record albums that were recordings of radio programs from the 1930s and ’40s—The Shadow, The Great Gildersleeve, and Fibber McGee and Molly. She then made some drawings, and my father took these into the garage and, using a piece of plywood and a jigsaw, made a convincing copy of the face of an old cathedral radio. After staining and lacquering it, he stapled a scrap of grille cloth to the back of the plywood to simulate a speaker, and then glued Bakelite knobs onto the front. There was even a dial that lit up via a tiny bulb connected to an AA cell battery. When finished, we propped the replica radio façade up on the hi-fi cabinet and spent evenings listening to the recorded radio shows. The effect was perfect. Unlike the radio in the television show, however, I didn’t imagine that mine was miraculously picking up broadcasts from the past. Inste
ad, I used the scene to pretend that I was in the past. From what I remember, that imaginary radio was the first instance of my trying to feel nostalgia for a past that I had not known.

  I was also a Disney geek. Being only an hour and a half away from Disneyland was, in my mind, one of the best things San Diego had going for it. From about age five until adolescence convinced me that it was no longer cool to do so, I went with my family on annual day trips to the vast amusement park. Of the themed sections that the park was divided into, Adventureland was an early favorite. Like the thousands of “tiki bars” that were all the rage in post–World War II America, Adventureland was not an attempt at replicating any cultural accuracy or geographic coherence. Instead it seemed to be based on the tales of sailors returning from voyages in the South Seas, or the stories of great-uncles who had passed through European colonial outposts in tropical Africa and Asia. This was not something that I realized at the time, of course. To me Adventureland was simply the most exotic place I had ever been—like being able to jump into a Saturday morning episode of Danger Island.

  The landscapers at Disneyland took full advantage of the Southern California climate, creating riotous jungles where before there had been groves of orange trees in orderly rows. The centerpiece of Adventureland is the Jungle Cruise, a ride on a cleaned-up and canopied version of Bogart’s African Queen steamboat. A cleverly designed maze of artificial waterways and islands, the ride quite convincingly made me feel as though I were chugging first through the rivers of tropical Asia and then Africa.

  The usual animatronics that Disney has long been famous for—depicting both animals and people—are the highlights of the ride, but I remember being most intrigued by some of the simpler visual effects, specifically the ruins of an ancient Khmer temple and a shrine to the Hindu deity Ganesha. The latter consisted of a concrete statue of the elephant-headed god—suitably detailed to appear carved from sandstone and clad in the patina of age—that the boat’s steersman pointed out and explained was the guardian of the “sacred elephant bathing pool” that lay just beyond the next bend in the river. The passengers of the steamboat got a fleeting glimpse of the shrine, a smiling Ganesha atop a plinth and surrounded by emerald stalks of giant bamboo, before the boat rounded the bend and the vision was gone.