Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  Helmut P. was a large man in his sixties, but there was nothing about his looks to differentiate him from the crowds of middle-aged European men who come to Bangkok for a good time. If I had passed him on a street near Patpong, Bangkok’s tourist-oriented red-light district, I would not have given him a second look. He was already waiting for me at one of the café's tables when I arrived, sipping from a small plastic bottle of mineral water. I ordered an iced coffee, and as I was stirring the liquefied sugar into the glass, he launched into his plea.

  Helmut P. said he’d been collecting for more than twenty years, making annual trips to Bangkok and other Asian cities in search of antique opium-smoking paraphernalia. He had recently been in Shanghai and told of how he distrusted the merchants there, suspecting that they were devising fakes especially for him. He talked about how he was finding less and less at his usual stops in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok, and as he said the word “Bangkok” his demeanor changed visibly.

  He paused to take a breath, started to talk, and then paused again. When he finally spoke his voice cracked and he seemed to be on the verge of tears. “I have been coming here so many years, you know,” he said. Again he paused to take a breath before repeating the sentence. “I have been coming here so many years.”

  I said nothing. He repeated the line again, like an actor trying to prompt another who is missing his cue. Finally with a sob he spat it out. “Please! Those beautiful things you are finding are meant for me! You must stop buying my things!” I didn’t know how to respond. His emotions were as real as his demand was ludicrous. The guy was obsessed, but at least I could see that I had no reason to feel intimidated. It was all rather pathetic.

  I could have eased his mind by admitting that my source was online auctions, but why should I invite the unwanted competition? This guy was rich and he could outbid me in any auction—and there was no reason to believe that he wouldn’t buy online as voraciously as he did in the antiques shops.

  I could also have placated him by saying that I would lay off buying antiques in Bangkok—just to make him happy. But for some reason I didn’t want to do that, either. I tried not to gloat, but I’m embarrassed to admit that’s exactly what I felt like doing. Struggling to keep a smile off my face, I drank the last of my iced coffee and watched him over the rims of my sunglasses. Helmut P. sat there panting in the heat and waiting for a reply. Then I looked him in the eyes and shook my head. “Nope,” I said.

  I left him sitting there with his mouth open but unable to speak. I let him see me walking into the air-conditioned River City mall. There was nothing in the entire mall worth buying, nor anywhere else in Bangkok for that matter, but Helmut P. didn’t know that.

  Unlike other forms of the opium-habit, that by smoking finds a special inducement in companionship, especially if the companions are congenial.

  —H. H. Kane, Opium-Smoking in America and China (1882)

  Over time, I met more aficionados of opium-smoking paraphernalia, and as my online auction bonanza continued, I was able to quickly and economically build a collection that was the envy of our tiny community. Nearly all the collectors that I got to know concentrated on acquiring opium pipes and lamps, giving little thought to the other pieces of paraphernalia that had been devised to make opium smoking convenient. I began to turn my attention to these mysterious tools of the habit.

  While doing guidebook research in Laos, I spent many more hours reclining at Mister Kay’s opium den. Madame Tui’s had since closed. The sight of vomiting backpackers moonwalking around Vientiane eventually caused the police to pay her a visit, and from then on she smoked alone. However, nothing changed at Mister Kay’s, except that my visits were not frequent enough to keep his teenaged grandson from challenging me at the door. Luckily the proprietor and regular smokers always remembered me from the times I had arrived bearing pieces of paraphernalia whose function was a mystery to me. Sometimes the skeletal old smokers would coo in amazement. “Haven’t seen one of those in a long time!” they whistled through the stumps in their gums before giving me a demonstration of how the implement was used.

  Mister Kay’s was invaluable to me. It was the one and only place where I might learn some rare piece of opium knowledge that was otherwise lost to history. The implications of this affected me deeply. This room and its ancient habitués smoking adulterated opium with jerry-rigged paraphernalia was the last remnant of what had only a century before been a worldwide, multimillion-dollar industry. Opium smoking, a habit that had financed empires and made fortunes all over the world, was now so rare that only in this landlocked backwater could the classic Chinese vice be witnessed. Imagine the possibility that, a mere hundred years from now, the modern wine industry and the millions of people who support it could be reduced to a roomful of elderly winos swilling fortified wine from stemware held together by packing tape. This is how thoroughly opium smoking has been eradicated.

  At about the same time that Mister Kay’s was becoming my research lab, I again ran across the scrap of paper on which I’d written down the contact information for that friend of the author Peter Lee. Coincidentally, this person who Lee claimed could teach me much about opium smoking was based in Vientiane, so I made it a priority to contact him before my next trip to Laos.

  This was how I found Wilhelm Borunoff. An expatriate Austrian who had lived in Southeast Asia since the 1980s, Willi claimed to be the progeny of Russian nobility and a long line of artists—a history that his broad Slavic forehead and precise taste in clothing seemed to confirm. He had lived in Bangkok for nearly a decade before relocating to Vientiane after the Soviets withdrew from Laos in 1991. Willi’s plan was to revive a Lao coffee industry that had been established by the French before World War II, but which had all but died as a result of wars and bad politics. He had built a small coffee bean roasting facility and was one of a handful of pioneering entrepreneurs who were testing the waters of the country’s fledgling market economy. When I met Willi in 2002, he was battling corrupt Lao officials to hang on to his coffee investment. “It’s crazy,” he explained as he gave me a tour of his operation. “Every day some new team of officials shows up to inspect and then demands a fat bribe to let me continue. I thought Bangkok was corrupt, but this place makes it look like a colony of Shakers.”

  Things did not look good, but that didn’t stop Willi from treating me to his impeccable brand of hospitality. His home was a teakwood bungalow in a bamboo grove on the outskirts of Vientiane. The bungalow, which Willi shared with his Thai-Chinese wife, had been built using aspects of Western and Southeast Asian design, and the open spaces within suggested some tribal longhouse, with a kitchen, dining area, and room for relaxing and receiving guests situated in a row. Off the living room was a wide verandah where Willi spent long mornings sipping oolong tea and contemplating a Zen garden that he had planted below. Under the house was a basement he told me was used for storage, and behind it was a wooden pavilion built up over the edge of a lotus pond.

  Willi had decorated the house with objects that he’d collected all over Asia, but with an emphasis on Chinese tea-drinking accoutrements—wood and glass display cases were filled with diminutive teapots fashioned from Yixing clay. Taking in the room on that first visit, I soon spotted a bamboo opium pipe whose saddle was adorned in the Yunnanese style with a row of semiprecious stones. A mutual friend had told me that Willi owned two antique opium pipes, and when I emailed him I used this as an excuse to propose a visit, expressing an interest in photographing them.

  After I had examined the pipes, Willi invited me to join him for tea on the verandah. I was interested to know if he had had any experience with smoking opium, but Willi was prudently guarded on the subject. He admitted to having smoked in the hills with the Hmong years before, and only after I had related tales of my trips to the rustic Vientiane dens did his enthusiasm get the better of him and he began to tell some stories of his own.

  “When I first came to Vientiane there were still a few members of
the Corsican mob who had controlled the opium trade in Indochina before the Communists took over,” he told me. “One ran a restaurant called Erawan down near Kilometer Three.” Erawan is a three-headed elephant, the Lao name for the mount of the Hindu god Indra, and the symbol of the Lao monarchy. “That crazy Corsican managed to stay in Laos after the revolution, and somehow the Communists let him keep the restaurant and never even made him change its name. He’s gone now. His half-Lao son got involved in heroin and committed suicide right there in front of the restaurant.”

  Willi claimed to have learned English as a young man in New York City while working for an old European Jew whose Yiddish accent Willi had absorbed and could turn on and off at will, an affectation that gave a playful yet cynical tone to his stories. Willi knew Mister Kay but scrunched his nose in mock disgust when I suggested that we visit the den together. “Oy! Dross smokers!” he snorted.

  Later that evening, after the sun had set, I came to understand the significance of that remark. We talked far beyond the hour that I had expected the visit to last, and Willi asked me to stay for dinner. After the meal he said he had something to show me. Willi led me to the basement, and there a modest opium layout tray was being assembled by an old Vietnamese manservant dressed in what was once the fashion of the Chinese in Southeast Asia: a mandarin-collar shirt and baggy trousers that were a matching color of indigo. The layout tray was set down on a mat spread out on the concrete floor between crates and boxes in the basement storage room. I could tell by the servant’s fluency in arranging the utensils on the tray that this was not the first time he had performed the duty.

  Willi and I wordlessly smiled at each other as the servant lit the diminutive lamp and then bowed out of the room. As always when I was about to smoke opium I felt gripped by a giddy excitement, and I could tell that Willi felt the same. Without having to be told, I also knew that he was bestowing upon me a grand honor that he rarely extended to others. I could sense in Willi’s actions a restrained graciousness that said he did not take the act of opium smoking lightly, and would not have invited me to share a pipe had he thought I wouldn’t appreciate the experience.

  Willi and I positioned ourselves on the mat, reclining on either side of the tray and facing each other over it. He produced a small brown bottle with a dropper, unscrewed the lid, and invited me to sniff the contents. It was opium, but in liquid form and with a surprisingly complex bouquet, as though it had fermented—it smelled something like loam drenched with red wine. He placed a few drops in a miniature copper wok perched on the opium lamp’s chimney, and as the liquid began to sizzle and evaporate, a rich scent filled the air—like roasted peanuts but with a hint of animal musk.

  “Picasso once said that opium is the world’s most intelligent smell,” Willi remarked while holding a skewer-like opium needle at the ready and without taking his eyes off the boiling opium. “Or perhaps he said it’s the world’s least stupid smell,” he continued as he brushed the now gummy opium from the wok with the tip of the needle. “I’ve seen the remark quoted both ways in English. I need to find it in the original French. Depending on what Picasso really said, it’s either a compliment to opium’s uniqueness or a comment on Picasso’s jadedness.”

  Willi looked at me over the tray and held my eyes, and I realized that I hadn’t acknowledged his remark. I was hardly listening. Instead I was mesmerized by what I had been witnessing. Still reclining next to the tray, Willi was deftly “rolling”—the complex process of preparing a dose of opium for the pipe. It was the first time I had ever seen a non-Asian prepare opium—and he did so with unparalleled grace.

  Willi’s accoutrements were few, simple, and unadorned—similar to what I had seen being used in the opium dens of Vientiane—but the quality of opium that he had somehow obtained was like nothing I had ever experienced. Here finally I would taste chandu, that rarefied form of smoking opium I had only read about in old books. Chandu, a Malay word that originated with the Hindi candū,, was once the preferred poison of sophisticated opium smokers from Peking to Paris. Chandu of this grade had not been produced for decades, simply because there was no longer any demand for high-quality smoking opium.

  The acres of opium poppies being cultivated in Afghanistan and Burma invariably supply clandestine heroin refineries whose deadly but lucrative product is then sent all over the world. Such operations are, of course, carefully guarded at all stages. In the case of Burma, much of the opium under cultivation is watched over by the Wa, a fierce tribal people whose head-hunting made them the bane of the British during the colonial era. In modern times the Wa have traded in their spears and long knives for Chinese-made Kalashnikovs, hiring themselves out to fill the ranks of the private armies of Burma’s drug-lord generals.

  Obtaining raw opium in large enough quantities to produce chandu is dangerous and thus expensive. If someone could manage to buy enough raw opium—and if that opium were real and reasonably pure—then there was the task of boiling and filtering the crude sap, followed by hours of allowing the concoction to settle before more filtering and settling. A dash of some fragrant liqueur would be added to the elixir to kill spores that could cause mold, and the chandu would then be sealed up in earthenware jars capped with beeswax and allowed to age.

  Willi paid dearly to obtain genuine and pure raw opium, I would learn, and then did this refining himself using a collection of copper pots, his process constantly evolving as he experimented with new techniques. Meeting Willi was for me like discovering the key that opened the long-locked door to a room full of knowledge. How many people remained in the world who, in the twenty-first century, could obtain good opium in the quantities needed to produce premium chandu, and who were then able to prepare and smoke that chandu in the classic Chinese manner? I was convinced that Willi was one of the last of an all but extinct breed.

  The effects of opium intoxication—the quality of the high—depend on the quality and purity of the blend being smoked. In the drug’s heyday, raw opium arriving in China passed through a series of brokers and merchants who had methods of diluting it in order to maximize profits. The easiest and most effective way was to add a quantity of boiled dross. Because of the high morphine content found in dross, adding it to opium changed the nature of the high. The more dross added, the more stupefying the intoxication.

  The poorest users smoked pure dross, which is why descriptions in travelers’ accounts of the lowliest opium dens in old China inevitably feature cramped rooms full of seemingly comatose opium smokers lying about in various stages of mental and physical decay. By contrast, Willi’s chandu was enlightening, markedly different from what I had previously experienced while smoking the dross-laced opium on offer in the dens of Vientiane.

  How did it feel? Physically, opium was energy. A few pipes and I was enveloped in an electric skin. As time passed after the initial pipes were smoked, the intensity of the high waxed and waned depending on such matters as whether I was lying down or sitting up, or whether my eyes were open or closed. Unlike the opium I had smoked previously, Willi’s chandu allowed me to move about without any loss of physical coordination—there was no staggering or moonwalking. I also noted that throughout the session, Willi’s meticulous rolling never faltered.

  Mentally, opium was a welling euphoria followed by a serene sense of well-being. The effects of the chandu were gradual and subtle, washing over me like a succession of tender caresses. A juvenile lust for kicks would not likely be satisfied by chandu’s leisurely and deliciously nuanced mental banquet. This perhaps explains why, in China’s past, high-quality opium was considered an intellectual pursuit and not recommended for young people or the mentally immature.

  Contrary to opium’s popular reputation, my own experiences indicated that the drug was not hallucinatory. Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” (1884) features an opium addict who watches two dragons on a brocaded pillow become animated and begin dueling as the character smokes pipe after pipe. A memorable s
cene perhaps, but Kipling’s portrayal strikes me as the fantasies of someone who had no firsthand experience.

  The so-called opium dreams—at least in the primary stages of opium use—are not waking dreams or hallucinations. In fact, a bit of vintage slang still in use today best illustrates opium’s most prominent mental kick: “pipe dream.” This term meant the same then as it does today, a way of describing an irrational sense of optimism. Irrational or not, this is opium’s greatest gift to the smoker: boundless optimism—the kind that one rarely experiences beyond childhood. All good things seem possible; problems are easily solvable; obstacles are always surmountable.

  For me, smoking opium in those early, heady days of experimentation was like donning a custom-made pair of rose-tinted glasses. Besides the optimism, a few pipes made me feel as though I could recapture a childlike wonder at the world. I also felt a renewed sense of excitement—again, the pure emotions from childhood. Yet these feelings of wonder and excitement were applied to an adult’s sophisticated sense of appreciation. Watching a dragonfly hover above the jade-hued surface of the lotus pond behind Willi’s house was not merely captivating but joy-inducing. Opium did not alter the landscape; it merely made me wondrously aware of the world’s beauty, giving me the sense that I was seeing it all for the first time. Transported to such a place, who needed dueling dragons on pillows?

  Sometime during that first session I had an idea. Willi had access to a grade of opium that was all but impossible to find and, even more important, a safe place in which to enjoy it. I had in my collection pieces of paraphernalia that were of an opulence and richness that could no longer be reproduced. Some were missionaries’ trophies and had never been used. Although more than a century old, these pieces were in near pristine condition. What if Willi and I were to combine these rare aspects of opium smoking—his incomparable chandu and my antique paraphernalia?