Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  Once the pipe was completed I gave it a name: the “Dream Stick”—an American slang term dating to the Roaring Twenties. The Dream Stick was one of six pipes from which Willi and I could choose at the start of each session—always after much enthusiastic deliberation over the merits of each pipe. I was drawn to the most ornate pipes, but Willi preferred the more streamlined examples. Usually, however, the pipe that needed the least amount of preparatory maintenance won out. Here I discovered yet another reason why opium smoking was relatively easy to eradicate: Opium pipes required constant and meticulous upkeep. They expanded and contracted with rising and falling temperatures and humidity. Pipes were mixed media, made up of parts crafted from different materials—bamboo, ivory, silver, paktong, clay—and these parts reacted differently to the surrounding atmosphere. Because of this, they always needed an inspection and some minor repairs before each smoking session. Most important, opium pipes had to be airtight before they could be used—if not, the complex vaporization process would not work.

  Of all the pipe’s parts, the distinctive ceramic bowl was the most crucial to this process. Functional pipe bowls were also the most difficult items for me to acquire. I would look at hundreds before I found one that was still in good enough condition to actually use for smoking. Usually the tiny needle hole had widened during the countless times in the past that opium needles had been thrust into it. This widening, almost imperceptible to the untrained eye, meant that precious chandu would be wasted during smoking—making the bowl useless.

  Fortunately I found a pair of pipe bowls on eBay that were at least a century old, unused, and still in their original box. Made from Yixing, the porous clay prized by Chinese as the perfect material for teapots, the bowls were part of a cache of opium paraphernalia discovered behind a false wall in a store in Vancouver’s old Chinatown—no doubt illicit inventory that was to have been smuggled into the United States. I paid twenty-five dollars for the pair of bowls on eBay. The seller knew what they were, listing them correctly as opium pipe bowls but foolishly giving prospective buyers a “buy-it-now” option. Were there others who would have bid on these relics? Perhaps, but according to the counter at the bottom of the webpage, I was the first to view the lot. I bought them immediately. To me these pristine bowls were priceless—I would have happily paid ten times that price.

  Normally, if I came across something extraordinary online, I would email Willi a link, but this time I waited to tell him anything until the pipe bowls had arrived in Bangkok by airmail. I photographed the pair still in their original box, and emailed the image with a simple note confirming that they were in my possession. Almost immediately the telephone rang and Willi exclaimed over the line, “You must come up at once! Please stop whatever you are doing and board the train now!”

  It was exactly the response I was hoping for. I will never forget the feeling of excitement as I arrived after a night on the train. I was carrying the small cardboard box enveloped in a bolt of silk, and Willi and I unwrapped and examined the bowls with the deliberation and respect befitting such prized objects. Willi selected one of them and then we readied it for use with one of the trophy pipes that had belonged to a China-based Christian missionary. After a century suspended in time, this pipe bowl would be used as the artisan who crafted it had originally intended.

  The scene that day reminded me of a Jacques Cousteau program that I had watched on television as a child. The underwater archaeologists had found a cache of centuries-old wine cradled in some shipwreck and, being Frenchmen, they brought the bottles aboard the Calypso and drunk their contents with gusto. Willi and I inhaled the first pills of opium through our newly acquired relic with the same enthusiasm. The pipe bowl performed as though it were rewarding us for our efforts in bringing it to life. There were no burned pills that night, and not a single drop of chandu was wasted. After smoking his tenth pill, Willi exhaled a column of near invisible vapors toward the ceiling and fixed me with an impish grin and a gleam in his eyes that told me his next utterance would be inflected with Yiddish. Even in the dim lamplight I could see that his pupils were dots as tiny as the eyes of a shrimp. He smacked his lips with satisfaction and lisped, “Isssss qvality!”

  “There’s nothing like a complete opium set to grab peoples’ attention,” an old German who ran a high-end antiques shop in the River City mall once told me. “I one time had a full opium set on a tray in my display window, and I watched the people walking past my shop stop suddenly to point and stare.”

  Opium pipes are the old masters of opium antiques collecting. Pipes have broad appeal and are more readily recognized and appreciated by noncollectors than lamps and other accoutrements. But nothing impresses like a complete layout, especially one as opulent as Willi and I had assembled. In all, there were nearly two dozen separate pieces of paraphernalia on our tray. Each item was crafted from either brass, copper, paktong, or a combination of the three metals, and kept polished to a high shine by Willi’s servant. Many of our pieces were meticulously decorated with delicate openwork that an artisan had cut into the metal with the tiniest of saw blades.

  Because Buddhism was important in old China, swastikas were a common motif adorning Chinese artworks—and opium paraphernalia was no exception. The swastika is an ancient Hindu and Buddhist symbol, and for the Chinese and other Buddhist cultures, the swastika carries none of the dark historical associations that it does for most Westerners. I had been so long in Asia, and had so many times seen the swastika as a decorative component of these religions—as adornment on Buddhist temples as well as on Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese art—that Nazi associations no longer sprang to mind upon seeing swastikas in this context. So I decided not to shun paraphernalia with the ubiquitous swastika but instead to celebrate the symbol as adherents of Hinduism and Buddhism have for millennia. By doing so I felt I was taking back this mysterious spiritual motif from the monsters who had so recently hijacked it.

  The opium lamp that Willi and I used was a model from China’s Yunnan Province. Minute openwork had been cut into its octagonal base of tricolored metals, allowing air to feed the flame while providing hundreds of facets on which the glow of the lamp could reflect. Although the light produced by the lamp was feeble, when coupled with the effects of a few pipes of opium, its reflection upon the layout’s gleaming surfaces seemed to tickle my eyelashes like a faint breeze.

  Our lamp was fitted with cotton wick that I had sourced at a shop in Bangkok’s Chinatown. At the start of each session, Willi would push its long tail deep into the lamp’s reservoir, which he kept filled with a fragrant brand of coconut oil from India. Then he would fastidiously trim the wick with a dainty pair of brass scissors—barely two inches in length—that had been specially made for the task. He used a matching pair of tweezers to gently advance the wick when necessary. Both tools were kept in a deep brass tray that supported the lamp and contained any oil that might be spilled while filling it. Also on this deep tray was the miniature wok for evaporating the liquid chandu as well as various tools to assist with the rolling process.

  The lamp tray sat centered on a much larger brass layout tray that was crowded with engraved brass and copper boxes for storing dross, gee-rags, and lamp wick, as well as a trash receptacle shaped like a miniature spittoon. Brass tools for scraping dross from the inside of pipe bowls leaned against their own matching stand, next to a rest for the all-important opium needle.

  All these rare and wonderful things were upstaged by what in my opinion is the holy grail of antique opium paraphernalia collecting: a shade for the opium lamp—in this case a silver cicada whose eyes were set with rubies. To smokers of yore, the burbling sound of an opium pipe was said to echo certain sounds found in nature—particularly the mating calls of cicadas, frogs, and a species of freshwater crab. Thus these three creatures became opium smokers’ mascots, and to honor them as such, artisans crafted their images onto paraphernalia. Our cicada lampshade hung from the lip of the lamp’s glass chimney, blocking the gla
re just so—a whimsical remedy for the opium smoker’s heightened visual sensitivity.

  “These old-time smokers were like children with their toys,” Willi once remarked to me during a session. This, I theorize, was what kept the makers of fine paraphernalia in business. Just like kids, the smokers would have tried to outdo one another, always competing to be the one with the coolest playthings.

  The more we used the antique paraphernalia, the more evident it was to us that many of the finest smoking accoutrements were created with the heightened senses of opium smokers in mind. The astounding attention to detail—the filigree-like openwork, the ornately ornamented surfaces etched with lines as light and tight as a feather’s—all of it was meant to catch and dazzle the opium-thrilled eye. To prop myself up on one elbow and behold our gleaming layout in the darkened room made me feel like a storybook giant who had stumbled upon a miniature city of gold—a shining El Dorado in some lost valley, banishing gloom with its magical radiance.

  Likewise, the textured surfaces on the handles of the tools, lids, and other bits meant to be touched were there to titillate those millions of hypersensitive nerve endings on a smoker’s fingertips. The full genius of the artisans’ efforts to create pleasing textures was most abundantly experienced by the lips. No kiss has ever been sweeter, more supple, or more enchanting, than that of an ivory mouthpiece upon the lips of an opium smoker.

  In the most basic sense, the huge layout—the pipe and lamp and sundry tools spread out upon their respective trays—was a system for keeping the involved and messy process of opium smoking as organized and tidy as possible. But to Willi and me, it seemed much more significant. Many pieces of our paraphernalia had been handled by long-departed souls who were adept at spinning the sap of poppies into dreams. We came to believe that the accumulated knowledge of this escapism was trapped within the paraphernalia itself, and that by using it, Willi and I were somehow learning important truths that had been long lost. Our sessions, progressively more blissful with each meeting, seemed to bear this theory out.

  Once the layout seemed perfect, Willi and I turned our attention to the space that hosted our sessions. After Willi had arranged for the basement storage room to be emptied, we gradually introduced decorative objects and period furniture from old China. Neither of us had the means to complete the embellishment of our smoking room all at once, but we felt that our inability to instantly transform the space made us more selective and gave us time to appreciate each new addition.

  Our decorative theme evolved in a way that made the room seem as though it, too, had gone through several permutations over time. Originally we conceived of the space as a classical Chinese study—a place of solitude that might have been used by some bespectacled student preparing for the imperial examinations. Later, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and the Qing dynasty fell to Sun Yat-sen’s republic, our room, as did all of China, came under the influence of Western ideas. This could be seen in the English-made pendulum clock we positioned prominently on the wall, as well as the framed American sheet music covers that hung between scrolls of calligraphic poetry on rice paper. But our march of time had stopped in Jazz Age Shanghai—in the 1930s—when the Japanese invasion of Manchuria had given China a fatalistic, devil-may-care attitude that the invaders encouraged by making opium more plentiful than ever before. At some point during the transformation, Willi christened the room: “the Chamber of Fragrant Mists.”

  It was in this safe haven that Willi and I smoked opium on a regular basis from 2002 to 2006. Upon my arrival—usually at mid-morning in a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi—Willi would be waiting on the verandah and, after a hearty greeting, would direct me to the shower where I could scrub off the grime of a night’s worth of tropical train travel. Then I exchanged my modern clothes for loose-fitting Chinese pantaloons, black cloth slippers, a white silk singlet, and a smoking jacket of brocaded indigo silk. This latter garment was also an online purchase—a relic with tags stitched into the lining indicating that it had been tailor-made by a shop on Yates Road in old Shanghai’s International Settlement. Perhaps it had been worn by Silas Aaron Hardoon himself—called the “Baghdad Jew”—who amassed a fortune trading opium in what was then known as the “Wickedest City in the World.”

  Once Willi and I were properly outfitted in period clothing, it was time to conduct the many pre-smoking rituals that we performed before the start of each session, descending into the dark and shuttered Chamber after weeks of absence. The old pendulum clock was set and wound only when the Chamber was in use—kick-starting time in our Chinese Brigadoon. I usually did the honor myself, fingering the pendulum into action and twirling the minute hand round and round until the clock caught up with time, the lost hours bonging away frantically.

  Then, once the clock was in motion, I gave my attention to the calendar. The number prominently displayed on the hanging pad of pages indicated the last date we had filled the Chamber with the sweetish scent of opium. One at a time I tore away pages until the present date appeared, making sure the sound of each one being ripped from the pad was clear and distinct. When the pages to be torn away were many, we lamented the time lost to mundane activities—how could we have squandered so many days without a visit to our beloved Chamber? If the pages were few we congratulated ourselves on having so soon found time to indulge.

  After the clock and calendar had been adjusted, I then made offerings of candles and incense to the Den God, an image of a nameless Chinese deity that I had rescued from a dusty stall at a flea market in Bangkok. Willi had converted an empty corner of the room into an elaborately gated shrine for the deity, framing it with decorative wooden panels that were salvaged from the interior of a demolished Chinese mansion. Upon the altar were smoldering sticks of incense and thick red candles whose tall flames softly illuminated the benevolent face of the Den God. Ribbons of smoke rose from the glowing tips of the joss sticks, stretching upward through the breezeless air in slender columns that billowed against the red lacquered ceiling. After countless sessions, the room’s surfaces became coated with the oily smoke of incense and opium, bestowing upon everything the glossy sheen of antiquity.

  Dominating one wall of the room was a huge old Chinese shophouse sign that I had bought at an antiques shop in Penang while updating a chapter of a guidebook about Malaysia. Made long ago from a single block of black lacquered wood, the sign consisted of two Chinese characters deeply carved and detailed with gold leaf. During our sessions, the faintest candlelight would reflect in the sign’s gilt recesses, causing the characters to shimmer softly above the room. When I first saw the sign in the antiques shop, I was only making conversation when I asked the proprietor to translate it for me. The sign read “Doctor with Peerless Hands.” I immediately bought it for the Chamber and in so doing, Willi gained a new nickname: “The Doctor.”

  On a long, narrow Chinese table positioned against another wall, Willi had arranged two wooden racks to display our pipes. Hanging above this was a wood and glass curio cabinet with our precious hoard of pipe bowls stored under lock and key.

  Over the years we covered nearly every inch of the Chamber’s brick walls with vintage Chinese advertising, old photos, and obscure, opium-related ephemera. My contribution was our collection of American sheet music covers—reminders of a time when opium smoking in America was so commonplace that it was the subject of popular songs. The oldest was Will Rossiter’s “I Don’t Care If I Never Wake Up” from 1899. There was also “Roll a Little Pill For Me” by Norma Gray from 1911, and Byron Gay’s “Fast Asleep in Poppyland” from 1919 (chorus: “Lights burn low / dreams come and go / dreams of happy hours / spent among the flowers”).

  Our favorite for cover art was Ole Olsen and Isham Jones’s “Frisco’s Chinatown” from 1917, which featured a depiction of an opium den with four pigtailed Chinese slumbering snugly in the tiered bunks that were a common space-saving arrangement in American “hop joints.”

  Sheet music cover from 1917 with
a depiction of a typical “hop joint” in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, opium smoking was so well known in America that it was mentioned in popular songs, many of which also reflected the association of the habit with Chinese immigrants, who introduced it from China in the 1850s. (From the author’s collection)

  The old song sheets notwithstanding, Willi and I preferred silence over music while smoking. Any loud, sustained noise—any sound other than the steady tick-tock of the pendulum clock—would mask the gentle burbling sound of the pipe. If a smoker cannot hear his pipe, the sound of which resembles the dregs of a milkshake being lightly sucked through a straw, he can’t tell if the opium is properly vaporizing, especially since the vapors of good chandu do not burn the throat or lungs like tobacco smoke.

  The all-important opium bed, the room’s centerpiece, was a heavy, baroquely carved rectangular hardwood platform. Unlike a traditional bed, the two long sides of an opium bed are its head and foot. Ours was positioned with one long side—the bed’s head—against a wall. The head and sides of the bed were enclosed with wooden panels about two feet high, meaning that it could only be mounted from the foot. This was designed to afford privacy to the bed’s occupants, keeping out any unwanted distractions and helping to cut down on drafts that might make the opium lamp flicker. Our opium bed was additionally sheltered from the rest of the room by a low-hanging canopy of silken brocade woven with elegant floral motifs that were just faintly visible through the smoky gloom. The result was a womblike space within a space, enveloped by darkness and quiet, a willful cocooning against the world.