Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  Details like this set my head spinning. I would have given anything to be able to go back in time and see an opium smoker’s travel kit being used. I had a number of such kits in my collection but the function of some of the components was a mystery to me. Not wanting to interrupt her story, I made a mental note to ask Roxanna about the kit later that evening.

  “So when the guy from the opium den arrived, we spread out some mats on the floor of the apartment. I remember giving Hunter instructions on how to inhale. Beginners are always surprised at how hard you have to huff to get the opium to vaporize. Since he was the guest of honor, we offered Hunter the first pipe. We were all pretty thrilled by the whole scene. Imagine, Saigon was surrounded by North Vietnamese, everyone was terrified and the city was descending into chaos, and there we were smoking opium with Hunter Thompson.”

  Willi handed the pipe to Roxanna and again she took a long draw. Despite the excitement she described, her voice had become far-off and flat, almost like the intonations of somebody under a hypnotist’s spell.

  “Then something strange happened. After his very first pipe Hunter began hyperventilating. At first I thought he was joking with us, but it was real. It was like he was freaking out. He was pulling at his shirt like he was trying to rip it off, like he couldn’t breathe. And his eyes were huge and rolling around. It was really scary.”

  Roxanna looked toward the shrine as though the scene were unfolding within the clouds of incense that enveloped the Den God. I thought I detected a hint of concern on her face as she relived the emotions of that day long ago.

  “The guy from the opium den told us to get hot and cold towels and apply them to Hunter, so we hurried to the kitchen, putting one towel under the tap and pouring hot water on another. Then we rushed back and began rubbing his face and chest with this succession of hot and cold towels. And it worked. Hunter started to calm down and finally he seemed okay. We asked him what happened and he said he didn’t know. He looked sheepish and then excused himself and quickly left the apartment. It was really odd.”

  Roxanna paused and her face creased into a puckish smile, as though she was recalling the punch line of an old joke she hadn’t heard in a while.

  “So we had the guy from the den roll us some pipes, and we started talking about what just happened. Some of my friends were really down on Hunter. Maybe they were just really disappointed. You know, his reputation and all … we were expecting to turn him on and have this experience right out of his book. But to see him panic like that, well …”

  Roxanna interrupted herself to ask Willi how many pipes she had smoked. He looked at me. “Ask the pipe boy.”

  “It’s been nine so far,” I said, grateful that I’d remembered to keep track.

  “Oh dear, maybe it’s time for a break.”

  Roxanna began fossicking through her handbag and finally produced a pack of Thai cigarettes and a plastic disposable lighter. Willi invited her to try one of his local cheroots instead. Roxanna took one, sniffed at the cheroot’s banana-leaf wrapper, and smilingly consented as Willi struck a match and cupped it in his hands. Roxanna held the cheroot to her lips and leaned it forward into the flame. After Willi blew out the match he said, “Disposable lighters are on the list of banned items in the Chamber.”

  “As they should be,” Roxanna concurred. “How much style have we abandoned for the sake of a little convenience? I remember when a Zippo lighter was one of those accessories you didn’t feel complete without.”

  If old studio portraits of opium smokers are to be believed, tobacco smoking was an indispensable part of a typical opium-smoking session—even long after the Chinese discovered the secrets of vaporization and had dispensed with the tobacco and opium blend. Tobacco was most often smoked in an upright metal water pipe with a tall, gracefully curved stem. Perhaps due to lingering associations, these metal tobacco pipes are commonly sold in antiques shops as opium pipes. Stickler that I was for historical accuracy, I drew the line at smoking tobacco in the Chamber—I had tried it once but didn’t like how the nicotine seemed to dampen my opium euphoria.

  Roxanna and Willi had gone quiet while smoking their cheroots, but I still had questions about the encounter with Thompson. “So he left the apartment after freaking out, but you must have seen him again around town, right?”

  “Well, after Hunter left the apartment some of my journalist friends hatched a plan. They decided they were going to play with his head. Maybe they felt silly for being so in awe of him earlier. I don’t know. You know how young men are. So that’s what they did over the next few days: They took turns working on Hunter. First, two guys went to his hotel to inspect his room and give him advice about which window was best for defending the building. They gave him an old pistol and some ammunition and they pointed through the window down at the street to give him an idea of the range of the thing. Then they left him there.

  “A few days later, more of my friends showed up at Hunter’s hotel room and gave him a bag of grenades. They told him the pistol would be worthless if the hotel was overrun by the North Vietnamese. They advised him to toss the grenades out the door so they rolled down the stairs. Later they told me Hunter looked very alarmed by the whole idea. The guys thought it was hilarious. They planned out their next visit and somebody even found an M-16 they could give Hunter, but when they went back to his hotel he had already checked out. For the next few days we looked everywhere for him, but Hunter was gone. It wasn’t until later I found out he’d flown out of Vietnam.”

  I sat there stunned by what I had just heard. The known version of the story about Hunter S. Thompson’s Saigon gig was that Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner had torpedoed the assignment, pulling the plug after Thompson was already on his way to cover the fall. Without an employer—and the insurance coverage that came with the magazine assignment—Thompson had decided it was too dangerous to stay in Saigon.

  Was it possible that this accepted version was just a piece of the larger story? Roxanna didn’t linger on the subject. After asking Willi if he wanted a break from preparing pipes, she switched places with him on the opium bed so that she was lying on her left side and her right hand was free to roll. Roxanna prepared pipes in the same way that she had told her war story, in a deliberate, unhurried fashion. She lacked Willi’s speed and flourishes, but instead had the cadence of someone who could roll pills in her sleep.

  This photo of an opium smoker has an insert showing a rare close-up of a pill being rolled. The image is from a 1919 issue of the French magazine Le Pays de France, but the photos are two of a series believed to have been taken in New York. (From the collection of Yves Domzalski)

  “Was Saigon during that time really as dangerous as your friends made out?” I asked.

  “Probably not. Nobody I knew was killed covering the fall. Probably the closest call I ever had was in Cambodia. Although at the time I didn’t know it was a close call.”

  Roxanna handed the primed pipe to Willi, who took it with both hands to show that he didn’t need her to guide him over the flame.

  “I had this idea to go to Phnom Penh. This was in 1970, a couple weeks after Lon Nol had replaced Prince Sihanouk in a coup. Cambodia was where the story was, and a lot of my friends were there already. Plus, there were two superb opium dens in Phnom Penh, and I was always looking for a reason to visit.”

  Again I sat up straight on the porcelain stool, about to interrupt and ask for details about Phnom Penh’s opium dens, but Roxanna had already moved on.

  “The road between Saigon and Phnom Penh was bad. Route One, it was called. On the map it looked like a highway, but a lot of Route One wasn’t paved. I thought if I left Saigon early enough in the morning I could reach Phnom Penh well before dark, so I set out on my motorbike just before dawn.”

  “You drove a motorcycle?” I asked with surprise. “Alone?”

  “There really wasn’t any other way. It wasn’t like in Vietnam where I could always hitch a ride just about anywhere in U.S. Army helicop
ters. My journalist friends were always so jealous of me. Being a young white woman I was a rarity in Southeast Asia. Those military guys almost never said no when I asked for a ride. Of course, in Cambodia there were no U.S. military flights. Not officially anyway. And I couldn’t afford to charter a private plane, so the motorbike was the only alternative.”

  Willi handed the pipe back to Roxanna and she used a damp sponge to wipe the blackened opium residue from the pipe bowl’s surface.

  “I’ll never forget that border crossing. The Vietnamese and Cambodian border officials were shooting at each other. It wasn’t a heavy firefight, just this kind of low-key feud. The Vietnamese had a card game going, spread out on a grass mat on the floor, but every few minutes one of them would get up and fire some shots at the Cambodian border post a couple hundred yards away.”

  Roxanna flicked the pipe bowl with the nail of her index finger, listening to the sound it made in order to judge whether or not the bowl needed to be scraped clean of dross. I couldn’t tell the difference, but she must have decided the bowl was still clear because she began counting another dose of chandu into the little copper wok.

  “I was delayed there for hours because the Vietnamese said I had to wait until lunchtime. That was when the two sides had both agreed to stop shooting. I joined the Vietnamese officials for a lunch of pho and after we finished eating they stamped me out of Vietnam. By that time the sun was horribly hot, but at least the crossing was quiet. I walked the motorbike across the no-man’s-land between the two border posts. When I got to the Cambodian side, I saw their little concrete post was all shot up and deserted. I thought they must all be dead, and I almost turned around and walked the motorbike back into Vietnam. Then I heard something from behind the building. It was somebody snoring. I found the Cambodian officials taking a nap in the shade. One of them got up and stamped my passport, and then I was on my way.”

  Like Willi, Roxanna eschewed the fancy rolling tool on the layout tray and instead rolled the pill of opium against the pipe bowl’s smooth upper surface. Their techniques diverged in the way that Roxanna used the flat end of the needle to scrape the wok clean of dried chandu and then dipped the sticky pill into the powdery remnants. When Roxanna rolled not a speck of opium was wasted.

  “The Cambodian countryside was a real contrast to Vietnam. There was no traffic on the road, nobody but me. And there wasn’t anybody working the rice fields, either. Even the little villages I passed through were empty. I had been riding for an hour or so and, wouldn’t you know it, I got a flat tire. It was so hot and there was no shade on that road, and I remember being afraid of the heat more than anything else. I walked the motorbike in the direction of Phnom Penh. There was nothing else I could do.”

  If I had been reclining I would not have been able to keep my eyes from sliding shut and letting my imagination supply the visuals, but sitting upright on the porcelain stool kept my mind sharp and allowed me to focus on both listening to Roxanna’s story and observing her rolling technique. I was spellbound. After she had finished shaping the pill on the end of the needle, Roxanna had an alarming way of seating the pill on the bowl’s needle hole, letting the wad of chandu cool for what seemed an inadequate amount of time before abruptly thrusting the needle deep into the bowl to break the pill free from the needle. Each time I saw her do this I was sure that she had botched this most difficult step in the process, but each time I was surprised to see her easily extract the needle, leaving the pill stuck fast to the bowl, and with a perfect little hole through which to inhale the vapors.

  “I had been walking for only a few minutes when out of nowhere a man and a boy appeared on the road ahead of me. They were very dark skinned and were wearing the black pajamas of the Khmer Rouge. The boy had a shoulder bag full of tools and the man was carrying a bicycle pump and without even looking at me they began working on the flat tire. It was really odd. They quickly fixed the tire and pumped it back up and then without a word they walked down the road in the direction I had come. I got on the bike and started it, but when I looked back to wave at them, they were gone.”

  Willi slid off the opium bed and motioned for me to take his place. Roxanna stopped telling her story until I was comfortably reclining on my right side and facing her over the tray. She handed me the slender pipe, guiding it over the lamp while I inhaled, but she didn’t resume speaking until my lips had left the jade mouthpiece.

  “I didn’t see another soul until I got to the ferry crossing hours later, but by then I was only an hour away from Phnom Penh. Just after I arrived in the city, I ran into a couple of friends including Sean Flynn. He was Errol Flynn’s son. The famous actor.”

  “Sure, I’ve heard of Errol Flynn,” I said while letting the opium vapors slowly escape from my lungs.

  “Well, if you know who Errol Flynn was then you’ll know how handsome he was. His son, Sean, was even better looking. He had the type of face that if you walked into a room full of people, he was the first person you noticed. But he was one of those rare people who don’t seem to realize how attractive they are. There was nothing vain about Sean.”

  Roxanna took the pipe from me and removed the bowl to scrape it clean of ash. Her fingertips were so calloused that she was able to handle the hot bowl with her bare hands. She held the doorknob-sized bowl in her left hand while gripping the scraper—about the length of a household screwdriver—in her right, winding the scraper’s curved blade around the inside of the bowl. Sand-like dross poured from the bowl’s open end as Roxanna shook it over a cylindrical container, creating what looked like a small pile of ground-up pencil leads.

  “When I told Sean where I’d just come from he thought I was joking. The news in Phnom Penh was that Route One was too dangerous to travel. I told him my story about the flat tire, and he was sure that who I met were Khmer Rouge. The fact that they’d helped me really excited him. It wasn’t long after that I heard he and photojournalist Dana Stone rode some motorbikes back in the direction of Saigon and were captured. They were never seen alive again.”

  By now there was no emotion in her voice or on her face. Had I known nothing about opium, I might have taken her reaction—or the lack of one—to be that classic symptom much remarked upon by nineteenth-century observers: the opium addict’s famed “indifference.” But I knew that opium smokers were anything but indifferent. Like so much else about this drug, it was a misunderstanding on the part of nonsmokers. Roxanna’s reaction wasn’t indifference but a sense of detached observation that feels to the smoker like the wisdom of a sage who sits on a mountaintop and views life from on high. As Jean Cocteau explained it, life is an express train speeding toward a dark tunnel that is death: “To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.”

  Roxanna lifted the little bottle of chandu from the tray and gave it a light shake. The blood-colored liquid mixing within was so toxic that if consumed orally, this small amount could have poisoned hundreds. She loosened the dropper from the bottle as she cradled the pipe against her breast. “Are you ready for more?” she asked.

  “You know I am,” I answered.

  To be able to “cook” well is quite an art, and one of which an old smoker is very proud. A novice or a poor cook will bedaub himself and the pipe, and either overdo or underdo the opium, so that it is too sticky or too crisp to smoke well.

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

  It wasn’t long after my return to Bangkok that I heard from Roxanna again. She telephoned, sounding a bit lost, as though she had expected the number to be wrong. Roxanna wanted to visit me at my apartment, and I immediately assumed that I knew the reason.

  I was excited, both at the prospect of meeting Roxanna again and because of some Pavlovian reaction to hearing her voice. Habitual opium use forms strong associations with sights and sounds. I learned just how strong on one occasion when Willi was passing through Bangkok and I met him for coffee at his hotel. Seeing his face and hearing his voice made my mind a
nd body anticipate the thing that had always been instantaneously available each time we met. Whenever I had experienced this feeling in Vientiane there was a deliciousness to the angst because I knew that it would soon end. In Bangkok, however, there could be no joy. Willi and I both found our meeting excruciating, and without finishing our coffee we parted—but only after making hasty plans for me to go to Vientiane later that week.

  With Roxanna, though, I was not sure where this would go. My mind raced. Was she expecting me to host, as Willi had? That was impossible, and I needed to warn her that I had no opium on hand—without uttering the word “opium” over the telephone. I could imagine what a trial it would be for someone with a prosthetic leg to navigate my Chinatown neighborhood with its narrow, vehicle-choked lanes. I could also picture her disappointment when she arrived to find that her efforts had been for nothing. Every horizontal surface in my apartment was crowded with antique opium-smoking paraphernalia, yet I had never even contemplated having opium there.

  It was an old joke. Friends who visited my apartment took the sight of my collection on display as a cue to ask if they could try some opium. One friend bragged to another that he had patronized the secret opium den that I was running in my flat. I actively discouraged such talk. I saw myself as a collector and a scholar. My opium experimentation had always been tied to collecting and research, and I was able to rationalize it in the name of scholarship. Sharing opium with Willi was not the same as bringing opium into my home and smoking it. The drug was illegal in Thailand and its antidrug laws were strictly enforced. The country may have still had a reputation for narcotics, but that was simply a case of perception being slow to catch up with reality. In the 1990s, when I was doing freelance journalism for the wire service Agence France-Presse, an editor at the Bangkok bureau remarked to me—only partly tongue-in-cheek—that 90 percent of the Thailand-related stories that AFP put on the wire were either about sex, drugs, or elephants. “That sums up Thailand in a nutshell,” he said. “It’s what the West wants to read about Thailand.”