Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  During that time the entire country—and especially Bangkok—was being flooded with methamphetamine from Burma, and it made for some shocking scenes. In the Thai-language newspapers it was not uncommon to see lurid front-page photographs of some meth head’s binge that had reached its tragic nadir—a last stand of extreme and deranged violence. When cornered by police, these meth addicts all seemed to react as if preprogrammed to do what onlookers would find most shocking: Their speed-warped minds commanded them to grab the nearest child and hold it hostage—usually with a knife to the throat and much bloodletting.

  I doubt there are any reliable statistics on how many of these meth-fueled hostage incidents occurred in Thailand, but in 2003 something happened. Word on the street was that the prime minister’s son had gotten hooked on meth. Suddenly things changed very rapidly. For two years extrajudicial killings were the order of the day. Thailand’s officially sanctioned “war on drugs” is said by human rights experts to have claimed the lives of 2,500 people. At the time I was well aware that having opium in my possession would change the status of my entire collection from oddball antiques to dangerous drug paraphernalia.

  There was a secondary, and to me no less important, reason for not letting opium become too familiar: My cherished trips to visit Willi and the Chamber—my escapes from the twenty-first century—would surely lose their magic if I allowed my mind to associate the sublime experience of opium with someplace as mundane as my living room. The mere idea seemed like gross sacrilege.

  I groped for a way to discourage Roxanna by letting her know that I had no opium, but she quickly cut me off. “Just give me your address. My driver will find your apartment.”

  I told her, and she promised to see me within the hour. I thought about lying and saying that I wasn’t free, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I agreed, and as soon as I did the conversation was over. I put down the phone and stared at it. What might I say to get out of smoking at my apartment without offending Roxanna? I contemplated calling her back and saying that I had to go out unexpectedly, but I knew this would sound hastily fabricated and might put her off wanting to meet me again.

  As I waited for Roxanna to arrive I began to reflect on how little I knew about her. We had spent a delightful evening in the Chamber and she had told some intriguing anecdotes, but regarding her present-day life she had said almost nothing. About all I knew was that she had relocated from Chiang Mai to Bangkok a few years back. Willi had been diplomatic when choosing his words to describe her. He referred to Roxanna’s “habit,” but had never uttered the “A” word. I wondered what I was getting myself into. Of course, I had met addicts in the past. Madame Tui was one, as were Mister Kay and his elderly patrons. What I had read in nineteenth-century missionaries’ memoirs didn’t worry me—all that drivel about moral decay and fiends who would stop at nothing to satisfy a yen. But there was something about Roxanna being a Westerner—it shouldn’t have mattered to me, but it did. How on earth did she manage to get hooked? Was it intentional? Willi and I had often talked about how we were too careful to get addicted. We used the word “careful,” but we were cocky and could just as easily have substituted the word “clever.” Had Roxanna once thought the same of herself?

  I began to wonder if perhaps Roxanna was bringing her own chandu and thought she might surprise me by showing up and offering to roll. I couldn’t imagine that she would go to the trouble to carry a pipe and lamp with her—she was almost certainly expecting me to supply the accoutrements. I hit upon the idea of telling her that none of my pieces were anywhere near operable, that my pipes were fragile and would need repairs before they could be used; that all my functional bowls were with Willi; that my lamps were missing their chimneys and would leak oil.

  I began removing pieces of my collection from their crowded display shelves, hunting for bowls that might still be usable and plucking them from the jumble. With each piece removed there appeared a footprint in the fine layer of Bangkok dust that blanketed every surface. I blew at the shelves to even out the dust and make the recent removals less obvious. I spirited away an opium lamp that was the centerpiece of my coffee table, one that I occasionally filled with oil and lit for decoration. There were so many pieces to hide and so little time that all I could think to do was line them up on my bed and throw a blanket over everything.

  This is where I was when Roxanna arrived—in my bedroom, rushing to hide my collection from an opium addict. There were still many functional pieces on display, including a pipe on the living room shelf, but I had run out of time. I waited until she knocked a second time and then opened the door and illuminated the shadowy corridor outside with the dazzling afternoon sunlight that flooded my apartment. This never failed to impress guests and Roxanna was no exception. “Oh my, look at that view,” she said, gazing past me and out the windows looking upriver.

  She hobbled in, apologizing for not removing her shoes, and made her way to the sofa while I stood there, wondering if I should offer to take her arm as I’d seen Willi do. “I won’t take up too much of your time. I can’t stay long, my driver is waiting,” she said while admiring the view. “I just had a little accident and I thought you might be able to help me.”

  “An accident?”

  Roxanna was dressed more formally than when I had last seen her. She was wearing a maroon smock of Javanese batik over a pair of dark pants. On top of this she wore a collarless cotton jacket dyed with indigo. Later I came to know that this ensemble was of her own devising and something of a trademark. It was semiformal with a nod to Southeast Asian style, as well as being cool and keeping her disability well hidden.

  Roxanna seemed to be in a rush. Standing next to the sofa, leaning on her cane, she looked around as though she were debating whether or not to sit. I urged her to and asked if she wanted anything to drink. She refused both invitations, surveying my living room but not remarking on anything, as though a room full of opium paraphernalia was nothing out of the ordinary. Finally she spoke. “I had an accident this morning just before going to work. It’s had me distracted all day.”

  “What can I do to help?” I asked.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. It’s my pipe—my old pipe that I’ve had for years. It split. There’s a crack in the bamboo the length of the pipe. I think it was that sudden change in humidity when it rained last night.”

  “Do you want me to try and fix it?”

  “I don’t think it can be repaired. And besides, I was so flustered when I found it broken that I dropped the bowl and its collar broke off. Imagine the bad luck. And I don’t have a backup pipe.”

  Roxanna’s eyes found the pipe resting on a shelf. It was rustic, a “workhorse” that had been imported from China to America in the nineteenth century and rediscovered in New Mexico. Unadorned, it was a no-nonsense pipe that had no doubt once belonged to a serious smoker. But despite its simplicity, I did not want to sell it. This particular pipe was special. A waxy red adhesive that was used to attach the saddle to the pipe stem was abundantly visible, and I had planned to have the substance chemically tested and perhaps confirm anecdotal evidence that old-fashioned sealing wax was used to seal opium pipes.

  “I could help you find a pipe. It might take me a month or two, depending on what you’re looking for. Or there’s a guy in Vientiane who makes them but that takes longer.”

  Roxanna had gone over to have a better look at my pipe on display. “What about this one?” she asked. “I really can’t wait.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not for sale. Nothing’s for sale. I just collect, I never sell anything.”

  She stood her ground. “I can’t afford to pay you what it’s worth, but I have other things you might be interested in.”

  “I do trades from time to time but only for other opium antiques.”

  Roxanna began fishing through her handbag, and I thought she might pull out a bottle of chandu and offer that, but it was a mobile phone that she finally produced. “I have to call my driver. I
told him I would only be here a second to pick up something.”

  She tried to communicate with the unseen driver in heavily accented Thai and then repeated the message in English. “I need more time. Five more minutes, okay?”

  As she put away the phone I had the feeling that I was greatly inconveniencing her. I wanted to help but the last thing I needed was for anybody to think that my apartment was some kind of one-stop shop for opium paraphernalia. I was very keen to know Roxanna and pump her for information about how opium was used in the days when it was still common in Southeast Asia, but my collection was more important to me than anything else. I tried to change the subject. “It must be nice to have a driver.”

  “The university provides a car and driver, but only for rides to and from the museum. I was able to talk him into coming here today but unless it’s official business I really shouldn’t be using the car.”

  “Which museum is that?” I asked.

  “The Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University. I’m the director. Didn’t Willi tell you?”

  In that instant I connected her name with an article that I had read somewhere about Chinese trade ceramics. I could feel my face flush with such intensity that I knew it must be visible. I smiled. I stammered. “Uh … no.”

  Roxanna smiled back. There is nothing to do in such situations but smile the awkwardness away. “Listen,” she said, “I know you can help me and I’m prepared to help you. How come you’ve never learned to roll?”

  “Willi says learning to be a world-class sushi chef would be cheaper.”

  Roxanna laughed. The bright sunlight on her face—highlighting sallow skin and mascara-ringed eyes—made her look like an actress in a silent film. “I’ll teach you. For free. The first lesson starts today. Just get a stem and a bowl and come home with me. It’s not far. We’ll be there in half an hour, traffic permitting.”

  I didn’t need to think about it long. She was the director of a respected institution, an expert on ceramics no less. One of my weak points was ceramic pipe bowls and their endless array of clays, glazes, and chop marks. I didn’t see any need to learn how to prepare pipes, but there were questions that I could ask about her technique and how it differed from Willi’s. I took a pipe from its storage place in an old suitcase. It was my “epiphany pipe,” the one that I had since discovered was a reproduction. I wrapped it carefully before zipping it into a tennis racket case, and then led Roxanna down to her waiting car.

  The vast majority of Westerners residing in Bangkok live on one of the hundreds of lanes branching off Sukhumvit Road. It is a relatively new part of the city—the streets were laid out in the 1960s—and it’s also pretty characterless. Anonymous towers house luxury condominiums and overlook at least ten branches of Starbucks. There are spotless supermarkets selling imported brands of sandwich spread from Europe and America, as well as red-light entertainment complexes—two of three such areas in Bangkok that cater to Westerners. Sukhumvit Road is legendary for dense traffic and great expense. I knew a European Union diplomat whose high-rise apartment cost his employers $2,500 a month—a staggering sum in a city where the legal minimum wage at the time was the equivalent of $6.50 per day. Most Southeast Asian capitals have their version of this neighborhood, and this is where one invariably finds the expat community. If somebody had asked me which part of the city I would expect the director of Bangkok University’s ceramics museum to reside, I would have guessed Sukhumvit Road.

  Roxanna’s house was only ten miles distant from the ex-patty glitz of Sukhumvit, but it was a world away in atmosphere. After turning off a main road we drove down a long lane lined with houses and family-run shops paralleled by a stretch of railway that terminated in Malaysia some six hundred miles away. Pedicabs ran from the wet market at the entrance of the lane nearly all the way to Roxanna’s house, which could be accessed only via a narrow walkway overhung with banana leaves and barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast. As Roxanna and I walked the final few yards to her home, she pointed out that the walkway was actually a concrete causeway raised above the swampy ground. “It used to just be wooden planks on stilts above the mud. The city came and built the cement walkways in the nineties.”

  The area was densely populated, judging by the way the little wooden houses were nearly touching one another on all sides, yet everything was surprisingly quiet. In that respect Roxanna’s neighborhood was Thai and very unlike Chinatown. I remarked upon this to Roxanna. She smiled and said, “Come visit some Sunday when all the men are home drinking and watching boxing on TV.”

  Roxanna’s house was indistinguishable from those of her neighbors. The simple wooden structure rested on concrete stanchions and was two stories high. On a stick near the front door was a Thai flag slowly bleaching in the tropical sun. Inside, the lower floor was little more than a semi-enclosed hallway to a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a stairway leading to the upper floor. Crammed into this tiny downstairs space were a table and chairs for eating and a shelf of dusty books. The outer walls were simply rows of vertical wooden slats about two inches apart that allowed for cooling breezes to enter but did nothing to keep out insects or bar the gaze of passersby. Roxanna’s bedroom was a plywood-walled room constructed within the larger room downstairs, and was clearly an afterthought designed to hold in conditioned air and afford some privacy. A second bedroom—as tiny as a closet—was occupied by Roxanna’s son, Jamie.

  As we entered, Jamie came out of his room with eyes that suggested a long nap, and stood silently to let his mother introduce us. I guessed him to be in his early twenties. He had shoulder-length hair and the good looks that have made children of mixed race a show business commodity in Thailand. My first impression of Jamie was that being introduced to me was the last thing he wanted to be doing. He was just a shade short of surly. I thought immediately that Roxanna must have raised him as an American—if Thais don’t like you, they almost always make an effort to hide their feelings. I wondered what he knew of his mother’s habit or if others had preceded me. Roxanna told him in English that we were “going upstairs to talk” and then she excused herself, saying she needed a minute to change out of her work clothes. Jamie went back into his bedroom without a word and I took the opportunity to use the bathroom. I was surprised to find that it was the traditional variety common in rural Southeast Asia: a squat toilet and a cement cistern filled with cold water. Plastic scoops were used for both bathing and to manually flush the toilet.

  I was both puzzled and captivated. Why did the director of a museum at a private university live so humbly? Friends of mine sometimes teased me about “going native”—based on my fluency in Thai, the non-Westernized part of town that I lived in, and perhaps also my lackadaisical housekeeping. For me there were a few reasons: a natural ability to pick up languages, a constant shortage of money due to my compulsive collecting, and a healthy dash of laziness that I liked to blame on my being a third-generation Southern Californian. I also had a desire to see the exotic everywhere I turned. Why bother to live in Thailand if one was simply going to live in that bubble-like facsimile of the Western world on Sukhumvit Road? I looked around Roxanna’s home and wondered what her excuse was. Was she consciously thumbing her nose at the expat community? If so, I could only admire her lifestyle.

  When Roxanna emerged from her bedroom she was wearing the same sort of sleeveless smock she had worn at the Chamber. Although it was already six in the evening, the temperature was still in the nineties and the humidity high. As we made our way slowly up the narrow wooden stairs, the temperature seemed to rise a few degrees with each step. Once we were on the upper floor I saw why: There was no ceiling—I looked up and there were the rafters and pressed-asbestos sheets that made up the roof. The upstairs space was divided into two rooms with a door between them. Roxanna steered me into the inner room and locked the door. There were four windows in the room, all lacking glass or screens, but with solid wooden shutters. She asked me to shut them as tightly as they would clos
e. Everything was made from an inferior type of wood and the warped shutters would not seat properly, but I did my best to pull them shut, knowing the reason behind the exercise was to prevent Roxanna’s opium lamp from flickering.

  The walls were bare and the only piece of furniture was an old desk on which sat a boxy television. Roxanna took a small key from a coin purse and opened a drawer in the desk. Inside were the components of her layout: a crude brass lamp; an opium needle evidently fashioned from a bicycle spoke; a cleaning rod made from a wire clothes hanger; and a jam jar that had been press-ganged into dross-storage duties. For a tray Roxanna spread out pieces of newspaper. After arranging her paraphernalia on the paper, she slowly lowered herself to recline on the bare floorboards. Her pillow was a small cushion filled with shredded coconut husks—the cheapest pillow on the market, I knew, because the stuffing made it hard as a block of wood.

  The scene bordered on squalid and reminded me of the opium dens that Karl and I had visited in Laos for his story in Time. I couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity for this woman, especially given her disability. Yet there was nothing in her demeanor that invited sympathy. This was the same Roxanna I had met at the Chamber—right down to that amused little smile. She joked about the contrast between her opium-smoking layout and the one that Willi and I had assembled. “If I could only afford something like that … wow. I could make myself believe I was the empress dowager,” Roxanna said, referring to China’s tyrannical ruler toward the end of the Qing dynasty. Putting on a stern face, she mock-growled, “Whoever makes me unhappy for a day, I will make suffer an entire lifetime.”