Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  Roxanna told me that the only thing that kept her going was her love for her son. Jamie had never been able to hold down a job, and Roxanna worried that he spent too much time shut up in his bedroom. She told me that he had gone to high school in America while living with her relatives there, but Jamie was shy and didn’t fit in, so he had come home withdrawn and lacking confidence in himself.

  A mild estrangement from her family in the States was something Roxanna often spoke of, but there was usually humor in her stories, and for me it was a relief to find somebody who understood the loneliness of self-exile in a foreign land. She, too, had felt the sensation, after many years abroad, of being trapped somewhere betwixt and between. Neither of us quite fit into our adopted country and yet we were no longer at home in the land of our birth, a place that had changed beyond recognition while we were away.

  Sometimes there was real sadness in her tales of trying to assimilate into Thai society. Roxanna told me that Jamie seemed ashamed to bring his friends home. She assumed it was because of her, but when she tried to listen for clues as he spoke Thai to his friends on the telephone, she was unable to follow his slang-infused speech. It was that oft-told coming to America story turned upside down: Roxanna was the immigrant parent whose outlandish looks and kooky accent were causing her child endless embarrassment.

  My lessons with Roxanna became more frequent. The original Sunday morning session was augmented by a midweek session, usually on Thursday evening after she had come home from work. Sometimes I wasn’t able to smoke for a few weeks when updating guidebooks took me to Cambodia, Malaysia, or Laos. There were definite feelings of withdrawal during these dry periods but nothing too severe. Mostly it manifested itself as insomnia and what felt like a case of jittery nerves. I became convinced that the doomsday withdrawal symptoms that I’d read about in old accounts were as exaggerated as the stories about opium’s hallucinogenic qualities.

  The setting for our sessions in Roxanna’s rustic house, besides being atmospheric, also debunked at least one opium-smoking myth. A dreamy passage in Cocteau’s Opium: Diary of a Cure related how animals were naturally drawn to the pleasures of the drug:

  All animals are charmed by opium. Addicts in the colonies know the danger of this bait for wild beasts and reptiles. Flies gather around the tray and dream, the lizards with their little mittens swoon on the ceiling above the lamp and wait for the night, mice come close and nibble the dross.

  In my laboratory open to the tropical atmosphere I found this to be completely untrue. Sparrows sometimes flew into the room through openings under the eaves of the roof, and they always flew right back out. Geckos avoided the rafters directly above the tray, and when on occasion Roxanna’s cat scratched on the door to get into the room, it turned and fled as soon as I opened the door and it got a whiff of the proceedings.

  Besides the rolling, I was also learning about ceramics from Roxanna. She taught me to recognize the difference between zisha and zitao, two types of pottery most commonly used for pipe bowls, and her knowledge of the settlements in China that had traditionally produced ceramics helped me map out what kind of bowls were produced where. Likewise, her groundbreaking use of salvaged shipwrecks to date Chinese trade ceramics inspired me to do the same for pipe bowls. I compared those found on the wreck of the Tek Sing, which sank in the Riau Archipelago near Singapore in 1822, with pipe bowls that had been discovered in the American West. These latter bowls were not likely to predate the California Gold Rush in 1849, and so this enabled me to create a rough chronology for pipe bowls—something that had never previously been done.

  As the months passed, my visits to smoke with Roxanna increased to three or four a week. If some holiday created a three-day weekend, we usually met on three consecutive days. My rolling was becoming impeccable, and on the increasingly rare occasions that I went to Vientiane to visit Willi, he was effusive in his praise of my accomplishment.

  Back at Roxanna’s, I would spend entire Sundays curled up next to the tray and peering through a pair of nineteenth-century wire-rim spectacles in patient pursuit of the perfectly rolled pill. On the way home, I would take the subway despite its being out of the way and slower than a taxi—just so I could luxuriate in the powerful air-conditioning and nod off between stations. I was supremely impressed at my own uniqueness: I was adept at using the world’s finest chandu to prepare my own pipes, and—I smiled to myself at the mere thought of it—I was surely the only person in this city of ten million who rode the subway while cooked on opium. I was an opium geek, even an opium snob, but it never occurred to me that I was also becoming an opium addict.

  One of the marvels of opium is its ability to exalt sensitivity, it transforms the most boorish people into courteous creatures by establishing true equality between races and sexes.

  —Max Olivier-Lacamp, Le kief (1974)

  “Don’t sell yourself short!” Roxanna said with insistence as I was vaporizing a pill. “And don’t overestimate how much he knows. He wouldn’t have flown all the way to Thailand if he knew enough to write his own book. If you give away your knowledge for free, Armand Hoorde will use it as his own and you’ll have nothing to show for it.”

  “He said I’d be on a list of contributors on the title page.”

  “That’s not enough. At least make him pay you for your work.… How many was that?” Roxanna interrupted herself as I handed the pipe back to her.

  “I don’t know. I forgot to keep count again. Sorry.”

  Awkwardly—because I was feeling too relaxed to bother sitting up—I reached toward the tray. Plucking three tamarind seeds from a small silver box adorned with a Chinese dragon, I dropped them into the box’s cylindrical lid. During my trips to smoke opium with Willi, he had never once asked for monetary contributions—our sessions were infrequent and my gifts of paraphernalia and decorative objects for the Chamber were enough. But my visits to smoke with Roxanna had become so regular that she asked if I would mind paying for the chandu I smoked. She somehow figured the cost per pipe based on how many drops she used for each pill. It was up to me to keep count using the tamarind seeds, which were brown and smooth, about the size of coffee beans. The tamarind seeds’ texture and stone-like hardness were appealing to my opium-sensitized fingertips. I chose them as counters for precisely that reason—no detail was too minute for opium’s most fastidious fancier.

  Roxanna and I were discussing whether I should be paid for my contribution to Hoorde’s catalog. I had received a compact disc with the text and images that were to make up the publication, and I saw that it wasn’t going to be some low-budget affair. The chapter I had agreed to contribute was already written—my job was to rewrite it. The original text had been penned by another Dutchman who had contacted me a couple years before, asking questions about opium pipe bowls and saying vaguely that he was working on “a paper.” I didn’t give him any information because at the time I was working on my own book. When I finally saw the makings of Hoorde’s book, I was glad I had refused. Hoorde would not have needed my help had I been too free with my knowledge a couple years earlier.

  I thought Roxanna was perhaps right about Hoorde’s lack of knowledge. The images taken for his book, while beautifully photographed, included a number of fakes and pieces that had nothing to do with opium smoking. Seeing these pictures reminded me of when Hoorde was visiting Bangkok and I had taken him to the antiques shops at River City mall. Once or twice he surprised me by gushing over some piece that was clearly not a tool of the trade. In one case he became very enthusiastic about a small cloisonné tray that was being offered as a lamp tray. The pattern of the enamel indicated that it was Japanese—and that alone is evidence enough that it was not crafted for smoking opium. The Japanese never produced opium paraphernalia for the simple reason that anti-opium laws in Japan were, from the earliest times, very severe and rigorously enforced. Still, I thought Hoorde might have just been testing me.

  Roxanna was enjoying her cigarette break—she never smoke
d more than one or two per session. I took advantage of the pause in rolling to open the windows and turn on the electric fan. Then I went downstairs to get two glasses of ice and a bottle of Gatorade from the refrigerator. The sports drink wasn’t exactly traditional, but Roxanna and I found it the best way to stay hydrated in the heat of that upstairs room. When I returned, Roxanna stubbed out her cigarette but continued on the subject of insisting on remuneration for consultation. She said she had once been hesitant to charge collectors when they approached her for ceramics appraisals—shyness and a low opinion of herself caused her to undervalue her own growing expertise. “Rewriting that chapter for Hoorde may seem easy to you, but think of how many years and how much money it’s taken for you to get where you are today. All that collecting and studying. Your time and knowledge are just as valuable as any other professional’s. Charge him accordingly.”

  At first I saw myself being compensated in other ways. Hoorde helped me acquire several pieces, including a porcelain stand for pipe bowls that he came across during a stopover in Hong Kong on his way back to Amsterdam. But as my smoking increased, so did my need for cash. By the time my trip to Europe was a month away, I was spending the equivalent of my monthly rent on smoking. So I renegotiated my arrangement with Hoorde, who agreed to pay me for my contribution to his book while generously keeping his promise to cover my journey to Europe.

  Roxanna suggested that I could also make some cash by selling off duplicate pieces of my collection directly to other collectors. Despite what might have seemed like a major conflict of interest—now that I was paying her for each pipe smoked—I valued Roxanna’s advice regarding my collection. For one thing, she was one of very few friends who understood and supported my decision to donate my collection to an institution—an idea I hit upon fairly early on.

  A serious collector can’t help but notice that the life span of a typical collection often only barely exceeds the life span of its owner. Once, at an antiques shop in Bangkok that specialized in antiquarian maps and books with Southeast Asian themes, I talked to the German proprietor of many years. He told of having European and American clients who visited Thailand annually, buying old books and maps to take back home to their collections. Often the collector had a wife and kids in tow. “He comes every year with his family and I watch as he gets older and his children grow into adults. I get to know them all very well. Then one or two years pass and he doesn’t come to Bangkok and I wonder what happened to him. If he is already old I can guess what happened.”

  The antiquarian book dealer explained that sometimes his suspicions were confirmed when a deceased collector’s family contacted him and wanted to sell the collection back. “I often get very good deals because the wife and especially the children have no interest in Father’s hobby. Sometimes they are even a little hostile toward the collection because so much of Father’s attention was given to his precious things. Families like this practically give back the books and maps to me for free.”

  I had observed something similar happening with the online auctions—where it was very common to see collections being scattered to the wind. The ones that I noticed being sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder had nothing to do with opium, but by using a collector’s eye I saw things that others might not have taken note of. In one case I watched the dissolution of an extensive collection of vintage firecracker labels. I could see that they had been meticulously gathered, just as a serious collector of stamps would have done: Every little variation in design, no matter how small, was represented. When such attention to detail was obvious I could easily imagine the passion of the person who had spent years putting the collection together. To that collector, each and every piece would have a backstory about how and where it was acquired and, if the collector was inclined to do research, a detailed description of its history and provenance would also have been recorded. I watched this auction as the labels—stripped of all their history—brought in a few dollars here and a few dollars there, and the disparate lots went to buyers on different continents.

  In 2004, a small but significant collection of opium antiques came up on eBay. The seller knew little about the items and would tell me only that the mother of a man who had died recently brought them in to be sold on consignment. The seller said that the mother didn’t want her son’s name disclosed, and so I could learn nothing about this collector except that he had lived in the Chicago area. I was able to buy some of his opium pipes, a few of which were very important pieces—including a pipe with a stem made from lacquered sugarcane that the seller didn’t correctly describe (in the auction the pipe was listed as bamboo). At first I didn’t recognize the pipe for what it was, either, but I bid on it and won the auction. It wasn’t until much later—after I had used a photo of the pipe to illustrate my book and erroneously captioned it “an odd species of bamboo”—did I realize that I owned one of the few surviving examples of a sugarcane opium pipe. This is something the original owner himself might have known, but if he did, he took that information to the grave.

  The notion that a similar fate might befall my own collection was enough to cause me sleepless nights. After dedicating a decade of my life to the one collection that had really caught my imagination, after the hours of meticulous research (all of it quite enjoyable, I had to admit), not to mention the money I had invested, the thought that the compilation I had put so much effort into assembling might someday end up on eBay—or worse, being haggled over by greedy shopkeepers and clueless tourists in Bangkok’s antiques shops—was truly distressing.

  I had long before decided that I would become the expert on opium paraphernalia. If I was going to be remembered for one thing, I wanted this to be it. Getting my book published was a start, but space constraints had meant that what was discussed and illustrated in my book was only a tiny fraction of what I knew and had collected. I needed a repository for both the goods and the information.

  I toyed with the idea of opening a small museum in Bangkok’s Chinatown. If my worst nightmare was having my collection shattered and scattered, my favorite daydream was to found and be the curator of my own museum—not some hall of institutional boredom with uninspired displays and labels that nobody bothered to read, but one of those weird little private museums that announces itself with a series of hokey roadside signs. I dreamed of something quirky enough to be hip yet academic enough to be taken seriously, a place where I could spend my days having conversations with visitors from all over the world. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it could work. I even picked out a vacant century-old shophouse in a quiet lane near my apartment that I thought would be the perfect venue.

  I discussed the project with an acquaintance—a Thai-Chinese businessman who was also a novice collector of opium antiques and who thought such a private museum might even turn a profit if it were done right. He had noticed the daily parade of tour buses hitting the Chinatown sights, such as the giant Golden Buddha at Wat Traimit monastery, and he felt a museum about opium would fit perfectly onto the tour companies’ itinerary. He declared himself interested and set out to see if it could be done, but it didn’t take long before he gave up on the idea. It seemed that the tour operators expected to be paid for each tourist they brought in; that each busload of visitors stopping by the museum would be accompanied by a tour guide with a smiling face and upturned palm. But before any of that could happen the tour companies would also have to be plied with substantial monetary enticement. When I heard all this, I was happy my collector acquaintance had lost interest. It was all too much like a business for my tastes.

  Willi, too, thought my collection could be an opportunity to earn money. He suggested a friend of his in Hong Kong who might be able to get permission to start a museum there, but by that time I was wary of any moneymaking ventures. What if the museum went bankrupt? What if the authorities decided to just walk in and confiscate everything? Technically opium paraphernalia was still illegal in Hong Kong. Museums can get waivers
because of their mission to educate, but who could trust a museum in China-controlled Hong Kong? China has been so intensely propagandizing its past, oversimplifying and emotionalizing its historic relationship with opium, that most Chinese—indeed most of the world—are convinced that the drug showed up on China’s shores with the British, who then forced millions to become addicted at gunpoint. What would Chinese authorities make of Chinese-made paraphernalia whose opulence suggested Chinese complicity? I didn’t think that China, or anyplace it controlled, would be right for a museum to house my collection.

  Ideally I thought my collection would be best housed and displayed in America, perhaps in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where opium smoking in the Chinese manner first got a foothold in the New World. Such a museum would be historically relevant to the entire country. Not only were a large percentage of the pieces I had acquired for my collection sourced in the United States, but late-nineteenth-century America had the largest population of opium smokers outside of Asia. But as I’ve mentioned earlier, the association of opium smoking with Chinese people has become politically charged in America, and so a museum presenting antique opium paraphernalia as an art form would probably be about as welcome in one of America’s Chinatowns as it would be in China itself.

  In San Francisco in 2004, I met Gaetano Maeda—an entrepreneur and filmmaker who was in town arranging the annual International Buddhist Film Festival. After graciously taking the time to listen to my ideas, he suggested that Las Vegas would be the only place in the United States that could host the type of museum I dreamed of opening. This was because the city’s cultural diversions were aimed at visitors who were quickly jaded by the sheer depth of choices for entertainment. Investors were therefore always looking for something new and unusual to grab tourists’ attention. If anyplace in America could host an opium museum and turn a profit, Maeda thought it would be Las Vegas. I thanked him for his advice, and then I promptly gave up on the museum idea. Nothing against Las Vegas, but my collection simply did not belong there.