The following night I began my session at the same time as the first. The tray was still arranged; I had simply slid it under my coffee table, put the bottle of chandu back in the fridge, and rolled up the cane mat. Once the session was well under way and I had smoked six pipes, I began once again to contemplate the porcelain bowl stand. Its odd configuration seemed as mysterious as ever.
Then, after my twelfth and last pipe of the night, I pushed the porcelain pillow aside and rested my head on the folded bolt of silk. Instead of going to bed, I decided to simply turn off the electric lamp and allow the oil-fed flame of the opium lamp to burn itself out, my slumber bathed in its diminishing glow. Lying supine, my whole body was relaxed and drifting like a raft on a placid sea, when suddenly an idea hit me with such force that it seemed to light up the room. It was nothing short of a revelation, and I knew instantly that I had solved the mystery. I sat up and turned the electric lamp back on and went into my bedroom to look for a white cotton T-shirt. When I found one that I didn’t care about, I used the lamp-wick scissors to cut the shirt into gee-rags—the small, doughnut-shaped cloth gaskets that when moistened form an airtight seal between the pipe bowl and the metal fitting on the pipe stem known as the saddle.
My mind was sharp and clear, and I sat on the mat working at my task until I had cut a handful of gee-rags, making a small pile of the curling cloth gaskets. Then I lifted the little lid from the porcelain bowl stand and stuffed the gee-rags into the space behind the vertical hole. The natural clinginess of the cotton kept the gee-rags bunched together and not a single one fell from the hole. Then, using two fingers, I reached into the vertical hole and pinched a gee-rag. When I pulled, it came out as easily and neatly as a tissue being plucked from a box of Kleenex. This made perfect sense! What would a smoker most likely need when changing from a dirty bowl to a clean one? Not a damned clock—but a fresh gee-rag, of course! I was so elated by my discovery that I hopped up from the mat and strutted around the room with my arms raised high.
To the layman my little discovery may sound like the height of useless arcana, but opium paraphernalia is full of these diminutive mysteries, bits of knowledge buried and forgotten like so many pieces of driftwood beneath the surface of a sandy beach—and each small mystery solved brought me that much closer to being the expert on my favorite subject.
My experience that second night was repeated twice more during my week of smoking alone. It felt as though the opium itself was giving me insight, guiding me and illuminating my path as I diligently worked to unlock its secrets.
A nineteenth-century porcelain stand for the storage and display of opium pipe bowls. The compartment behind the circular opening is for clean gee-rags, cloth gaskets that were used to make an airtight seal when a pipe bowl was attached to the opium pipe’s stem. (Photograph by Yves Domzalski)
It wasn’t until later that I remembered reading about the so-called hop-head hunch—uncanny powers of the mind attributed to opium smokers in American underworld lore. The phenomenon was recorded by Jack Boyle in an anonymously written essay in The American Magazine in June 1914. While relating his story of being an opium-addicted criminal in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Boyle told of his own experiences with opium-induced revelations: “In the underworld there is a species of foresight termed ‘hop-head hunches.’ They are regarded with superstitious awe the country over.”
In Jack Black’s memoir of crime and opium smoking in western America and Canada of the same period, he, too, experienced a similar revelation when the solution for cracking a problematic safe came to him while smoking opium.
So, you ask: Was the hop-head hunch a bunch of hopped-up hooey?
“The Eureka Hunt,” an article in the July 28, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, asked a question with its subtitle: “Why do good ideas come when they do?” The story explained how relaxation, not concentration, is what allows the brain to have sudden bursts of creative insight—the same reason that solutions to problems seem to come to us while we are taking hot showers or during the minutes just before drifting off to sleep. Opium seemed to bring on these “eureka moments” with an amazing frequency.
Although my opium-induced revelations were the highlight of my week of weaning, I was also glad to learn how easy it was to get off the dross. After just over a week of smoking an ever-decreasing dosage of Roxanna’s opium, I “fasted” for five days to see if I could handle the withdrawal. Days three and four were uncomfortable—it felt as if I had a nasty cold—but by day five I was on the mend. I called Roxanna and made arrangements for a visit the following weekend, and for the next two months my smoking was limited to weekends.
Since turning forty, birthdays were something I did my best to ignore, but in mid-July 2007 I used the occasion of my forty-fifth birthday as a reason to bring home another quantity of chandu. Roxanna protested mildly when I told her my plan to spend my birthday smoking alone, but she, too, had been impressed by the little discoveries I’d made during my week of solitary research. She consented to sell me some, and so I measured out half a bottle drop by drop in front of her, counting in advance the hours and days that I would spend riding my magic carpet high above Chinatown.
Money was no longer a problem. By this time I had found a novice collector in Las Vegas whose hunger for antique paraphernalia was matched by his wealth. The collector was looking for tools to make two complete layouts and was willing to pay hundreds of dollars for each piece. Roxanna allowed me to use her PayPal account to receive the payments, so the cash went directly to her. In the past I had been adamantly against selling anything from my collection, but I came to realize that I owned plenty of duplicate tools because I was in the habit of buying items even if I didn’t need them—as long as the price was right. Now this strategy was paying off. I was able to sell for $200–$500 pieces that had originally cost me $20–$50. I now had more than enough money to pay Roxanna for her opium. I put the half-full dropper bottle in a small paper bag with the logo of a local hospital and took the subway home, buzzing with the feeling that I was about to take a long-awaited vacation to some wonderful and exotic locale.
My move to Bangkok’s Chinatown predated my interest in collecting antique opium-smoking paraphernalia by a couple of years. Once I started collecting, I began asking antiques merchants if they knew where Bangkok’s old opium quarter had been located. None that I talked to seemed to know. “Chinatown,” they said vaguely, forcing a smile to indicate that was all they knew.
One day I stumbled across an old-style antiques shop—more of a junk shop compared to the gallery-like spaces of the River City mall—in an exhaust-blackened shophouse on Bangkok’s oldest road, a long, narrow thoroughfare lined with low buildings, known to most expats as “New Road.” The junky antiques shop was located opposite Bangkok’s imposing main post office, and after mailing off a parcel one day, I spied its cluttered display window from across the street. I almost put off having a look—the road is difficult to cross on that block because a lack of traffic lights lets vehicles get up to speed—but a gap in the flow suddenly opened up, allowing me to sprint across.
Seen through the glass door, the inside of the shop looked deserted, but I tried the knob and it opened to the sound of jangly brass bells. The proprietor—a smiling Chinese gentleman whom I later learned was in his eighties—came in from a back room. He welcomed me with rather good English, but I switched into Thai as I began a spiel that would lead to a description of what I was after. This narrative was well rehearsed and allowed me to keep the conversation going toward my goal in a way that sounded natural and unhurried. It also kept the antiques merchant from wasting both my time and his by giving him too much freedom to offer me items that I had no interest in buying.
I began by asking if he had an example of the most ubiquitous piece of opium paraphernalia in existence: the porcelain pillow. Unlike a pillow for sleeping, the porcelain opium pillow was a raised platform for the head, enabling a smoker to comfortably lie on one side and allowing f
or an unobstructed view of the pipe bowl as it was held above the opium lamp. Every antiques shop in Bangkok seemed to have one or two of these on hand. The old gentleman indeed had one, but its green-hued glaze was badly chipped. After pretending to give the pillow an appraising look, I asked about other opium antiques. He went into the back room and returned with an old soup dish containing a selection of pipe bowls in one hand and a porcelain Chinese teapot in the other. The antiques merchant invited me to drink a cup of tea, letting me sit and examine the pipe bowls at my leisure.
During our conversation it came out that he was originally from Talat Noi, the neighborhood in Chinatown where I was living. Without any prompting he then told me about how he had visited the Chinatown opium dens as a child while accompanying his uncle, who was an enthusiastic smoker. The old merchant mimed smoking a pipe, and his gestures—he cocked his head to one side as though reclining—left little doubt he had witnessed the ritual firsthand.
I asked him where the dens used to be located and he smiled and said he didn’t know the present-day names for the warren of alleys that once made up the old opium quarter. Speaking in Thai, he attempted to give me directions: “The opium dens were located off Prosperous City Road, this road in front of my shop, the one you Westerners call New Road. Follow it across the bridge over the canal and then turn left down Lane 22. Then walk about a hundred meters and turn left into the first alley. Back then, Lane 22 was known as ‘Dog Shit Lane’ and the principal alley with many opium dens was called ‘Raw Ghost Alley.’ Go in there and ask the old folks; they’ll point to where the dens used to be.”
I bought a bowl from the proprietor, although it was rather common and plain, as a way to thank him for what I felt was a fascinating bit of local color. I wondered why I’d never before heard those vulgar old street names, but it was typically Thai to withhold such history on the assumption that a shady past would reflect badly on the present. On the walk back to my apartment I stopped at a hole-in-the-wall eatery that specialized in stewed duck and ordered my usual lunch of duck over rice.
As I was waiting for my order, I started a conversation with “Old Uncle,” the patriarch of the family-run restaurant, who was always puttering around collecting empty glasses and wiping food scraps from the stainless tabletops. I showed him the pipe bowl that I’d just bought and asked him to guess what it was. He knew. I then asked the old man if he had ever heard of “Raw Ghost Alley.” He laughed upon hearing the name. “One way into that alley is right there,” he said, pointing to a narrow walkway that passed right through a motorcycle repair shop next to the eatery.
“Do you mean there were once opium dens around here?” I asked.
“You’re sitting in an old opium den!” he said and laughed again, waving his arms around to indicate the very restaurant where I had lunch practically every day.
The news that I was living in Bangkok’s old opium quarter didn’t surprise me. At that point I was ready to believe that fate had drawn me to the neighborhood in the first place. Days later, I again brought up the subject with Old Uncle at lunchtime, and this time he elaborated on Raw Ghost Alley, pointing to another entrance some twenty yards away from the eatery and next to one of the neighborhood’s best preserved traditional Chinese homes. Despite having lived in the area for years, I had never explored these narrow alleys. I was curious but something always held me back. Just a peek down the alleys—there were toddlers playing among slumbering dogs and oldsters lounging in the shade—had been enough to convince me that I would be intruding had I strolled on in. I decided instead to let the sleeping dogs of Raw Ghost Alley lie, leaving it all unexplored for the time being.
Many months later, during the two-week opium smokefest that my forty-fifth birthday developed into, Raw Ghost Alley came back into my thoughts. The name was intriguing. Anyone who has lived in Southeast Asia for a longish spell will have noticed that ghosts are widely believed in throughout the region. While living in the Philippines, I often heard about people who had been visited by spirits—although I never met anybody who admitted to having actually seen one themselves. Later, when I began doing guidebook work, I frequently came across ghost stories—most often associated with hotels that were supposedly haunted—in Laos, Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand. In fact, some Thais seemed to be so terrified of the supernatural that it was difficult to get them to talk openly about ghosts; my inquiries about hauntings often produced bulging eyes and silence.
However, the ghosts referred to in the alley’s informal name weren’t the disembodied spirits of deceased opium smokers. In Thai, phi dip directly translates into English as “raw ghost,” but the meaning is actually more akin to the term “the living dead.” In other words, opium smokers in old Bangkok were thought of as zombies—people dead to the world yet still walking around among the living. Interestingly, “ghost” was also an American underworld term for opium smoker. But I didn’t think the imagery these words evoked was meant to paint opium habitués as slack-jawed ghouls. Instead, I felt the meaning probably conveyed the idea that opium smokers were withdrawn and no longer took an interest in society.
Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” opens with what the author claimed was an old opium-smoker’s proverb: “If I can attain heaven for a pice, why should you be envious?” (“Pice” is the old Anglo-Indian spelling for “paisa,” a near valueless copper coin, one hundred of which made up a rupee.)
As I spent my birthday blissfully preparing one pipe after another, I could very much relate to the sentiment raised by Kipling’s proverb. Good quality chandu was no longer available for pennies, but why should anyone object if opium made the lives of those who chose to partake of it so delicious?
Why was opium illegal? From my vantage point next to the layout tray, the historic anti-opium crusades did look like petty envy—resentment soured by large doses of ignorance. Surely the banishment of opium was just another example of Victorian efforts to truss up society in a rigid corset of morality; the same kind of righteous zealotry that begat the temperance movements that led to the Volstead Act and a decade of Prohibition; the same hysteria that caused most countries in Europe to ban absinthe after a mass murder was wrongly attributed to the drink in 1905.
Starting in the last week of July 2007, I again forced myself to fast, this time abstaining from opium for an entire month—longer than I had gone without the drug since I began smoking with Roxanna. My birthday celebration, with its round-the-clock rolling, was exquisite, but during that two weeks of indulgence I’d done no work. It was time to catch up on some assignments. I found the weeklong detox period uncomfortable but manageable—reinforcing my belief that the torment of opium withdrawal had been grossly overstated. While working at my laptop, I noted that my mind often wandered to the mat, but I had no problem keeping to my fast, despite seeing the bottle of chandu rolling around on the egg shelf of my refrigerator every time I opened it.
In mid-August I was visited by an old friend whom I’d first met years before when she was posted at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. Lisa Bailey was a Southerner who managed to shatter all the Southern stereotypes. She was also the first of what would become many American embassy friends whose transcendent coolness debunked my preconceived notions about whom the State Department sends abroad. I best remembered Lisa for an informal Bangkok nightclub she introduced me to. In a city known for its nightlife, this place was unique. Lisa and her friends had dubbed it “the Japanese speakeasy” because it apparently had no liquor license and was run as a hobby by a Japanese fashion designer who rented the building—a century-old mansion on a quiet back lane. There was a tiny, handwritten sign on the gate out front, but other than that, there was no indication the house was anything but a private residence. Here was a nightclub minus the loud music, flashing lights, and gyrating pole dancers. Instead there was a genteel atmosphere behind high hedges where one could throw house parties—imagine a scene from The Great Gatsby if West Egg had been in tropical Asia. There my e
mbassy friends drank vodka tonics and bemoaned having to work in offices overseen by the sneering visage of Dick Cheney.
Lisa’s August 2007 visit to Bangkok immediately followed her having been posted in Afghanistan. We met at the tiny riverside café up against the Sheraton Hotel, which had become my usual place to meet people—this was where Helmut P. had begged me to stop collecting a few years before. Lisa was very excited about my recently published book and had bought a copy. We talked about what I had been doing to promote it, and I told her about the website that I had paid to have constructed, OpiumMuseum.com, on which images of my collection were displayed together with historical photographs of opium smokers in China, Southeast Asia, and America.
“Have you had a book launch party yet?” she asked.
“Who would pay for it?” I asked. “My publisher?”
“Why not?”
“I have absolutely no complaints about my publisher, but Silkworm Books is a small operation. I don’t think anybody gets a book launch party.”
“Well, why don’t you let me arrange one for you?” Lisa asked with an eager look in her eyes that told me she was serious.
It sounded like fun, but my first reaction was to decline. Lisa pushed the idea in a playful tone, but then let it drop after making me promise to let her know if I changed my mind. She had only a few more days left in Bangkok and said she was going to have a small get-together with friends to see her off. “We could make it into a goodbye party for me and a book launch party for you.”
I said I would give it some thought and we parted with a hug. On the walk back to my apartment I remembered how much I’d enjoyed the opening night of the exhibition in Rotterdam—which was unusual for me because getting a lot of attention was always something that made me uncomfortable. And then I remembered exactly why I had enjoyed both opening night and the demonstration at the tea house in Paris a few days later: Beforehand I had been smoking Armand Hoorde’s opium. I pictured the sweet little bottle of chandu in my refrigerator and felt a wave of excitement just like a kid feels during the last days of school before summer vacation. I decided then and there that I would break my fast for a worthy cause: my book launch party.
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