Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  Weeks passed. I was unable to focus on work but had already received an advance from Rough Guides to update their guidebook to Cambodia. The on-the-ground research would take at least three weeks, and I intended to do it—as soon as I tapered back on my smoking. There was no way I could up and leave town unless I was willing to take the opium with me, and that was something I was not prepared to do. Instead, I scheduled a week’s worth of decreased smoking as I had done after coming back from Europe. I wasn’t too worried about it—I was sure this time would be even easier since my opium was pure and not the dross-laden stuff I had smoked with Armand Hoorde. I set a date a week before my new regime was to begin, but my sense of time was warped by the opium—time flew by. Before I knew it, the date had passed without my having started reducing. I set another date, but as the time to start weaning myself off the opium approached, I found a reason to push it back another week. It was procrastination of the most blatant sort, but how could I say no to just one more week of heaven? The damned guidebook could wait.

  At some point I remembered that my visa for Thailand was soon to expire. I had less than a week to get out of the country, but luckily my multiple-entry visa would allow me to simply exit Thailand and then reenter for another three months. Still, I felt a rising panic. The thought of leaving my apartment even briefly brought on anxiety, but there was no way around it. I got online and started looking at options. I wanted to leave the country and return without spending the night away from home. A single night absent from the lamp would bring on the initial symptoms of withdrawal, and with regional immigration officials still jittery about the so-called Bird Flu, I didn’t want to take the chance of being sick for the pipe while traveling.

  Singapore was the one place I could fly into without a visa in the morning and be assured of a flight back to Bangkok later the same day. Other destinations such as Vientiane and Phnom Penh were risky, since there was not as much traffic between these cities and Bangkok, and I would have to gamble that Thai Airways wouldn’t cancel the return flight. Going to Singapore was an ironic choice since its antidrug laws are the strictest in the region, but I had no intention of leaving the airport, and of course I would take nothing incriminating with me. I booked a morning departure and an afternoon return and then went back to the pipe and rolled until I regained my confidence.

  The night before my flight I smoked lightly and tried to sleep, setting my alarm clock to wake me early so I had time to have a few pipes before leaving for the airport. In the morning I didn’t overindulge, stopping at eleven pipes and dropping a large dose of Visine into my blinking eyes. I also wore a pair of non-prescription glasses to help obscure my eyes and, hopefully, to give myself a square, bookish appearance—the sort of person who would never be involved with drugs.

  The flight landed in Singapore just past noon, and after completing immigration and customs formalities, I ran through the airport to the check-in counter of the departures area, arriving just in time to board the very same plane to Bangkok that had brought me to Singapore. Walking on board, I noticed the bemused smiles of a couple of the stewardesses who recognized me from the morning flight. “You don’t stay in Singapore?” asked one.

  “I miss Thailand,” was my reply. By late afternoon I was back at my apartment, lighting the lamp and having a self-congratulatory smoke.

  “Opiates are a slippery slope,” warned my friend Jake Burton. He was a freelance television journalist and through me had become an amateur collector of opium antiques. He also claimed to have a friend confined to a nursing home in Australia whose downfall was heroin. I listened politely to his sorry story and then replied: “Apples and oranges.”

  Jake was the one Bangkok friend whom I had let in on my big secret. Years before, Jake had discovered a little stall in Bangkok’s Weekend Market that specialized in Chinese antiques. Along with the usual blue-and-white porcelain vases and carved wooden deities, the vendor had a few choice pieces of antique opium paraphernalia on offer. Seeing how excited I was about his discovery and knowing how seriously I took my collecting, Jake graciously shared his find with me and then stood aside and let me have the pick of the booty. The source lasted nearly a year before the shopkeeper began trying to pass off fakes, but for a time her stall was a fairly rich vein.

  To pay Jake back, I invited him to my apartment to take part in a session after a back injury began causing him difficulty in shouldering his video camera. “I’m bloody laid up with a bad back. It’s completely oucho-imobilizo,” he had said.

  I badgered him out of bed, saying that I could guarantee relief, but only if he would catch a taxi to Chinatown. He arrived at my flat within an hour. Watching the opium work its pain-banishing magic reminded me what a miracle it could be, and I asked Jake to return once his back had healed so he could experience opium in a purely recreational sense.

  From the time of my monthly visits to Willi I had been keeping a record of my smoking sessions with still photographs—self-portraits that I shot at arm’s length or with a timer. My digital camera had a screen that rotated free from the camera’s body, allowing me to see what was in the frame while the lens was pointed at me, and I used it to take scores of photos of myself lying next to the tray. I also wanted to document my rolling technique in a way that would catch the subtleties of my method. Video was the only way. Jake was a video whiz, having shot and edited many hours of television news stories for the English-language services of Agence France-Presse and Al Jazeera.

  The two of us set a date and time, and when he arrived at my apartment late one evening, I was pacing the living room in anticipation. Outside, the strains of a Chinese opera were booming from a joss house situated between my apartment building and the river. Normally, I enjoyed the exoticness of these sounds—the catlike vocals shrilly punctuating sawing fiddles, whistling flutes, and crashing cymbals—but that night I was too distracted to think about anything but a smoke. Upon awakening around noon I had decided that the video might be more interesting if I abstained from smoking until Jake could record my first pipe of the day. As Jake set up his camera and began testing angles, I fiddled with the accoutrements on my layout tray and gritted my teeth in an effort to enforce patience. Time crawled. Once Jake was finally ready and the camera was rolling, I began making preparations for my first pipe. Jake asked me to lift the bottle of chandu and hold it to the light, and I did that much, but his other requests were ignored as I rushed to inhale that first lungful of divine vapors.

  Three pipes into the session and my haste was forgotten. I rolled a couple pills for Jake, and after smoking them he continued to film me for the better part of an hour. Then he put the camera aside and we smoked until just before midnight when he suggested that we wander down to the joss house and watch Chinese opera for an act or two. Out in the street, the night air was perfumed with the fragrance of jasmine mixed with the swampy smell of the Chao Phraya River, which flowed unseen behind a row of century-old shophouses that bordered the western edge of my apartment building. Jake and I admired the old teak and stucco façades as we walked with a light step toward the direction of the music. A makeshift stage had been set up opposite the entrance to the joss house, positioned so the performance would be visible from the ornately carved stone altar just inside the temple’s open doors. In actuality the show was for the Taoist deities within, but in front of the stage two dozen metal folding chairs had been arranged in uneven rows just in case any mortals might want to watch as well. Only a handful of these chairs were occupied, primarily by elderly Chinese women looking strangely uniform with their permed gray hair and flower-print pajamas.

  Jake and I took a seat front and center so as to get an even blast of music from the stacks of speakers on either side of the stage. Once we were seated, Jake craned his neck around slowly to take in the whole scene before turning his glazed eyes and contented grin on me. I knew exactly what he was thinking. There would be no more talk of Australian nursing homes. Jake lived across town in the Westerners’ glitzy
ghetto off Sukhumvit Road—far from any joss houses reeking of incense and idolatry. If for him a trip to Chinatown was a taste of the exotic, watching Chinese opera while high on opium was nothing less than a feast.

  I smiled in reply, but all I could think about was getting back to my pipe and lamp. Here I was surrounded by what should have been the height of exoticism; a setting that went hand in hand with my cherished vice. Many times I had read John Blofeld’s tale of the opium-addicted singing master, star of both a troupe of opera performers in 1930s Peking and the smoking scenes that were my favorite passages in City of Lingering Splendour. Attending a midnight performance of Chinese opera in the courtyard of a Taoist temple should have produced exhilaration, yet something akin to a restless boredom kept me from enjoying my surroundings.

  I was reminded of an opium-wise character in Claude Farrère’s collection of stories Black Opium. As a novice smoker, the character had decorated his private smoking room in the most exotic manner he could think of—by covering the floor and walls with the skins of tigers whose taxidermied heads were permanently frozen in fang-bearing snarls. Later in his smoking life, the character realized that no sights, sounds, or other external stimuli—not even snarling tigers—could compete with opium’s internal sorcery. It was as though the narcotic had the ability to make one evolve into a being whose interests lay entirely within oneself.

  When I had first read Farrère’s story during my early days of experimentation, it sounded like so many other passages of French opium literature that had been translated into English: pompous and ridiculous in equal parts. How could opium make the outside world uninteresting when recapturing a childlike sense of wonder was what it did best? Time and opium answered that question for me. The intervening years had changed my tastes until I found myself anxious to trade the dizzying sights and sounds of Chinese opera for sensory deprivation in the form of a quiet, dark room that allowed me to be alone with my thoughts and imagination.

  At the time it seemed like a simple preference and a logical one—a preference for silence over noise. But then something happened. I went from preferring these things to absolutely needing them. The change was subtle and gradual. I could not pinpoint when it happened exactly, but I did know what seemed to be driving the change: a strange skittishness that I could not control. Loud noises—especially sharp reports like the sound of a firecracker—began to terrify me. I might be walking down the lane in front of my apartment building, on my daily trip outdoors for sustenance in the form of stir-fry, when a backfiring motorbike would cause me to react like a shell-shocked war veteran. Even loud sneezes—the Thai often amplify their sneezes with an accompanied shriek—would completely unnerve me. I would jump visibly, clenching my fists and scrunching up my shoulders as my eyes involuntarily slammed shut—a reaction that was impossible for others not to notice. Even when I knew the loud noise was coming there was simply no way for me to remain calm and collected. It was as though the opium had tapped into some deep well of animal instinct, reanimating primal fears that a lifetime had taught me were of no real danger.

  There were other things. During my monthly trips to visit Roxanna and refill my bottle of chandu, I discovered that riding in a taxi on the expressway made me short of breath. Had historic opium smokers ever traveled at such high speeds? I asked Roxanna if she had ever experienced the same fear. “Not that I can recall,” she said with a smile and just the slightest hint of sarcasm. Did she think I was making it up?

  In mid-October 2007, for the first time in almost a year, I traveled to Vientiane to visit Willi and the Chamber of Fragrant Mists. Normally I would have taken the night train, using the trip as an excuse to treat myself to a cabin in the first-class sleeping car. Each stateroom had a wide, sofa-like seat and a mirror on the opposite wall, into which I could look up and smile at myself whenever I made some opium-related discovery in one of the old books I always brought along to read. There was a small table for writing and even a miniature sink and drinking glasses with the logo of the State Railway of Thailand. And for about twenty dollars more than the standard first-class fare, I could have the two-passenger cabin all to myself. As soon as the train pulled out of the station and my ticket had been inspected, I would lock the cabin door and change into a T-shirt and a sarong. The only decision confronting me then was whether to eat dinner in my cabin or take a sightseeing stroll down the rolling aisles of the second-class cars that led to the diner.

  Yet I had not taken a long train ride since I began smoking heavily. I knew that going the whole night without opium would make the trip horribly tedious, and the overnight trains were sometimes delayed for hours. Just worrying about such a delay would take much of the enjoyment out of train travel. Tempted as I might have been to bring along an abbreviated layout and have a few pipes while reclining on the rocking train, I knew that such an idea was pure idiocy: The smell of something burning would immediately bring the conductor knocking.

  I decided instead to fly, and during the hour-long flight from Bangkok to Vientiane, I made another discovery: I could no longer fly comfortably. If high speeds on the expressway were frightening, flying—especially takeoff and landing—felt like imminent doom. I gripped the armrests and sat bolt upright, my feet firmly planted on the vibrating floor as though coiled and ready to spring through a hole in the fuselage, jumping to safety, should the plane just happen to break up in midair. Willi noticed the fear in my eyes when he picked me up at the airport. “Was there turbulence?” he asked.

  But this particular visit was most notable for a different realization. During the ride to his house outside Vientiane, Willi explained that he and his wife had the previous week hosted a houseguest—a rather obnoxious Briton—who, as Willi described it, had driven his wife to threaten to abandon him if she didn’t get some peace and quiet. Willi apologized profusely before telling me that he had booked a room for me at Vientiane’s finest hotel. “I’m sorry; it really can’t be helped. I’m paying for the room, of course. And I’m preparing a big dinner tonight for all of us.”

  Upon arrival at Willi’s, we adhered to custom just as we always had, bringing the Chamber back to life step by ritualistic step: lighting candles and incense; starting the pendulum clock. It was nearly 5 P.M. by the time we finally reclined for our first shared pipes in nearly a year. Yet something was off. Willi counted four drops of chandu into the miniature copper wok and meticulously rolled two pipes for each of us. The pills were tiny. Barely the size of a half grain of rice, they were much smaller than the pea-sized pills I rolled for myself. I asked if he was getting low on opium. “No, not at all, but these days I rarely smoke more than once a week and I’m limiting myself to two or three pipes per session.”

  “Is two or three pipes enough for you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure. When I smoke more than my usual dose, it makes me irritable the following week.”

  “I see.”

  Willi had not blown out the lamp, but I felt he was signaling an end to the session. I asked, “So are we finished smoking for the evening?”

  “Of course not! But let’s take a break and have some tea while I check on how dinner is coming along.”

  I sat in the pavilion above the lotus pond, sipping oolong tea while feeling frustrated at my lack of a buzz. As I drained the tea from its tubelike cup, I heard the rolling crunch of a car approaching slowly up the gravel drive, followed by loud greetings with an English accent. Dinner “for all of us” turned out to be a more crowded affair than I had anticipated. Besides the Englishman and his Lao wife, there was another couple—a Canadian and his Thai wife. The food and presentation were flawless, brought out to the pavilion by Willi’s servant one dish at a time and perfectly on cue as Willi described the ordeal he had gone through to procure the extraordinary ingredients. As always, there was also plenty of wine on hand, although I wasn’t drinking.

  I tried to follow the conversation but soon gave up. It started with that sort of inane chatter in which almost nothing of any rea
l meaning is said. The men, all of whom were expat entrepreneurs, then started talking shop while the women switched into Thai and began discussing the plot of a soap opera. As the alcohol flowed and the time passed, I tried not to look at the clock on my mobile phone. Then the word “opium” caught my ear and I was astonished to hear the Englishman ask Willi if he would be smoking opium later that night. Willi replied in a vague way, saying that he had to be up early the following morning.

  I stared at my half-empty glass of mineral water and thought about what Willi hadn’t said. This was the former houseguest who had overstayed his welcome—and who in the process had managed to spoil my welcome. He had no doubt been staying in the Chamber, using the paraphernalia I had so painstakingly assembled. If he had been smoking Willi’s opium, that was none of my business, but I couldn’t help but feel insulted. What I had come to think of as my own private getaway had been usurped by this loutish philistine.

  What was worse, it was already late and Willi looked half drunk. I could picture him asking his dinner guests to drop me off at my hotel to save himself the trouble of driving into town. Was this payback for my having neglected to visit for so long? Since I had begun smoking with Roxanna, I’d been more attentive in supplying her with the accoutrements necessary for maintaining her habit. Had she told Willi about this, and had he taken it the wrong way? I had no idea, but there was one thing I did know: If I didn’t get more opium into my system, my night at the hotel was going to be less than restful. I got up from the table. “Willi, I’m sorry, I just need to lie down for a bit. Do you mind?”