Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  “No! No, go right ahead!”

  I excused myself to the other guests, left the pavilion, and walked the few paces to the Chamber door, shutting and quietly locking it behind me. Then I lit the opium lamp and started to prepare a pipe, propelled by an emotion that I’d never before experienced while on the mat—anger.

  Whatever his reason for sharing our secret, whatever his reason for relegating me to the backseat, I didn’t care. At that moment, all I cared about was smoking as much opium as possible before Willi realized what I was doing and perhaps put a stop to it. After about fifteen minutes, Willi called to me from outside, saying that they were about to have dessert. Two can play at that game, I thought to myself. “Please go ahead without me. I’ll join you as soon as I’m feeling a little better.”

  I did not rejoin the dinner party. An hour after dessert was served the guests were getting up to leave, politely saying their goodbyes to me through the locked Chamber door. I replied in kind. It was easy—my anger had subsided as soon as the opium brought a ticklish itch to the tip of my nose.

  When the guests were gone Willi knocked on the Chamber door and let himself in—I had quietly unlocked the door as the guests were driving off—and then he stretched out on the other side of the tray. I offered to prepare Willi a pipe and he accepted. Nothing was said by either of us about how the evening had transpired and the drive to my hotel was mostly quiet.

  As I lay on my back on the hotel bed, I decided that there was no longer any reason to visit Willi and the Chamber of Fragrant Mists. I felt no resentment or hard feelings. The five years that we had collaborated had been an exceptionally good run. But things had changed. I now greatly preferred to smoke alone.

  Opium, an equivocal luxury in the beginning daintily approached, becomes ere long under the clamorous demands of a perverted appetite a dire alternative, a magisterially controlling power.

  —Alonzo Calkins, Opium and the Opium-Appetite (1871)

  Forbidden fruit is always the most pleasing to the palate. Not only is opium illegal, there is also the added gamble of potential addiction. Back in the days of the Chamber of Fragrant Mists, I had doubted the possibility of opium addiction, but by October 2007, I was forced to rethink everything.

  Willi once related a story to me about an old German expatriate living in Bangkok whom he knew in the 1980s. The German told Willi that he smoked opium only once a year—to celebrate Christmas. Yet the old man claimed that even though he smoked only that single time every year, during the week leading up to his annual session he would become very agitated. Moreover, after smoking his Christmas pipes the old German was annually hit with the classic opium withdrawal symptoms: It was as though he had caught the flu. I laughed at Willi’s story and remarked that the case sounded psychosomatic to me.

  Later, when I, too, experienced physical symptoms that I believed were all in my mind, I had to wonder about yet another of opium’s mysteries—the nature of addiction. Did opium have the ability to hijack the mind and body in order to force its continued usage? Was the drug some demon seed planted in my brain—an alien life-form that was using me as a vehicle to perpetuate itself?

  Plant species have developed remarkable knacks to assist in propagation. Take the jackfruit tree: Its fruit can grow as large as a small child and is covered with a thick, spiky skin. Growing on the tree’s trunk, the heavy fruit hangs low and free from the tangle of branches. The seeds are numerous and as big as walnuts, but rounded and smooth—perfect lozenges for passing easily through the digestive tract, but only that of a really large animal. Humans have taken a liking to the jackfruit, but evolution targeted the elephant—or perhaps I should say, the elephant has been the jackfruit’s facilitator in the process of natural selection. Elephants can deftly pull the low-hanging fruit down from its tree, breaking through the thick skin that repels other animals in order to eat the fruit’s sweet yellow flesh. The seeds that pass unharmed through the elephant’s digestive system are deposited in a pile of fertilizing dung. A jackfruit sapling sprouts and the species is furthered.

  Then there is opium, whose unparalleled ability to relieve pain and control diarrhea was discovered in ancient times and led to the cultivation of the poppy. Opium was the first wonder drug. Its value as a painkiller is well known even today, but opium’s effectiveness at suppressing diarrhea was once of equal importance. For the ancients (as in undeveloped countries of today), diarrhea was a frequent and dreaded killer—especially of young children. Opium saved lives. But there was a catch. If too often resorted to, opium had to be used again and again. If not, the pain that opium initially drove away would come back tenfold; the diarrhea that opium once kept in check would return with a vengeance, leaving the body as drained and lifeless as an empty chrysalis.

  “Opium, the Judas of drugs, that kisses and betrays,” was how career criminal Jack Black described the narcotic, calling the six months that it took him to wean himself off opium “the toughest battle of my life.” My problem was that opium made life so sweet that I longed to do it every day. I had gone from looking forward to the time when I was wrapped in its blissful blanket to loathing the time when I wasn’t. With opium, a porcelain pillow on a hardwood floor seemed as soft as a feather bed; without it, every surface felt like a bed of nails. Once a taste for the drug is acquired, it takes an extremely self-disciplined personality to keep from surrendering to its delights on a more and more frequent basis. Unfortunately, self-discipline was never my strong suit. Opium preys on compulsive behavior. The same traits that made me a passionate and successful collector also rendered me unable to resist its siren song.

  I thought of Jack Black’s self-detox ordeal—six months of cutting back on his daily dosage—and I wondered if I had the discipline to do the same. I remembered seeing a young Frenchman at Mister Kay’s Vientiane opium den. His name was Xavier and he was an entrepreneur who had come to Laos some years before. I had exchanged words with Xavier on a couple of occasions, but he wasn’t the talkative sort, and the few times that I saw him at Mister Kay’s he was in and out within fifteen minutes. One day, just after Xavier had left the den, I remarked on his brief visits to the other habitués. They told me what they knew about him. Xavier came to Mister Kay’s on a daily basis, usually in the early evening. He smoked two pipes a day—no more, no less—and then he left. Xavier never missed a day, but he never lingered after his second pipe was finished. His socializing was limited to brief greetings for the proprietor and the regulars.

  At the time I didn’t give much thought to Xavier’s odd routine, but now I had to ask myself: What else but trying to cut back on one’s opium use could explain such behavior? And if a mere two pipes could keep him coming back day after day, how tightly would the grasp of twenty or thirty pipes a day hold me?

  Not since the beginning of August had I made a serious attempt to stop smoking. Sure, I had gone full days without a session, but agitation always drove me to the pipe before the clock struck midnight. I needed answers. There was nothing to do but visit Roxanna and be frank. The previous week I had sold some antique paraphernalia—several rare tools—to the collector in Las Vegas, and I was due to pay Roxanna a visit to get more chandu. I resolved to tell her everything.

  On a drizzly Sunday morning I took the subway to its terminus and then a taxi the remaining couple of miles to Roxanna’s house. Walking the deserted narrow lanes, melancholy with puddles and dripping eaves, I thought about what might be the real reason behind her austere, “authentic” lifestyle. There was tragedy in Roxanna. It wasn’t just her leg—there was something else that I could feel but couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  Roxanna had left the front door bolted but unlocked, instructing me over the phone to reach through a hole in the door’s wooden slats and let myself in. I found her upstairs dressed in one of her trademark sleeveless smocks, a Javanese batik with a black spiderwebby pattern that contrasted with the bare wooden floorboards. She was holding the mouthpiece of her bamboo pipe to her lips as the
ceramic bowl softly gurgled. The house was silent—Roxanna’s son was still asleep—and I whispered a greeting as I positioned a porcelain pillow on the floor next to the tray and lay my head upon it. After letting Roxanna prepare three pipes for me, I asked about buying more chandu. She looked up from the pill she was rolling. “At the rate you’re going you’ll need another refill in three weeks. How many pipes a day are you smoking?”

  I tried not to sound concerned. “I haven’t really been counting. Maybe between twenty and thirty?”

  Roxanna didn’t even try to conceal her shock. “What? Oh dear, you’ve gotten in way too deep. Even if you have the money to keep this up, I won’t have enough to supply you much longer.”

  I had never asked Roxanna how many pipes she smoked each day. I had just assumed it was around twenty. She surprised me by claiming to smoke only six or eight pipes per day: a few in the morning upon waking and a few more in the evening after work. “On Sundays I sometimes splurge,” she said. “To tell the truth, I haven’t been doing that so much since you stopped coming over.”

  “What should I do?” I asked. It was no use for me to try to explain or make excuses. Roxanna picked up the little glass bottle of chandu and removed its dropper cap. She counted seven drops into the miniature copper wok. “You would use a lot less opium if you took it orally. Just take micro-doses. One drop under the tongue is equal to five pipes and six drops is equal to thirty. And six drops is less than I use for a single pill.”

  As she said this the seven drops of chandu began to boil in the wok, the water evaporating in a frantic sizzle. I watched but said nothing. The word “micro-doses” had set alarm bells ringing in my head. Opium eating sounded like an admission of addiction. It sounded like failure. It was also totally bereft of romance. The words “Confessions of an American Opium-Eater” flashed in my head and made me wince. I hadn’t gotten into this to become a modern-day Thomas De Quincey. Allowing myself to go the route of opium eating might also lead to other opiates that I viewed as barbaric. I had an absolute horror of needles. What could be worse? I thought of the corpulent, waxy-faced Hermann Goering, rolling up an impeccably tailored uniform sleeve to inject a daily dose of morphine. But what if I used opium eating as a way to scale back on my smoking?

  Back at my apartment I tried taking a single drop orally. It tasted so indescribably bitter that I made a face into the bathroom mirror as I held the burning liquid under my tongue. Roxanna had said to keep it there as long as possible—where it could be absorbed into the nest of blood vessels below the tongue. Swallowing the chandu would slow the drug’s effects.

  Within an hour I felt a light tingling sensation at the back of my head and neck, and I knew the opium had passed into my bloodstream and was massaging my nervous system. Roxanna was right—the physical effects that I felt were similar to what I typically experienced after about five pipes. The high was less complex than smoked opium, because there was no vaporization process to shuffle opium’s alkaloids to the advantage of the smoker, but the feeling was near enough to what I had become accustomed. I tried to do some work and found that I could focus as well as if I had smoked a few pipes. Yet a niggling feeling told me that something was missing; that something wasn’t quite right.

  By late that evening I knew very well what was missing: the ritual. Like a cigarette smoker who quits and suddenly has nothing to do with his hands, I missed the feel of the needle rolling between my fingertips. I longed for the kiss of ivory against my lips. I pined for the warm glow of the lamp. I didn’t have a favorite TV show I never missed, or even a television on which to watch it. Instead, my entertainment was watching myself conduct a nightly black mass.

  There were also some side effects to eating opium that I didn’t notice until the following day. My digestive system all but shut down, seemingly frozen into hibernation by the drug. The result was constipation and a bloated, unwell feeling in my guts that lasted all day. That night, the physical discomfort subsided, but there was something else that kept luring my mind back to the mat—what Victorian-era Americans knew as “nostalgia for the pipe.”

  I was able to keep from reclining until just after midnight, but once I did, my reduction strategy was quickly abandoned. I began rolling and inhaling, losing count of how many pipes I had smoked and ruining any chance of making use of the drop of opium I had eaten earlier to lessen the night’s dosage. I told myself it wasn’t a problem. Roxanna had showed me a way to reduce and I was sure it would work—as soon as I seriously put the method to use. But that could wait. Another night passed by the glowing lamp wouldn’t make any difference.

  I had all but stopped collecting. Indeed, I’d been selling off some of my minor pieces in order to afford more and more opium. However, there was one piece of paraphernalia that as a smoker I could not do without: the pipe bowl. In my collection there were literally hundreds of bowls, but almost none were of any use to me. This was because the seating of one pill after another upon the needle holes long ago had caused a barely visible enlarging of these tiny apertures. The needle hole is crucial to the vaporization process: If the hole is the right size, the opium will vaporize efficiently and uniformly. However, if the hole is too large because of having become worn from use, opium gets sucked into the bowl without being vaporized, wasting significant amounts of the costly drug with each inhalation.

  The two pristine antique bowls that I had bought on eBay years back—the ones discovered behind the false wall in Vancouver’s Chinatown—were both in use. Willi had one and Roxanna had the other. The chances of finding more of the same were very slim, but I put the word out to a handful of antiques merchants and waited.

  In October I received an email from Alex, my longtime dealer in Beijing, with photo attachments of some opium antiques he had on offer. I didn’t expect to find unused pipe bowls in China. I cannot speak for other types of Chinese antiques, but opium antiques that are sourced anywhere else are more likely to be in good condition. Antiques that had the misfortune of being in China during the twentieth century did not have an easy time of it. Wars and political upheaval are never good to old things—when refugees pack their belongings, antiques rarely make the list. Then there was that unique Chinese event, the Cultural Revolution, or as the Chinese now call it, the “Ten Years of Chaos.” During this turbulent period, keeping an innocuous heirloom such as a Qing vase might cause the owner to be targeted by the fanatical Red Guards, who under Mao had absolute power to stamp out the bourgeois trappings of Old China. Opium-related relics were even more likely to get their owners in trouble, and as a result, countless thousands of opium pipes, lamps, and other accoutrements were destroyed.

  In the past I had purchased pipe bowls from Alex that I suspected had been thrown down wells or buried in gardens, and these were sometimes well preserved, having been covered with a protective layer of soil until later discovery. However, such bowls had been used prior to being discarded, and the needle holes always had wear that made them unsuitable for smoking.

  The photos that Alex had attached to his email message were only large enough to get a cursory look at what he was offering. The items were laid out on a yellow towel alongside a U.S. dollar bill for scale. There were some brass tools and a pair of scissors for trimming an opium lamp’s wick. There were also three pipe bowls, all about the same size and shape, and all with the same odd, splotchy patina. Something about the bowls caught my eye, and so I zoomed in on them until the image blurred with pixilation. I wasn’t absolutely sure, but the needle holes seemed to be identically small on all three bowls. I emailed Alex asking for larger photos of the bowls, and within a couple of hours the images arrived in my in-box. The needle holes were tiny and perfectly formed as if the bowls had never once had a needle thrust into them. This was luck.

  I quickly emailed back and asked the price of the bowls. As always, Alex’s price was fair. He would sell me all three bowls for a hundred dollars. I agreed immediately. The transaction was the best kind—one of those in which both
the buyer and seller are sure they’ve gotten the better deal. At a glance I knew the three bowls would have generated little interest in anyone other than myself. Their ceramic surface was covered with blackish and whitish stains from mineral deposits that had leached out of the soil in which they were once enveloped. Neither ornamented nor fitted with brass collars, the bowls lacked the two features that collectors usually look for. However, when they arrived in the mail, I saw that my observations had been correct: The bowls had pristine needle holes that had never been used.

  My guess was that the pipe bowls had been new when their original owner decided to ditch them, perhaps throwing them down a well or digging a hole and burying them. I cleaned the bowls under a running tap, using a soft-bristle toothbrush to scrub away the lichen-like incrustations from the terracotta surface. After an hour of gentle scrubbing, the bowls were clean and looked like new. Next, I picked through a drawstring bag full of spare brass collars, looking for three that would fit snugly onto the necks. Once this was accomplished, there was only one thing left to do: Take the bowls for a test drive.

  All three worked perfectly, burbling sonorously as I drew opium vapors into my lungs. I marveled at my good fortune in finding them, and vowed not to share them with anybody. With luck, a well-made pipe bowl might last a year or more, and so I figured that I had at least three years of not needing to worry about this essential piece of paraphernalia. Then, extraordinarily, Alex emailed me again with two more bowls that he wanted to sell. Immediately I noticed that these two new bowls had the same exact patina as the first three. Had somebody in China found a cache of “dead stock” pipe bowls stashed away in a cave? The thought intrigued me.