I had already decided to buy these latest offerings, but I feigned hesitation in order to extract more information from Alex. As we conversed via Skype enhanced with cams, I saw that he was bundled up against the chill of a Beijing autumn and laughing nervously. Alex at first pretended he knew nothing about the pipe bowls’ provenance. Then, after some goading, he finally admitted that he thought all five bowls had been robbed from the same century-old grave. “Tomb bowls” was how he began referring to them.
“The smokers in old times were buried with opium and tools to smoke,” Alex explained, “so they will not suffer in the afterlife.”
I asked, “Would the family of the dead smoker buy new paraphernalia—new tools—or use old pieces?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe one or the other. Maybe a favorite pipe and lamp but also maybe some new bowls for use when the favorite bowl no longer works.”
This made perfect sense. I surprised Alex by jumping at the newly offered pipe bowls. He again laughed uneasily and asked if I wasn’t afraid of ghosts. I was not. On the contrary, it wasn’t just that the bowls were in perfect condition and would improve my sessions by preserving precious chandu. I was also morbidly fascinated by the idea of using paraphernalia that had for a century been cradled by a corpse. I imagined a link between myself and this long-dead smoker whose spirit was soothed by the presence of opium and paraphernalia with which to smoke it. It was true that some rude spade had shattered his time capsule and grasping hands had desecrated its sanctity; but a smoker is a smoker and I was sure that the original keeper of these bowls, if he had some way of knowing, would break into an admiring smile upon seeing me put them to work.
That night, in the darkened living room of my apartment above Bangkok’s Chinatown, I drew vapors through one of the pipe bowls and marveled at its perfection. The taste was superb—not a hint of brimstone. What would the ghosts of Raw Ghost Alley think? There was no mistake—I could hear them cheering me on. Their roar of approval could not be confused with the noise of inane carousing that at that moment was emanating from the booze cruises on the nearby river. In my increasingly withdrawn state, the sounds of human revelry had begun taking on a sinister quality, while in my head the imagined shouts of encouragement from the neighborhood’s old opium spirits rang with the familiarity of family.
The world outside the confines of my apartment now seemed a hideous and brutal place. Every night I became Charlton Heston in the 1971 film Omega Man, living in an elegantly appointed mansion that also served as a fortress. Inside the mansion’s thick walls were sanctuary and civilization: Heston’s character, dressed in a smoking jacket, plays chess with a bronze bust and sips scotch, while outside chalky faced mutants clad in soiled cowls shriek and howl for him to come out and face them. Once in a while Heston might step out onto the balcony—the mere sight of him causing the mutants’ keening to crescendo—and pump a few rounds from a high-powered rifle into the orgy of flapping robes. Yet for the most part Heston simply ignores the rabble.
Okay, the shooting part was taking it too far. Of course I didn’t hate people, but my feelings of uniqueness at being able to smoke opium had somehow morphed into a cold sense of superiority. I felt no kinship with people. Their concerns were not my concerns; their worldly joys and desires struck me as absurd. People were lining up for blockbuster movies or to eat in trendy restaurants or to buy the latest version of some video game—and I saw no point in any of it. To the contrary, my one great joy was knowing that I didn’t need any of it. There was euphoria in what felt like the ultimate act of rebellion against modern society. Opium was setting me free.
Even the eventual demise of my libido felt liberating. The ability to see beauty in the human form was still there, but all consequent sexual desire had vanished. It felt no different from admiring marble nudes in a museum. Yet to me this didn’t seem like loss—quite the opposite—it was as though I had conquered a base instinct and risen above it. Like some Buddhist ideal, this extinction of desire brought about an end to suffering. Except that a single desire remained: I needed a fix every few hours or my mind and body would go to pieces.
“Okay, but this is the last bottle. There’s really no way I can sell you another refill unless you chip in to help with buying a shipment through Willi.”
I had been dreading this day for what seemed like a lifetime. I knew it was coming but had purposely avoided asking Roxanna how low her stash was. As for the who, what, when, and where of procuring the chandu, I always felt that the less I knew, the better. I wanted to keep a buffer between myself and the ones handing money to the procurers, whoever they were. Even now, the only thing I wanted to know was how much money I would need to raise in order to invest in opium futures.
“Well, I’m never sure exactly how much it will cost until I get the chandu, but if you gave me five thousand dollars, that should take care of it.”
It was a good thing I had saved this conversation for the end of my visit or it would have ruined our session. I had less than a week to come up with the money—longer if I began eating the chandu instead of smoking it. I was broke. I had already spent much of my advance for the guidebook to Cambodia—the one that I had not yet begun researching. There was only one way to come up with such a large amount of money in such a short amount of time: I had to sell something from my collection.
On the subway ride home I started taking inventory in my head, going through boxes and examining pieces in my mind’s eye. When I arrived back at my apartment I immediately began taking stock of what I might part with, opening boxes that contained hundreds of pieces of paraphernalia, each individually wrapped but not labeled. I relied on my memory and the feel of an object through the plastic Bubble Wrap to help me decide what to unwrap and examine.
During the preceding year I had been selling bits and pieces to a wealthy amateur collector in Las Vegas. The tools I let go were mostly ones for which I had acquired duplicates. This, of course, allowed me to sell without worrying that I might never find replacements for what I had sold. Opium antiques are so rare that finding exact duplicates is the exception, not the rule. Many of the pieces that I had collected were unique; during all my years of collecting and research I had never seen another. But in order to raise such a large amount of money I would need to sell off some of these unique pieces, and this made it very difficult to choose. I might instead sell one major item—such as an ornate pipe—and with its sale get the bulk of the cash I needed. I gave both options some thought and came to the conclusion that it would be less painful for me to sell off a lot of minor pieces than one or two major ones.
I picked through the boxes that contained the bulk of my collection, but after hours of queasy indecision I had made no progress. The experience was exactly like going through my belongings as a kid after having been told by my parents that it was time to throw things out. Back then, I always ended up daydreaming; playing with toys that I had neglected for years; leafing through old magazines; minutely examining the contents of cigar boxes filled with coins or streetcar tokens. Hours passed and no decisions were made. Part of my problem was that as a kid I was convinced that inanimate objects had feelings, and so throwing out old toys or bits of collections felt like individual acts of betrayal. I vividly recall sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, taking everything out of bureau drawers (most of which were “junk drawers”), and scattering their contents on the floor around me—making my bedroom an even bigger mess than when I had started. And there I would sit frozen, unable to discard anything.
Of course, as an adult I wasn’t troubled by thoughts that pieces of my collection might grieve being sold to a new owner. Still, in an odd way my collection provided companionship of sorts. Collecting opium antiques was the principal activity in my life. For years it had been my main source of entertainment—until I discovered how entertaining opium smoking could be. Now my opium-smoking habit was threatening to change everything. What it was coming down to was this: Opium paraphernalia co
llecting or opium smoking—I had to choose. If I continued smoking opium, I knew that my collection would literally pay the price. My plan to donate my entire collection to the University of Idaho would be shelved, and as a result, what I had hoped would be my legacy—what I would be remembered for long after I had left this world—was going to be undone as well.
It was with this dilemma in mind that I finally made a decision: I would quit cold turkey. Previous attempts to gradually scale back on my daily dosage had all failed. Every effort had ended the same way: As soon as I started smoking, the inevitable tendency to procrastinate took over. Somewhere along the way my opium optimism had become opium fatalism.
I had already tried stopping abruptly, fighting the urge to smoke as soon as I awoke in the afternoons and then spending sleepless nights sneezing and wiping my nose until it was raw. On three occasions I made it all the way until dawn before breaking down—frantically preparing pipes to calm my jagged-edged nerves and allow me to sleep. But this time quitting would not be some spur-of-the-moment decision. I would make a plan and stick to it. Halloween was a few days away and that seemed a fitting date to quit. I had a week to prepare and do research.
During the many years that I had been collecting opium antiques I spent countless hours reading about every aspect of the drug. While looking for clues as to how opium’s mysterious paraphernalia was used, I had gone through every book and magazine article written in the English language that I could find. In some of those publications—the older ones dating back to the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries—I had run across dire descriptions of opium withdrawal. In the past I had skimmed over these passages without much notice—back then I was interested in learning to smoke, not learning to quit. Now I went back to my library and nervously reread those same passages to get an idea of what I might be up against.
My first move was to seek out the advice of the good doctor from New York City, H. H. Kane. Despite the great age of his words (Kane did his research in the 1870s), I felt that he was solid and reliable. I had found the majority of Kane’s observations matched my own, and while no doubt a product of his time, he was atypical in that he did not assume a high moralizing tone when discussing opium use. Kane also seemed to feel, as did I, that opium addiction was less harmful than alcoholism. This attitude, also rare for his time, made me trust his words. I opened the book to a passage that I was already familiar with:
Between opium-smoking and chronic alcoholism there can be no comparison. The latter is by far the greater evil, both as regards its effects on the individual and on the community. The opium-smoker does not break furniture, beat his wife, kill his fellow-men, reel through the streets disgracing himself or friends, or wind up a long debauch comatose in the gutter.
I nodded at this forgotten truth as I continued leafing through the book. On page 44, Dr. Kane had this to say: “A man who smokes large amounts of opium daily is, in this country, called a ‘fiend.’ ”
Even in my desperate state I couldn’t help but chuckle at these words. I didn’t feel particularly fiendish. Then, on page 84, I found this: “The shackles that he has lazily and indolently riveted upon himself now refuse to be unloosed, and he finds himself bound to an idol that he despises.” And finally, on page 100, there was this description of opium withdrawal:
A peculiar, dry, drawing, burning pain in the throat, and tearing pains, most marked in the calves of the legs, in the loins, and between the shoulders, are felt. These pains are usually very distressing in the worst cases. If no opiate is used and the vomiting and diarrhoea continue, the restlessness and flushed face give place to quiet, with paleness, sunken eyes, collapse, and death.
For good measure, Kane quoted one Samuel Wells Williams, an American diplomat and Christian missionary who lived and traveled widely in China in the nineteenth century and wrote a book about the country’s social life and customs. Williams’s description of opium withdrawal symptoms were much the same:
At this stage of the habit his case is almost hopeless; if the pipe be delayed too long, vertigo, complete prostration, and discharge of water from the eyes ensue; if entirely withheld, coldness and aching pains are felt over the body, an obstinate diarrhoea supervenes, and death closes the scene.
I also discovered the contemporaneous Opium and the Opium-Appetite by Alonzo Calkins from 1871. Calkins, a doctor like Kane but one whose research among Americans focused more on laudanum and opium eating, paraphrased one addict’s own words when saying this about opium withdrawal: “With the ‘horrors’ upon him, the sensations were what no imagination could conceive, much more what no pen could describe.”
I also searched online, but, as with the paraphernalia, knowledge about withdrawal seemed to have vanished along with opium smoking. My Internet searches for “opium addiction” brought up websites for a number of American detox clinics, but every one of these lumped it together with addiction to heroin and other opiates, seeming to mention it only as an afterthought. I didn’t think the websites had reliable information. For one thing, from what I had gathered by reading other sources, the symptoms of withdrawal from heroin were milder than those of opium. I wondered if the clinics had actually treated any opium addicts.
Back with the leather-bound books, I learned that both doctors Kane and Calkins warned against trying to cure an opium habit without a qualified doctor’s supervision. The cases that both doctors saw probably involved people who had been using the drug regularly for years, so I wasn’t sure if their warnings applied to me. It was true that I had been experimenting with opium for about a decade, but I hadn’t become a regular smoker until a couple of years before, and had been smoking heavily and daily without a break for only a couple of months, since the end of August 2007. From reading Emily Hahn’s memoir I deduced that her length of serious experimentation with opium was about the same as my own. She claimed to have overcome it with the help of hypnosis.
As Halloween approached I became more and more determined to quit. All I needed, I told myself, was to believe that I still had the self-discipline. I reminded myself that when I really put my mind to doing something, I always did well. It was a simple case of mind over matter. I kept a stream of such thoughts running through my head during those last days, steeling myself for the business of quitting even while I was smoking.
On the afternoon of the thirtieth of October I began my session as soon as I woke up. I was going to have my last pipe before midnight rang in the thirty-first, and I wanted time to have a full session in order to say goodbye in style. After a few pipes to limber up my sleep-sore muscles, I showered and donned my linen suit. For company, I propped a framed photograph of Miss Alicia de Santos on the opposite side of the layout tray. Miss de Santos would have been the first runner-up beauty queen of the Manila Carnival in 1931, but she cried foul and declined the title. There was something about the wronged look in her eyes that made her an agreeable opium-smoking companion.
My usual layout mascot, a century-old brass Billiken figurine grinning like some species of cheeky Buddha, would keep the conversation lively even when Miss de Santos became petulant. I rolled a few pills and told them both how much I would miss their company. In the last couple of months I had come to understand the fondness of old-time opium smokers for whimsical pipe bowls shaped like jolly Buddhas and laughing children. How much easier it was to anthropomorphize your pipe if its bowl smiled back at all your witty pronouncements.
What was to be my last session flew by with the rush of a roller-coaster, leaving me breathless and euphoric. Just before midnight I blew out the lamp and pushed my layout under the coffee table. I thought that perhaps by breaking opium’s routine I could lessen the impact of withdrawal, so instead of passing the rest of the night blissfully drifting on the mat, I broke with custom and went to bed. I was determined to wake in the morning as normal people do—not on the living room floor, but in bed.
Three days later I was back on the mat chuckling at my own folly. Nothing had changed excep
t that my apartment looked as though a tornado had ripped through it. There were fresh bruises on my arms and legs as well as aching in my guts and bowels from days of oral and anal purging. I spent two days smoking and recovering from the Halloween Massacre. There were no more thoughts of quitting. Billiken smiled; Miss Alicia de Santos stared beseechingly. As soon as I had rested, I selected some items to sell, photographed them, and emailed the files and a price list to the collector in Las Vegas. Within a couple of weeks I would have enough of a payment to show Roxanna that I was serious. For the time being I could stop worrying about the ever-decreasing level of chandu in the little brown bottle.
I had been smoking a thousand years. The calendar didn’t concur—it had been just over a week since my failure to quit on Halloween. Yet it was obvious that I had passed some sort of milestone—descended into some previously unvisited level of opium surrender. I no longer needed a clock or a calendar. Opium became my timekeeper. It alone would let me know when it was time to smoke and when it was time to sleep. Hunger no longer had much sway over my body clock. Food became increasingly unnecessary, and sweets were all I desired. Did the husband and wife from Canton who ran the minimart on the ground floor of the condo notice that I was living almost exclusively on ice cream? If so they said nothing. The only remark I ever heard from anybody about my appearance was that I looked “tired.”
Near dreamless sleep had been the norm since I started smoking with Roxanna, but that changed, too. Every afternoon I awoke with memories of lonely images, such as abandoned stone temples in airless jungles or rusting hulks of automobiles upon bleak stretches of desert. These dreamscapes all had one thing in common: They were totally devoid of people. While sleeping I perspired profusely and upon waking my sheets and pillow were soaked with a tea-colored sweat that smelled of opium. I showered twice a day, washing off an oily opium sheen that coated my skin. I thrived on hot water, tolerating the highest of temperatures even on the hottest of days. Conversely, lukewarm showers felt as though they were freezing cold.
Opium Fiend Page 28
