Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  I still had no urge to vomit despite feeling as though I had just funneled a case of beer. Saundra advised me to stick a finger down my throat, and so with scores of eyes upon me I did this. The first upchucks were feeble, but they were soon followed by torrents of rust-colored water. The vomiting became the violent, rhythmic sort that causes one to cry out involuntarily with each heave. On both sides of me others were doing the same, but I paid no notice to anyone but Art and Saundra. When the vomiting became dry retching, I wiped the mucus from my nose and the strands of saliva from my chin and attempted to catch my breath. Before I could recover, however, Saundra demanded that I drink more water. “You’re not finished! You have to get all the medicine out of your body. Drink more water! Just like before, drink until you are going to burst!”

  If only it were possible to stop moments like this—to be allowed to step out of them for a while and enjoy the spectacular irony of it all. My helping to research a story for Time magazine about opium experimentation among Western backpackers in Laos had seemingly led to this moment. But actually, if I went really far back, I would have to admit that my insatiable love for the exotic—a desire that I had cultivated since childhood—was the real force that pulled me down the trail that had ultimately led to this moment. “Everyone gets everything he wants,” Captain Willard said in Apocalypse Now. I wanted an exotic life. And for my sins, they gave me one.

  I was more than eight thousand miles away from my place of birth, in a Buddhist monastery on the edge of a Southeast Asian jungle. A bald, eyebrowless woman dressed in a sheet and looking like some refugee from a 1970s cult was urgently giving me lessons in self-waterboarding. Was I still looking for exotic adventure?

  Of course, as much as the vomiting cure felt like some torturous endgame, I knew this was my way out of the hole. This would save me. I scooped up more water from the pail and forced it down. With three fingers thrust down my gullet, I kept up the vomiting for twenty minutes until my stomach ached and my throat was raw. After the music had died down and the crowd began to disperse, I shakily got up and walked back to the dorm on rubbery legs. My dorm mates congratulated me with upturned thumbs and pats on the back, but I was too dazed to speak. Collapsing onto my bunk, I stared sideways at the bottle of mouthwash on the shelf. I was too exhausted to even care about using it. David helped me make it to the 6 P.M. muster, but I spent the rest of the evening too weak and queasy to get out of bed. One treatment down; four more to go.

  On November 25, 2007, at around noon I wrote the following in my journal:

  Day four. Haven’t felt up to writing the last two days. Last night was the worst so far.… I could not lie down. The moment my head touched the pillow the pain was excruciating. So instead of lying I paced the darkened dorm wrapped in a blanket & walking wounded circles around a pillar in the middle of the room. This I did for what seemed like hours, or until my legs were no longer sturdy enough to continue. But whenever I walked over to read the clock on the wall, I was always disappointed to see how little time had passed.

  Bim Nolan was right. Delirium is a disease of the night. But it turned out that the night I was describing in my journal was as bad as things got. At some point I crumpled from exhaustion and got a couple of hours of sleep. When the morning gong sounded I tried to get up and sweep leaves, but while standing at the detox compound gate, peering into the darkness of the mango orchard, my feverish state transformed the view into a howling, frozen wilderness. I dropped my broom and shuffled back to bed, burying myself under the thin blankets.

  David asked me about it later that day. “You didn’t sleep last night? I also didn’t sleep. Every time I wake I see you walking round and round in circles like in Midnight Express.”

  I should have been embarrassed at having kept David awake, but I simply felt too awful to care. However, I was fortunate that the trials of a new arrival were taking the spotlight from my own. Pierre was a boyish Frenchman in his mid-forties who spoke very little English. As it happened, nobody in the dorm spoke any French, and so Pierre, who made us understand with sign language that he was coming off a ten-year heroin habit, could take no solace from our words of encouragement.

  His second night in the dorm—which was my fourth—brought him to tears. I still could not sleep, and the fever from the previous night returned, but I found that by reading I could keep my mind off the pain in my head and legs. Actually, reading was just an exercise in clutching the book with both hands while trying to decipher the same paragraph over and over—but at least I didn’t have the angry urge to launch weird Franz at the wall on the far side of the room.

  One bunk away, Pierre was tossing and turning while now and then letting out a hopeless sob. He was in and out of his bunk as I had been the night before, muttering to himself in French before finally walking out the back door to where the toilets were located. I could see his silhouette as he paced between the window and the clothesline, holding his head in his hands. After a while I could no longer see or hear him, and guessed he must be sitting on the stairs leading to the bathrooms.

  Then, a few minutes later, the sound of a fiercely barking dog caught my attention. The wat was typical in that it was a magnet for stray dogs, which were fed scraps of food by the monks during the day and, in turn, became loyal sentries at night. The noise was far away, off toward an area of the monastery beyond the detox center. The angry barking was joined by another dog’s and then another’s, until there must have been ten dogs barking and howling. I thought to myself: Pierre’s doing a runner. I listened closely for the next fifteen or so minutes as the sound of the barking dogs receded into the distance and then faded away.

  The next morning I again missed leaf-sweeping duty, but David pulled me out of bed for morning muster. Pierre was there with the rest of them, and I was reminded of the commotion I heard the night before. I figured I had just imagined it all.

  Later, while I was lying on my bunk getting a Thai massage, Saundra visited the dorm to see if I was ready for the day’s vomiting cure. We talked a bit and then she asked if I heard what Pierre had gotten up to the previous night. It turned out that Saundra spoke some French, and Pierre had confessed his adventure to her.

  “He ran all the way to the highway and tried to flag down some passing cars but he said nobody would stop.”

  “Was he using the thumbs-up gesture?” I asked. “To Thais that just means ‘A-okay.’ Nobody would interpret it to mean ‘Stop, I need a ride.’ ”

  “And even if somebody happened to stop, what was he going to say to them?” Saundra mimicked a French accent while making jabbing motions at the inside of her elbow. “Hairo-ween! Hairo-ween! Le feex! Le feex!” She laughed uproariously, but then quickly recovered her Buddhist nun demeanor.

  “The funniest thing is,” she continued, “there’s a pond with a crocodile in it, and Pierre walked right past it last night.”

  “A crocodile? What?”

  “Yes! It’s the abbot’s pet. There used to be two but one crocodile disappeared a while back.”

  Pierre, who, like me, always felt much better during the day, came in from outside and joined the conversation. Through Saundra he explained that he thought he saw a police truck pass him on the highway, so he ran back to the monastery and got back in bed. For my benefit, Pierre tried to sum up his predicament with one line of English, “For me, it is impossible.”

  Whether he was referring to his attempted breakout, his withdrawal from heroin, or life in general, I did not ask. I supposed it was all the same.

  My days were becoming easier, but my nights were still fraught with pain. Each morning I awoke tangled in sweat-soaked sheets and with that feeling of a recently broken fever—as if an aura of heat was rising from my skin and dissipating into the cool morning air. Since the day after my arrival, I had not been able to eat more than a couple spoonfuls of boiled rice and a bite of banana per day. I was weak as a baby. All smells were overpowering to the point of making me nauseous. Take away my opium and life had b
ecome a foul stench.

  Gradually, the nights became more restful. No longer was I simply passing out at dawn from the exhaustion of enduring hours of pain. I began to fall asleep earlier and earlier with each successive night. I had a recurring nightmare about a jackal with a pair of rusting scissors hanging from one of its fangs, but that was no doubt due to my choice of reading material.

  On my sixth day, while recovering from the five days of vomiting, it occurred to me that I felt very different from before. It was as though the last of the opium had finally been expelled from my body. Suddenly I was famished. I ate ravenously and felt my mind sharpening and an immediate regaining of physical strength.

  I walked around the detox compound and saw beauty that until now I had barely noticed. Mountains of jagged, jungle-clad limestone overlooked the monastery, and in the clear morning air they seemed so close that I felt I could reach out and pluck the blossoms from the flowering trees on their summits. To one side of the detox center, not far beyond the fence, was a circular arrangement of gigantic Buddha images that I later learned had been cast from molten stone. Towering above the treetops, the black, opalescent surfaces of the Buddhas’ heads sparkled in the bright sun. Built as a grand centerpiece to the Buddhas were three colossal black stone columns that seemed to be several stories high. These were flanked by what looked like two giant wagon wheels—stone renditions of a Buddhist symbol called “the Wheel of Law.” This fantastically imposing monument gave the impression that some classical deity’s chariot had come plunging down from the heavens and crash-landed within a Stonehenge of Buddhas. Many of the stone sculptures were unfinished, adding to their surreal quality.

  On a much more mundane level, there was a hammock strung between two mango trees at one end of the middle dorm building. The hammock was usually occupied by one of the Thai addicts, but that day the television in the canteen was showing a soccer match, and I found the hammock invitingly empty. Lying on my back, looking up at the sky through the shimmering green canopy, I felt a rising tide of joy surge through me. The next thing I knew, I was laughing. It was the first time I had felt like laughing in as long as I could remember; the first time I’d had any reason to laugh. I thought of my good fortune at having found this place—and the miracle of having survived opium withdrawal with so little pain. This was the true miracle of Wat Tham Krabok. I had experienced perhaps a quarter of the withdrawal symptoms that I had endured when I tried to quit opium on my own. It was then that I knew my ordeal was over and that I was free, and the very realization of this fact salted my laughter with tears.

  It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously.

  —Jean Cocteau, Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication (1930)

  On the day before I checked out of the monastery, I met with the abbot at his living quarters, a modest bungalow just a couple of hundred yards beyond the detox facility. Although I had finished my treatment, I was not allowed to leave the facility unescorted until I officially checked out, and so Phra Marc, the Belgian monk, led me to the abbot’s quarters. Marc had the serene personality that one expects in a Buddhist monk. Months after I left the monastery, I ran across a video interview of Marc on YouTube. In it he revealed that he had once abused a multitude of drugs including heroin, cocaine, crack, tranquilizers, and alcohol—and kept it up for nearly a decade—before coming to Wat Tham Krabok to clean himself out.

  Marc and I were accompanied by David and Kurt, who were also nearing the end of their stays at the monastery. The abbot was waiting for us in a chair on the verandah of his bungalow, and we climbed some stairs and sat on the floor in front of him. Practicing Thai Buddhists spend a lot of time sitting on floors. A position sometimes referred to in English as the “mermaid pose” is considered the politest way to sit in front of Buddha images or Buddhist clergy. It involves kneeling with the legs folded back to one side, and the feet—the lowest part of the body—pointed away from holy people or objects. To complete the pose, the hands should be held in the wai gesture. Thais practice sitting this way from childhood and can seemingly do it for hours. For many Westerners, however, having to stay in this position for more than a few minutes can feel like some diabolical form of torture.

  Fortunately the abbot was used to Westerners and their inability to sit politely, and he smiled patiently as we crossed and uncrossed our legs in an effort to make ourselves comfortable. While Marc translated, the abbot explained in Thai that he was going to give each of us a mantra to help us get through the hardest part of the process: staying clean once we left the monastery. He produced tiny slips of paper, each with a short line of Thai letters that were a transliteration of a fragment of a Pali-language chant. This, the abbot said, was powerful magic. The mantra needed to be memorized and repeated whenever we felt the temptation to break our vows. Once the mantra was committed to memory, the slip of paper was supposed to be eaten. The abbot gave us a warning that breaking the sacred vow would bring about real calamity. He asked Marc to emphasize this in his translation, and the Belgian monk duly repeated the dire warning. The abbot asked if we understood. We all nodded that we did. The abbot then gave each of us a ring that had the monastery’s name engraved into the silvered brass setting—a visual reminder of our time at Wat Tham Krabok that might also help with fighting temptation.

  Marc mentioned to the abbot what I had been treated for, and after the usual expression of surprise, the abbot asked me to explain the process of smoking opium, confessing that he had only a vague idea of how it worked. I did my best to describe something that just a week before I had been forced to do, night and day, and that I now had taken a vow never to do again. Talking to the abbot about it made me feel very happy; it was like telling someone about your former life of poverty the day after winning the lottery. The old holy man’s interest gave me joy for another reason. The fact that I was being asked about this by the abbot of a monastery that had once rehabilitated thousands of opium addicts was yet another testament to how incredibly rare opium smoking had become. Right then I realized that I could still be proud of my unusual—and now former—vice. I had given up opium, but my experiences and the knowledge that resulted from them would always be mine.

  That evening, the call for the monks to gather for their nightly chanting caught my attention. It was a rhythmic banging on a gong that began very slowly but increased in tempo until it was almost as fast as a drumroll. Then it abruptly stopped before the slow rhythm began over again. The noise of the gong caused all the dogs in the monastery compound to howl in unison, and this haunting sound inspired me to ask permission to go listen to the monks chant. Saundra agreed to escort me to the wide, open hall where twice a day dozens of monks gathered to chant while the ordained disciples of Theravada Buddhism were doing the same in countless monasteries throughout Thailand.

  Saundra and I sat near the back of the hall and watched as the monks entered the building one at a time, walking in a slightly bowed, feline way. Wordlessly they sat in half-lotus positions on a raised platform along one side of the room, facing an image of the Buddha on a red lacquer and gold-leaf dais. At a signal that I could not discern, they all began chanting. The resonant sound of a hall full of chanting Buddhist monks is an experience that can literally bring on goose bumps, but this time it was particularly powerful. For the first time in months, my mind was sharp and clear of the muddling effects of opium dependence. I closed my eyes, and the otherworldly sound washed over me like a cleansing wave. The chanting went on for about half an hour and stopped as suddenly as it had started. The monks then wordlessly stood up and filed out into the darkness. That night I slept soundly—my first real sleep in months.

  The following day I checked out. I had brought clean clothes so I wouldn’t have to wear the same ones departing as when I arrived. The addict’s rubber flip-flops were replaced with a pair of black leather oxfords. I had purposely packed a shirt that I hadn’t worn since before I became ad
dicted—it was the one I wore to the opening night of Armand Hoorde’s museum exhibition. I walked back into the detox facility to say my goodbyes dressed as though I was going for dinner at an upscale restaurant. I wanted people to notice the difference—to see a change in me.

  David, Jerry, and Kurt were scheduled to leave in the next couple days, and we exchanged phone numbers and promises to get together in Bangkok for a meal. David knew a seafood restaurant that did a blazing crab curry. “It’s the bomb!” he said. Jerry was trying to postpone his flight back to England so he could stay in Bangkok a few days. Kurt had plans to go to Koh Samui, an island in southern Thailand popular with tourists, where he had been staying prior to coming to the monastery.

  On my way out, I ran into Clark, the Thai American from New York, in the canteen. He told me that he, too, would be leaving in the next couple of days. I suggested that we keep in touch, and he replied as though he thought it was a good idea but then excused himself and rejoined some Thais who were eating sun-dried pork and sticky rice. Among them was the kid who had checked in with me—the one who arrived bruised and limping. He looked even worse than when I first saw him—the whites of his eyes were a demon-like red from burst blood vessels caused by the physical trauma of repeated vomiting. I remembered his family and wondered if they would think he had endured more beatings when they saw him after treatment.

  The driver that I hired for the ride back to Bangkok was not the same one who had brought me—I made sure of that. The new driver’s car was an old Volvo with leather upholstery, and sitting alone in the backseat would feel like high luxury after the rustic living of the past week. Before I departed, I donated 10,000 baht to the monastery—about $300—putting half directly into a donation box and giving the other half to Art in an envelope. He said he would share it with the other monks who supervised at the detox facility. The money was the last of my savings, but I would happily have paid ten times that amount to get to where I was in so short a time and with so little pain.